Goldsmiths ISOC posted its ludicrous version of what happened at Maryam’s talk yesterday, claiming that their members were harassed by the Goldsmiths ASH.

Goldsmiths Islamic Society (ISOC) would like to categorically condemn the vile harassment of our ISOC members (both male and female) by the Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society (ASH).

On Monday 30th November, students of Goldsmiths University, alongside members of the public attended an event organised by the ASH titled “Apostasy, Blasphemy & Free Expression, In the age of ISIS”. The ASH invited Maryam Namazie, who is known as a notorious islamophobe to speak at the event, despite our polite request for them to reconsider. The university should be a safe space for all our students. Islamophobic views like those propagated by Namazie create a climate of hatred and bigotry towards Muslim students.

Muslim students who attended the event were shocked and horrified by statements made by Namazie, and peacefully expressed their dissent to the disrespectful cartoons shown of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh). These students were subsequently made subject to unnecessary bullying, abuse and violence by the ASH society and security staff. Some students were even forcibly removed from the event.

Following the event, members of the public who were present at the event have been tweeting unauthorised pictures of our University students with fabricated statements regarding false allegations of “death threats”.

We would like to make it very clear that Muslim students did NOT make any alleged “death threats”. This is a fabrication made by supporters of the ASH and Namazie in an attempt to distort the truth and further marginalise Muslim students for expressing dissent at offensive statements and images.

A university should be a safe environment/space for all students including Muslims in this sensitive time. Hateful statements that encourage Islamophobia by Namazie and the ASH can lead to very serious & violent consequences towards the Muslim students at the university. A university institution needs to prioritise the safety of its students and take action to ensure students are not harrassed/intimidated online or on campus.

What a pack of liars. There’s video showing who did the harassing and to whom.

So there’s this preacher in Tempe, Arizona…which can just mean he’s some guy who got a few people to listen to him say things somewhere. He could be some guy who invented his own church and got a few neighbors to sit in front of him while he delivers “sermons.” Or he could be a Baptist in good standing; who knows. The point is that “preacher” doesn’t tell you much of anything. We know a few people listened to him because we can hear a few people laughing slightly on the video.

So there he is, in Tempe, and he says all the “homos” should be killed because Leviticus, and that would cure AIDS.

Conservative “Christian” Pastor Steven Anderson openly called for executing every gay person in America during a Sunday sermon at his church in Tempe, Arizona. He claimed from the pulpit that gays need to be put to death in the name of God by Christams Day in an effort to wipe out AIDS, even though AIDS is not a virus exclusive to the LGBT community. Anderson opined:

Turn to Leviticus 20:13, because I actually discovered the cure for AIDS. If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them. And that, my friend, is the cure for AIDS. It was right there in the Bible all along — and they’re out spending billions of dollars in research and testing. It’s curable — right there. Because if you executed the homos like God recommends, you wouldn’t have all this AIDS running rampant.

I recommend watching the video though, to get the full flavor – the way he keeps saying “homos” is quite striking.

That’s a loss:

The Moroccan writer and sociologist Fatima Mernissi, known for her pioneering work in the field of Islamic feminism, has died.

Her work also touched on broader issues of human rights and democracy in the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Her best known work, Beyond the Veil, examines Islam from a feminist perspective and critiques traditional, male-dominated interpretations.

…

Moroccan-American author Laila Lalami was among many others who paid tribute to Mernissi, writing that “in addition to being a wonderful scholar, Fatema Mernissi was a kind and generous human being. A rare combination.”

Mernissi’s work drew attention to the active political role played by women in the early history of Islam, for example in her book The Forgotten Queens of Islam.

She contrasted this with claims of some conservative Islamists that the idea of a female political leader was un-Islamic after Pakistan elected its first female Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto, in 1988.

We need more like her.

H/t Maureen.

So Maryam gave her talk at Goldsmiths…and “brothers” from ISOC did their best to disrupt it.

After my talk began, ISOC “brothers” started coming into the room, repeatedly banging the door, falling on the floor, heckling me, playing on their phones, shouting out, and creating a climate of intimidation in order to try and prevent me from speaking.

