Ziauddin Sardar says Islam has a history full of freethinkers.

“This has nothing to do with Islam,” say the imams. “These callous and fanatic murders have nothing to do with us,” say the mullahs. “Islam means peace,” say the worshippers. These disclaimers, and variations on them, have been repeated countless times by Muslim commentators since the Charlie Hebdo killings. They are designed to distance people from guilt by association with those who kill and maim in the name of Islam.

But what about the sentence recently handed down to the (mildly) liberal blogger Raif Badawi in the Islamic state of Saudi Arabia? Ten years in jail, a massive fine, 1,000 lashes over 20 weeks (currently suspended because the first 50 lashes have rendered him “medically unfit”)? Does this have “nothing to do with Islam”? Does the hashtag “Je suis un couteau” – referring to this week’s stabbing of 11 Israelis on a bus – have “nothing to do with Islam”? Not to mention the 10 Christians killed during Charlie protests in Niger last week, or the ongoing depredations of al-Qaeda, Isis, Boko Haram, the Taliban and the Laskar Jihad of Indonesia?

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

The king of Saudi Fascist Arabia has died and his half-brother has replaced him. The New York Times gives some background.

Abdullah’s reign was a constant effort to balance desert traditions with the demands of the modern world, making him appear at times to be shifting from one to the other.

When popular movements and insurgencies overthrew or threatened long-established Arab rulers from Tunisia to Yemen in 2011, he reacted swiftly.

On his return from three months of treatment for a herniated disk and a blood clot in New York and Morocco, his government spent $130 billion to build 500,000 units of low-income housing, to bolster the salaries of government employees and to ensure the loyalty of religious organizations.

He also created a Facebook page, where citizens were invited to present their grievances directly to him, although it was not known how many entries actually reached him.

Was it known how many people ended up in prison for having grievances?

But in at least two telephone calls he castigated President Obama for encouraging democracy in the Middle East, saying it was dangerous. And he showed no tolerance in his country for the sort of dissent unfolding elsewhere.

The grand mufti, the kingdom’s highest religious official, proclaimed that Islam forbade street protests. Scores of protesters who failed to heed that message were arrested in the chiefly Shiite eastern provinces. A new law imposed crippling fines for offenses, like threatening national security, that could be broadly interpreted.

Imagine our surprise.

Abdullah’s Saudi Arabia had hurtled from tribal pastoralism to advanced capitalism in little more than a generation. The fundamentalist clerics who gave the family legitimacy remained a powerful force. Women who appeared in public without the required covering risked arrest or a beating from the religious police.

And Raif Badawi was tortured for uttering some thoughts about secularism and liberalism.

The king also grappled with domestic crises. The deaths of 15 girls in a dormitory fire in Mecca in 2002 caused an international uproar when it was learned that the religious police had not let them escape from the flames because they were not properly dressed. Furious, the king dismissed the head of women’s education.

In 2007, he pardoned a teenage girl who had been sentenced to six months in jail and 100 lashes after being raped. She was convicted after being found in a car alone with a man who was not her relative, a crime under Saudi law.

Though Abdullah made it clear that he thought the girl was guilty, pleasing the religious authorities, he pardoned her, he said, “for the greater good.”

The piece doesn’t mention Raif Badawi.

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

However, one piece of better news – though I can’t really call it good news, given the eight years wasted…

A pardon granted by El Salvador’s Parliamentary Assembly to a young woman imprisoned after suffering a miscarriage is a triumph of justice and gives hope to the other 15 women languishing in jail on similar charges, said Amnesty International.

In 2007 “Guadalupe” received a 30 year jail sentence after authorities wrongly suspected she had terminated her pregnancy. She was only 18 years old.

Now she’s 25 or 26. She lost eight years because she had a miscarriage.

El Salvador has one of the most draconian abortion laws in the world, criminalizing abortion on all grounds, even when a woman or girls’ life or health is in danger and in cases of rape. Women and girls suspected of having illegal abortions are also often cruelly and deliberately charged with homicide, as in Guadalupe’s case.

The other 15 women jailed after suffering pregnancy-related complications are also seeking pardons. Their cases will come before the Parliamentary Assembly in the coming months.

My Body My Rights is Amnesty International’s global campaign to stop the control and criminalization of sexuality and reproduction by governments and others. Over 2014-2015 the campaign is working for change in people’s lives in a number of countries, including El Salvador. This campaign aims to remind world leaders of their obligations to respect, protect and fulfil sexual and reproductive rights.

15 more women.

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

Michael Shermer is on the book tour for his new book explaining morality.

Morality? Shermer?

Yes. Bemusing, isn’t it.

