Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Originally a comment by Dave Ricks on Religion should not be a political argument.

A few minutes before NBC aired Meet the Press yesterday, Chuck Todd talked with local NBC Washington DC co-anchors Angie Goff and Adam Tuss to introduce the broadcast of Meet the Press as a whole. I transcribed what they said about the interview with Gérard Biard:

ADAM TUSS: He was unapologetic, right?

CHUCK TODD: Unapologetic, but tried to offer the explanation of what he says is the editorial line that he draws when it comes to satirizing religion.

He says they only choose to satirize religion when people are trying to use the prophet Mohammed, Jesus, as ways to advance a political agenda. And he says they are not mocking believers, that he is trying to draw that line. Now a lot of people don’t view that there is a difference between doing that, but that was his explanation, that they’re not attacking people who believe, that have faith, they are only attacking those who are trying to use it for political purposes. But it’s a — you know — I understand the nuanced argument, but it is a tough one to sell to folks of faith, I think.

ANGIE GOFF: Since all this, we’ve seen more protests erupt, as well as more terror plots foiled in the last week. So when we’re talking strategy — what the US is doing to avoid these near-misses — are we at a point where we need to change strategy, as we see this global terrorism network continue to evolve and just get bigger? US officials have admitted that.

CHUCK TODD: Well there seems to be, the one piece of the strategy that has never really worked is an old phrase I’m going to borrow from Vietnam: Hearts and Minds. That’s the missing piece here, because we kill a lot of the enemy, but we haven’t defeated the enemy — right, the radicalization part of it — so the question is why. Why is it that they can cut off a snake head, and four other groups pop up. It’s been constantly a problem, and it moves around, so the name has changed, but the ideology is the same. And I think now we’re at 14 years of this. And so the Hearts and Minds aspect of this, that you hear the President talk about it, you hear others talk about it — but it is, I think there — there’s this feeling there isn’t a lot of good answers right now.

I don’t have good answers either, but part of the problem occurs to me: Even if political satirists are careful to maintain the distinction Biard explained — to satirize the use of religion for political purposes, not satirize individual belief — the religious individuals who want religious government are bent on conflating those things. As Pat Paulsen said when he ran for US President in 1968, “Freedom of speech in no way guarantees freedom of hearing.”

I still think the political satire should exist. The alternative would put totalitarianism off-limits from satire.

Oh, ugh.

I’ve been only vaguely aware that there’s a movie out called American Sniper…

…and now this:

Rich pop star flames shadow culture minister for saying there should be more diversity in the arts. Sounds promising…

James Blunt, the singer, has issued a robust response to an MP who criticised his privileged background, saying his “populist, envy-based, vote-hunting” ideas were making the country worse.

Blunt told Chris Bryant, the shadow culture minister, he was teaching the “politics of jealousy”, after the MP spoke out to condemn a lack of diversity in the arts.

Mr Bryant told the Guardian one of his priorities if he became a minister would be to encourage fairer funding, encouraging organisations to hire from a wider variety of backgrounds rather than just “arts graduates from Cambridge”.

“I am delighted that Eddie Redmayne won [a Golden Globe for best actor], but we can’t just have a culture dominated by Eddie Redmayne and James Blunt and their ilk,” he said.

Yes we can! Because they’re the best. Everybody knows that the way this works is 100% fair because it’s 100% based on merit and talent and quality and gooditude. If you mess with it in the name of “a wider variety of backgrounds” you’ll just end up with a bucket of shit, because talent invariably rises to the top on its own, no matter what.

I kid.

Excerpts from James Blunt’s elegant letter to Chris Bryant:

Dear Chris Bryant MP,

You classist gimp. I happened to go to a boarding school. No one helped me at boarding school to get into the music business.

…

Every step of the way, my background has been AGAINST me succeeding in the music business. And when I have managed to break through, I was STILL scoffed at for being too posh for the industry.

And then you come along, looking for votes, telling working class people that posh people like me don’t deserve it, and that we must redress the balance. But it is your populist, envy-based, vote-hunting ideas which make our country crap, far more than me and my shit songs, and my plummy accent.

