Nothing’s too good for the Iranian president.

Italian officials keen to spare the Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, any possible offence on his visit to Rome covered up nude statues at the city’s Capitoline Museum, where Rouhani met Matteo Renzi, the Italian prime minister.

Photographs of Monday’s visit show both men standing near a grand equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor. Nude statues in the vicinity were covered by large white panels.

I think the Italian officials misunderstand. It’s not that the Iranian mullahs and government hate statues of naked women, it’s that they hate women – live women, women walking around and breathing, women who could cause trouble for them. The male theocrats aren’t prudes, they just want to control women. Statues are only statues, and besides they’re Italian, and in Italy.

The decision to cover the artwork was seen as a sign of respect for the Iranian president, according to the Italian news agency Ansa. Not everyone agreed.

“Respect for other cultures cannot and must not mean negating our own,” said Luca Squeri, a lawmaker in Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right Forza Italia party. “This isn’t respect, it’s cancelling out differences and it’s a kind of surrender.”

In another placatory gesture by Italian officials, alcohol was not served at an official dinner held in Rouhani’s honour, abiding by a standard diplomatic gesture for visiting Muslim dignitaries.

That’s a whole different thing though. It’s not comparable. Alcohol isn’t a person. Alcohol doesn’t have rights that the Iranian regime violates. The hatred of non-muffled women leads to violations of the rights of living breathing walking talking women. That’s a great deal more important then whether or not alcohol is served.

Rouhani’s visit to Europe – his first since sanctions were lifted in Iran – was supposed to take place in November but was delayed following the Paris terror attacks. On Tuesday, he had a private meeting with Pope Francis and other top church officials where the two leaders held “cordial” talks, the Vatican said, adding that the two men shared “common spiritual values”.

Of course they do, especially the “value” that women are stupid and inferior and have to be suppressed.

Originally a comment by Bernard Hurley on All the women SPIEGEL likes to call the “old feminists”.

About 25 years ago I was a parent governor of a school in Ilford in East London. According to their statistics, the intake was 60% Muslim. Most were from Bangladesh but there were some Kurds. At the time, apart from language difficulties, I had no problem talking to any of the mothers and they seemed to have no problem approaching me about any issues they might have with the school. One of then told me that she likes living in England because she can have more of a say about how her children are brought up. Most of these people came to England because they wanted a more western way of life, not because they were trying to escape from anything and so had some sort of commitment to finding out how the society works and what its values are.

However things seem to have changed – I have been told by one of my Muslim friends who still lives in the area that this would not be possible today. He puts this down to the spreading of Islamist propaganda among younger Muslims. Although I hadn’t realised it myself, I had provided a small area in which these women could start to find a way out of some of the traditional misogyny of the communities they came from. Today the Islamists would simply not allow this to happen. Nevertheless most Muslims who live in the area would be shocked by what happened in Cologne.

Even though most Muslims are not Islamists, the mere existence of Islamism as a political force will tend to make the traditional misogyny of some Muslim communities seem more acceptable. I should imagine that most of the perpetrators in Cologne were not in the West out of choice, had no idea what Western values are and, even if they rejected it, have been influenced by the Islamism that has affected the culture they were brought up in. Even so, even though there were many of them, they are but a small proportion of all the young male refugees to have come to Europe recently.

The solution, as always, is not to try to find groups to blame but to find out what exactly happened and why and to work out what to do about it.

BBC News:

Sweden’s prime minister has described as a “terrible crime” the stabbing of a female employee at a centre for young asylum seekers.

Prime Minister Stefan Lofven visited the centre for unaccompanied migrants in Molndal, near Gothenburg, hours after the killing.

The suspect, an asylum seeker aged 15, has been arrested for the killing of the employee, who was 22.

…

Police officers arriving at the scene found a “crime scene with a lot of blood”, said police press spokesman Thomas Fuxborg.

“The perpetrator had been overpowered by other residents, people were down and upset.”

The unnamed victim died in hospital of her injuries.

So that’s appalling.

Aw gee, that attempt to damage Planned Parenthood has turned around and gone the other way.

A county grand jury here that was investigating allegations of misconduct against Planned Parenthood has instead indicted two anti-abortion activists who made videos of the organization.

In a statement, the Harris County district attorney, Devon Anderson, said Monday that the director of the Center for Medical Progress, David Daleiden, had been indicted on a felony charge of tampering with a governmental record and a misdemeanor count related to purchasing human organs.

