Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Taliban ‘Ban’ Female Education in Swat District

    Teacher says they have also ordered women not to visit markets. They kill anyone who disobeys.

  • Pakistan: Taliban Promise to Kill Girls in School

    ‘You have until January 15 to stop sending your girls to schools. If you do not pay any heed to this warning, we will kill such girls.’

  • Scruton Speaks Up for Midgley

    Is dismayed that she joined ‘the disastrous attack on hunting with hounds’ though.

  • Fears for Safety of Zimbabwean Activists

    Judge ordered Mukoko and her co-accused to be sent to hospital but police ignored the order.

  • Mukoko and Other Activists Missing Again

    The police have refused to comply with the court order that Mukoko be taken to a hospital.

  • Mukoko, Other Activists Remanded to Hospital

    Mukoko is among a list of 32 human rights and MDC activists abducted by state security agents..

  • Meet the elf

    On a lighter note – in case you’ve never heard it, or haven’t heard it lately – here is Santaland Diaries. I defy anyone not to laugh. ‘Santa doesn’t deal in coal any more. He comes to your house and steals things.’

    The snow is still up to our ear lobes here, and the streets going down and up the hill are still closed, and the buses are still not coming up here or going down from here…but I’m going to wrap myself in heavy-duty plastic and pad myself with inner tubes and venture out, with good hopes of being no more than two or three hours late.

  • Silent night

    The Taliban in northwest Pakistan is in a festive mood.

    Taliban in Swat district have imposed a ban on female education and have warned teachers of ‘severe consequences’ if any girl is seen heading for school after a 15-day deadline ends.

    They’re not messing around.

    “You have until January 15 to stop sending your girls to schools. If you do not pay any heed to this warning, we will kill such girls,” one official quoted the commander as saying. “We also warn schools not to enrol any female students; otherwise, their buildings will be blown up.”

    They’re not shy. They clearly don’t feel any need to win hearts and minds.

    Durran said local Taliban leaders were determined not to allow girls to attend school, saying: “We want to enforce the true Sharia in the area – for this, we are fighting and laying down our lives.”

    They are fighting and ‘laying down their lives’ for the sake of murdering girls who go to school and destroying school buildings. They are risking their own lives and destroying those of other people for the shining inspiring goal of…preventing girls from getting an education. Humanity struggles and learns for thousands of years and arrives at the point of – packs of ignorant violent men whose main goal in life is to grind women into the dirt.

    Joy to the world.

  • What do the bible say

    Now…let’s think a little more about Rick Warren and this here ‘invocation’ and what it all involves. Let’s think about Rick Warren’s beliefs apart from gay marriage.

    Let’s consult that cached page of faqs again.

    The Bible is God´s word to all men. It was written by human authors, under the supernatural guidance of the Holy Spirit. It is the supreme source of truth for Christian beliefs and living. Because it is inspired by God, it is truth without any mixture of error. 2 Timothy 3:16; 2 Peter 1:20,21; 2 Timothy 1:13; Psalm 119:105,160, 12:6; Proverbs 30:5

    That’s nuts. It’s childish. You can’t cite statements internal to a document to back up the claim that the document is inspired by God and that it is truth without any mixture of error. That doesn’t work, and it doesn’t work for reasons that are so obvious that failure to grasp them is simply childish. If that did work then all authors could just say ‘this book is inspired by God and it is truth without any mixture of error’ and be taken seriously.

    I know that seems too obvious to be worth pointing out, but that’s why religion gets a free pass on this kind of thing. It all seems so obvious, no one bothers – so then there are whole huge segments of the population who never hear that actually there is no good reason at all to think the bible is inspired by God.

    In other words it makes sense to start with the basics and go on from there. This whole idea of bible-based beliefs and morals is a broken reed; it’s worthless before we even get to the specifics.

    And then there’s the fact that the bible of Rick Warren’s church is a translation, so what can it mean to say that a translation is truth without any mixture of error? Nothing – but Rick Warren says it. It’s childish, but we’re supposed to take it seriously.

