Author: Ophelia Benson

The BBC on witch hunts in India, and a woman who campaigns against them.

Witch hunts have been reported from Assam, one of India’s most ethnically diverse states, for decades now.

Last year, the home ministry informed the parliament that at least 77 people – mostly women – were killed and 60 others injured in “witch hunting incidents” in Assam since 2010. Last year, in a particularly grisly incident, a feted athlete was branded a witch, tied up and severely beaten. (More than 2,000 ‘witchcraft murders’ have taken place in India since 2000)

Women are often branded witches to help relatives and neighbours grab their land and property, to settle personal grudges, or for denying sexual favours.

In tribal villages where superstition is rife and the public health system is in a shambles, quacks and shamans thrive and conspire with locals to blame women for crop failures, illnesses and natural calamities. Single women, widows or old couples are the main targets.

For the last 15 years, Ms Rabha, a slight and diminutive woman with big-rimmed spectacles and a girlish laugh, has been leading a courageous campaign against witch-hunting.

Travelling extensively and braving attacks and ridicule, the indefatigable 66-year-old crusader has spoken at meetings, held awareness camps, and taught school lessons about the dastardly practice. She has stormed police stations and lobbied authorities demanding protection for the victims.

In the past decade, Ms Rabha has rescued some 35 women branded as witches. Her relentless campaign spurred the Assam government last year to bring what many say is India’s toughest anti-witch hunting law.

That’s a woman who’s making a difference.

She talks to people in a village:

“Women have to fight against superstitions, women have to be vigilant. When you become sick go to a doctor, not a quack. Don’t have blind belief in rituals and worships. Worship your gods but don’t hate others in the name of your gods. Women can sometimes be their own worst enemy,” she tells the crowd.

The crowd, mainly women, listen intently.

Many have been victims themselves. They tell stories of how witch hunting has now even become a lucrative extortion industry, a far cry from old tribal beliefs such as the world is full of disembodied spirits “as a tree is full of leaves”.

Three years ago, Ms Rabha reached Majuli, the world’s largest river island, to find that 35 women had been branded as witches.

Later she discovered that they had been made to pay a hefty amount to the local quack for a ceremony to get “rid of the devil” or leave the village. “We went to the police, invoked the law, and saved the women. Then we found out this was a money making racket run by the local quack.”

Get rid of women you dislike and make some money. Who could resist?

H/t Mary Ellen

The Guardian took a look at comments on the Guardian, and found what we all knew.

New research into our own comment threads provides the first quantitative evidence for what female journalists have long suspected: that articles written by women attract more abuse and dismissive trolling than those written by men, regardless of what the article is about.

Although the majority of our regular opinion writers are white men, we found that those who experienced the highest levels of abuse and dismissive trolling were not. The 10 regular writers who got the most abuse were eight women (four white and four non-white) and two black men. Two of the women and one of the men were gay. And of the eight women in the “top 10”, one was Muslim and one Jewish.

And the 10 regular writers who got the least abuse? All men.

Imagine my complete lack of surprise.

We also found that some subjects attracted more abusive or disruptive comments than others. Conversations about crosswords, cricket, horse racing and jazz were respectful; discussions about the Israel/Palestine conflict were not. Articles about feminism attracted very high levels of blocked comments. And so did rape.

Again – I could not be less surprised.

Mind you, it used to surprise me that feminism was so very unpopular at the Guardian, but it doesn’t any more.

At its most extreme, online abuse takes the form of threats to kill, rape or maim. Thankfully, such abuse was extremely rare on the Guardian – and when it did appear it was immediately blocked and the commenter banned.

Less extreme “author abuse” – demeaning and insulting speech targeted at the writer of the article or another comment – is much more common on all online news sites, and it formed a significant proportion of the comments that were blocked on the Guardian site, too.

Here are some examples: a female journalist reports on a demonstration outside an abortion clinic, and a reader responds, “You are so ugly that if you got pregnant I would drive you to the abortion clinic myself”; a British Muslim writes about her experiences of Islamophobia and is told to “marry an ISIS fighter and then see how you like that!”; a black correspondent is called “a racist who hates white people” when he reports the news that another black American has been shot by the police.

Familiar to anyone who has spent 15 minutes reading comments online.

“Dismissive trolling” was blocked too – comments such as “Calm down, dear”, which mocked or otherwise dismissed the author or other readers rather than engaged with the piece itself.

Is that kind of thing said to men much? Especially white men? I don’t think so.

Oh calm down, dear.

This looks like a delayed April Fools joke but apparently isn’t. Neil Lyndon at the Telegraph is aggrieved that some people think prostitutes aren’t the guilty party when it comes to the sex trade.

This unusual approach to criminal responsibility – reversing legal tendencies that have developed for decades in the West to protect the customer – will be the obvious, logical outcome of France’s latest regulations governing prostitution.

Interesting point: he thinks the sex trade should be a matter of consumer protection rather than worker protection. So I guess if a punter finds a prostitute insufficiently hot when naked, he can file a consumer complaint?

