Well that’s festive. Eiynah of Nice Mangos on Twitter:
Within hours of uploading, before I even shared the link, our episode with @MaryamNamazie has been removed from @YouTube @theqpodcast
(I removed the Twitter abbreviations for ease of reading.)
Figures, doesn’t it. Mustn’t let those ex-Muslim women talk freely; must shut them down by “reporting” them to YouTube.
Remember Purvi Patel? I blogged about her case last March 30-April 1 – here, here, here, and here. She was sentenced to twenty years in prison for having a stillborn baby.
In October PRI reported on the appeal:
Patel has now filed an appeal of that conviction with the Indiana Court of Appeals. She’s represented pro-bono by Stanford Law professor Lawrence Marshall and Indiana University law professor Joel Schumm. Marshall’s representation, in particular, shows the precedent-setting importance of her case. Marshall previously founded the Center for Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University.
“What I generally gravitate toward are cases where it seems like an intense passion has interfered with dispassionate interpretation and application of the law,” Marshall told the South Bend Tribune in April. “It struck me that this case may be a textbook example of that phenomenon.”
That tactic appears to underpin the appeal released today, in which Patel’s legal team writes, “Resolution of this appeal does not necessitate delving into any contentious issues. It requires nothing more than straightforward application of well-accepted neutral principles of law such as those this Court addresses every day.”
Patel’s lawyers argue “there are powerful reasons to challenge the conclusion there was a live birth.” But even if so, there’s little Patel could have done under such circumstances to save an extremely premature infant, the appeal states.
As for the feticide charge, the appeal argues that it was improperly applied to cover abortion, and that the conviction also violates Patel’s constitutional rights. Furthermore, Patel’s team writes, “the Feticide conviction depended on the plainly wrong position that one can be guilty of Feticide (i.e., the killing of a fetus) even if no fetus was killed (as the State adamantly maintains was true here).”
National advocacy organizations have authored two amicus briefs in support of the appeal. The first, by National Advocates for Pregnant Women and signed by several reproductive rights groups, states: “Allowing the judicial expansion of Indiana law to prosecute women in relation to their own pregnancies endangers public health and the civil rights of all people who are or may become pregnant.”
“While the Indiana General Assembly has unquestionably regulated abortion, and criminalized third parties who harm women’s pregnancies, it has not enacted a modern law that makes it a crime for a woman to have an abortion or experience a pregnancy loss,” the brief continues.
NBC News reported some days later:
Lawyers for Patel filed an appeal of her conviction in May. Her legal team, headed by Stanford Law professor Lawrence Marshall and Indiana University law professor Joel Schumm, stipulated in the brief, released Oct. 2, that multiple errors were made by the state of Indiana in the case against Patel that require the reversal of her conviction–and, furthermore, that the conviction of Patel went against the United States and the Indiana Constitutions.
…
Marshall and Schumm’s appeal outlines how applying the feticide statute to women who choose to have abortions is unconstitutional, explaining, “If the Court decides to grant relief on statutory grounds, the Feticide Statute must be invalidated as violating the United States and Indiana Constitutions. This is because the statute, as so interpreted, would place an ‘undue burden’ on women by exposing them to severe criminal penalties absent proof they had any idea they or anyone else were doing anything wrong.”
The Indiana attorney general’s office will file a brief in response to Patel’s attorneys in November. The appeals court will then decide if it will hold oral arguments.
And Purvi Patel will wait, in prison.
Hopeful news for Galápagos tortoises, maybe. First, the New York Times last week:
Originally there were at least eight species of Galápagos tortoise, scientists now believe. (One was discovered only this year.) At least three species are now extinct, including tortoises on Pinta Island. The last one, George, was discovered wandering alone in 1972 and taken into loving custody. His death, in 2012 at more than 100 years old, was a powerful reminder of the havoc visited by humans on delicate ecosystems worldwide over the last two centuries.
Whalers and pirates grabbed them up because they could live in a ship’s hold for up to a year without food or water.
There are two types of Galápagos tortoises: saddlebacked and domed. The sailors much preferred the smaller saddlebacks, which were easier to lug around and said to taste better. They were also easier to find: Domed tortoises live at higher elevations and can weigh 300 pounds. Saddlebacks evolved at lower elevations and feed on drier vegetation.
Saddlebacked tortoises disappeared from Santa Fe Island and Floreana Island, a favorite hangout for sailors posting letters for other ships to carry home. With George’s death, the Pintas were gone, too.
Or so they thought, but there’s a plot twist.
More than a century ago, it turns out, sailors dumped saddlebacked tortoises they did not need into Banks Bay, near Wolf Volcano on Isabela Island. Luckily, tortoises can extend their necks above water and float on their backs. Many of them made it to shore, lumbered across the lava fields and interbred with Isabela’s native domed tortoises.
