More news from ISIS: one of their soldiers has publicly murdered his own mother for “apostasy.”
The activist group Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently (RIBSS) said 20-year-old jihadi Ali Saqr al-Qasem shot his mother Lena, 45, in the head with an assault rifle in front of a large crowd.
Lena al-Qasem is understood to have been accused of apostasy – a crime that usually means leaving one’s religion but in practise is used by Isis as a justification for murdering anybody who doesn’t support or speaks out against the terror group.
Naturally. There is The One True Group in Purity and Righteousness, and everyone else is an apostate. Such a view is efficient and, in the short term, good fun (assuming you love cruelty and death, as of course ISIS does).
The exact charge against Ms al-Qasem was “inciting her son to leave the Islamic State and escaping together to the outside of Raqqa”, according to the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights.
The UK-based conflict monitor said Ali Saqr al-Qasem had reported his mother to his Isis superiors, who then sentenced her to death and ordered him be the one to kill her.
Ok. Who the fuck is Eddie Redmayne? Why should we care?
Redmayne, who plays transgender artist Lili Elbe in The Danish Girl, said he disagreed with her provocative comments.
Oh, that’s who he is – the one who isn’t trans.
The 34-year-old London-born actor told British GQ: “I completely disagree with what she has to say about Caitlyn in relation to why she is making her show.
“It’s a shame to see an instance of feminism and trans issues diminishing each other. But also, it’s quite important that this is a singular instance, and most feminists ally with the transgender. But specifically, I just disagree with her.”
Well it’s always great to have a man explaining about feminism and what it needs to do to come up to his standards.
As most people reading this will know, The Book Case in Hebden Bridge was destroyed by the major flooding in the Calder Valley on Boxing Day. Despite flood resilience measures taken after the last flood in 2012 we were completely wiped out as the water came through at over 5ft, nearly 2ft over the highest we had planned for. Like nearly all businesses in the town we were uninsurable against flooding.
We have just had the fantastic news that we will be receiving a £5000 grant from the James Patterson fund. Our enormous thanks to Meryl Halls at the Booksellers Association for organising this for us, and to the grant fund who are arranging this to be paid speedily and with minimal paperwork. And of course to the great man, James Patterson himself!
We have been overwhelmed by the support we have received since Boxing Day from all sections of the book trade. In the first few days after the flood much of Hebden Bridge was left without phone signal, power or internet. While we felt cut off from the outside world, Kevin Duffy from independent publisher Bluemoose Books together with Calder Valley based writers, Stephen May, Ben Myers and Melvin Burgess (who also spent hours shovelling wet books for us on the first day) began to rally the book trade to our support.
Meanwhile Sarah Corbett (another wet book shoveller) who organised our Poetry Nights, contacted poets who head read at the shop for donations.
When Sam Missingham from Harper Collins and crime writing duo R C Bridgestock (Carol and Bob to their friends) heard about what had happened it made a huge difference. Despite not ever having had direct contact with them they turned their awe inspiring organisational talents to our rescue and used their contacts and position in the industry to get big name authors involved in a signed book auction to raise money for us.
And we have had so many wonderful personal messages of support from readers, writers, booksellers, publishers, in fact book lovers of all kinds! Here’s one lovely example – yesterday we received an anonymous package from Amazon containing 6 rolls of commercial absorbent paper towel, just addressed to ‘the people saving books at The Book Case’.
The fact that so many people, from all areas of the book trade, have rallied round to help us means so much. I admit that in the past, reading some of the articles in the Bookseller for example, I’ve not really felt connected to the more corporate world of publishing. In fact as a small northern bookseller I’ve sometimes felt invisible in the industry.
The last week it has felt genuinely felt that we are part of a real community, that publishers do care about independent bookshops and understand their value. We are important; to the book trade, to authors, readers and to the wider communities we exist in. The amazing support we have had is a huge reminder of this and made us even more determined to survive this.
Finally a list of publishers who have come to our support, apologies to anyone we have left off this list, there are still boxes to open and messages that may not have got through. Just remind me so I can add you x
Literary Gift Company
Harper Collins
Thames and Hudson
Rough Trade
Tangerine Press
Galley Beggar
Faber
Phaidon
Bluemoose
Bloomsbury
Quercus
David Fickling Books
Amberley
Country Publications
Dean Street Press
Carcanet
Chicken House
Anderson Press
Longbarrow Press
Canongate
Independent Alliance
River Ocean
Summersdale
Yale
Head of Zeus
Wrecking Ball Press
Macmillan
4th Estate
With our most heartfelt thanks
Kate Claughan and all at The Book Case
She worked there from 2004 to 2009 – five particularly intense and fascinating years, she says.
The first time I met its audacious, fabled editorial team was as a young journalist, in 1997. Beloved by the radical left, Charlie is the last French paper to maintain a long tradition of trenchant caricatures of the religious, the sacred and the powerful, and to openly mock all forms of fanaticism. Its greatest covers, for many years, were devoted to poking fun at the Pope and the Catholic Church’s antiquated positions on abortion, sexuality and women’s rights.
But fewer people know that Charlie has always been the rallying paper of the anti-racist French left. Its legendary cartoonists — Cabu, Charb, Tignous, Wolinski, Honoré, Luz, Riss — were behind the emblematic illustrations of the “SOS Racisme” movement that gained momentum in the 1990s and pushed back against post-colonial anti-Arab discrimination. When the killers stormed the newsroom on January 7, the staff were in the middle of an argument — as they often were — on how to help the situation of the young victims of discrimination.
Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Ondaatje, Peter Carey, please note.
Charlie became a target for Islamists after it republished the controversial Danish caricatures of Muhammad that caused a worldwide controversy in 2006, an affair that fanatics and (more significantly) many journalists naively described as an Islamophobic provocation. This interpretation, as well as being false, placed a target on the cartoonists’ backs.
It got them killed, in other words.
In 2006, at the time of the Danish caricature affair, I worked at Charlie, and dealt with fanaticism (in all religions) and the extreme right. I heard of the Danish story through a friend, an Iranian refugee in Denmark, and explained to my colleagues the atmosphere of threats and intimidation in which Jyllands-Posten decided to publish the cartoons. Embassies in Iran and Syria were burning. Islamic radicals cried “Death to freedom of expression” in London.
We knew an illustrated magazine like ours couldn’t shy away from covering this instance of censorship and violence, the latest in a string of many others: Salmon Rushdie, Taslima Nasreen, the death of Theo Van Gogh in the Netherlands and, of course, the murder of Algerian journalists during the “black years.” We decided to cover this incredible story, and to publish the drawings that had ignited it. For the cover, we chose a cartoon that captured the spirit of Charlie: Muhammad in despair, lamenting the fanatics who committed atrocities in his name.
We searched for the right image for a long time. We wanted something both funny and honest, representative of our editorial line: neutral on religion, but resolutely anti-racist.
We were going to fight to make that understood. And we did fight — relentlessly. As one of the few journalists at Charlie who spoke English, I gave countless interviews in publications around the world to explain that it was crucial not to give in to threats of violence, especially as an opinion newspaper. We understood the risks. We received countless threats, but also messages of support, from French Muslims who thanked us for believing that they too could have a sense of humor when faced with religious extremism.
They counted on their colleagues to stand by them, and many did, especially Turkish and Arabic ones.
Other publications, mostly English-language, stabbed us in the back: by lying about our intentions, refusing to explain the chronology of events and the context of our actions, and by echoing the same accusations we heard from fanatics themselves.
Reliving this same hell 10 years later, after the death of my colleagues, was deeply painful. The despicable accusation that Charlie was “Islamophobic” was not only wrong, it had killed and continued to put its survivors in danger.
But it made the accusers feel clean and righteous, no doubt.
Luz, one of the few cartoonists to survive the attack, drew the most poignant cartoon of his career in its aftermath: Muhammad, in tears, saying “Everything is forgiven.”
I have it right here next to me.
Still, this was “too much” — many called it blasphemy. As if the killers had been justified in their violence. Democrats, trembling with fear, asked us to respect the fact that the laws of the most fanatic and violent among us may become the laws that govern our independent publications and our secular democracies. After harassing us with requests to see Luz’s illustration, American and British channels subsequently censured it — all the better to criticize it, and without allowing viewers to make their own judgements. I was stopped when I tried to show it on live TV. It was a living nightmare.
Remember that? I remember it. It was gruesome.
Caroline was talking about the betrayal by journalists who refuse to show cartoons and she held up the Luz cover – and Sky News cut away to the presenter, who scolded Caroline and apologized to the viewers. It was a disgusting display of cowardice and brutality – brutality toward Caroline and toward everyone at CH and blasphemers in general – many of whom were bloodily hacked to death in the months after the slaughter at CH.
Our colleagues were losing their minds. Unwilling to acknowledge their crippling fear, they stopped defending the free press, they deformed the facts, and censured themselves. They lectured us on journalistic “responsibility.” And we still haven’t woken up from this nightmare: Today, Charlie’s cartoons are repeatedly taken out of context, their message utterly distorted. Most recently, this happened with the drawing of the little Syrian boy, Aylan, found dead at the foot of McDonald’s golden arches, an image that denounced Western indifference to the plight of the refugees.
But people pretended to think CH was insulting Aylan and mocking his death.
I wrote a book called “Éloge du blasphème” (“In praise of blasphemy”: Why Charlie Hebdo is not ‘Islamophobic’”) about Charlie to bridge the gap between us. I wanted to dispel the common misunderstandings that distance us from the crux of this fight against terrorism and religious extremism — a fight that by necessity involves us all. Writing gave me back the sleep that the January 7 attacks had robbed me of.
The book became a best-seller in France and Salman Rushdie, a man I admire infinitely, gave me his endorsement and support. But no American or British publisher was willing to publish the book. There’s no market for this kind of book, I was repeatedly told, in an attempt to justify their unwillingness to touch on something as explosive as the press’ right to blasphemy.
Weasels.
Thanks to the Internet and to this publication’s willingness to publish some pages below, I hope to touch a few readers. To renew a dialogue with those who “are not Charlie,” as a number of writers belonging to PEN International declared when the association decided to award Charlie with a prize. We all despaired. If they want to disassociate themselves from Charlie, then let them do so having truly made an effort to know and understand Charlie, and not on the basis of a cultural misunderstanding.
Two French Islamist gunmen of Algerian descent entered a newspaper office in Paris a year ago today and gunned down a generation of Europe’s greatest political cartoonists – many from an anarchist, anti-racist tradition – along with their co-workers and those protecting them, who also included people of Algerian descent. In case anyone is confused about the politics of this – it was a far right attack on the left.
