Staffan de Mistura is nuts. He’s barking.

…the head of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (Unama), Staffan de Mistura, said during a visit to Mazar-e Sharif that the only person who could be blamed for the violence was the American pastor.

“I don’t think we should be blaming any Afghan. We should be blaming the person who produced the news – the one who burned the Koran. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from offending culture, religion, traditions.”

The only person who could be blamed. Not the people who did the actual killing, with guns; only the guy who made a point of pissing them off.

Please.… Read the rest

Isn’t there a literary character, or family, called Tantamount? Did I imagine that?

I’m thinking it’s from someone like Aldous Huxley or Evelyn Waugh. Anthony Powell? Mervyn Peake?

It started when Paula Kirby said on Facebook yesterday that some BBC presenter had said something was of “tantamount importance.” Groans all around. But then I started getting this itch inside the head…Margot Tantamount? Charles Tantamount? Tantamount Hall?

Google has been no help, so maybe I did imagine it. Anyone?… Read the rest

These guys certainly think so.

A student at an Islamic school in Bangladesh has been shot dead and at least 30 others injured during a demonstration against women’s rights.

The protesters were marching through the south-western town of Jessore against moves by the government to ensure equal property rights for women…

Under Bangladeshi law, a woman normally inherits half as much as her brother.

Because god wants it that way, which we know, because god said so in this book we are holding aloft while screaming in rage.… Read the rest

Oh good grief.

[David] Willetts blamed the entry of women into the workplace and universities for the lack of progress for men.

“Feminism trumped egalitarianism,” he said, adding that women who would otherwise have been housewives had taken university places and well-paid jobs that could have gone to ambitious working-class men.

Yes, and working-class men who would otherwise have been miners had taken university places and well-paid jobs that could have gone to ambitious women. What about it?

Everybody could always have been and done something else; so what? It’s no more inevitable or Right or How Things Ought to Be that women “are” housewives than it is that working-class men “are” miners. The university places and well-paid jobs … Read the rest

Watch out for Fridays. Maybe stay home on Fridays, with the doors locked and barred and sheets of iron over the windows. At least, if you live somewhere like Pakistan or Afghanistan, do that.

Thousands of demonstrators angered over the burning of a Koran in Florida mobbed offices of the United Nations in northern Afghanistan on Friday, overrunning the compound and killing at least seven foreign staff workers, according to Afghan officials…The incident began when thousands of protesters poured out of the Blue Mosque in Mazar-i-Sharif after Friday prayers and attacked the nearby headquarters of the United Nations.

Correlation is not causation, but when thousands of angry men rush out of a mosque after Friday prayers and attack a … Read the rest

What a relief: it turns out that religious schools don’t exclude after all. Whew!

The Catholic school accommodates plenty of non-Catholic children whose parents are often African Christians who choose to send their kids to a school with a specifically religious ethos.

In other words, they find a denominational school, even if it is not of their own denomination, more congenial than a non-denominational or a multi-denominational school.

This is an absolutely key point. It blows out of the water the assumption that denominational schools somehow ‘exclude’ anyone not of their own denomination.

Ohhhhhh, I see. I was confused all this time. I thought “exclusion” could apply to students of other religions as well as other denominations, and to … Read the rest