I continued speaking as loudly as I could. They repeatedly walked back and forth in front of me. In the midst of my talk, one of the ISOC Islamists switched off my PowerPoint and left. The University security had to intervene and remain in the room as I continued my talk.

Eventually the thug who had switched off my PowerPoint returned and continued his harassments. At this point, I stood my ground, screamed loudly and continued insisting that he be removed even when the security said he should stay because he was a student. When he was finally escorted out of the meeting, discussions on many issues from apostasy, the veil to Islamism and Sharia laws continued, including with some of the ISOC “sisters” who remained behind.

That’s their Islam, their religion of peace – one that can’t let people dissent from it.

In the Q&A, a women’s rights campaigner who had been kidnapped by Islamists in Libya and held for three days said that the attempts at intimidation reminded her of those dreaded days.

Another CEMB activist said one of the ISOC thugs disrupting the meeting threatened him by pointing a finger to his head.

The behaviour of the ISOC “brothers” was so appalling that a number of Muslim women felt the need to apologise, to which I explained that no apology was needed from those who were not to blame.

Absurdly, this very group which speaks of “safe spaces” has in the past invited Hamza Tzortzis of IERA which says beheading of apostates is painless and Moazem Begg of Cage Prisoners that advocates “defensive jihad.”

“Safe spaces” in which to advocate the stoning of women for having sex.

Despite the many attempts of the ISOC “brothers,” the meeting ended successfully and raised critical issues, including that criticism of Islam and Islamism are not bigotry against Muslims who are often the first victims of Islamism and on the frontlines of resistance. The meeting also helped expose the Islamists for what they are – thugs who cannot tolerate dissent.

Nonetheless, the Islamists at ISOC will need to learn that apostates, and particularly women, have a right to speak and that we will not be intimidated or back down.

Freedom of expression and the right to criticise and leave Islam without fear and intimidation is a basic human right. We have a responsibility to fight for these universal values at British universities and also across the globe.

A video of the talk will be made available shortly.

Well done Maryam.

News from our beloved ally Saudi Arabia, so very different from that horrid Islamic State that’s always killing people for no reason.

Sri Lanka has urged Saudi Arabia to pardon a domestic worker, sentenced to death by stoning after she admitted committing adultery while working in the Arab kingdom.  An official from Sri Lanka’s Foreign Employment Bureau said the married 45-year-old, who had worked as a maid in Riyadh since 2013, was convicted of adultery in August.

She had sex with someone. Saudi Arabia is going to throw stones at her to kill her, because she had sex with someone. This is our “ally.”

(You know how the stoning works, right? The woman is buried up to her shoulders, and the men stand in a circle around her and throw stones at her head. It takes awhile to kill her. She screams a lot.)

This.is.our.ally.

Kamel Daoud in the New York Times on November 20:

Black Daesh, white Daesh. The former slits throats, kills, stones, cuts off hands, destroys humanity’s common heritage and despises archaeology, women and non-Muslims. The latter is better dressed and neater but does the same things. The Islamic State; Saudi Arabia. In its struggle against terrorism, the West wages war on one, but shakes hands with the other. This is a mechanism of denial, and denial has a price: preserving the famous strategic alliance with Saudi Arabia at the risk of forgetting that the kingdom also relies on an alliance with a religious clergy that produces, legitimizes, spreads, preaches and defends Wahhabism, the ultra-puritanical form of Islam that Daesh feeds on.

It’s rich, isn’t it? We pitch a huge fit over a fourteen-year-old kid who brings a clock to school, but we clutch the throbbing heart of Wahhabism to our oil-loving bosom, and then give it all our money. We jump at phantoms, we yank people off airplanes, we start wars, and all the time, we’re treating the official, state-based, “legitimate” version of IS as our great great great friend and trusted colleague. Saudi Arabia is an ally! We saw fit to shun South Africa, and rightly so, but Saudi Arabia is our god damn ally.