So many people are so very confused about the politics of this. So many are convinced it was an anti-racist attack on racists.
At first the world reacted with justified horror and a solidarity which is not always forthcoming for the frequently anonymous victims of Islamist slaughter, and which was not often experienced by the Charlie Hebdo staff in previous years when they endured threats and firebombs. However, the backlash began quickly. The truth about Charlie was that many were shockingly equivocal in their reaction to these events.
There was the “I am not Charlie” campaign, promoted by Tariq Ramadan, grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. The meaning of that was clear enough. Those whose ideology helped pave the way for such killings were publicly admitting their lack of solidarity with the victims.
There were outright vilification campaigns suggesting that the cartoonists (or perhaps French people generally) were racists, “Islamophobic” or otherwise had it coming. In California – which by year’s end became the site of another Islamist bloodbath – a number of people expressed such views to me, thinking that because I have a Muslim name I would agree. Not long after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, I spoke at a U.S. university event on freedom of expression along with a self-appointed young American spokesperson for “the Muslim community” from the Council on American Islamic Relations – whom I must say I never elected to speak for me. She reviled the 7 January victims to the point where I felt compelled to ask if she understood that they were actually dead. She did not know as I did that just before their murders, the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were in a heated discussion about terrible socio-economic conditions in the Paris suburbs where much of the Muslim population lives – an injustice which mattered a great deal to them.
I saw a lot of that, even among people I knew. (I know far fewer of them now.)
On this anniversary, we must remember that those who killed Charlie also killed Ahmed and that saying “I am Charlie” is also a way of saying “I am Ahmed,” and vice versa. Indeed, opposing the Kouachis of the world is essential to saving those countless people of Muslim heritage and their fellow citizens in the Global South who have been dying in the tens of thousands at the hands of Muslim fundamentalist killers in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Iraq, Nigeria, Libya and beyond. Ahmed is a synonym for Charlie, not an antonym. That was why so many people of North African descent stood with the 7 January victims.
For example, Ali Dilem, one of Algeria’s best political cartoonists joined the Charlie Hebdo team in February out of solidarity. His bold cartoons have lampooned political figures and fundamentalist terrorists for years, earning him jail sentences and countless fatwas. On 7 January 2015, Dilem’s cartoon bore the heading: “God is Humour” (in French: “Dieu est humour,”a play on words derived from “Dieu est amour” – “God is Love”). Another of Dilem’s cartoons after the 7 January attacks shows a dying figure writing in his own blood on a wall: “the idiots killed me.”
Bennoune saw a copy of that cartoon among the flowers left for the victims at the Bataclan in November.
I stood in the street where a pregnant woman had hung from a windowsill trying to escape the “Islamic State” offensive, and in front of the small club where 89 mainly young people lost their lives at the hands of another group of young Islamist assassins of North African descent. I found my visit doubly poignant because I went with Samia Benkherroubi a former Algerian TV presenter whose own producer, the legendary Aziz Smati, had been shot in 1994 by the Armed Islamic Group, the forerunners of “Islamic State,” and is today a paraplegic, but continues his work from his wheelchair.
…
Outside the bullet-riddled Bataclan, Samia and I laid flowers and mourned together, lamenting that the fundamentalists we have been battling for years are still so much stronger than their civil society opponents. She had written to me after the 13 November attacks to say how deeply saddened she was to see the fundamentalist violence she fled in 1990s Algeria reproducing itself elsewhere. What was especially mystifying to her, was the way in which some on the left tried to use the history of French colonialism as the excuse (or so-called “explanation”) for these attacks. The same thing happened after 7 January. Samia wrote that “looking for explanations in colonial history is an injury to all victims of blind terrorism.” It also entirely overlooks that Algeria itself lost as many as 200,000 – including many veterans of the liberation struggle – to extremist terrorism in the 1990s, a fact often conveniently forgotten.
Some opponents of colonialism will be fascists. That happens. They’re not allies of people on the left.
All of this complexity seems to have been lost on the authors and signatories of the petition against the granting of the PEN Freedom of Expression Courage award to the Charlie Hebdo staff signed by a group of mainly Western intellectuals in the name of anti-racism. They wanted to make clear that they were not Charlie. They claimed solidarity with Ahmed. They presumed to know what the Ahmeds of the world think (and that they think alike) while overlookingthe contemporary politics of the Muslim majority regions of the world. They regretted the killing, but clearly didn’t understand it.
The petition’s authors presumed a) that French Muslims were mostly devout, and b) that this meant they could not stomach satirical drawings – two huge and highly inaccurate presumptions. This was a recurring theme after 7 January – that all Muslims and all people of Muslim heritage were offended by the publication of cartoons (whether they liked the cartoons or not). It is not at all clear how assuming that 1.5 billion people have no sense of humor (and no politics) is anything other than patronizing.
Meanwhile, the campaign to support the presentation of the PEN award to Charlie Hebdo was led by Salman Rushdie, who is of Muslim heritage, and whose name is derived from a great 12th century Andalusian Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd who likely would not have been terribly troubled by provocative cartoons, and whose own books on philosophy and theology were burned by Muslim fundamentalists while his Christian followers were slain by the Inquisition.
