Author: Ophelia Benson

  • FGM Actually Glorious and Empowering

    Pesky Western feminists just don’t understand.

  • Texas Official Fired for ‘Siding’ With Evolution

    She forwarded an e-mail from NCSE about a talk by Barbara Forrest – ‘an offense that calls for termination.’

  • Review of Ibn Warraq’s Leaving Islam

    Critics of Islam and ‘apostates’ are subject to fatwas and death threats, prison and murder, in many parts of the world.

  • A new charade by the Islamists

    Islamists have become good at their own kind of PR. Every once in a while they find something to raise hell over and threaten the world. The charade over cartoons of Mohammad is still lingering on in the Media, and now they have started another bizarre show of offended feelings and indignant masses over a teddy bear called Mohammad in a class room of 7-8 year old kids in Sudan. The timing of this teddy bear show puzzles me greatly. Is the concurrent teddy bear saga and Annapolis conference merely a coincidence or does the timing tell us something?

    It is irrelevant whether the English teacher has done this deliberately or it is just “an innocent mistake.” Whatever the reason, the action of the Sudanese government must be categorically condemned. This is a deliberate political action with a political aim. I do not believe that the Sudanese government is alone on this. In my opinion this is a well planned and well coordinated action by the Islamist movement. This is an Islamist style PR action.

    Every once in a while we get to witness a show of so-called fanatic Muslim frenzy. These serials of soap opera-like reality shows are creating a real dilemma for the international world. Questions are raised in perplexed moods. In the West people are divided. Some, out of fear or frustration, feel Islam should be left alone and free from any criticism and satire. Others get vengeful over the so-called “Muslim communities” and vent their anger in a racist manner on them. These reactions are wrong and will not solve the problem.

    We must get to the root causes. Two basic questions must be asked: Is this really a spontaneous demonstration of people’s indignation and hurt feelings, or is it an orchestrated political demonstration to intimidate and terrorize the world? Is compromise and compassion with the angry mob the solution?

    In my opinion this is a political demonstration orchestrated and organised by political Islam. The civilized and humane world must stand against it. We must condemn all such actions and expose them as they really are: a political stage-managed demonstration by the Islamist bullies. However, this is only one part of the solution.

    The Islamists have been helped by the actions of the USA, Britain and their allies. The Iraq war, Afghanistan, the war on Lebanon, and the fate of the Palestinians and the injustices they suffer play into the hands of Islamists. People in the Middle East and North Africa are increasingly becoming indignant, angry and frustrated over these wars and injustices. This is no soap opera. It is real. It is justified.

    To stand against the US-led aggression is another part of the solution. Islamists are exploiting this real anger; they are manipulating people’s frustration. They pose as their spokesperson. Islamists are not representative of the people. They are merely cashing in on real sufferings, real anger and real frustration felt by millions of people. We must stand against both poles. We must not fall into the trap of “Easterners” and “Westerners”, Muslims, non-Muslims. This is not clash of civilization. This is not a cultural war. This is a real political war with deep roots. And we must address the roots.

    As long as we explain the complicated issues with oversimplified dichotomies, such as moderates vs fundamentalists, Muslims vs non- Muslims, West vs East we will not be able to tackle the real problem. The real problem is over political power and political supremacy between the USA and the Islamists. Religion, culture, race and colour happen to be convenient tools for distorting the real war, for falsifying the real interests. This is a political war as well as an ideological war. We need to fight it in both battlegrounds. A world free from aggression, injustices and religious frenzy depends on this.

  • ‘1.5 Million Muslims Know Who I Am’

    Greg Palast is a radical campaigning journalist and author. He broke the British ‘Lobbygate’ scandal of 1999, which revealed that the Labour government was twisting policy to fit the needs of its financial backers. He revealed how George Bush stole the presidency in 2000 and continues to make the case that Bush stole the presidency in 2004. He is one of the most vocal opponents of the Iraq war.

    He encountered British MP George Galloway in 2003 and initially defended him:

    I sought additional material from Galloway and other sources to bolster that defense and to my surprise, found more that damned him than supported him. As a journalist, I could not bury the findings.

