West Midlands Police and the Crown Prosecution Service have apologised for accusing the makers of a Channel 4 documentary of distortion.

The apology and the promise of £100,000 were made at the High Court on Thursday.

It follows comments made about a Dispatches programme, Undercover Mosque, which tackled claims of Islamic extremism in the West Midlands.

The police statement said the force was wrong to make the allegations.

A press release issued by the police and the CPS in August 2007 claimed the Dispatches programme, broadcast in January of that year, misrepresented the views of Muslim preachers and clerics with misleading editing.

One preacher was shown saying a homosexual should be thrown off a mountain, another that women were born deficient.

Police also reported Channel 4 to television watchdog Ofcom for "heavily editing" the words of Islamic imams.

But in November, Ofcom rejected the police and CPS claims, and Channel 4 said it was going to sue the CPS and police for libel.

The statement, released to the media after the High Court hearing by West Midlands Police, said they accepted there had been no evidence that Channel 4 or the documentary makers had "misled the audience or that the programme was likely to encourage or incite criminal activity".

It added that the Ofcom report showed the documentary had "accurately represented the material it had gathered and dealt with the subject matter responsibly and in context".

The police statement concluded: "We accept, without reservation, the conclusions of Ofcom and apologise to the programme makers for the damage and distress caused by our original press release."

Kevin Sutcliffe, deputy head of current affairs at Channel 4, said the apology was a vindication of the programme team in exposing extreme views.

"Channel 4 was fully aware of the sensitivities surrounding the subject matter but recognised the programme’s findings were clearly a matter of important public interest.

"The authorities should be doing all they can to encourage investigations like this, not attempting to publicly rubbish them for reasons they have never properly explained," he said.

David Henshaw, executive producer of Hardcash Productions, who made the documentary, said it was a thorough and detailed programme, made over nine months and at personal risk to the undercover reporter.

Channel 4 boss Julian Bellamy said they had had no choice but to pursue action when the police and CPS refused to withdraw their remarks.

The programme infiltrated a number of mosques, one of which was Green Lane Mosque in Small Heath, Birmingham.

An undercover reporter claimed to provide evidence that certain speakers preached messages of religious bigotry and extremism.

Police initially investigated whether three of the people shown in the programme could be prosecuted for inciting terrorism or racial hatred.

But they later switched their attention to the documentary makers, suggesting they may have been guilty of stirring up racial hatred.

Channel 4 said £50,000 would be donated to the Rory Peck Trust for freelance journalists and their families.

The broadcaster will also receive £50,000 to cover legal costs.

Clergymen in east London have been given police protection after a second attack on a vicar in the area.

Police patrols have been stepped up around Bethnal Green and surrounding areas after the two assaults.

Rev Kevin Scully, of St Matthew’s Church in Bethnal Green, was attacked last week when he asked a group of youths to move off the church steps.

The vicar of St-George-in-the-East Church in Shadwell less than a mile away was attacked by a gang in March.

The Church of England said it wanted to keep its land open to the community but protection was needed.

Police are keeping an open mind as to whether the two attacks are linked.

"Our Safer Neighbourhood Patrol has been stepped up in the area," said a Metropolitan Police spokesman. "We are liaising with multi-community and inter-faith groups."

The council and the police have now been galvanised into action and we are meeting to solve this problem

On 10 May, an 18-year-old man was arrested in connection with the attack on Rev Scully on 6 May.

He has been bailed to return to an east London police station on 11 June.

Rev Scully said : "It’s not a particularly pleasant experience and these things come out of a specific situation, unfortunately this one bubbled over into what it did."

A 19-year-old man has been charged with the attack on Canon Michael Ainsworth, 57, on the grounds of St George-in-the-East Church.

He suffered cuts, bruises and two black eyes.

Rev Alan Green, Dean of Tower Hamlets, said : "It is unfortunate that there have been these two attacks in such a short period. The council and the police have now been galvanised into action and we are meeting to solve this problem."

He described the assault on Rev Scully as a "mindless act of violence" by drunken youths.