…
So today, in memory of Charb, Cabu, Wolinksi, Tignous, Bernard Maris, Honoré, Elsa Cayat, Mustapha Ourad, Frédéric Boisseau, Michel Renaud, and the police officers Franck Brinsolaro and Ahmed Merabet who were killed exactly a year ago, and all those who died at the hands of Islamist terrorists in 2015, I say simply, “I am still Charlie.” It is a battle cry in the ongoing campaign against fundamentalist violence and the ideas that motivate it, which is one of the defining human rights struggles of 2016. That is perhaps the most important truth about Charlie.
If you identify as pangender, is the claim that you represent every possible point on that spectrum? All at the same time? How might that be possible, since the extremes represent opposites of one another? Pure femininity is passivity, weakness and submission, while pure masculinity is aggression, strength and dominance. It is simply impossible to be all of these things at the same time. (If you don’t agree with me – if you’re angry right now about my “femmephobia”, because I’ve defined femininity as weakness and submission – feel free to give me alternative definitions of masculinity and femininity. Whatever you come up with, they’re going to represent opposites of one another.)
It’s true. You could define femininity as empathy, interpersonal understanding, intuition – but then if that’s femininity, you have to say that masculinity is callousness and mind-blindness. If you define any X as part of femininity, you’ve committed yourself to defining not-X as part of masculinity. Otherwise the X wouldn’t be part of femininity, it would just be something some people have more of and other people have less of.
If we do go with the idea that “gender is a spectrum” then how many possible genders are there?
But if this is so, it’s not clear how it makes sense, or adds anything to our understanding, to call any of this stuff “gender”, as opposed to just “human personality” or “stuff I like”. The word “gender” is not just a fancy word for your personality or your tastes and preferences, and it is not just a label to adopt so that you now have a way to convey just how large and multitudinous and interesting and misunderstood you are.
It’s not, or it shouldn’t be, but by god it certainly is being used that way, to terrible and nauseating effect. All those boring yet privileged cis people who are convinced there are only two dull genders, when the clever exciting breakthrough Young People are all special rainbows. They are the first people in history to be gender nonconforming; please give them all MacArthur grants immediately.
I want to quote the whole of the next bit too, but I won’t. Go read it if you haven’t already.
Fortunately, what is a spectrum is human personality, in all its variety and complexity. (Actually that’s not a spectrum either, because it is not simply one continuum between two extremes. It’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, humany-wumany stuff.) Gender is the value system that says there are two types of personality, determined by the reproductive organs you were born with. The first step to liberating people from the cage that is gender is to challenge established gender norms, and to play with and explore your gender expression and presentation.
So go for it; by all means. Define yourself however you want to. Have a blast.
A problem only emerges when you start making political claims on the basis of that label – when you start demanding that others call themselves cis, because you require there to be a bunch of boring binary cis people for you to define yourself in reference to; and when you insist that these cis women have structural advantage and political privilege over you, because they are socially read as the women they know themselves to be, while nobody really understands just how complex and interesting your gender identity is.
And there’s more, as good as that, and then there’s the knockout final paragraph. Go read it if you haven’t already. At More Radical With Age.
A looming Supreme Court case that could severely undermine the right to an abortion has attracted an unprecedented amount of opposition from across the country.
A slew of organizations and individuals filed 45 legal briefs in the Supreme Court on Tuesday, each brief examining the case through a unique lens and each coming to the same conclusion: State laws that restrict abortion access are unconstitutional.
The case will examine the validity of a Texas law, known as HB2, that places burdensome, unnecessary guidelines on the state’s dwindling abortion clinics. These regulations, while framed as improvements to safeguard “women’s health,” ultimately have nothing to do with patient safety — and were instead created by anti-abortion legislators to impose additional, costly red tape on clinic staff. So far, it’s been successful. HB2 has already forced half of the state’s clinics to close, thus cutting Texas’ abortion providers in half.
And if the court upholds the law – that will give the green light to every god damn state in the country to make abortion almost impossible to get.
Reproductive rights advocates have been outspoken since HB2 passed in 2013, but since the Supreme Court’s November decision to hear the case, the diversity of opponents has grown. The 45 briefs were filed by a variety of petitioners, including physicians, historians, religious leaders, military officers, scientists, members of Congress, civil rights advocates, law scholars, entire cities, and the United States federal government itself.
…
Among the briefs were voices of actual women who’ve been affected by the lack of abortion access in the past — a voice some say is forgotten in the high-level case.
“The Supreme Court justices need to hear the real effects of restrictive abortion laws on women like this one in Texas,” said Debra Hauser, the president of Advocates for Youth, a group helping young people access comprehensive sexual health education. Hauser shared her personal experience with abortion in her organization’s brief.
“What is missing from this issue are our personal stories. The reality is that one in three women will have an abortion in her lifetime.”
Why? Because women need to control if and when they get or remain pregnant.
Many of those women shared their stories in another brief submitted Tuesday, representing 110 law professionals who’ve had abortions. Some noted how they would have never had the chance to become a lawyer if they hadn’t had an abortion when they did.
“[Our] experiences demonstrate the real world effects of abortion access on the lives and careers of women attorneys, and underscore the truth of the court’s observation that reproductive choice facilitates women’s ability ‘to participate in the economic and social life of the nation,’” the brief reads.
A lot of religious boffins and organizations also submitted a brief.