    Throughout his career, Galloway has been accused of a large amount of financial skullduggery. From his days at the charity War on Want and the Dundee Labour clubs, to the Mariam Appeal and the Oil for Food programme, he leaves a trail of empty wallets and bitter recrimination. Yet what emerges is nothing so grand as fraud or embezzlement; it’s missing taxi receipts, mysterious break-ins, the chiselling and cutting of corners. Galloway’s life, on paper, is a murky fog through which transactions and motives can occasionally be discerned.

    The difficulty for Galloway’s biographer and every other writer is that it is almost impossible to discuss the evidence against him. Galloway is fond of the British libel laws, that friend of the ruling class that places the burden of proof entirely on the defendant. David Morley knows this and, wisely, keeps things nebulous. His book states that, ‘when journalists ask [Galloway] questions about his lifestyle he will sometimes jokingly refer to the help he has had from Fleet Street.’

    In her published diaries, House Music, Galloway’s opponent Oona King says that:

    For legal reasons, I have had to leave out many interesting sections of this diary relating to George Galloway… When either he or I is six foot under, they can be exhumed. Until then, suffice to say, there is more than enough in the public domain that gives pause for thought about the way George Galloway chooses to operate.

    So let’s follow King and Morley in sticking to the public domain. What do we know about George Galloway?

    Galloway has said that ‘the disappearance of the Soviet Union was the biggest catastrophe of my life.’ To Saddam Hussein, he said, ‘I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability. And I want you to know that we are with you until victory, until victory, until Jerusalem!’ We know that Galloway signed a petition demanding the release of Saddam’s number-two Tariq Aziz, with whom Galloway once danced in a North African nightclub. The Iraqi ‘resistance’, jihadis who kill civilians, socialists and aid workers, is ‘defending all the Arabs, and they are defending all the people of the world from American hegemony.’ When trade unionists broke down in tears at their recollections of torture under Ba’athists, Galloway sneered that their visible emotion was ‘a party trick’. He called Iraqi trade union leader Abdullah Muhsin an ‘Iraqi Quisling’. He said of the Syrian dictator that ‘Syria is lucky to have Bashar al-Assad as her President.’ We know that he described Hamas as a ‘Palestinian national resistance movement, analogous to the organisations fighting for freedom in Kashmir,’ and said at a London antiwar rally that ‘I AM HERE to glorify the Lebanese resistance, Hezbollah, and I AM HERE to glorify the resistance leader, Hassan Nasrallah.’ He has also said that ‘in poor third world countries like Pakistan, politics is too important to be left to petty squabbling politicians… only the armed forces can really be counted on to hold such a country together.’

    All this makes Galloway’s alleged financial corruption seem almost irrelevant.

    Yet his reputation in the West was of a principled maverick, speaking truth to power. And this is the approach that Morley takes. His preface states that, ‘In broad terms, I am on the same side as George Galloway regarding the Middle East… In my view, Galloway was right that invading Iraq was the wrong decision.’ Galloway comes across as a bit dodgy and a bit extremist but right about one big thing.

    Although Morley is a little naïve about his subject, he provides bang-on insights. The nickname, ‘Gorgeous George,’ comes from a 1985 press conference at which Galloway was being grilled about his adventures at War on Want. In particular, he had claimed a £186 bill from a Mykonos restaurant as expenses for a trip to an Athens conference. Journalist Brian McCartney asked, ‘Obviously, there is some interest that you travelled to Greece in the company of someone else, presumably a female. Is that the case?’ Galloway’s current partner was also at this restaurant; what McCartney was driving at was that he had been drinking sangria with his girlfriend at the expense of a humanitarian charity.

    After some flapping and dodging, Galloway said this:

    I travelled to, and spent time in, Greece with lots of people, many of whom were women… some of whom were known carnally to me. Some of whom were known carnally to me. I actually had sexual intercourse with some of the people in Greece.

    It was classic Galloway. There were a few days of tabloid headlines and he looked foolish for a while. But being known as a womaniser does not do your long-term reputation any harm. And the relevant issue – that Galloway may or may not have diverted charitable funds for his own personal use – was blown out of the water.

    Another anecdote stands out. In 1988, Pakistan’s dictator Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq died. Galloway described the event, accurately, as the ‘death of a hangman.’ Bad move. Several imams condemned Galloway’s attack. Although other Pakistani Muslims agreed with Galloway’s criticisms of Zia’s rule, the lesson was learnt: ‘Since then,’ Morley says, ‘he has been very careful to cultivate his relations with ethnic groups, particularly in Bethnal Green and Bow.’