I got signed in America, where they don’t give a stuff about, or even understand what you mean by me and “my ilk”, you prejudiced wazzock, and I worked my arse off. What you teach is the politics of jealousy. Rather than celebrating success and figuring out how we can all exploit it further as the Americans do, you instead talk about how we can hobble that success and “level the playing field”. Perhaps what you’ve failed to realise is that the only head-start my school gave me in the music business, where the VAST majority of people are NOT from boarding school, is to tell me that I should aim high. Perhaps it protected me from your kind of narrow-minded, self-defeating, lead-us-to-a-dead-end, remove-the-‘G’-from-‘GB’ thinking, which is to look at others’ success and say, “it’s not fair.”

Up yours,

James Cucking Funt

So really what should be happening is that the music industry should be energetically recruiting talent from the posher public schools.

NBC News has found just the right defensive label for Bill Cosby – he’s “embattled.”

DENVER — Embattled comedian Bill Cosby told NBC News that the show must go on as he ignored protests over sexual-assault allegations and took the stage in Colorado Saturday night.

In a 15 minute phone call with NBC News hours before appearing at Denver’s Buell Theater, the entertainer would not comment specifically on the growing list of accusations from more than 20 women.

He can’t; some of them are likely to go to court. Two women (so far) are pressing criminal charges.

Instead of talking about the accusations he told NBC how fabulous he is.

“What you’ll see tonight is history, you’ll get to see me on stage. I will share this gift that was given to me with the people of Denver tonight,” he said.

“You will see this wonderful gift on stage tonight [at the show] as well as the people of Denver,” he added. “You will see a master at work.”

His comments came on the heels of a packed show in Pueblo, Colorado…

It’s so heart-warming that a guy can be accused of rape by more than 20 women and still pack the hall.

Backstage before the show, Chuck Morris — ‪president and CEO of AEG Live Rocky Mountains, the promotion company that hosted Cosby — defended his decision to put the comedian onstage despite the allegations against him. Cosby, through his lawyer, has denied wrongdoing.

“We didn’t feel it was our place to play God, judge or jury, when Mr. Cosby has not been convicted or even charged with any crime,” said Morris, who added that Cosby declined offers in recent weeks to cancel other shows.

“I felt that we had a moral obligation to go on with the show. We didn’t feel it was right to cancel a show based strictly on accusations. If there had been a conviction or an admission of guilt, it would have been a different story,” he added.

Right. It’s a moral obligation to believe the famous rich guy and disbelieve the multiple women who say he raped them. For sure.

Beware, says Howard Jacobson, the fanatic who has read only one book.

Maybe, before pondering the education of a jihadist, we should ask a prior question: what makes a fanatic?

We were given some insight into this on Newsnight earlier this week when Evan Davis, growing nicely into his job, interviewed the lawyer, journalist and associate of Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald – a man strikingly deficient in the musculature necessary to essay a smile. The subject was surveillance and David Cameron’s call for more of it. There are, I accept, differing views on this. I, for example, am for having every member of the human family watched day and night by every possible means because the human family is currently dysfunctional and can’t be trusted. But I understand why others don’t think as I do. This puts me in a different category of person from Greenwald, who allows no beliefs that conflict with his and attributes those that do to a cowardly subservience to authority.

Oh my, that’s some good writing there.

Leading Greenwald with expert gentleness into the gated hell that is his mind, Davis put the case for differing viewpoints.

*falls over in awe at that sentence*

Nothing could have been more instructive than Greenwald’s dead expression – his mouth fixed in the rigor mortis of absolute conviction, his eyes unanimated by the pleasure of conversation or the excitement of controversy. Doubt honours a man, but this was the face of someone whom no ghost of a second thought dares visit.

So, beware of monomania. Avoid at all costs having eyes unanimated by the pleasure of conversation or the excitement of controversy.