Known for his analytic approach to the complex plight of humanity, New York Times bestselling author Michael Shermer (Skeptic Magazine) brings his characteristic insight to the nuanced relationship between science and morality in his latest book, The Moral Arc. From paying ransom to Somali pirates and the dilemmas of being a Nazi, to an analysis of the Bible’s basic principles, Shermer unpacks the philosophies behind some of today’s greatest moral questions. He’ll explain how beginning with The Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, scientific ways of thinking have made society more moral and in turn, created a freer, more just world.

Not by themselves they haven’t.

The subtitle of his book is

How Science and Reason Lead Humanity toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom

They don’t; that’s how. Not on their own. They can help; they can help a lot; they can correct a lot of mistakes. But they don’t just lead humanity toward justice, like a beacon in the night. Science and reason on their own can’t, for instance, convince someone that it’s immoral to get someone drunk and then steer her into your hotel room and then have sex with her. You need more than science and reason for that.

Shermer on morality. Funny old world, isn’t it.

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

Now have some revolting kakk from the International Union for Islamic Scholars.

(That’s not “scholars” as normally understood, of course. It means not people who have read and understood many books, but people who have read and memorized one book.)

IUMS calls for the Islamic nation to continue in the legal peaceful demonstrating to defend the great messenger, and calls for the West to protect Muslim communities from attacks.

Defend him from what? He’s dead. It’s too late to defend him because he has no life to defend any more.

IUMS had received with deep sorr[ow], the insistence of some of the re-deployment of graphics or movies that offend the Prophet of mercy, the Great Prophet Muhammad – peace be upon him

But they don’t offend him, because they can’t offend him, because he’s not alive to be offended. People who are no longer alive can no more be offended than they can be surprised or delighted or giddy or afraid. You have to be alive to have feelings and thoughts. This is basic. Living people can be hurt; dead people can’t. Dead people can sustain damage to their posthumous reputations, but that’s all.

ignoring the feelings of a great nation that came into the world with values and ethics and knowledge and civilization that lit up the whole world, and spread goodness between the people , and is still trying to recover, under the conspiracy of the conspirators on it, to continue to provide universal mission based on freedom, compassion, justice, and the reconstruction of the earth

No. That universal mission is not based on freedom. Not even a little bit; not in any sense. Submission is not freedom, it’s the opposite of freedom.

It’s not great on compassion or justice either, at least not going by its current record in countries where Islam is entangled with government.

and about the continued abuse of the systematic Holy Prophet, IUMS affirms the following:

• The Union confirms that the Islamic religion forbids not only the contempt of the Prophet Muhammad – peace be upon him, but denied contempt of all religions and the prophets and holy sites.

No. The Islamic religion can “forbid” what it likes, but it doesn’t get to impose its rules on people who have never signed up to obey them.

•The Union calls on Islamic countries to submit a global law draft criminalizing defamation of religions and the prophets and the holy sites of all, through a global conference to discuss clauses in complete freedom.

Such a law, of course, would be, again, the very opposite of freedom. It’s not freedom that these “scholars” want. It’s global authority they want, and they can’t have it.

• The Union calls on Western countries to provide full protection to the Muslims living in their country, whether they are citizens or residents or visitors, especially after a series of systematic attacks, they have suffered from after the events of the French newspaper “Charlie Hebdo” and till now.

Certainly. All people should be protected.

And guess who is the president of this fine outfit.

Mr. Dr. Yusuf Al-Qaradawi

IUMS President

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

The doctors have again said Raif should not be whipped tomorrow, Amnesty reports.

The planned flogging of Raif Badawi is likely to be suspended this Friday after a medical committee assessed that he should not undergo a second round of lashes on health grounds. The committee, comprised of around eight doctors, carried out a series of tests on Raif Badawi at the King Fahd Hospital in Jeddah yesterday and recommended that the flogging should not be carried out.

Nothing surprising about the assessment – deep cuts caused by repeated blows of a stick would of course not heal completely in two weeks.

“Instead of continuing to torment Raif Badawi by dragging out his ordeal with repeated assessments the authorities should publicly announce an end to his flogging and release him immediately and unconditionally,” said Said Boumedouha, Deputy Director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Programme.

“Raif Badawi is still at risk, there is no way of knowing whether the Saudi Arabian authorities will disregard the medical advice and allow the flogging to go ahead.”

The authorities should release him immediately and unconditionally and let him leave the country and join his wife and children in Québec.

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

CFI Canada is holding weekly protests at the Saudi embassy in Ottawa in conjunction with Amnesty International  Canada.

CFI Canada calls its volunteers and supporters to join or lend support to weekly 30-minute demonstrations at the Saudi embassy in Ottawa (201 Sussex Drive).  Amnesty International  Canada  is leading this initiative on Thursday January 15, 2015  at 4:00 pm.  Raif Badawi is expected to receive lashes every Friday for a total of twenty weeks.    For further information, contact the CFIC office at ned@cficanada.ca.