    Too right. Out of all the government MPs who voted for the war, Galloway chose Oona King to defeat in the nastiest campaign of the 2005 general election. Oona wasn’t a Blair Babe. She was a serious leftwing politician who voted against the government’s anti-terror laws on civil liberties grounds. When interviewed, she would agree to talk on only two issues: housing and genocide. A hardworking constituency MP, King was sidelined by New Labour because she refused to write an article condemning Ken Livingstone, who was then running against the party for London Mayor.

    She agonised over the vote for war and finally backed it on humanitarian grounds. That was enough. Galloway could tell Bethnal’s 36% Muslim population that Labour were making war on Muslims abroad and making war on Muslims at home. His party workers drove through the streets, shouting through megaphones, ‘Every vote for Labour is a bullet in the back of an Iraqi child.’ The campaign turned into a referendum on Iraq. Local Labour man Josh Peck gives this account of a typical ‘debate’:

    Oona and George both agreed to speak in a public meeting, the first head-to-head. There were about twenty residents and another forty or fifty Respect supporters who booed, heckled and jeered Oona whenever she spoke. It’s a very effective technique… There were another couple of teachers there who were well-known SWP [Socialist Workers Party] activists. They said things like, ‘If it wasn’t for you killing Iraqi babies, we could afford to keep that fire engine.’ Even this came back to the war.

    Galloway’s Respect party was an alliance between the SWP and conservative Muslims. To keep its new friends on board, the party threw out its commitments to secularism, female equality and gay rights, which SWP leader Lindsey German dismissed as a ‘shibboleth.’ That is Galloway’s legacy, if nothing else: he has brought the communalism of the BNP into left-wing politics, and brought religious reaction into left-wing politics.

    Yet these are hard times for Galloway. He has been discredited by an ill-advised appearance on a game show, in which he made light of a fellow contestant’s alcohol problem and declared that he was the most famous person on the programme because ‘1.5 billion Muslims know who I am.’

    His Respect party has descended into internal warfare. The SWP expelled many of Galloway’s supporters, and activist Rania Khan spoke at a meeting of ‘the excitement she felt when first joining Respect and how she looked forward to attending meetings, now she is scared of the arguments, the bullying and threatening behaviour.’ In response, Galloway shouted, ‘off you go – fuck off, fuck off the lot of you,’ and later locked the SWP out of Respect’s offices. It’s a long, hilarious story, and you can read the whole thing on Harry’s Place.

    This kind of internecine farce seems to be a pattern. Oona King says:

    Once the press reported that Galloway was suing me in December 2004, more and more people contacted my office with information about past events, many of them still incandescent with rage at Mr Galloway’s behaviour – even years later. I had been unaware that his career trajectory often followed a pattern: initially received with open arms by a group or organisation placing great faith in him, they then felt betrayed, and denounced him in the strongest terms.

    Now, we on the Euston left are often accused of being a little obsessed with George Galloway; ‘turning,’ in Johann Hari’s words, ‘towards Galloway to give him another deserved – but increasingly irrelevant – spit in the face.’

    There’s some truth in that, but interest in Galloway goes beyond his actual influence; he fascinates as a symbol, a freakshow, a grotesque parody of leftwing politics. And one of the qualities I admire about Galloway is his resilience, and his ability to make a comeback; he walks away from the smoking ruins, whistling, cigar in hand, already thinking of the next opportunity, and planning his next big score.

    There are murmurs that Galloway may stand for the Poplar seat. It looks as if Gorgeous George isn’t done yet.

    Gorgeous George: The Life and Adventures of George Galloway, David Morley, Politicos 2007

  • Sudanese Views Over Mobear Not All the Same

    Some ‘hotheads’ demand the sword, many people are ashamed and angry.

  • Meet the Sudanese Thinker

    ‘We’ll make a mosh pit, head bang together and proclaim “down with the infidel teacher”. Yaaay!’

  • International Appeal to Reinstate Malalai Joya

    Joya has been an outspoken critic of the heavy presence of warlords in the Afghan parliament.

  • Dawkins Site’s Favorite 100 Articles

    Notice numero uno…

  • Pope Eager to Chat With Muslim ‘Leaders’

    Excited about command to love God – yes let’s make everyone do that.