We rightly shy from holding communities to immediate and unambiguous account for what their most errant children do, but is it wise, is it honest – reader, does it make the world a better place for any of us – to raise the charge of Islamophobia the moment someone questions the communal atmosphere such errancy might have breathed? At the heart of every narrative of belief is a weak spot of exclusivism and dogma waiting to be exploited by its wilder adherents. Monotheism is a grand conceit, but can we really say that it is innocent of the millions of killings in its name? Danger lurks in the tales we all tell.

That guy can do things with words.

Yes.

Prithvi Acharya says can we please stop calling it “eve-teasing.”

Really. As an outsider it was easy for me to find that ridiculous trivialization shocking, but all the same, it’s possible to pull back and take a look at local trivializations too. Acharya says it’s time to do that now.

I take an exception to how practically everyone in India is framing an important national issue that pervades class, age and geography, and has been doing so for decades. I take a strong exception to the phrase ‘eve-teasing’. Yes, it’s a phrase that is used by the police, the news, and the activists alike. We’re constantly exposed to the euphemism – I don’t blame you for subconsciously having included it in your vocabulary. But enough is enough; it’s time we stopped ‘eve-teasing’.

Most glaringly, it trivializes what is – in no uncertain terms – sexual harassment. Notice how the phrase ‘street sexual harassment’ conjures up a very different image in your head than ‘eve-teasing’? This is by design. Euphemisms, historically, serve the specific purpose of replacing phrases, words, or concepts with ones that sound more acceptable or polite. Cat-calling and groping are never acceptable or polite. So even if you mean well, there is no reason to continue to frame them as if they could be.

And, honestly – teasing? That’s supposed to be for mutually enjoyed joking, not uninvited groping and leering.

One of the many examples of how both globally, and in India, we trivialize gender issues by presenting them with words and idioms that intentionally make them sound less polite, or less harsh than they are. It’s never ‘revenge porn’; it’s always ‘MMS’. It’s never ‘statutory rape’; it’s always ‘molestation’. And until very recently, it was hardly ever ‘rape’ and almost always ‘brutal assault’. If, as society, we want to address the problem of sex-crime in our country, we need to start admitting its extent and magnitude, and stop mollycoddling ourselves into believing that they’re only a minor grievance.

And it’s not just India and it’s not just sexual harassment. This is why I keep mentioning the murderers who massacred the people at Charlie Hebdo, and why I call Islamists Islamists and not “extremists.”

Down with euphemisms.

Ah now this is pure fun – a guy on French tv, on what looks like a talk show, takes on Fox News’s pontifications about “zones interdites” in Paris. C’est drolatique.

Especially the part where a correspondent goes into the field, in pleasant areas of inner Paris, and asks locals if their neighborhood reminds them of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Watch French TV make fun of Fox News claims of… by ewillies

H/t Maureen

News from India, via the Independent:

An Indian man has been arrested after he allegedly attempted to bury his 9-year-old daughter alive.

Adul Hussein allegedly dug a pit in the back garden of his home in Putia, a small village near the India-Bangladesh border, while his wife was away from the house on Friday afternoon.

Police sources told Indian news channel NDTV that the man’s “dislike” of his daughter Rukshena prompted his actions.

Hussein reportedly tied Rukshena’s hands and feet together before placing tape over her mouth and placing her in the hole, which came up to her chest as pictures show.

Iram Ramzan on Twitter –

50ShadesOfBeige ‏@Iram_Ramzan
I think the world should sue Saudi Arabia for bringing the human race into disrepute

That puts it neatly. I think something along those lines every time I post about one of their atrocities.

Iram has a piece in the Sunday Times today.

THROUGHOUT the week, we have heard commentators condemning the Paris attacks while simultaneously chastising Charlie Hebdo journalists for “provoking” the wrath of Muslims.

It was almost like telling a rape victim she should not have “provoked” her attacker by wearing a miniskirt.

Even Hamas — that well-known advocate of human rights and free speech — denounced the onslaught on the satirical magazine. Yet notable by its absence was any comment on the Jewish people murdered in the supermarket.

I put this question to all those who are trying to explain away the actions of terrorists they claim had “genuine grievances”: what was the justification for the murder of the Jews? They were murdered simply for existing.

