Some people have a very strange idea of “morality.” The BBC reports:

A female Islamic State group member accused of letting a five-year-old girl die of thirst in scorching sunlight is facing war crimes charges in Germany.

The 27-year-old German, identified as Jennifer W, and her husband bought the child as a house “slave” in the IS-occupied Iraqi city of Mosul 2015.

Her husband chained the girl up outside after she fell ill and Jennifer W did nothing to save her, prosecutors say.

…

The five-year-old girl was among a group of prisoners-of-war when Jennifer W and her husband bought her.

German media say the child may have been a member of the Yazidi minority, many of whom were captured and enslaved by IS as the militant group swept across northern Iraq in 2014.

“After the girl fell ill and wet her mattress, the husband of the accused chained her up outside as punishment and let the child die in agony of thirst in the scorching heat,” prosecutors said in a statement.

“The accused allowed her husband to do so and did nothing to save the girl.”

Jennifer W travelled to Iraq in 2014, where she became a member of IS’s self-styled morality police, the allegations against her say.

Her role saw her patrol parks in Mosul and another IS-occupied city, Fallujah, armed with a Kalashnikov assault rifle, a pistol and an explosives vest, prosecutors said.

“Her task was to ensure that women comply with the behavioural and clothing regulations established by the terrorist organisation,” said the statement.

So “morality” is forcing women to wear tent-like garments that render them effectively invisible. “Morality” is not giving water and shade to a sick child chained up in the sun, nor is it abstaining from “buying” a child as a slave in the first place. “Morality” has nothing to do with compassion and kindness, it’s all about the systematic forcible violently-enforced concealment of women.

The New Yorker posts a cartoon by Emily Flake on Facebook.

Our old friend the intersection between god and Santa again…but many commenters instead saw anti-Semitism.

–I agree this smacks of Anti-Semitism. At the very least a typically erroneous Christian stereotype of Jewish scripture.

–This is antisemitic. And it’s sparking hateful comments.

–This would be funny, if it wasn’t anti-semitic!

–That feels really antisemitic. And not funny.

–One anti-semetism from your increasing pathetic magazine. Shame on you..

Etc. There’s even a whole essay on it at Religion News Service!

The idea of an “Old Testament Santa” is anti-Judaism 101.

First of all, the very term “Old Testament.”

“Old Testament” is an unconscious piece of anti-Judaism. “Testament” means “covenant.”

To say that the Jewish Bible, or the TANAKH, is the old testament implies that the covenant that God made with Israel is old — as in, outmoded, out of step, out of style. To put it in computer terms, the old covenant needs an upgrade — to a new covenant, a new testament — through Jesus.

For that reason, many sensitive Christians no longer refer to our Bible as the Old Testament. Some refer to it as the “first testament.” Some even respectfully call it what we call it — the TANAKH.

Second, Santa wielding a whip. Here we have the following implication — that the God of the so-called Old Testament is a cruel, vengeful God — and that the God of the Christian New Testament is a loving God. God of justice vs. god of love.

The idea is very powerful, and very old.

It dates back to the first century Christian theologian, Marcion.

And so on and so on, for many words…all as if the cartoon had appeared in a Christian magazine and were making a Christian argument when any fule kno Santa was invented by the Coca Cola company.

H/t Dave Ricks

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on The Covenant.

When I learned Santa Claus was definitely just a story (I’d had my suspicions for a while,) I did think of God, and while I didn’t turn into a baby atheist immediately, I’m quite sure a seed of skepticism was planted.

My seeds of doubt were planted in public school, when there was still a fair amount of religious stuff (particularly songs we sang during daily “opening excersizes.”) One of those songs, “God Sees the Little Sparrow Fall,” was one of the things that started me on the road to doubt:

God sees the little sparrow fall,

It meets His tender view;

If God so loves the little birds,

I know He loves me, too.

I wanted to know why God didn’t catch the sparrow. It was not obvious to me that his seeing the falling sparrow he failed to catch meant that he had any regard for me. Catch the sparrow, then we’ll talk. I’m sure that kindly Mrs. Luke would have been saddened that teaching this children’s song of childlike (or childish?) faith had a result directly opposite to the one she had intended. This was grade three, so I would have been around eight years old. I know maybe the year before I’d tried staying up late in Christmas Eve in my oldest brother’s room, to listen for Santa. (His room was closest to the chimney, so it was a natural place for a Santa stakeout). I don’t ever recall trying the milk and cookies thing; sleigh bells on the roof would have been enough. God was much less inspiring of empirical investigation or hypothesis testing. God drove no reindeer.