A group of 40 prominent scientists also submitted a brief Tuesday, hoping to overrule the “flawed pseudoscience” that will be used in testimony to support the case.
“We hope the court is able to put abortion politics aside and focus on the illegitimacy of the medical claims propping up the restrictions,” said Robyn Blumner, president and CEO of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science. “When science claims are used to infringe a constitutional right they had better be valid, but that’s not the case here.”
That brief was written by CFI’s legal director Nick Little.
A Tuesday press call drew a variety of opponents together, including Wendy Davis, the former Texas state senator who led an 11-hour filibuster in an attempt to defeat HB2, and Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards, to further illustrate the severity of this case. Jessica González-Rojas, the executive director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, also spoke on the call, representing the women already harmed the most by the current Texas law.
“For immigrants, mothers, low-wage workers, and Latinas who are all three, securing an abortion means navigating a state-created obstacle course,” she said. “Those unable to jump through these hoops will be forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term or take matters into their own hands.”
Since HB2 was enacted, at least 100,000 Texan women have tried to induce their own abortion, due to the cost driving to a distant abortion clinic, taking time off work to do so, and other frustrating roadblocks to make it difficult for them to legally end a pregnancy.
Mind you – in actual Saudi Arabia as opposed to whatever fantasy version Dolce and Gabbana is working with, those shoes would get that woman arrested if she didn’t get beaten to death first. Also? Her bare face would too. But no matter, because at least the black shroud is pretty.
Storied Italian House Dolce & Gabbana has launched its very first abaya collection and makes its global reveal here on Style.com/Arabia. For the most part, the collection comes in neutral hues—luxe black and sandy beige—while a sprinkling of abayas capture the Sicilian spirit of the house (and make a nod to the Spring 2016 collection) with printed daisies, lemons, and lush red roses. The abayas and hijabs come in sheer georgette and satin weave charmeuse fabrics and include copious lace details along hems. They also appear to feature a lightweight and dramatic drape, which makes this debut collection rife with special occasion overlays to be worn to celebrate the inimitable dolce vita that is distinct to us in the Arab world.
Ah yes, the inimitable dolce vita of Saudi Arabia. Remind me how Raid Badawi and Hamza Kashgari are flourishing there?
What stands out in particular about Dolce & Gabbana’s take is that it gives the lie to the idea that one can’t follow trends and have fun with fashion while also following a religious dress code. “Modest” doesn’t have to equate to dowdy, boring, or head-to-toe neutrals. It’s not just about lowering hemlines and extending sleeves, but preserving the runway aesthetic that got everyone so excited in the first place. Even if Dolce & Gabbana’s dramatic, Sicilian-influenced designs and playful prints aren’t your personal bag, how great would it be to see Moschino‘s kidult-oriented prints, Armani‘s power suiting, or Versace‘s logoriffic wordplay adorning abayas and hijabs?
Decorate your chains, slaves, and all will be well.
Fans of gender identity think that gender is not a system of arbitrary rules imposed on all of us but “an internal, essential facet of our identity” that is much bigger and richer than any stinkin’ binary.
That idea is full of holes, and politically it’s a disaster.
First, if gender is a spectrum, then we’re all non-binary.
I would be happy with this implication, because despite knowing that I am female and calling myself a woman, I do not consider myself a one-dimensional gender stereotype. I am not some ideal manifestation of femininity, and so I am non-binary, just like everybody else is. Those who identify as non-binary are unlikely to be happy with this conclusion, however, as their identity as a non-binary person depends upon the existence of a much larger group of binary cisgender people, against whom they can define themselves as more interesting and complex, and by whom they can claim to be misunderstood and politically oppressed.
I gotta go, so that’s all for now, but you can see why you have to read every word of it yourself.
A special issue of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo went on sale in France on Wednesday, amid a week of official commemorations and other events paying tribute to the 17 people who were killed one year ago in attacks last January at the newspaper’s office and other locations in the Paris area.
The commemorations have been accompanied by a flurry of book releases and new documentaries on the subject, as well as a resurgence of questions about whether French intelligence and police services failed to adequately assess security threats against the newspaper, which had been under police protection.
The newspaper has printed around a million copies of the issue, up from a typical print run of about 100,000, and it includes drawings by illustrators who were killed in the attacks as well as guest contributions.
“Charlie is insolence elevated as a virtue, and bad taste as a mainstay of elegance,” the French culture minister, Fleur Pellerin, wrote in her contribution to the issue. “For all of us, continue to create, to draw freedom.”
Laurent Sourisseau, the newspaper’s editorial director, wrote, “It isn’t two little idiots in balaclavas who are going to screw up our life’s work.”
“They aren’t going to see Charlie die, it is Charlie that is going to see them die,” he added.
The Times does mention the Vatican’s disapproval, but not until 13 paragraphs in – it doesn’t make it the focus the way the Guardian did.
The new Charlie Hebdo is on the stands, the anniversary edition. The slaughter was a year ago, January 7 2015.
The murderer is still on the run.
The Guardian reports on this by letting us know what the Vatican thinks of it – as if we’re all somehow obliged to pay attention to what the Vatican thinks of our struggles to break free of its tyrannical murderous god.
The Vatican’s newspaper on Tuesday criticised French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo for a front cover portraying God as a gun-wielding terrorist to mark the first anniversary of a terrorist attack on the publication’s offices in which 12 people died.