The rest is subscription, but it’s good to know that people like Iram are being heard. (By rights they should be heard via the New Statesman and the Guardian, but those two are more enamored of Islamists than liberal Muslims.)

Yesssss – finally the progressive liberal Muslims are starting to get a voice in the UK media. The Independent quotes four who were on Panorama last week.

Last week four British Muslims told the BBC’s Panorama why they believe the government is right to identify “non-violent extremism” as the ideology that helps lays the ground for violent extremism. They explained that this non-violent ideology is the politicised version of puritanical Sunni Islam that dominates Saudi Arabia and which has been exported to Britain and around the world over decades.

The programme showed how Salafi Wahhabism is wreathed in anti-westernism, contempt for parliamentary democracy, reactionary attitudes to gender equality and gay rights, and disdain for other faiths. Through its UK-based adherents, this puritanical strain of Islam has taken on a life of its own here with a proliferation of Islamic teaching institutions, activist groups and Islamic satellite channels. It “takes young Muslims to the front door of violent extremists” said Sara Khan.

And yet many on the left persist in thinking that Islamism is an ally.

Adam Deen runs an institute promoting “critical thinking and rational thought” among British Muslims. He told Panorama that puritanical Islam is “a cancer. We have to pinpoint where the problem is.” It is rare and brave for British Muslims to speak with such candour. They know how hard it is for many ordinary Muslims, let alone extremists, to accept that Islamic theology is prone to being turned into bad theology when it morphs into a toxic political ideology.

Barely had transmission begun when Deen’s twitter account was hit by a stream of abuse. He was a “coconut aren’t you lad?” (brown outside, white inside); a “scumbag white man”; a “white liberal man”; a “kafir lover” (a derogatory Arabic term for “infidel” or “disbeliever”); he had been paid by David Cameron to “become a complete donkey for the Home Office, Kafir lover”; he was a “Kafir apostate” (a Muslim who had abandoned Islam) who should go to Saudi to be “executed”; a “little snake”; “quite frankly mate, get lost” – and so on.

Of course. That’s what Twitter’s for, innit.

Likewise Khan was dismissed as a “feminist” who was “parroting the same rhetoric” as another interviewee Manwar Ali. An ex-Afghan jihadi who has long since renounced violence, Ali explained that dividing the world starkly into “them” and “us” (believers and non-believers) was the first step on the road to violent extremism.

See the Twitter comments above.

Last autumn, Khan led a campaign by Muslim women against the “barbarism of Islamic State” promoted by The Sun newspaper’s front page featuring a woman wearing a Union Jack hijab. This provoked a mouthy young Islamist called Dilly Hussain to describe Khan as “the government-friendly desperado”. He is deputy editor of a new website called 5Pillars which refers favourably to the extremist organisation Hizb-ut-Tharir as “working for the re-establishment of the Caliphate”.

While Hussain sermonises about “Islam’s true teachings of brotherhood” he also does a particularly venomous line in abuse against the “sisterhood”, describing Khan as an “airhead” who belongs to an “ultra-minority of secular liberal ‘Muslims’ who service nothing and no one but Islamophobes.” He has likewise called another female Muslim critic a “stupid liberal cow”, a “fat cow” and a “p***head” who writes “drunken liberal garbage” and should “do one”.

The personal vituperation and constant smearing by Muslims of co-religionists who dare to challenge this kind of non-violent extremist narrative helps explain why more have not put their heads above the parapet.

There’s much more; read the whole thing.

Here is a segment of Gerard Biard on Meet the Press.

The chief editor of Charlie Hebdo is defending the magazine’s controversial depictions of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad, saying it skewers religious figures only when faith gets “entangled” in the political world.

“We do not attack religion, but we do when it gets involved in politics,” Gerard Biard said in an interview with Chuck Todd broadcast on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday.

“If God becomes entangled in politics, then democracy is in danger,” Biard said through a translator in his first interview with an American television network since his magazine was attacked by Islamist terrorists. The attack on Jan. 7 killed 12 people, including staff members.

