The doctors have again said Raif should not be whipped tomorrow, Amnesty reports.

The planned flogging of Raif Badawi is likely to be suspended this Friday after a medical committee assessed that he should not undergo a second round of lashes on health grounds. The committee, comprised of around eight doctors, carried out a series of tests on Raif Badawi at the King Fahd Hospital in Jeddah yesterday and recommended that the flogging should not be carried out.

Nothing surprising about the assessment – deep cuts caused by repeated blows of a stick would of course not heal completely in two weeks.

“Instead of continuing to torment Raif Badawi by dragging out his ordeal with repeated assessments the authorities

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CFI Canada is holding weekly protests at the Saudi embassy in Ottawa in conjunction with Amnesty International  Canada.

CFI Canada calls its volunteers and supporters to join or lend support to weekly 30-minute demonstrations at the Saudi embassy in Ottawa (201 Sussex Drive).  Amnesty International  Canada  is leading this initiative on Thursday January 15, 2015  at 4:00 pm.  Raif Badawi is expected to receive lashes every Friday for a total of twenty weeks.    For further information, contact the CFIC office at ned@cficanada.ca.

That’s from last week but theobromine tells us there is one today:

Note to anyone in or near Ottawa, Canada: Atheist and Humanist groups (CFI-Canada and Humanist Canada) are joining the weekly protests sponsored by Amnesty international –

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Watch Shazia Mirza speak up for the value of humor and Nabila Ramdani speak up for…other things.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuQZwZhFJaw… Read the rest

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Another item from Maajid on Twitter:

Maajid Nawaz @MaajidNawaz · 13 hours ago
Adam Lowisz on my Facebook page applied Kübler-Ross ‘5 stages of grief’ onto outdated Muslim “community leader” types

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More from that Washington Post article about the overlooking of female scholars of the Middle East when events are being organized. I ran out of time before.)

The problem isn’t going to fix itself, even though women are the majority at some graduate schools of international affairs now.

The paucity of women’s voices in public discussion comes not just from thoughtless conveners, but also from long-standing problems in the professional “pipeline” that carries individuals to the top levels of the field. Inequities in hiring and promotion often reflect, and help perpetuate, the unconscious bias of a male-dominated field.

Women are systematically cited less than their male peers, for example. Even when women are active scholars, as they are in

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Are.you.kidding.

Last year, six leading Washington think tanks presented more than 150 events on the Middle East that included not a single woman speaker. Fewer than one-quarter of all the speakers at the 232 events at those think tanks recorded in our newly compiled data-set were women. How is it possible that in 2014, not a single woman could be found to speak at 65 percent of these influential and high-profile D.C. events?

They all figure it’s more of a guy thing?

Pretty much.

Such questions are increasingly common in other fields, including the natural sciences. In our experience, organizers of all-male events reply to challenges with one of two answers: “I didn’t even notice there weren’t any women!”

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Now this is good – Maajid Nawaz on Twitter –

Maajid Nawaz ‏@MaajidNawaz 2h
I personally raised flogging @raif_badawi & @WaleedAbulkhair with UK Dep.Prime Minister @nick_clegg today #FreeRaif

Here’s hoping.… Read the rest

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Good – another ratchet in the protests to Saudi Arabia about its brutal torture and rights-abrogation of Raif Badawi.

The international outcry over  restrictions on freedom of speech in Saudi Arabia escalated last night as an array of Nobel prizewinners published an open letter calling on the country’s academics to condemn the public flogging of the blogger Raif Badawi.

In their letter, passed to The Independent, the 18 Nobel Laureates urge their Saudi peers to be “heard arguing for the freedom to dissent” by standing up for Mr Badawi, whose case they say has “sent a shock around the world”.

They also hint that if the country’s academics are unable to stand up for free speech they risk being

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Shocking but not really surprising – more than half of students in public schools in the US come from families in poverty.

This week, the Southern Education Foundation reported that 51 percent of students in grades K through 12 received a free or reduced-price school lunch in 2013, meaning that their families lived on less than 185 percent of the poverty line. According to the Washington Post, it is “the first time in at least 50 years” that more than half of the country’s public school kids have qualified as low income. In 1989, the figure was under 32 percent. In 2006, it hit 42 percent, and by 2011, it had ratcheted up to 48 percent.

Why … Read the rest

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James Croft asked an interesting question in a public Facebook post.

Interesting question which came up at this Clergy Care Summit: what is a Humanist version of “Know that God Loves you?”

There’s a string of comments offering substitutes but they’re not fully convincing. My answer is that there isn’t one. (Ian Cromwell’s is good though – “We’re all in this together”. That has the advantage of being true, along with the disadvantage of being not nearly as comforting as the original.)

There can’t be a humanist or Humanist version of “Know that God Loves you” because people are free to project onto this imagined god the most perfect satisfying consoling love possible. They’re free to reconcile mutual impossibilities … Read the rest

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Originally a comment by Crimson Clupeidae on Quick to sneer.

