Author: Ophelia Benson

Brendan O’Neill is a piece of work. You knew that, but I’m saying it anyway. He had himself a good time defending the pope against the evil atheists last year, but I didn’t know he’d recently amused himself by defending Dominique Strauss-Kahn against “the feminists”; but it was so.

I can’t help feeling that his arrest on charges of sexual assault is being turned into a modern-day medieval drama, a kind of reality-show version of the witch trials of old, in which DSK has been assigned the role of all-purpose hate figure rather than suspect in a crime.

Oh, sure you can. Did you try? Really try?

And feminists hate DSK because… well, because he is a man, and even worse than that he’s a man who has reportedly flirted and engaged in saucy dialogue with his female staff in the past.

Oh, yeah – those pesky puritanical prim humorless “feminists” who hate all men because they are men, and especially they hate men who flirt and engage in saucy dialogue with their servants.

What he means, of course, is that feminists are less than keen on men who attempt to rape maids in hotels. He neglects to explain why he finds that distaste so risibly contemptible. What a shit he is.

Yes we just can’t ever hate women enough, there always has to be a new way to hate them even more.

At least 38 of the 50 states across America have introduced foetal homicide laws that were intended to protect pregnant women and their unborn children from violent attacks by third parties – usually abusive male partners – but are increasingly being turned by renegade prosecutors against the women themselves.

South Carolina was one of the first states to introduce such a foetal homicide law. National Advocates for Pregnant Women has found only one case of a South Carolina man who assaulted a pregnant woman having been charged under its terms, and his conviction was eventually overturned. Yet the group estimates there have been up to 300 women arrested for their actions during pregnancy.

That’s some serious hatred.

There’s nothing like a good healthy sense of priorities, is there. What could be more urgent for Irish Catholics than to pitch a huge fit about an art installation that has something to do with “the Virgin Mary”?

In Our Lady and Other Queer Santas, Chicana artist Alma Lopez will exhibit her picture Our Lady, a digital pastiche of Our Lady of Guadeloupe, a 16th-century Peruvian manifestation of the Virgin Mary…The Madonna in a bikini, basically…

On last Friday’s Liveline, one of Ireland’s most popular radio shows, presenter Joe Duffy was flooded with calls from irate Catholics mortified by this “blasphemous” artwork.

You see what I mean. That’s what these irate Catholics are irate about – a picture of something labeled “the Virgin Mary.” Not Magdalen laundries, not child rape by priests, not industrial schools, not the Catholic church’s relentless stranglehold on the people of Ireland for generation after generation – but a picture of a putative “manifestation” of a putative woman who lived (if she lived) two thousand years ago in unblemished obscurity like nearly everyone else in human history.

Cork South Central TD Jerry Buttimer chimed in, saying the university should not be supporting an event that was “overtly blasphemous and blatantly disrespectful” and that “those in charge at UCC should consider whether or not it is appropriate to permit this exhibition to take place on its campus without affording others the opportunity to present an alternative and balanced point of view”.

Point of view? Alternative point of view? Balanced point of view?

………….What would that be? A kitsch “Mary” from a souvenir shop? Our Lady of Guadeloupe in a burqa topped by a full set of sealskins suitable for winter in Barrow? Joseph in a Speedo?

Lopez has been under attack for her artwork since it was first exhibited in California in 2001. The current campaign is headed by America Needs Fatima, a Mariolatrous US group that organises anti-abortion and anti-blasphemy rallies…Ireland, meanwhile, is facing its first blasphemy controversy since the Fianna Fáil/Green government introduced a new blasphemy law. Buckley’s claim that all Irish people revere Mary chimes dangerously with that law’s definition of blasphemy as something likely to cause “outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of [a] religion”. UCC could yet have a case on its hands.

Priorities, people. Fix them.

The BBC continues to pretend not to understand.

Geert Wilders has been acquitted of “inciting hatred” because the judges managed to distinguish between annoying/unpleasant/offensive and illegal. The BBC isn’t so sure about that.

With Thursday’s acquittal, it appears that Mr Wilders’s radical words are now more mainstream in a country that for decades was viewed as one of the most liberal and tolerant in the world.

But “liberal” and “tolerant” about what? About Islam, mostly. But there are difficulties with being “liberal” and “tolerant” about Islam, given that Islam itself is not altogether “liberal” and “tolerant.” Many critics of Islam, partly including Wilders, are critics of it because it is not altogether liberal and tolerant, or egalitarian or fair. The BBC’s implied claim that all the liberalism and tolerance are on the side of Islam and all the opposition to liberalism and tolerance are on the side of critics of Islam, is profoundly wrong.

Mr Wilders is an enormously popular politician, his Freedom Party the third
largest in parliament, and many analysts say Thursday’s acquittal will only
boost his popularity in the immigrant-wary Dutch mainstream.

…

In turn, the government is supporting many of his anti-immigrant positions,
from limiting immigration to banning face-covering attire.

But “immigrant” is not synonymous with Muslim and vice versa. Even if Wilders conflates the two, explicitly or by suggestion, the BBC should not follow his lead. “Face-covering attire” can’t just be reduced to “immigrant” so banning it can’t just be reduced to “anti-immigrant.” Yes there’s overlap and confusion and suspect motivation, but that’s all the more reason to make the distinctions.

“I’m very disappointed,” said one Dutch Moroccan, Zenap al-Garboni, eating a bagel with her children in a restaurant near the courthouse.

“He should not create hate and that’s what he’s doing. He’s creating hate
against Islam.”

Nobody should be required to love Islam.