Author: Ophelia Benson

And there is this horrible item. Part of the heart-warming series ‘how can we make women’s lives more helpless and deprived and nasty than they already are?’

Taliban insurgents in southern Afghanistan have executed a school teacher in front of his pupils for refusing to comply with warnings to stop educating girls.

Well of course they have, because that kind of behavior interferes with the whole project. Sets it right back. What good is is for the Taliban to keep valiantly struggling to take away every single right and capacity and freedom and pleasure and opportunity and chance that women have, if evil thugs like this teacher are going to come along and educate them? Is he crazy? The whole point with women is to shove them into a corner and then everybody gather together and get on top of them until they are squashed down into something about the size of an acorn, and can’t talk or move anymore. Not to educate them! Duh.

“He had received many warning letters from the Taliban to stop teaching, but he continued to do so happily and honestly – he liked to teach boys and girls.”

How sickening. He liked to teach boys and girls, he liked to give them something, and make them bigger, and more able to make choices and expand and grow. What he should have liked to do, of course, is to stamp all that out, and make them smaller and more hopeless. That’s the right thing to do, that’s virtue and purity.

Under the Taliban interpretation of Islamic Sharia law female education was banned, along with female employment. Since the overthrow of the Taliban government by the US-led invasion of 2001, the Afghan government claims six million Afghan children have returned to school, many of them girls. However, Taliban insurgents in the south have repeatedly targeted schools, burning many to the ground at night or issuing beatings or warnings to teachers.

Good, good, good. That’s the way. High priority, burning down schools. Great. Afghanistan’s a poor country, it can’t just go re-building schools every ten minutes, so burning the nasty things down is the way to go. Very spiritual. Three cheers for religion.

What a lot of nonsense the hooray for theocracy crowd does talk. Distortions, omissions, fantasies, strawmen, non sequiturs, aimless babbling – no trick is too cheap, apparently.

Resistance to politically correct attempts to expunge Christianity from our culture – the conversion of Christmas into “winterval” is symptomatic – should be encouraged, but one can push the defence of Christianity farther by imagining what Western society would be like without it…It was and is a highly cosmopolitan and egalitarian religion, recognising neither Greek nor Jew, bond nor free. That, in addition to such novel ideals as charity, compassion and peace, and the status attached to women, differentiated Christians from a surrounding society based on cruelty, hedonism and organised slavery. Imagine yourself as a slave, rather than Caesar or Cicero, in Ancient Rome, and you’ll get the hang of it.

That is absolute crap. Self-serving self-flattering crap. It is not true. That word ‘cruelty’ for instance – that’s key. It’s a great myth now that Christianity has always been the enemy of cruelty above all, but that is not true. Cruelty is not, for instance, one of the seven deadly sins, and Montaigne’s great book was put on the Index partly because he argued against the cruel torture of heretics before their execution. And as for ‘imagine yourself a slave’ – well imagine yourself a slave in ancient Alabama, too! And then when you’ve done that, read what Seneca has to say about slaves, and ponder.

And then we move on to the ‘hedonism-materialism-consumerism’ moan that seems to be the last refuge of fools like this.

The stressed-out workaholic is a slave to work and the material things labour buys. Mindless hedonism, which Christianity once successfully eradicated or sublimated, is endemic on TV. As audiences, rather than commissioning editors, grow bored with images of sexual deviancy, how long will it be before this is replaced by the equivalent of the Roman arena? “Good idea,” thinks a TV Tristram! Dan Brown’s book, consisting of bizarre conspiracy theories, is the best-selling bible of credulous housewives.

Yes, and the actual bible is the best-selling bible of credulous godbotherers. What, exactly, is the difference? There isn’t any. Burleigh just prefers his bible to the other one. Well, fine, but what’s he getting on his high horse about? Where does he get off talking about credulity? And don’t overlook the veiled coerciveness in that bit about Xianity successfully ‘eradicating’ mindless hedonism. Beware of people who like to eradicate things. Especially when they’re theocrats.

Scruffy Irish pop stars and smart chefs are the new moral arbitors, while aspiring politicians vie to demonstrate their knowledge of Radiohead or Franz Ferdinand rather than two millennia of European high culture…blahblahblah whingebleatmoan…Scientists try to cut every corner regarding what Christianity established as the sanctity of human life, or they proselytise atheism with an evangelical fervour.

