Bill Cosby is trending again

May 2nd, 2015 4:22 pm | By

Meanwhile, in the annals of Bill Cosby, the list keeps lengthening.

In a press conference held by attorney Gloria Allred in New York this Friday, two women, Lili Bernard and Sammie Mays, both accused Cosby of drugging and sexually assaulting them.

Mays, a writer, says she met Cosby at a convention in New Orleans in the late ’80s, and that she became unconscious after receiving a drink from Cosby. She woke up half undressed and falling out of her chair.

Bernard, an actress who appeared on the final season of the “Cosby Show” and viewed Cosby as a mentor, claims that the comic drugged and raped her in the early ‘90s. “He praised me,” said Bernard. “He lifted me up. I believed him. After all, he was Bill Cosby. After he had won my complete trust and adoration, he drugged me and raped me.” Bernard added that when she saw Cosby in 1992 he threatened her and said “You’re dead, Bernard. You don’t exist. I never wanna see your face again.”

While the statute of limitations has expired for most Cosby accusers, Bernard was allegedly assaulted in New Jersey, which has no statute of limitations for rape. Yesterday, Bernard and Allred reported the crime at a police station in Atlantic city, with hopes that Cosby will finally be prosecuted. “Unlike most other states, New Jersey has no statue of limitations for rape,” said Allred. “Which means that law enforcement is not prevented from prosecuting a case because of an arbitrary time period set by law.”

This brings the total number of accusers to 35.

Cosby’s doing a show tonight in Atlanta. Protests are planned.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)



Categorically wrongheaded, churlish and morally repugnant

May 2nd, 2015 3:52 pm | By

Christiane Amanpour in a public Facebook post. It’s a letter she sent to PEN.

I am sure I was among many people who were puzzled and dismayed by the 6 PEN writers who have pulled out of next week’s Gala because of the award going to Charlie Hebdo. I am very glad to know that American PEN is standing up for what’s right by going ahead with the award, and as such I am glad I am still able to make available my video-taped contribution to the Gala, on behalf of one of our jailed colleagues, Khadija Ismayilova of Azarbaijan.

Much has been already written disdaining the action and motives of the PEN 6. I can only imagine these writers were wholly unacquainted with the precise nature of Charlie Hebdo’s satire and cartoons. So I’d like to send you this little primer in the hope you will forward to them all:

First as the PEN 6 will see from this article in Le Monde, Charlie Hebdo was NOT obsessed by Islam, was not deliberately inciting hatred of one religion, and was most certainly not aiming its satire at France’s large and beleaguered Moslem minority. The graph shows that of 523 copies of the magazine between 2005 and 2015, religion took up 38 of the covers. Of those, Islam 7, Christianity 21, and multiple religions took up 10.

In addition, while some of the PEN 6 complain Charlie Hebdo targets or offends French moslems, a precise examination of their satire shows they are actually targeting the absurdity, violence, misogyny, hatred and intolerance of global Islamic extremism. You can like or dislike what Charlie Hebdo does, find it funny or not, but to suggest that somehow they were inciting hatred and violence and ….not so subtle subtext…”oh well, the cartoonists were asking for it then”, is categorically wrongheaded, churlish and morally repugnant.

Music.

Read the whole thing.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)



All the nays

May 2nd, 2015 11:49 am | By

Thursday I posted a partial list of the writers who protest the courage award to Charlie Hebdo; via Glenn Greenwald here is the full list:

Chris Abani

Leslie Absher

Elizabeth Adams

Gabeba Baderoon

Deborah Baker

Russell Banks

Susan Bell

Naomi Benaron

Helen Benedict

Cara Benson

Charles Ramírez Berg

Susan Bernofsky

Eric Bogosian

Donald Breckenridge

Ami Sands Brodoff

Karen Brown Brooks

Janet Burroway

Helene Cardona

Peter Carey

Bryn Chancellor

Carmela Ciuraru

Patricia Clark

Tony Cohan

Teju Cole

Michael Cunningham

Emily M. Danforth

Tod Davies

Siddhartha Deb

Junot Díaz

Erin Edmison

Brent Hayes Edwards

Brian T. Edwards

Deborah Eisenberg

Hedi El Kholti

Trey Ellis

Eve Ensler

Elizabeth Enslin

Barbara Epler

Jennifer Cody Epstein

Ali Eteraz

Percival Everett

Marlon L. Fick

Boris Fishman

Stona Fitch

Peter H. Fogtdal

Seánan Forbes

Ashley Ford

Linda Nemec Foster

Lauren Francis-Sharma

Ru Freeman

Nell Freudenberger

Molly Friedrich

Joshua Furst

Gretchen Gerzina

Keith Gessen

Francisco Goldman

Conner Habib

Jessica Hagedorn

Kathryn Harrison

Jonathan T. Hine Jr.

