James Bloodworth got into a discussion with an Amnesty volunteer last week on the question of whether or not it’s a good idea to collaborate with groups or people who stand for bad things, with Cage being the example of standing for bad things. That’s a difficult and unavoidable question for all movements and campaigns and groups, because there are always going to be differences, and it’s not generally easy to know where to draw the line.

But Cage has made it easier now…

My own argument was simply to ask whether it would be acceptable to partner with an organisation of the British far-right in a similar fashion. Would it really be kosher to share a platform with Nick Griffin simply because of ‘common ground’ over his and  our opposition to, say, the war in Iraq?

Of course not, and I suspect my interlocutor now realises this – ever since Cage’s unsavoury nature became undeniable yesterday afternoon, his tweets defending the group have mysteriously disappeared. Or not so mysteriously; for who really wants to be on the record publicly defending a group which referred to Mohammed Emwazi (aka Jihadi John) as a ‘beautiful man’?

Yes, that makes it a whole lot easier.

Nor can yesterday’s Cage press conference be defended on the basis of putting Mohammed Emwazi’s actions in their proper ‘context’. Contemplate for a second how silly (and how sinister) it would have been to talk about the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik in a similar fashion – not as a ruthless killer but as a misunderstood victim of the system. As a friend put it this morning, the ‘MI5 made me do it’ narrative is also an insult to all of those who fall foul of the immigration system yet do not resort to beheading people.

Many who ought to have known better have coddled Cage in recent years and will no doubt feign surprise at news that the group isn’t so much a human rights group as an Islamist activist outfit. Well I’m sorry to say this but: we told you so.

But there are still people who think Islamist activism is more or less the same kind of thing as human  rights activism. I can never really understand how they manage to think that, but they do.

One hopes that after yesterday’s grim spectacle Amnesty will distance itself from Cage, just as it would any other group that was so closely aligned with (and so ready to make excuses for) dangerous extremists.

There’s that word again. I don’t care that they’re “extremists”; I care that they’re theocratic murderers and rapists and enslavers and colonialists of the most bloodthirsty kind. If they were “extremist” Quakers for instance, we wouldn’t have this problem.

But that’s a quibble. On the larger point, James is quite right.

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

Taslima shares a long string of excerpts from the Koran and the Hadith that mandate the kind of thing the murderers did to Avijit Roy.

The Islamic killers used big sharp knives to kill Dr. Avijit Roy, the well known progressive blogger. ISIS terrorists use sharp knives to behead people. They like knives because Muhammad liked knives to kill nonbelievers. Islamist leaders convince fellow Islamists to kill nonbelievers for the sake of Islam. Allah Himself advise people to kill. There are many Islamic organizations in Bangladesh working to indoctrinate young people with Islam. The leaders of those organizations insist people to believe in the Quran, the words of Allah and the Hadith, the words of Muhammad. Governments and almost all established organizations encourage people to believe in Allah the God and Muhammad the messenger.

If you are a Muslim, you have to believe in the Quran and Hadith. And if you believe in the Quran and Hadith, you have to agree with Allah that atheists should be brutally killed. These are the texts that inspire Islamists to kill Avijit Roy, the freethinker. These are the texts that inspire ISIS, Boko Haram, Al Shabaab etc. to kill nonbelievers and non-Muslims.

Read and ponder the whole list in all its horribleness. I’ll select just a few from Taslima’s selection.

Quran (5:33) – “The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His messenger and strive to make mischief in the land is only this, that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off on opposite sides or they should be imprisoned; this shall be as a disgrace for them in this world, and in the hereafter they shall have a grievous chastisement”

Quran (8:12) – “I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.”

That’s the “prophet” that we are told Muslims love the way they love their parents, only more.

Quran (9:5) – “So when the sacred months have passed away, then slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captive and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush, then if they repent and keep up prayer and pay the poor-rate, leave their way free to them.”

If that were something written by Plato or K’ung-fu-tzu people would be free to say we’ve outgrown that kind of thing, and just ignore it. But no, it’s in The Holy Book, so it’s a crime and Forbidden and a sin and idolatry and unbelief to say we’ve outgrown it.

Quran (9:29) – “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.”

Fight fight fight; conquer; squash; extort money.

Fuck that noise.

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

Remember this? From five years ago? Gita Sahgal told the Sunday Times about her disagreement with Amnesty International over their support for CAGE? And they fired her as a result?

A SENIOR official at Amnesty International has accused the charity of putting the human rights of Al-Qaeda terror suspects above those of their victims.

Gita Sahgal, head of the gender unit at Amnesty’s international secretariat, believes that collaborating with Moazzam Begg, a former British inmate at Guantanamo Bay, “fundamentally damages” the organisation’s reputation.

