Author: Ophelia Benson

Dear zany madcap Nadya Suleman was on tv again last night, in a nice extensive interview that she gave away for free. Like so many of my fellow Murkans, I find her morbidly fascinating. Her peculiar air of warm, even patronizing confidence is especially intriguing. I get the distinct impression that she thinks of herself as deeply wise, even wiser than Angelina Jolie. She was asked, right out in the open, if she had had a lip job, and she said no. I don’t believe her, and neither does anyone else. Of course she bloody did; she wasn’t born with those things! The mystery is why she thinks they’re attractive.

There were some funny parts. I just wanted to mention one or two. Frivolous of me, I know, but I like to let my hair down now and then. One was when the reporter asked if she had any income, and she said no except for student loans. She thinks loans are income! There speaks the American financial sense right there: loans are income. No no no no no, sweetheart, loans are minus income, on account of how you have to pay them back – that’s what ‘loan’ means. They’re really really not income in the sense you need income to be when you have 14 small children 8 of whom are in the ICU. Another was when she said proudly that she never used welfare, then when asked, cheerfully agreed that she was on food stamps to the tune of $490 a month. (This is my Reagan moment; this is where I start talking about welfare queens in Cadillacs driving up to their solid gold mansions in Beverly Hills.) Another was when the reporter asked if she didn’t feel at all concerned about depriving her children of a father and she said perkily ‘They have a father – he’s just not around.’ I suspect that being ‘around’ was what the reporter meant by having one. Another was when she said she believed the octuplets were God’s way of telling her to stop having children. Couldn’t he think of a less drastic way of telling her?! Like just messing up the IVF?

Frivolity over.

I like Evolving Thoughts but I think John Wilkins got the wrong end of the stick when he read Johann’s article ‘Why should I respect these oppressive religions?’ He quoted a bit on the Islamic Declaration of Human Rights and the UN and then commented:

There’s more, but I wanted only to discuss the UN-bashing here. There has been no such resolution by the UN, either by the General Assembly or the Security Council.

It’s not clear from the quoted passage exactly what resolution he means – it could be the Cairo Declaration, it could be the resolution on ‘defamation of religion,’ it could be the change in the role of the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights – or it could be all those, or bits of all of them. But whichever it is, Wilkins is wrong; all three are very real.

Yes, Muslim leaders have asked the UN to ensure respect for religion, but only in the sense of tolerance for all religions, and at the same time they condemned the use of suicide bombers and attacking schools.

But the linked article doesn’t say that at all, it says something quite different.

SPEAKERS at a seminar urged the UN to take stringent measures to ensure respect of every religion and formulate laws to stop blasphemy against the Prophet of Islam (pbuh)…He said Muslims respected West’s freedom of expression but were deeply grieved and angered on the blasphemy of their Prophet (pbuh) and the Holy Quran committed with blatant callousness by the western leaders in the name of freedom of expression. He said freedom of expression had its limits in the West and it must never damage religious feelings of any human being, adding that Muslims would never tolerate the blasphemy of the prophet (pbuh) and other sacred personalities…He asked the UN to legislate to stop blasphemy and disrespect of religions which, he stressed, was essential for world peace. [emphasis added]

That is very far from ‘only in the sense of tolerance for all religions.’ Moreover, it is hardly mollifying that ‘at the same time they condemned the use of suicide bombers and attacking schools’; it’s not as if everything short of suicide bombers and attacking schools is perfectly all right.

Frankly it’s hard to see how anyone could read that passage as asking the UN to ensure respect for religion ‘only in the sense of tolerance for all religions’ when it says quite clearly that the request is for laws to stop blasphemy. Wilkins goes on to say that the UDHR protects religions in Articles 18 and 19 and that this ‘hasn’t changed’ – but the OIC would like it to change, and the Cairo Declaration is in direct opposition to Article 18 in many places. The UDHR protects various rights only as long as it is adhered to, and the OIC has explicitly repudiated it; that is the point of the Cairo Declaration. I think Wilkins perhaps should have looked into the subject a little more. (Most of his readers don’t seem to know the facts either. I keep saying how under-reported this whole subject is.)

Good news, which so far I can’t find anywhere online apart from Facebook, so I can’t link to it in News, so for now I’ll just say it here. Pegah Emambakhsh has been granted refugee status in the UK.

Hurrah!

I’ve transcribed a few bits of the Satanic Verses Nightwaves.

Kenan Malik talked about how different things were twenty years ago, and about the myth that all Muslims were offended by The Satanic Verses. Twenty years ago radicals didn’t identify themselves as Muslim or even Asian, they were black, and that was a political term. But that was then.

When people talk about ‘radical’ in the Islamic context now, what they mean is usually somebody who is religiously fundamentalist; twenty years ago, it meant the very opposite, somebody who was militantly secular, somebody like me; so that whole thing has shifted completely now in the past 20 years.

Jo Glanville of Index on Censorship talked about The Jewel of Medina, and Denise Spellberg’s intervention, and Random House’s instant capitulation.

