Reuters says one person was killed in the shootings in Copenhagen.

One civilian was killed and three police were wounded on Saturday in shooting at a public meeting in the Danish capital Copenhagen attended by the controversial Swedish artist Lars Vilks, police and the Danish Ritzau news agency reported.

Danish police confirmed one civilian had been killed in a shooting and said the suspects had fled in a car.

Ritzau said both Vilks and the French ambassador, who was also attending, were both unharmed, but that three police had been wounded. The gathering was billed as a debate on art and blasphemy.

Just over a month ago, 17 people were killed in France in three days of violence that began when two Islamist gunmen burst into the Paris offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, opening fire in revenge for its publication of satirical images of the Prophet Mohammad.

Bad bad bad bad news. The implications are horrific.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Just publicly posted to Lars Vilks’s Facebook page by Jenny A Wenhammar who is at the Copenhagen blasphemy conference with him –

ART, BLASPHEMY AND FREEDOM OF SPEECH
– meeting in Copenhagen was attacked.

At the panel discussion about freedom of speech in Copenhagen organized by the committee of Lars Vilks, during the speech of Inna Shevchenko there were around 20-40 shots. In the room together with her were also Lars Vilks and French ambassador Francois Zimeray. Inna escaped with some people through the back door, and is at the moment at the police station. The meeting is said to continue and not be stopped by terror.

— with Lars Vilks and Inna Shevchenko.

One person was killed in the shooting.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The BBC reports:

Danish police have said three officers were shot and wounded at blasphemy debate in Copenhagen where the French ambassador was speaking.

Two gunmen are said to be still at large.

Reports say up to 40 shots were fired outside the venue in the Danish capital.

Controversial Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks, who has drawn caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, was also present at the debate.

Thanks, BBC, be sure as always to sneak in some condemnation of people who dare to do things like caricature Mo. Lars Vilks is “controversial” only among theocrats.

The area around the venue, reportedly a cafe, is under lockdown, the BBC’s Malcolm Brabant reports.

Police have erected cordons and are searching a nearby park, he adds.

Lars Vilks stoked controversy in 2007 by drawing pictures of the Prophet Muhammad dressed as a dog.

There it is again, only more so – Lars “stoked controversy” by doing something that should be perfectly ordinary.

But that’s not the point. The point is that they want to silence us all. It’s too bad the BBC can’t even report on an ongoing gun attack on people at a conference without sticking a target on some of those people.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

When parents go bad.

On Sep. 24, 2014, 18-year-old Alecia Faith Pennington left her family and childhood home with the help of her grandparents. Having been raised in a staunchly Christian, homeschooled family in Texas, she was ready to set off and pursue a new life.

You know, that needs a re-write.

On Sep. 24, 2014, 18-year-old Alecia Faith Pennington escaped her family and childhood prison with the help of her grandparents. Having been imprisoned in a fanatically Christian family in Texas that wouldn’t let her go to school, she was ready to escape and find a life.

But there’s a glitch: she has no paperwork of any kind.

Ms. Pennington, who says she’s now 19, has launched a campaign via YouTube and Facebook called “Help Me Prove It.” In the video, she explains her strange circumstance: she was born at home, after which her parents neglected to file for a birth certificate or a social security number; she was homeschooled and therefore has no school records; she has never been to a hospital and is without medical records. Furthermore, her parents have refused to help her in any way.

Never been to a hospital or a doctor of any kind – which is or should be criminal negligence.

She appears caught in a Kafkaesque bureaucratic web – one that’s been dubbed “identification abuse,” which  a small percentage of homeschooled children and adults sometimes experience, often due to the anti-government views held by their parents.

It’s appallingly abusive. She’s basically enslaved – her parents have systematically deprived her of everything she needs to get an education and/or work.

James and Lisa Pennington have refused to help, according to their daughter.

James and Lisa live in Kerrington, Texas, where they serve on the board of the Hill Country Home School Association. In 2010, they were named the 2010 Texas Home School Coalition Association’s “Leaders of the Year,” according to the THSCA website. Lisa is also an ardent Christian, homeschooling, and parenting blogger, posting at Hip Homeschool Moms and The Pennington Point.

In other words she’s an “ardent” child abuser. Very hip.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Just imagine the fun of being a Muslim in Raqqa. It’s a good deal more peppery than life in Chapel Hill, according to what the Independent says.

Residents of a city besieged by Isis have described living under strict bans on alcohol and cigarettes, with anyone caught smoking publicly flogged, handed huge fines and even reportedly executed.