Edward Hoagland

Laura Hoffmann

Nancy Horan

Marya Hornbacher

Sandra Hunter

Megan Hustad

Randa Jarrar

T. Geronimo Johnson

John Keahey

Uzma Aslam Khan

Dave King

Gilbert King

Robert Spencer Knotts

Ruth Ellen Kocher

Nancy Kricorian

Amitava Kumar

Rachel Kushner

Amy Lawless

Zachary Lazar

Jonathan Lee

Katherine Leiner

Ted Lewin

Ed Lin

Michael Lindgren

Julie Livingston

Craig Lucas

Ann Malaspina

Charlotte Mandell

C. M. Mayo

Patrick McGrath

Clarissa McNair

Deena Metzger

Thais Miller

Kyle Minor

Rick Moody

Skye Moody

Lorrie Moore

Dolan Morgan

James McGrath Morris

Idra Novey

Stephen O’Connor

Joyce Carol Oates

Peter Orner

Michael Ondaatje

Raj Patel

Chris Pavone

Francine Prose

Marcus Rediker

Adam Rex

Clay Risen

Roxana Robinson

David Roediger

Paul Rome

Mark Rotella

Gina Ruiz

Steven Schroeder

Sarah Schulman

Taiye Selasi

Danzy Senna

Kamila Shamsie

Jeff Sharlet

Wallace Shawn

Matthew Shenoda

Nancy Shiffrin

Russell Shorto

Charles Simic

Tom Sleigh

Holly Goldberg Sloan

Alexis M. Smith

Jill Smolowe

Linda Spalding

Scott Spencer

Emily Gray Tedrowe

Roy A. Teel Jr.

Michael Thomas

Ted Thompson

Kathleen Tolan

Joanne Turnbull

Chase Twichell

Padma Venkatraman

Jasmine Dreame Wagner

Eliot Weinberger

Jon Wiener

G. K. Wuori

Dave Zirin

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)



It lets murderers start and be part of the conversation

May 2nd, 2015 11:00 am | By

If you want to see people saying good, intelligent, reasonable things, you can do worse than check out Salman Rushdie’s Twitter. He’s RTd several such things.

Joel Gordon @JoelGord13 hours ago
Do Charle Hebdo opponents at PEN realize that boycotting their award normalizes murder as opposition to speech?

@JoelGord It lets murderers start and be part of the conversation. This is why none of their analogies to American racists, etc. works.

There’s Azar Nafisi:

Azar Nafisi ‏@azarnafisi
.@PENamerican @SalmanRushdie PEN award to CH is recognition of the writers’ &artists’ rights to “disturb the peace,”regardless of the price

.@SalmanRushdie @PENamerican Satanic Verses didn’t insult true Muslims, it offended their oppressors who treated their own authors same way

Also of interest is a Storify by Dylan Horrocks. He was working in a bookshop in 1989, and he remembers what the fuss over The Satanic Verses was like. He remembers people on the left being full of agonized doubts. Should the paperback come out?

Was it an unnecessary provocation? Shouldn’t we be trying to heal the wounds caused by the book & fatwa? Some argued we should respect the views of Muslims offended by the book, as a marginalised minority who had suffered under colonialism, Western invasion & war, racism & cultural imperialism. Above all, a slow subtle undermining of Rushdie’s credibility: he’s over-rated, it’s a lousy book, he’s not a proper Indian, he’s culturally colonised, arrogant, disrespectful, deliberately offensive, racist. As a young leftist writer & cartoonist, I found it all very confusing & disturbing. People were persuasive. I remember vividly 2 things: 1. The fear of being on the wrong side & confusion about which side that was. 2. The pervasive sense of Satanic Verses as something tainted, toxic, dirty. When the pbk came out at last I bought one & remember keeping it hidden on the way home, like something illicit, pornographic. The Charlie Hebdo murders has brought back these vivid memories because the reaction has been SO similar. I see young well-meaning leftists having the same doubts & fears & confusions, for exactly the same reasons. And the same ongoing murmur of denegration, dismissal, accusation & shaming. So no, @tejucole, don’t tell me the @SalmanRushdie Affair was completely different. Because I was there & it was very much the same.

