The Manzanar Committee puts out a statement written by Gann Matsuda.

(Manzanar is the name of one of the horrible “camps” in which Japanese-Americans were interned – aka imprisoned – after Pearl Harbor.)

On November 18, the Manzanar Committee repudiated statements by David Bowers, Mayor, Roanoke, Virginia, in which he used the unjust incarceration of over 110,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry as justification for his demand that Syrian refugees be denied asylum in the Roanoke area.

In an official statement, Bowers said, “I’m reminded that President Franklin D. Roosevelt felt compelled to sequester Japanese foreign nationals after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and it appears that the threat of harm to America from ISIS now is just as real

Jeremy Duns has an extended exposé of the risible Twitter personality Mo Ansar. One section of it is illuminating about what may be something a lot of people are doing on Twitter (which would explain people who seem to spend hours every day doing it).

Ansar’s main base of operations is Twitter, where his persona often appears charming and reasonable. It is a Potemkin persona, designed to impress bookers from TV and radio shows as well as to curry favour with media figures. It’s a method he has honed over several years, and it goes like this: he sees something in the news that he feels he can use to lever himself into the media, usually something related to

Barry Duke at The Freethinker tells us:

Iain Lee has lost his job as a presenter for BBC Three Counties radio after calling an anti-gay Christian group representative ‘a bigot’ during a debate on homophobia.

Lee made the comments to Libby Powell, a lawyer for the Christian Legal Centre, who was appearing on breakfast show to defend homophobic Pentecostal preacher Barry Trayhorn who had read out verses from the Bible condemning homosexuality during a service at a prison.

The presenter described the passages, and Libby’s belief in them, as “homophobic” and “bigoted” during a heated debate.

He asked her “Do you support bigotry?” and, when Libby defended her stance, said:

You’ve chosen not to question it, because you’re a

Update: The SOAS SU Twitter account says it’s not true, and they’ll investigate tomorrow to find out where the story came from.

SOAS Students’ Union ‏@soassu 40 minutes ago
There was no vote to no-platform @monaeltahawy, we are not sure where this story came from.

Ophelia Benson ‏@OpheliaBenson 23 minutes ago
@soassu @monaeltahawy Nor a vote that she not be allowed to give a talk, but a panel instead?

SOAS Students’ Union ‏@soassu 18 minutes ago
@OpheliaBenson @monaeltahawy no, no vote.

Will investigate further tomorrow where this story came from to see what has happened.

So, good.

Original post:

In the You have got to be kidding department –

Mona Eltahawy tweets that the SOAS Student Union has

Originally a comment by SA Wells on Changing the subject again.

It’s taken me some time to decode that too, but I think I get it. The claim is that any recognition that genitals are relevant to gender is bad and wrong; because in order for the claim that “trans women are women full stop” to be true, all women would have to be women for the same reason, viz. an internal sense of gender identification. This of course flies in the face of the observable reality, which is that almost all women (or men) or regarded as women (or men) because they were born with female (or male) bodies and were told that that makes them girls/women (or … Read the rest

Amy Poehler has a thing I didn’t know about, called Smart Girls. As part of that, she has this highly appealing video in which two women – who say they are each other’s fiancées – explain about female bodies, starting with menstruation. I wish I could be besties with both of them. Cameron Esposito and Rhea Butcher, they’re called.

Good, right? Great idea?

Most commenters on the Facebook post about it think so, but there’s an exception.

Hey Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls. I think you are doing a great job empowering cisgender girls–but that’s about where it stops. All kids with vaginas, breasts, or any of the parts that you refer to as “the female bod,” deserve to

George Ongere has a guest post at CFI about Ron Lindsay’s visit to CFI-Kenya. (I was looking forward to seeing George Ongere at the CFI conference last June, but he couldn’t get a visa. Many disappointed people there.)

On November 10 and 11, 2015, CFI President and CEO Ron Lindsay visited CFI–Kenya. Ron’s visit during this time was very important because he was coming to officially launch the Humanist Orphans Center, which is a project of CFI–Kenya, located in the rural of Kisumu County. While launching the center, Ron stressed the importance of education to the growing generation and explained the commitment of the Center for Inquiry to supporting vulnerable children living in disadvantaged areas to make them realize their

The Peshmerga took Sinjar back from IS on Friday, but the Sinjar that remains is shattered.

In Sinjar, Islamic State focused more on destruction than governance. In the aftermath of the Sinjar offensive, fresh Islamic State atrocities are coming to light. An officer of the Kurdish regional government forces known as Peshmerga confirmed that a mass grave with tens of bodies was found Saturday near the city, filled mostly with old women and some old men.

Just like the Nazis. The “selection” at Auschwitz and elsewhere was the same way: select out the people who can be fucked or worked or both; kill the old and the very young.

Meanwhile, more than a thousand Yazidi women have been kidnapped,

Via Maryam:

Maryam Namazie ‏@MaryamNamazie 24 hours ago
After liberation, a female peshmarga destroys ISIS signboard ordering women to cover themselves with a niqab.