Over at Bartholomew’s Notes on Religion Richard Bartholomew has been engaged in an argument with Joel Richardson, right-wing Christian fundamentalist author of various wacko books including The Islamic Antichrist. Richardson published an article at WorldNetDaily claiming that there is “epidemic of child brides throughout the Islamic world” and that there are today “approximately 51 million” such cases worldwide. Bartholomew does a good job of debunking these claims, much to Richardson’s annoyance.

In the course of this dispute the Australian blogger “Sheik Yer’Mami” – real name Werner Reimann and a deeply repellent individual even by the standards of the collection of racists, cranks and sociopaths that make up the “international counterjihad movement” – rallied to the support of Joel Richardson by posting a piece at his Winds of Jihad site in which he accuses Bartholomew of “whitewashing Mohammedan pedophilia”, and claims that it shows that Bartholomew himself “supports pedophilia”.

As it happens, Reimann himself has been accused by one of his critics of having had links to a paedophile ring in Australia. I’m sure Reimann would vehemently deny this allegation and argue that it is a vile slur on his character. So why does he think it’s acceptable to post a baseless charge of support for paedophilia against Richard Bartholomew?