I was there too, albeit not working in a bookshop. But I was there in the sense that I paid close attention. But I didn’t have those doubts. Why not? I think because even then I was far too passionately unwilling to be told what to do by god-huggers to have doubts of that kind. People blaming Rushdie for the fatwa seemed grotesque and disgusting to me even then. People blaming Charlie Hebdo for their own murders seems grotesque and disgusting to me right now.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)



The privilege of being born in 2015

May 2nd, 2015 10:07 am | By

Martin Robbins seizes the occasion of a birth in the Windsor family to point out what luck that baby has to be born with such good odds.

[T]hings are getting better. The small wrinkly proto-Royal that just emerged from the national womb will have thrice the chance of surviving that her father and I did, just through the privilege of being born in 2015. But if that makes you feel all warm and complacent, there are a couple of big problems with this story.

While it’s true that things are getting better, they’re still not good enough. Our babies are considerably more likely to die than those born in countries like Spain, Italy, France or basically any other European nation you can think of. By 2010, we’d just about caught up with Japan… in 1985.

Martin doesn’t talk about the US, but I’ll make this point: things here are quite a lot worse. We have much more poverty and class / race / immigration status / etc segregation here, and a much much much worse system of health care distribution. Oddly enough, that has results.

Martin says that Britain’s version of the US is the north.

There’s a simple statistical adjustment you can do that brings Britain’s infant and child mortality rates back into line with the rest of Europe’s, reducing the rate by a third and putting us level again with countries like France and Germany. Can you guess what it is?

Get rid of the poor people. Especially northerners.

That, at least, is the same here – not the northeners part, but the poor people part. We have a lot of them, and it’s intentional. Why? Because poor people will work for low wages in crap conditions. Profit!

The National Children’s Bureau made the point in a recent report that: “If the UK had the same all-cause mortality rate for children under 14 years as Sweden we could have nearly 2,000 fewer deaths among children in that age group per year – five fewer children’s deaths per day.”

How do we address that? Well there are several things a government can do, and they boil down to this. Protect our strong system of primary health care, and raise standards of mental health treatment. Ensure that poorer families received adequate support. Treat alcohol and drug abuse. Above all, reduce inequality in our society. As the NCB put it, “Poverty kills children. Equity saves lives.”

We don’t even have a strong system of primary health care. The US is a third world country in many ways.

Not to derail Martin’s point. Sorry Martin. The UK could do better, and the US that times a thousand.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)



Cartoons can and do offend

May 1st, 2015 6:02 pm | By

Andrew Solomon and Suzanne Nossel explain why PEN is giving Charlie Hebdo an award.

Although censorship has traditionally been the province primarily of governments, attempts to curb speech are likewise undertaken by vigilantes who employ threats and violence. In the last few months we have seen shootings at Charlie Hebdo and at a free-speech event in Copenhagen; the hacking to death of two Bangladeshi atheist bloggers, one of them an American; a death threat against an Australian political cartoonist by jihadists; and the gunning down of a Pakistani social activist.

I missed the death threat against an Australian political cartoonist, but all the other items I’ve been ranting about relentlessly.

These audacious attacks aim to terrorize a worldwide audience into silence on subjects that, though sacred to some, affect many others and must not be above debate. While this is hardly the only free-speech issue on PEN’s long agenda of American and global concerns, the spate of homicides gives it particular urgency.

Six writers of tremendous distinction — Peter Carey, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner, Michael Ondaatje, Francine Prose and Taiye Selasi — have sent notes to us indicating that they were not comfortable attending our gala on Tuesday, in light of the award. Many other writers of distinction — including Paul Auster, Adam Gopnik, Siri Hustvedt, Porochista Khakpour, Alain Mabanckou, Azar Nafisi, Salman Rushdie, Simon Schama and Art Spiegelman — have made statements (some in public and some in private) in support of the award. Our goal has been to avoid a reductive binary; this is a nuanced question, and all of these writers have made persuasive moral arguments.

Not really. All of them have tried to, no doubt, but not all of them succeeded. They’re not all above average.