What is obvious, however, is the clear prejudice towards heterosexual men which underpins the thinking of the legislators. In their minds, the woman offering sex for sale must be innocent because the man – purely by dint of being a man – is guilty.

That’s sexism, you see. Unfair to men! Men are the oppressed sex! Women should give away sex to all men who ask, for free, the whores!

Struggling for air under the suffocating ideological blanket of feminist generalisation which these authorities are casting over the subject, we might ask whether they think all prostitution involves “a known violence” against all women? Does all prostitution involve “exploitation and abuse”? Should all women be protected and all men prosecuted?

If you like a paradox, you will relish seeing these representatives of a movement that claims to liberate women and to celebrate their sexual freedoms refuse to countenance the possibility that a woman might freely and voluntarily enter into this transaction (despite the unanimity with which prostitutes and their representative bodies tell such figures to butt out and mind their own business).

Oh no, that’s not true – of course we know that some women “freely and voluntarily enter into this transaction” – we just say that they’re the privileged few and that laws shouldn’t be based on how the privileged few see the matter. And it’s far from true that prostitutes unanimously “tell such figures to butt out and mind their own business.” It would be convenient for pimps if that were true, but it’s not.

But then he goes on to use the nonce-word “hen-headed” as a pejorative, so I don’t think I’ll bother paying any more attention to him.

A friend posted that 1997 David Foster Wallace piece on Updike on Facebook, and what a gem it is.

[N]o U.S. novelist has mapped the solipsist’s terrain better than John Updike, whose rise in the 60’s and 70’s established him as both chronicler and voice of probably the single most self-absorbed generation since Louis XIV.

That is what eventually put me off Updike – the fact that he was always writing about himself. And the fact that he didn’t seem to realize that women existed, except as things for having sex with.

His friends, especially his women friends, did not like Updike, at all.

[I]t’s Mr. Updike in particular they seem to hate. And not merely his books, for some reason-mention the poor man himself and you have to jump back:

“Just a penis with a thesaurus.”

“Has the son of a bitch ever had one unpublished thought?”

“Makes misogyny seem literary the same way Limbaugh makes fascism seem funny.”

These are actual-trust me-quotations, and I’ve heard even worse ones, and they’re all usually accompanied by the sort of facial expression where you can tell there’s not going to be any profit in arguing or talking about the esthetic pleasure of Mr. Updike’s prose. None of the other famous phallocrats of his generation – not Mailer, not Frederick Exley or Charles Bukowski or even the Samuel Delany of Hogg – excites such violent dislike.

I wonder if that’s because you’d think he would know better. He seemed thoughtful and non-macho, so shouldn’t that kind of writer be able to avoid the commonplace blindness about women? I think that’s how I felt about it, at least. Mailer, meh, what do you expect, but Updike? But misogyny is way more pervasive than that. It took me a long time to understand how pervasive (and I still probably don’t fully understand it).

Updike, for example, has for years been constructing protagonists who are basically all the same guy (see for example Rabbit Angstrom, Dick Maple, Piet Hanema, Henry Bech, Rev. Tom Marshfield, Roger’s Version ‘s “Uncle Nunc”) and who are all clearly stand-ins for the author himself. They always live in either Pennsylvania or New England, are unhappily married/divorced, are roughly Mr. Updike’s age. Always either the narrator or the point-of-view character, they all have the author’s astounding perceptual gifts; they all think and speak in the same effortlessly lush, synesthetic way Mr. Updike does. They are also always incorrigibly narcissistic, philandering, self-contemptuous, self-pitying … and deeply alone, alone the way only a solipsist can be alone. They never belong to any sort of larger unit or community or cause. Though usually family men, they never really love anybody – and, though always heterosexual to the point of satyriasis, they especially don’t love women.

Those characters palled in the end.

Maybe the only thing the reader ends up appreciating about Ben Turnbull is that he’s such a broad caricature of an Updike protagonist that he helps us figure out what’s been so unpleasant and frustrating about this gifted author’s recent characters. It’s not that Turnbull is stupid-he can quote Kierkegaard and Pascal on angst and allude to the deaths of Schubert and Mozart and distinguish between a sinistrorse and a dextrorse Polygonum vine, etc. It’s that he persists in the bizarre adolescent idea that getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants is a cure for ontological despair. And so, it appears, does Mr. Updike-he makes it plain that he views the narrator’s impotence as catastrophic, as the ultimate symbol of death itself, and he clearly wants us to mourn it as much as Turnbull does. I’m not especially offended by this attitude; I mostly just don’t get it. Erect or flaccid, Ben Turnbull’s unhappiness is obvious right from the book’s first page. But it never once occurs to him that the reason he’s so unhappy is that he’s an asshole.

That’s always the first place to look.

H/t Cam

From the Telegraph:

A stack of leaflets calling for the killing of a sect of Muslims have been found at south London mosque, it was reported today.

The flyers, uncovered in Stockwell Green mosque, are said to have labelled Ahmadi Muslims apostates, claiming they deserved to die if they refuse to convert to mainstream Islam.