Wahhabism, a messianic radicalism that arose in the 18th century, hopes to restore a fantasized caliphate centered on a desert, a sacred book, and two holy sites, Mecca and Medina. Born in massacre and blood, it manifests itself in a surreal relationship with women, a prohibition against non-Muslims treading on sacred territory, and ferocious religious laws. That translates into an obsessive hatred of imagery and representation and therefore art, but also of the body, nakedness and freedom. Saudi Arabia is a Daesh that has made it.

And Daesh is a Saudi Arabia that lacks only a centralized state to make itself an official member of the family of nations. Oh wait, it also needs a shit-ton of oil.

The West’s denial regarding Saudi Arabia is striking: It salutes the theocracy as its ally but pretends not to notice that it is the world’s chief ideological sponsor of Islamist culture. The younger generations of radicals in the so-called Arab world were not born jihadists. They were suckled in the bosom of Fatwa Valley, a kind of Islamist Vatican with a vast industry that produces theologians, religious laws, books, and aggressive editorial policies and media campaigns.

And all of the laws and books and policies? They suck. They’re antediluvian, they’re fascist, they’re woman-hating and life-hating; they suck. There’s nothing good to say about them.

Daesh has a mother: the invasion of Iraq. But it also has a father: Saudi Arabia and its religious-industrial complex. Until that point is understood, battles may be won, but the war will be lost. Jihadists will be killed, only to be reborn again in future generations and raised on the same books.

Kamel Daoud, a columnist for Quotidien d’Oran, is the author of “The Meursault Investigation.” This essay was translated by John Cullen from the French.

Sue me, Saudi.

Scott Kelly sends a snapshot of California from the ISS.

I was running around outside most of last week so I didn’t see Dawkins’s latest adventures in publicly chastising a 14-year-old boy for saying he “made” a clock when he didn’t really “make” a clock in the strictest sense of “making” something. I’ve seen some of his previous adventures in that exciting field, and blogged about some of those, but I missed the latest, in which he really outdid himself. He outdid himself by such a margin that CNN took the trouble to report on it.

Eminent British scientist Richard Dawkins has drawn criticism on social media for what some say is an unfair comparison between Ahmed Mohamed, the Texas teenager whose school project was mistaken for a bomb, and a young ISIS killer.

But Dawkins says he was merely drawing a parallel between their ages.

“HORRIFIED anyone thinks I could POSSIBLY liken Ahmed to a killer,” Dawkins said in a tweet Wednesday. “My ONLY point of comparison was their AGES: kids not immune to criticism.”

Yes. You know…it’s striking how many of these HORRIFIED anyone thinks he could POSSIBLY whatever it was that time, and that one, and that one, tweets he’s tweeted. He’s tweeted very many of them. He’s always finding himself having to tweet these all-caps horrified corrections. Wouldn’t you think he would spot the pattern, and correct for it? Wouldn’t you think it would dawn on him that people keep getting his meaning wrong, and that might not be solely because people are stupid? That he might be phrasing them clumsily? That in his eagerness to be provocative and witty, he often comes off just being rude?

Wouldn’t you think he could go back and look at that tweet again and realize that it does look as if he were saying what so many thought he was saying?

Or is that just me?

Dawkins, a leading voice in the atheist movement, was reacting to news that the Mohamed family was demanding $15 million in damages and an apology from city and school officials in Irving, Texas, over their treatment of the teen.

In September, the 14-year-old, who is Muslim, was detained, questioned and hauled off in handcuffs after bringing a handmade clock to school, which a teacher thought could have been a bomb.

“Don’t call him ‘clock boy’ since he never made a clock. Hoax Boy, having hoaxed his way into the White House, now wants $15M in addition!” Dawkins tweeted Tuesday.

Dawkins has been calling Ahmed “Hoax Boy” for weeks. It’s exceptionally obnoxious. Ahmed is fourteen. I flatly don’t believe he decided to devise a cunning plan to get invited to the White House for a brief visit, and that fiddling with a clock was that plan. I think a grown man, an Oxford academic, a best-selling author, should not be labeling him “Hoax Boy” in that childish and nasty way.

