The Independent on sharia courts in the UK, via Machteld Zee, a Dutch researcher who did her PhD on the subject.

“The judges were very friendly,” she says. “We chatted between cases. The problem is not that they were mean but the foundation of their judice acts in a system of sharia Islamic law, in which the principle focus is making women dependent on their husbands and clerics.

“One judge said: ‘Under Islam, we should reconcile marriages even if there is violence’. They don’t care. It was shocking:

they would have you cling to a marriage.

“There are also unfair custody statements. The woman has no idea this is a religious institution and she should go to a secular

There’s a report out in the UK, about religion and diversity and public life yadda yadda…

And Malcolm Brown at the Church of England blog has a post about it. (Did I know there was a CofE blog? No.) Brown is slightly triumphalist, saying religion isn’t going anywhere so ha.

But he also does the thing religionists always do: he pretends we can’t do without religion because religion is the source of all the good things.

[T]he common assumption that religion is in decline and can safely be relegated to the margins of our cultural life is simply wrong. Patterns of religious observance and affiliation are changing, but religion shows no sign of going away or allowing itself to be

NUS women had a conference last March. They issued some resolutions. Some of them are blood-curdling. Like this one for instance:

Motion 405: Trans Inclusion in the Women’s Campaign: Siblings, Not Cisters

See what they did there? Cisters? Sisters is a bad word, because…because it means female sibling, and there are trans people, so we can’t use words that mean female or male any more – like woman for instance. So it turns out that trans women aren’t women? Because it would be not inclusive to call them that?

Conference Believes:
1. The student women’s movement must strive to be a trans inclusive environment.
2. The definition of Women for the NUS Women’s Campaign is “all who self-define

A public Facebook post by Simi Rahman that has gone viral.

Every Muslim humanist is asking themselves a question I first asked myself in September 2001.

How do you tell a radical Muslim from a moderate peace loving one?

And here is my train of thought.

The 9/11 hijackers reminded me of boys I had gone to school with in Dubai in the 80s and 90s. They were the same age, background, and modern enough to have listened to 80s pop and chased girls. Meaning that just like most young people in the Muslim world, we weren’t that religious.

So, I thought, maybe I could locate the differences between them and me, and at some point I would identify a

P.K. Balachandran reports from Colombo in the New Indian Express:

Four Muslim Members of Parliament, including a cabinet Minister, shouted down Tamil National Alliance (TNA) MP M.A.Sumanthiran, when he mentioned the term “Shariah” while speaking in parliament on Friday on a Saudi Arabian court’s order to “stone to death” a Lankan women for committing adultery.

She was scheduled to be killed on Friday but the Saudis paused because she has appealed the sentence.

Sumanthiran, also a leading Supreme Court lawyer, said that laws regarding the mode of punishment in various countries should be looked at afresh, from the human rights angle. He mentioned stoning in Saudi Arabia, flogging in Singapore and the use of the electric chair in some

Jamie Palmer takes a long hard look at the pro-Islamist left and its shameful behavior to Maryam and other ex-Muslims, secular Muslims, apostates, refuseniks.

And so it was that when ISOC misrepresented the event as an unhappy tale of marginalization and Islamophobia, both the Goldsmiths Feminist Society and the LGBTQ+ Society quickly released statements pledging their support and solidarity with ISOC.

“We support them,” FemSoc soberly declared:

…in condemning the actions of the Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society and agree that hosting known islamophobes at our university creates a climate of hatred. 

Two days later, the LGBTQ+ Society came up with this:

We condemn AHS and online supporters for their islamophobic remarks, attitudes, and harassment. If they feel

The cabaret performer Lili La Scala took the late train home last night after a performance in London. She likes to use the 55 minute trip to wind down. Last night a bunch of guys had other plans for her.

I stepped on to the train and assumed my usual corner seat, the one right at the front with a little table. Within a minute or so, five chaps of a rather burly description with shaved heads and assorted football wear, had claimed the seats around me.

They tried to strike up conversation but I’m rather taciturn on my homeward journey so I fended off the questions. However, now I feel bad about that, it was bad manners to

Hey all you aspiring playwrights out there, and you working playwrights, and you who hadn’t thought of writing a play before but just might think of it now – here’s a thing for you:

CALL FOR PLAYS

The First Annual Freethought Onstage Festival will be held the week of August 7-13, 2016, at the Haymarket Theatre in Lincoln, Nebraska. Play submissions will be accepted beginning December 1, 2015. The deadline for submission is April 1, 2016. Winners will be announced in early June.

Submission Guidelines:

•  Plays are to be submitted in standard playwriting format.
•  Length: 10 minutes to 2 hours will be considered; if your running time in reading is longer than 2 hours, and your play is accepted, you

Tom Owolade has some thoughts on the Goldsmiths feminists and LGBTQ+ activists.