They call for those who refuse to convert to mainstream Islam within three days to face a death penalty.

Which random guys are apparently willing to carry out on a voluntary basis. A return ticket from Bradford to Glasgow and the job’s done.

Ahmadis are known for their non-violence and interfaith concerns. But the sect is banned by the constitution of  Pakistan from referring to themselves as Muslims.

Members have become targets of sectarian violence there and some fear that could spread to the UK, encouraged by organisations like Khatme Nabuwwat, which has previously been linked to the mosque.

The BBC reported that the leaflets, written in English, were authored by Yusuf Ludhianvi and were found arranged in piles on a desk next to a shoe-rack, the usual place to display literature in mosques.

Allah is merciful.

The Beeb reports another manifestation of religious zeal:

An Australian prisoner who supports the so-called Islamic State has allegedly used a knife to carve a slogan on to his cellmate’s head.

Reports said the Islamic State mantra “e4e”, standing for “an eye for an eye”, was carved into the man’s head.

An inquiry will examine how the high-risk attacker, 18, came to be housed with his 40-year-old cellmate.

The guy with the carved-up head was a minimum security prisoner; the carver was maximum security.

The 40-year-old man was admitted to Port Macquarie Base Hospital in a critical condition, but was now stable, a hospital spokesperson told the BBC.

Police have charged Hraichie with causing grievous bodily harm with intent and intentionally choking a person.

Allah is merciful.

Oh hey, I think I see where the “discussion” that led to the shunning of Surly Amy took place. I’d assumed it was on The Orbit, and there was no way I was going to look for it there, but it seems to have happened on The Orbit’s Facebook wall, where it’s a doddle to read posts by visitors.

So unless there’s another parallel discussion on The Orbit, this is where the Aggrieved ordered the Orbit to shun Amy and The Orbit said okay.

It’s a public post, by the way.

Emily Titon‎ to The Orbit
March 30 at 11:29pm ·

I would love to support the Orbit, because some of my most favorite bloggers are on it. But I can’t, not in good conscience, because I have learned that also on The Orbit is someone who was not only ableist but doubled down on their ableism when called out on it – in a pretty spectacular fashion. I have included a link below for reference. Amy Roth hurt a lot of people, and dismissed disabled people, and seeing her and especially the very thing that was ableist in the first place, the thing she was first talked to about – being a part of what is supposed to be an awesome and amazing social justice place – as an award for supporting, no less, and without having ever seen a true apology from Amy, or any sort of a resolution or affirmation that what she did was harmful – it just doesn’t make The Orbit seem very good or very safe.

There are many comments supporting this ludicrous claim.

America Madeleine YamaguchiI am extremely concerned about this as wellm

America did a followup post to say so.

Chris Hall I’m really not sure what the problem is. Amy Davis Roth doesn’t have a blog on The Orbit.

Like · Reply · March 31 at 12:32am

Emily Titon Ah. My mistake then.

But The Orbit shouldn’t be using her creations as rewards though, either, IMO; as you will see at the link, they are the same things that were at the center of things and were ableist. By using them as rewards, it seems to me that The Orbit either was unaware of this and now is and can choose to act or not, or they knew, but didn’t see it as a problem.

It’s a problem when works by someone who is unrepentantly oppressive are being promoted on a social justice site, because that implies that they think or that she is concerned with social justice. Which, if she was, she would have sincerely apologized, and because her apology was sincere, she would not have used the same ableist things as rewards. Or The Orbit would not have used her creations as rewards because that is holding them and her out as good for social justice.

That that shouldn’t happen unless and until she apologizes sincerely for her ableism and works to correct it going forward.

Like · Reply · 3 · March 31 at 12:45am

America Madeleine Yamaguchi She is participating in the Kickstarter by providing several rewards.

Like · Reply · 5 · March 31 at 1:22am

Kassiane Alexandra S. Anyone partnering in any way with someone so wantonly, knowingly, & unrelentingly bigoted is unsafe by association.

Like · Reply · 9 · March 31 at 1:38am

Mox Sapphire The offer and distribution of those rewards promotes her reputation. The Orbit is signaling their support and approval of her.

Like · Reply · 6 · March 31 at 2:07am

Alyssa Hillary The rewards from her on the Kickstarter indicates approval. This does not fly.

Like · Reply · 3 · March 31 at 5:17am

Neeley Fluke Any official word from The Orbit yet?

Like · Reply · March 31 at 10:42am

Kassiane Alexandra S. Approximately “tough shit but don’t say we don’t care about ableism”

Like · Reply · March 31 at 10:43am

Emily Titon Thus proving you right so far.

I am hoping they will do better. I know they can.

Like · Reply · March 31 at 10:48am · Edited

Kassiane Alexandra S. I hate being so often right. I’d love to be proven wrong.

Like · Reply · March 31 at 10:46am

Emily Titon I would love for that to happen too.

