Guest post by Saba Farbodkia. Originally a post at British Muslims for Secular Democracy on Facebook, published here by permission.

Dear offended religious people,

Please stop the hypocrisy. The right to offend is not exclusively yours.

If you know the holy scriptures of the religions that you uphold so dearly, you already know how offensive parts of them are to people.

Yet, some of you still continue to publish them. Some of you buy those publications and read them. Some of you recite them to your children. Some of you force your children to uphold them as sacred and act upon them as far as they can. And all of you regard those scriptures beyond questioning and criticism, otherwise why … Read the rest

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AFP at the Guardian reports on the arrest of Dieudonné.

Notorious French comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala has been arrested for being an “apologist for terrorism” after suggesting on Facebook that he sympathised with one of the Paris gunmen, a judicial source has said.

Prosecutors had opened the case against him on Monday after he wrote “Tonight, as far as I’m concerned, I feel like Charlie Coulibaly” – mixing the slogan “Je suis Charlie”, used in tribute to the journalists killed at magazine Charlie Hebdo, with a reference to gunman Amédy Coulibaly. Dieudonné was arrested on Wednesday.

Coulibaly killed four people at a Jewish supermarket on Friday and a police officer the day before.

In the US that wouldn’t get him … Read the rest

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Pliny the in between offers a helpful algorithm for the offended:

… Read the rest

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So. Someone whose case does not fall under the statute of limitations is pursuing criminal charges against Cosby.

A model who claims Bill Cosby drugged and sexually abused her at the Playboy Mansion met with Los Angeles police on Wednesday to pursue criminal charges against the comedian over the 2008 incident.

An attorney for Chloe Goins said after the meeting that his client is the first woman accusing Cosby of sexual misconduct whose case may fall within the statute of limitations.

More than 15 women have accused Cosby of sexual misconduct, including several who say the comedian drugged and raped them in incidents dating back at least four decades.

Quick, somebody make a joke about women not drinking around … Read the rest

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Lliana Bird also objects to the whole “Charlie Hebdo is racist!” thing.

[O]ne thing I’ve found difficult to ignore is the growing voices of those who knew little of the cartoonists and journalists saying terrible things about them, which are quite frankly unsettling.

“Racist”, “Islamophobic” and “hypocritical” have been the most common accusations. Many seemingly educated friends and social media buddies seemed to be merely glancing at a few cherry-picked Charlie Hebdo covers without making any effort in understanding their true meaning or impetus (or often even of the French translation of the accompanying captions).

And that’s not enough, especially when the subject is people who were just murdered by two fanatical bigots for reasons that are beneath contempt.

Charlie

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Salty Current has further thoughts on the failure of many to make the effort to understand Charlie Hebdo before declaring it racist.

I’ll repeat briefly the major point I’ve been making for the past several days: that I hate the approach that many people with basically good motives seem to be taking, which consists of a hostile-prosecutorial attitude that begins by assuming the worst, even on the basis of the most skeletal evidence and biased reports, and proceeds through various stages of half-listening to and then minimizing or dismissing evidence that contradicts or at least challenges the original impression.

Not the history of the publication and its political commitments or those of its staff, not the statements of the

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On page 10 of the new issue of Charlie Hebdo – under the subhead Allah Akbar! –

The killers shouted twice before executing the team – “God is the greatest!” Bah, no, fuckhead, if he existed, you really think he would have let your bottomless stupidity murder the brilliant intelligence of Wolinski, Cabu, Honoré, Charb, Tignous, Bernard Maris, Elsa Cayat and Mustapha Ourrad?

It actually says “he wouldn’t have” rather than “he would have” but I figure that’s an idiom I’m not aware of.

“Allah Akbar” was Charb’s cri de guerre, his salutations in emails and texts – “Allah Akbar, do you think you can manage to get your article in tomorrow?” One day at the magazine, for a laugh,

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On Twitter –

FranceBleuLoireOcéan @bleuloireocean · 15 hours ago
5h20 ce mercredi : plus aucun #CharlieHebdo au kiosque de la gare de #Nantes. Les 106 exemplaires sont partis en 5′

5:20 a.m. this Wednesday: not a single #CharlieHebdo left at the newsagent’s at Nantes station. The 106 copies were gone in 5 minutes.

I like that photo because you can see how CH is still all over all the papers. I especially like the cover of Libération.… Read the rest

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I knew it wouldn’t be enough. I knew 3 million wouldn’t be enough just for France, let alone everywhere else.

The print run has been raised to 5 million, but that won’t be enough either.

I want a copy, but apparently it’s not even distributed here outside New York.

The Guardian reports:

The planned print run of the first Charlie Hebdo magazine since last week’s deadly terrorist attack has been increased to 5m as many newsagents in France sold out of stocks within minutes of it going on sale.