  • The silent women whose voices we never hear

    I heard Robin Fox explaining that democracy is not ‘natural’ on NPR this morning. He said we think that what we’re used to is human nature, but it’s not, it’s just what we’re used to. Most people in the world are used to tribalism, he went on, and that’s what they want. They don’t care about nation or categories like ‘Arab,’ they care about family and tribe and what brings honour to them.

    It’s interesting, and persuasive up to a point, but only up to a point. For one thing, there are objective benefits that tend to go with democracy and don’t tend to go with tribalism. And for a perhaps more significant and more far-reaching thing, what does Fox mean by ‘they’? He means what people always mean by ‘they’ in such contexts: he means the people who determine what ‘the tribe’ wants, and in tribes and all other hierarchical patriarchal arrangements, that means the people who have the power to do that, and that means (some of) the men. In other words Fox doesn’t actually know what everyone wants, because he can’t, because the people without power are silenced. They don’t get to sit around with the visiting anthropologist and tell him what’s what.

    Natasha Walter could perhaps fill in the picture a little. She went back to Afghanistan last year, and was shocked and depressed at what she found. On her previous visit, soon after the Taliban was kicked out, she went to a ‘dirt-poor village’ and met women involved in a literacy project after years of no education and house arrest under the Taliban.

    When I asked the students, who ranged from 13-year-old girls to 50-year-old widows, if they thought all women in Afghanistan wanted more freedom and equality, my translator struggled to keep up with the clamour: “Of course we do,” said one widow furiously. “Even women who are not allowed to come to this class want that. But our husbands and brothers and fathers don’t want it. The mullahs keep saying freedom is not good for us.”

    On her second visit, the room was empty.

    “They were threatening us, telling us not to do it any more, and we were scared. For a while we continued, but we were afraid that they might do something worse. This place is a place of Taliban. Neighbours may work for the government in the morning but at night they are the same Taliban with the same thoughts.”

    All very tribal or familial – but ‘they’ are not happy about it. The women are miserable. Let’s not be too sure they don’t want those funny foreign things but would much prefer to stick with their good old families and tribes.

    Human Rights Watch says that a third of districts in Afghanistan are now without girls’ schools, due to attacks on teachers and students by the Taliban and other anti-government elements; and traditional practices such as child marriage and baad, in which women are exchanged like objects in tribal disputes, still continue unchallenged. “Every day women are sacrificed for their family or tribe,” Nilab Mobarez, a 45-year-old doctor who stood recently as a vice-presidential candidate, tells me angrily. “We still do not have the judicial system to resolve this.” Women who stand up against oppressive traditions are vulnerable; the number of assassinations and threats against women working for the government and international organisations is rising.

    Let’s not be too sure all those women are delighted to be sacrificed for their family or tribe. It doesn’t sound as if they are.

    Walter talks to Malalai Joya.

    “I have only just moved here,” Joya says. “I have to keep changing my house. I hate guns, but I have to have men with guns guarding me all the time. One day they will kill me. They kill women who struggle against them.”…”Here there is no democracy, no security, no women’s rights,” she says. “When I speak in parliament they threaten me. In May they beat me by throwing bottles of water at me and they shouted, ‘Take her and rape her.’ These men who are in power, never have they apologised for their crimes that they committed in the wars, and now, with the support of the US, they continue with their crimes in a different way. That is why there is no fundamental change in the situation of women.”

    Then she makes a crucial point.

    Joya talks like this to me, furiously, for more than an hour, almost weeping as she catalogues the crimes against women that still keep them in a state of fear: from Safia Ama Jan, the leading women’s rights campaigner assassinated in Kandahar earlier this year, to Nadia Anjuman, a poet murdered in Herat last year; from Amina, a married woman who was stoned to death in Badakhshan in 2005, to Sanobar, an 11-year-old girl who was raped and exchanged for a dog in a reported dispute among warlords in Kunduz in northern Afghanistan last month. She is desperate for people to take account of the silent women whose voices we never hear.

