Author: Ophelia Benson

  • It’s OK, we’re on the 10th floor

    Alom Shaha notices an excess of timidity about discussing Islam.

    “We can’t publish this, we’ll get firebombed.” Apparently this was the response from one of the staff at Biteback Publishing, the UK publishers of my book, The Young Atheist’s Handbook, when it was first presented to them. Thankfully, Iain Dale, the managing director, laughed at the idea, saying, “it’s OK, we’re on the 10th floor” and went on to publish the book anyway.

    It’s not just staff at Biteback who may have been concerned about publishing my book — according to a senior editor at one of the largest international publishers, who claimed to be personally keen to give me a deal, she was unable to convince her colleagues to agree because a “number of people” in the company would be “uncomfortable” about it. She then went on to explain that by “uncomfortable” she really meant “afraid”.

    Yes, I’ve been there. Remember that? More than three years ago? The sudden delay in the imminent publication of Does God Hate Women?

    About this non-ecumenical book that Jeremy and I wrote, that is due out at the end of this week. Yes, what about it, you’re thinking, all agog. For reasons which I will explain another day, the publisher became nervous about it last Friday. The publisher phoned us on Friday, and talked of changes, or delays, or would we like to drop a chapters. We would not like to drop a chapter, and if we had liked to drop a chapter, the time to discuss that would have been several months ago, not now, a week before the book is supposed to appear. The publisher sent the can-we-drop-it chapter to an ecumenicist to get his opinion.

    There was a reason for the publisher’s sudden nervousness.

    An academic book about religious attitudes to women is to be published this week despite concerns it could cause a backlash among Muslims because it criticises the prophet Muhammad for taking a nine-year-old girl as his third wife…This weekend, the publisher, Continuum, said it had received “outside opinion” on the book’s cultural and religious content following suggestions that it might cause offence.

    Suggestions that came from the reporter who wrote the article reporting the suggestions. Really: that’s what happened.

    And there was pretty much no outrage about the book once it was published. There was an irritated little Facebook group for awhile, but that’s it. Alom hasn’t had even that.

    I’ve encountered the idea that Muslims will be offended by my book from numerous people — from the publishers who looked at my proposal to the people who have interviewed me since publication and even from some friends. The only people who have not suggested that the book might be offensive to Muslims are Muslims themselves. Not a single Muslim has come forward to say that he or she has been offended by my book. The most strongly worded email I’ve received is one that expressed pity that I had “lost the one truth path” and the hope that “Allah would guide [me] back to it”.

    Publishers should ease off on the nerves, it seems to me.

  • Putting the knife in

    We all know that Twitter is a gift to people who enjoy saying horrible things to people they dislike or disagree with. Think Jessica Ahlquist; think #mencallmethings. Even Olympic athletes get the treatment.

    A 17-year-old boy arrested as part of an investigation into Twitter messages sent to the diver Tom Daley after he and team-mate Pete Waterfield missed out on a medal on Monday has been issued with a harassment warning….

    The teenager was held at a guesthouse in Weymouth, Dorset, hours after Daley retweeted messages he had been sent soon after finishing fourth in the 10m men’s synchronised platform diving event. Daley, 18, retweeted a message that said: “You let your dad down i hope you know that.” The diver added: “After giving it my all … you get idiots sending me this …”

    Daley’s father, Rob, died from cancer last year…

    Speaking before the Olympics, Daley told the BBC: “Winning a medal would make all the struggles that I’ve had worthwhile. It’s been my dream since a very young age to compete at an Olympics. I’m doing it for myself and my dad. It was both our dreams from a very young age. I always wanted to do it and Dad was so supportive of everything. It would make it extra special to do it for him.”

    Ugly, isn’t it.

  • Take one for the team

    A runner broke his leg during an Olympic relay race and went on running to the end.

    “As soon as I took the first step past the 200m mark, I felt it break.” Manteo told the USA Track and Field website.

    “I didn’t want to let the three guys or the team down, so I just ran on it.”

    Mitchell still managed to finish the opening lap in 46.1 seconds as the US team, also featuring Joshua Mance, Tony McQuay and Bryshon Nellum, went on to set a qualifying time of two minutes, 58.87 seconds.

    “It hurt so bad,” the 25-year-old added. “I’m pretty amazed that I still split [close to] 45 seconds on a broken leg.”

    USA Track and Field chief executive Max Siegel said: “Manteo has become an inspiration and a hero for his team-mates.”

    That’s horribly irresponsible.

    Update: I meant that what Siegel said is irresponsible, not what the runner did. I suppose once the runner had done it, onlookers kind of had to acknowledge the heroics…but still, I think it was irresponsible. You know all those kids who go back in the game after being hit on the head? Really bad idea.

  • Sleaze

    Gee, I was thinking about other things this morning – the column I have to finish for TPM, the column I have to proofread for the Freeth, stuff I have to do in the physical world, those cherries that need sorting, that book I was reading – but then I glanced at the stats and noticed an influx via Thunderfoot, so I looked at the title – and then it all came back to me. Oh right; that.

    Ed explains it all. PZ does. Jason adds technical details.