Police have appealed for anyone who has any information about the attack on Rev Scully to come forward.

This letter from Archbishop Orombi is in response to the Presiding Bishop’s ‘Open Letter’ Presiding Bishop tells Primate of Uganda: Don’t come to Georgia

14th May 2008

The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori
The Episcopal Church USA
815 Second Avenue
New York, NY

Dear Bishop Katharine,

I received word of your letter through a colleague who had seen it on the internet. Without the internet, I may never have known that you had written such a personal, yet sadly ironic, letter to me.

Unfortunately, you appear to have been misinformed about key matters, which I hope to clear up in this letter.

1. I am not visiting a church in the Diocese of Georgia. I am visiting a congregation that is part of the Church of Uganda. Were I to visit a congregation within TEC, I would certainly observe the courtesy of contacting the local bishop. Since, however, I am visiting a congregation that is part of the Church of Uganda, I feel very free to visit them and encourage them through the Word of God.

2. The reason this congregation separated from TEC and is now part of the Church of Uganda is that the actions of TEC’s General Convention and statements of duly elected TEC leaders and representatives indicate that TEC has abandoned the historic Christian faith. Furthermore, as predicted by the Primates of the Anglican Communion in October 2003, TEC’s actions have, in fact, torn the fabric of the Communion at its deepest level.

3. May I remind you that the initial reason the Lambeth Commission on Communion was appointed was because of unbiblical decisions taken by TEC in defiance of repeated warnings by all of the Anglican Instruments of Communion. The Windsor Report was produced and accepted in amended form by the Primates at our meeting in Dromantine, Northern Ireland, in February 2005. It is, therefore, quite ironic for you to be quoting the Windsor Report to me. Nowhere in the Windsor Report or in subsequent statements of the Instruments of Communion is there a moral equivalence between the unbiblical actions and decisions of TEC that have torn the fabric of our Communion at its deepest level and the pastoral response on our part to provide ecclesiastical oversight to American congregations who wish to continue to uphold the faith once delivered to the saints and remain a part of the Anglican Communion. Your selective quoting of the Windsor Report is stunning in its arrogance and condescension.

4. You and your House of Bishops rejected outright the Pastoral Scheme painstakingly devised in Dar es Salaam, and to which you agreed. You have, therefore, left us no choice but to continue to respond to the cries of God’s faithful people in America for episcopal oversight that upholds and promotes historic, biblical Anglicanism.

5. An important element of the Dar es Salaam agreement was the plea by the Primates that "the representatives of The Episcopal Church and of those congregations in property disputes with it to suspend all actions in law arising in this situation." This was something to which you gave verbal assent and yet you have initiated more legal actions against congregations and clergy in your short tenure as Presiding Bishop than all of your predecessors combined. I urge you to rethink, suspend litigation and follow a more Christ-like approach to settling your differences.

Finally, I appeal to you to heed the advice of Gamaliel in Acts 5.38ff, "Leave these [churches] alone! Let them go! For if their purpose or activity is of human origin, it will fail. But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop [them]; you will only find yourselves fighting against God."

Yours, in Christ,

The Most Rev. Henry Luke Orombi
ARCHBISHOP OF CHURCH OF UGANDA.
 

A convicted and defrocked pedophile Episcopal priest is being allowed to conduct spiritual retreats - two of them in an Episcopal facility with the blessing of Mrs. Katharine Jefferts Schori, TEC’s Presiding Bishop.

In an exchange of correspondence with David Clohessy, National Director of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), Mrs. Jefferts Schori, through her Pastoral Development Officer Bishop F. Clayton Matthews, said that Mr. Lynn C. Baumann could function as a spiritual retreat master on the understanding that "Mr. Baumann’s contact (is) to adults only".

Baumann is scheduled to lead spiritual retreats at The House of Prayer in the Episcopal Diocese of Minnesota, later this month.

