Author: Ophelia Benson

  • No, Black Gays are not Happy With Murder Music

    Black Gay Men’s Advisory Group has launched Declaration Against Homophobia in Music.

  • Gangsta Culture Not All That Educational

    ‘Street culture will become a deadly virus robbing millions of their potential’

  • This Should Be the Last Straw for Anyone

    Maryam Namazie: Let’s talk about the horrendous and tragic situation in Beslan. We know that over 1,000 people were held hostage. Over 300 were killed. 150 plus of those so far are children. It is an immense human tragedy. Are there any words that can describe what’s happened there?

    Bahram Soroush: It is extremely difficult to come up with the right words to describe this tragedy. It is on a horrendous scale; of an unbelievable magnitude. It is very hard to try to put yourself in the place of those parents who lost their loved ones. I don’t myself remember having witnessed a terrorist action where children were taken hostage on such a scale and used as a bargaining chip. It is comparable to the 9/11 tragedy and it will be remembered for years to come. People will look back and try to make sense of what happened on that day. One’s first reaction, apart from deep grief, is outrage that such a monstrous attack against innocent civilians, against children is possible.

    Maryam Namazie: Who is responsible for this slaughter? Is it the Islamic terrorists that took the hostages? Or is it the Russian government and its violent suppression of the so-called Chechen liberation movement?

    Fariborz Pooya: The world is facing waves of Islamic terrorist atrocities. We are seeing that on a daily basis now. It seems there are no depths to which these people would not sink. The Islamic movement has shown its capacity for savagery and brutality and this is the ultimate that they could have done. Initially, we have to make sure that we condemn this brutal act. At the same time, on a much broader scale, we have to recognise that the world is hostage to the two poles of terrorism. On the one hand, you see the US in Iraq and Russia in Chechnya who have destroyed whole cities and slaughtered civilians. On the other hand, you have the political Islamic movement who does not have the slightest regard for human life. They have shown the depth of their barbarity by actually killing so many children.

    The attention of the media has occasionally focused on whether Putin is going to survive this or not! But this is not the issue. The question that the world is facing is how to combat international terrorism of the Islamic kind. Clearly, military actions like that of the US and Russian armies are incapable of preventing this; in fact they strengthen the grounds for the growth of such forces. The people who can stop the Islamic movement are the progressive movement that can uphold the standards and expose the Islamic movement and its capacity to sink to such levels. The Islamic movement has to be defeated – in all its fronts; whether you are fighting the hijab in Europe, the Islamic government in Iran, Al-Qaeda in the Middle East or Chechen terrorists in Russia. It is the fascism of today and must be defeated. At the same time, we know that the military action of the United Sates and the Russian army is incapable of defeating this movement.

    Maryam Namazie: In the newspaper Independent there was an article saying that the Chechen movement is a national liberation movement, that it is not a political Islamic movement and it has been given this image in order to allow the Russian government to place it within the framework of the war on Islamic terrorism. Would you agree with that?

    Bahram Soroush: I wouldn’t. This is very clear from the features of that movement. It is not easy to try to hide the Islamic or political Islamist character of that movement. This is not the only atrocity that they have committed. This tragedy, although an enormous tragedy compared to the earlier ones, was one in a chain of attacks recently inside Russia and over recent years as well. The attack bears the hallmarks of a very organised force. In the media there have been suggestions that other local, tribal, nationalist movements were involved. But when you look at the scale of the attack, it is very similar to, for example, two years ago, when a theatre in Russia was seized and where many people died. So clearly the indications are that this was the work of political Islamists; I don’t think there is any doubt about that. And if anyone in the world had the slightest doubt about the capacity of the Islamic movement in committing such atrocities, this carnage should have dispelled that. This should be the last straw for anyone. From now on there should be an enormous campaign by all progressive people to discredit, oppose and crush this movement. When it comes to people like Putin and Bush, although they try to pose themselves as people who are waging war on terror, they are themselves part of the problem. They are part of the terrorist contest that is creating catastrophes for civilised humanity, for all of us. So we are not expecting Putin to come and fight political Islam. It is up to us, to workers, to the progressive movement throughout the world to do that.

    Maryam Namazie: Obviously it is very clear that there can be no guilt put on the children. They are not to blame for anything that has happened in Chechnya or elsewhere, but sometimes you do see in the media that there is a sort of collective guilt put on people who are the victims of terrorist acts or of the hostage-taking of Islamists. You see the two French journalists who were held hostage. The French government went and negotiated with them and said, well, we were against the war, so you shouldn’t be holding French journalists hostage. If you continue that line of reasoning, then you could say, well, it’s OK to hold an American hostage or it’s OK to behead a Turkish worker or driver because of the US and Turkish governments’ involvement in the war. The justification they sometimes offer is that these are acts of revenge, like they said, for example, about September 11th. What’s your analysis on that?

    Fariborz Pooya: Historically, there have been people who try to justify taking civilian lives. There are people who justify the killing of civilians based on the interests of a national liberation movement, for example. But killing civilians must be condemned under any circumstances. We know that the US forces bomb civilian areas in Iraq. They are doing it today. We know that the Islamic terrorist movement has no regard for civilian life. There needs to be a Left progressive movement that raises its banner against them. If there’s a war between armies, we need to defend civilians.