I dislike smoking myself, but I don’t think people should be executed for it.

Raqqa, in Syria, is one of the group’s biggest strongholds.

A leading figure with Isis’s police force was recently found in  Deir-al-Zor beheaded and with a cigarette in his mouth, with the sentence “O Sheikh this is munkar (hateful and evil thing)” written on his body.

Harsh.

Isis swiftly shut down shops selling cigarettes and water pipes after Raqqa fell and banned street vendors from selling smoking materials. One man described militants bending his fingers with pliers after being [he was] caught smoking in the street to Al Monitor.

The group also released a series of statements from the so-called Isis ‘Preaching Office’ describing the health problems that made smoking “a slow suicide“.

Ah! Well no wonder they execute people for doing it then. Speeds up the suicide.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Meanwhile…let’s not lose sight of the bigger picture. The much much much bigger picture; the orders of magnitude bigger picture. Like this item from CNN today –

The Pakistan Taliban claimed responsibility for a Friday attack on a Shiite Muslim mosque in Peshawar in northwestern Pakistan — a suicide bombing and gunfire assault that a hospital representative said killed 19 people.

The Islamist militant group said the attack was orchestrated by a commander who was behind December’s massacre of 145 people, including 132 children, at a Peshawar school.

Sixty-seven people were injured Friday, said Tauheed Zulfiqar, a representative of the Hayatabad Medical Complex in Peshawar.

All of them Muslim, it would appear.

That’s just today, just in Pakistan. Then there are all the Muslims killed over the past few years by Boko Haram, and all the Muslims killed by Daesh, and all the Muslims killed in Somalia, Libya, Kenya, Algeria, Iran and Iraq, Syria, India – all the Muslims killed by other Muslims.

That’s a bigger picture. The murders in Chapel Hill are horrifying, but so are the murders at that Shiite mosque in Peshawar today.

Bigger picture is bigger.

That fact makes Erdogan’s show of indignation at Obama for not condemning the murders pretty contemptible.

Speaking on a visit to Mexico, Mr Erdogan criticised Mr Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry and US Vice-President Joe Biden for not having made any statement about the murder of the “three Muslims”.

“If you stay silent when faced with an incident like this, and don’t make a statement, the world will stay silent towards you,” he said.

“As politicians, we are responsible for everything that happens in our countries and we have to show our positions.”

Mr Erdogan is a devout Sunni Muslim who has been increasingly critical of the treatment of Muslims living in Western societies.

The treatment of Muslims living in Western societies is a hell of a lot better than the treatment of Muslims living in Muslim societies. As theocrats, you are responsible for everything that happens in your theocracies, so give that some thought, Mr Erdogan.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Michael DeDora has an excellent post on what Craig Hicks does or doesn’t have to do with vocal atheism and what vocal atheism has to do with being a decent human.

…as merely a position on whether god/s exist, atheism is no guarantor of moral behavior, and no guarantee should that be expected from it. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and many others — apparently now including Craig Hicks — are atheists who have killed. A person’s atheism only tells you that they reject the idea of a god. It does not tell you about the rest of their character, which, as with all people, can include a very human but very misguided hatred. I guarantee some atheists will continue to do violence in the world so long as both atheists and the world exist. Why atheists continue to defend atheism at the expense of a broader moral and philosophical framework remains a mystery to me. This event should remind us that mere atheism is not enough — that for humans to find decency and sustain it, we must construct and nourish moral frameworks that engender complete respect for our fellow humans regardless of their beliefs on religion or gods. Hicks was an atheist, but he was apparently not also humanist. Humanism provides no shelter for such hatred and murder.

Quite. For a good long while I was focused on being a vocal atheist, partly just because I was fed up with the taboo on being that very thing. I’m over it. The accumulated nastiness and brutalism of a huge swath of The Atheist Movement put me off it. I still am a vocal atheist, for sure, but also a vocal feminist and internationalist and advocate of universal rights and similar things.

Which brings us back to the issue of causation. It is very easy to point at reports of a parking dispute, or quotes from a Sam Harris book. But, as when examining terrorism and violence carried out in the name of religion, it is much more difficult to address complex reality, which in this case is that Hicks was most likely driven by a multitude of factors, which hopefully the police investigation will reveal. But, whatever his inspiration, Hicks is responsible for his actions. Yes, he might have found intellectual and emotional comfort in anti-religious writings. But not a single report has shown that the writings he consumed, or that he shared on his social media accounts, condoned violence against any innocent persons, including religious believers. One can think that religion is a burden on society, and that we would be better off without it, while also respecting the dignity and autonomy of individuals to believe in a religion and lead their lives peacefully. For all their stridency, I see no evidence that Dawkins or Harris believe otherwise, or that Hicks found otherwise in their writings.