"There are big problems with that," Clohessy told VOL. "If I start telling people, from today forward, that I am a sex offender, it does nothing to ameliorate the betrayal of all those people who have already been mislead by my secrecy, nor does it reach out to anyone already molested.

"If I own a toxic waste dump and, under public pressure, post a sign saying ‘DANGER STAY OUT’, it fails to address the issue of how many children have already been contaminated!"

Clohessy said Bauman molested one youngster and several others at a retreat center ironically titled "The Way of the Wolf Retreat Center" in Fredericksburg, Texas.

Read here:  http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=8238

WHAT:     Seminar with question time and breakfast

WHEN:    14th June from 9.30am until 12.30pm

WHERE:  Downstairs at Christ Church Clifton

WHO:       Dr Philip Giddings

Dr Philip Giddings is Vice-Chairman of the General Synod’s House of Laity, Member of Archbishops’ Council, Chair of the Church of England’s Mission and Public Affairs Council, Convenor of Anglican Mainstream and Chair of its trustees.  Philip is also head of the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Reading; writer and commentator on constitutional and parliamentary affairs.

This seminar is vital for anyone who wishes to develop an understanding of the difficulties currently faced by the Anglican Church.  All welcome, please contact the church office of you wish to attend.

Tel: 0117 973 6524

Email: info@christchurchclifton.org.uk

Web: www.christchurchclifton.org.uk

The Australian prints a story that you won’t see in the British media. It reports:

Children with a step-parent or no biological parent are significantly more at risk than those with a single parent or both biological parents…Dr Tooley’s study found that children with a step-parent were at least 17 times more likely to die from intentional violence or accident. A limited version of the study found that the rate could be as high as 77 times. It found the risk was higher if there were no biological parents, such children being at least 22 times more prone. Most at risk were children under five.

Very similar findings were reported in Britain some two decades ago. The evidence that shattered or reconstituted families pose vastly greater risks to children than traditional two-parent families has always been overwhelming. But in Britain, the government simply stopped collecting statistics that broke down families by type which enabled researchers to compare violence and other ill-effects in different types of household.

This blurred the distinction between parents and parent-substitutes, and enabled the lie to be told that children were in more danger from their parents than from strangers. The truth is that natural parents provide the greatest safety for children, and it is the reconstituted family which poses the greatest danger. The deliberate concealment of that truth has been used to justify the breakdown of family life whose catastrophic ill-effects are only now beginning to be acknowledged.

Women priests in the Church of England say they would rather never be bishops at all than have to accept special arrangements for opponents of women’s ordination.

Nearly half of all the serving women priests in the Church of England have signed an open letter to the Church’s bishops warning that the entire integrity and mission of the Church is at stake.

The women say they support those in the Church in Wales who a few weeks ago defeated a proposal to ordain women bishops because it included protections to safeguard opponents.

A recent report by a group chaired by the Bishop of Manchester, the Right Rev Nigel McCulloch, outlined a number of options for the General Synod to consider at its meeting in York this July, including the creation of separate dioceses for traditionalists which would transcend historic geographical boundaries.

Instead of legislation that would provide safe havens for traditionalists, the women say they want the Church to proceed straight away with a simple measure to consecrate women to the episcopate.

Senior clergy who have signed the letter include Canon Lucy Winkett, precentor at St Paul’s and Canon Jane Hedges, steward at Westminster Abbey. Both are women likely to be considered for the episcopate once it becomes possible to consecrate them.

More than 700 women priests have signed it, indicating they are backing the stance.

Canon Winkett told The Times: “We are saying that to consecrate women bishops is right, both in principle and in its timing. We believe now is the time to do it. But the way that it happens is important.

“The Church at large misjudges women if it really believes that we would support the consecration of women bishops at any price. We would regret very much a delay, but regretfully we would rather wait than see discriminatory legislation passed.”

When women were ordained to the priesthood over a decade ago, the Church of England passed an Act of Synod which created “flying bishops” to care for traditionalist parishes. Under that legislation, which will be repealed when women are ordained bishops, parishes can still opt to be cared for by a bishop other than their own diocesan, and to make their churches into “no-go areas” for women priests.