And not just democracy. Human rights are in danger, freedom of speech and inquiry are in danger, for women freedom of travel and work and reproduction and dress are in danger – so many rights and freedoms that we take for granted are in danger. The god invented by people two or three thousand years ago doesn’t like people like us; it wants us tamed and silenced and enslaved.

I transcribed a bit that starts around 2 minutes –

Every time that we draw a cartoon of Mohammed, every time that we draw a cartoon of  the prophets, every time that we draw a cartoon of god, we defend the freedom of conscience, we declare that god must not be political or a public figure. He must be a private figure. We defend the freedom of religion. Yes it’s also the freedom of speech, but it’s the freedom of religion. Religion should not be a political argument.

H/t Dave Ricks

Now Boko Haram is turning its murderous violence on Cameroon. The BBC reports it has kidnapped dozens of people there.

They said many of those kidnapped in the cross border attack against villages were children.

Four villagers who tried to fend off the attackers were killed, a security source has told the BBC.

…

A security source told the BBC that it was the villages of Maki and Mada in the Tourou district near Mokolo city in Cameroon’s Far North region, about 6km (four miles) from the Nigerian border, that came under attack.

The suspected militants arrived in the early hours of Sunday morning when it was still dark and left in the direction of Nigeria with scores of hostages.

Cameroon’s Information Minister Issa Tchiroma Bakary confirmed the attacks saying between 30 and 50 people were taken in the raids – although he said an exact number was difficult to establish as investigations were ongoing.

“They burnt to ashes almost 80 houses,” he said.

A police officer told the AFP news agency put the figure of hostages at around 60, saying “most were women and children”.

It’s like rolling back hundreds of years of human history, back to when most people were helpless before armed gangs of men.

The new ed-in-chief of Charlie Hebdo was on Meet the Press this morning. Mediaite transcribed a bit:

Meet the Press host Chuck Todd asked Charlie Hebdo’s new editor-in-chief Gerard Briard Sunday morning what he made of the decision of many American news outlets, including NBC News, to blur the cover of this week’s issue, which featured a caricature of the Islamic prophet Muhammed…

“Écoutez, we cannot blame newspapers that already suffer much difficulty in getting published and distributed in totalitarian regimes for not publishing a cartoon that could get them at best jail, at worst death,” he said.

“On the other hand, I’m quite critical of newspapers published in democratic countries,” he continued. “This cartoon…is a symbol of freedom of religion, democracy, and secularism. It is this symbol that these newspapers refuse to publish.”

“When they refuse to publish this cartoon, when they blur it out, when they decline to publish it, they blur out democracy, secularism, freedom of religion, and they insult the citizenship.”

Which they should not do.

Jane Harley explains at Comment is Free that Oxford University Press hasn’t banned pigs, it just…doesn’t want its education authors to mention them. (Scholars are entirely free to mention them, she says. Oh, whew.)

Given that our editorial guidelines that reference pigs and pork have been in place for as long as I can remember, little did I imagine that they would attract international headlines claiming that the Oxford University Press had banned sausages. To clarify, OUP does not have a blanket ban on pork products in its titles, and we do still publish books about pigs. Although there have been no recent changes to our guidance on this topic, these articles highlighted the fine balance needed when considering students’ cultural and learning needs.

*waves hand in the air* Question, question! We don’t know how long Jane Harley can remember. For all we know, she can remember the OUP editorial guidelines only up to two weeks ago when she started working there. We don’t know; she didn’t tell us. Saying “as long as I can remember” like that, as if we all knew each other, is silly.

And then, this notion about needing such a “fine balance” that you don’t mention pigs – that’s the very thing we’re questioning. We’re not convinced that students have “cultural and learning needs” that depend on not mentioning pigs. We know that’s what OUP intends, but that’s what we think is fatuous.

To address children’s learning needs, it is important that they also reflect the cultural context in which children are learning. In the UK, we take it for granted that we would not include references to sex, violence, or alcohol in our textbooks; to do so would be considered inappropriate and offensive to many. In order to make an impact around the world, there are other sensitivities that, although not necessarily obvious to some of us, are nonetheless extremely important to others.

