Bad idea of the moment – a tweet -

Only three horsemen left. Who’s feet are big enough to fill Hitchens’ shoes? #atheism

Dear god what a stupid question (even if it had been “whose”). It’s like asking “what shall we call people who were just too young to fight in WWII that’s not ‘the greatest generation’?” Or “what shall we call the new atheists now that some time has passed?” It’s taking a dopy media cliché and treating it as somehow meaningful.

And then, even if it weren’t ridiculous to take the dopy media cliché seriously, why take it seriously in that way? Who cares whether there are four?

And then, if you want to say Hitchens left a gap, say that, but don’t talk sycophantic (and risible) nonsense about filling his shoes.

But much more, what is this pathetic craven belly-crawling need for Bosses or Leaders or Heads or motherfucking Horsemen? Why are people such suckups? Why are they not just suckups, but not even embarrassed to be suckups?

Atheism doesn’t need any leaders. Leaders are not automatically a good thing. Get over it.

And by the way least of all does atheism need male leaders, or a mindless belief that we need male leaders. Of all people you would think atheists could manage to figure that out, because what is it that we don’t share with most people? Belief in a mysterious supernatural hidden male boss of all the bosses, that’s what.

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

Well thank something for Kunwar Khuldune Shahid and his blistering retort to “Muslimah Pride.” Thank Abhishek Phadnis for sending me the link.

What the ignorant world does not realise is that once you have the permission of your husbands, fathers, brothers, uncles, the approval of your neighbours, in-laws, their relatives and the consent of your spiritual guardians, their God and their scriptures, you can be quite the rebels.

It takes a lot of courage to ridicule something that is already taboo where you live. It takes volumes of bravery and valour to bow down to the status quo, and toe the lines that have been forced upon you. It takes unbelievable amounts of gallantry to act out a script that someone else has written for you.

All the more so if you dress it up with rebel-like noises about colonialism and Orientalism and “Western” liberalism. Yeah! That’s what the left has always been for: encouraging women to be more obedient to theocratic rules. Utopia looks amazingly like life under the Taliban.

Who on earth are those damn Europeans to try to steal your voice? Do they not realise that your lives were defined a million-and-a-half ago by the Arabs, who protected your rights and guarded your modesty by ensuring that you don’t have much of a say in most things? Who are those unabashed infidels to protest on your behalf? Do they not realise that you are not allowed to express, let alone clamour in favour of, anything that contradicts the ostensibly divine scriptures? Who are those shameless activists to try and liberate you? Do they not realise that you can’t be liberated without the permission of your mehrams?

Exactly! Down with solidarity! Down with internationalism and giving shit about people far away! The noble thing to do is just say “it’s their culture” about everything ugly and brutal. It also leaves one delightfully free to go to the mall.

Dear ‘feminist’ Muslimaat, thank you for being a ray of hope for bacon-eating vegetarians, god-fearing atheists and peace-loving terrorists. Thank you for reiterating the fact that your mehrams choose to overlook the divine orders and allow you to think freely and take your own decisions. Thank you for citing your personal example to highlight how you wear the hijab by your own choice, ignoring the fact that an overwhelming majority of Muslim women are coerced into doing so. Thank you very much for making the whole debate about you, when it was always about the torment and suffering that most of the Muslim women are going through.

Oh dear. Just as I did, Shahid is saying that “feminist” and “Muslim” are not easy to combine or reconcile. That’s heresy in some circles.

Dear ‘revolutionary’ Muslimaat, thank you for ignoring the life threats that Amina Tyler and many others like her are facing, after choosing to protest against the harassment that they have to bear on a daily basis. Thank you for overlooking other lesser issues like terrorists attacking a 15-year-old schoolgirl; female genital mutilation; women being raped with judicial approval just so they don’t die virgins; two-year-old girls being forced to wear veils because the disgusting men in your country have no self-control; and fathers legally getting away with raping their daughters by paying a few riyals. Thank you very much for screaming bloody murder over half-naked women’s claim of representing you, but accepting rapists, pedophiles and sorry excuses for human beings as your state leaders and role models.

Brilliant.

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

Michael McDowell, a former Irish Attorney-General and Minister for Justice, applies some actual legal expertise (sorry, Brendan) to the question of risk to the mother’s life and Irish abortion law.

The phrase “established as a matter of probability that there was a real and substantial risk to the life of the mother” is not without difficulty, as the evidence at the Galway inquest is demonstrating.

In my view, the phrase “real and substantial risk” does not mean that the mother is more likely than not to die.

It’s pretty staggering that lots of people in Ireland apparently think it does mean that and that that’s the standard and that if the risk is 50% then it’s just tough shit for the woman.

If, as may be unlikely, it could be established that a pregnant mother found herself in a condition that, say, three women out of 10 women in the same condition lost their lives, no one could doubt but that there was a real and substantial risk to her life, even if the statistical odds favoured her survival.

