‘The people who believe that Satanists might eat your baby’

Thanks to Mr. Really Angry for sending us this (he also sent us the Ben Fellows article – see previous post). It’s an old article (from 2002) but still very pertinent:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3574493/The-people-who-believe-that-Satanists-might-eat-your-baby.html

Here are some choice snippets:

…What the inquiry did expose…was the tangle of folklore and urban legend that produced the scare. The ingredients included: stories of baby sacrifice borrowed from 19th-century anti-Catholic propaganda (many Satan-hunters are anti-Catholic fundamentalists); the anti-Semitic blood libel; corny images of devil-worshippers owing more to The Wicker Man than to any real occult rubric; television cartoons (the Orkney allegations featured adults dressed as Ninja Turtles); and the scatological rambling of small children…

…As Prof La Fontaine points out, paedophilia is the most potent representation of evil in modern society; it is not surprising that it should become conflated with older folk devils, or that groups with a distrust of the Establishment – fundamentalists, feminists, social workers – should prove receptive to such a myth. What is surprising is that they have been able to sustain their belief in the face of the empirical demolition of their claims…

…They have done so by retreating into the time-honoured logic of the conspiracy theorist: the absence of evidence proves the effectiveness of the conspiracy. The resourceful Satanists dispose of bodies by feeding them into mincing machines, dissolving them in acid baths, burning them in furnaces or just eating them. How do they get away with it? Dr Joan Coleman, a psychiatrist who spoke at yesterday’s meeting, says the abusers have “Masonic connections”, though an American campaigner, Prof Cory Hammond, thinks they are part of a Nazi conspiracy led by a renegade Jew…

…Miss [Valerie] Sinason, the main speaker yesterday, is on the record as saying that Satanists are breeding babies for ritual murder, a practice she described to the Catholic Herald as “an Auschwitz in peacetime”. Until now, not one body has surfaced to corroborate this theory…

…Prof La Fontaine’s verdict on Valerie Sinason goes to the heart of the problem. “It’s depressing to find someone who has a position at leading London hospitals who is so cut off from what research methodology is, and what rational evidence is,” she says. When Miss Sinason announces that she has “clinical evidence” of infanticide and cannibalism, she means that her patients have told her stories about them…

~ Damian Thompson, Telegraph, 22.03.02

Sadly, the likes of Valerie Sinason et al are still peddling their SRA bullshit; but it’s reassuring to know that since her heyday, most people have now woken up to these hoaxes and can see right through them. If only that had always been the case.

Valerie Sinason, a lot to answer for

Further SRA-related blogs, videos and press articles:

https://hoaxteadresearch.wordpress.com/satanic-ritual-abuse