No, neither do I. On the other hand there are a lot of intermediate steps, and there I’m not so confident. I think Dawkins encourages some contemptuous attitudes by modeling them so often and enthusiastically on Twitter. It’s a big leap from contemptuous attitudes to murder…but it’s a big leap, not an infinite gap. Contemptuous attitudes can and do lead to bullying, to violence, and even to murder. That can happen. It’s playing with fire, that kind of thing.

Of course, some anti-religious rhetoric is charged, and could provide cover for, or amplify, stereotypes of believers. Atheists must have a serious conversation about what counts as this kind of unfair rhetoric, what rhetoric should be welcomed and promoted, and what rhetoric should be rejected outright. But even when we decide on what counts as “too far” in intellectual criticism and argument, are we willing to blame the peaceful anti-religious people around us for inexcusable physical acts like cold-blooded murder?

No, of course not. But what about blaming the verbally belligerent people around us for creating an atmosphere of callous contempt? That I’m willing to blame those people for. To the extent that I’ve contributed to it I’m willing to blame myself.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Sometimes movie stars put their celebrity to good use.

Europe’s first academic centre to combat the brutality faced by women in warzones has been opened in London by Angelina Jolie, who called for “the empowerment of women to be the highest priority for the finest minds, in the best academic institutions”.

Jolie, a special envoy for the UN high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR), has just returned from northern Iraq, where she met some of the millions of refugees forced to flee from their homes due to Islamic State (Isis) violence. She said students of the centre on women, peace and security at the London School of Economics (LSE) had the chance to change the world.

That seems like a good thing to have.

The Hollywood actor, director and international women’s rights campaigner was joined at LSE by the former UK foreign secretary William Hague. The pair have worked together for three years on an initiative to prevent sexual violence in conflict.

A four-day summit hosted by Jolie and Hague in June last year, as part of the UK government’s Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict initiative, resulted in a protocol signed by 151 countries and the LSE’s centre on women, peace and security is the latest step in trying to combat the use of rape as a weapon of war.

The groundbreaking LSE centre on women, peace and security will gather key thinkers, activists, policymakers and academics together in order to better tackle intransigent global problems such as the prosecution of warzone rapists and women’s engagement in politics.

Thumbs up.

Asked after her speech why it had taken so long for sexual violence to gain the world’s attention, Jolie said: “My emotional response is: I have no idea. I find it abhorrent and it makes absolutely no sense to me that we know that girls are being are being sold into sexual slavery; that when a woman is raped she is forced from her community; that girls as young as nine are being married off.

“I cannot fathom why it has taken so long. I cannot fathom why it has ever been alright to treat women this way.”

Christine Chinkin, professor of law at LSE and head of the new centre, said it would provide an opportunity to further her long-term commitment “to ending the marginalisation of woman’s human rights in academia, including the right of women to be free from all forms of violence”.

Yessssssss – I would love to see that marginalization and normalization ended. Good luck to them.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

One woman killed by an abusive husband.

Mumtahina Jannat was killed by her abusive husband, Abdul Kadir, in 2011 after surviving years of being drugged, beaten and raped by him.

The abuse had started since she married Kadir at the age of 16, and continued till her death at the age of 28.

She’d approached various doctors, case workers and lawyers, but didn’t receive the support necessary to leave her husband and have sole custody of her children.

Her niece Onjali Rauf, who founded an anti-abuse charity called Making Herstory after Jannat’s death, has now spoken out saying that one of the biggest problems was that professionals all dismissed Jannat’s abuse as “a typical Asian situation”.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

That Washington Post article that Glenn Greenwald linked to – it’s by Michelle Boorstein yesterday, on the (cough) tensions between atheism and Islam.

On Wednesday, the father of the two women said one of his daughters had mentioned Hicks’ before and felt he was anti-Muslim. A week ago, he said, she told her family she had  “a hateful neighbor.”

“Honest to God, she said, ‘He hates us for what we are and how we look,’” Dr. Mohammad Abu-Salha, who has a psychiatry practice near Chapel Hill, told The News Observer.