That’s from last week but theobromine tells us there is one today:

Note to anyone in or near Ottawa, Canada: Atheist and Humanist groups (CFI-Canada and Humanist Canada) are joining the weekly protests sponsored by Amnesty international – next one is this Thursday at 4pm in front of the Saudi Embassy (dress warmly – the high tomorrow will be -10C).

This Thursday is now today. You have a few hours to pile on the sweaters.

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

Watch Shazia Mirza speak up for the value of humor and Nabila Ramdani speak up for…other things.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuQZwZhFJaw

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

Another item from Maajid on Twitter:

Maajid Nawaz @MaajidNawaz · 13 hours ago
Adam Lowisz on my Facebook page applied Kübler-Ross ‘5 stages of grief’ onto outdated Muslim “community leader” types

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

More from that Washington Post article about the overlooking of female scholars of the Middle East when events are being organized. I ran out of time before.)

The problem isn’t going to fix itself, even though women are the majority at some graduate schools of international affairs now.

The paucity of women’s voices in public discussion comes not just from thoughtless conveners, but also from long-standing problems in the professional “pipeline” that carries individuals to the top levels of the field. Inequities in hiring and promotion often reflect, and help perpetuate, the unconscious bias of a male-dominated field.

Women are systematically cited less than their male peers, for example. Even when women are active scholars, as they are in international relations and Middle East politics, such lack of professional recognition means they lose visibility. Less visibility means they are less likely to be considered by transition teams vetting government appointees, recruiters for executive jobs, media bookers or organizers trying to put together public programs. But these structural issues should not lead to paralysis. Instead, they underscore that individual and collective efforts to advance women’s inclusion in events and the media must be understood as part of a larger agenda of promoting women’s professional development.

I can hear the denunciations from Sommers and her fans now. There are no structural issues, they claim, only preferences, only biology, only women’s yearning to stay home to cuddle the baby. It’s their story and they’re sticking to it.

First, we can commit to consistently drawing attention to the issue – all of us, whatever our level or role in the policy and academic community. Male scholars who are troubled by the ongoing imbalance in our field can take one concrete step that would have faster and more notable impact than any other: They can join colleagues, like the Center for Global Development’s Owen Barder and Foreign Policy’s David Rothkopf, in a pledge not to appear on programs that do not include any women, at least not without a clear, satisfying and publicly articulated explanation from the organizers.

And “it’s more of a guy thing” doesn’t qualify as a clear, satisfying and publicly articulated explanation from the organizers.

The more men who make a public pledge to avoid all-male panels, and communicate it in their responses to event invitations, the more organizers will know that diversity at their podiums is asine qua non to get ALL the speakers they desire. As development expert Scott Gilmore noted last year in announcing his own pledge, “if you are invited to join a panel with no women, you must conclude it is being organized by fools. I do not perform for fools.”

Nice one.

Why is it necessary to ask men to take this pledge? Why can’t we all just pledge to do better at inviting women to join our events? Because it’s extremely difficult to surmount the unconscious biases of a field in which men still dominate. Women cannot themselves overcome their colleagues’ longstanding, unnervingly persistent failure to consider them – the gender imbalance within which we all work and the invisibility it creates are mutually reinforcing.

It’s heads we win, tails you lose, you see. Women can’t overcome their colleagues’ longstanding, unnervingly persistent failure to consider them, because they’re not there to do the overcoming. Failure to consider breeds yet more failure to consider.

Already, events and institutions that fail to demonstrate gender inclusivity are earning public censure through Web sites like GenderAvenger.com. Increasingly, those who demonstrate disregard for the goal of events that reflect the real diversity of our field’s leading voices will be seen as embarrassing outliers. The more well-established gender balance becomes as a norm, the more all-male panels will demand an explanation, and an apology.

Well…unless that’s not what happens. Unless what happens instead is that men who are urged to do better pitch giant temper-tantrums and call their critics witch-hunters and inquisitors and McCarthyites – as Michael Shermer called me. The authors make it sound as if it’s a smooth and friendly process, as long as it gets started in the first place. That hasn’t been my experience. My experience has been the opposite – it’s been that men bellow with rage, and then attack. It’s been that powerful men do their best to silence women who talk back to them, by using their power to bluster and threaten them and call them names.

But hey, maybe that’s something special about the skepto-atheist movement. Maybe foreign policy attracts people who do better at acting like adults; that seems quite likely, given the relevance of diplomacy to foreign policy.