The evolutionary biologist has been vocal in his belief that the case — which made Ahmed a cause célèbre, prompted the hashtag #IStandWithAhmed to trend, and led to a personal invitation to the White House from President Barack Obama — was a “hoax.”

He has repeatedly insisted that Ahmed did not make a clock but rather “took a clock out of its case and put it in a box,” and has questioned the teen’s motives in doing so.

And repeatedly called him “Hoax Boy” – on Twitter, where he has 1.2 million followers.

And then he did even worse than that.

When Twitter users chided the 74-year-old scientist for “picking on a kid,” he responded by tweeting a link to a news story about a child ISIS killer.

“‘But he’s only a kid.’ Yes, a ‘kid’ old enough to sue for $15M those whom he hoaxed. And how old is this ‘kid’?” tweeted Dawkins, linking to a story about a young ISIS killer beheading a victim.

And then he was surprised and HORRIFIED that people thought he was comparing Ahmed to the kid in the photo.

Me, I’m horrified that Dawkins is still on Twitter.

And there’s more. The story goes on. People protested and Dawkins responded in his usual clueless and belligerent way, and it’s enough to make you want to eject your lunch.

He’s mean; that’s all there is to it. He’s a mean bastard, and Twitter gives him a place to take his meanness out for exercise, and that’s what he does. Apparently nothing will convince him this is not a clever or useful or productive thing to do.

#SueMeSaudi

Via Josephine Liptrott:

Greatest designer:

1. man
2. man
3. man
4. man
5. man

Greatest comedian:

1. man
2. man
3. man
4. man
5. man

Greatest author:

1. man
2. man
3. man
4. man
5. man

Greatest woman:

1. woman
2. woman
3. woman
4. woman
5. woman

Men do, women just be.

I happened to see this while looking for something else, and couldn’t resist it. It’s from a BBC feature on vintage railway posters.

The New York Times apparently perpetrated one of the most oxymoronic lines one could dream up in its initial reporting on the guy who killed three people and injured nine more at Planned Parenthood. Gawker has the record.

After what was likely a heated debate around the editorial desk, The New York Times decided to rework a story that described Robert Lewis Dear, the man who killed three people and wounded nine others at a Planned Parenthood clinic on Friday, as “gentle.”

A story published on Saturday about Dear’s background used that adjective, defined as “[a person of] a mild in temperament or behavior; kind or tender” to describe Dear, following that adjective with details about how he harassed women for years.

Jack Mirkinson tweeted a snapshot:

Acquaintances described the guy as a gentle loner who occasionally unleashed violent acts toward neighbors and women he knew. Some “gentle.” (Also, weren’t some of the neighbors women? Was he surrounded exclusively by men?)

To be fair, you can see how they screwed that up. The acquaintances they talked to probably said he seemed like a gentle loner and yet he had violent outbursts. Violent people can seem gentle at intervals; few people are all one thing all the time. But still. You can see how they screwed it up, but it’s more difficult to see how they failed to catch it before publication.

Via Ali Rizvi on Twitter:

In 2015 SArabia’s beheaded 150+ people, incl for “crimes” like sorcery: @SaudiEmbassyUSA @SaudiEmbassyUK #SueMeSaudi

Sue me.

Adam Taylor at the Washington Post reports that Saudi Arabia considers itself profoundly different from IS, and that it plans to persuade everyone of this by suing people who say otherwise.

Authorities in Saudi Arabia have long been annoyed that everyone keeps suggesting they are anything like the Islamic State. Sure, they say, perhaps some of the laws on the books may look similar to the punishments in the extremist organization, but the Saudi kingdom is a sovereign state that abides by the rule of law and uses these punishments with discretion.

Yes, it’s a “sovereign state,” for what that’s worth – which in their case is pretty much nothing. So it’s a sovereign state, so what? It’s a sovereign state with bad laws, bad judges, bad courts, bad government, bad ideas, bad you name it. It’s one of the worst countries on the planet.