The women priests are anxious to ensure that no legislation is passed that offers even more safeguards than the Act of Synod.

In their letter they say: “We believe that it should be possible for women to be consecrated as bishops, but not at any price.

“The price of legal ‘safeguards’ for those opposed is simply too high, diminishing not just the women concerned, but the catholicity, integrity and mission of the episcopate and of the Church as a whole.

“We cannot countenance any proposal that would, once again, enshrine and formalise discrimination against women in legislation. With great regret, we would be prepared to wait longer, rather than see further damage done to the Church of England by passing discriminatory laws.”

They continue: “We long to see the consecration of women bishops in the Church of England, and believe it is right both in principle and in timing. But because we love the Church, we are not willing to assent to a further fracture in our communion and threat to our unity. If it is to be episcopacy for women qualified by legal arrangements to ‘protect’ others from our oversight, then our answer, respectfully, is thank you, but no.”

TOLEDO, May 14, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Crystal Dixon, associate vice president of human resources at the University of Toledo, was first suspended then fired after writing a letter to a local newspaper. In it she responded to a previous article released by the paper that compared the discrimination of homosexuals to that of African-Americans. Dixon, an African-American, challenged the civil rights comparison of race with homosexual behavior, saying that science has never found a genetic cause or DNA for homosexuality. She said many gay people have overcome unwanted homosexual feelings as evidenced by the growing population of PFOX and ex-gay organizations.

Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays & Gays (PFOX) says the University of Toledo’s firing of administrator Crystal Dixon for speaking out about PFOX and the ex-gay community is an act of bigotry.

"African-Americans like Dixon have the right to defend their race without being subjected to punishment," said Regina Griggs, Executive Director of PFOX. Dixon was responding to an article by Toledo Free Press Editor Michael Miller, who had compared gay rights to the African-American civil rights movement. Miller also wrote that three women he had dated subsequently declared themselves gay.

The University of Toledo reportedly has a "Safe Places Program" designating space for "lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning individuals." According to Lloyd Jacobs, president of the university, there is a Safe Places sticker on his door of the president’s office. "Mr. Jacobs needs to add ex-gays and African-Americans to that list of campus ’safe spaces," said Griggs. "His firing of Dixon creates an unsafe environment for minorities."

See Related Coverage:

Black University Employee Suspended for Objecting to Comparison between Black and Homosexual Discrimination
 

TORONTO, ON, May 14, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In its ruling against Christian Horizons(CH), the Evangelical charitable organization, the Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) adjudicator Michael Gottheil has delivered several striking juridical precedents which have serious implications for all Christian organizations operating in Ontario.

Several sections of the ruling infringe upon the rights of managers and employees to act, or in some cases to even think, in a Christian manner within the context of their specifically Christian organization. They also epitomize the modern homosexual activists’ self-interested and accusatory misunderstanding of the Christian position on homosexual persons.

In one section, Gottheil states that: "Its (CH’s) policy, based on the belief that homosexuality was unnatural and immoral, engendered fear, ignorance, hatred and suspicion. It sent the message to employees that gays and lesbians were not equal members of the workplace community."

This statement was made only in reference to the implications of CH’s policy and the Christian belief without any specific citing of resulting discrimination tied to it. Whether or not Christians, or more specifically the fellow employees of CH, are called to respect the dignity of the human person and not to indulge in hatred of other persons was not mentioned. Therefore the Christian position itself, regardless of context or evidence of wrongful discrimination, is, according to Gottheil, wrongfully discriminatory under the Ontario Human Rights Code.

Among several other violations of the Code adjudicator Gottheil was particularly condemning of Christian Horizons’ offer of counselling to Ms. Heintz.

Speaking to the offer of ‘restoration’ counselling, Gottheil states that, " …the attempt of ‘restoration’ for persons who are gay or lesbian is profoundly disrespectful and oppressive. Notwithstanding that Christian Horizons sincerely believes that homosexuality is unnatural and immoral, homosexuality is neither a crime nor an illness. Gays and lesbians are entitled to be treated by their employers, even where those employers may be religious organizations, with respect and dignity, and not be offered counselling to cure them of their sexuality."

