Author: Ophelia Benson

Let me get this straight – a guy has some video evidence that his wife and her sister were in the company of some men when he wasn’t there, and so they’re going to be executed? That’s the deal? Yes, that’s the deal.

Two Iranian sisters convicted of adultery face being stoned to death after the supreme court upheld the death sentences against them, the Etemad newspaper reported. The two sisters were found guilty of adultery – a capital crime in Islamic Iran – after the husband of one of the pair presented video evidence showing them in the company of other men while he was away.

It’s not even video evidence that they were having sex with the men – which, to be perfectly honest, shouldn’t be a capital crime in any case – it’s just evidence that they were in the company of other men. And that’s a capital crime. Well why am I surprised; the penalty for allowing one’s hijab to slip half an inch back from one’s forehead is 80 lashes. Don’t skip over that, now – consider it. For allowing a tiny strip of hair to show at the edge of a hijab a woman is handcuffed facedown to a wooden bed and whipped with a cane 80 times. Pretty, isn’t it.

There’s just no end to the joys of fundamentalism, is there. Health, hygiene, avoidance of untreatable illness and death, adherence to established rational medical norms? As nothing in the balance compared to what is said to be ‘a basic tenet of Islam’ – no matter how stupid, trivial, pettifogging, mindless, exaggerated, plain bloody absurd the ‘basic tenet’ is. This should (again) be something out of The Onion but apparently isn’t.

Muslim medical students are refusing to obey hygiene rules brought in to stop the spread of deadly superbugs, because they say it is against their religion. Women training in several hospitals in England have raised objections to removing their arm coverings in theatre and to rolling up their sleeves when washing their hands, because it is regarded as immodest in Islam.

Right. Those things between the wrists and the elbows – they’re obscene and sexual and smutty, on women, so they have to be kept wrapped up at all times or else men will run amok and start trying to copulate with them. (Never mind how, they just will.) This is a basic tenet of Islam.

Universities and NHS trusts fear many more will refuse to co-operate with new Department of Health guidance, introduced this month, which stipulates that all doctors must be “bare below the elbow”. The measure is deemed necessary to stop the spread of infections such as MRSA and Clostridium difficile, which have killed hundreds.

Yes but stopping the spread of lethal infections is not a basic tenet of Islam. So there.

[T]he Islamic Medical Association insisted that covering all the body in public, except the face and hands, was a basic tenet of Islam. “No practising Muslim woman – doctor, medical student, nurse or patient – should be forced to bare her arms below the elbow,” it said.

A thoughtful, careful, reasonable, sensible response. Never mind the health and safety of the patients (some of whom are Muslim, don’t forget), no practising Muslim doctor or nurse should be required to obey the medically necessary rules. Well done Islamic Medical Association. (Is there an alternative? A Sensible Islamic Medical Association? A Not Quite So Deranged Islamic Medical Association? A Quasi-rational Islamic Medical Association?)

Irritated readers of Talking Philosophy are emailing me to scold me about the removed post on debating David Irving, so just to make things clear: I have nothing to do with TP, I can’t post there, I have no access to the equipment, I don’t make decisions; it’s nothing to do with me. I didn’t take the post down. I work for the magazine, but I have no connection with the blog.

The deniers have the post here.)

I went to the central library today (Sunday) to get Deborah Lipstadt’s Denying the Holocaust and Richard Evans’s Lying About Hitler. Lipstadt says something very apposite to Julian’s question (‘Should I debate a Holocaust denier?) on page 26.

There is a qualitative difference between barring someone’s right to speech and providing him or her with a platform from which to deliver a message.

And it’s a difference that a lot of people, probably especially in the US, have a hard time keeping in mind.

Oh, lordy, lordy, lordy, children – I’ve spent too much of today arguing with a ‘Holocaust denier,’ or perhaps just a brainless troll pretending to be a Holocaust denier. I knew I shouldn’t, I knew it was as futile an enterprise as cooking rice one grain at a time or shoveling snow with a teaspoon, but I couldn’t stop myself. The troll kept answering and answering and answering, and I just couldn’t leave it alone. I’m such a fool!

But, I don’t know, perhaps it was inevitable. It kept saying ‘there’s no evidence’ so how could I not go fetch some evidence to show it that there is? It would be expecting too much. Or maybe it wouldn’t, but anyway, that’s what I did. But of course the stupid troll couldn’t be bothered to look at the evidence, it was having much too much fun doing nothing at all apart from repeating over and over that there was no evidence. It only does it to annoy, because it knows it teases – I know that, I know that perfectly well, it’s like those people in the playground, you don’t argue with them, you just walk away. But – well, I’m not that sane, that’s all; I never have been.

The thing is that Julian wanted readers’ thoughts on whether he should or shouldn’t debate David Irving.

The issue for me is not about whether Irving should be allowed to air his views: I think he should. The serious issue for me is whether it is right to give people with such views a prominent public platform, thereby legitimising them in some way. In theory, it sounds nobler to always fight the truth out in public, but we surely can’t ignore the fact that the attention someone gets has as much, if not more, of an impact than what we actually say when we debate them.

Just so, and in particular in the case of David Irving, because he is a falsifier as well as a denier, so not only is that an excellent reason not to give him the oxygen of publicity, it’s also an excellent reason not to debate him since it’s impossible to trust him to tell the truth. Most people yesterday said Don’t do it – and then today the deniers turned up. There’s a guy called Fredrick Toben, who has a Wikipedia entry. And there’s a troll, who has nothing in particular except the ability to say ‘There is not a shred of evidence’ over and over despite having evidence handed to him on an engraved silver charger with tortoiseshell inlay. He got up my nose, that troll did. So I spent too much time typing words for him to read and then ignore. I’m a fool, a fool!

But maybe not. After all I’m interested in this kind of thing, these cherished and protected delusions (and of course that’s what they think or pretend to think of us – the ‘Holocaust industry’ as they call it), so it’s not such a waste to explore it in depth now and then. Only the stupidity is so exasperating, you know.

Never mind, I spent time exploring Holocaust Denial on Trial, which is certainly well worth doing. An education in history all by itself, for one thing.

Actually I guess the reason it annoys me is not the time but the sense of, how shall I say, contamination. They’re not a crowd I much want to sit around chatting with, frankly.