Are there? And they include pigs? Not pork, but pigs? A religious taboo on eating pork translates to a taboo on the very mention of the live animal? I don’t like eating pineapples, but I don’t quail at the sight or thought of them.

It’s not clear to me that pigs can’t be seen as the very opposite of pork – pork is part of the corpse of a pig; a pig is a live animal. An animal isn’t the same as the meat you can take off its corpse.

While we should be mindful of these cultural sensitivities, a healthy dose of common sense is also required. Cultural taboos must never get in the way of learning needs, which will always be our primary focus. So, for example, a definition of a pig would not be excluded from a dictionary, and we wouldn’t dream of editing out a “pig” character from an historical work of fiction. We also maintain entirely separate guidelines for our academic titles which are relevant to scholarly rather than educational discourse.

Imagine my relief.

What we do, however, is consider avoiding references to a range of topics that could be considered sensitive – in a way that does not compromise quality, or negatively impact learning.

“Negatively impact” – oy. I take it back, I think we can be confident she’s been at OUP longer than two weeks; she’s got the corporate jargon down. God forbid she use the blunt word “damage” or “harm.”

So, for example, if animals are depicted shown in a background illustration, we would think carefully about which animals to choose. In doing so we are able to ensure children remain focused purely on their learning, rather than cultural characteristics.

Meaning, there shouldn’t be pigs in the background. But do they even know that pigs in illustrations bother anyone? I don’t know that.

Managing cultural sensitivities isn’t about reducing educational quality, pandering to minority views, restricting freedom of speech or self-censorship. It’s about ensuring the educational value of our publishing is able to navigate the maze of cultural norms for the benefit of students around the world. We want to ensure we can make the widest possible impact.

I suppose lobsters are forbidden too?

Nick linked to a piece by Mehdi Hasan so I just had to go read the whole thing. I do not like it. I never do like what Mehdi Hasan writes or says.

He frames this as an open letter to “Dear liberal pundit” – which is annoying. Should we reply “Dear conservative Muslim pundit”? Or should we play at being grown-ups.

The massacre in Paris on 7 January was, you keep telling us, an attack on free speech. The conservative former French president Nicolas Sarkozy agrees, calling it “a war declared on civilisation”. So, too, does the liberal-left pin-up Jon Snow, who crassly tweeted about a “clash of civilisations” and referred to “Europe’s belief in freedom of expression”.

In the midst of all the post-Paris grief, hypocrisy and hyperbole abounds. Yes, the attack was an act of unquantifiable evil; an inexcusable and merciless murder of innocents. But was it really a “bid to assassinate” free speech (ITV’s Mark Austin), to “desecrate” our ideas of “free thought” (Stephen Fry)?

Yes of course it fucking was, you buffoon. Do you think writers who criticize Islam feel safer today than they did on January 6th? Do you think the Charlie Hebdo massacre sent no message at all?

It’s easy for Mehdi Hasan to be smug, isn’t it, because he knows no one is going to burst into his office or study and machine gun him to death.

Yes, the Charlie Hebdo massacre was indeed an attack on free speech. Of course it was.

Please get a grip. None of us believes in an untrammelled right to free speech. We all agree there are always going to be lines that, for the purposes of law and order, cannot be crossed; or for the purposes of taste and decency, should not be crossed. We differ only on where those lines should be drawn.

Yes, that’s right – and drawing the line at “anything critical of Islam” is miles and miles from the right place.

Consider also the “thought experiment” offered by the Oxford philosopher Brian Klug. Imagine, he writes, if a man had joined the “unity rally” in Paris on 11 January “wearing a badge that said ‘Je suis Chérif’” – the first name of one of the Charlie Hebdo gunmen. Suppose, Klug adds, he carried a placard with a cartoon mocking the murdered journalists. “How would the crowd have reacted?… Would they have seen this lone individual as a hero, standing up for liberty and freedom of speech? Or would they have been profoundly offended?” Do you disagree with Klug’s conclusion that the man “would have been lucky to get away with his life”?