Thus, the mere offer of counselling from a Christian perspective in the area of sexual morality, within the context of a specifically Christian organization, with a published and agreed upon code of conduct, is ‘profoundly oppressive’ and in violation of the code.

Christian Horizon’s only available defence within the Ontario Human Rights Code was an exemption under section 24(1)(a) which states:

"A religious, philanthropic, education, fraternal or social institution or organization that is primarily engaged in serving the interests of persons identified by race, ancestry, place of origin, colour, ethnic origin, creed, sex, age, marital status or handicap, is allowed to give preference in employment to persons similarly identified, if the qualification is a reasonable and genuine one because of the nature of the employment. Inquiries about such affiliation may be made at the employment interview stage."

Gottheil denied this exemption based on the fact the CH serves the public outside of its own creed, not, as many have supposed, because Christian Horizons receives public funding for its work with the handicapped.

Whether this decision lays further ground work for the type of ’secular bullying’ now characteristic of Human Rights Tribunals remains to be seen. The decision may well have implications for Christian schools and even Churches, as it can be argued that they operate within the public sphere outside of their own specified groups in terms of evangelization ministries and outreach programs. Such a finding may prohibit even Christian schools and Churches from being able to require employees to be practicing Christians.

Christian Horizons has appealed the current decision. The nature of the appeal and its outcome should be of great interest to all parties involved.

Commenting on the decision, Ontario Human Rights Tribunal Commissioner, Barbara Hall, stated:

"This decision is important because it sets out that when faith-based and other organizations move beyond serving the interests of their particular community to serving the general public, the rights of others, including employees, must be respected."

See related coverage:
Huge Christian Ministry to Disabled Fined $23,000 For Rejecting Homosexual Employee
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/apr/08042512.html

Christian Ministry to Disabled Drops its Code of Conduct Under Human Rights Tribunal Pressure
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/may/08051205.html

Ontario Human Rights Tribunal Ruling Denies Christian Ministry’s Right to be Christian
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/apr/08042809.html
 

Western governments are spending mind-boggling sums treating HIV-positive patients in the developing world. But would they save more lives by concentrating on prevention? Decca Aitkenhead meets the outspoken expert who says that liberal fears of appearing judgmental are blinding us to the truth about the disease.

When Elizabeth Pisani began her career as an HIV epidemiologist, fewer than 1.5m cases of Aids had been reported across the world. Within a year, by the end of 1997, 30 million people were estimated to be infected with HIV. As Pisani wrote in her first report for World Aids Day, that meant one in every 100 sexually active adults aged between 15 and 49 worldwide.

Today, just over a decade later, the global figure is estimated to be closer to 40 million, with more than 1.5m new infections every year. Yet there is a widespread impression that the world is now winning the fight against the virus. The perception that it threatens only sex workers, heroin addicts and gay men has been replaced by the urgent consensus that this is a universal problem - backed by mind-boggling sums.

Ten years ago, the developing world received roughly $300m a year from the west. By 2007, the figure was $10bn. This year the US alone has budgeted $5bn for HIV in developing countries - and last month the US Congress voted to commit a further $50bn over the next five years. The President’s Emergency Plan For Aids Relief (Pepfar), personally initiated by George W Bush, has been described in Washington as the most successful foreign aid programme since the Marshall Plan, and "the best thing that ever happened to the poor people I work with" by one HIV programme leader in Africa. On a recent visit to the continent, Bush was feted as the saviour who has put one and a half million Africans on life-saving drugs.

"We used to sit around fantasising about having unlimited resources," Pisani recalls. "Like winning the lottery." Today, the Aids industry - "or Aids mafia", in her words - effectively has won the lottery. But Pisani is not celebrating. Her book, The Wisdom of Whores, published this week, condemns the global strategy for Aids as an ill-conceived waste of money which is not saving but costing lives.