    The question is: What does the Bible have to say about when life begins?

    “You made my whole being; you formed me in my mother’s body. … You saw my bones being formed as I took shape in my mother’s body. When I was put together there, you saw my body as it was formed. All the days planned for me were written in your book before I was one day old.” (Psalm 139:13, 15-16 NCV)

    “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.” (Jeremiah 1:5 NIV)

    Psalm 139 tells us that God knows us personally while we are being formed in the womb, and Jeremiah 1:5 is one of many verses in the Bible that clearly show that even before we were conceived God knew us as persons. Life begins when God creates, and the Bible tells us that that happens in the womb.

    But the Jeremiah verse (in this translation anyway) says that God knew someone before the womb. It seems pretty clear that that’s a magical claim – that God is being made to say ‘I knew you before you were even conceived, I knew you before you were a leer on your father’s face, I knew you when your grandmother was still in diapers.’ So if that’s taken as some kind of rule about when a person starts to exist…it’s not much help. And then in any case, it’s just some words in a book. It’s a grand claim by a ‘prophet,’ it’s some poetry in a psalm. It’s interesting, but it doesn’t really tell us anything about the foetus. Yet Warren says the question, when thinking about stem cell research, is what the bible says about when ‘life’ begins. (He promptly confuses life with personhood, of course.) You might as well think that Wordsworth’s poem about daffodils tells us that daffodils know how to dance. It’s baby stuff – but here we have a lot of adults taking it seriously and presumably heeding its instructions. That’s more bizarre than people generally admit.

  • Jestina Mukoko Alive but not Safe

    She and other activists appeared in court, charged with trying to overthrow the ‘government.’

  • Rick Warren Whines About ‘Christophobia’

    People who disagree with him are doing hate speech, people who agree with him are wrongly accused of hate speech.

  • The Pope Takes the Low Road

    Much of organised Christianity is powerful only when it is sanctioning the persecution of individuals.

  • Pope is Partly Right

    Biology helps to shape gender; what follows from that is another issue.

  • Conservative Anglicans Cheer Pope’s Assertions

    The Catholic church ‘teaches’ this and that, the pope supports Catholic ‘teaching’; all good.

  • Scheisshaus Luck: Surviving the Unspeakable in Auschwitz and Dora

    If you’re seeking a Holocaust survivor’s memoir with a profound philosophical or poetic statement on the reasons six million Jews and many millions of other unlucky souls were slaughtered, and why a person like myself survived the Nazi camps, you’ve opened the wrong book. I’d be lying if I said I knew the reason, or if I even believed there is a reason, I’m still alive. As far as I’m concerned it was all shithouse luck, which is to say – inelegantly – that I kept landing on the right side of the randomness of life.

    Pierre Berg, from his Foreword, Scheisshaus Luck: Surviving the Unspeakable in Auschwitz and Dora

    Scheisshaus Luck is the memoir of Pierre Berg, a teenage member of the French Resistance who was captured and processed through four Nazi concentration camps as well as a protracted death march. He wrote the book shortly after his emigration to America after the war, but trunked it after a couple of rejection letters. Retired but doing voluntary work at a local cinema, he ran into Brian Brock, who persuaded him into a collaboration on his story. The growth of holocaust denial made it imperative that Berg have his say: ‘Those morons couldn’t tell you what continent Germany is on,’ Berg snarls, ‘and they exalt a coward who committed suicide after ordering brainwashed youths to their slaughter on the barricaded streets of Berlin.’

    Berg’s description of life in the death camps is vivid and harrowing. The executions. The gassing. The selections. The disease. The dry, terrible pragmatism of survival. The way that inmates end up collaborating with the system; the way that hunger reduces one’s horizons to a pinprick. Berg witnesses two starving inmates eat liver straight from the corpse. He avoids being hanged by virtue of a clerical error. He sees dead women thrown into rivers, their bodies stuffed with eels to weigh them down. It’s brutal and horrific beyond human imagination, and yet it happened. No matter how many testimonials we read, there is no catharsis – the mind reels back every time.