In an email sent to Amnesty’s top bosses, she suggests the charity has mistakenly allied itself with Begg and his “jihadi” group, Cageprisoners, out of fear of being branded racist and Islamophobic.

Sahgal describes Begg as “Britain’s most famous supporter of the Taliban”. He has championed the rights of jailed Al-Qaeda members and hate preachers, including Anwar al-Awlaki, the alleged spiritual mentor of the Christmas Day Detroit plane bomber.

The rest is pay-walled, but you get the idea.

Maajid Nawaz wrote a pointed little Facebook post linking to that article yesterday:

I take this moment to salute human rights campaigner Gita Sahgal. Five years ago to the month she was sacked by Amnesty International for exposing their links to Islamist group CAGE (Jihadi John’s friends) in The Sunday Times to Richard Kerbaj http://t.co/kUtp4CktnA
Will you apologise Amnesty? Sincerely, your former Prisoner of Conscience.

Seriously. They should have listened to Gita instead of firing her. Islamists are not allies of human rights organizations. Islamists have human rights, and AI gets to campaign to protect those human rights, but that’s not the same thing as being allies.

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

Three suspects were arrested in Bangladesh on Saturday but it’s not clear if they were arrested specifically on suspicion of involvement in the murder of Avijit Roy or for Islamism in general.

Three suspected Islamists were on Saturday arrested in Bangladesh in a pre-dawn raid, as authorities intensified a crackdown on extremists following the brutal killing of American blogger Avijit Roy in the capital.

Acting on a tip-off, elite anti-crime Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) conducted a pre-dawn raid at a five-storey building in the northeastern port city of Chittagong and arrested three suspected militants.

“We have seized 30 grenades…it appears they (militants) could have made some 300-400 bombs with the explosives we found at the den,” RAB’s commanding officer in Chittagong Lt Col Mista Uddin told reporters in a primary briefing.

Were the police just giving the explosives a pass until yesterday? That seems hard to believe.

A bio-engineer and naturalised US citizen, Roy also earned a repute of being a writer. He was in Dhaka to attend Bangladesh’s annual February or Ekushey Book Fair in memory of 1952 Language Movement martyrs.

Roy’s family and friends said Islamist radicals had been threatening him in recent weeks because he maintained a blog ‘Mukto-mona’ or ‘Freemind’ that highlighted humanist and rationalist ideas and condemned religious extremism.

“They (Islamists) are behind the murder of my son,” Roy’s octogenarian father famous physicist Ajay Roy earlier said after coming out of a police station filing a murder case.

Doctors who carried out the autopsy on the body said professionals appeared to have carried out the murder as they struck three blows “very expertly and with ferocity” on Roy’s head, causing his death from profuse bleeding.

Police said they were investigating the involvement of Ansarullah Bangla Team, an Islamist extremist group based in Bangladesh, that claimed responsibility for the murder.

Allahu akbar.

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

I’m looking to see how much news coverage the murder of Avijit Roy is getting outside Bangladesh. A Google News search turns up items at Fox News’s blog, the Daily Mail, CNN’s blog, and a few more…so it’s not as much as it should be.

The New York Times reported Friday, with some details I hadn’t seen before.

A Bangladeshi-American blogger known for his antipathy to religion was hacked to death on the street in this capital city by two assailants wielding machetes, the police said on Friday.

The victim, Avijit Roy, 42, was leaving a book fair with his wife Thursday evening when his attackers approached him from behind, according to the police. His wife, Rafida Ahmed Bonya, 45, suffered a blow to the head and was in critical condition in a Dhaka hospital, said Sirajul Islam, an officer at the Shahbag police station, where Mr. Roy’s father reported the assault.

Jibon Ahmed, a photographer for a local photo agency, said by phone that he heard screams outside the fair around 9 p.m. After finding the couple, he said, he helped them into an auto-rickshaw and took them to the hospital, where Mr. Roy died.

The police have not named any suspects, but Mr. Islam said that witnesses had provided descriptions of the attackers. Officers recovered two bloodied machetes from the scene of the crime.

The reporters are Julfikar Ali Manik and Nida Najar, so perhaps reporting from Dhaka.

Mr. Roy was a prolific writer on secularism and condemned religious extremism, particularly through his blog, Mukto-Mona, the Bengali words for Free Mind. He also wrote on the website of the Center for Inquiry, an organization based in the United States dedicated to humanist thinking and critiques of religion.

In a recent article, Mr. Roy described the release of his 2014 book, “Biswasher Virus,” or “The Virus of Faith.”

