Haleh Esfandiari and Robert S. Litwak point out some ironies of Ahmadinejad’s visit.

While in New York, President Ahmadinejad, at a dinner arranged by the Iranian Mission to the United Nations, met with American scholars who work on U.S.-Iranian relations and with representatives of nongovernmental organizations. Yet the Iranian president failed to explain why he was inviting comments from this group even as his government was curtailing the activities of Iranian NGO’s and preventing their members from attending workshops outside Iran. The Ahmadinejad government’s broad crackdown on Iran’s civil society, described by some observers as a cultural revolution, has essentially criminalized the activities of academics, journalists, and activists for women’s rights and human rights.

And labor unions, I believe; … Read the rest

Polly Toynbee went to the abortion rights meeting. ‘Some of us had to pinch ourselves, time-warped back to old 1967 arguments against women’s same old enemies.’

Joining the Catholics and evangelicals, that pathetic weather-vane windbag, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has now dithered his way into the debate…His contribution was yet another intellectual contortion to mollify his church’s woman-hating, gay-bashing, Daily Mail wing…Women’s bodies are always the issue – too unclean to be bishops, and dangerous enough to be covered up by Islam and mikvahed by Judaism. All the Abrahamic faiths find the key to morality in keeping women and their fertility under control. So it will be that 26 male bishops in the Lords will help decide on this

Hitchens says why it’s valid to compare fascist and jihadist ideology even though ‘it’s quite the done thing, in liberal academic circles, to sneer at any comparison between fascist and jihadist ideology.’

Both movements are based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind. (“Death to the intellect! Long live death!” as Gen. Francisco Franco’s sidekick Gonzalo Queipo de Llano so pithily phrased it.) Both are hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons), and both are bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories. Both are obsessed with real and imagined “humiliations” and thirsty for revenge. Both are chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish

Dang, I’m always falling behind in my saint-memorization. I don’t know who the saints are. I don’t even know who all those crazy saints all over California are! I haven’t got a clue. Saint Rose – who? Saint Clement? Saint Diego? Saint Joe? Saint fucking Barbara? I don’t know these people! I’ve heard of Saint Francis, I can deal with that all right, but all these other ones – I suspect some map-makers just took them out of the Oakland phone book one day. And I’d never heard of Padre Pio – I’m happy to say. Padre Pio, indeed; the very name makes the toes curl. Yuk.

And for good reason, it turns out; the guy flounced around the place … Read the rest

Oh look, Theocracy in America.

A collection of major Religious Right groups is seeking to flex some muscle this weekend, screening Republican presidential hopefuls and demanding they show fealty to the fundamentalist political agenda. The so-called “Values Voter Summit” in Washington, D.C., is sponsored by the Family Research Council Action, Focus on the Family Action, the Alliance Defense Fund, American Family Association Action and Gary Bauer’s American Values group. Every major GOP presidential hopeful is slated to appear. “This may be the biggest collection of theocrats in one room since the Salem Witch Trials,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “Their goal is simple: to consolidate their power