So I learned about God and Christianity. I remember thinking very seriously about it all, and trying to read the Bible (I was an early reader.) I also remember thinking it all sounded a bit unlikely, a bit like a story, but grownups believed it and said it was true, so…

Atheism took a lot longer than Santa letdown, but I’d given up on traditional Christianity by the time I got to high school. I’d read the Gospels, and was rather impressed with some of Jesus’s ideas. But I had no interest in Paul’s letters or Acts or any of the other bits of the New Testament. I noticed some of the variations and discrepancies between the Gospels, and learned a bit about their origins in specific times and places, for particular audiences (and much later, learning that each had their own theological axes to grind).

I came up with my own set of rules or guidelines as to what a fair, just god should and should not be and most traditional religions missed most of the boxes I needed or ticked the ones that were deal breakers. In the course of this progression into disbelief, I never sat up on a stakeout for god. God was never going to be that “real” or corporeal; I’d already absorbed enough theological cop outs that I knew that such a being wasn’t going to be knocking on the door or coming down the chimney… I would tell people I was agnostic or atheist depending on what kind of day I was having. Oddly enough I tended to ascribe my “better days” to my agnostic phases while on a bad day There Was No God. It was my early thirties when the final, attenuated flickers of deistic ideation finally guttered out.

And it started with that little sparrow.

Kirstjen Nielsen issued a statement yesterday:

Secretary Kirstjen M. Nielsen Statement on Passing of Eight Year Old Guatemalan Child

Murderous, callous, and chickenshits. The word is death. Nielsen’s statement is on the death of the eight year old Guatemalan child.

Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen M. Nielsen today released the following statement on the eight year-old Guatemalan national who passed away shortly before midnight on December 24 at Gerald Champion Regional Medical Center in Alamogordo, New Mexico:

“In the evening hours of December 24^th, a child who had been apprehended with his father by the Border Patrol attempting to illegally enter the United States, died at an El Paso hospital after being taken for emergency treatment for the second time in less than 12 hours.  This tragedy, the death of a child in government custody is deeply concerning and heartbreaking. In the last 24 hours, I have a directed a series of additional actions to care for those who enter our custody.”

Then she gets to the “they’re swarming our border” part.

“Our system has been pushed to a breaking point by those who seek open borders. Smugglers, traffickers, and their own parents put these minors at risk by embarking on the dangerous and arduous journey north. This crisis is exacerbated by the increase in persons who are entering our custody suffering from severe respiratory illnesses or exhibit some other illness upon apprehension.  Given the remote locations of their illegal crossing and the lack of resources, it is even more difficult for our personnel to be first responders.”

Yes, it’s all their fault. They come here solely to get on our nerves and to get publicity when their children die.

That’s the St Louis. They weren’t on that ship for the fun of it.

No wonder Trump forced the government shutdown.

Lawyers for President Donald Trump are invoking the government shutdown to seek a delay in a court case over claims that Trump is illegally profiting from business his Washington hotel does with foreign countries.

Justice Department attorneys representing Trump asked a federal appeals court on Wednesday to postpone indefinitely all further filings in an appeal related to a suit that the governments of Maryland and Washington, D.C., filed over Trump’s alleged violation of the Constitution’s ban on foreign emoluments.

Convenient, isn’t it. If you get sued for abusing your presidency to fill your pockets, you just shut down the government so that the case can’t proceed. Heads he wins, tails we lose.

So close, and yet…

Hey, kids under 8 years old, thanks for reading The New York Times. But this time, please don’t. Maybe go play Minecraft or something instead.

… O.K., are they gone now? Cool. Here’s what President Trump said to a child about Santa Claus on Monday: “Are you still a believer in Santa? Because at 7, it’s marginal, right?”

“Yes, sir,” the child, Collman, responded twice. She had spoken with the president for at least 10 seconds before he suggested that her parents had been lying to her all her life.

Ah, are we going to talk about that?

No; the next paragraph is about Collman putting out cookies for Santa.

Whatever. But the thing is, if she does think Santa Claus is real then her parents have been lying to her all her life, and she will find that out before long. Is the idea that that would be bad at age 7 but it’s fine at age 8? If so, why?

Mr. Trump’s faux pas was roundly mocked on social media, where he was criticized for breaking the covenant in which we have all agreed to deceive our children.

I think that is one strange covenant.

I wrote a somewhat sarcastic column for The Freethinker about it.

There’s the big picture, and then there are the details. One detail is the town of Fergus Falls, Minnesota.

Claas Relotius, who spent weeks reporting in Fergus Falls last year for one of Europe’s most respected publications, could have written about the many residents who maintain friendships across partisan lines, about the efforts to lure former residents back to west-central Minnesota or about how a city of roughly 14,000 people maintains a robust arts scene.

To give a sense of the place, he could have described local landmarks like the giant statue of Otto the Otter. Or the Minnesota-shaped welcome sign next to the Applebee’s. Or the expansive prairie that surrounds the town.

