In Sudan, watching men whip a terrified woman is a source of amusement.… Read the rest
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The “Islamophobia” myth
Dec 13th, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonAmerican Jews are far more likely to be the victims of religious hate crime than members of any other group.… Read the rest
Off with his head!
Dec 13th, 2010 11:25 am | By Ophelia BensonThey’re kidding, right? This is a joke? It has to be a joke – right? They can’t be serious?
A doctor has been arrested for insulting the Prophet Mohammed in Pakistan…
Naushad Valiyani was detained on Friday following a complaint by a medical representative who visited the doctor in the city of Hyderabad.
“The arrest was made after the complainant told the police that Valiyani threw his business card, which had his full name, Muhammad Faizan, in a dustbin during a visit to his clinic,” regional police chief Mushtaq Shah told AFP.
“Faizan accused Valiyani of committing blasphemy and asked police to register a case against the doctor.”
And the police obliged.
So………no phone books can be thrown out in … Read the rest
Pakistan: doctor arrested for “blasphemy”
Dec 13th, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonA sales rep named Mohammed Faizan gave the doctor a business card; the doctor put it in the wastebasket. Blasphemy!… Read the rest
Sweden bomber lived in Luton
Dec 13th, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonHe had a BSc in sports therapy from the University of Bedfordshire and a hobby of trying to explode people.… Read the rest
Court rules against Helen Ukpabio and the Liberty Gospel Church
Dec 13th, 2010 | By Leo IgweToday a Federal High Court in Calabar in Cross River State, presided over by Justice P.J. Nneke, dismissed the application by Helen Ukpabio and some members of the Liberty Gospel Church seeking to enforce their fundamental rights against Akwa Ibom state government, the Commissioner of Police of Cross River state, Assistant Inspector General of Police, Leo Igwe, Sam Ituama, Gary Foxcroft and others as respondents for daring to organize a workshop which they perceived to be critical of their activities. They asked the respondents to pay them 200 billion naira ($.1.3 million dollars) in damages.
The court wondered why Helen and her church members attacked some of the respondents and still came to court to enforce their fundamental rights for … Read the rest
Nigeria: court rules against Helen Ukpabio
Dec 13th, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonLast year over 150 thugs from Ukpabio’s Liberty Gospel Church invaded a workshop on Witchcraft and Child Rights and attacked the organizers.… Read the rest
Ghana: woman burned to death for being a “witch”
Dec 13th, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonAma Hemmah was allegedly tortured into confessing she was a witch, doused in kerosene and set on fire.… Read the rest
Expensive communication
Dec 12th, 2010 4:30 pm | By Ophelia BensonStephen Law offers us a video of the Permanent Secretary for Government Communications telling a bunch of people that communications are goods things and that he is goods at doings them. I watched a minute or two, which was enough to confirm me in my surmise that I didn’t want to watch more than that. Stephen explains why.
… Read the restHe has little to say, surely? Strip out the “successful behavioural outcomes”, “partnership”, “stakeholder”, “co-creation”, “we’re on a journey” jargon and rhetoric, and his message boils down to:
• The public used to be seen by Government as passive recipients of information, not as customers to engage with, which they now are, ‘cos of the internet, twitter, etc. Citizens can now provide
Abandoning FGM in the Afar Region of Ethiopia
Dec 12th, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonThe strategy is to gain the support of a core group, which decides to abandon the practice then helps mobilize enough people to facilitate a tipping point.… Read the rest
Simon Blackburn replies to Sam Harris
Dec 12th, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonIt’s one thing to know the world, it’s another to care.… Read the rest
Deep anger in the bombing world
Dec 12th, 2010 12:53 pm | By Ophelia BensonAs is typical with coverage of this subject, the New York Times has to blame Lars Vilks just a little for doing that Motoon.
But the country’s prime minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, stopped short of connecting the bombs to an e-mail that a Swedish news organization received minutes before the blasts, which seemed to link the attacks to anger over anti-Islamic cartoons and the war in Afghanistan.
It wasn’t cartoons plural, it was one cartoon. And anti-Islamic? What’s that supposed to mean? It sounds sinister.
The e-mail’s reference to Mr. Vilks, a 64-year-old artist and free-speech activist, pointed to the deep anger in the Muslim world over his drawings of the prophet Muhammad in 2007.
“The” deep anger in “the” … Read the rest
Jerry Coyne on Michael Behe in Boston Review
Dec 12th, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonBehe likens himself to Newton, Einstein, and Pasteur, but claims that a defensive band of evolutionists blocks his ascendancy to the pantheon. Such declarations of unrecognized genius are a diagnostic feature of crank science.… Read the rest
Swedish police confirm terror attack
Dec 12th, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonElements in Somalia linked to al-Qaida have been recruiting young people from Sweden.… Read the rest
“Your children — daughters and sisters — will die”
Dec 12th, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonDeep, deep, deep anger in “the Muslim world” over Lars Vilks’s Mohammed cartoon. Boom.… Read the rest
Anti-“Islamophobia” parliamentary group drops Engage
Dec 12th, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonAnt-semitism, Zionism, the MCB, views that others may disagree with, “Jewish schools,” “Islamophobia” – a riot of bad thinking.… Read the rest
Hitchens on Glenn Beck and tea partiers
Dec 11th, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonBeck’s “9/12 Project” is canalizing old racist and clerical toxic-waste material that a healthy society had mostly flushed out of its system.… Read the rest
Stockholm: email threats, then explosions
Dec 11th, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonThe writer of the e-mail mentions the presence of Swedish troops in Afghanistan and Lars Vilks.… Read the rest
AAA rejecting science?
Dec 11th, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia Benson“Interpretation” opened not just one but dozens of exits from scientific rigor and was the beginning of the postmodern moment in anthropology.… Read the rest
Separating the fluff
Dec 11th, 2010 1:59 pm | By Ophelia BensonAlice Dreger was at the American Anthropological Association meeting when it moved to kick science out.
Interestingly, it isn’t just that the AAA leadership is ditching science. They’re also trying to position the AAA as being primarily about “public understanding” of humankind. As Stu Plattner, who served for many years as Cultural Anthropology Program Director for NSF, observed in email exchanges, this looks like “another step in the conversion of Anthropology from a social science into an esoteric branch of journalism.” Yeah, but the kind of journalism that is much more concerned with editorials than factual reporting.
So not one but two giant steps away from genuine truth-seeking.
… Read the restPresumably, in the AAA’s tradition, the promotion of the “public understanding of