Before examining the underpinnings of the Atheist and Humanist society ideology, one should first examine Goldsmiths’ Islamic society.

In 2011, they invited to speak at their annual dinner Abdurraheem Green and Hamza Tzortzis. Green believes that a husband is permitted to beat his wife if she misbehaves, and that homosexuality should not be permitted in society; Tzortzis has supported child-marriage.

In 2014, Goldsmiths Islamic society invited Cage Prisoners – a group whose dalliance with terrorism and extremism is well-documented. CAGE has supported a wide range of Islamist terrorists – from Abu Hamza to Anwar al-Awlaki. The deputy director of CAGE, Asim Qureshi, has twice

James Bloodworth pointed out an extraordinary claim by Stop the War yesterday:

Say what?

Benn does not even seem to realize that the jihadist movement that ultimately spawned Daesh is far closer to the spirit of internationalism and solidarity that drove the International Brigades than Cameron’s bombing campaign – except that the international jihad takes the form of solidarity with oppressed Muslims, rather than the working class or the socialist revolution.

No. It isn’t.

The kind or type or category of internationalism and solidarity that drives Daesh is profoundly different from the kind or type or category that drove the International Brigades. (Here I’m talking about the individuals who joined the IB, not the Stalinists who ran them and ended … Read the rest

More comments from the Goldsmiths LGBTQ+ post declaring solidarity with Goldsmiths Isoc and condemnation of Goldsmiths ASH.

One.

I understand your wish to show solidarity, but I don’t understand your choice to necessarily take sides in this matter, nor do I understand the side you’ve chosen.

Try investigating what Maryam mentions several times as one of the central issues – conflating Islam, Islamism and Muslims – making it impossible to criticize an ideology without being called a bigot by people who can’t tell apples from oranges.

There are real people suffering very real pain right now. They are partially suffering because we in the west fail to identify and point out the actual problems, and hide behind political correctness

Laurie Penny says a thing at the New Statesman.

Title and subhead:

If men got pregnant, abortion would be legal everywhere

The concept of women deciding when, whether and how to have children, is still a threat to the status quo.

In other words, all together now: if men got pregnant abortion would be a sacrament.

Laurie Penny cites the murders at Planned Parenthood and a Belfast judge’s ruling that “abortion might just be permissible in cases of rape, incest or foetal abnormality” and suggests that there’s a pattern.

The concept of women having actual goddamned agency over their lives and bodies, the idea that we might get to decide when, whether and how to have children, is

Originally a comment by iknklast on They never accused.

You’re right, I have the right not to invite you to my party, and do it on the flimsiest of reasons. But you also have the right to complain about that, loudly, to all your friends, and anyone who will listen (and even to those who won’t, because they have a right to walk off while you’re talking). This isn’t about birthday parties, or even events. This is about an attitude that is becoming increasingly pervasive, where women are not only not being invited to events, they are being smeared as transphobic or TERF, and at times being disinvited to speak, or being invited to speak by one group who … Read the rest

For the sake of completeness of information –

Goldsmiths Students Union has a brief statement…a brief, nasty, insinuating, hateful statement.

Maryam Namazie Talk – Holding Statement

Emil Allard

This matter is currently under investigation and we are not in a position to comment further. Goldsmiths SU are aware of a video that has been posted online without consent of the attending students, we have contacted the speaker and requested that this video [be] removed.

Any further statement will be posted in the news section of this website.

See what they did there? They made it appear as if Maryam or ASH or both did something wrong, and as if no one else did.

They also, probably without fully realizing … Read the rest

And now the Goldsmiths LGBTQ+ Society has joined the reactionary Goldsmiths Feminist Society in solidarity not with the secular feminist human rights campaigner Maryam Namazie but with the people – the men – who tried to bully her into silence at her talk on Monday. Yes that’s right. Solidarity with the bullies who did their best to shout down a woman advocating religious freedom and human rights.

Following recent events on- and offline, we would like to state and show our solidarity with the sisters and brothers of our Goldsmiths ISOC

We condemn AHS and online supporters for their islamophobic remarks and attitudes. If they feel intimidated, we urge them to look at the underpinnings of their ideology. We find

In case we haven’t had enough no-platforming today, in case we haven’t had enough damnfoolery from UK university feminist societies today, in case we haven’t had enough of mouthy feminist women being stabbed in the back by other feminists today – we can contemplate the fact that the Bristol Feminist Society decided to no-platform Sarah Ditum because somebody somewhere said she said something transphobic maybe perhaps but don’t quote them.

Sarah Ditum ‏@sarahditum 6 hours ago
Too perfect. No-platformed by @TWSSMagazine (Bristol uni femsoc mag) because they won’t have anyone “accused of transphobia” on a panel.

Obvs they claimed “unforeseen circs”. Too cowardly to keep their invitation, too cowardly to say why. But I have the emails @TWSSMagazine

Well don’t … Read the rest