But he did not.

Instead, Mr. Relotius invented a condescending fiction. On the venerated pages of Der Spiegel, a German newsmagazine, Mr. Relotius portrayed Fergus Falls as a backward, racist place whose residents blindly supported President Trump and rarely ventured beyond city limits. He made up details about a young city official. He concocted characters, roadside signs and racially tinged plotlines.

A bit like Sinclair Lewis, except that Sinclair Lewis was straightforwardly writing fiction; Relotius was supposed to be writing and researching journalism.

“We’re taking the high road,” Mayor Ben Schierer said in an interview, in which he praised his city’s arts, parks and schools, which mostly seemed to escape Mr. Relotius’s notice. “We’ve moved on.”

Indeed, amid the heartache and hassle, some in Fergus Falls have seized an opportunity to tell the world what their city is really like. Sure, it has its struggles and tensions. But on the whole, residents get along, there is plenty to do, people enjoy living there.

Not all small towns are hotbeds of racism (and few or none are 100% populated by racists); not all Minnesotans are Trumpers.

Because the article was published only in German, its readership in Minnesota was limited. But civic leaders commissioned a professional translation, the text of which circulated around town in a shared online document. Outrage simmered.

The article’s fabrications ranged from the trivial (an account of a foreboding forest that does not exist and a Super Bowl party that did not happen) to the personally devastating (the city administrator was falsely portrayed as a gun-obsessed, romantically challenged man who had never seen the ocean) to the downright inflammatory (Mr. Relotius claimed there was a sign that said “Mexicans Keep Out” at the entrance to town).

No no, that’s the Oval Office.

The Times took some photos.

Credit Tim Gruber for The New York Times

It doesn’t exactly look like a shithole, does it.

The county did heavily vote for Trump (64%) but that’s not all there is to say about it.

“What happened, I think, was that he was trying to look for a cliché of a Trump-voting town and he simply didn’t find it,” said Christoph Scheuermann, the Der Spiegel correspondent who visited Fergus Falls last week to apologize and write about the town’s true story.

Mr. Scheuermann said the Fergus Falls he encountered was “almost the opposite” of the one Mr. Relotius described.

“I felt a lot of warmth,” he said. “Everybody was welcoming.”

You know, if you’re a journalist looking for a cliché of a Trump-voting town and the one you’re in isn’t it, you can always go find another town…or you could write about expecting a cliché and not finding it. Just a thought.

SpiegelOnline a few days ago:

It has now become clear that Claas Relotius, 33 years old, one of DER SPIEGEL’s best writers, winner of multiple awards and a journalistic idol of his generation, is neither a reporter nor a journalist. Rather, he produces beautifully narrated fiction. Truth and lies are mixed together in his articles and some, at least according to him, were even cleanly reported and free of fabrication. Others, he admits, were embellished with fudged quotes and other made-up facts. Still others were entirely fabricated. During his confession on Thursday, Relotius said, verbatim: “It wasn’t about the next big thing. It was the fear of failure.” And: “The pressure not to fail grew as I became more successful.”

That crude mishmash, which looked like masterful works of feature writing, transformed him into one of the most successful journalists in Germany in recent years. It earned Relotius the German Reporter Prize on four different occasions, the Peter Scholl Latour Prize and the Konrad-Duden, the Kindernothilfe and the Catholic and Coburger media awards. He was named CNN “Journalist of the Year,” he was honored with the Reemtsma Liberty Award, the European Press Prize and he even landed on the Forbes magazine list of the “30 under 30 – Europe: Media.” One wonders how he could endure the praise at the award ceremonies without running out of the hall in shame.

Well, there are people like that. I constantly wonder how Trump isn’t curled into a ball on the floor in shame, but I also know it’s foolish to keep wondering. It’s who he is.

So now the Trump ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, is making hay with the story.

Since the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel disclosed a fabrication scandal that has sent tremors through the news world at a tense time for journalists globally, Grenell has taken aim at the company.

He has tweeted about Der Spiegel, often harshly, and retweeted the criticism leveled by others, more than a dozen times in the past week.

“Spiegel hasn’t answered as to how this fraud happened,” he wrote, for example, on Dec. 23, apparently dissatisfied with the company’s somewhat extensive efforts to publicize the wrongdoings of the reporter, Claas Relotius. “It’s absurd for them to pretend this is only about one reporter.”

Yes, that’s definitely how ambassadors to friendly countries are supposed to behave.

Grenell wrote an incendiary letter to Der Spiegel, which it published on its site, in which he asked the company to arrange for an outside organization to conduct a thorough investigation of what went wrong.

“These fake news stories largely focused on U.S. policies and certain segments of the American people,” Grenell wrote. “While Spiegel’s anti-American narratives have expanded over the last years, the anti-American bias at the magazine has exploded since the election of President Trump.”