In 2008, scientists tagged and collected blood samples from more than 1,600 tortoises living on the flanks of the volcano. Back in the laboratory, there was a genetic eureka: Eighty-nine of the animals were part Floreana, whose full genetic profile DNA had been obtained from museum samples.
Some had genes indicating their parents were living purebred Floreana tortoises, hinting that the species may not be extinct after all.
Seventeen tortoises were shown to have high levels of Pinta DNA. Tortoises can live for more than 150 years, so some of them may well be George’s immediate next of kin.
And from an animal rescue site ten months ago –
After 100 years of dwindling birth populations, attacks by invasive species, and heavy casualties from fishing and whaling, baby tortoises were found born in the Galapagos Islands. This is huge news for a species that has been struggling to survive for a century, relying on humans raising young tortoises bred in captivity until they are large enough to not fall prey to rats and predators. Finding naturally born young is evidence that conservation efforts are helping rebuild the islands ecosystem, which has been damaged, possibly irrevocably, since the 17th century.
Rats have been the biggest threat to the tortoise population since their accidental introduction to the island via ships infested with them. The rats root out nests and eat the eggs and newborns of numerous island species, hurting more than just the tortoise population. Thankfully, the island of Pinzón, home to the newborn tortoises, was declared rat-free in 2012, and the results are already showing.
Happy holidays, tortoises.
Saudi authorities have reduced a Sri Lankan woman’s sentence for adultery from death by stoning to a three-year jail term after an appeal, Colombo’s foreign ministry has said.
The woman, 45, who is married and had worked as a domestic helper in Riyadh since 2013, was convicted in August of adultery with a fellow Sri Lankan migrant worker. The man was given a lesser punishment of 100 lashes because he was not married.
It’s great that she won’t be killed by having rocks thrown at her head. (It’s disgusting that that was ever a possibility.) It’s not great that she’s been sentenced to three years in prison. It’s a violation of her rights. Having sex outside her marriage shouldn’t be any kind of crime; the state should have nothing to do with policing whatever agreements married people make about sex outside the marriage. Some people have open marriages (aka are poly), some aren’t; it’s not a state matter either way.
The death penalty sparked uproar in Sri Lanka, from which hundreds of thousands of men and women migrate to wealthy Gulf Arab states every year to take up jobs as maids or drivers. Their remittances are an important contributor to the south Asian nation’s GDP.
Saudi Arabia has been criticised by western human rights groups for the number of crimes that carry the death penalty there, including adultery, drug smuggling and witchcraft.
Not to mention liberalism, and secularism, and “apostasy,” and atheism.
Saudi Arabia, currently chair of the UN Human Rights Council, has executed more than 150 people this year, mostly by public beheading, the largest number of executions in 20 years, Amnesty International said last month.
That’s not right, actually. Saudi Arabia is the chair of one panel of the HRC, not the HRC itself. The Independent reported in September:
As head of a five-strong group of diplomats, the influential role would give Mr Trad the power to select applicants from around the world for scores of expert roles in countries where the UN has a mandate on human rights.
Such experts are often described as the ‘crown jewels’ of the HRC, according to UN Watch, which has obtained official UN documents, dated 17 September, confirming the appointment.
UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer said that the appointment, made in June but unreported until now, may have been a consolation prize for the Saudis after they withdrew their bid to head the 47-nation council following international condemnation of the kingdom’s human rights record.
So they got a consolation prize for being so wholly unacquainted with the very concept of human rights. Ok…
Golly. CJ Werleman on Twitter:
CJ Werleman @cjwerleman
Maajid Nawaz tells Muslim women to remove their hijab. Slobbering, white, fascist atheists still think he’s a Muslim.
Why is CJ Werleman policing who is a Muslim? Why is he implying that Maajid Nawaz is not a Muslim, thus aligning himself with Islamists who try to incite violence against Maajid? Why is Werleman helping Islamists bully Maajid for being a reformist? Why is he doing it in such an ugly, abusive, vituperative way? What’s the matter with him?
(Also what’s this “white” bullshit? Does Werleman think he’s not white? Why do people do that?)
NPR’s Ari Shapiro interviews Asra Nomani, co-founder of the Muslim Reform Movement and author of Standing Alone: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam, about the op-ed she co-wrote with Hala Arafa in the Washington Post about why, as Muslim women, they are asking other Muslim women to not wear the hijab.
…
ASRA NOMANI: Well, what we argue in the piece is that the headscarf has become a political symbol for an ideology of Islam that is exported to the world by the theocracies of the governments of Iran and Saudi Arabia. Just like the Catholic Church in the 17th century did religious propaganda to challenge the Protestant Reformation, these ideologies are trying to define the way Muslims express Islam in the world.
And that ideology of Islam is not a good ideology. It’s a bad one: anti-human, coercive, cruel, and stunningly harsh toward women.
