The press release on the One Law For All event today:

On Thursday 10 December 2015, Southall Black Sisters (SBS), One Law for All, Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation (IKWRO), Centre for Secular Space and British Muslims for Secular Democracy will attend 10 Downing Street to hand deliver a letter signed by nearly 400 individuals and organisations urging David Cameron to hold an inquiry into the discriminatory nature of Sharia ‘courts’ and other religious arbitration forums.

These women’s and human rights organisations also led successful campaigns preventing public authorities such as the governing body of UK Universities (UUK) and the Law Society from incorporating aspects of Sharia laws into their public policies. With regards the question of parallel legal … Read the rest

I guess Donald Trump is to the Right what George Galloway is to the Left. Galloway considers himself on the Left in some sense, but I (along with of course many others), despite being on the Left, consider him a terrible person. So it apparently is with Peter Suderman, a senior editor at Reason magazine, when it comes to Trump. His article is elegantly titled Donald Trump Is a Bad Person.

His declaration yesterday that he would close the United States to all Muslim immigrants, including tourists and Muslim American citizens abroad trying to return home, confirmed both his fascistic tendencies and his undisguised bigotry, and made something else clear in the process: that he is simply a bad

Mother Jones reports on a brilliant plan for next weekend:

Gun rights activists in Texas are planning to stage a mock mass shooting at the University of Texas this weekend in protest of both gun-free zones and President Barack Obama’s continued calls for tougher gun control legislation.

According to the website Statesman, gun rights supporters will begin the day by marching through Austin with loaded weapons and conclude their walk with a “theatrical performance.”

A spokesman for the two participating gun rights groups, Come and Take It Texas and DontComply.com, told the site the event will involve using fake blood and bullhorns to mimic gunshot noises.

By way of persuading the people of Austin and perhaps the Texas … Read the rest

There’s a new Fellowship for young writers in Australia.

The Kat Muscat Fellowship

Express Media is honoured to announce the inaugural Kat Muscat Fellowship to support and develop female-identifying young writers and editors from around Australia.

The annual Kat Muscat Fellowship offers professional development up to the value of $3,000 for an editorial project or work of writing by a young person. The Fellowship aims to continue Kat’s legacy and further develop the future of defiant and empathic young Australian women.

Kat Muscat was a brilliant young mind of the Australian writing community, whose formidable talent was demonstrated through her incisive writing and perceptive editing. Kat was an integral part of Express Media for many years, before becoming Editor of

The linguist Deborah Cameron dissects the damaging allure of neuroscience for non-scientists who write books about female and male brains.

For every scientist doing her best to communicate the complexity of contemporary brain research, there are a hundred non-scientists—self-help gurus, life-coaches, marketing consultants—churning out what has been labelled ‘neurobollocks’, a species of discourse that purports to be scientific, but is actually, in the words of one article on the subject, ‘self-help books dressed up in a lab coat’.

You can picture them on the shelves at Barnes & Noble or Waterstones, in the Men Are From Mars section.

The language connection explains why over the years I have felt obliged to read such classics of neurosexism as Why Men

And now for something completely different from Saudi Arabia – the Independent reporting that they did indeed lie about the numbers of people who were killed in the crush at Mina during the hajj. Only a little – only by a factor of 3.

A stampede during the hajj in Saudi Arabia killed three times the number of people acknowledged by the Kingdom, according to the Associated Press.

A new count reveals at least 2,411 people died during the crush at Mina on 24 September, despite the official Saudi toll of 769 deaths not changing since 26 September.

That’s only 1642 people not reported. That’s only Saudi officialdom treating the pointless deaths of ONE THOUSAND SIX HUNDRED FORTY TWO … Read the rest

A note from Maryam:

Delivered letter today to 10 Downing Street calling for end to parallel legal systems with one law for all, southall black sisters, Iranian Kurdish women’s rights organisation, centre for secular space and British Muslims for secular democracy.

 … Read the rest

A very worrying alert from Ensaf Haidar:

TOP URGENT: Saudi Prison administration transferred Raif Badawi to a new isolated prison and Raif started a hunger strike since Tuesday

The prison administration transferred today my husband Raif Badawi to a new isolated prison called Prison Shabbat Central, located in a deserted and isolated area – around 87 KM from Jeddah City.

This prison is designed for prisoners whose verdict has been confirmed with a final Adjudication. The Saudi government has repeatedly declared that Raif’s case is under review and is yet to be decided by the Supreme Court.

We express our surprise at this decision especially after the Swiss Secretary of Foreign Affairs Yves Rossier announcement on 28 November that … Read the rest

More on the Michelle Goldberg article.

Cohn estimates that there are about 20 gender-critical trans bloggers, though their Internet presences tend to wax and wane; some who were active just a few months ago have pulled back, while others have just begun. Among the most prominent are Snowflake Especial and Gender Minefield, as well as Gender Apostates, a group blog run by both trans and cisgender women. Like many other trans people, the trans writers behind these blogs have experienced a searing conflict between their physiognomy and their self-conceptions. Like the broader trans rights movement, they believe in fighting violence and discrimination against trans people. But they reject the idea that biological sex is mutable, though sex

Michelle Goldberg has written an article about heretical trans women – you know, the ones who don’t buy the ever-shifting but always-binding Current Dogma of how one is allowed to understand and talk about gender.