Surprise surprise. Trump is a crook, a liar, a sadist, a bully, and an empty sack of wind, so a country that puts him at the top of government has something badly wrong with it. It’s not “anti-American bias” to pay a lot of attention to Trump.

Trump, who has made undermining otherwise credible news reporting a central effort of his presidency, has often claimed, without evidence, that reporters make up their sources.

Against this backdrop, the Relotius affair has predictably fueled a long-standing right-wing campaign to criticize media whose reporting is not friendly to Trump.

Shawn Steel, the committeeman of the Republican National Committee in California, tweeted about it on Christmas, calling it the “German Fake News” that was guilty of “hating” Trump and America.

Home of Fox News and Breitbart.

An actual feminist fighting an actual oppressive patriarchy…. https://t.co/Ex0N4DDHwO

— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) December 26, 2018

Well thank fuck we have Jordan Peterson to tell us which oppressive patriarchies are actual, right?

Nick Cohen says the reason Corbyn and pals are so chill about Brexit may be that old Leninist magic.

Labour has inherited the mental deformations of the Leninist style of doing business: the leadership personality cult, the love of conspiracy theory, the robotic denunciations of opponents, and most critically for our current crisis, the ineradicable fantasy that the worse conditions for the masses become, the brighter the prospects of the far left are. Disaster socialism is its alternative to disaster capitalism.

You know the one: don’t support reformist candidates because they will merely make things slightly better and thus kneecap more radical reforms. The idea is clear enough but…risky.

Labour’s leaders don’t sound remotely fearful, however. When asked about Brexit they deliver bland, mendacious slogans and make it as clear as a waiter trying to avoid eye contact that they would much prefer to talk to someone else. The easy point to make against them is that ending freedoms is what the far left has always done: there was precious little freedom of movement across the Iron Curtain. But, for anyone familiar with socialist history, it is the embrace of what Leninists called “revolutionary defeatism” that is Labour’s most striking characteristic.

Corbyn wrote for the Morning Star, the newspaper of the old Communist party, which managed to carry on being pro-Soviet even after the Soviet Union collapsed. His Stop the War coalition was founded by Trotskyists from the Socialist Workers party and Islamists, an alliance of believers in the one-faith state and one-party state, as some of us noted at the time.

A coalition of Trotskyists and Islamists – it mirrors the weirdness of The Women’s March over here, with hijab-flaunting anti-Semitic Linda Sarsour as its poster woman.

Lenin established the doctrine of revolutionary defeatism during the First World War. He had no time for “banal” socialists who were campaigning for peace. The true communist welcomed war and yearned for the defeat of his country. For a defeat, in Lenin’s case of Russia by Germany, would incite “hatred of one’s own government and one’s own bourgeoisie” and bring the revolution closer.

Or (as Nick goes on to point out) it brings something altogether nightmarish so close that you can’t get away from it.

Beyond the practicalities lies the morality. To wish suffering on people who are weaker and poorer than you is disgusting and it is no less disgusting when Jeremy Corbyn rather than Jacob Rees-Mogg is hoping that the misery of others will advance his political programme.

It’s not a good gamble and it’s not with your own money, so get away from the table.

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them,” said Maya Angelou. The dominant factions of the British far left have shown you since the 1970s that they are anti-European. All far-leftists have shown you since 1917 they believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that catastrophe should be welcomed as the midwife of socialist revolution. Why not believe them?

Call a different midwife.

Here’s a new distinction – for the first time ever the US is on the Reporters Without Borders list of most dangerous countries for journalists. High five?

At least 63 professional journalists were killed doing their jobs in 2018, a 15 percent increase over last year, said the group, Reporters Without Borders. The number of deaths rises to 80 when all media workers and people classified as citizen journalists are included, it said in its annual report.

The world’s five deadliest countries for journalists include three — India, Mexico and, for the first time, the United States — where journalists were killed in cold blood, even though those countries weren’t at war or in conflict, the group said.

“The hatred of journalists that is voiced … by unscrupulous politicians, religious leaders and businessmen has tragic consequences on the ground, and has been reflected in this disturbing increase in violations against journalists,” Secretary-General Christophe Deloire said in a statement.

The Annapolis shoot-up is what put us on the list.

Is it fair to say Trump has made the US a lot more dangerous for journalists? Damn right it is.

Speaking of Wall and the border and holiday festivities and telling brown people to get out, we’ve killed another child in custody.

An 8-year-old boy from Guatemala died in United States custody early Christmas Day, according to the United States Customs and Border Protection.

The boy died just after midnight on Tuesday at a hospital in Alamogordo, N.M., where he and his father had been taken after a Border Patrol agent saw what appeared to be signs of sickness, according to a news release from the agency.