SHAPIRO: Are you urging Muslim women who feel most comfortable wearing hijab not to wear one or are you just saying to well-intentioned non-Muslims please don’t do this as a sign of solidarity?
NOMANI: Well, very interestingly in a movement that I call now the hijab lobby, sadly promulgated by women that some of us refer to as Muslim mean girls and their friends, are trying to put out this meme that we are denying women their choice. But of course in this world everybody should have their choice. What we are saying is we have to be smart about the ideology that is putting this idea into the world that a woman must be defined by her idea of modesty, that she is the vessel for honor in a community. And I believe that we have to be very pragmatic, too, about the consequence of this. Women in Iran and Saudi Arabia are jailed, punished and harassed if they don’t cover themselves legally, according to the standard of those countries. So the consequences for many women is oftentimes very dark.
Women in the UK and the US and other places are harassed if they do wear it, so you can see why people want to be in solidarity with them, but…hijab doesn’t become benign or feminist because of that harassment.
SHAPIRO: I see certain parallels between the debate over feminism where some women argue that women should not be forced to stay at home and take care of children. And there are other women who are saying you are criticizing my decision as a free liberated women to stay home and take care of my children.
NOMANI: Right, but at the end of the day here what we’re talking about is choice. And we’re talking about everybody’s free right to have choice. And so what we’re also getting are interesting messages like you really need to obey the command of Allah and put a scarf on your head. And what we caution well-intentioned Americans and others to think about is whether the scarf matches their own values related to issues of honor and shame.
That’s the thing, you know – it’s not a “choice” in the full sense, because it is a (putative) religious obligation or command. It’s a “choice” to obey a religious command, one that is violently enforced in some parts of the world. That’s a dubious form of “choice,” if you ask me.
There’s a very ugly comment on the interview:
I agree with Fredrik deBoer up to a point, but only up to a point.
I was quoted in a couple prominent publications yesterday, repeating my complaints with Oberlin’s protest against the supposed cultural appropriation of bad cafeteria food. Predictably, this resulted in both a lot of praise and a lot of criticism on social media. I don’t take either too deeply to heart. But I am disappointed that, from both critics and supporters, this has resulted in a common refrain: that I must be something other than a leftist, that to differ with (for example) Oberlin college students on the question of cultural appropriation must mean that I’m a closet whatever.
In fact, I critique that practice because I am on the left.
Same here. I think a lot of accusations of appropriation are wrong and decidedly unhelpful – which is not to say that all of them are.
But after that comes the point where I stop agreeing.
In fact, I critique that practice because I am on the left. I’m part of a small but growing collection of people who feel that the left has lost its way, and that it must be steered back to its traditional roots: in materialism, in class solidarity as the basis of political organizing, in recognizing that racism and sexism can only be meaningfully addressed through structural economic change, in privileging the material over the symbolic or the linguistic, and in defining our purpose as building a mass movement — and thus necessarily reaching out and convincing those who are not already convinced.
I agree that class solidarity is one basis for political organizing, and is badly neglected by the left these days, and should be recuperated…but I don’t agree that it should be the basis, to the exclusion of other categories. I absolutely don’t agree that racism and sexism can only be meaningfully addressed through structural economic change – that used to be the standard left approach and look at the result: sexism and racism were all but ignored. I don’t think I agree that the left should privilege the material over the symbolic or the linguistic, because I think they all matter. I think it matters that popular culture is so packed with all-dude entertainment, as if women were a tiny insignificant minority. I think it matters what culture we grow up in.
That said, I think his post is a useful corrective.
Kenan Malik in the New York Times compares and contrasts Donald Trump and Maryam Namazie.
What links them is that there are many people in Britain who do not wish to let one or the other speak.
Mr. Trump’s recent call for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” caused outrage across the world. More than half a million Britons signed a petition to Parliament demanding that he be barred from Britain, a demand that has been backed by senior political figures.
The furor over Ms. Namazie’s views has caused fewer ripples, but is no less significant. Ms. Namazie is a founding member of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, an organization that campaigns on behalf of those facing hostility for renouncing their Islamic faith, or “apostasy.”
But, Kenan points out, there are people fatuous enough to think and say that Maryam is “Islamophobic” and thus in the same category as Donald Trump.
All this reveals the odd relationship that many on the left have with Islam. They view all Muslims as helpless victims, and regard any criticism of Islam as a form of bigotry. A columnist for The Guardian, David Shariatmadari, called the attempt at Warwick to muzzle Ms. Namazie “reasonable” because “we don’t want to have any part in the further stigmatisation of Islam.” Some academics disdainfully dismiss liberal Muslim critics of Islam as “native informants” — defined by one academic as “insiders” who “air the dirty laundry of Muslim communities.”
So what’s left? If Exes are “Islamophobic” and liberals are “native informants” – what’s left?
Uncritical endorsement of reactionary Islamists, that’s what.