Well that backfired.

Another center employee, Sandra Merritt, was indicted on a charge of tampering with a governmental record.

The Center for Medical Progress had covertly shot videos of Planned Parenthood officials discussing the provision of body parts from aborted fetuses for research. Mr. Daleiden, 26, had posed as a biotechnology representative to infiltrate Planned Parenthood affiliates and surreptitiously record his attempts to procure tissue for research.

The activists have claimed that Planned Parenthood has engaged in the illegal sale of body parts — a charge the organization has firmly denied.

And the “activists” faked the video in hopes of framing Planned Parenthood.

Mr. Daleiden has been praised as a hero by some religious opponents of abortion. On Thursday, Mr. Daleiden was a featured guest at an Evangelicals for Life conference and was interviewed by Russell Moore, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, and Jim Daly, the president of Focus on the Family.

Framing people for things they didn’t do is so heroic.

Oh gawd.

ZoéS on Twitter:

Zoé S. @ztsamudz
Even HE must’ve realized how bad it was because he deleted it. Not to worry, here it is screenshot for posterity.

This is how a good Muslim speaks. And how she dresses. And wears her beautiful hair.

Then a link to the World Government Summit.

God almighty.

Spiegel Online gives us a conversation with two feminists on what happened in Cologne.

Alice Schwarzer, 73, the grande dame of German feminism, and Anne Wizorek, 34, a prominent member of the new generation of feminists, often have different views about the direction the women’s movement should take. For decades, Schwarzer — as publisher of Emma, the country’s highly influential women’s magazine — has been at the forefront of women’s issues. In more recent years, a younger generation of feminists, led by Wizorek, has sought to challenge Schwarzer’s preeminence.

I wonder if that last bit is true, or just Spiegel’s way of saying they’re not the same person, or something. If it is true I find it very tiresome. Why is there any need to “challenge” anyone’s “preeminence”? How can any social movement get anywhere if people are always too busy trying to knock each other off perches? How, specifically, can feminism ever get anywhere if women over 45 are invariably treated with hostility and contempt? Feminism has never stipulated that it’s only for women ages 20 to 45, and it shouldn’t, so the whole re-hashed Battle with Mommy is a bad idea.

Both women are concerned about recent developments in Cologne that saw mass sexual violence against women perpetrated by Muslim immigrants. The following is an excerpt from a combative interview with SPIEGEL in which the two share their at times divergent views on the violence and the consequences.

SPIEGEL: Ms. Schwarzer, Ms. Wizorek, what happened in Cologne on New Year’s Eve? Was it a particularly extreme example of sexism or the consequence of failed immigration policies?

Wizorek: The events were terrible and, given the scale, a new phenomenon. That’s why we need to take a very precise look at what happened. I really hope that the perpetrators are caught. The ensuing debate, though, unfortunately has had the wrong focus: It is wrong to only speak about sexualized violence if it is committed by migrants or refugees.

Schwarzer: The debate over sexual violence has re-emerged as a result of that night in Cologne. Even Germany’s justice minister, who for years allowed necessary reforms to tighten Germany’s rape laws torot in a drawer, has pulled them out again. But when you only speak using generalizations, you run the danger of denying the specific. In recent decades, millions of people have come to us from cultural groups within which women have absolutely no rights. They do not have a voice of their own and they are totally dependent on their fathers, brothers or husbands. That applies to North Africa and that applies to large parts of the Middle East. It isn’t always linked to Islam. But since the end of the 1970s, at the beginning of the revolution in Iran under Khomenei, we have experienced a politicization of Islam. From the beginning, it had a primary adversary: the emancipation of women. With more men now coming to us from this cultural sphere, and some additionally brutalized by civil wars, this is a problem. We cannot simply ignore it.

Wizorek hinted that perhaps we could, and should.

Schwarzer: Do you know what I just thought of, Anne? You were born in East Germany at the beginning of the 1980s, right?

Wizorek: Yes.

Schwarzer: It’s entirely OK that you missed certain things. In the 1960s and 1970s among the leftests in the West, one of the leading arguments against feminism was that it was only a subordinate issue. That’s what people said back then. The main issue was the class struggle.

Wizorek: I am familiar with the discussion.

So am I. We had it here, with class struggle replaced by struggle against racism. Women were told their struggle didn’t count.