    That’s just it you see – we never hear their voices because they’re not allowed to use them. They’re not quiet because they’re content, they are silenced. It’s very very important to keep that always in mind when trying to think clearly about these subjects. Fox is of course right that it’s silly to take it for granted that our way of doing things is the natural and best way, but it’s mistaken to assume that the way group or tribe X does things is the way all members of group or tribe X wants to do them – it’s mistaken to forget that whole swathes of people may be systematically prevented from ever saying or acting on what they want, and that powerful people don’t invariably treat powerless people kindly and generously.

  • Confusion has its uses

    Are you shy? Introverted? Reserved? Hostile? Easily bored? Hypercritical? Tightly wound? Quarrelsome? High maintenance? Have you considered medication? It could be that KlineGlasgowSmith has just the pill for you. Do you have restless legs? A limp dick? Flat hair? Do you get hungry several times a day? Do you scratch a lot? You could have a treatable syndrome: please turn on your tv, and the right ad for your condition will appear sooner than you expect.

    Frederick Crews looks at the wonderful interplay between Big Pharma and middle-class hypochondria.

    Most of us naively regard mental disturbances, like physical ones, as timeless realities that our doctors address according to up-to-date research, employing medicines whose appropriateness and safety have been tested and approved by a benignly vigilant government. Here, however, we catch a glimpse of a different world in which convictions, perceived needs, and choices regarding health care are manufactured along with the products that will match them…Clearly, the drug companies’ publicists couldn’t exercise their consciousness-shaping wiles so fruitfully without a prior disposition among the populace to strive for self-improvement through every legal means…Americans have required little prodding to believe that a medication can neutralize their social handicaps and supply them with a better personality than the one they were dealt by an inconsiderate fate.

    See, that’s where I elude their clutches; I’ve never wanted a better personality, even though I would never describe my personality as the ideal personality for everyone to aspire to. I just happen to like mine, that’s all. I like being grouchy and surly and difficult; it suits me; I’m used to it. I’m bemused by people who want to be warmer and more gregarious. What an odd thing to want, I always think, pounding another nail into the board over the window.

    I didn’t know about this though – drug companies concealed the side effects of SSRIs and argued in court that there was insufficient evidence for them – until –

    Eli Lilly bought the marketing rights to a near relative of its own patent-lapsed Prozac. According to the new drug’s damning patent application, it was less likely than Prozac to induce “headaches, nervousness, anxiety, insomnia, inner restlessness…, suicidal thoughts and self mutilation”.

    Fascinating, isn’t it? Deny the side effects until the patent lapses and it’s time to sell a new one, and then mention the side effects. Don’t I feel clever and vindicated for having no urge to take pills to make me Nicer.

    Then there’s the way the DSM is geared to validating ‘disorders’ so that psychiatrists can treat them and insurance companies will treat them. (This is US of course, not relevant to other places.)

    As for psychiatry’s inability to settle on a discrete list of disorders that can remain impervious to fads and fashions, that is an embarrassment only to clear academic thinkers like these two authors. For bureaucratized psychological treatment, and for the pharmaceutical industry that is now deeply enmeshed in it, confusion has its uses and is likely to persist.

    Great phrase, that: confusion has its uses. It does indeed.

  • Bunglawala tells us where he stands

    A couple of days ago I asked what if there had been (quoting Bunglawala) ‘apparent intention to offend Islamic sensibilities or defame the honour and name of the Prophet Muhammad’ – would that make the arrest of Gibbons okay?

    Should ‘defaming the honour and name of the Prophet Muhammad’ or ‘offending Islamic sensibilities’ be a criminal offense under the law? It’s good that Bunglawala said Gibbons shouldn’t have been arrested, but his reason for saying so is not so good, and the fact that the BBC is still automatically phoning the MCB for the obligatory comment is also not good. The BBC still needs to expand its Rolodex.

    Bunglawala obliged us by answering the question*, and what do you know, he answered it as I thought he would; he answered it as a theocrat would answer it.

    Muslim majority countries have their own laws and customs. If you set out to deliberately insult the Prophet Muhammad in a country where such behaviour is regarded as unacceptable and against the law then I would have little sympathy for you.

    And that’s the man the BBC still thinks is the first person they should phone for a comment on these issues – that’s the man who is still often the only Muslim quoted in its Muslim-relevant reporting – that’s the man who is still considered and treated as some kind of establishment, obvious, central, representative, sane, reasonable, non-extremist non-wacky spokesperson for all British Muslims. It’s astonishing.