In offering this award, PEN does not endorse the content or quality of the cartoons, except to say that we do not believe they constitute hate speech. The question for us is not whether the cartoons deserve an award for literary merit, but whether they disqualify Charlie Hebdo from a hard-earned award for courage. (The gala on Tuesday will also honor Khadija Ismayilova, an Azerbaijani journalist in jail for exposing rampant corruption.)

That’s a good way of putting it; I wish I’d thought of it. As I keep saying, it would be possible for cartoons and satirical papers to be racist and thus bad candidates for an award, it’s just that Charlie isn’t one of them.

That the cartoons were not intentionally racist does not preclude their being experienced as racist. Cartoons can and do offend. Yet Christiane Taubira, the black French justice minister who was parodied as a monkey in a cringe-worthy cartoon, delivered a poignant elegy at the funeral of one of her supposed tormentors, Bernard Verlhac, known as Tignous, saying that “Tignous and his companions were sentinels, lookouts, those who watched over democracy,” preventing it from being lulled into complacency.

The leading French anti-racism organization, SOS Racisme, has called Charlie Hebdo “the greatest anti-racist weekly in this country.” Its current editor, Gérard Biard, says it deplores all forms of racism. According to Le Monde, of 523 Charlie Hebdo covers published from 2005 to 2015, only seven singled out Islam for ridicule (ten were cited as mocking multiple religions); many more mocked Christianity and the racism of the French right.

Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons resist religious extremists’ attempts to redraw the boundaries of free speech by using violence. They do so in defense of norms to which free societies subscribe. Anti-Muslim prejudice in the West is a serious matter. So is fundamentalism, Islamist or otherwise. Feeding off one another, both ills threaten civil liberties and tear at social fabrics. But a statement or an award that addresses one problem does not thereby deny or acquiesce to the other. The distressing absence of broad respect toward Muslims in France does not undercut Charlie Hebdo’s bravery in defending the right to be disrespectful.

I hope the rafters ring with cheers next Tuesday evening when Alain Mabanckou presents the award and Gérard Biard accepts it.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)



Take that, parochialists

May 1st, 2015 5:29 pm | By

Philip Gourevitch tweets:

Philip Gourevitch @PGourevitch 13 hours ago
Congolese French novelist/Man Booker finalist @amabanckou to present PEN award to CharlieHebdo http://www.lexpress.fr/culture/livre/alain-mabanckou-remettra-le-prix-liberte-d-expression-de-pen-a-charlie-hebdo_1676505.html …

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Peter Carey, Francine Prose, please note.

Updating to add a cartoon via Twitter RTd by Alain Mabanckou:

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The east side of the hill

May 1st, 2015 4:34 pm | By

I found this by accident, looking for something else, but here it is for your Friday afternoon entertainment. Not that it is Friday afternoon for most of you any more, but it is for me.

Seattle for some reason I will never understand has a strong bias toward painting houses in horrible drab muddy dark dreary ugly colors. Dull greys, muddy greens, dreary browns…and that’s it. It’s annoying.

The Slog, the blog of the Stranger, ran a piece aptly titled Houses That Don’t Hate Color Like the Rest of Seattle. The first house is one I know well – it’s on the other side of the hill where I live.

Do admit.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)



Not when it feeds into a narrative of oppression

May 1st, 2015 2:55 pm | By

A satirical cartoonist on people who don’t understand or appreciate satirical cartoons:

but

Patreon.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)



I thought this was so clear

May 1st, 2015 2:19 pm | By

Stewart at Gnu Atheism:

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)



Standing up

May 1st, 2015 12:08 pm | By

Ulrike Lunacek, the Vice-President of European Parliament, stood up for Raif Badawi today, according to Ensaf Haidar.

Via Ulrike Lunacek:

She’s the one facing us, in the blue scarf.

Take heed, King Salman!

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)



There is no “but”!

May 1st, 2015 12:01 pm | By

From a translation of what the head of SOS Racisme said about Charlie Hebdo in January.

Embedded image permalink

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Undertaken in line with approved protocols

May 1st, 2015 11:11 am | By

The symposium on Charlie Hebdo at Queen’s University Belfast is back on.

In a statement released today, Queen’s University said:

“Following the completion of a comprehensive risk assessment, undertaken in line with approved protocols, the University is pleased to confirm that the Charlie Hebdo Research Symposium, organised by the Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities has been approved.”