I’m glad you asked me that. Yes, I do. Of course I do. No they would not have seen that lone individual as a hero, but also no, they would not have torn him limb from limb. Then again it’s an imaginary, so neither of us knows, so it’s not a particularly compelling argument.

Lampooning racism by reproducing brazenly racist imagery is a pretty dubious satirical tactic. Also, as the former Charlie Hebdo journalist Olivier Cyran argued in 2013, an “Islamophobic neurosis gradually took over” the magazine after 9/11, which then effectively endorsed attacks on “members of a minority religion with no influence in the corridors of power”.

That depends on which corridors of power we’re talking about. The ones in Jiddah, Karachi, Mogadishu? The ones in households where brothers and fathers and sons tell the women what to do? Gay bars? The offices of satirical magazines?

You ask Muslims to denounce a handful of extremists as an existential threat to free speech while turning a blind eye to the much bigger threat to it posed by our elected leaders.

A handful of extremists is an existential threat to free speech when it murders five journalists in one attack for doing something they don’t like. It’s a threat because it’s…you know, a threat. A literal, forceful threat. The fact that they’re a handful of extremists doesn’t make them less frightening, it makes them more so – anybody could do what they did.

Weren’t you sickened to see Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of a country that was responsible for the killing of seven journalists in Gaza in 2014, attend the “unity rally” in Paris?

Somewhat, yes, but you know whose attendance grossed me out much more? The officials from Saudi Arabia who attended. Why aren’t you talking about them, Mehdi?

I feel dirty now.

Nick Cohen too is unimpressed by the pope’s assertion that we can’t insult religion. He’s also unimpressed by the “Charlie Hebdo had it coming” crowd.

After the Paris attacks, the novelist Will Self claimed moral equivalence. Those who say “freedom of speech is an absolute right” – no one does, incidentally – have “a religious point of view”. Mehdi Hasan, political director of the Huffington Post, agreed that freedom was fanaticism. He condemned “the hypocrisy of free-speech fundamentalists” and cited a thought experiment of an Oxford philosopher called Brian Klug. If an Islamist had joined the free speech rallies in Paris and applauded the murderers, Klug mused on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, he “would have been lucky to get away with his life”.

And yet, and yet – when’s the last time journalists shot up the office of some Islamists? Hmm? That would be never, wouldn’t it. Imagining such a scenario is not quite the same thing as actually being able to point to one, or fifty.

Think before you go along with the pope’s argument that violence is the “normal” response to insults to family honour. Once the law accepted it was. A husband could beat a wife, who failed to stroke his ego and confirm his superiority and the police would dismiss the case as a “domestic”. A man could kill a woman who had betrayed his honour and the courts would dismiss it as a crime of passion.

We don’t live there any more. And you know what? We don’t want to.

I ignore 99.999% of it, but someone brought this particular lie to my attention and I’m finding it unignorable.

Brive1987 ‏@brive1987 2 hours ago
@vtchakarova @mirandachale just forced myself to watch botched beheading of Burmese woman in Saudi. OMG.

Miranda Celeste Hale ‏@mirandachale 2 hours ago
@brive1987 @vtchakarova Oh god that’s so awful Even reading about it made me feel sick.

Brive1987 @brive1987 · 2 hours ago
@mirandachale @vtchakarova it was on Benson’s blog and is on liveleak. I’ve decided not to avoid “real Islam” but I think others should :/

Miranda Celeste Hale ‏@mirandachale 47 minutes ago
@brive1987 She posted the *video* on her site? JESUS. Wtf? I mean, I fully agree w/you that we shouldn’t bury our heads in the sand & should

Shermertron ‏@Shermertron 52 minutes ago
@brive1987 @mirandachale @vtchakarova Too bad the ppl calling her a racist for her stance on Islam won’t watch it,…

Miranda Celeste Hale ‏@mirandachale 51 minutes ago
@brive1987 not ignore the Islamic elephant in the room, but that can be done w/o seeing the vids & her posting it is kinda fucked up

I did not post that video on my blog. I didn’t look for the video, let alone post it. I don’t want to think about the video. Of course I didn’t fucking post it. “Brive” told a huge disgusting lie.