Just as Mr. Trump seems unable to distinguish between Muslims and terrorists, do many on the left seem unable to distinguish between criticism of Islam and bigotry against Muslims. And just as Mr. Trump views Muslims as an undifferentiated lump, all potential terrorists, those on the left also often view Muslims as a homogeneous community speaking with a single voice. Both ignore progressive Muslim voices as not being truly of that community, while celebrating the most conservative voices as authentic.
I once interviewed Naser Khader, a secular Muslim and a Danish member of Parliament. He recalled a conversation with Toger Seidenfaden, then editor of the left-wing newspaper Politiken, about the “Muhammad cartoons” that had caused global controversy in 2005 when published in another Danish paper, Jyllands-Posten.
Mr. Seidenfaden claimed that “the cartoons insulted all Muslims.” “I am not insulted,” Mr. Khader responded. “But you’re not a real Muslim” came the reply. To be a real Muslim is, from such a perspective, to find the cartoons offensive. Anyone who isn’t offended is, by definition, not a real Muslim.
And yet people who think that way call Maryam Islamophobic.
And speaking of reform and “the community,” there’s a busy Twitter hashtag #DuaAgainstMaajidNawaz. Yesterday it was full of disgusting requests that Allah kill Maajid in degrading painful ways, but then the liberals took it over and now it’s full of jokes. I made a few myself.
But as so often, it’s interesting to note that passionate religion doesn’t seem to inspire people to be kinder, but rather the opposite.
Simon @wingedbullsimon 27 minutes ago
May your earbuds always be tangled. #DuaAgainstMaajidNawaz
It’s Jesus and Mo day, i.e. the day a new J & M appears.
So that means people like Maajid Nawaz and Irshad Manji and Tarek Fatah and Tehmina Kazi and Sarah Khan are totally outsiders, right? Of course.
Volume 7, Wrong Again, God Boy, with a foreword by ME, is out now.
It gets more degrading every day.
Trump, last night:
“Even her race to Obama, she was gonna beat Obama,” the GOP frontrunner told a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “I don’t know who would be worse, I don’t know. How does it get worse? But she was gonna beat — she was favored to win — and she got schlonged. She lost.”
See what he did there? She got penised. The weak worthless pathetic woman got penised, because she’s so weak and pathetic and vagina.
I don’t like the way we do things here. It’s bad.
Had you heard of the Harvard placemats? I hadn’t heard of them until just now.
It was just a matter of time before the campus debates over free speech and racial injustice took on a festive tone.
At Harvard, this has arrived in the form of a “Holiday Placemat for Social Justice,” an initiative from the Harvard Office for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion which was met with a recoil and an apology from two Harvard College deans this week.
These placemats, distributed in undergraduate dining halls, offered a script for answering questions about some of the more controversial topics of the year, from “Islamaphobia [sic]/Refugees” to “Black murders in the street.”
A script. Who wants a script? Can’t people create their own scripts? Especially when they’re talking to friends and family?
For example, in response to the question under “Yale/Student activism” — “Why are Black students complaining? Shouldn’t they be happy to be in college?” — students are instructed to tell their relatives:
When I hear students expressing their experiences of racism on campus I don’t hear complaining. Instead I hear young people uplifting a situation that I may not experience. If non-Black students get the privilege of that safe environment, I believe that same privilege should be given to all students.
Are students so helpless and hapless and feeble now that they need the Office for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion to write scripts for them? Can’t they figure out what to say all by themselves? Based on the thoughts in their own head, which will have been shaped by other conversations and reading and reflection?
Also, do they need such bad scripts? “Uplifting a situation”? That’s not what “uplift” means.
A note at the bottom of the page states that the guidelines were adapted from the “Showing Up for Racial Justice Holiday Placemat” created by a national community organizing network of the same name which “moves white people to act as part of a multi-racial majority for justice with passion and accountability.”
Well that’s a whole different thing. It makes sense coming from a community organizing network; you know where you are with that. But coming from an office of the university and distributed at dining halls? Not so much.
Well now look at that, Godless Utopia is doing a Woman Atheist of the Year poll with four categories (with four nominees in each category). It’s a Twitter-based poll, i.e. you vote by clicking a box on the relevant tweet.
One is for comedian; I of course voted for Kate Smurthwaite. There’s also actress and blogger (I voted for Maryam). The fourth is author; I voted for Taslima. But here’s the shocker: somehow I’m one of the nominees in that one. I won’t win of course but feel free to vote for me anyway! (But really you should vote for Taslima.)
(Voting has already started.)
Gagandeep Kaur in Delhi tells us more about those huts where women are isolated because they’re menstruating.
Poornima Javardhan, 25, felt dread and trepidation as she got ready to spend five days in a gaokor – a hut outside her village where girls and women are banished during menstruation.