Like · Reply · March 31 at 10:48am

The Orbit All,
We have heard your concerns and your criticisms and we are currently deliberating on the best way to address them. As we are a collective, it will take some time to craft an appropriate response because all members of The Orbit get a say in situations like this. Please rest assured that we have heard your concerns and though the decision making process may appear slow, we are working to resolve this issue.

Like · Reply · 6 · March 31 at 12:20pm

Ronja Addams-Moring Update appreciated — best of luck with the discussions and please be kind to each other.

Like · Reply · March 31 at 8:52pm

Meghan Murphy on Australia’s first abolitionist conference, and the harassment that greeted it.

A campaign headed up by Vixen, a pro-prostitution advocacy group in Australia, attempted to shut down Australia’s first abolitionist conference (which doubles as the Prostitution Narratives: Stories of Survival in the Sex Trade book launch), but failed.

Over the past week, the #RMIT2016 hashtag was overrun by prostitution fans and anti-feminists who claimed that, somehow, hosting voices of survivors and feminists who opposed the sex industry equated to “silencing” and “hate.” Vixen encouraged supporters to harass RMIT University, via Twitter and email, into shutting down the conference, though University representatives refused to comment publicly (because, why?). Feminists were called “cunts” by online protesters and one young woman suggested RMIT University be burned to the ground, as though simply speaking out against a racist, exploitative, abusive industry like prostitution deserves arson in response.

Because why? Do people think – like Amnesty International – that access to prostitutes is a human right? Do they think pimps are the defenders of human rights and abolitionists are the destroyers of human rights? Do they think access to female bodies is a human right?

Murphy includes a lot of tweets from the conference. Here’s a zinger:

Sex trade reps say "listen to sex workers" but tell those same "sex workers" to shut up as soon as they exit #oldestoppression #prostitution

— Melinda (@MelLiszewski) April 9, 2016

Remember last summer when things got all sharp and spiky at Freethought blogs so I left there and came back here? After that everything calmed down at FTB and went back to collegial harmony and love.

Hahaha no it didn’t. That’s why we saw the debut of The Orbit on March 15, a new blog formed from a bunch of former FTB ones and some new ones.

It took only three weeks. Three weeks! Even I, who know their way with dissenters so intimately, thought it would take way longer than that. Only three weeks before the first schism: an update to their fundraiser on April 6:

We Made a Mistake, and We Apologize

When The Orbit launched, we offered a number of rewards on our (ongoing) Kickstarter, including Surly-Ramics jewelry. As readers may or may not know, there was controversy two years ago—involving, among others, Surly-Ramics creator Amy Davis Roth—regarding ableist language and responses to criticism. There remains significant disagreement among disability activists about these events: some accepted Amy’s apology and subsequent actions, while others are still dissatisfied with her reaction when criticized. (For details, see the linked post, written by one participant. https://teenskepchick.org/2014/02/17/what-actually-happened-and-a-rough-timeline/)

Many Orbit bloggers, who have different relationships (or lack thereof) with Amy and Surly-Ramics, are ourselves disabled and engaged in disability advocacy to different extents. While some now feel comfortable promoting Amy’s work, others differ, and individual bloggers will continue drawing their own lines. As a network, however, we recognize offering Surly-Ramics was a mistake, both because no consensus existed on our network and because doing so without explanation cast doubt on disability rights’ importance to us. We apologize for that mistake.

While preparing to launch our site, we did a lot of things in a hurry. This decision was made quickly, and we now realize we should have given ourselves more time to reach the fully informed consensus The Orbit aims to operate under. In the absence of this consensus, we are no longer offering the Surly-Ramics through our Kickstarter. Although we remain contractually bound to provide the jewelry to any donors who requested it, Surly-Ramics are now marked “sold out”. In their place, we’re offering poster prints by Orbit blogger and disability activist Ania Bula. (Any existing backers who would rather receive a print as a reward can change their pledge any time before the Kickstarter closes.)

In addition, we’re now examining our decision-making process to stop situations like this from arising in the future and looking at ways to respond to criticism more quickly. While we can’t promise never to make another mistake, we aim to make as few as possible, especially where marginalized people are concerned. We hope anyone hurt by this one can accept our apology, though we recognize they retain the right not to.

So that’s Surly Amy thrown under the bus, and then run over a few times for good luck. That’s Surly Amy’s jewelry thrown back in her face. That’s Surly Amy’s art rejected in favor of that of Ania Bula, which is not (to put it gently) as good. This despite the fact that several of the Orbit people have long been friends of Amy’s, in some cases fairly close friends.

What a horrible set of people.

First there’s the headline. You just have to laugh.

John Colapinto Revives the Male-Centric Literary Sex Novel

Say what? Revives it? Since when is it moribund?

Then there’s the author: Steven Kurutz. So men think there aren’t enough male-centric sex novels around. Ok…

Then there’s the article.

There was a time when the great American male novelists took delight in writing about sex…Sex was freedom, sex was adventure, sex was a good time, sex was pain, sex was life. Masturbation, threesomes, pedophilia, extramarital flings, one-night romps: It was all up for grabs, and how they grabbed it.