The conference, titled Understanding Charlie: New perspectives on contemporary citizenship after Charlie Hebdo, will now be hosted by Queen’s Univeristy’s Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities on 4-5 June.

Jo Glanville, director of free speech advocacy group English PEN, welcomed Queen’s University’s decision, telling Little Atoms: “It’s very good news that the conference is now going ahead. We need as much opportunity for debate as possible at a time when the ability to exercise the right to freedom of expression remains highly vulnerable.”

Good. Now if only the Soft-headed Six or Thirty Four or One Hundred Fifty would have some sense.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)



It’s so white I know it’s pure!

May 1st, 2015 11:00 am | By

Guest post by Josh the Spokesgay.

[Note: This is a hypothesis and it’s surely incomplete and might be badly wrong in some places. I’m not suggesting it’s a well-documented piece of research; criticism and correction is welcome.]

I wonder if anyone else has noticed this: The current obsessions with gluten, GMO crops, “chemicals,” and “clean eating” are expressions of the exact same set of purity concerns that animated the mid-20th century consumer love of —wait for it—-foods made in sterile, scientific factories.

Take a look through cookbooks and promotional materials from food companies published in the 1930s through the 1950s. They go on at length about the “hygienic conditions” in which foods like vegetable shortening and bread were made. Many proudly feature photographs of boxy, Brutalist-style factories where “safe, pure” foods were made. Enriched with extra vitamins to be wholesome, of course.

This was a cultural reaction to the new availability of standardized manufacture and quality control of foodstuffs. It was a reaction AGAINST what consumers believed (sometimes wrongly) were the unsafe, tainted foods produced by local family farms. Consumers often got it wrong. For instance, believing that locally baked bread was to blame for illnesses. Of course, most food poisoning came from bad dairy, meat, etc., not bread.

The appetite for canned (purified, protected) and frozen foods was enormous among the post-war US buying public. Homemade foods that we’d call today “local” and “artisan-made” seemed to be have been seen in the 1950s the way we see mass-manufactured “processed” foods like boxed macaroni and cheese. That is, they were the province of unsophisticated or dated homemakers.

You were seen as “country” or out of touch or not sufficiently worried about your family’s health if you served traditionally made foods. Good, Caring housewives served spinach from a frozen box and cheese sauce from a can. You didn’t reuse bacon grease like mother did, you used vegetable shortening. Spry-brand shortening was advertised on the basis of its “purity”, signified by its brilliant white color. One ad in my collection has a smartly dressed woman (picture Rosalind Russell in The Women) saying, “It’s so white I know it’s pure!”.

The preference for this kind of food was largely about the convenience that was available in food preparation for the first time in history. But it was also about misguided notions of purity and contamination, and about posturing through purchasing to show that you were Properly Concerned About Your Family’s Health.

The supermarket housewife stocking her larder with cans of Libby’s vegetables seems to me to be the cultural equivalent of the “crunchy moms” who ostentatiously patronize Whole Foods and claim never to let a non-organic potato pass the lips of dear little Kayden or Abigail.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)



Le Rabelais de nos jours

May 1st, 2015 10:39 am | By

Justin Erik Halldór Smith on Charlie Hebdo.

In response to the recent attempt by some members of PEN to betray persecuted editorialists throughout the world by refusing to honor the survivors of a right-wing death squad’s attack on a group of caricature artists in Paris a few months ago, Harper’s has taken my April essay out from behind its paywall. Many have been writing on the Internet about their exasperation with all the ‘think pieces’ on this topic. When will we have finally had enough? they wonder. My answer is that there will be no more need for ‘think pieces’ when there will be sufficiently serious thinking about this question. What the PEN protesters have given us is a refusal-to-think piece: Twitter-worthy, infantile, presentist American identitarianism that both denies commonalities of experience and history when they are present (as between Europe and the Arab world), and presumes such commonalities when they are in fact absent (as between Anglo-American and French traditions of humor and satire), all on the basis of the ungrounded extension of the currently preferred American analytic lens of ‘whiteness’ and ‘non-whiteness’. This lens certainly reveals quite a bit about American history and its enduring legacies, but very little about the broader history of the Mediterranean and its peoples, against the background of which the recent Charlie Hebdo incident is best understood.