    Maryam Namazie: Should there be a justification for the decapitation of an American soldier, for example, who has been taken hostage?

    Fariborz Pooya: There shouldn’t be. Absolutely not. These are acts of barbarism and need to be condemned. At the same time, the attacks against civilians these days, the scale of them, are unbelievable. There is no justification for such actions. We know that the true source of this is both state terrorism and the political Islamic movement. That needs to be condemned and the world has to be protected against this. At the international protest on 15th February last year against the war on Iraq, world humanity showed that it can raise its voice and say, enough is enough! People need to come out on the streets and condemn both the Islamic movement and international state terrorism.

    The above is an International TV interview dated September 6, 2004.

    Maryam Namazie hosts International TV English. Prior to the English programme, Maryam Namazie also hosts a half-an hour long Farsi programme. Fariborz Pooya is the co-editor of WPI Briefing and Bahram Soroush is a civil rights activist.

  • Response to Atheist in Florida

    There are others, but they keep their heads down. Maybe if we all kept our heads up…?

  • Atheist in Florida

    Frightening but true.

  • Additions

    I’ve been updating the Dictionary a little – for the first time in more than a year. We decided a long time ago to stop adding to it because of the book, and it was almost a year ago that we decided it was time to get serious about the book – but we may have stopped adding to it many months before that, even, because we thought of the book long before we decided to get serious about it. I don’t remember. I don’t remember if we went on adding to the Dictionary for several months, or if we stopped only a couple of months after we started. Probably the latter.

    So anyway. We had a lot of leftovers. I’ve been cleaning out my email, and there’s this immense bulge in March, when we were doing the book and generating definitions like mad. I didn’t just delete them all with one blow of my fist because of the leftovers – I knew I had to go through each one in order to salvage the ones we didn’t use. So I’ve been doing that. Salvaging. Now, before you smite your brows and exclaim ‘Oh thank you so much, just what we want, a lot of rejected jokes!’, that’s not it! I’m not salvaging boring unfunny ones. No. There weren’t any of those, as it happens. No, there were other reasons for not including some, especially since we ended up with more than we needed so could afford to be nice. Some we didn’t include because they were obscure or cryptic; they’re extremely funny, it’s just that you have to know what the reference is to see that. Others we didn’t include because they were too similar to others, which of course is not a problem for the site version, which doesn’t include those others. And others again I really don’t know why we didn’t include – perhaps we forgot. One of us is incredibly forgetful and is always losing things. I forget which one.

  • Essence

    Terrible about Samira Bellil. A difficult life and then an early and very nasty death – thanks a lot. What godawful luck some people have. I know; no kidding; but it’s worth pointing out anyway. It’s worth registering these futile protests that don’t go anywhere. Worth shaking our puny fists at the sky.

    I happened on this article in Dar al Hayat, and it seems relevant, to the issues that Bellil raised and those we’ve been discussing lately. They’re all the same issues at bottom.

    In this framework, there are two forms of enmity against Islamists. The first is the annoyance of the wide spreading Islamic thought in comparison with other trends, to the extent that people wish to wake up one day and see no single woman wearing a headscarf on earth!

    Well, yes, as a matter of fact. I do wish that. Though I suppose I could imagine other utopian scenarios in which the hijab had shed every last trace of connotation of subordination, inferiority, blame for male sexual attention, coercion and control and ownership, and had become simply a piece of clothing like any other. I can imagine such a scenario, but that’s not the same thing as thinking it’s going to happen, so until and unless that does happen, yes, I would be delighted to wake up one day and find every last woman on earth free of the requirement to wear it. And that is indeed one reason I am not pleased about wide spreading Islamic thought, why in fact I think it’s a bad thing.

    There is an excellent article by Irfan Khawaja on this larger subject on Ibn Warraq’s Secular Islam site. Khawaja discusses the way nonsense about ‘essentialist’ claims works to deflect critical discussion of Islam.

    What Staerk is telling us is that it’s easier to generalize rigorously about the behavior of 1.25 billion existing Muslims plus all the Muslims who have ever existed in the 1400 years of the existence of Islam—than it is to generalize about the claims of a handful of Islamic texts! That is the unavoidable implication of his claim that those who use the Qur’an as the basis for claims about the essence of Islam generalize “sloppily,” while those who rely on Gallup polls for information about “the” behavior of “Muslims” generalize with rigor.

    Just so. This is why I keep pointing out that religion is not the same thing as race. Religions do have texts and/or rules, laws, truth claims. Religions are systems of ideas, and thus both can be and must be criticized, disagreed with, analyzed. To pretend that it’s a kind of racism to disagree with Islam or any other religion is an absurd category mistake, a confusion of terms, and a pretext for allowing a supernatural belief system to run people’s lives on the basis of unfounded claims.