Good old “it.” No need to ask an it how it feels about any of this. Also, what is pedophilia doing in there? Is Steven Kurutz a Catholic bishop? Raping children is a crime. It’s not kink, it’s a crime.

In these more tentative times, male literary novelists tend to shy away from such strong stuff. And when these creatures of the workshop do manage to summon up the courage to test their descriptive powers against the most basic of human drives and activities, it is often to chronicle male sexual hesitation, confusion or inadequacy.

Still no mention of the non-male people who are often involved in all this “strong stuff.” Apparently they have no say, being its.

John Colapinto wrote a novel with, apparently, a lot of sex in it. 41 publishers said no thank you. Kurutz tells us nothing about the quality of the novel, but assumes without argument (let alone demonstration) that the no thank yous were all because the novel is too sex for them.

An editor at Grove Atlantic, writing to the author’s agent, called the manuscript “gripping,” only to add, “There were worries that it might be a bit challenging to publish.” An editor at Simon & Schuster said that although the novel was absorbing and perceptive, “It’s not a world or a story I want to live in and explore.” An editor at Gallery Books put it like this: “The subject matter is too tricky.”

It’s far from obvious that the Simon & Schuster editor, for instance, didn’t simply dislike the novel, as opposed to shying away from all the sex.

One of the protagonists of “Undone,” Dez, has a fetish for teenage girls. His latest catch, or victim, is a 17-year-old high school student named Chloe.

Hello. If by “catch, or victim” he means sex partner, that’s statutory rape.

But by exploring heterosexual male lust, Mr. Colapinto has written the kind of novel that has gone way out of fashion. The classics of the genre — “Portnoy’s Complaint” (Roth), “An American Dream” (Mailer) and “Couples” (Updike), among them — are many decades old.

I grew up on Roth and Updike, and even then their misogyny and failure to grasp that women are fully people put me off. I don’t lament the decline (if it even is a decline) of that kind of writing. (Martin Amis, by the way, is one who still does a fine line in women-oblivious writing.)

Publishers of literary fiction, perhaps afraid to alienate their biggest customers — women, who read more than men — aren’t exactly rushing to release the next male-written sexually provocative novel.

He got so close to the obvious, yet he never noticed. Why would that kind of writing alienate women? It’s not the sex part, it’s the male-centric part. We get enough of that in the world, we don’t need even more of it in novels.

Many critics and civilian readers would say — and have said — good riddance to priapic literature. In a 1997 essay, ostensibly a review of the late-period Updike novel “Toward the End of Time,” David Foster Wallace slammed the previous generation of “phallocrats” for its sex-obsessed narcissism. He mocked the protagonist of the Updike book for giving voice to such pronouncements as “I want women to be dirty” and expressed disgust for the author’s description of a 13-year-old girl’s breasts (“shallow taut cones tipped with honeysuckle-berry nipples”).

What had once been an act of literary daring had grown stale, Wallace argued, and Updike was misguided in clinging to the “bizarre adolescent idea that getting to have sex with whomever one wants is a cure for ontological despair.”

Well quite. Yet Kurutz, even after quoting that, still doesn’t seem to get it.

Mr. Colapinto, who has a wife and a teenage son, travels in educated, liberal circles that have internalized several waves of feminism. His son has not read the entirety of “Undone,” he said, and his wife, who only recently did, “had her concerns.” (“I’m insane,” Mr. Colapinto added, laughing.) But he set out to write a “dangerous” novel, he said, in the belief that “inappropriate lust” made for a worthwhile topic.

He even mentions feminism, and still doesn’t get it.

Male-centric journalism is still flourishing, I promise you.

Libby Brooks in the Guardian on Tanveer Ahmed and life for Ahmadis in the UK and elsewhere.

She begins with a slice of life:

Some of Samia Sultan’s neighbours don’t greet her any more, and sometimes it’s hard for her to understand why. Sultan, a dentist, lives in Glasgow, in an area of the city that is – like most Muslim populations in the UK – majority Sunni. But Sultan isn’t Sunni: she is Ahmadi. And that is the source of the problem.

“My neighbours were fine, but when they came to know I was Ahmadi, their attitude changed,” Sultan explains. It is a bright morning in Glasgow, but the boredom of the school holidays is beginning to bite, and her daughters are impatient to borrow her smartphone so that they can use its stopwatch to time their game. Sultan passes her palm gently over her older daughter’s hair as she sends her back out to play. “They would no longer reply to my greeting As-salāmu ‘alaykum [peace be upon you]” with Wa’alaykumu s-salām [and upon you peace].”

At first hearing, it seems almost negligible; a petty withholding.

No, it doesn’t, actually. On the contrary. It seems like the harshest non-physical stab humans can give each other: rejection. Refusal of a kind greeting is not at all negligible, it’s brutal.

This is one way religion is so dreadfully bad for people. Politics can be bad for us in the same way, but religion is also arbitrary, which makes it all even worse. Brutally shunning people over complete nonsense about whether Mo was the last prophet or not, not to mention murdering them, is a refinement of hatefulness that’s special to religion.