Dayum, this guy can word. “Twitter-worthy, infantile, presentist American identitarianism” is one for the ages. (And yes, “American” belongs there. I often prepare to bristle when I see that word, because it [or rather its plural] often precedes some stupid remark like “are so pathetic to think ‘pussy’ means ‘vagina'” or just “are so thick.” But in this case there’s a parochialism that just wouldn’t fly in places that share several borders with foreign countries.)

Honestly, people who have signed the PEN letter are openly admitting that they have never even looked at Charlie Hebdo, and even that they would not be in a position to understand the French if they were to look it. I can accept that your overall judgment of it might, after thorough consideration, be negative (just like you might not like Lolita, Gargantua, Monty Python…), but that is just patently not what is happening here. As I’ve written elsewhere, it seems to me thatCharlie Hebdo has been Justine Sacco’d in the Anglosphere: summarily judged, and then subject to a campaign of ruthless denunciation. Except that Charlie Hebdo is not a Tweet, but a decades-long collaborative endeavor, and those of us in the part of the world that is still capable of interpreting texts and images in a nuanced way are left scratching our heads when we see the unreflective, summary judgment passed on such a complicated body of work –often misfiring, but often unquestionably courageous and unquestionably funny– as if it were some dumb Tweet or other source of ephemeral online outrage.

Yes but you see they have friends who say it’s racist. Those friends also haven’t read or understood it, but they too have friends who say it’s racist. If you go back far enough there must be some people who actually have read and understood it, and are Correct to say it’s racist. Otherwise…well there wouldn’t be all these people saying it is, would there. That’s democracy.

Honestly from what I can see that’s about the level of the “thinking.” It sort of has to be, since it’s so easy to find people explaining how and why Charlie is not racist. It has to be some ridiculous level of trust in chains of transmission from one right-on person to another right-on person that can trump all those people who do know something about the subject.

In the Harper’s piece what I was trying to do was to insist on a revision of the facile view that what Charlie Hebdo represented was something distinctly and exclusively ‘Western’, ‘Enlightenment-based’, etc. Hence my attempt, space permitting, at a sort of genealogy of the joke and of the sources of bawdy literature –of which I see Charlie Hebdo as a descendant– in pan-Mediterranean oral folklore. I detect here a possibility for going back around all the apparent dichotomies that both French laïcité defenders such as Alain Finkielkraut as well as the American left thinkers who have taken such a firm stance on Charlie Hebdo have helped to perpetuate, and finding a shared history and a common reality.

To put this a bit differently, Rabelais is closer to an anonymous medieval Arab raconteur than he is to, say, Peter Carey. You can classify Charlie Hebdo as a product of the wit-shrouded racism and imperialism of the Enlightenment, assimilating it to Voltaire and so on, but there is an alternative genealogy, which I have been trying to draw out, which connects the modern European satirical tradition to something much larger than Europe, and to something much older than modernity. It is my opponents, and not me, who are perpetuating the ideology of European exceptionalism by acting as though satire has no roots, and can have no purchase, outside of Europe.*

Ah now that’s interesting – Charlie as a descendant of Rabelais. There is no American Rabelais; maybe that’s why this all goes so wrong.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)



Diana Nammi

May 1st, 2015 10:16 am | By

Diana Nammi has won an award for doing the important work she does. IKWRO reports:

On Thursday 30 April 2015, at a ceremony in New York, Diana Nammi, Founder and Executive Director of the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation (IKWRO) will be honoured with the Voice of Courage Award for her lifelong commitment to protecting the rights of Middle Eastern and North African women and girls and to ending “honour” based violence, forced marriage, female genital mutilation (FGM) and domestic violence.

The awards, which celebrate refugee women who champion the prevention of violence against refugee women and girls, are held by the Women’s Refugee Commission, an international organisation that monitors the care and protection of refugee women and children globally.

Diana, a former Kurdish refugee, founded IKWRO in 2002 in response to the police dismissing the “honour” killing of her own interpreter as a “cultural matter”. She recognised the need for an organisation to protect the human rights of women and girls from Middle Eastern and North African communities and to tackle “honour” based violence, forced marriage, female genital mutilation (FGM) and domestic violence. Prior to arriving in the UK, Diana spent 12 years as a Peshmerger, freedom fighter, defending women’s rights in Kurdistan. Eventually, she had to flee the Middle East when the situation became too dangerous for her young child.

Diana’s work has broken the silence on the taboo of “honour” based violence and one of her stand out achievements was securing the first ever extradition of “honour” killing murderers from the Kurdish region of Iraq to the UK through the Justice for Banaz campaign.