    Yet Berg’s story stands out even in survivor literature. One reason for this is Berg’s humour. He says the camp made him subhuman, but it never took Berg’s ferocious wit or his remorseless cynicism. It feels disrespectful and blasphemous to say this, but Scheisshaus Luck reads like Blackadder set in a concentration camp. Berg is disarmingly honest, sexually acute, often self-deprecating, and has an eye for irony and coincidence.

    When a Kapo tells Berg that his shirt is filthy, he responds: ‘How observant. I had worked and slept in it for over a month.’ To another official who asks the name of the man who tattooed the number into Berg’s arm, the author replies: ‘He didn’t bother to sign his masterpiece.’ Witnessing a male Kapo rape a young boy, Berg comments: ‘The SS really needed to switch the colour of his triangle.’

    All great comedy is deadly serious, and laughter is often a weapon against totalitarianism. In Monowitz Berg sees inmates laughing with the noose around their necks with the guards shouting: ‘Lachen verboten! Lachen verboten!’ It is the very definition of gallows humour.

    Berg’s wit and defiance are at their strongest when he deals directly with Nazism. From the SS’s ‘ludicrously stringent regulations’ to ‘the brownish water the Germans had the audacity to call soup’ he writes of Hitler and the Nazis never with fear, but always with a pulsing anger and a deep, lacerating contempt. Drafted as a camp machinist, Berg delights in sabotaging the weapons he is working on. It’s love for his lost Stella that gets him through the camps, but it is also hate, and a steel resolution not to – in Berg’s phrase – let his bones stoke their fires. But defiance can be gentle, too: Berg and Stella manage to make love in Drancy, despite the puritan regime; Stella tells Berg, in a particularly moving scene, that she is happy not to die a virgin.

    Another shining quality of the book is Berg’s resounding unbelief. Throughout his endurance, he remains an ‘atheist red triangle’. Having finally escaped, and sheltering with a religious couple, he responds to an invitation to church with: ‘No disrespect, but four horses couldn’t drag me there. The clergy of all religions make a good living selling you a hereafter that they have no proof exists.’ The dialogue is reminiscent of Primo Levi’s maxim: why change the rules of the game just because you are losing? Berg’s interlocutor, Mrs Novak, tells him his soul will burn in hell: Berg might have responded, like Terry Pratchett, that it had already had a lot of practice.

    Scheisshaus Luck manages to be both grinding in its bleakness and compulsively readable. As far as it’s possible without having lived through it, Berg lets you see the reality of Europe near the end of the war, with the SS fighting to maintain the camp’s evil symmetry in the midst of a crumbling Nazi infrastructure. Berg often finds himself hiding from Allied bombing raids while cheering on the pilots. The strongest part of the book comes after Berg’s eventual escape, because by this time you’re punching the air for him and also because he describes the carnage of Europe so beautifully: Soviet tanks in tiny villages, Nazi officials scrambling for expropriated goods, the marching refugees, the fragments of human lives.

    Gripping and lyrical, Scheisshaus Luck is a powerful corrective to the bullshit and moral equivalence that is beginning to congeal around contemporary discussions of the Holocaust. It is also a paean to the strength of the human spirit and its will, even in the darkest times, to get to a state ‘where we can live again and love.’

    Scheisshaus Luck: Surviving the Unspeakable in Auschwitz and Dora, Pierre Berg and Brian Brock, Amacom 2008

  • Heads I’m right tails you’re wrong

    Now look here – let’s get something straight. If a fundamentalist literalist bible-bashing preacher says something, then it is hate speech to disagree with him*. Not only that, it is also Christophobia, demonization, and hatred of the people in their glorious majority.

    [Warren] says the criticism of him in the wake of his selection has been characterized by “a lot of hate speech” and by “Christophobia — people who are afraid of any Christian. Our nation is being destroyed by the demonization of differences.”…He reiterated his opposition to same sex marriage, but said he is in agreement with “the view of the vast majority of the world and the vast majority of religions.”