"HIV is mostly about people doing stupid things in the pursuit of pleasure or money," declares the cover on a proof copy of the book. "We’re just not allowed to say so." She suspects she will never work in the Aids industry again for saying so. "But it’s true."

Pisani, 43, spent 10 years working in the field of HIV, first for Unaids and then for a non-governmental organisation (NGO) in Indonesia. As an epidemiologist, she quickly identified the risk of the virus spreading among drug injectors, gay men and the sex trade across Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe - underdeveloped countries with inadequate resources to prevent an epidemic. That placed 100 million at risk in Asia alone - equivalent to a third of the population of the Africa. But the data was clear: "HIV wasn’t going to rage through the billions in the ‘general population’. And we knew it."

Like most of her colleagues, however, she also quickly realised that "governments don’t like spending money on sex workers, gay men and drug addicts". So she put her skills as a former journalist to work, and began producing the sort of reports that persuaded politicians in Washington and the west that it is not "wicked people" but "innocent wives" at risk. "Aids couldn’t be about sex and drugs," she explains. "So suddenly it had to be about development, and gender, and blah blah blah."

The strategy was more successful than she could ever have imagined. "All these obsessively politically correct things started getting introduced." HIV publications and conferences began devoting more time and attention to issues such as poverty, gender, development, vulnerability, leadership - what Pisani calls "sacred cows" - than to condoms and clean needles. "I’m just waiting for ‘climate change and Aids’," she jokes sarcastically in her book - and sure enough, this week a headline appeared in an Australian newspaper: "Global warming set to fan HIV."

These were all far more palatable issues to politicians than sex and drugs, and the money began to roll in. But they are not, Pisani argues, what cause Aids. "We have to stop this nonsense now. Talking about ‘vulnerability’ will not stop people getting infected."

Pisani’s relief at being free now to "tell it how it is" is palpable. After gaining a degree in classical Chinese, she joined Reuters as a reporter in the far east, and then took a masters in medical demography in London in the early 90s. She quit the field to write her book, and people are often surprised to discover she is an epidemiologist, because her charisma and sense of irony would be more familiar to a foreign correspondent’s club than an NGO. "Basically," she likes to say, "my book is about sex, drugs and taxation." It is easy to see why she grew exasperated with UN colleagues who would exchange tortuous memos agonising over the most sensitive wording of something as simple as "men who have sex with men". She wasn’t hostile to their liberal instincts - just impatient that semantics were wasting time, when people were dying.

There are two distinctly separate Aids epidemics, she says - one in Africa, and one in the rest of the world. In Africa, people are contracting the virus through heterosexual, non-commercial sex. But in most of the world, Pisani claims, the data clearly indicates that the risk is confined to drug users, sex workers and gay men - the very groups that Aids organisations have worked so hard to distance from the problem. Yet all the evidence of focused programmes which target these high-risk groups with effective preventative measures - condom use and clean needles - is that they work.

"We could knock this epidemic in the rest of the world on the head - just like we’ve knocked so many things on the head in the rest of the world - but we’re not doing it, largely because of the paradigm that we’re developing in Africa. The Aids industry has become an island unto itself, in a sea of common sense. That’s the tragedy of it. It’s unsayable."

There is more than a touch of the maverick iconoclast about Pisani. The Wisdom of Whores is full of exotic anecdotes from the colourful world of transgender prostitutes, and the language - like her manner - is lively. But the book is built around a solid body of scientific evidence, and the blend of data analysis and straight talking makes a very persuasive argument. But if Pisani is right, why isn’t anyone else making it?

"If you are a data nerd, you spend your whole time looking at the numbers, and the conclusions are fairly inescapable. So a lot of the data nerds feel the same way as me. But at the NGO level, of UN organisations, we’ve been spouting all this stuff about development and poverty for so long that if you don’t look at the data, if you just listen to the rhetoric, you’d be completely forgiven for believing that stuff."