Sorry for the interruption. Back to ignoring the 99.999%.

Speaking of sausages, and outrage, and women seen cooking sausages on tv, and outrage, and outrage, and outrage, the Oxford University Press has given one of its authors a friendly nudge to avoid writing the words “pig” or “pork” in a projected book.

Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme, presenter Jim Naughtie said: “I’ve got a letter here that was sent out by OUP to an author doing something for young people.

“Among the things prohibited in the text that was commissioned by OUP was the following: Pigs plus sausages, or anything else which could be perceived as pork.

“Now, if a respectable publisher, tied to an academic institution, is saying you’ve got to write a book in which you cannot mention pigs because some people might be offended, it’s just ludicrous. It is just a joke.”

Muslim Labour MP Khalid Mahmood said: “I absolutely agree. That’s absolute utter nonsense. And when people go too far, that brings the whole discussion into disrepute.”

And today in Niger – the protests against Charlie Hebdo continue, with extra added church-burning.

At least two churches have been set on fire in the capital of Niger amid fresh protests against French magazine Charlie Hebdo’s cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad.

Saturday’s protests began outside Niamey’s grand mosque with police using tear gas a day after at least four were killed in the second city of Zinder.

The French embassy has warned its citizens to stay indoors.

Charlie Hebdo doesn’t hang out at the church.

In Niger, a former French colony, hundreds of demonstrators gathered at Niamey’s grand mosque, shouting “God is Great” in Arabic.

At least two churches were set on fire – similar to Friday’s demonstration in Zinder where protesters also raided shops that were run by Christians.

The French cultural centre in Zinder also came under attack.

God is great so let’s burn down the churches. Makes all kinds of sense.

Speaking of the US rivalry with Saudi Arabia over who can inflict the most sadistic punishments, the Death Penalty Information Center gives us some examples of botched executions. Not all; just some.

Be warned – obviously this is not pleasant reading.

NOTE: The cases below are not presented as a comprehensive catalogue of all botched executions, but simply a listing of examples that are well-known.  There are 44 executions listed: 2 by asphyxiation, 10 by electrocution, and 32 by lethal injection, and 1 attempted execution by lethal injection.

1. August 10, 1982. Virginia. Frank J. Coppola. Electrocution.

   Although no media representatives witnessed the execution and no details were ever released by the Virginia Department of Corrections, an attorney who was present later stated that it took two 55-second jolts of electricity to kill Coppola. The second jolt produced the odor and sizzling sound of burning flesh, and Coppola’s head and leg caught on fire. Smoke filled the death chamber from floor to ceiling with a smoky haze.[1]

The next one is also an electrocution and it’s nightmarish. Why is this supposed to be a relatively “humane” method?

3. Sept. 2, 1983. Mississippi. Jimmy Lee Gray. Asphyxiation. Officials had to clear the room eight minutes after the gas was released when Gray’s desperate gasps for air repulsed witnesses. His attorney, Dennis Balske of Montgomery, Alabama, criticized state officials for clearing the room when the inmate was still alive. Said noted death penalty defense attorney David Bruck, “Jimmy Lee Gray died banging his head against a steel pole in the gas chamber while the reporters counted his moans (eleven, according to the Associated Press).”[3] Later it was revealed that the executioner, Barry Bruce, was drunk.[4]

One more.

18. March 10, 1992. Oklahoma. Robyn Lee Parks. Lethal Injection. Parks had a violent reaction to the drugs used in the lethal injection. Two minutes after the drugs were dispensed, the muscles in his jaw, neck, and abdomen began to react spasmodically for approximately 45 seconds. Parks continued to gasp and violently gag until death came, some eleven minutes after the drugs were first administered. Tulsa World reporter Wayne Greene wrote that the execution looked “painful and ugly,” and “scary.” “It was overwhelming, stunning, disturbing — an intrusion into a moment so personal that reporters, taught for years that intrusion is their business, had trouble looking each other in the eyes after it was over.”[27]

We rival Saudi Arabia.

When you rival Saudi Arabia in the violence and cruelty of your judicial punishments, something is wrong.