    And the view of the vast majority is necessarily right on any given subject and not to be disputed or declared unconstitutional or in violation of human rights. Unless of course the vast majority disagrees with Rick Warren, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. The point now is that disagreement with Rick Warren is entirely illegitimate on a variety of grounds, also known as, any port in a storm.

    “Free speech has to be free speech for everybody,” he says. “Some people feel today if you disagree with them that’s hate speech.”

    Er – yes – as in the bit where he said ‘the criticism of him in the wake of his selection has been characterized by “a lot of hate speech” and by “Christophobia”‘…How quickly he seems to forget.

    “I’m doing this because I love America and it’s a historic opportunity and it’s an honor to be a part of any inauguration of any president,” he says.

    Indeed it is, and that’s exactly why we don’t want Warren to have the honor. We think he’s the wrong kind of person for a Democratic president to give that kind of honor. In fact a lot of us think he’s the wrong kind of person for any president to give that kind of honor at a secular government ceremony.

    *Literalist fundies don’t go in for no women preachers, so ‘him’ is the right pronoun.

  • Marriage has meant one thing from the beginning of time

    Rick Warren is a bit of an ignoramus, isn’t he. He said when he endorsed Prop 8 in California

    We should not let 2 percent of the population determine, to change a definition of marriage that has been supported by every single culture and every single religion for 5,000 years.

    Oh really. Is that a fact. Every single culture and every single religion for 5 thousand years. Really. Never one man and five women? One man and thirty women? One man and a hundred women? Perhaps Rick Warren has never heard of Mormons, or considers Mormonism to be neither a religion nor a culture. He probably considers Islam a religion though.

    And what about one man and one girl? Perhaps Rick Warren is not aware that some religions and some cultures define marriage as including one man and one female child or five or ten female children. But if Rick Warren is not aware of that – maybe he really ought to shut up about gay marriage.

    An eight-year old Saudi Arabian girl who was married off by her father to a 58-year-old man has been told she cannot divorce her husband until she reaches puberty…In many child marriages, girls are given away to older men in return for dowries or following the custom by which a father promises his daughters and sons to marriage while still children. But the issue is complicated by different interpretations of sharia law and a lack of legal certainty…The father agreed to marry off his daughter for a dowry of 30,000 riyals (£5,400) as he was facing financial problems…No figures are available for the number of arranged marriages involving pre-adolescents in Saudi Arabia, where the strictly conservative Wahhabi version of Sunni Islam holds sway and polygamy is common. But human rights groups say they are aware of many such cases.

    Oh, well…at least there are no faggots involved. Whew!

  • The bible very clearly says that football is a sin

    The Saddlesore church on homosexuality.

    The Bible very clearly says that homosexuality is a sin…[E]ven if some physical difference were discovered, it would be no excuse for sin. We know that some people can develop a stronger physical addiction to alcohol than others, but that’s obviously no excuse for living an alcoholic lifestyle…It’s not judgmental to say that what the Bible calls a sin is a sin, that’s just telling the truth.

    Actually, no, it’s not. To say that what the bible calls a sin is a sin is not telling the truth at all; it’s propagating a delusion, and to say that homosexuality is a sin is propagating a harmful dangerous immoral delusion. ‘Sin’ is not a meaningful concept, and the bible is not a reliable source for much of anything, and it’s childishly obscurantist to pretend otherwise. Yet this guy is playing an important part in the inauguration – of someone from the non-theocratic party. He’s being taken seriously, even though he think an old work of fiction and poetry is a reliable source of knowledge about what is a ‘sin.’ What a tragic joke.

  • Iran Closed Shirin Ebadi’s Human Rights Group

    HRW called on the Iranian government to allow the Defenders of Human Rights Center to reopen its office.

  • Polly Toynbee’s Christmas Message

    Priests, imams and rabbis reserve for their beliefs a special respect, ringfenced from normal public argument.