“The publisher has decided this morning to bring the print run to 5m,” Véronique Faujour, president of the distributor MLP, told AFP. The figure is 2m more than

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Via Twitter –

Nakul Shenoy ‏@nakulshenoy Jan 13
Eh?! RT @girishmallya: Bought my copy of one part Woman to support freedom of expression http://www.amazon.in/One-Part-Woman-Perumal-Murugan-ebook/dp/B00GZQDISO/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1421146193&sr=1-1&keywords=one+part+woman … #IAmPerumalMurugan

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There’s a new party standing in the next UK general election in May.

An anti-feminism party called Justice for Men and Boys (And the Women Who Love Them) is standing for parliament in May’s general election.

The party, which hands out “Lying Feminist of the Month” awards to female journalists, will be fielding three candidates in the Nottingham area, including one candidate who will attempt to unseat shadow women and equalities minister Gloria De Piero.

The party was founded by retired businessman Mike Buchanan, who told BuzzFeed News it’s his party’s ultimate aim to “make feminism a dirty word”.

That’s already happened.

Buchanan used to work as a business consultant for the Conservative party, but quit in 2009 when David

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A beautiful new Jesus and Mo today.

I just love that last panel – it expresses what I’m always struggling to express in words – the notional quality of the putative “love” for the putative prophet.

I also love the presence of the Charlie cover.

The J and M Patreon is here.… Read the rest

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They are the same. Ce sont pareils.

Iman @1GodlessWoman · Jan 12
They are indeed but one in the same #ParisShooting #RaifBadawi #saudi #NotInMyName

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It was Raif Badawi’s birthday yesterday.

IN THE NOW @INTHENOWRT · Jan 13
World chants #JeSuisCharlie for #FreedomOfSpeech while Saudi blogger #RaifBadawi takes 1K lashes for discussing faith

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Clemens Wergen at Die Welt has some home truths for the American media on this matter of refusing to publish the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, even the new cover cartoon.

Today the French newspaper Libération published the new cover of Charlie Hebdo which will be on the newsstands on Wednesday. Yes, it is Muhammad again. He is shedding a big tear and holding a poster like so many people did in these days that reads “I am Charlie”. The title of the cover says “All is forgiven”. I can only imagine what amount of self conquest the surviving members of the Charlie Hebdo team had to muster to come up with a cover of such melancholic sweetness after they have lost

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Sameer Rahim at Prospect points out that it’s not straightforwardly true that – as so many media outlets glibly assert – “Islam forbids depictions of the Prophet.”

Although it’s true there is a strong iconoclastic streak in the religion, there is also a significant alternative tradition of representing the Prophet in Islamic history books and devotional manuals—a tradition not especially well known in the West because Muslim clergy have often condemned or tried to suppress it.

Nothing in the Koran forbids image-making but it does worry about idol-worshipping. A century after the Prophet died in 632, around the time his first biography was being circulated, religious authorities tried to avoid replicating what they saw as the misguided Christian adoration of

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Another tragedy – the Tamil writer Perumal Murugan has decided to withdraw all his books and never write again after being bullied by Hindutva groups.

A week after the police advised Tamil writer Perumal Murugan to leave his home in Namakkal following protests by caste- and Hindutva organisations against his book Madhorubagan, the author has announced that he will withdraw his entire body of work from publication and will never write again.

The announcement came after four hours of negotiations with the groups that had objected to the book.

“Negotiations” forsooth! What is there to negotiate?!

Last month, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh burnt copies of his novel  in Tiruchengode in Tamil Nadu on Friday, The Hindu reported, saying

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If you haven’t seen enough rebarbative assholitude enough lately, there’s always Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke. The lovely man did an interview with a lovely site called The New Emangelization – see what they did there?

Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke:  I think there has been a great confusion with regard to the specific vocation of men in marriage and of men in general in the Church during the past 50 years or so. It’s due to a number of factors, but the radical feminism which has assaulted the Church and society since the 1960s has left men very marginalized.

Unfortunately, the radical feminist movement strongly influenced the Church, leading the Church to constantly address women’s issues at the expense of

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Tina Nguyen at Medialite reports on the photographic obliteration of women who had the temerity to be visible in the Paris march on Sunday. These brazen hussies were merely the chancellor of Germany and the mayor of Paris and the EU foreign policy chief, so what the hell did they think they were doing out there with the grown-ups?

Yesterday’s historic march across Paris included over 40 world leaders expressing solidarity for France after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, but if you read this Haredi newspaper, you’d believe that none of them were women.

The image that ran on the front page of the Israeli newspaper The Announcer edited two female world leaders out of the image, originally provided by wire

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Here’s the YouTube video of extracts from the Charlie Hebdo press conference.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyDIX-dNf5E… Read the rest

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