“During the rainy season, it is all the more difficult to stay in a gaokor because water comes inside and sometimes the roof leaks,” says Javardhan, who lives in Sitatola, a village in central India’s Maharashtra state. Each month, custom dictates that she must stay in the thatched hut on the edge of a forest, sometimes on her own, or, if she’s lucky, with another woman.
There are no kitchens, because bleeding women aren’t allowed to cook. A thick sheet on the ground is the only bed; during the day it’s folded to serve as a chair. The huts are isolated, so forest animals pay visits; there are reports of women dying from snakebites.
The practice of banishing women and girls is most prevalent among the Gond and Madiya ethnic groups. The Gonds are the largest indigenous group in central India and hail from the states of Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh and Orissa.
Girls miss school while they are in the huts. An estimated 23% of girls in India drop out of school when they start menstruating. “Many times a menstruating girl is unable to take her exams because of this practice. It means that few girls from this region study beyond matriculation [high school],” says Barsagade.
They have to stay there for five days.
There are two gaokors in Sitatola, home to about 20 families. Although there have been incidents of harassment, women are generally left alone because they are considered impure while they have their periods. There have been moves to improve the conditions of the gaokors, but not to end the practice.
It’s very important not to rape a woman when she’s impure. Keep that for when she’s not bleeding.
From the New Statesman in August 2005: Donal MacIntyre reports some of the truth about “Mother” Teresa.
dormitory held about 30 beds rammed in so close that there was hardly a breath of air between the bare metal frames. Apart from shrines and salutations to “Our Great Mother”, the white walls were bare. The torch swept across the faces of children sleeping, screaming, laughing and sobbing, finally resting on the hunched figure of a boy in a white vest. Distressed, he rocked back and forth, his ankle tethered to his cot like a goat in a farmyard. This was the Daya Dan orphanage for children aged six months to 12 years, one of Mother Teresa’s flagship homes in Kolkata. It was 7.30 in the evening, and outside the monsoon rains fell unremittingly.
Earlier in the day, young international volunteers had giggled as one told how a young boy had peed on her while strapped to a bed. I had already been told of an older disturbed woman tied to a tree at another Missionaries of Charity home. At the orphanage, few of the volunteers batted an eyelid at disabled children being tied up. They were too intoxicated with the myth of Mother Teresa and drunk on their own philanthropy to see that such treatment of children was inhumane and degrading.
Or maybe just too Catholic, too indoctrinated, too unthinking, too convinced that piety=goodness to see that such treatment of children was inhumane and degrading. Irish industrial “schools” were run by people like that.
Volunteers (from Italy, Sweden, the United States and the UK) did their best to cradle and wash the children who had soiled themselves. But there were no nappies, and only cold water. Soap and disinfectant were in short supply. Workers washed down beds with dirty water and dirty cloths. Food was prepared on the floor in the corridor. A senior member of staff mixed medicine with her hands. Some did their best to give love and affection – at least some of the time. But, for the most part, the care the children received was inept, unprofessional and, in some cases, rough and dangerous. “They seem to be warehousing people rather than caring for them,” commented the former operations director of Mencap Martin Gallagher, after viewing our undercover footage.
Much of that was because “Mother” Teresa refused to spend money on the people she claimed to be caring for, instead giving it to the church (and spending it on herself when she was ill).
Susan Shields, formerly a senior nun with the order, recalled that one year there was roughly $50m in the bank account held by the New York office alone. Much of the money, she complained, sat in banks while workers in the homes were obliged to reuse blunt needles. The order has stopped reusing needles, but the poor care remains pervasive. One nurse told me of a case earlier this year where staff knew a patient had typhoid but made no effort to protect volunteers or other patients. “The sense was that God will provide and if the worst happens – it is God’s will.”
“God will provide” but the 50 million dollars sits in the bank account.
Nearly eight years after her death, Mother Teresa is fast on the way to sainthood. The great aura of myth that surrounds her is built on her great deeds helping the poor and the destitute of Kolkata, birthplace of her order, the Missionaries of Charity. Rarely has one individual so convinced public opinion of the holiness of her cause. Her reward is accelerated canonisation.
But her homes are a disgrace to so-called Christian care and, indeed, civilised values of any kind. I witnessed barbaric treatment of the most vulnerable.
But she’ll be a “saint” all the same.
Asra Nomani and Hala Arafa say thanks but no thanks to the whole “wearing ‘hijab’ in solidarity” thing – not for the familiar and irritating reason that it’s “appropriation” but for the much better reason that it’s sexist shit.
Last week, three female religious leaders – a Jewish rabbi, an Episcopal vicar and a Unitarian reverend – and a male imam, or Muslim prayer leader, walked into the sacred space in front of the ornately-tiled minbar, or pulpit, at the Khadeeja Islamic Center in West Valley City, Utah, the women smiling widely, their hair covered with swaths of bright scarves, to support “Wear a Hijab” day.
The media obligingly reported this interfaith gesture.