Another way we can all help to increase women’s participation in policy discussions and public panels is to highlight women experts, easing the path for busy organizers building media programs or events. Foreign Policy Interrupted, the brainchild of the journalists Lauren Bohn and Elmira Bayrasli, puts out a weekly newsletter of foreign policy writing by women (sign up here or follow them on Twitter @fpinterrupted). Women in International Security, founded by a group of women pioneers in national security in 1987, boasts a network of some 7,000 members and a robust Washington chapter including luminaries like Michèle Flournoy, former U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. After Foreign Policy’s 2012 Twitterati list was trashed for ignoring women, Twitter users crowdsourced a list of women Twitterati on a wide array of foreign policy topics (100 “FPwomerati;” a larger list is available on request). Tamara Cofman Wittes is building a searchable database of female foreign policy experts that will be publicly available, so that “I couldn’t think of any women to invite” becomes a practical impossibility.

Keep on working away.

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

Are.you.kidding.

Last year, six leading Washington think tanks presented more than 150 events on the Middle East that included not a single woman speaker. Fewer than one-quarter of all the speakers at the 232 events at those think tanks recorded in our newly compiled data-set were women. How is it possible that in 2014, not a single woman could be found to speak at 65 percent of these influential and high-profile D.C. events?

They all figure it’s more of a guy thing?

Pretty much.

Such questions are increasingly common in other fields, including the natural sciences. In our experience, organizers of all-male events reply to challenges with one of two answers: “I didn’t even notice there weren’t any women!” or “I couldn’t think of any women to invite.”

And I not only couldn’t think of any, I couldn’t think of any way to find any. I tried and tried and tried but somehow the idea of using a search engine just never crossed my mind.

Really? Well-known women experts in Middle East politics are on the faculties at Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, Northwestern, American, Georgetown and many more universities. Nine of the 15 members of the steering committee of the Project on Middle East Political Science (directed by Marc Lynch) are women. A dozen women have served as president of the Middle East Studies Association. Women are likewise a palpable presence in Middle East policy: Well over a dozen women have served as U.S. ambassadors in the Middle East, and Anne Patterson currently serves as assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, the highest-ranking U.S. diplomat dedicated to the region.

Well yes but how are people supposed to find that out? Besides a search engine, that is, which we’ve already established is something it’s too hard to think of.

As for the think tanks, women run the Middle East Institute, the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution (Tamara Cofman Wittes), the Middle East Center of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center, the Center for the Middle East and Africa at the U.S. Institute of Peace, the Center for Middle East Public Policy at RAND, and play key roles at the Middle East programs of the Center for a New American Security and the Atlantic Council. Women journalists covering the region are powerhouses in print, on air and on Twitter; there are, frankly, too many of them doing cutting-edge work in the region to even start to list them.

And yet, all those organizers of those more than 150 events couldn’t manage to think of a single woman to invite – apparently couldn’t even manage to form the thought that they ought to invite women.

This is why Christina Hoff Sommers and all her acolytes are so fucking wrong. The status quo in the sciences and at policy events does not reflect women’s choices, end of story – it also reflects stupid intractable clueless forgetting and not bothering and who caresing like the above.

The vast gap between the large number of senior women in our field and their notable absence from our public discourse means it’s time for active steps to fix the latter problem. Eliminating woman-free public events has become increasingly a priority in other fields, such as the hard sciences.

And philosophy. And atheism, skepticism, secularism, humanism.

The post is by Tamara Cofman Wittes and Marc Lynch.

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

Now this is good – Maajid Nawaz on Twitter –

Maajid Nawaz ‏@MaajidNawaz 2h
I personally raised flogging @raif_badawi & @WaleedAbulkhair with UK Dep.Prime Minister @nick_clegg today #FreeRaif

Here’s hoping.

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

Good – another ratchet in the protests to Saudi Arabia about its brutal torture and rights-abrogation of Raif Badawi.

The international outcry over  restrictions on freedom of speech in Saudi Arabia escalated last night as an array of Nobel prizewinners published an open letter calling on the country’s academics to condemn the public flogging of the blogger Raif Badawi.

In their letter, passed to The Independent, the 18 Nobel Laureates urge their Saudi peers to be “heard arguing for the freedom to dissent” by standing up for Mr Badawi, whose case they say has “sent a shock around the world”.

They also hint that if the country’s academics are unable to stand up for free speech they risk being internationally marginalised – a veiled threat that will be of serious concern to the Saudi authorities, who have been keen to market the country as a burgeoning research hub.

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

Shocking but not really surprising – more than half of students in public schools in the US come from families in poverty.

This week, the Southern Education Foundation reported that 51 percent of students in grades K through 12 received a free or reduced-price school lunch in 2013, meaning that their families lived on less than 185 percent of the poverty line. According to the Washington Post, it is “the first time in at least 50 years” that more than half of the country’s public school kids have qualified as low income. In 1989, the figure was under 32 percent. In 2006, it hit 42 percent, and by 2011, it had ratcheted up to 48 percent.

Why is it not surprising? Because poverty is official policy. We keep wages down as a matter of policy, we don’t have a national health service as a matter of policy, we don’t fund universal day care as a matter of policy, and on and on.

It’s how we roll.

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