Last month, a 42-year-old English accountant who goes by the pseudonym Helen Highwater wrote a blog post disputing the idea that trans women are women. Helen is trans herself; in the last few years, she says, she has taken all the steps the U.K.’s National Health Service requires before it authorizes gender reassignment surgery, which she plans to have in 2016. Yet she has come to reject the idea that she is truly female or that she ever will be. Though “trans women are women”

The case of the Sri Lankan woman who was scheduled to be stoned to death in Saudi Arabia for “adultery” is going to be reviewed. That’s good news. Let’s hope they “review” the case so thoroughly that they decide to send her home instead of torturing her to death.

Harsha de Silva, the deputy foreign minister [of Sri Lanka], told parliament on Tuesday that an appeals court in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s capital, has decided to hear the case again following pleas by Sri Lanka’s foreign ministry.

…

The 45-year-old woman, who is married with two children, was working as a maid in Saudi Arabia. She was sentenced to death in August. The unmarried Sri Lankan man convicted alongside her

The NSS reports:

A coalition of Muslim writers, activists and politicians has launched a “Muslim Reform Movement” rejecting violence and calling for a defence of secularism, democracy and liberty.

The reformers have issued a Declaration defending gender equality, freedom of speech and freedom of religion, stating that they are for “secular governance” and “against political movements in the name of religion.”

They have called for the separation of “mosque and state” and emphatically reject the “idea of the Islamic state”.

Activists from the group stuck their Declaration of Reform on to the front door of the Islamic Centre of Washington, a mosque the movement described as “heavily influenced by the government of Saudi Arabia”.

The preamble to the Declaration

The president of the Goldsmiths ISOC has resigned, because too many people had saved his homophobic tweets and were giving him grief about them.

Goldsmiths Islamic Society (ISOC) President Muhammed Patel has resigned from his position after a motion of no confidence.

The society released a statement via its Facebook page today and although the group did not say what allegations were attributed to Patel that led to his resignation, it is believed that the President published a series of homophobic messages via his Twitter account, which has recently been deleted.

The committee have elected an interim leader who has yet to be named. Patel declined to comment when approached by The Leopard but an ISOC member assured The

Another resolution from the NUS Women Conference:

Motion 512: Dear White Gay Men: Stop Appropriating Black Women

Conference Believes:

1. The appropriation of Black women by white gay men is prevalent within the LGBT scene and community.
2. This may be manifested in the emulation of the mannerisms, language (particularly AAVE- African American Vernacular English) and phrases that can be attributed to Black women. White gay men may often assert that they are “strong black women” or have an “inner black woman”.
3. White gay men are the dominant demographic within the LGBT community, and they benefit from both white privilege and male privilege.
4. The appropriation of Black women by white gay men has been written about

The filmmaker Jennifer Hall Lee asks why British women are being called “Islamophobes.”

“We are in the ISIS era.”

Houzan [Mahmoud], a Kurdish woman who is a representative of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, made that proclamation at the recent Feminism in London conference. She was on a panel of four feminists called, “Unlikely Allies: Religious Fundamentalism and the British State,” that focused on the connection between Islamic fundamentalism and British law.

I attended this panel to hear Maryam Namazie, an Iranian Muslim-born woman who lives in London and is a spokesperson for One Law for All, a group that opposes Sharia law in Britain. I was unprepared for the bluntness of the talk about ISIS and

The NY Times has more on what the FBI and other agencies are discovering about Tashfeen Malik and Syed Farook. None of it is cheerful or consoling. None of it says: this was a peculiar, one-off event with peculiar motivations that are most unlikely to be duplicated anywhere else. It says the opposite of that.

The main point is that they were both “radical”; they no longer think that Malik “radicalized” Farook.

Investigators say they have learned through interviews with people who knew Mr. Farook for several years that he had militant views before he met Ms. Malik online and married her in Saudi Arabia.

“At first it seemed very black and white to us that he changed radically

The Vatican. Again.

A group representing victims of sexual abuse at the hands of Catholic priests has blasted the San Diego Catholic Diocese for appointing a priest who admitted to destroying documents detailing sexual assaults to oversee their sex abuse hotline.

The San Diego Catholic Diocese appointed a priest who destroyed documents detailing sexual assaults to oversee their sex abuse hotline. A priest who covered up sexual assaults will be overseeing a sex abuse hotline. A fox who dines on chicken every night will be guarding the hen house.

[Father Steven] Callahan is listed as the Victims’ Assistance Coordinator on the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego website — with a phone number to call the priest as well

An album of twenty photos of nature photographers at work.

… Read the rest

Really?

A tweet:

Anne Thériault ‏@anne_theriault 9 hours ago Toronto, Ontario
“biological sex” and “female body” are definitely transphobic red flags

Really?

At that rate, is anything not a “transphobic red flag”?

And why female body but not male body?

Why is it always women and feminists who are in the cross-hairs? Why is there so much talk of TERFs but zero talk of TEMRAs? Why is it always women and feminists? Why is it always women and feminists?… Read the rest

Ah the way the left loves to devour its own. Nick Cohen says it has to do with the left’s self-image as the home of all righteousness.

Anyone who saw Gordon Brown and his aides in action, or watched the student left ban speakers for disagreeing with them, has found the myth of leftwing decency hard to swallow. But it has taken the triumph of Jeremy Corbyn’s “new politics” to finish it off.

Police are investigating a death threat madeagainst Neil Coyle, the Labour MP for Bermondsey, after he voted to allow the RAF to attack Islamic State in Syria. His colleague Diana Johnson said the abuse of Labour MPs who supported the action was horrendous. “‘Murderous cunt’ is