But this doorstep refusal to return the universal Muslim greeting is blunt in its intended humiliation: a denial of the basic vocabulary of belonging. Sultan shrugs lightly. “We can’t stop it by ourselves and we are taught to bear hardship with patience, so we try to be friendly.” She pauses. “But it is hard. Sometimes you think: what is wrong with me?”

Of course you do, and that’s why it’s so cruel.

(Mind you, as a non-Muslim and an atheist I wonder how the greeting works – if Sultan knows which neighbors are Muslims and which aren’t, or if she relies on appearance, or if her neighborhood is so ghettoized that everyone is Muslim, or what, and I also wonder how she greets non-Muslims if there are any. In short I’m not very keen on a specifically religious greeting that doesn’t work for outsiders, because it’s just more of the same Us and Them that motivated Tanveer Ahmed to murder Asad Shah. But that’s separate from the meanness of Sultan’s neighbors.)

The man now charged with Shah’s murder is also a Muslim. On Thursday, Tanveer Ahmed, from Bradford, released a statement through his lawyer, justifying the killing because Shah had “disrespected” Islam.

Insisting that the killing had “nothing at all to do with Christianity or any other religious beliefs”, he went on to warn: “If I had not done this, others would and there would have been more killing and violence in the world.”

Why would there have been more violence if someone else had done it? Did he do it in an especially peaceful way? I don’t think so.

Glasgow’s Ahmadi have called on all Muslim leaders and imams in Britain to publicly condemn this statement. Describing Ahmed’s words as “deeply disturbing”, community leader Ahmed Owusu-Konadu said: “It justifies the killing of anyone – Muslim or non-Muslim – whom an extremist considers to have shown disrespect to Islam.”

Indeed it does. See Charlie Hebdo, see Kurt Westergaard, see the long list of murdered atheists in Bangladesh, see the more than two decades of threats against Taslima, see the fatwa on Salman.

Speaking from his office in Islamabad, Ali Dayan Hasan, the former Pakistan director of Human Rights Watch, is succinct about general attitudes to Ahmadis: “It is shocking how much hate there is in the UK.” He refers in particular to literature distributed by Khatme Nubuwatt, an organisation that in Pakistan calls for the ‘elimination’ of the Ahmadi, but also has branches in the UK, where it is a registered charity and an affiliate of the Muslim Council of Britain. A posting on the Facebook page Anti Qadianiat (Tahafuz Khatme Nubuwwat), included the Guardian’s report of Shah’s death, with the message “Congratulations to all Muslims”.

Emphasis added. That loathsome murder-inciting group is an affiliate of the MCB – the umbrella organization that the BBC used to treat as representing non-theocratic Muslims.

Police Scotland are investigating alleged links between a prominent Glasgow Muslim leader and a banned sectarian group in Pakistan. A recent BBC investigation revealed that Sabir Ali, the head of religious events at Glasgow Central mosque, was president of Sipah-e-Sahaba, a militant political party that has accepted responsibility for deadly sectarian attacks against Shia Muslims and Ahmadiyya minorities in Pakistan, and was banned by the Home Office in 2001.

Aamer Anwar, one of Scotland’s most outspoken Muslim reformers, last week helped to broker a unique event where representatives of Sunni, Shia, Ahmadiyya and Pakistani Christian communities shared a platform for the first time, and vowed to stand shoulder-to-shoulder against extremism.

At the time, Anwar warned: “A very small minority of the community may think it’s OK to meddle in the cesspit of violent extremist politics in Pakistan, but we are united in saying that we do not want to import sectarian violence that has caused so much division and so much bloodshed to our community or to our streets.” He has since received death threats himself, which are now under investigation by the police.

Of course he has.

French flight attendants are saying no to Air France’s order to wear Air France hijab in Iran.

Air France stewardesses, furious at being ordered to wear headscarves in Tehran, say they will refuse to fly to the Iranian capital when the airline resumes the service later this month.

Female members of flight crews have been ordered to cover their hair once they disembark in Tehran and unions are demanding that the flights be made voluntary for women.

…

French women see Islamic headscarves and veils as an affront to their dignity. Headscarves are banned in French state schools and offices, and it is illegal to wear the full-face Muslim veil in public.

You know…that’s not just some funny quirk of French women. Hijab is an affront to the dignity of all women. It treats women as a special case, and men as the only Real Humans and the ones who get to tell women what to wear. It treats women as subordinate and men as dominant. It treats women as dirty, a contaminant, a thing that has to be wrapped up and concealed. It treats women as an inferior class of people who can’t even consult their own comfort and freedom of movement when they decide what clothes to wear.

The financially ailing French airline, which sees the resumption of Tehran flights as an “excellent” business development, pointed out that other airline staff were obliged to comply with Iranian rules. “Tolerance and respect for the customs of the countries we serve are part of the values of our company,” a spokesman said.

Fuck that, and fuck them. What if the customs of the countries they serve required Jews to wear yellow stars? What if the customs of the countries they serve required people from Africa to wear some special garment or mark? What if the customs of the countries they serve required dalits from India to wear badges of Untouchability? Would they “respect” those customs?