    The bare bones: ten minutes after he was removed from the mailing list he put himself back on it, and he passed on some of the messages he read. It’s sleazy stuff.

  • How not to creep

    John Scalzi has a good post on how not to be creepy, especially (I take it) if you’re a geek.

    There are ten rules.

    4. Acknowledge that other people do not exist just for your amusement/interest/desire/use. Yes, I know. You know that. But oddly enough, there’s a difference between knowing it, and actually believing it — or understanding what it means in a larger social context. People go to conventions and social gatherings to meet other people, but not necessarily (or even remotely likely) for the purpose of meeting you.

    It’s funny, in a way, reading the rules, because I think I must be the inside out of the kind of person who needs to be told all those things. I always simply assume people are not wherever it is for the purpose of meeting me, and that meeting me won’t change that, so I kind of do the opposite of rules 5-10, which are about not touching and not crowding and not boxing in and not trying to be funny and not following and not staying around when people want you to leave. I avoid, and stand far away, and say nothing, and leave.

    I exaggerate, but that is my instinct, and my default mode.

     

     

  • Two

    I’m not ignoring you. It’s just that I have two deadlines tomorrow – and they’re both in the UK so really that means they’re today. One for The Freethinker, the other for TPM.

    The first is done. The second isn’t.

  • Abstract of Nature article on fossils from Koobi Fora

    The new fossils confirm the presence of two contemporary species of early Homo, in addition to Homo erectus, in the early Pleistocene of eastern Africa.

  • New human species identified from Kenya fossils

    The discoveries suggests that at least three distinct species of humans co-existed in Africa.

  • Police made her father sign a “pledge”

    And then there are those strange coincidences – like when a woman complains to the police that her father and brother beat her, and they are arrested but then released on bail, and three days later the father takes her body to a clinic where a doctor issues a death certificate. Spooky, isn’t it.

    The men, from al-Samu near Hebron, were detained for four days, but a court released them on bail on July 18.

    Randa’s brother has told south Hebron prosecutor Mohammad Gaboon that on his release he returned home and beat Randa on her face and chest. “She lost her conscious and I left the room at that time,” he said.

    On July 21, Randa’s father took her body to a clinic, where a doctor issued a death certificate.

    And the family hastily buried her, without a funeral.

    Several months before her death, Randa had sought police protection from her father and her brother, said Farid al-Atrash, the regional director of the Independent Commission for Human Rights told Ma’an.

    In January, she filed complaints with the family protection unit and at police stations in al-Samu, where she lived, and Yatta, a nearby town. Police made her father sign a “pledge” to stop beating her.

    The beatings continued and Randa approached the Independent Commission of Human Rights on Feb. 4.

    “We called the family protection department to find her a safe house, but family protection said that her father and brother promised to find her a job,” al-Atrash said.

    Oh well in that case – obviously she’s perfectly safe staying with them.

    Randa was living with her family after her husband threw her out, Hiyan Qaqour, a lawyer for the Women’s Center for Legal Aid and Counseling told Ma’an.

    Aged 28, Randa was forced to marry a 78-year-old man from Beersheba, in Israel, her mother told Ma’an.

    They were married for six years and he regularly beat her, the lawyer said. Randa complained to Israeli police, who arrested him. On her husband’s release, he sent her back to her family in as-Samu in the southern West Bank, Qaqour added.

    Got it. Shit life, and shit death. Treated like shit by her birth family, and the man she was forced to “marry,” and the institutions around her.

  • Saudi cleric lists things forbidden to women in sport

    Mixing with men, or men watching her run or fall down or laugh or cry or quarrel with another female athlete, or mount a horse, or practice gymnastics or wrestling.

  • Father, brother detained on charges of beating woman

    They were released on bail on July 18, and on July 21 she was dead. What a coincidence.

  • Children were born

    Some ways of living are better than others. Some basic constituents of a good life are fresh air, freedom of movement, access to the wider world. Ways of living that provide more of those basic constituents are generally better than those that don’t.

    Living underground, for instance. Not ideal.

    MOSCOW – A self-proclaimed prophet had a vision from God: He would build an Islamic caliphate under the earth.

    The digging began about a decade ago, and 70 followers moved into an eight-level subterranean honeycomb of cramped cells with no light, heat or ventilation.

    Children were born. They, too, lived in the cold underground cells for many years — until authorities raided the compound last week and freed 27 sons and daughters of the sect.

    Ages 1 to 17, the children rarely saw the light of day and had never left the property, attended school or been seen by a doctor, officials said Wednesday.

    Human moles, in other words. Not ideal. Not one of the better ways of living. Not responsible parenthood.

     

     

  • Russia: police raid sect living underground

    Ages 1 to 17, the children rarely saw the light of day and had never left the property, attended school or been seen by a doctor, officials said.

  • Talk of the Nation discusses harassment in gaming

    “These are less and less isolated incidents.”

  • Not even a hint

    Are the Saudis proud of their women athletes? They are not. They consider them a dirty secret.

    Across the world, word that Saudi Arabia would send women athletes to the Olympics for the first time immediately rocketed to the top of websites and broadcasts. In Saudi Arabia’s official media: Not even a hint.