In my view, the requirement that the “real and substantial risk” must be established as a matter of probability simply means that there is no legal requirement to establish “beyond reasonable doubt” that the risk exists – not that the risk itself is quantified at more than 50 per cent.

In other words, in my view, what is legally required is that the doctors making a lawful decision to terminate a pregnancy in a manner that will end the life of the unborn must establish two things:

(a) as a matter of probability there is a risk to the life of the mother if the pregnancy is not terminated; and

(b) that the identified risk is a real and substantial risk, as distinct from a very small risk, that the mother will die.

Note that even on that interpretation the Irish Supreme Court ruled that women should be forced to take that very small risk.

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

Brendan O’Neill posted what he says is a speech he gave at QED, and I guess is what he said on that panel. It’s a bizarro rant about expertise and what a bad thing it is. This is apparently because expertise is undemocratic.

So the idea that we need more expertise in politics is not actually a new one. It’s been around for a long time, and it has always been on the wrong side of the debate about democracy, in my view. Because it’s an idea which tends to depict ordinary people as not sufficiently enlightened for serious political debate, especially on really complicated matters like war or law and so on.

This outlook survives today, in the widespread belief that we need more expertise and less ideology in politics; more science, less passion; more cool-headed, educated people like David Nutt, and fewer nutters from the mass of the population who think they know everything but don’t actually know very much at all.

The only difference today is that where once it was fat old Tories and stiff American officials who said politics is better done by experts, today it is young rationalists and humanists who say politics needs more expert input and less playing to the public gallery, less populism, less ill-informed passion or wrongheaded ideology.

He’s mashing things together there, probably on purpose. Especially he’s mashing together the people or citizenry as a whole, and expertise in the process of government and administration. That’s ludicrous. It’s perfectly possible to include expertise in the process of government and administration without excluding the people or citizenry in general on the grounds of non-expertise.

What we have today is a situation where evidence and expertise are the main drivers of policy. For many complicated historical reasons, politicians no longer feel they have the moral or electoral authority to make judgements or decisions, and so they outsource their authority to scientists and other researchers. They call upon these people to provide them with authority, to provide them with a good, strong, peer-reviewed justification for taking a certain course of action, often a course of action they had already decided upon but felt too morally denuded to push forward.

When politics and science mix in this way, both of them suffer, I think. We end up with evidence-driven policy and policy-driven science, neither of which is a very good thing.

There see it’s that kind of thing that makes me think he doesn’t mean a word of anything he says, he just says it to create a stir. Come on. Evidence-driven policy is not a good thing? Policy should carefully exclude evidence?

I don’t believe him.

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

Even a consultant who is critical of the care that Savita Halappanavar received at University Hospital Galway is apparently ok with the refusal to speed up her miscarriage.

Dr Susan Knowles, consultant microbiologist at the National Maternity Hospital at Holles Street in Dublin, was critical of poor documentation at a critical time in Ms Halappanavar’s care at the Galway hospital on Wednesday, October 24th, last.

…

From 1pm on Wednesday, Ms Halappanavar received a high standard of care, the witness said.

Eileen Barrington SC, for Ms Halappanar’s consultant obstetrician Dr Katherine Astbury, suggested Dr Knowles’s view was that delivery was not called for before the Wednesday.

Dr Knowles said there wasn’t a substantial risk to her life before then. There were “subtle indicators” of sepsis and chorioamnionitis before this, including a high pulse rate on Tuesday. However, this “in and of itself” was not enough for a termination to go ahead.

Nor were her and her husband’s requests, nor was the international standard of care, nor was the fact that the fetus would not survive. Nothing was, because priests.

Fuck that.

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

Brilliant new plan in campaign to convince everyone everywhere that abortion is terrible and forbidden: distribute little rubber fetus dolls to high school students.

What could possibly go wrong?

Many students pulled the dolls apart, tearing the heads off and using them as rubber balls or sticking them on pencil tops. Others threw dolls and doll parts at the “popcorn” ceilings so they became stuck. Dolls were used to plug toilets. Several students covered the dolls in hand sanitizer and lit them on fire. One or more male students removed the dolls’ heads, inverted the bodies to make them resemble penises, and hung them on the outside of their pants’ zippers.

Oh.

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

You know how every now and then I do a post about some article by Brendan O’Neill because it’s so offensively perverse and illiberal and ass-backward that I can’t just ignore it?

He was on a panel at QED a couple of hours ago (so that would make it 3 p.m. in Manchester), and apparently got his head handed to him by an incandescent with fury Robin Ince. Check out #QEDcon on Twitter if you want a good laugh. Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss were in the audience, and RD asked a question. How I wish I’d been there!

Update: I can add some illustrations, because someone posted a bunch of photos and said help yourselves.