Later on Wednesday, Hicks’s wife insisted that the shooting was only due to parking arguments and not to any bigotry. “I can say with my absolute belief that this incident had nothing to do with religion or victims faith, but in fact was related to the long-standing parking disputes that my husband had with the neighbors. ” Karen Hicks said during a news conference.

Notice a problem with that? It was a fucking parking dispute. Who the hell murders three people over a parking space? Citing “long-standing parking disputes” really doesn’t do anything to fill the yawning void between a parking dispute, however longstanding, and murdering three people.

But reports that an outspoken atheist — most of Hicks’ many Facebook posts railed against religion — had attacked a family who were visibly Muslim (the women wore headscarves) tapped immediately into a conversation that has been going on since Sept. 11 about why several of atheism’s biggest figures have singled out Islam for criticism.

Among them are biologist and writer Richard Dawkins and neuroscientist Sam Harris, who have both triggered controversy with their comments about Islam.

And therein lies a whole different problem, which is that both of those examples of Atheism’s Biggest Figures are annoyingly crude and simplistic in what they say in public about Islam. Dawkins in particular thinks it’s useful to keep cranking out eye-poking tweets about Islam as a way to…whatever: fix it or lure people away from it or startle people into paying more attention to it. He’s wrong to think that’s useful. It’s the opposite of useful. It makes him look like a jerk who likes poking people in the eye, and by extension it makes all atheists look like that. This is one reason out of many I wish we had different, better Atheism’s Biggest Figures.

The tensions have been central enough that umbrella secular and atheist groups Wednesday were quick to release statements condemning the Chapel Hill killings. Ron Lindsay, president of the skeptics’ group Center for Inquiry[,] said atheists have in the past held conferences on the topic of Islam and tried to “reach out for dialogue” but the overtures have been viewed skeptically by Muslims.

Lindsay and other secular groups said Wednesday that the atheists’ particular focus on Islam has been triggered by the comments of big-name celebrities like Harris.

“I don’t think he’s an Islamophobe. But it’s fair to say in his writings that he portrays Islam as inherently more violen[ce]-prone than other religions and that has had an effect on some people, maybe an unintended [e]ffect. A lot of people tend to see Muslims in their mind a[s] more of a threat and tend to lump Muslims together,” Lindsay said. “To try and put things in focus, clearly we’re concerned about Islamic extremism, but we always make this clear, this is a small minority of Muslims.”

I’m tired of having to live with the unintended effects of Harris and Dawkins being provocative. I think they’re both clumsy at it; I think they’re both rude rather than wittily challenging, which I think is what they intend. I think they’re both very full of their own importance and prickly when disputed. I’m tired of having them as putative Leaders.

Meanwhile, a group of atheists is raising money to donate to a cause championed by one of the Muslim victims. Barakat, whose family was from Syria, had started a crowd-sourcing campaign to collect donations for the Syrian American Medical Society Foundation. His “Refugee Smiles,” focuses on providing dental care to refugees of the Syrian War in Turkey.

“There are conflicting reports about what the motivation was,” said Dale McGowan, executive director of the humanist nonprofit, Foundation Beyond Belief, a national organization based in Atlanta. “It doesn’t matter. It’s someone who identified with our community. We need to make a strong statement against the act.”

Quite right. The conflicting reports don’t matter: he was part of the atheist community and we need to repudiate the whole thing – the leader-worship, the male-centrism, the belligerent tweets, the hostility for its own sake. Enough already.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Glenn Greenwald tried to school Maajid Nawaz. That didn’t go well.

Maajid posted a screenshot.

@ggreenwald @SamHarrisOrg as if to say “those poor natives are just born like that and we must patronisingly defend everything about them”

Aka the racism of low expectations.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Pope pope pope. You really should learn to think before you speak. NPR says why.

Pope Francis said that couples who opt not to have children are being “selfish” as he spoke of a “greedy generation” that’s choosing not to procreate.

Think, pope pope. Slow down, stop talking, take a breath, and think.

Any luck yet?

Pope pope, you opted not to have children yourself. Officially. You look very fucking stupid saying things like that, given your own choices.

I know – you expect us to treat that as different, because it’s part of your ReLigIon. Nope. Not gonna do that. It’s not different, it’s the same, so you have no standing to go tut tut at everyone.

That’s before we get to the fact that it’s terrible advice at a time when the planet may be tipping into a rapid slide to drought and famine and mass extinction.

Speaking at his general audience in St. Peter’s Square on Wednesday, Francis talked on the joy of children and their importance in society, at one point reminiscing about his own mother.