    They don’t want the sluts to get big ideas.

    “It does not change the fact that Saudi women are not free to move and to choose,” said political analyst Mona Abass in neighboring Bahrain. “The Saudis may use it to boost their image, but it changes little.”

    Even the two athletes selected to compete under the Saudi flag — 800-meter runner Sarah Attar from Pepperdine University in California and Wodjan Ali Seraj Abdulrahim Shahrkhani in judo — live outside the kingdom and carry almost no influence as sports figures.

    They sent only two women; both women live outside the country; Saudi Arabia kept the whole thing a secret.

    So actually, nothing changed.

     

  • How to cope with eternal bliss

    A great new Jesus and Mo. The title article on Jesus’s magazine particularly amuses me.

     

  • Sport will lead to corrupt morals

    Saudi Arabia finally gave in to pressure and “allowed” Saudi women – a whole entire two of them – to compete in the Olympics, but it really really hated doing it.

    The ministry of education bans physical education for girls. The rationale behind the ban ranges from claims that sport will lead to corrupt morals and lesbianism, to it being masculine and damaging for female health and psyche.

    The main rationale, though, is that introducing physical education is a slippery slope that will eventually lead it to becoming common to see Saudi women practise and compete in sports publicly in front of men. In a country where all state schools mandate fully covering the face , the thought of Saudi women running in a conservative tracksuit with the face showing is simply too much for many to handle.

    Saudi Arabia thinks everything is damaging for female health and psyche, apart from being fucked and bearing children. It’s as if women were both fragile as crystal and infectious as Ebola, while still being tragically necessary because fucking and reproduction.

    Imagine not being allowed to do any kind of sport. Imagine not being allowed to go outside unless you’re buried in a bag and have a male relative along. Imagine not being allowed to go into banks, shops, restaurants because women are banned.

    Once it was announced that two women would be joining the Saudi delegation, many  criticised the minister of sports, Prince Nawaf al-Faisal, for allowing it. However, the inclusion of women proceeded, and when those opposing the move saw that they could not get the minister to retract, they changed strategy and focused on the female athletes instead.

    Photos of Sarah Attar on the running track from her university website in California emerged on Twitter and Facebook with her face, arms and legs blurred so that all a person can see is that it is a woman in shorts. These photos were captioned with statements of how this goes against the minister’s promise to ensure that Saudi women would participate in hijab.

    As if the Saudi minister of sport gets to promise that a girl in California will wear what he says she’ll wear. As if it were the world’s business what she wears.

    Meanwhile, judo competitor Wojdan Ali Seraj Abdulrahim Shahrkhani‘s father received insults that included racial abuse and comments questioning his manhood, his honour and even his citizenship.

    Both women were featured under an Arabic Twitter hashtag that translates as “Olympic whores“.

    Aren’t people lovely.

     

  • Two Saudi women compete in the Olympics

    But Saudi Arabia forces them to dress “in compliance with Sharia.”

  • Men call Wojdan Shaherkani things on Twitter

    “You do not represent the chaste Muslim woman,” tweeted Mohammed al-Barrak, a lecturer at Umm Al-Qura University in Mecca.

  • Uncomfortable with activist women

    Michael Idov attends the closing arguments in the Pussy Riot trial.

    …the hometown opinion on Pussy Riot is mixed at best. Even the liberal response has involved language like “They should let these chicks go with a slap on the ass.” Despite the rapid Westernization of the city elites, the rise of the vaunted “creative class” and the widespread distrust of the state-coddled Orthodox Church, Russians remain distinctly uncomfortable with activist women.

    …

    Pride parades remain banned in Moscow, while opposition leaders freely use the Russian word for “faggot” in public. The idea that liberalism is partly about upholding someone else’s liberty — including their right to do something that’s personally offensive to you — is an exotic and untested notion in Russia.

    This allows Russian commentators to say or write things like “these women disgust me, they should rot in jail” without noticing the clear line between opinion and law that separates the first thought from the second.

    It seems such a conspicuous line to fail to notice, doesn’t it. Is there a crime of “disgusting someone” on the books in Russia?

    A case that should pivot on a specific legal question (“Does a violation of church protocol rise to the level of religious hatred?”) instead hangs entirely on emotions, including those of Patriarch Kirill I and President Vladimir V. Putin, that the judge and the prosecution appear to be trying to divine. The debate about the trial has also been full of pointless syllogisms: What if it was your daughter up there? What if they tried doing this in a mosque? What if someone came into your house and defecated on the carpet?

    Snort. Pointless indeed. A public space like a church is not the same as “your house” and swearing is not the same as defecation. No carpet was damaged in the singing of Pussy Riot’s song.

    Of course, if the defendants decided to convey over-the-top remorse (by falling to their knees, crying, etc.), then public opinion and even their legal fortunes would almost certainly turn. But Ms. Alyokhina, Ms. Samutsevich and Ms. Tolokonnikova remain cool, smiling and remote — a “Western” and “unfeminine” attitude. When you’re a woman in Russia, nothing but tears will do.

    Policing the woman’s face again.