Schwarzer: As soon as you opened your mouth and said the word woman, you were beaten down with the argument that you were betraying the class struggle. There are many poignant writings in which feminists first write pages about their class standpoint before getting to their actual issue. What was then known as class warfare is today called anti-racism. The threat of being accused of racism gave birth to false tolerance. Once, about 20 years ago, a police officer in Cologne told me, “Ms. Schwarzer, 70 to 80 percent of the rapists in Cologne are Turkish.” I was very upset and said: “Then good God, why don’t you bring the issue up?” Because only after you call a problem by name can you change it. And then he said, no way, that’s not politically opportune. So you see, the police have long been extremely frustrated by these hush-ups. I think that’s changing now, and that’s a good thing.

Wizorek: But that’s just another version of this terrible: “One should also be able to say …!”

Schwarzer: No, it’s the opposite. People aren’t stupid. They saw what was happening at the Cologne central station. A lawless space was created in the middle of a city of over a million. That has to be addressed and it has to be done so in a sober-minded way.

Then they agreed briefly, arguing that “groping” needed to be treated as a crime too, along with sexual harassment in general.

SPIEGEL: Ms. Schwarzer, what consequences will Cologne have?

Schwarzer: We need to finally be proactive in enlightening people from Islamic cultural groups. And this applies to immigrants already here as well as to current refugees. The German constitution stands above the Sharia. Schools need to offer classes on gender equality. You also have to offer an alternative to young men with a penchant for violence.

Wizorek: Only the young men? Education is important for all genders.

Schwarzer: Of course, because you have to tell girls what rights they have and you must stand by them as they assert themselves. We have to go into the relevant neighborhoods and do something to counter the campaigning Islamists. We failed to do that during the last 25 years. We also can’t be naïve when it comes to the refugees. Men who commit violence should of course be deported to their countries of origin. We already have enough problems here and we don’t need to import anymore.

Wizorek: Sexualized violence existed before the refugees — it has not been imported.

Schwarzer: I know that because I have been fighting against it since 1995, just like all the women SPIEGEL likes to call the “old feminists.” For us feminist pioneers, fighting sexual violence, which until then was totally silenced — be it abuse, rape within marriage or sex killings — has always been given top priority.

Remember those “slaves” in Saudi Arabia, whom it’s halal for their owners to rape.

A charming item from Deutsche Welle:

Muhammad Salih al-Munajjid is not really that old. Nevertheless, despite being born to Palestinian refugees living in Syria in 1960, and having lived in Saudi Arabia since he was a child, the opinions issued by this religious scholar read like documents from a time long, long ago.

He publishes his opinions on “IslamQA.info,” the most popular Salafist website in the Arab speaking world. There, for instance, a young man asks him for the answer to a seemingly difficult question: What is the status of the many “slaves” that live in his home of Saudi Arabia? Can one have sexual intercourse with them? Even if one is married? The questioner himself does not define a “slave” – he assumes that this is common knowledge. In Saudi Arabia the term refers to the many Southeast Asian housemaids that work in the country.

Isn’t that pretty? All by itself, before we get to the “scholar”‘s answer? Isn’t it pretty that women from Southeast Asia who work in Saudi Arabia are called “slaves”? And that men are asking if they have religious permission to rape them?

No, it’s not, it’s disgusting enough to make me want to wash my eyes after reading it.

The religious expert knows the answer: “Islam allows a man to have sexual intercourse with a slave, no matter whether the man is married or single.” As justification, the scholar recites Koran passages, the biography of the prophet Mohammed and the opinions of leading sheikhs. “The scholars,” he summarizes, “are unanimous in this assessment, and no one is permitted to view this act as forbidden, or to forbid it. Whoever does so, is a sinner, and is acting against the consensus of the scholars.”

Not only is it permitted to rape women “slaves,” it’s forbidden and a sin to say it’s not permitted to rape women “slaves.” It’s just the most hateful, callous, contemptuous view of what’s good and what isn’t, and of human rights, and of women, and of foreign women, and of domestic servants, I can barely stand it. What a shit-colored awful loathsome place Saudi Arabia must be, steeped in that way of thinking.

The fatwa on the sexual availability of Asians, who have in fact only come to Saudi Arabia to carry out home cleaning duties, is just one of a universe full of fatwas that Saudi religious scholars publish on the role of women day after day.