For us, as mainstream Muslim women, born in Egypt and India, the spectacle at the mosque was a painful joke and reminder of the well-financed effort by conservatives to dominate modern Muslim societies. This modern-day movement spreads an ideology of political Islam, called “Islamism,” enlisting unsuspecting well-intentioned do-gooders, while promoting the headscarf for women as a virtual “sixth pillar” of Islam, after the traditional “five pillars,” the shahada (or proclamation of faith), prayer, fasting, charity and pilgrimage. We reject this interpretation. We are not too sexy for our hair.
It’s been grating on me for ages, the way the media and would-be progressives beam approval on the headscarf for women, as if it stood purely for mutual love and respect and not at all for the subordination of women.
This modern-day movement, codified by Iran, Saudi Arabia, Taliban Afghanistan and the Islamic State, has erroneously made the Arabic word hijab synonymous with “headscarf,” furthering a sexist interpretation of Islam that women and girls must “protect” their “honor” by covering their hair. Hijab literally means, “curtain” in Arabic. It also means “hiding,” ”obstructing” and “isolating” someone or something. It is never used in the Koran to mean headscarf.
I did not know that. I’ve been calling it hijab all this time. Damn.
Born in the 1960s into conservative but open-minded families (Hala in Egypt and Asra in India), we grew up without an edict that we had to cover our hair. But, starting in the 1980s, following the 1979 Iranian revolution of the minority Shia sect and the rise of well-funded Saudi clerics from the majority Sunni sect, we have experienced bullying to cover our hair from men and boys – and women and girls, who are sometimes called “enforce-hers” and “Muslim mean girls,” for example, telling jokes about “hijabis” in skinny jeans actually being “ho-jabis,” using the indelicate term for “whores.”
…
To us, the headscarf is a symbol of an interpretation of Islam we reject that believes that women are a sexual distraction to men, who are weak, and, thus, we must cover ourselves. We don’t buy it. This ideology promotes a social attitude that absolves men of sexually harassing women and puts the onus on the victim to protect herself by covering up.
And treats her like so much garbage if she doesn’t cover up.
Unfortunately, the idea of “hijab” as a mandatory headscarf for women, duping well-intentioned “interfaith” supporters, is promulgated by efforts such as “World Hijab Day,” started in 2013 by Nazma Khan, the Bangladeshi American owner of a Brooklyn-based headscarf company, and Ahlul Bayt, a Shia proselytizing TV station, that the University of Calgary, in southwest Canada, promotes as a resource for its participation in “World Hijab Day,” the TV station arguing “hijab” is necessary for women to avoid “unwanted attention.” World Hijab Day, Ahlul Bayt and the University of Calgary didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Yikes. Bad move, University of Calgary.
In its “resources,” Ahluly Bayt includes a link to the notion that “the woman is awrah,” or forbidden, an idea that leads to the confinement, subordination, silencing and subjugation of women’s voices and presence in public society. It also includes an article, “The top 10 excuses of Muslim women who don’t wear hijab and their obvious weaknesses,” with the argument, “Get on the train of repentance, my sister, before it passes by your station.”
Also, the notion that “the woman is awrah” presupposes that the only people who count as people are men. The woman is forbidden to men, and therefore she’s just plain forbidden, because only men count. Since only men count, the way to deal with these forbidden women is to imprison them. Problem solved…as long as you assume women don’t count as people.
The rush to cover women’s hair has reached a fever pitch with ultraconservative websites and organizations pushing this interpretation, such as VirtualMosque.com and Al-Islam.org, which even published a feature, “Hijab Jokes,” mocking Muslim women who don’t cover their hair “Islamically.”
Last week, high school girls at Vernon Hills High School, outside Chicago, wore headscarves for an activity, “Walk a Mile in Her Hijab,” sponsored by the school’s conservative Muslim Students Association. It disturbed us to see the image of the girls in scarves.
These things always disturb me. They just send the message that Muslim women and girls are expected to wear the damn curtains.
As Americans, we believe in freedom of religion. But we need to clarify to those in universities, the media and discussion forums that in exploring the “hijab,” they are not exploring Islam, but rather the ideology of political Islam as practiced by the mullahs, or clerics, of Iran and Saudi Arabia, the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Islamic State.
In the name of “interfaith,” well-intentioned Americans are getting duped by the agenda of Muslims who argue that a woman’s honor lies in her “chastity,” pushing a platform to put a headscarf on every woman.
Please do this instead: Do not wear a headscarf in “solidarity” with the ideology that most silences us, equating our bodies with “honor.” Stand with us instead with moral courage against the ideology of Islamism that demands we cover our hair.
I do!
Alice Dreger has, with effort, learned to accept that historians are always too late with advice; people don’t listen until after it’s all over.
A group of transgender activists has achieved a major victory—the shutting down of the Child Youth and Family Gender Identity Clinic at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). Even better from their point of view, they got the head of it, psychologist Ken Zucker, fired.
