Author: Ophelia Benson

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.

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?

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.

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 don’t somehow belong to men, and women aren’t stealing them if they try to get them too.

Women who would otherwise have been housewives would have been housewives because things were rigged against them. That’s what that “otherwise” is pointing at. Willetts is thinking back to a time when it was just taken for granted that women would “be” housewives and that they would not “be” anything else, especially not anything demanding brains and hard work, and he’s thinking of it as if it were a natural or default state which we have now weirdly departed from, with the result that women are grabbing jobs that should have gone to men.

It looks to me as if David Willetts grabbed a job that should have gone to someone who doesn’t think that way.

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 nearby UN headquarters, causation seems a pretty safe bet.

The crowd, which he estimated at 20,000, overwhelmed police forces and the United Nations security guards, and the weapons they used in the attack may have been those they seized from the United Nations guards.

Funny kind of “prayers,” too, if the correlation is indeed causation. Funny kind of “prayers” that can prompt twenty thousand men (yes men – they don’t let women join in) to go on a violent rampage and kill some random innocent people.

Mr. Ahmadzai, the police spokesman, said the demonstrators were angry about the burning of the Koran at the church of Pastor Terry Jones on Mar. 20.

Except it’s not actually “the” Koran that was burnt. Jones didn’t cause the Koran to disappear from the face of the earth. It was one copy out of many millions. It was a calculated insult, and that is all. It was not a felony, much less a capital crime, and a mob in Afghanistan is not an appropriate substitute for a Florida cop in any case.

Shut up your doors on Fridays.

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 students of no religion at all at all. But it turns out that’s wrong and the only issue is that a school of one denomination might exclude students of a different denomination and David Quinn knows of one where it doesn’t work that way, he guesses, as far as he knows, so there’s no problem with churchy schools and everything is copacetic.

A cynic might say oh really? So a Catholic school doesn’t exclude children from Muslim backgrounds? Or Protestant ones? Or secular or atheist ones? But decent people don’t care what a cynic might say, so let’s rejoice to know that denominational schools are a wonderful brilliant great terrific perfect idea.