Because that’s what religion is for – working out the details of how to provide men with as much fucking as possible.

The Tunisian feminist and historian Sophie Bessis says that Islamic theologians are trying harder than ever to force a religious identity on Middle Eastern countries.

She says that identity is based on signs and symbols reflected in traditionally dressed Muslim women. “Identity = religion = veiled women, is a triptych that Islamist movements propagate to Arabs,” writes Bessis in her book, “The Arabs, Women, Freedom.”

For years, the veil has been the sign that Muslims and non-Muslims alike have most strongly identified with Islam. But signs can have many meanings. What could the veil mean? Over the last several years many Western feminists have wanted to see it as a symbol of female emancipation.

But Ibtissam Bouachrine, who was born in Morocco and is now an associate professor at Smith College in Massachusetts, disagrees. In her book, “Women in Islam. Myths, Apologies and the Limits of Feminist Critique,” she writes that, “As a ‘mobile home’ the veil is always a reminder that the natural place for the woman in Islam is at home.”

At home, being raped, while elsewhere in the house “the slave” is scrubbing toilets and wondering when it will be her turn to be raped.

An unpleasant byproduct of the blizzard yesterday was repeatedly hearing about a bus full of Catholic high school students stranded on the freeway in Pennsylvania on their way back from an anti-abortion rally in DC.

Returning from Washington D.C., where they took part Friday in the annual March for Life, they at least had food and water on board, said Tim McNeil, chancellor of the Archdiocese of Omaha. A nearby maintenance building gave them access to bathrooms.

And while there was nothing resembling a chapel anywhere near the cars, buses and trucks stopped westbound between the Bedford and Somerset exits, the group managed to hold Mass anyway by improvising, creating an altar out of snow, he said.

See what I mean?

“We were proud that they stood up for a cause they believed in,” Mr. McNeil said of students and adults who participated in the pro-life trip; he commended their reaction to the storm as well. “We’re proud of them now for their resilience.”

Yeah, proud that they stood up for the cause of taking away women’s right to stop being pregnant.

About that boy in Pakistan…

The boy, Anwar Ali, the son of a poor laborer, had been attending an evening prayer gathering at the mosque in the village, Khanqah, when Mr. Ahmad asked for a show of hands of those who did not love the Prophet Muhammad. Thinking the cleric had asked for those who did love the prophet, Anwar’s hand shot up, according to witnesses and the boy’s family.

He realized his mistake when he saw that his was the only hand up, and he quickly put it down. But by then Mr. Ahmad was screaming “Blasphemer!” at him, along with many others in the crowd. “Don’t you love your prophet?” they called, as the boy fled in disgrace.

It’s like those games bullies like to play, where they trick you into saying something shaming or incriminating and then bully the crap out of you for saying it. Only in this case the punishment is death. It’s not something imams should be playing games with.

Anwar went home, found a sharp scythe and chopped off his right hand that same night. When he showed it to the cleric, he made clear it was an offering to absolve his perceived sin.

The police quickly caught the mullah and locked him up, but local religious leaders protested, and the authorities backed down and released him. After the international news media began picking up on the story over the weekend, the authorities rearrested Mr. Ahmad on Sunday, holding him on terrorism and other charges.

“There is no physical evidence against the cleric of involvement, but he has been charged for inciting and arousing the emotions of people to such a level that the boy did this act,” the district police chief, Faisal Rana, said.

But he wouldn’t have been able to if contemporary Islam weren’t so saturated in this terrible frantic emotionalism and rage.

The boy’s family, however, argues that the cleric did nothing wrong and should not be punished.

“We are lucky that we have this son who loves Prophet Muhammad that much,” Muhammad Ghafoor, Anwar’s father, said in a telephone interview. “We will be rewarded by God for this in the eternal world.”

Anwar, too, declined to make any charge against the mullah. “What I did was for love of the Prophet Muhammad,” he said.

Like that. That’s all disgusting, gruesome, life-hating stuff. The prophet is one human being who lived 14 centuries ago. Children shouldn’t be cutting off their hands “for love” of him. If that’s the kind of thing he inspires, everyone should turn their backs on him.

The National Zoo in DC tweets:

Tian Tian woke up this morning to a lot of snow, and he was pretty excited about it. #blizzard2016

 

Tom McTague at the Independent joins the popular chorus of contempt for feminists.