The activists didn’t like Zucker because he never did subscribe to the “true transgender” model of identity, wherein you simply accept what any child (no matter how young) says about his or her gender. The transgender activists who called for his ouster insisted that Zucker was doing “reparative therapy,” trying to talk children out of being transgender when they “really” were.
I don’t doubt that these particular transgender adults look back and see that, from very early on, they had been assigned a gender that didn’t make sense for them. The mistake they make is then to assume that every child who expresses doubt about his or her birth gender assignment should simply be “affirmed” by parents and clinicians in their “new” gender.
It’s the other minds problem, as always. You can’t ever know that other people are thinking exactly what you thought in what you take to be the same situation. You just can’t. It’s all guesswork and extrapolation, and it’s inherently fallible.
This is an unbelievably simplistic understanding of what’s going on with these children. Yes, some of them will grow up to be transgender; Zucker and others have documented that, over and over again. But if history is a guide, the majority will not. Trying to make sure they all get the best care they need is the goal of clinics like Zucker’s, as well as the clinics run by other good folks at the children’s hospitals of UCLA, Northwestern, Seattle, and on and on.
Why not just go ahead and transition everyone who expresses doubt about his or her birth gender assignment? Because physical transition is a big deal. On the other hand starting early with kids who won’t later regret it is much better than waiting. There are reasons both ways. That’s why it’s important to get it right.
For many years, there was pretty heavy medical gatekeeping around sex reassignment. This had some to do with homophobia, heterosexism, and so on, and some to do with defensive medicine (fear of being sued if a patient later regretted transitioning). Today, the pendulum has swung really hard in the other direction. It is now much, much easier for children, adolescents, and adults who signal that they are transgender to gain access to social gender changes, hormone therapies, and sex changing surgeries. This has a lot to do with political rejection of homophobia, heterosexism, transphobia and so on, and some to do with defensive medicine (fear of being attacked as anti-transgender).
In other words, it’s still pretty damned political. Whereas before, some people who would have benefitted from transition were denied it, today some people who might benefit from alternative clinical help (alternative to transition) are effectively denied that help and are instead being “treated” with transition.
Dreger links to people who have later changed their minds about transitioning.
There are more and more of these, and they are typically not written by people who are anti-transgender by any means. They are written by people who realize transition isn’t what they needed after all. They are written by people who urge caution.
Many people today are afraid to urge caution, because when you do, you get labeled anti-trans, and sometimes coopted by genuinely anti-trans people. But some people are willing to talk in private or to speak pseudonymously. So, earlier this year for WIRED magazine, I interviewed a thirty-something woman I called Jess. She had been a gender nonconforming female child and was skeptical about sending children too quickly down the road of transition.
Today, in the clinics presumably the transgender activists want, a gender nonconforming, gender-questioning child like Jess would simply be transitioned over and sent out into the world. But Jess told me that, today, “I’m very happy having the body I have, with just some changes in how I express it.” She identifies as a genderqueer gay person with a female body (the body type she was born with), and works on LGBT rights issues professionally. She’s not anti-trans.
Not a bad outcome, is it?
The transgender activists who demanded and ultimately achieved the shut-down of Zucker’s CAMH clinic said that Zucker’s approach was full of stigma. That’s because he didn’t simply “gender affirm” every child that came by. He worked with them to figure out what they needed psychologically. For some, that was transition. For others, it was coming to see that you could be gender nonconforming without changing your sex, or dealing with depression or bi-polar disorder, or dealing with the mental health needs of parents who were not well enough to really care for their children as their children deserved. It was a pretty idiosyncratic approach, designed to help each individual child be the most healthy in the long run, no matter which label she or he came to inhabit. Again, for some children, that meant transition (becoming “T”), and for those children, Zucker arranged puberty-blocking hormones and then hormonal and surgical transition.
The trouble is, Zucker didn’t do the community education and outreach that was needed.
I so wish Zucker had done the “community education” that this review called for. Now it is too late. For years, I and others advised Zucker to be far more proactive in terms of the politics in which he was caught—to reach out to the public to directly engage them in conversation about the methods and reasoning of his clinic’s approach, the same approach used in many top clinics around the world. As late as this summer, I gave him a lot of the advice I also recently gave to the International Society for Intelligence Research about how to work to protect yourself in politically difficult fields (see video).
But Ken seemed to believe that he didn’t need to deal with the activists coming after him. He disregarded my repeated advice. As a consequence, what has happened to him reminds me very much of what happened to Napoleon Chagnon, as recounted in chapters five and six of Galileo’s Middle Finger. It’s the Galilean personality, stuck on the belief that truth will save you. Wrong. The Church of True Gender doesn’t give a crap what science shows.
But people don’t listen to historians until it’s too late.
Jonah Cohen and Ramya Chamalie Jirasinghe tell us what “justice” looks like for foreign domestic workers in Saudi Arabia.