“The death threats started flowing to my email inbox on a regular basis,” he wrote, describing reaction after the book came out. One extremist, he wrote, “issued death threats to me through his numerous Facebook statuses.” In one, the extremist wrote: “Avijit Roy lives in America and so it is not possible to kill him right now. But he will be murdered when he comes back.”

Michael De Dora, the director of the Center for Inquiry’s office of public policy, reacted to news of Mr. Roy’s death in a statement on the center’s website.

I don’t want martyrs. I want people who live long happy lives writing books and being there for their friends. I’m just saying.

Activists and intellectuals gathered at Dhaka University on Friday to protest Mr. Roy’s death and demand action against those responsible.

Parvez Alam, a Bangladeshi blogger who has written for Mukto-Mona, described Mr. Roy as “one of the most talented writers of our country.”

“This has been going on in Bangladesh,” he said by telephone. “The bloggers have different religious viewpoints and we’re being attacked again and again, and we’re not getting justice.”

“Using religion in the attempt to resist freethinking will not be accepted,” Khushi Kabir, a rights campaigner, told The Dhaka Tribune.

We don’t want martyrdom. We want to keep talking.

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

The Times of India reports on the funeral of Avijit Roy today.

Bangladeshis in huge numbers paid tributes to slain American blogger Avijit Roy on Sunday as they criticized the government for its failure to ensure safety to the writer, known for his critique of religious extremism.

People from all walks of life, including Roy’s friends, relatives, well-wishers, teachers and students, gathered at the Dhaka University premises with flowers to pay their respect to the slain writer, who was on a visit to his native city in mid-February to attend a book fair.

…

“Free thinking in Bangladesh is become a great danger, all the free thinkers are at great risk,” writer-journalist Shahriar Kabir, a friend of Roy’s father, said.

“We want to know why the government failed to ensure the safety of him, despite knowing that he had been facing threats from the Islamist radicals,” he added.

The killing of the blogger — said to be around 40 — that apparently took place right in front of a police barricade put up to restrict vehicular movement on the adjacent road for the ongoing book fair sparked countrywide protests and international condemnation.

Yes, we tend to get annoyed when the police just stand and watch as people hack us to death with machetes. We’re peevish that way.

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

The Independent talked to Ensaf Haidar and gives us more details on yesterday’s terrible news:

Raif Badawi, the Saudi Arabian blogger whose punishment of 1,000 lashes has prompted international condemnation, may now face the death penalty.

Mr Badawi’s wife, Ensaf Haidar, told The Independent in a series of messages that judges in Saudi Arabia’s criminal court want him to undergo a re-trial for apostasy. If found guilty, he would face a death sentence.

She said the “dangerous information” had come from “official sources” inside the conservative kingdom…

In 2013, a judge threw out the charge of apostasy against the 31-year-old blogger after he assured the court that he was a Muslim. The evidence against him had included the fact that he pressed the “Like” button on a Facebook page for Arab Christians.

The news that the charge may now be re-examined will come as a bitter blow to Mr Badawi’s family and supporters, who had hoped that the international pressure over his case would prompt Saudi Arabia to reduce his sentence.

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

Ensaf Haidar has bad news:

Very Urgent:

An official source told me that Raif Badawi may be facing death penalty for apostasy again

Free Raif Badawi posted some details:

URGENT – RAIF BADAWI MAYBE FACING DEATH PENALITY FOR APOSTASY AGAIN.
This told a official source Raifs Wife Ensaf on Saturday 01-03-2015 and she shared this message right now on Twitter.
What happened:
The Criminal Court in Jeddah where Raif faces his retrial is controlled by Hardliners who still intend to murdered him.

What can we do?
Our only chance are is to keep an enormous pressure against the Saudi Authorities and – as well – to our Governments, Parties, Politician, Ambassadors in Saudi Arabia & Organizations like the EU, UN and others. We MUST demand them to intervene right now and to stop this madness.
So please, mail, tweet, phone, call your Government & Embassy but also every other Embassie you find in SaudiArabia for intervention.
(Please use google or another search-engine.)
Call, mail, phone it is possible the Saudi Embassy in your Country.
Please also join the protest on the street the next week. Please ask your local Amnesty Chapter if they will organize a protest.
Please don’t give up and help to stop this crime against all humanity.
Be strong and fight for Raif.
Here are some Tweet-Accounts:
For Saudi Arabia: @KingSalman @KSAMOFA @MojKsa @NSHRSA @SaudiEmbassyUSA @SaudiEmbassyUK

Some Foreign Embassies in Saudi Arabia:
@USEmbassyRiyadh @SaudiEmbassyUK @GermanyinKSA

Please use ‪#‎RaifBadawi‬ ‪#‎FreeRaif‬ as Hashtag for better RT.

Please take action now.

Thank you.
Admin Antje.