When the Women and Equalities Committee published a report calling for a sea-change in attitudes to transgender people, Maria Miller, the chair of the committee, might have expected to be attacked by right-wingers within her own party.

But, while they were largely silent on the issue, the former Culture secretary said she was taken aback by the “extraordinary” hostility from a minority of women “purporting to be feminists”.

Speaking to The Independent on Sunday from her office in Westminster, Ms Miller insisted that the “overwhelming” reaction to her report has been positive. Despite controversial calls for “gender neutral” passports and for 16-year-olds to be given the legal right to change their sex, there was barely a peep from her more traditional colleagues on the Tory back benches.

Why might that be, do you suppose? Could it be because conservatives are perfectly happy with an ideology that relies on essentialist ideas of “gender identity”? Could it be because conservatives are perfectly happy to see men who are “too girly” solve the problem by identifying as women?

A glance at Ms Miller’s Twitter page shows that the backlash is real. She is accused of exposing women to “violent men hiding behind the mask of transgender”. In another message, she is told trans women are “not real women” and are often “violent offenders or sex offenders” and that she was failing in her duty to protect women.

It follows on from Germaine Greer’s remark that transgender women “can’t be women”, adding: “Just because you lop off your penis … it doesn’t make you a woman.”

No, it doesn’t. Couldn’t the Independent have found someone who knows something about the subject to report on it? It’s got nothing to do with Germaine Greer.

But Ms Miller, wading into the dangerous territory of radical feminist politics, insisted that they are wrong. She pointed to research by the Fawcett Society, a think-tank campaigning for women’s rights, which found that two-thirds of feminists believe gender to be fluid. “Of course, that would cut across what Germaine Greer is saying,” she said.

Sigh. No it wouldn’t. Saying gender is fluid is not the same thing as saying some people assigned male are “really” women and some assigned female are “really” men. It’s pretty much the opposite of that; if not the opposite it’s at least in strong tension with it. If gender is fluid, then males can just be as “feminine” as they like, and females can be as “masculine” as they like. The need to transition melts away.

But that would ruin the fun of attacking feminists, so forget it.

The X-Files is back for a short run. Guess which star was offered half of what the other star was getting.

Hahaha just kidding, nobody can “guess” that because it’s stone-cold obvious. Carolyn Cox at The Mary Sue reports:

When I first saw this story last night, I assumed it had to be fake. Gillian Anderson was already notoriously offered far less than David Duchovny when the X-Files first premiered in 1993, and Anderson has rightfully not been shy about calling Fox out for that wage gap, and for some of the early requirements they had for her character, Dana Scully (that she constantly stand a few feet behind Mulder, for instance).

Oh really? She was supposed to stand back? Because what, the audience would think he’d been castrated if she took up as much space as he did? Because the audience would freak out and die if the woman were not visibly subordinated and made smaller and less important in every shot? Because women have to be seen as smaller and less important at all times no matter what?

But it happened again. Over two decades later. The Daily Beast writes,

The work Anderson put into securing equal pay back in the ’90s seemingly came undone when it came time to negotiate pay for this year’s event series. Once again, Anderson was being offered “half” of what they would pay Duchovny.

Anderson herself explained in an interview with The Daily Beast:

I’m surprised that more [interviewers] haven’t brought that up because it’s the truth. Especially in this climate of women talking about the reality of [unequal pay] in this business, I think it’s important that it gets heard and voiced. It was shocking to me, given all the work that I had done in the past to get us to be paid fairly. I worked really hard toward that and finally got somewhere with it.

Well that’s how it is. Women get somewhere and then the next year it’s all grabbed back again.

More news from the Malheur invasion:

On Friday, Ammon Bundy met briefly with a federal agent as authorities attempt to resolve the three-week old standoff over federal land policies, but Bundy left because the agent wouldn’t talk with him in front of the media.

The short meeting occurred as Oregon officials are putting increased pressure on federal authorities to take action against Bundy’s group.

On Thursday, Bundy went to the airport in Burns, where the FBI has set up a staging area, and spoke to an FBI negotiator over the phone. They agreed to speak again Friday, but Bundy left the airport shortly after he arrived because the FBI agent he spoke with said federal authorities wanted any conversation to be private.

Bundy wants face-to-face conversations in front of reporters. “I really don’t think, at this point, even having another phone conversation here without him would be beneficial,” Bundy said before leaving Friday.

Best thing ever.

H/t Josh Spokes