They start with the Sri Lankan woman whose sentence of beheading for having sex outside her marriage has been sent back for review.
But the public still doesn’t know her name, for whom she was working, what she testified in court, or who bore witness against her. Not her family, not even her “betrayed” husband, knows that she stands to be executed.
Why won’t her name be released? Officials involved with the case claim she doesn’t want her family to know how far she’s fallen, that she’d feel humiliated. But it’s hard to believe that the same court that would stone a woman to death would also protect her from the sting of social scandal. It’s just as likely that the housemaid’s name is being concealed to stifle media attention, as well as to imply her shame and guilt over a sexual crime for which her male judges might kill her.
Yeah Saudi officials are so concerned with their victims’ feelings of humiliation. Please.
If she does survive and make it home, she will be another in a string of horror stories.
“Now I have become a prostitute. I have come back home a prostitute,” says the woman in this video as she recounts the horror of her experience as a maid in Saudi Arabia. “The house I was working in threw me out on to the road. When I got into a taxi on the road, the driver took me to a brothel. I had to work as a prostitute for two months.”
Another woman says that she was tasked with looking after 14 children. “When I couldn’t manage, instead of taking me back to my agency, they sold me to another agency. And at that agency they hit me until I started bleeding from my skull.”
Beaten like slaves, treated like merchandise, these women are among the fortunate ones. Other young Sri Lankan housemaids, working for two dollars a day, never return home.
Human Rights Watch reports on this subject too.
You might have heard about the young woman who was beheaded in Saudi Arabia in 2013. But you probably haven’t heard of the underage housemaid whose corpse was just returned earlier this month to her parents in Sri Lanka.
She hanged herself in the spring. Or so it is claimed by Saudi authorities. Her parents are skeptical. “I have doubts that someone who was supposed to come home in May would kill herself like this,” her father says. “She called us and said she was coming in May.”
And these aren’t aberrations.
Namini Wijedasa, a Sri Lankan journalist, recently reported that “the tales of misery are too numerous to ignore.”
Few, if any, of these migrant workers receive the protection of domestic employment laws. Visiting workers in Saudi Arabia must obtain permission from their employers to exit legally from the kingdom. If that is not slave labor, what is?
It’s almost as if more religion doesn’t make people good.
I tried to find some evidence to rebut (or not) something I claimed.
Ed Cara on Twitter said in response to my link to the first collection of misogynist comments about Germaine Greer:
Those are all certainly vile, but I absolutely do think there’d be vile racist comments over quotes from a famous AA speaker
So I looked around, and found a rapper who obliged. Pink News reported last September:
Waka Flocka Flame made a series of transphobic comments on a New York radio station on Friday.
The rapper told ‘The Breakfast Club’ that Caitlyn Jenner’s transition was an: “Affront to God.”
He went on to accuse “transgenders” of “marketing evil, man.”
Flame continued to wax lyrical about the danger of non-traditional family units, accusing men and women of forgetting their gender roles as “husbands and wives”.
“Women are afraid to be a wife and young males is afraid to be men.” he said.
“It’s like, it’s not cool, they’re not marketing that. They don’t market families and husbands and wives no more.
“They marketing young girls, you know what I’m saying?” he said, as it became increasingly clear that few around him did.
“Transgenders — they’re marketing evil, man,” he said, before accusing the trans community of doing the “devil’s work” and as a test that society needed to “outbeat [sic]”.
“You are who you are when God made you, not who you became after he did.
“That’s how I just feel. You rebuking God, man.
“God didn’t put them feelings in you, man, that’s the Devil playing tricks on your mind,” he added.
“That’s a test from God. If you can’t outbeat [sic] that one task and you believe that, then you’re going to believe everything else.”
However, Mr Flame didn’t reserve his hate fuelled philosophising for trans people alone – he also criticised the African American community, insisting that they need “get over slavery”.
So I found the Pink News Facebook post of the story. Ed was at least partly right – the comments are certainly abusive. On the other hand they’re not explicitly racist the way so many of the comments about Greer were misogynist – and there are only 34, compared to her 223.
But plenty of them are implicitly racist. Like the second one for instance:
Gideon John Kramer Waka flaka wtf all theses idiots with the brain the apsize of an ant who brag about fucking bitches selling drugs and people are so fucking stupid they pay these idiots attention rap takes no talent what so ever these idiots call themself artists and then say stupid things like this moron its sad to see how many people actually even listion to anything these idiots say
And others:
Pete Smith Looks like a trans human.
Scott Sherman I’m not a fan of ignorant, bigoted talentless twats holding themselves out like theyre a role model and spewing their hate in interviews
There’s a rather cryptic one…
Donny Ball WAKA your baby girl is waiting for you.
The misogyny sneaks in even when the sinner isn’t a woman.
But anyway: my claim is at least partly rebutted.
