Author: Ophelia Benson

  • What matters, and why?

    Let’s do a thought experiment. Suppose a 24 hour period during which every heterosexual copulation on the planet resulted in conception and then, 48 hours later, spontaneous abortion. Would that be a tragedy?

    Then suppose a 24 hour period during which every infant born between 48 and 72 hours earlier, died. Would that be a tragedy?

    It seems to me that people who think an embryo is just as important as a neonate would answer yes to the first. But what I wonder is, why? Why would that be a tragedy? More particularly, to whom would it be a tragedy? Can something be a tragedy to no one and still be a tragedy?

    The problem is that no one would know about the first event. (Bracket people who are trying to conceive and fail on this particular occasion, for the sake of argument, because that’s a separate issue.) No one would know it had happened, including, obviously, the microscopic cluster of cells it happened to. If no one knows about it, and it has no effect on the outside world (thus being unlike a tree falling in the forest unheard by any humans), in what sense can it be a tragedy?

  • Committee to Protect Journalists on Khalil

    Calls arrest ‘an indication of the fragile state of press freedom in Bangladesh.’

  • AsiaMedia Reports Tasneem Khalil’s Release

    Khalil’s arrest was the latest in a string of military actions against journalists.

  • Drishtipat Reports Tasneem Released

    Staffers in office say he looks physically ok, but badly shaken up.

  • Senior Vets Call for Slaughter of Bullock

    British Cattle Veterinary Association said any risk of TB spreading was unacceptable.

  • Hindus Resist Slaughter of Welsh Bullock

    The ‘sacred’ bullock has tested positive for TB.

  • Pope ‘Creates’ Brazil’s First Saint

    Really?! Out of what, some woman’s rib?

  • BBC Reports Tasneem’s Arrest

    But spells his name wrong.

  • AP Reports on Tasneem Khalil

    Zafar Sobhan of the Daily Star said Khalil was being held without any charge or warrant.

  • Tasneem Khalil

    Update: There are reports that Tasneem has been released, but so far they seem to be reporting each other, all reporting something Human Rights Watch said. It’s not absolutely clear how HRW knows – although Tasneem works for them, so they probably do know. Still, I’ll feel happier when some major media report it. But it’s the middle of the night everywhere but Seattle; no doubt by the time I get on the computer tomorrow there will be lots of major media reports.

    This is terrible. I know Tasneem – well not know, exactly, but we’ve swapped emails, he’s a fan of B&W and sends me links to his excellent articles; I think of him as a friend in Bangladesh. I also think of him as a brave, at risk friend in Bangladesh, and sure enough, they showed up at midnight and took him away. This is not good. Bangladesh does not have a good record on this kind of thing – which is exactly what Tasneem has been reporting on – which is why they showed up at midnight and took him away. Make noise. If you have any way to make noise (blog, newspaper, captive audience, etc), make it. Spread it around. I was alerted by an email from Tasneem’s wife (sent to a bunch of people); I forwarded it to a few people who can make noise; I even took the liberty of forwarding it to Amartya Sen. No, I don’t know him, but I was pretty sure he’d be interested, so why not.

    Hm – I know what I could do. I could break protocol and tell everyone on the B&W mailing list – that’s over a thousand people, many of whom are journalists or academics or BBC producers with inside knowledge of silencing by oppressive regimes (well not many of those that I know of, only one). Yeah, that’s what I’ll do. You do something too if you can.

  • Army Arrests Journalist Tasneem Khalil

    “We are extremely concerned about Tasneem Khalil’s safety,” said Brad Adams of HRW.

  • Moses is so Cool

    Okay, Jesus, whatever works for you, man.

  • Moses is sooooo Irritating

    He is non-judgmental and holier-than-thou at the same time.

  • Moses Goes Pomo

    He’s off to continue his quest to destabilise the univocity of meaning. Vroom vroom.

  • Some Expected the Pope to Be Diplomatic

    But he thinks ‘an assertion of bedrock Christian values is the only way to stem the tide toward secularism.’

  • Implications of Irish Abortion Case

    The ban on abortion reflects the historical influence of the Catholic church.

  • Pope Tells Brazil What to Do

    Moments after arriving in Sao Paulo, the pope was fuming about abortion.

  • Bangladesh: Release Tasneem Khalil

    (London, May 11, 2007) – Bangladesh’s military-backed care-taker government should immediately release Tasneem Khalil, an investigative journalist and part-time Human Rights Watch consultant, who was detained by security forces late last night, Human Rights Watch said today.

    Khalil, 26, is a journalist for the Dhaka-based Daily Star newspaper who conducts research for Human Rights Watch. According to his wife, four men in plainclothes who identified themselves as from the “joint task force”came to the door after midnight on May 11 in Dhaka, demanding to take Khalil away. They said they were placing Khalil “under arrest” and taking him to the Sangsad Bhavan army camp, outside the parliament building in Dhaka.

    “We are extremely concerned about Tasneem Khalil’s safety,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “He has been a prominent voice in Bangladesh for human rights and the rule of law, and has been threatened because of that.”

    The men did not offer a warrant or any charges, Khalil’s wife said. Using threatening language, they searched the house and confiscated Khalil’s passport, two computers, documents, and two mobile phones.