A million copies of the special edition hit France’s newsstands on Wednesday with a cover featuring a bearded man representing God with a Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder, accompanied by the text: “One year on: the assassin is still out there.”
In a commentary, the Vatican daily Osservatore Romano said treatment of this kind towards religion “is not new” – and stressed that religious figures have repeatedly condemned violence in the name of God.
So what? Who cares? Of course the Catholic church doesn’t like rebellion against religion; we know that already. Of course the Vatican is aligned with the enforcers of religion and not with escapees; we know that already too.
“Behind the deceptive flag of uncompromising secularism, the weekly is forgetting once more what religious leaders of every faith unceasingly repeat to reject violence in the name of religion – using God to justify hatred is a genuine blasphemy, as pope Francis has said several times,” it said.
That’s just a lie. It’s far from true that all “leaders” of for instance Islam “unceasingly” reject violence in the name of religion.
The commentary added: “In Charlie Hebdo’s choice, there is the sad paradox of a world which is more and more sensitive about being politically correct, almost to the point of ridicule, yet does not wish to acknowledge or to respect believers’ faith in God, regardless of the religion.”
And yet it’s the cartoonists and writers of Charlie Hebdo who were slaughtered a year ago – the Vatican could have the empathy and tact to remember that and refrain from abusing them some more when they point to that very fact. Instead it just adds more paint to the target on Charlie’s back.
A week after the Charlie Hebdo attack, pope Francis condemned killing in God’s name but warned religion could not be insulted. “To kill in the name of God is an absurdity,” Francis told reporters on the papal plane on an Asian tour.
While defending freedom of expression, he also cautioned “each religion has its dignity” and “there are limits”.
“If a good friend speaks badly of my mother, he can expect to get punched, and that’s normal. You cannot provoke, you cannot insult other people’s faith, you cannot mock it.”
In other words they had it coming. The assassin is still on the run.
The tensions simmering beneath Germany’s willingness to take in one million migrants blew into the open on Tuesday after reports that scores of young women in Cologne had been groped and robbed on New Year’s Eve by gangs of men described by the authorities as having “a North African or Arabic” appearance.
The German authorities expressed outrage at the attacks and called them unprecedented in scale and nature, saying hundreds of young men appeared to have participated.
It was not clear that any of the men involved were recent arrivals to Germany over the last year from conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, North Africa and elsewhere. But the situation created a new political challenge for Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose decision to take in refugees from conflict-ridden nations opened the doors to waves of migrants last summer and fall. As the number of asylum-seekers has grown and the challenge of assimilating them has become clearer, she has come under intensifying criticism for failing to anticipate the social and economic costs of her policy.
At the other end of the spectrum from Merkel and Germany are the countries that reject refugees altogether, so that you get desperate people pushed from one railway station to another, or drowning in leaky little boats, or held in nightmare refugee camps. It would be nice if the generous thing to do could work out to be also the sensible and productive thing to do, but this story doesn’t seem like a good omen.
The descriptions of the assailants — by the police and victims quoted in the news media — as being young foreign men who spoke neither German nor English immediately stoked the debate over how to integrate such large numbers of migrants and focused new attention on how to deal with the influx of young, mostly Muslim men from more socially conservative cultures where women do not share the same freedoms and protections as men.
The assaults, which went largely unreported for days, set off accusations on the right and among some political commentators that authorities and the news media had tried to ignore or cover up the attacks in order to avoid fueling a backlash against the refugees.
Far right groups are yelping, but so are groups and people to the left of them.
Several hundred people gathered in front of Cologne’s cathedral late Tuesday to protest violence against women. Several groups promoting women’s rights have complained that the authorities have not taken complaints about sexual abuse of women in refugee shelters seriously enough.
Steven Pinker, Eugenie Scott, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, and more than 40 other eminent scientists and public intellectuals are backing the Center for Inquiry in a brief to the Supreme Court criticizing the state of Texas’s onerous restrictions on abortion providers. CFI’s brief argues that the alleged expert, scientific testimony used to justify the restrictions is flawed pseudoscience and the Court cannot constitutionally rely on it.
In Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole, plaintiffs argue that restrictions on abortion providers passed in Texas in 2013 impose an undue burden on women’s constitutionally protected right to end a pregnancy. Since only a few clinics are able to meet the law’s strictures it will result in mass clinic closures and sharply restricted access to abortion services in the state.
Texas’s claim that the regulations protect women’s health is contrary to the science and facts. As the CFI brief explains, Vincent Rue, a long-discredited anti-abortion partisan with no relevant medical credentials, coordinated the testimony in support of the state’s claim. Yet, in every case in which Rue has coordinated testimony to defend regulations requiring abortion doctors to have hospital admitting privileges—such as those at the heart of this case—the evidence presented has been discounted by the trial court.
Federal trial courts have found that the unqualified Rue substantially ghostwrote the testimony of alleged expert witnesses in a number of cases. His efforts are agenda-driven pseudoscience that seek to manufacture controversy, the CFI brief says.
“This case will affect the medical well-being of millions of women, and it is unthinkable that the Supreme Court of the United States might make such a monumental decision based on such flawed testimony, that offers only misrepresentation and misdirection,” said Nicholas Little, legal director of the Center for Inquiry. “While the Center for Inquiry as an organization wholeheartedly supports women’s abortion rights, for this case we come to the Court purely as advocates of science and reason. Justice Kennedy, in the last abortion case to reach the Court, made clear that the Supreme Court has a duty to independently examine the facts of cases where constitutional rights are at issue. The Court has wisely rejected fabricated, pseudoscientific evidence in previous cases, and we strongly urge the justices to do the same here.”