“A society with a greedy generation, that doesn’t want to surround itself with children, that considers them above all worrisome, a weight, a risk, is a depressed society,” the pope said. “The choice to not have children is selfish. Life rejuvenates and acquires energy when it multiplies: It is enriched, not impoverished.”

Except, of course, when the ice caps are melting and the rivers are shrinking and the coral reefs are dying and the crops are failing.

I suppose he thinks his buddy God will intervene at the last minute and reverse all that, and then we’ll want all those extra babies.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Peter Tatchell spoke at the “Sharia law, apostasy and secularism” conference in London last Saturday, the one that Maryam organized.

Although Sharia law is not the law of the UK, there have been repeated and on-going attempts by Islamists to apply Sharia principles in law and education, in a bid to make these public institutions Sharia-accommodating. This is a direct threat to human rights; most notably to the human rights of UK Muslims.

…

Speaker after speaker last Saturday warned of an Islamist agenda of stealthy, creeping, subtle Sharification. This involves sustained attempts by Islamists to pressure public institutions, in the name of religious freedom and multiculturalism, to make special allowances for their reactionary sectarian clerical values.

By Islamists, please note, not Muslims. Most Christians are not Christianists and most British Muslims are not Islamists.

The conference organiser Maryam Namazie made an impassioned plea:

“Islamism is an international far-right movement that has murdered innumerable Charlie Hebdos over several decades across the Middle East, North Africa and Asia, including many Muslims who have dared to…live twenty-first century lives (that are) prohibited by the Islamists. Being a woman, a freethinker, being gay, being unveiled, improperly veiled, an atheist, going to school, driving a car, having sex, falling in love, laughing out loud, dancing….’offends’ them. Calling for civility, censorship, silence or ‘respect’ for the ‘offended’ is merely heeding the Islamist demand for submission (to clerical authority) at the expense of dissenters – whether (they) be Charlie Hebdo in Paris, Raif Badawi in Saudi Arabia or Roya Nobakht in Iran.”

Far-right, not far-left. Right-wing, not left-wing.

Pragna Patel, Director of Southall Black Sisters, saluted those who continue to “bravely challenge deadly religious far-right movements whose end game is to shut down secular democratic spaces and to terrorise us into silence. The time has come to….reject the politics of hatred, whether emanating from the racist far-right or the religious far-right.”

Another conference speaker, Marieme Helie Lucas, founder of Secularism is a Women’s Issue, warned against:

“A growing restriction on our freedoms and civil rights in the name of religious tolerance; an endless abandonment of secular values….(and of) equal rights to all citizens – agnostics, atheists and believers alike. We are heading towards unequal rights and different laws for different categories of citizens – all condoned by ‘democratic’ states. The right to practice according to one’s own belief should not supersede universal rights.”

Hold that thought.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

A really gruesome thought has occurred to me.

First, fair warning: I’m speculating about the motives of Craig Hicks in killing the three people in that Chapel Hill condo. I know it’s stupid to speculate about the motives of killers in the absence of knowledge…but that ship has sailed. People already are speculating about the motives, and if we – by which I mean we vocal atheists – stay silent we just come across as evasive or worse.

Plus there’s the fact that it looks like a hate crime against Muslims because Muslims, and there was anger at the fact that it wasn’t being reported.For that reason too I think we shouldn’t ignore it.

So I’m speculating; that is, I’m trying to think about what might be his motives, or perhaps more accurately what set him off.

We don’t know; we don’t know that he went to their condo to complain about parking and then flipped out, but that seems to be one likely explanation. It doesn’t seem to fit a planned murder of three people for the crime of being Muslim, or a planned murder of three or two people or one person for parking in his parking spot. We don’t know, but suppose the story is that somebody parked in his spot and he went to the condo to make another fuss about parking.

What has occurred to me is that when he went there he found a man, and two women in hijabs. Two. It has occurred to me that he could have flipped out because of the two women in the condo. He had encountered Deah Barakat and Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha before, but perhaps he’d never seen Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha before. I don’t suppose he got into a friendly chat with them about who’s visiting from out of town. It has occurred to me that he may have seen a second woman there and leapt to the conclusion that Deah was going in for polygamy, right there in the same condo complex with him, and flipped out.

I don’t know, obviously. It’s sheer speculation. But there is a big gap between going to someone’s door to complain about parking, and shooting three people in the head. A huge gap.

It is a horribly gruesome thought.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)