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

Yesterday the CBC documentary show The Fifth Estate was about a medical doctor who wrote a best-seller about zomg wheat is poison stop eating it right this second and you will live forever.

Millions of people are joining the anti-wheat revolution.

Kellogg’s, the world’s largest cereal maker, has seen its biggest drop in sales since the 1970s. Food companies are selling off their struggling bread divisions. It’s all because best-selling health evangelists say that wheat is causing everything from fat bellies to schizophrenia. But do they have science on their side? Mark Kelley takes a hard look at what’s driving a movement that is dramatically changing the way we eat.

There were a couple of women on it, Rachel and Rachel, who are very devout about their hostility to the dreaded Wheat.They didn’t come across as particularly credulous or sappy, but then when they started explaining how they knew Wheat was so very very bad for humans…oh dear. It was both depressing and annoying.

CBC News expanded on the subject.

Critics say the anti-wheat claims made by leading health crusader Dr. William Davis are based on shaky science, an investigation by the fifth estate has found.

Davis is the author of the No. 1 New York Times best-selling book Wheat Belly, considered the bible of the wheat-free movement. He argues wheat has killed more people than all wars combined, and that it is responsible for an astonishing array of diseases — diabetes, obesity, Crohn’s disease and autoimmune disease, among many others.

He also claims the wheat we eat now is not what it used to be. Rather, it’s a genetically modified monster he calls “Frankenwheat” — and he says it’s killing us.

I think there’s a rule there – if there’s a “Franken” prefix on it then it’s bullshit.

But the fifth estate’s investigation found that experts in the scientific community say scientific claims made by the anti-wheat movement are questionable at best.

Joe Schwarcz, a chemist at McGill University dedicated to demystifying science and debunking big claims, says, “This is one of these arguments that has one smidgen of scientific fact to it, which is then exploded into a whole blob of nonsense.”

Schwarcz says he hasn’t seen any evidence that wheat has addictive properties, as Davis claims in his book. Schwarcz also says “opioid peptides” are produced when some foods are digested. But just because they can bind to opiate receptors in the brain doesn’t mean they produce a morphine-like effect.

“If we’re going to say that wheat is addictive,” Schwarcz explains, “it’s along the line that people like foods that have wheat in them. It’s not a physical addiction.”

But it’s so much more attention-grabby to say it’s an addiction.

The Canadian Celiac Association, the American Heart Association, the Obesity Society and the American College of Cardiology all refuse to endorse gluten-free diets for anyone who does not have celiac disease.

They must all be on the payroll of Big Pharma Big Wheat.

Yoni Freedhoff, a family doctor and diet expert who runs a nutrition clinic in Ottawa, says the eating guidelines touted in Wheat Belly are similar to other carb-free diets that get results by dramatically reducing the carbohydrates and calories people eat.

But just reducing carbohydrates and calories is boring. Cutting out Wheat is exciting, because you get that whole purity – eliminate the toxins thing. It’s like learning ballet, or calculus.

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

Deeyah Khan underlines the importance of free expression.

When I organised World Woman I was keen to emphasise the need for freedom of expression for activists and artists, to identify that those who are most likely to be silenced by the religious right most often share the culture of those who wish to silence them: that this is not a conflict of the enlightened West versus the obscurantist East, but against extremist ideologies that threaten all our shared liberties.

Definitely. We have extremist theocrats in “the West” and there are many loyal free expressionists in “the East.”

[T]here is something very wrong with a world in which being an artist, activist, a feminist, a politician, a lawyer or a trade unionist can be considered a dangerous activity. We need more courageous individuals who will defy the structures of power, whether political, economic or intimate; but we also need it to be safe for people to feel their power and to be able to express their ideas and imagine without fear. Self-expression should not be a challenge that demands extraordinary talent but should be a right accessible to all.

But violence against human rights defenders is increasing. Across the world, voices for human rights are ranged against repressive states, fundamentalist movements and corporate power…

And random murderers with machetes.

In 2013, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution to defend those who defend human rights with strong support from the Norwegian Mission underlining the freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly as foundational to democracy and all other human rights. The new Special Rapporteur dealing with Human Rights Defenders in 2014 called out a culture of impunity and worsening attacks on those brave people who sacrifice their safety for the hope of a better future for us all.

Making people fear the expression of their own power is a very effective way of disempowering them. It is not just those who feel the frustration of being silenced: it also encompasses every person who has no idea of their own power to realise their visions because they have not seen this in action in their communities. We need to be able to guarantee the safety of all artists and activists for human rights, so that it no longer takes extraordinary courage to call for a better world – so that every person with the ability to imagine peace, equality, progress and justice can express their dreams and hopes without fear.

Yes.we.do.

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