“We hope the Court is able to put abortion politics aside and focus on the illegitimacy of the medical claims propping up the restrictions,” said Robyn Blumner, president and CEO of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science. “When science claims are used to infringe a constitutional right they had better be valid, but that’s not the case here.”
The brief argues that the state’s testimony, as coordinated by Rue, “fails to demonstrate even a rational relation between the restrictions and the State’s legitimate interest in women’s health sufficient to overcome the burden that these restrictions create for women in Texas who are in need of essential and legally protected medical care.”
The amicus brief, filed by the Center for Inquiry, was joined by the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science, along with over 40 individual scientists and experts in reason and critical thinking, including psychologist Steven Pinker, anthropologist Eugenie Scott, physicist Lawrence Krauss, skeptic icon James Randi, social psychologist Carol Tavris, astrophysicist Jill Tarter, and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.
The mayor of Cologne has summoned police for crisis talks after about 80 women reported sexual assaults and muggings by men on New Year’s Eve.
The scale of the attacks on women at the city’s central railway station has shocked Germany. About 1,000 drunk and aggressive young men were involved.
At least one woman was raped.
What is particularly disturbing is that the attacks appear to have been organised. Around 1,000 young men arrived in large groups, seemingly with the specific intention of carrying out attacks on women.
Police in Hamburg are now reporting similar incidents on New Year’s Eve in the party area of St Pauli. One politician says this is just the tip of the iceberg.
…
One man described how his partner and 15-year-old daughter were surrounded by an enormous crowd outside the station and he was unable to help. “The attackers grabbed her and my partner’s breasts and groped them between their legs.”
A British woman visiting Cologne said fireworks had been thrown at her group by men who spoke neither German nor English. “They were trying to hug us, kiss us. One man stole my friend’s bag,” she told the BBC. “Another tried to get us into his ‘private taxi’. I’ve been in scary and even life-threatening situations and I’ve never experienced anything like that.”
If it’s a whole crowd, there’s really nothing you can do.
Cricketer Chris Gayle, already facing a barrage of criticism over inappropriate remarks to a female television reporter, allegedly indecently exposed himself to a woman during a Sydney training session at last year’s World Cup.
The Australian woman, who was working around the West Indies team in Sydney, has detailed the incident to Fairfax Media. In the course of her work she entered the team dressing room to get a sandwich as she hadn’t eaten all day, thinking the players were on the field training.
Instead, she found Gayle in the room with one other player. Gayle was wrapped in a towel, which she says he pulled down to partially expose his genitals to her while saying to her: “Are you looking for this?”
All part of the job, eh?
The new revelations came as the Melbourne Renegades announced they would fine Gayle $10,000 for his controversial live interview with Channel Ten’s Mel McLaughlin on Monday night. Gayle asked an uncomfortable McLaughlin if she wanted to come out for a drink with him, before quickly adding “don’t blush, baby”.
It’s always so impressive when a guy just cannot see women as anything other than potential fuck-objects.
On Tuesday morning, Gayle delivered a half-hearted apology and said his comments had been “blown out of proportion”. Renegades chief executive Stuart Coventry described his comments as a “one-off”.Several other female journalists also came forward to detail inappropriate comments or unwelcome advances by Gayle.
The female employee involved in last year’s incident does not want to be identified, but has explained she was motivated to tell her story “in support of [Channel Ten reporter] Mel McLaughlin last night, and to support the many other women working as career professionals in sport who shouldn’t have to put up with this kind of treatment”.
“It’s that moment when you have a split second to react. I was shocked, and I just walked out,” she said.
“You put yourself in an office environment in Australia, and there’s no way that’s going to fly. Put yourself back in that deserted change room and it’s somehow OK for a career professional to be subjected to sexual jokes and demeaning advances.”
…
The woman says she felt sick when she watched Gayle proposition McLaughlin on air during Channel Ten’s coverage of the Big Bash League on Monday night.
Gayle went on to be feted for his World Cup exploits, when he belted a record 215 against Zimbabwe in Canberra. “It makes me sick that people like that are emulated as heroes when they behave like that towards half the population, there is nothing heroic about the way he conducts himself towards women,” she said.
Gayle has been writing paid columns for Fairfax Media over the past month. Given the issues that have arisen over the past 48 hours, that arrangement has been terminated.
Jodhpur: In a shocking incident, a lower caste Dalit student of a government school was beaten up by his teacher till he started vomiting for touching plates being reserved for the upper caste.
According to media reports, the episode happened on October 1, a day before Gandhi Jayanti in Government Higher Secondary School in Osian town of Jodhpur, when a seven-year-old picked up a green coloured plate (reserved for the upper caste) where mid-day meal was being served.
“I picked up a plate reserved for upper caste students mistakenly and started having the rice on it. When the teacher saw this, he started hitting me badly on my head. I started vomiting,” Ramesh, a Dalit, told TOI.
That will be the Times of India.
That’s just…stunning. Special plates for the upper castes? And different plates for those dirty filthy lower ones? What must that do to children? It makes me want to cry and scream even without the beating to the point of vomiting part.