Also, tolerating and respecting other people’s customs in the sense of not interfering with them is one thing, and doing so in the sense of following the customs yourself is quite another. I don’t expect Air France to go to Iran and campaign against the law requiring women to wear hijab, but that doesn’t mean they have to order their employees who have the bad taste to be women to wear it.

Tanveer Ahmed, the Bradford man accused of murdering Asad Shah, issued a statement on Wednesday explaining why he did it. The statement is exactly as disgusting as you would expect.

Ahmed made no plea when he appeared at Glasgow Sheriff Court on Wednesday for a full committal hearing in private but after the hearing he released a statement through his lawyer, John Rafferty.

The statement said: “This all happened for one reason and no other issues and no other intentions.

“Asad Shah disrespected the messenger of Islam the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him. Mr Shah claimed to be a Prophet.

“When 1,400 years ago the Prophet of Islam Muhammad peace be upon him has clearly said that ‘I am the final messenger of Allah there is no more prophets or messengers from God Allah after me.

”’I am leaving you the final Quran. There is no changes. It is the final book of Allah and this is the final completion of Islam.

“‘There is no more changes to it and no one has the right to claim to be a Prophet or to change the Quran or change Islam.’

“It is mentioned in the Quran that there is no doubt in this book no one has the right to disrespect the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him and no one has the right to disrespect the Prophet of Islam Muhammad Peace be upon him.

“If I had not done this others would and there would have been more killing and violence in the world.

“I wish to make it clear that the incident was nothing at all to do with Christianity or any other religious beliefs even although I am a follower of the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him I also love and respect Jesus Christ.”

What a terrible, hideous, mindless, cruel religion Tanveer Ahmed believes in – one that wants human beings to murder other human beings over nonsense about who is or is not the last “prophet.” A god that was any good wouldn’t want that at all, and would have the decency to tell humans so in unmistakable terms.

Mr Rafferty said: “My client Mr Tanveer Ahmed has specifically instructed me that today, April 6 2016, to issue this statement to the press, the statement is in the words of my client.”

His statement certainly underlines what a terrible religion he and those like him submit to.

And then there’s Dilly Hussain. His latest caper is to pin a target on Sunny Hundal:

FTR: here is @DillyHussain88 trying to incite violence against me because I asked about his bogotry towards Ahmadis pic.twitter.com/d5j0uase4v

— Sunny Hundal (@sunny_hundal) April 9, 2016

Dilly Hussain is currently busy on Twitter mocking the idea that he tried to incite violence against Sunny, but that’s extremely disingenuous given what he said:

Dilly Hussain‏@DillyHussain88
.@sunny_hundal mocks the Prophet of Islam (saw) on the status of animals,,and uses his hidden Islamophobia to come across as a fair liberal.

We know what the sentence is supposed to be for people who “mock the Prophet of Islam (saw)” – it’s death. We know there are people who carry out those death sentences. Dilly Hussain knows that too.

The CEMB has more on Media Diversified, from December 2013.

Lejla Kuric is a Bosnian Muslim who lives in Manchester, England.

She believes in secularism, feminism and the principles enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As such, she disagrees with those who seek to restrict Women’s Rights in the name of religion, and is very active in opposing cultural relativists and Islamists.

We disagree with Lejla Kuric on many issues. She is a believing Muslim. We are apostates. Despite this, Lejla has openly supported our right to leave and be critical of Islam, and has done that despite facing criticism and abuse from some Muslims for doing so. We consider her to be a brave and principled person.

Same here. I’m friends with her on Facebook and I think she’s terrific.

Lejla is also a survivor of the anti-Muslim genocide in Bosnia. Which makes it all the more remarkable and perverse that following the publication of an article by a Hizb ut Tahrir representative by the website Writers of Colour, she was described by the twitter account of that site in the following terms:

“I have blocked that woman as she is an Islamophobe who abuses Muslims on the internet”

People in comments point out that Writers of Colour=Media Diversified.

Lejla earned the wrath of this website by pointing out that Hizb ut Tahrir are a group who say that gays and apostates deserve to be killed, who are classified as a fascist Hate Group by the anti-Nazi activists Hope Not Hate, and for saying that they should be confronted about their extremist, racist, misogynistic and murderous hate.

We take for granted that liberal Muslims and Exmuslims who oppose Islamist extremism are betrayed by some cultural relativist liberals. This is pretty par for the course. But describing a Muslim survivor of the anti-Muslim genocide in Bosnia in these terms simply because she points out how Hizb ut Tahrir are a fascist, murderous, extremist group is striking for being a low point in a large field of low points.

It is, isn’t it.

We stand with Lejla Kuric, a brave, principled and brilliant defender of Universal Human Rights and secularism against all forms of extremism, and we lament the ethical failure of some liberal, left wing cultural relativists.

No low too low.

It’s about time. Channel 4 has rebuked Assed Baig for calling liberal Muslims names like “house Muslim” and “sell-out.” He’s bullied several friends of mine that way.