Last year IKWRO assisted over 780 clients face to face and gave advice to over 2500 clients and professionals over the telephone. IKWRO provides advice, advocacy, training and counselling and campaigns for better laws and policies.

Diana’s work has received national and international recognition and she is regularly called upon to share her expertise with government, academics, the media and professionals. In 2007 Eve magazine awarded Diana the Eve Heroines Honour, in 2012 she was named in a list of 150 women who shake the world by Newsweek and The Daily Beast. In 2014 she received the Special Jury Women on the Move Award from UNHCR, The Forum and Migrants Rights Network, she was selected as one of BBC’s “100 Women” and she was honoured with the Woman of the Year Award.

One of the best.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)



No good; get some men to help

May 1st, 2015 9:11 am | By

This seems almost too classic to be real. Two women submit a research paper for peer review and get a suggestion that they should add a man or two as co-author(s). I’m not making it up.

Evolutionary geneticist Fiona Ingleby was shocked when she read the review accompanying the rejection for her latest manuscript, which investigates gender differences in the Ph.D.-to-postdoc transition, so she took the issue to Twitter.

Earlier today, Ingleby, a postdoc at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, posted two excerpts of the anonymous review. “It would probably … be beneficial to find one or two male biologists to work with (or at least obtain internal peer review from, but better yet as active co-authors)” to prevent the manuscript from “drifting too far away from empirical evidence into ideologically biased assumptions,” the reviewer wrote in one portion.

Or, better yet, add one or two male biologists and then subtract the original female biologists. And change the subject to male superiority in the Ph.D.-to-postdoc transition. That would be perfect.

“Perhaps it is not so surprising that on average male doctoral students co-author one more paper than female doctoral students, just as, on average, male doctoral students can probably run a mile a bit faster than female doctoral students,” added the reviewer (whose gender is not known).

True, true. Not so surprising at all. It’s a matter of preferences, you see. Females are the marrying and child-having sex, you see, so it’s just natural that they don’t want to write as many papers, because they’re too busy being broody. Christina Hoff Sommers has explained all this very well.

Ingleby and her co-author, evolutionary biologist Megan Head of the Australian National University in Canberra, submitted the manuscript to “a mid-range journal with a broad readership,” Ingleby explained in an e-mail to ScienceInsider…

Ingleby and Head said they received the rejection with just the single review. “Not only did the review seem unprofessional and inappropriate, but it didn’t have any constructive or specific criticism to work on,” Ingleby wrote. (The reviewer wrote that the study is “methodologically weak” and “has fundamental flaws and weaknesses that cannot be adequately addressed by mere revision of the manuscript, however extensive,” according to a copy of the review Ingleby provided to ScienceInsider, but Ingleby says these comments are “quite vague” and therefore difficult to address.)

Three weeks ago, the pair appealed the rejection. The only communication they had received from the journal was an e-mail apologizing for the delay. So today Ingleby posted the excerpts because “we felt that the journal should have taken the appeal a bit more seriously – the review is so obviously inappropriate that we couldn’t understand why it was taking so long, when we just wanted them to send it back out for a fair review.”

I don’t see what the problem is. There was only one reviewer, who said this is no good and you should get two men to write and submit it. What’s wrong with that?

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)



“Charlie Hebdo’s work is not important,” Francine Prose said

Apr 30th, 2015 6:27 pm | By

Katha Pollitt stands up for Charlie Hebdo.

When PEN decided to award the first PEN/Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award to the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, they surely thought they were honoring bravery in defense of free speech. This was a magazine that kept publishing after its offices were firebombed by Islamists in 2011, and kept publishing after nine staffers were horribly murdered by Islamists in January. Compare that to, say, Yale University Press, which dropped the illustrations for Jytte Clausen’s book about the Danish Mohammed cartoons after the book’s first printing, or Random House, which canceled publication of Sherry Jones’s The Jewel of Medina, a historical novel about Mohammed’s wife Aisha. Both publishing houses cited fears of violence by Muslim extremists. Those fears were not irrational. The head of the British publishing house that picked up Jones’s novel had his house firebombed—and the book was dropped. Violence works.

Damn straight. There was even some hesitation about Does God Hate Women? for a few nerve-racking days, but that ended.

But the Six see things differently.