According to a report in pro-government newspaper Al Riyadh, the Saudi justice ministry is planning to sue a Twitter user who suggested that a death sentence recently handed out to a Palestinian artist for apostasy was “ISIS-like.”

“Questioning the fairness of the courts is to question the justice of the Kingdom and its judicial system based on Islamic law, which guarantees rights and ensures human dignity,” a source in the justice ministry told the newspaper, according to a translation by Reuters. The ministry would not hesitate to sue “any media that slandered the religious judiciary of the Kingdom,” the source added.

Sue…where?

Maybe they’re thinking of libel tourism. They’ve done that before:

When Rachel Ehrenfeld wrote “Funding Evil: How Terrorism Is Financed and How to Stop It,” she assumed she would be protected by the First Amendment. She was, in the United States. But a wealthy Saudi businessman she accused in the book of being a funder of terrorism, Khalid bin Mahfouz, sued in Britain, where the libel laws are heavily weighted against journalists, and won a sizable amount of money.

The lawsuit is a case of what legal experts are calling “libel tourism.” Ms. Ehrenfeld is an American, and “Funding Evil” was never published in Britain. But at least 23 copies of the book were sold online, opening the door for the lawsuit. When Ms. Ehrenfeld decided not to defend the suit in Britain, Mr. bin Mahfouz won a default judgment and is now free to sue to collect in the United States.

That was 2008; the UK’s libel law has been somewhat improved since then, and the US has passed laws preventing people like Mr bin Mahfouz from suing here.

So where do the Saudis think they’re going to do this suing?

…the comparison to the Islamic State appears to be a particular bone of contention for the Saudi kingdom. Speaking to NBC News earlier this year, Interior Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Mansour al-Turki justified the use of capital punishments such as beheadings in the kingdom by saying the country’s Shariah-based legal system ensures fairness. “ISIS has no legitimate way to decide to decide to kill people,” Al-Turki said, adding that “the difference is clear.”

No, it isn’t, really. Yes there’s a legal system; no it’s not a good legal system or one that ensures fairness. The way Saudi Arabia decides to kill people is not legitimate either. Should we list all the people it’s killed illegitimately? All those maids beheaded on trumped up charges after they resisted rape or failed to serve the coffee hot enough? All those bloggers who dared to talk about liberal reforms?

So I guess I’d better get busy insulting Saudi Arabia more.

You wanted visuals of the walk to the Carmel end of the Pebble Beach golf course the other day. I didn’t take pics myself so here are a few from Pebble Beach the company and a blogger.

This is the famous and infamous 9th hole. You can see how it would be rather tricky to play – and hot damn it’s a pretty place to take a stroll.

Here’s how it looks as you approach it.

At the base of those cliffs there’s a little beach called Stillwater Cove.

This is approaching the far end – those houses are in Carmel, not on the course, and the beach is Carmel Beach.

This one is near the beginning rather than the end, but it shows the hills I mentioned.

You can see why playing a round there would be on people’s bucket lists.

Yet again the BBC treats Maryam Namazie and the ExMuslims as some kind of horrid contaminant if not just plain traitors.

I was interviewed by Anne-Marie Tomchak for thirty minutes for BBC Trending on 26 November. Despite my also having referred 4 ex-Muslims, including those who maintained anonymity whilst Tweeting for#ExMuslimBecause due to fears for their safety, the programme spoke to Mobeen Azhar and Rashid Dar, two men who identified themselves as Muslims, about my segment which was highly edited for BBC World Service on 28 November.

The presenter Tomchak and the two Muslim men framed the entire discussion about apostasy and the basic human right to leave and criticise Islam without fear into one that was “hateful,” “bigoted,” “an attack on Muslims,” “Islamophobic,” “opportunistic,” “quite offensive”…

So the BBC actually thinks Muslims should not be allowed to leave Islam? It thinks Maryam and the ExMuslims are being “hateful” in saying Muslims can leave?