    …when it comes to the fundamental clash between Islam and its rivals, our half-hearted secularists almost always find an excuse to beg off. Does God exist? “Let’s not look.” Does faith supersede reason? “Let’s change the subject.” Do the demands of the afterlife supersede the requirements of this one? “It’s a matter of perspective.” Are the claims of the Qur’an true? “Depends on how you define ‘truth’.” Does Islam provide a basis for a viable political order? “Sorry, that question is too divisive.” Is there a connection between the precepts of Islam and Islamic terrorism? “Sorry, that question is too essentialist.” At the end of the day, according to this crowd, the only claims you’re allowed to make about Islam are the recycled pieties of PC toleration, followed by claims so “nuanced” that they cease to mean or imply anything of significance. But I don’t see Muslims constrained by the same imperatives…

    Great stuff. Read the whole thing.

  • ‘Sorry, that question is too essentialist.’

    Irfan Khawaja says ‘essentialist’ claims about Islam should not be discouraged.

  • Guardian on Samira Bellil

    ‘Ni Putes Ni Soumises’ says Bellil fought against barbarous machoism and violence.

  • Samira Bellil 1973-2004

    Her memoir of gang-rape helped movement fighting for rights of Muslim women and girls.

  • Al-Muhajiroun and its ‘Spiritual Leader’

    There are two types of terrorism: the type praised by the almighty Allah and the type dispraised.

  • Utopia, Freedom, the State, part 3

    Attention to impulses there are in human beings to seize advantage over others.

  • Scott McLemee’s ‘Zizek Watch’ Online At Last

    Fisting, Zapatistas, Hegel’s concept of the beautiful soul, surfboarding, all in one essay.

  • Not Extremists, Activists, Protestors; Terrorists

    Campaigns of violence and intimidation to liberate guinea pigs.

  • Multiple Intelligences

    Athletic, interpersonal, conversational, fainting in coils…

  • Recipe for Realism

    Multiple intelligences. Why has the idea always made me want to laugh? Because I’m a mean rotten swine, that’s why. Obviously. Yes but also because it is quite funny. It’s so easy to think of more of those alternative intelligences. Watching tv intelligence, eating intelligence, using the potty intelligence.

    Now, one aspect of the general idea seems perfectly unexceptionable.

    Gardner’s ideas appealed to many traditional teachers who extolled hard work but also had some students who did better on tests if multiplication tables were set to music or works of literature were acted out in class.

    Well, obviously – if it works, do it. (That is, do it if you can, which seems unlikely when most teachers have classes of 30 to 35 students, five times a day. When are they going to get the time to teach everyone differently?) But that’s a different thing from drawing large conclusions about multiple intelligences.

    This summer, two university professors accused Gardner, 61, of encouraging elementary school teaching methods, such as singing new words or writing them out with twigs and leaves, for which there is no scholarly evidence of success. Daniel T. Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, wrote in the journal Education Next that Gardner’s theory “is an inaccurate description of the mind” and that “the more closely an application draws on the theory, the less likely the application is to be effective.”

    And Gardner says one thing that’s slightly alarming.

    He added that “the standard psychologist’s view of intelligence is a recipe for despair. It holds that there is but one intelligence and that intelligence is highly heritable.”

    Yes but…the fact that something is a recipe for despair is a separate question from whether there is good evidence for it or not. Sad to say, there are a lot of accurate descriptions of the world that are indeed recipes for despair, as well as hopeful ones that are not accurate. Gardner’s benevolence is a good thing, but benevolence-driven research can get things badly wrong.

  • Drug Trials ‘Distorted’

    Eleven medical journals have told researchers to register trials at the start so unflattering results cannot be covered up.

  • ‘Healers’ Licensed in South Africa

    They’ll be barred from treating fatal diseases.

  • MMR Vaccine Safe

    Finds UK study of more than 5000 children.

  • Happy Birthday to Us Again

    Well it’s that time again. Yup, it is – I know that’s hard to believe, but it is. September 10. It’s our birthday. We’re two. Two!! Would you believe it! Well of course you would, why not – but still it does seem very respectable and elderly and established. They haven’t driven us away yet! They haven’t shut us down, they haven’t silenced us, they haven’t sent a plague of locusts. We’re still here! (Who’s they? Oh you know, just the paranoid’s fantasy army. All those faceless Darth Vader types in black plastic outfits who were going to better I mean butter I mean batter down the doors and throw our computers out the window and trample on us until we whimpered and promised to go to Business School.)

    And we’re not only still here, we have a book coming out in a few weeks. B&W’s first book. Awww. Don’t websites grow up quickly these days. One minute it just has a logo and nothing else, and the next thing you know it has a book slung over its shoulder and another on the way. (Has nobody heard of birth control these days? I blame the Pope.)

    You would probably like to look at last year’s celebration. It was very rowdy. You wouldn’t think it to talk to me, but I am one hell of a rowdy partyer. I get drunk the instant I cross the threshold, I turn the music up until the plaster starts falling off the walls, I aim food in the general direction of my mouth and usually miss, I grope everyone that breathes including the hamster, I smash glasses in the fireplace, and I dance the tarantella. I am fun, man. A few days in the slammer are a small price to pay.