The Beeb really is hilarious sometimes. In its report on Gillian Gibbons’s story it puts ‘ordeal’ in quotation marks but leaves ‘insulting Islam’ free of them. So we get

A British teacher jailed in Sudan for letting her class name a teddy bear Muhammad has spoken of her “ordeal”, after returning to the UK. Gillian Gibbons, 54, from Liverpool, had spent eight days in custody for insulting Islam before eventually being pardoned by President Omar al-Bashir.

You have to admit – that really is funny.… Read the rest

I trust you read that piece by John Tierney on the need to be more respectful of female genital mutilation – or rather, of what he carefully decides to call ‘female circumcision’ because it’s critics who call it female genital mutilation. Well we call it that because chopping off the clitoris and most of the labia and sewing up the whole hatchet-job does seem like mutilation – we critics are funny that way.

Tierney’s piece on Leon Kass’s speech last week was terrific, but this one is…not so good. I do not like it. It makes me cross.

But the one by Richard Shweder puts Tierney’s in the shade. It’s jaw-dropping.

He’s very angry with feminists who don’t like FGM.… Read the rest

I heard Robin Fox explaining that democracy is not ‘natural’ on NPR this morning. He said we think that what we’re used to is human nature, but it’s not, it’s just what we’re used to. Most people in the world are used to tribalism, he went on, and that’s what they want. They don’t care about nation or categories like ‘Arab,’ they care about family and tribe and what brings honour to them.

It’s interesting, and persuasive up to a point, but only up to a point. For one thing, there are objective benefits that tend to go with democracy and don’t tend to go with tribalism. And for a perhaps more significant and more far-reaching thing, what does Fox … Read the rest

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Frederick Crews looks at the wonderful interplay between Big Pharma and middle-class hypochondria.

Most of us naively regard mental disturbances, like physical ones, as timeless realities that our doctors address according to up-to-date research, employing medicines whose appropriateness and safety have been tested

A couple of days ago I asked what if there had been (quoting Bunglawala) ‘apparent intention to offend Islamic sensibilities or defame the honour and name of the Prophet Muhammad’ – would that make the arrest of Gibbons okay?

Should ‘defaming the honour and name of the Prophet Muhammad’ or ‘offending Islamic sensibilities’ be a criminal offense under the law? It’s good that Bunglawala said Gibbons shouldn’t have been arrested, but his reason for saying so is not so good, and the fact that the BBC is still automatically phoning the MCB for the obligatory comment is also not good. The BBC still needs to expand its Rolodex.

Bunglawala obliged us by answering the question*, and what do you … Read the rest