One of the extraordinary things in their decision was the reason they gave for not publishing; one was the fear of causing offense, but the other was they said that its publication might incite violence, and I thought that was such an extraordinary statement to make, and to show the mindset of a publisher today; you can compare it with Penguin and the position that they took at the time when they had all sorts of threats being made against themselves – to essentially say, not ‘there might be people who might react with violence’ but ‘this book itself might incite violence’ and I think that whole affair really encapsulated the journey that we’ve been on.

Priyamvada Gopal, while defending free speech for all kinds of writing, also made a distinction between Rushdie’s novel on the one hand and the Motoons and The Jewel of Medina on the other.

There are fundamentalisms of different kinds, and we must think about the relationship between discourses of purity, whether they are Western, race-based discourses of purity or Islamic fundamentalist religious discourses of purity – it’s asking us to think – and I would as a literary critic make a distinction between books that invite us to think in complex ways and works that are in some sense intended to titillate or provoke, although I would stand by the right of all of them to be published.

Jo Glanville made another good point.

I think what I’m most concerned about or disturbed by in this argument about offense is the demand that we respect. That we respect religion and we see the United Nations Human Rights Council calling for it, we saw the UN Secretary General calling for it, and actually the only thing that’s going to work is tolerance, not respect, and I think in a plural society that is what we have to push for.

I want to be Jo Glanville’s new best friend.

The Republican mind is a surprising thing at times. Sarah Palin’s sneer at community organizing, Sarah Palin’s sneer at fruit-fly research…and then their jokes.

‘A member of the Florida state Republican committee sent out an email to 8 people that said this:’

From: Carol Carter Friday, January 30, 9:30 AM Subject: FW: Amazing!

I’m confused.

How can 2,000,000 blacks get into Washington, DC in 1 day in sub zero temps when 200,000 couldn’t get out of New Orleans in 85 degree temps with four days notice?

Carol Carter

Jeezis.

Somebody was unamused (so it’s not all Republicans, so I shouldn’t say ‘the Republican mind’ – except that’s obviously not a left-wing ‘joke’) and Carter was told to apologize.

From: Carol Carter January 30, 5:54 PM Subject: Earlier e-mail

I have been asked to send this apology for my earlier e-mail. I am sorry that it was received in a negative manner. I do hope that we are going to be allowed to keep our sense of humor.

As you can now see, it went to very few people. I did add Todd Marks in this apology, as he is in the mix now. I am also sorry to learn that some of these persons are not real team players. There really was no reason for this to go beyond those that I e-mailed (8 people). This was not an e-mail blast as I do not have that capability.
Carol

I’m fascinated by that ‘I do hope that we are going to be allowed to keep our sense of humor.’ Our sense of humor…about people who don’t own cars or don’t have enough money for gas or who are too terrified of losing everything to abandon their houses, being trapped by rising flood waters and drowning in their attics or surviving the floods only to die of dehydration and heatstroke two or three days later. This is something people should have a ‘sense of humor’ about? This is funny?

It’s a sick, sick, sick mind that finds that funny.

As you may have noticed, comments are disabled. I think I know why. They were being bombarded by spammers for a few days, which I didn’t realize until yesterday, at which point I had to waste a vast amount of time deleting all the spam. I told Jeremy about the problem, which is to say I whined about it, without actually asking him to fix it in case it’s not convenient at the moment. I think he may have disabled them pending a less drastic fix (or perhaps, more depressingly, in the absence of a less drastic fix). I hope they’ll be restored eventually; meanwhile you can send comments to me if you like, and I will post them, though obviously there may be a delay.

Update: I spoke too hastily, I should have said I would try to post them; it turns out inserting them directly into the database doesn’t work either. Dratted spammers! Well…I’ll see what can be done, and let you know.

The Atlantic’s rather boring Wunderkind Ross Douthat tells Jerry Coyne what’s what. He breathes heavily for some time in order to come up with the obvious point that many disciplines make various kinds of claims that are not scientific claims and that that’s all right.

One can reason productively about questions that cannot be resolved through falsification tests. If this weren’t the case, philosophy departments, historians, polemicists, and many social “scientists” would be out of business in a hurry.

Yes indeed; very true; well spotted. But…is it relevant?

Now of course religion is not a thing like political philosophy. But there are similarities between the way that belief operates in both religion and in politics. In making their case, an apologist for Christianity and an apologist for, say, liberal democracy are likely to draw on a similarly hodgepodge-ish set of claims – some philosophical, some historical, some scientific, some anthropological and some personal.

Ah, so that’s where you went wrong. Yes, sure, there are similiarities (though frankly not many), but they’re not the point. The point is that religions really do make literal factual truth claims, often with much heat and emphasis; religions do make claims about facts as well as values, and the factual claims are based on…nothing; they’re sheer invention. That’s the point.

At the very end of the piece, Douthat did an incredibly stupid thing, a thing which is more common than one might expect in this day and age.

[T]he standards of scientific rigor simply aren’t the only standards that there are for holding warranted beliefs. And if you applied Coyne’s “method of disproof” standard to every important question in life, you’d end up paralyzed by indecision – you’d never cast a vote or marry a woman, let alone choose which God to worship, or whether to worship one at all.

Oh look, there I was foolishly assuming he was talking to everyone, people in general, which would include me, only to get to the last sentence and realize he was talking only to men. It appears I was intruding the whole time. How disconcerting.