Why? The BBC is based in the UK. People in the UK are allowed to leave their religions (though it’s socially difficult for some, especially Muslims); that freedom is taken for granted. Why does the BBC make it its business to tell Muslims that they’re not allowed to leave their religion? Why does it treat her as some sort of criminal?

Tomchak and her “experts” insist that #ExMuslimBecause was “bad timing” due to the Paris attacks. For apologists,  the timing for dissent is never right.

Whilst we mourn our dead in Paris, we must not forget the countless others killed by ISIS and Islamists, including this very month in Lebanon, Nigeria, Mali, Iraq, Egypt, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan… as well as those executed perfectly legally via Sharia laws in Iran, Saudi Arabia… The refugee crisis is in large part due to this unbridled brutality.

In fact, if there ever was a “right” time to challenge Islam and Islamism, it is now.

And why would we not be allowed to do that in any case? It’s not the 13th century. We’re allowed to challenge ideas, ideologies, institutions. We’re allowed to challenge them and we’re allowed to abandon them. The BBC shouldn’t be saying or implying otherwise.

Maybe this example will help Tomchak and the BBC understand what they have got so very wrong (though I am not holding my breath). What they’ve done in their report on #ExMuslimBecause is similar to labelling critics of the Magdelene Laundries or Symphysiotomy as “strident,” “Catholic bashers” or “openly hostile to the Catholic Church.”

Of course there are people who do exactly that: apologists for the Catholic church and all its actions. But they tend to be cardinals or Bill Donohue; they don’t tend to be the BBC.

I know the BBC and its “Muslim community specialists” would have preferred us to raise #ExMuslimBecause in private over coffee. Regressive laws and fascist movements, however, are not pushed back over private chats but via normalising the taboo and through very public challenges and renunciations.

Every movement – from the demand to end racial apartheid, for gender equality, and LGBT rights – were battles fought in the public square. The right to apostasy and blasphemy is no different.

Remove all the BBC’s bogus accusations and one fact remains: the right to religion comes with a corresponding right to be free from religion. #ExMuslimBecause is part of the effort to bring about that hugely important change.

And the BBC should not be crapping on it.

Human Rights Watch on the murder of Tahir Elçi:

The November 28, 2015 assassination of Tahir Elçi, one of Turkey’s most prominent human rights lawyers and defenders, is a huge loss for the human rights community and all those who seek rule of law, democracy and justice, Human Rights Watch said today.  Human Rights Watch offered sincere condolences to the family, friends and colleagues of Elçi, head of the Diyarbakir Bar Association.

“This is a very dark day for Turkey – the murder of Tahir Elçi is a devastating blow not only to human rights activists but to all who want to see justice and rule of law prevail in Turkey,” said Emma Sinclair-Webb, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Tahir Elçi played a key role in representing victims of human rights violations and was critical of abusive tactics whether by the state or by armed groups.”

Elçi was shot in the head with a single bullet on a street in the southeastern city of Diyarbakır, where he worked and lived, shortly after holding a press conference in the old city. The full circumstances of the killing are at the time of writing unclear. A police officer was also killed nearby.

Elçi’s murder comes at a dark time for human rights in Turkey. The breakdown of the government’s peace process with the Kurds over the summer has seen a spiraling cycle of violence in the southeast.

Elçi had worked since the early 1990s as a human rights lawyer, first in the southeast in Cizre, his home town, and later in Diyarbakır, the largest city in region. He worked extensively to represent families of victims of egregious human rights violations by the security forces, including enforced disappearances and unlawful killings by suspected government agents.

Over many years, he played a key role in representing victims of these crimes before the European Court of Human Rights, and worked closely with international human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. He himself was a victim of torture and arbitrary detention, amongst other abuses, facts recognized by the European Court of Human Rights before which he and his colleagues also successfully brought their own case.

Turkey is on a very bad path.

Shaheen Hashmat on Facebook:

My face when someone comes to an event on forced marriage and asks why we’re not campaigning against male circumcision 😂 ‪#‎fuuseforum‬ Photo by Julie Tørrissen