Charlie Hebdo’s work is not important,” Francine Prose told me, over the phone. “It’s not interesting.” She said she was offended by Charlie’s crude cartoons of the Prophet and mockery of the religion of France’s marginalized Muslim community: “It’s a racist publication. Let’s not beat about the bush.” She compared the magazine’s Muslim caricatures to Goebbels’s anti-Semitic propaganda. “I don’t see a difference, really. It’s the same big noses and thick lips.” She pointed out that many dozens of Mexican and Russian journalists had been killed for reporting on their government’s corrupt doings. Why not honor them?

She should start her own PEN if she wants to decide who gets the awards. Thinking someone else should have gotten it is not a good reason to boycott it, especially when the people getting it were murdered.

I’ve known Francine since we were in college, and admire her and her writing enormously. I agree with her that there’s a distinction between supporting the freedom to speak and write, as we both do, and honoring the speech itself. It is probably safe to say that if PEN believedCharlie Hebdo was the Volkischer Beobachter of our day, they wouldn’t be giving it an award, no matter how many of its editors had been massacred. I don’t agree that the drawings of Mohammed are in a different key than the magazine’s rude caricatures of the Pope or Hasidic rabbis or the Virgin Mary just after being raped by the three kings, but maybe that’s in the eye of the beholder. In any case, Charlie is a small satirical magazine run by aging sixties leftists who spend the vast bulk of their column inches attacking the National Front and other French conservatives, with frequent jabs at the Catholic Church. Those immersed in French cartoon culture have pointed out that the offensive drawings circulating on the Internet are, in context, the opposite of what they seem to some American readers—indictments of the racist and anti-immigrant views of right-wing French politicians. In fact, after the murders, Rushdie tweetedthat the president of SOS Racisme, the premier anti-racist group in France, had called it “the greatest anti-racist weekly in the country.” Justice Minister Christiane Taubira, whom opponents of the award described as depicted as “a black woman drawn as a monkey” in the pages of Charlie Hebdo, also paid tribute to the magazine.

So why can’t Francine Prose and the rest of them take that in? Even if the cartoons (or some of them) make them flinch, why can’t they take in the explanations that they simply have it wrong? Why can’t they at least grasp that Charlie is not on the right but the left? Why can’t they listen?

The six writers are circulating a letter to PEN members, which many great and famous writers are signing: Joyce Carol Oates, Junot Diaz, Lorrie Moore. It seems to me these writers must be awfully sure that they will never fall afoul of either fanaticism or well-meaning liberalism. “There is a critical difference between staunchly supporting expression that violates the acceptable,” it argues, “and enthusiastically rewarding such expression.” Well, sure, but excuse me: violates the acceptable? The acceptable what? And don’t we need writing and artwork that pushes the boundary of what the acceptable is? “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” as Blake put it.

It’s a great piece; read the whole thing.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)



The head of SOS-Racisme calls Charlie Hebdo the greatest anti racist weekly

Apr 30th, 2015 5:49 pm | By

Salman Rushdie tweets:

Salman Rushdie @SalmanRushdie 12 hours ago
Salman Rushdie retweeted Philip Gourevitch
The head of SOS-Racisme calls CH the greatest anti racist weekly. PEN protesters, please note. Salman Rushdie added,

Philip Gourevitch @PGourevitch
“Charlie Hebdo, le plus grand hebdomadaire anti-raciste”: more French context from Dominique Sopo, Pres of SOS-Racism http://www.europe1.fr/mediacenter/emissions/europe-midi-votre-journal-wendy-bouchard/videos/charlie-hebdo-est-le-plus-grand-hebdomadaire-anti-raciste-2341899 …

And:

Salman Rushdie @SalmanRushdie 11 hours ago
Now that the leading anti-racist group SOS-Racisme has called CH “the greatest anti-racist weekly”, will PEN protesters admit their error?

Le plus grand hebdomadaire anti-raciste:

EXTRAIT – Le président de SOS racisme prend la défense du journal qui a été la cible d’un attentat.

The president of SOS Racism defends the magazine that was the target of an attack.

D’accord? Francine Prose, Peter Carey, the rest of the 150? Anything?

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)



Reading Raif in Vienna

Apr 30th, 2015 5:08 pm | By

Via Ensaf Haidar:

Today The Green Party Hold Reading for ‪#‎RaifBadawi‬ Book in Austrian Parliament

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)