More coercion. Christianity doesn’t get to ‘establish’ things, especially things that don’t mean much, and it’s crap anyway, given the number of wars and executions that have been carried out on Christianity’s watch. And more ‘you don’t get to proselytise or be credulous or have bibles, only we get to proselytise or be credulous or have bibles.’ More silly childish non-argument.

People with little or no historical knowledge of Christianity are allowed to caricature it as divisive, fraudulent or oppressive.

Er – yes. They are allowed to do that. What do you propose instead, Mr Burleigh? A long term of imprisonment? Whipping?

By the same token, Burleigh is allowed to talk vacuous canting drivel in the Times, and I’m allowed to point out what vacuous canting drivel it is. So it goes.

A couple of brief update items. Azam Kamguian emailed me to tell me what an informant in Norway told her – that there apparently is no reason to think that Samira Munir was murdered. Which is a relief. No less sad for her, of course, but the fewer murders of this kind there are, the better. So that is, in a limited way, good news.

And I was inaccurate in what I said about Michael Bérubé and Meera Nanda and B&W. I thought he’d first read Meera here, but no, he read her 1997 article in Dissent – and, as he put it, realized he was going to have to worry about it sooner or later. Seeing her work on B&W just prompted him to start the worrying process.

Michael’s got a great story about dentistry, needles in haystacks, beef jerky, promises, garbage, pizza and such today.

A spectre is haunting the place. No doubt you’ve already read or heard about the Fulham cops.

…the author Lynette Burrows went on a BBC Five Live show to talk about the government’s new “civil partnerships” and expressed her opinion – politely, no intemperate words – that the adoption of children by homosexuals was “a risk”. The following day, Fulham police contacted her to discuss the “homophobic incident”. A Scotland Yard spokesperson told the Telegraph’s Sally Pook that it’s “standard policy” for “community safety units” to investigate “homophobic, racist and domestic incidents”…”It is all about reassuring the community,” said the very p.c. Plod to the Telegraph. “All parties have been spoken to by the police. No allegation of crime has been made. A report has been taken but is now closed.”

It’s pretty staggering. All this ‘reassuring the community’ crap – can I be the only one who is developing a violent allergy to the very word ‘community’? A community right now seems to be a very unattractive and annoying specimen. A whining, nose-running, pants falling down, sleeve-plucking, feeble, knock-kneed, spiteful, tattling, nagging, droning, sniveling, self-obsessed pile of ordure. Why is everyone expected to keep reassuring it all the time? Why isn’t it expected to grow up? Why is it allowed – allowed? encouraged, urged – to run screaming to the police and the courts and the monarch and the armed militias every time someone ‘offends’ or ‘insults’ or ‘wounds’ or ‘blasphemes against’ or ‘disrespects’ its horrible poxy tiny closed airless stupid little beliefs? Why does it get to push all the grown-ups around all the time with its high-pitched noisy demands? Why doesn’t everyone with one voice tell it to shut up and piss off?

The community in question is not even a real community, it’s a spectral community, The Community as it exists in the minds of people who think it has to be reassured all the time. That community is not only whiny and covered in snot, it’s also damn dangerous. It’s a shut up device, and it works a treat.

Mark Steyn gets one thing quite wrong though, I think.

Mrs Burrows writes on “children’s rights and the family”, so I don’t know whether she’s a member of PEN or the other authors’ groups. But it seems unlikely the Hampstead big guns who lined up to defend Salman Rushdie a decade and a half ago will be eager to stage any rallies this time round. But, if the principle is freedom of expression, what’s the difference between his apostasy (as the Ayatollah saw it) and Mrs Burrows’s apostasy (as Scotland Yard sees it)?

Well which Hampstead big guns are we talking about? Some of them precisely did not line up to defend Rushdie fifteen years ago, and isn’t that exactly when all this sickening community-reassuring got going? With a good many Hampstead big guns saying Rushdie was a bad fella and that the feelings of devout Muslims ought to be respected? Yes, as a matter of fact, it is. And I strongly doubt that the people who ‘lined up’ (what else should they have done, pushed and shoved?) to defend Rushdie would all approve of the Fulham police work in this case. Hitchens for instance? That seems vanishingly unlikely. Steyn seems to have his enemies confused here (not for the first time).