Cultwatch

A former Labor Party state planning minister for Victoria, Justin Madden, attended the opening of a new Scientology centre in Melbourne.

He was quoted as saying "Unselfishly, you work to provide ways and means to uplift our society. You have set the standard for the community with your restoration of this building and with your social programs — an example I will point to for others to follow. Your new Church is as Melbourne as Melbourne gets”.

...

"Your new church" is a monument to a greasy money-grubbing fruitcake criminal cult. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the life of our city.

Former conservative state leader and current Melbourne Lord Mayor Robert Doyle also showed up - in a mayoral limo - even though he said he was there for a friend, a local entertainment figure who is a Scientologist. He has voiced regret about doing it however.

The man who actually got the job Doyle wanted, Victoria Premier Ted Baillieu, said "I, like many Australians, have concerns about the role Scientology has played in the past and I’m not a fan".

Xemu's chief scumbag David Miscavige is quoted as saying "Having triumphed today in the name of our religion, you just flipped this planet all the way around so that Melbourne now sits on top of the globe. And that’s what it means to build an Ideal Org beneath the Southern Cross"

Independent Senator Nick Xenophon challenged Doyle to meet with the victims of the cult that Xenophon has been representing in his bid to reverse the cult's formal recognition as a religious body.

Related.

Scientology accused of violent crime

Today independent senator Nick Xenophon castigated Scientology as being a criminal organisation and called for an inquiry into their tax exempt status.
He referred to allegations by former members - some of them members for decades - of unlawful imprisonment, coerced abortions, physical violence, and blackmail.

He stated "It is alleged that information about suspicious deaths and child abuse has been destroyed and one follower has admitted that he was coerced by the organisation into perjuring himself into deaths of his two daughters.....These victims of Scientology claim it is an abusive manipulative and violent organisation."
The prime minister was careful with his words but described the allegations as "grave".
He said ‘‘Many people in Australia have real concerns about Scientology....I share some of those concerns. Let us proceed carefully and look carefully at the material he (Xenophon) has provided before we make a decision on further parliamentary action.’’

This morning I was listening to a radio interview between ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) host Jon Faine and a leader-spokesperson for the Australian branch of the church of Scientology. I like Faine as a savage questioner, most of the time.

Faine took the church spokesman to pieces when the latter refused to answer a simple yes-no question as to whether the church would respond to questions honestly if under oath in a court of law.
Under oath....
"I don't care to answer that" is not an okay response. That's contempt of court, and if you lie it's perjury.

The clear implication was that when it came down to a choice between compliance to the law of the land and protecting the interests of the church... the law of the land would be disregarded. I couldn't believe how stupid the spokesman was for tacitly admitting that.

Personally I try not to indulge in casual Scientology-bashing.
True, it looks fun for all their stable of goofy celebrities and, apparently, an inheritance of really bad science fiction as their theology, but each to their own...
It's when they prey on the mentally vulnerable that I get hostile.

There are other cults, at a local level, that I would go after ahead of Scientology. The cult called The Exclusive Brethren probably tops my list because of their extreme separatism and alleged political influence.
But if any of these allegations that Xenophon has aired are true... then they need to answer the charges.

Looking forward to seeing what develops from this.

Terrorism, as I remember it...

I came close to violent death twice during the time I lived in Japan.

Once would have been at the hands of low-level yakuza, who 'conveyed' me from a part of Tokyo where they were engaged in something private. They could in truth have cut me into little pieces and dumped the bits into the Sumida river. I should have shat myself on the spot... but the experience was so surreal and unexpected - and I was so young and stupid - that I didn't feel anything till my coffee was shaking in my hand an hour later in a cafe. Overall.... that's now just a strange thing that happened to me once, remembered by no-one else but me.

The second time was when I missed a train, and unfortunately this incident is infamous...

It was 1995 and Aum Shinrikyo (Aum Supreme Truth and now called Aleph) released sarin, a poison gas, into the subway near Kasumigaseki in Tokyo. Twelve dead and nearly a thousand affected. It could have been a thousand dead and twelve thousand affected, and it wasn't the last time they tried.

Aum were and are religious nuts. They weren't Right or Left. They were starting something they somehow thought would trigger Armageddon. Their pig of a leader took the concept from the book of Revelation.

There was such shock at the time... for this atrocity was not committed by devious foreigners or a loopy regime like North Korea... it was committed by educated and seemingly respectable people among their own citizenry.
Aum, among their other revolting features, were a hate group. The leadership bought into conspiracy theories about Jews ruling the world, and - needless to say - they were anti-government.

The police swooped. They were on to Aum already.
The public were singularly without outrage that homeland security was taken seriously, that religious cults were watched, and that people storing weapons were not regarded as patriots.

When their compounds were raided, it was discovered that they had imported samples of anthrax and ebola. They had a helicopter.
And a lot of guns.

Could that happen anywhere? Is it a relevant example?
There are a number of grieving families who would think so.