    “It is an emergency; we can arrest anyone,” one of the men said. Another asked if Khalil suffered from any particular physical ailments. They drove Khalil off in a Pajero jeep.

    Khalil is a noted investigative journalist who has published several controversial exposes of official corruption and abuse, particularly by security forces. He assisted Human Rights Watch in research for a 2006 report about torture and extrajudicial killings by Bangladesh security forces.

    According to Bangladeshi human rights groups, the army has detained tens of thousands of people since a state of emergency was declared on January 11, 2007. A number of those detained are picked up in the middle of the night, as Khalil was, and then tortured.

    In Bangladesh, security forces have long been implicated in torture and extrajudicial killings. The killings have been attributed to members of the army, the police, and the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), an elite anti-crime and anti-terrorism force. The Human Rights Watch report Khalil worked on, “Judge, Jury, and Executioner: Torture and Extrajudicial Killings by Bangladesh’s Elite Security Force,” focused on abuses by the RAB.

    Killings in custody remain a persistent problem in Bangladesh. To date, no military personnel are known to have been held criminally responsible for any of the deaths.

    Khalil was called in for questioning by military intelligence last week, apparently as part of the military’s campaign to intimidate independent journalists ahead of May 10, 2007, when the army’s three-month legal mandate for ruling under a state of emergency came to an end.

    “The Bangladeshi military should be on notice that its actions are being closely watched by the outside world,” Adams said. “Any harm to Tasneem Khalil will seriously undermine the army’s claims to legitimacy and upholding the rule of law.”

  • Women Under Theocracy

    The lives of most women in the industrialized world have improved enormously over the past hundred years, and especially so, in social, cultural, political, and human rights terms, over the past forty. But in the rest of the world, a great many women lead lives of misery and sometimes of plain horror. They are often considered and treated as the property of men: as children they are seen as burdens, to be married off as soon as possible, and as adults they are sex tools, reproductive machines, and domestic labour. When things go wrong – when sexual rumours are floating around, when the crops fail, when a child falls ill – they are scapegoats to be punished, often ferociously. They have few if any rights, they are kept out of school as children, they are illiterate, they receive less food than men however hard they work, they are confined to the house or required to wear stifling, movement-inhibiting clothing if they go outside, they are denied medical treatment, they are forbidden to vote or drive cars, and they are whipped or beaten if they disobey.

    This is not to exaggerate. Consider, for example:

    • In June 2002 a panchayat, or tribal council, in the Punjabi village of Meerwala presided over the trial of a woman named Mukhtaran Mai. Her 12-year-old brother had been accused (falsely, it turned out) of having an affair with a woman from the higher-caste Mastoi tribe. In punishment, the elders ordered that Mukhtaran be raped. As several hundred people watched, four men dragged her screaming through a cotton field. Pushing her into a mud-walled house, they assaulted her for more than an hour.
    • When crops fail or children die of mysterious illnesses, villagers in northern Ghana often suspect witchcraft. Fearing for their lives, hundreds of elderly women in northern Ghana have banded together for protection in sanctuaries known as “witch camps”.
    • During the famine in Niger in the summer of 2005, there were villages in which women and children went hungry while there was still food in their households. Men were leaving their families in order to find work, locking the grain store while they were away. There were women in the villages who had hungry children, but no access to the stocks of sorghum and millet in the granary. There is widespread polygamy in Niger; men take more than one wife, and each woman is given a small plot to support herself and her own children. The women also have to work on the larger family fields, but they have no control over and no access to the production from these large fields.
    • In Jharkhand, India, Ramani Devi was badly tortured after being branded a witch: “I was tortured and forced to eat human excreta just because I was branded a witch by the ojhas (witch doctors),” she reported. According to the crime branch of the Jharkhand police, 190 witch killings have been reported in the past five years.
    • In Guatemala, a man can escape a rape charge if he marries his victim, as long as she is over the age of twelve; having sex with a minor is an offence only if the girl can prove she is “honest” and did not act provocatively; a battered wife can prosecute her husband only if her injuries are visible for more than ten days.
    • In the same country, the bodies of girls and women are often found trussed with barbed wire, horrifically mutilated, insults carved into the flesh, raped, murdered, beheaded and dumped on a roadside. Bodies are appearing at an average of two a day this year: 312 in the first five months, adding to the 1,500 females raped, tortured and murdered in the past four years.

    Such treatment is generally sustained and protected by a combination of religion and culture; that combination makes reform very difficult. It is worth examining the way religion and culture function to shield the oppression of women from criticism not only locally but also globally, so that it is not only councils in Punjab and priests in Nigeria who keep the shackles on, but also multiculturalists and diversity-celebrators in the rich world who, muttering apologetically about cultural imperialism, look the other way.

    There are also large pockets of conservative inegalitarian treatment of women in the industrialized world, for instance among fundamentalist Christians in the US, Muslims in the UK and Europe, ultra-orthodox Jews in Israel, and Catholics in Ireland. This In Focus will collect material on the subject.

    External Resources

  • Win a Copy of Stephen Law’s Book

    Who can find the most irritating, sinister or downright funny use of ‘atheism is a faith position too’?