But there is that part. Teachers are allowed to hit children? On the head? And they do? Because a small child picked up a “wrong” plate?
According to Dalit Adhikar Network, “the plates there are coloured red and green for Dalits and upper castes, respectively. The seven-year-old had to be rushed to Umaid Hospital in Jodhpur. His treatment went on for six days.”
Malaram, father of the Dalit student, was also allegedly beaten up when he came to pick up his son from school.
“The cook in the school noticed Ramesh picking up a plate reserved for upper caste students. He complained about this to the teacher, who bashed up Ramesh. He kicked Ramesh and pulled his hair. He thrashed him severely, and this led to some internal injuries in his ears, because of which he still fears going to the school. When I visited the school, the teacher thrashed me too,” said his father Mala Ram.
The situation presents a complicated challenge for authorities seeking to end the standoff peacefully but armed militia members itching for a confrontation. But some observers caution that once it is settled — however it is ultimately resolved — those involved must face consequences, unlike Bundy himself, who was never sanctioned for his armed showdown with the government and still owes some $1 million in disputed public grazing fees that triggered the initial incident.
“These folks are militant extremists and they need to be treated as such,” Jessica Goad — advocacy director at the Center for Western Priorities, a conservation group which has monitored the rise of anti-government groups — told TPM. “They need to be brought to justice in order for this thing not to keep occurring in the future.”
Because here’s the thing – if you just shrug and walk away when they do it, they’ll keep doing it.
Soon after the 2014 dispute dissipated, Alex Jones of the right-wing conspiracy website InfoWars bragged to Reuters that it was a water-shed moment for the anti-government movement.
“Americans showed up with guns and said, ‘No, you’re not,” Jones told Reuters. “And they said, ‘Shoot us.’ And they did not. That’s epic. And it’s going to happen more.”
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, there has been a 37 percent rise in militia groups since the Bundy showdown in 2014, with the center identifying 276 militia groups – up from 202 in 2014– in its annual count released Monday.
Katie Glover writes in the Independent that men mustn’t be allowed to wear “women’s clothes” because that’s a “danger for trans women.”
She starts with the fact that 17-year-old Jaden Smith, son of American actor Will Smith, is going to be “the face of” Louis Vuitton clothes, specifically, women’s clothes.
Jaden seems to be up for this gender-neutral, equal clothing rights thing which allows men to wear women’s clothes without any fear of ridicule. But there is another, more important issue afoot.
There’s a reason why men wear men’s clothes and women wear women’s clothes, and why they are generally so different. OK, I know women have been wearing trousers for decades but they’re usually a femme version of the male equivalent – and I’m not talking about unisex clothes like jeans and t-shirts.
Not talking about them? Why not? Since they contradict that silly claim.
I’m talking about basic clothes norms that depict which gender is wearing them, even in the modern world. Stereotypically, men wear trousers and women wear dresses and skirts. That’s the ‘norm’ and it’s more than that – it’s a uniform.
Or, to put it another way, it’s an arbitrary custom, one that enforces a needless and oppressive gender binary, which is one reason to flout it.
But that’s not what Katie Glover is after. Quite the opposite.
When you get out of bed in the morning the most important thing you have to do all day is tell the world what your gender is, because from that, everything else flows. You may think that your job is to be an office supervisor or a stockbroker or police officer but these are all human constructs. Deep down your real job is to reproduce, and showing other humans your gender is the first step on that path.
Hoo-boy – evo psych in aid of enforcing the gender system yet again. No, my real job is whatever I decide it is, using my own brain and ideas and wants. Telling the world what my gender is is not even on my list of things to do, let alone at the top of it.
So, to help make it plain for anyone to see which gender you are, you put on a uniform. Men put on trousers and have men’s haircuts, and women put on dresses and skirts, feminine tops and tights and women’s shoes to show their femininity and declare to the world that they are female.
They have women’s hair-dos and they put use cosmetics to make themselves look nicer and more presentable and to reinforce the female uniform a bit more.
So, when some people come along and want equal clothing rights, that upsets the apple cart a bit.
Male-to-female transgender people rely on props like clothes, shoes, make-up and hairstyles to create the gender identity they want to portray to the world because most of the time their bodies alone are unable to do that. There are a few lucky ones who don’t have to do a thing to put across a female persona, but most trans women have to work hard at it.
Or not. They can just decide they don’t need to “put across a female persona” any more than they need to be visibly religious or political or of X nationality. We’re not walking advertising posters, we don’t need to be visibly anything in particular. That’s not a genuine need. It may be a desire, but it’s not a need.
The danger for trans women is that if wearing what are traditionally women’s clothes becomes the norm for men too, then trans women will no longer be able to rely on these props to help them display a female gender identity – and for many, that could be a serious problem.
Of course it will take time – a long, long time even – for things to change to the extent where men wearing skirts and girly stuff will be totally acceptable.
But trans people should be aware that well-known faces like Jaden Smith are starting to encroach on our territory. They’re starting to wear the trans uniform without actually stating that they are transgender, and they’re claiming it for themselves under the guise of gender-neutral fashion. All of which begs the question: where does that leave us?
So there you have it. We have to continue to enforce the arbitrary customs of the gender binary because men wearing “skirts and girly stuff” is what Glover so stunningly calls “our territory.”