Not to worry, we here at Islamo-Judeo-Xian software, Inc, LLC, GAWD, are working on an automated version of photoshop (we’re calling it Photochop, to avoid copyright issues).

This brand spanking new software will automagically edit all images in digital form (the retroactive paper version is pending tests of the new high powered laser satellite….) to not only edit out women, pigs, prophets, dogs, etc, that may offend any religious sensibilities*, but it will autodetect blogs, words, and even recipes written by women, pigs, prophets, dogs, etc. and make them appear to be written by manly burly manly men!

Our next release will offer an optional Hindu add-on package, but … Read the rest

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Originally a comment by themadtapper on Honoring the Legacy, a press release by a right-wing group for Martin Luther King day claiming to be honoring King by promoting homophobia.

As I read over that press release, which reads like a fundie Mad Lib, I debated over what part to actually comment on.

I could comment on the inanity of comparing to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. those who seek to do the very thing that King fought against: denying goods, service, and basic dignity to a marginalized people whose only desire is to have the same opportunities of life, liberty, and happiness that white conservative Christians enjoy.

I could take the low-hanging fruit and comment on yet another attempt … Read the rest

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The New Yorker has a piece by Ruth Margalit on the gradual disappearance of women in Israel – not disappearance as in being murdered and buried in an obscure place, but disappearance as in not being allowed to appear.

In 2008, a thirty-year-old religious woman named Rachel Azaria headed a slate of candidates for city council. Her team had arranged to mount an ad campaign on the back of buses in the city that would feature her picture. In order to finalize the details of the campaign, Azaria called Cnaan Media, the company in charge of Jerusalem bus advertisements. “We’ve already had a schedule, we picked out the bus lines, everything,” Azaria told me on the phone this week. She

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Ha. The Tablet took its revenge on that Haredi newspaper that photoshopped out the women who walked with the other heads of state and public officials in solidarity with Charlie Hebdo.

Check out the Million Merkel March.

Merkel Merkel Merkel.… Read the rest

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Have a press release from the “Liberty Counsel.” (That’s really their name, but it’s so sick-making I find I can’t type it without scare quotes.)

January 19, 2015

Honoring the Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.

LC.org

Orlando, FL – As we remember today the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we are inspired by his courage to combat injustice that had become imbedded in our culture and our law.

Writing from a jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama, Dr. King said, “I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would

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A brilliant piece by Leigh Phillips from last week on clueless accusations that Charlie Hebdo is racist and homophobic, accusations obviously emanating from the left (the right seldom bothers accusing people of racism, much less homophobia).

In the 48 hours after the Paris massacre, much of the anglophone activist and academic left were quick to sneer at public displays of solidarity with the murdered cartoonists and journalists of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and criticized the vigils, demonstrations and editorial cartoons from other artists as siding with racists.

Of course the killing of journalists is a bad thing, so the argument goes, but come on, Charlie Hebdo is “a racist publication.” So what do you expect? is the

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More detail on the FGM case.

Mounting the first prosecution against someone for carrying out FGM in England and Wales, the Crown alleged that Dr Dhanuson Dharmasena, a junior registrar in obstetrics and gynaecology at the Whittington hospital, had mutilated a 24-year-old mother by the manner in which he had sewn her up after childbirth.

The woman had undergone type 3 FGM – in which part of the labia are sewn together – as a child in Africa, and during labour the doctor had made two cuts to her vaginal opening to ensure the safe delivery of her baby. When Dharmasena sewed her up, a midwife warned him that what he had done was illegal. He asked a consultant

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Judicial theocracy in the UK – a judge orders a father to take his children to Catholic mass.

A judge has ordered a father to take his children to Roman Catholic mass as part of a divorce settlement, even though he is not Catholic.

The man, who can only be identified as “Steve” because of reporting restrictions on the case, faces possible contempt of court and a jail sentence if he fails to go to church when he has custody of the children.

The church attendance requirement was imposed by Judge James Orrell during a hearing at an undisclosed county court in the Midlands.

County court, be it noted – not ecclesiastical court.

Court transcripts seen by The Telegraph

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DeWayne Wickham at USA Today says Charlie Hebdo has gone too far with the “all is forgiven” cover. Right; forgiveness is going way too far. So extreme much fanatical.

Charlie Hebdo has gone too far.

In its first publication following the Jan. 7 attack on its Paris office, in which two Muslim gunmen massacred 12 people, the once little-known French satirical news weekly crossed the line that separates free speech from toxic talk.

Toxic talk? Portraying a Mohammed who cares is toxic talk? Portraying a Mohammed who is saddened by what three of his more hateful followers did is toxic talk? How does that work, exactly? How is it toxic to offer a Mo who doesn’t rejoice at piles of … Read the rest

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