Even if Pisani is right about the rest of the world, what can be wrong with a global strategy for Africa which has brought antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) to one and a half million of the poorest people in the world? It is easy to mock talk of "gender and development and blah blah blah", but it has persuaded a conservative president to fund HIV treatment on a previously unimaginable scale. Bush’s motive may be unconventional - he is said to see global HIV as a US national security - but surely, I suggest, if he throws enough money at the wall, some of it will stick.

"Not if you’re chucking it at the wrong wall."

The problem, Pisani says, is that 80% of the Pepfar budget goes on treatment. "Pepfar says great, we’ve got 1.8 million people in treatment. And next year it will be another 1.8 million! That will mean 3.6 million people. It’s exponential - and that’s the biggest question mark over the entire approach to Africa. The more treatment you have, the more infection you get."

ARVs reduce people’s viral load, she agrees, making them less likely to infect someone else - as long as they don’t miss a single dose. "But it also keeps them alive longer, and healthy enough to want to have sex. You only have to look at the experience of the UK or US gay communities where we’ve had more or less universal access to ARVs for at least eight or nine years, and the number of new infections are rising. More people are living longer with HIV, and there is what we call behavioural disinhibition: ‘Fuck the condoms, I don’t need them any more, because if he’s positive he’ll be on drugs, so he probably won’t infect me. And if I do get infected, it would be annoying, but not the end of the world.’

"But having Aids is not a picnic. Yes, it’s great that all this stuff on treatment is happening. But it becomes all the more urgent to have effective prevention. And that’s not happening."

Even the 20 cents in every US dollar allowed to be spent on prevention is wasted, Pisani argues. A third of the prevention budget has to be allocated to faith-based organisations, which refuse to distribute condoms and will promote only abstinence before marriage. The failure rate of "virginity pledge" programmes among young Americans in the US is about 75%; condoms’ failure rate is roughly 2%. Yet Pepfar, Pisani laughs, "claims its policy decisions are ‘evidence based’".

Pisani’s criticism of the treatment-and-abstinence approach in Africa has been echoed elsewhere. The director of America’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases told an international conference last summer, "For every person who gets life-saving drugs, six more are getting infected. Clearly, we’re losing that game." Richard Holbrooke, the former US ambassador to the UN, agrees. "Focusing primarily on treatment will never succeed."

But if some in the Aids industry are willing to criticise the contradictions driven by rightwing ideology, Pisani finds them far less ready to admit the ideological motivation of their own "Poverty causes Aids" agenda. They daren’t say the virus is usually transmitted by risky behaviour, she thinks, for fear of appearing "judgmental" and confirming the old rightwing attitude that
people with HIV don’t deserve to be cared for.

"A good friend of mine - he works in the industry and is a sensible guy - called me up and said, ‘You’ve got to change the blurb on the cover of your book. You can’t use the word stupid. You can’t call people stupid.’ I said, ‘I’m not calling people stupid, I’m saying they do stupid things. Not the same thing.’ But he said, ‘You will get absolutely crucified.’ So I’ve had to change it to ‘daft’."

She half laughs, and rolls her eyes.

"You know, it’s one of the difficult things about arguing for a more targeted response. You’re basically saying, ‘Look, people are getting infected now because they’re doing dumb things.’ But people do dumb things all the time. I do. We all do. Why is it OK to be judgmental about people who smoke? But not to be judgmental about people who take crystal meth and fuck 16 guys in a weekend without condoms?"

Is Pisani judgmental?

"I don’t think it’s evil to have anal sex with 16 people in a weekend without condoms. I just think if you do that there’s a high likelihood you’re going to get infected. That’s all. It’s cause and effect. And I think if we can prevent a fatal disease, we should. I don’t get how it’s OK to keep someone alive once they’re sick - but not OK to stop them getting sick. I just don’t get that."

· Elizabeth blogs on sex, science and HIV at wisdomeofwhores.com

· The Wisdom of Whores by Elizabeth Pisani is published by Granta Books at £17.99. To order a copy for £16.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875.