A Channel 4 reporter has been reprimanded by the broadcaster after claiming British Muslims are ‘sell-outs and Uncle Toms’ if they attend government-organised Islamic events.

Investigative journalist Assed Baig, 34, who was born in Birmingham but now lives in London, has also used the pejorative term ‘house Muslim’ on Twitter in relation to moderate Muslims.

And the former BBC reporter referred to any Muslims who attend British government iftars as ‘Uncle Toms’, which is a derogatory term meaning a black person showing obedience to whites.

…

Mr Baig, whose tweets were reported by the Guido Fawkes political blog, was criticised by some on Twitter today, but backed by others who said ‘keep up the good work’ and praised his ‘excellent reporting’.

But Fiyaz Mugha, founder of Tell Mama, a Government-backed group which tracks anti-Muslim crimes, told MailOnline: ‘The term “house Muslim” effectively is synonymous with someone using house and using the N-word.

‘It means that people are subservient to a white master or a power structure. We think it actually has some racial connotations to it and also in many instances is used to provide a “them and us”.’

Mr Baig doesn’t approve of liberal Muslims.

Arwa Mahdawi reports on a festive annual event:

Every year at the end of March, 20,000 lesbians from around the world fly into the Californian desert for five days of debauchery, and I’m one of them. It’s my second time at the Dinah, also known as the largest girl festival in the world. I’m staying at the Hilton in Palm Springs, which is hosting the famous Dinah pool parties, and the hotel feels like a homosexual harem.

It’s a surreal experience: for a few days the world is turned upside down, the minority is suddenly the majority. Everywhere you look, lesbians are smiling, drinking, dancing, kissing. There are a few men around – staff working the event and guys who have been dragged along by lesbian friends – but they are hard to spot. It’s basically entirely queer women in attendance.

It’s named after a Dinah Shore golf tournament. This is its 26th year.

Today, nobody is here for the golf. No one is here for the DJs, comedians or YouTube stars performing either. They’re here for the girls. Butch, femme, old, young, gold stars, bi, black, white, hardcore, normcore – the Dinah attracts a diverse group. There’s a sense of liberation and a tacit understanding that what happens in Dinah stays in Dinah (unless it ends up on Facebook).

Lots of hooking up, lots of drinking.

The feeling of permissiveness is compounded by the desert scenery: it looks like there has been some sort of gaypocalypse, and all the straight men and women have died out.

I can’t lie, it’s nice being in a predominantly female space for a few days. There’s a feeling of comfortable camaraderie; a sense of suddenly being a first-class citizen. But I feel like that comes more from the queerness rather than the femaleness. No one at the Dinah wishes a plague on all men. Despite the stereotype of the man-hating dyke, most lesbians really like men (we need them around to ensure we don’t get too distracted). The Dinah isn’t about separatism; it’s about celebration.

A funny thing about this article – there’s not a single mention of trans-exclusionary radical feminists, or of the cotton ceiling, or of trans women. Did Mahdawi not get the memo? I thought everybody always got the memo.

While a lot of big brands have only started wooing dyke dollars recently, the city of Palm Springs has long been cognizant of the economic benefits of embracing diversity. It grew to prominence in the 1930s when closeted Hollywood movie stars would head to the desert to escape the studios’ scrutiny. The likes of Rock Hudson, Liberace, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford and Marlene Dietrich all spent time there.

Today it’s estimated that almost half the population of Palm Springs are gay, and it has the highest per capita gay population in the US, if not the world. It’s also seeing a surge of interest among straight Hollywood. Leonardo DiCaprio recently bought a vacation home there: the Dinah Shore Palm Springs Estate.

Rob Moon, the openly gay mayor of Palm Springs, told me that “now more than ever, the city is experiencing a tremendous renaissance and Dinah Shore Weekend has been a huge economic driver. We owe a debt of gratitude to the LGBT community for helping Palm Springs evolve into the ultra-cool, stylish and sophisticated city it is today.”

As for the future of lesbian-centric events, there has been a trend of lesbian bars closing recently. This has been partly been blamed on apps like Tinder, which make meeting other gay people less reliant on gay bars. It’s also been put down to more liberal attitudes; there’s no longer a need for gay space if all space is more inclusive.

Will the next generation of gay women feel the same need for an extended women’s party? Mariah Hanson, founder of the Dinah, certainly seems to think so. “There’ll always be need for gay people to come together and congregate,” she said. “Our culture is unique … we’re not part of straight culture. The Dinah is and always has been five days of incredibly magical celebration of our lives. If the UN would pay attention to what’s going on at the Dinah it could change the world in a big way. People put aside their differences and go home feeling changed.”

Should I get pissed off about being excluded by that “we’re not part of straight culture” line? Should I call these women SERLs? Or should I just think it sounds festive and move on? Hmm, hmm, so hard to decide.

I’m kidding. It’s easy to decide. Mind you, I don’t like deserts or crowds or public swimming pools or drinking a lot, so that helps make the decision easier, but even if it didn’t…I would still find it easy to say it sounds festive and move on.