    *Thanks to mirax for alerting me.

  • Turkish Publisher Faces Jail for Atheist Book

    Dawkins’s publishers threatened with legal action by prosecutors who accuse TGD of ‘insulting believers.’

  • Nick Cohen on Liberal Condescension

    How does Garton Ash know what seeds Hirsi Ali is planting in the minds of Muslim women?

  • Garton Ash on How to Get Along

    When a Muslim says the Koran favours free speech, why argue?

  • Bunglawala: Gibbons Case a ‘Silly Affair’

    Ridiculous case – Sudan already has a poor image – silly affair – Sun readers barbarous too.

  • UK Peers to Visit Gibbons

    FO ‘pleased that they have been able to convey the views of British Muslims to the Sudanese authorities.’

  • Deborah Lipstadt on Irving at Oxford Union

    ‘How does [Tyrl] propose “debating” someone such as David Irving who is a proven falsifier of history?’

  • Book or no book?

    Ed Husain takes Ayaan Hirsi Ali to task.

    Just as Wahhabites and Islamists bypass scholarship, context, and history in the name of “returning to the book”, Hirsi Ali and others such as Robert Spencer and Ibn Warraq commit exactly the same error…Let’s take the question of apostasy. At an Evening Standard debate the other night, Rod Liddle had no qualms in declaring Islam, with a barrage of other baseless abuse, “a fascistic ideology”. Why? Because the Qur’an commands the killing of those who abandon it…[T]here is no verse in the Qur’an that calls for the killing of apostates…There is no stronger argument against religious fanatics than to illustrate the scriptural weaknesses of their case.

    Well, maybe so, when you’re dealing with religious fanatics, but that still leaves you with the problem of having to argue over what’s in a 1400-year-old book – it still leaves you with the problem of worrying about what ‘scripture’ says instead of about what is best for human beings in the light of current knowledge and accumulated understanding and moral insight.

    When ex-Muslims such as Hirsi Ali ignore the nuances, complexities, and plurality inherent within Islam…then she plays into the hands of extremists and allows their discourse to dominate one of the great faiths of our world. Worse, it creates a public space in which attacking all Muslims and Islam becomes acceptable, even fashionable.

    Attacking Islam is and should be acceptable, and even fashionable. Attacking all Muslims of course should not, but attacking Islam (and any other religion) should. Attacking people is bad, attacking ideas and beliefs is not.

    Timothy Garton Ash is also pondering the issue.

    When a Muslim letter-writer in yesterday’s Guardian tells us, with the aid of Qur’anic references, that Islam, properly understood, supports “the vital principle of freedom of speech”, what possible interest have we non-Muslim liberals in arguing against him?

    None in arguing against his support of free speech, certainly…but there are risks in basing that support on claims that the Koran is really liberal after all, because there are always going to be plenty of people who will offer up different Koranic references to support the claim that it’s not.

    Nick Cohen disputes Garton Ash’s view.

    Garton Ash met Hirsi Ali at an electric meeting in London on Wednesday. Unlike Buruma he had the good sense and good grace to think again and he gave her a public apology. Nevertheless, he stuck to the argument that there was no point in liberals treating her as a heroine because her abandonment of Islam and embrace of atheism meant her arguments carried no weight with Muslims. Instead he told us to encourage those Muslims who reject the stoning of women because they dispute its scriptural authority. Religious debates about whether the Prophet Muhammad really approved of stoning may be ‘gobbledegook’, but, he cried, ‘We must support gobbledegook that is compatible with liberal democracy.’

    Well there’s a stirring call. There are risks either way, so I’m not attracted to the ‘support bullshit’ version.

    I’m not sure how he can be certain that Hirsi Ali has no influence. How does he know what seeds she is planting in the minds of Muslim women? I know one former jihadi who thought again after reading Salman Rushdie…Ayaan Hirsi listened to Garton Ash and had two questions. If liberal secularists, like my heckler, didn’t have pride and confidence in their principles, why should they expect anyone else to take them seriously? And if, like Garton Ash, they turned away from democrats and insisted on treating European Muslims as children who can only be spoken to in the baby language of gobbledegook, what right did they have to be surprised if European Muslims reacted with childish petulance rather than the broad-mindedness of full adult citizens?

    Two damn good questions, if you ask me.