That’s Brendan O’Neill, and next to him is Geoff Whelan, one of the QED dudes, who is moderating, and next to him is Rick Owen, another one of the QED dudes. The QED dudes are great.

O’Neill getting rabbit-punched by Robin Ince. Yesssssss!

Go, Robin!

More photos.

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

Well done CFI Canada.

On April 4, CFI Canada Board Chair Kevin Smith and National Director Michael Payton met with Andrew Bennett, the Ambassador for Canada’s Office of Religious Freedom. At the meeting CFI got a  commitment from the Ambassador that the ORF will support and protect the rights of all people to question, change and even leave their religion. Today, concerned about the fate of atheist bloggers in Bangladesh, CFI sent the following letter to Ambassador Bennett urging him to send a formal protest to the Bangladeshi government on behalf of the persecuted bloggers:

Dear Ambassador Bennett:

Thank you for the very productive meeting last week. CFI is pleased to be working with the Office of Religious Freedom as it addresses the issues affecting religious and non-religious people around the world.

During our meeting on April 4, we discussed the increasing tensions in Bangladesh affecting atheist bloggers. In January 2013, a 29 year old blogger, Asif Mohiuddin, was stabbed to death in Bangladesh. In February, a second blogger, 35 year old Ahmed Rajib, was attacked and brutally killed. The violence against atheist bloggers continues. In March, Islamists continued to threaten prominent bloggers and have called for the “execution of 84 atheist bloggers for insulting religion.” Rather than defend freedom of expression, religion and belief, the Bangladeshi government has arrested several bloggers for “hurting religious sentiments,” under Section 295A of the Bangladesh Penal Code. Home Minister M.K. Alamgir recently announced that the government has a list of seven more bloggers who will also soon be targeted. On April 11, a newspaper editor was arrested for printing quotations from the targeted bloggers.

Read the rest at Veronica’s blog.

Maryam has a rallying call and a suggested petition to sign.

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

Sometimes it’s hard not to diagnose self-hating [whatever] when reading the more vicious reactions to Femen’s protest about Amina Tyler. There’s one by Susan Carland on the ABC’s Religion and Ethics site, for example.

It is admittedly difficult for people who have bought into Western liberalism, with its elevation of individual freedom to the pinnacle of human moral evolution, to regard the Muslim world with anything other than baffled contempt.

Oh yes those crazy deluded people who have “bought into” liberalism. (Calling it “Western” liberalism is itself an insult to all non-Westerners. It’s not “Western.” See Amartya Sen for more on this, or Kwame Anthony Appiah, or any human rights activists in non-Western countries ffs.) It’s a pity more people haven’t “bought into” liberalism, because if they had then abuses of human rights wouldn’t be such a commonplace.

And what an ignorant description. She seems to have liberalism confused with Randian libertarianism.

Fighting sexism can only be powerful while operating coherently in its cultural context. Tunisian women often take to the streets in large numbers to protest against what they see as curtailing of their freedom by the government. In Egypt, the group Tahrir Bodyguards, comprised of men and women, was formed to offer women free self-defence classes against sexual harassment and to patrol the streets in order to help protect women against assault in the face of an indifferent government.

Yes, and? Governments do curtain freedoms; groups other than Tahrir Bodyguards assaulted women. In other words, no “cultural context” is monolithic; any “cultural context” includes disagreement and conflict, so what is her point? She dislikes and disagrees with Femen, fine, but it doesn’t follow that she’s any more clued in about the “cultural context” in question than they are.

This would matter to Femen if they were genuinely interested in helping to improve the situation for women in countries like Tunisia, where female employment is low, laws and norms restrict women’s access to employment and mobility, and domestic violence is common. But despite all of Femen’s attention-seeking claims, it is abundantly clear that their outrage is not about feminism. It is certainly not about women’s advancement in the Middle East. This is prejudice, racism and imperialism, dressed up in the apparently scant clothing of women’s rights.

And that’s where she gets just plain vicious. How the hell does she know that? Imperialism? On the basis of what? She sounds unpleasantly similar to the anti-abortion fanatics who have been flooding the discussion of the Savita Halippanavar inquest on Twitter with endless dark accusations of not giving a shit about Savita but simply wanting abortion, for its own sake.

Moreover, it is apparent that Femen’s outrage isn’t even about Amina. For all the scrawling of “Free Amina” on their adamantly bared breasts and the fulminating against threats of stoning and incarceration in a psychiatric asylum, little of this is based in reality. Amina’s lawyer, herself a Tunisian women’s rights activist, has confirmed that Amina was never in a mental institution (she was being kept at home with her family), she was not charged with any offence, and even if Amina were to be charged, the maximum sentence would be six months in jail for public indecency, not stoning.

So that’s all right then? Six months in jail? For nothing?

So, if not for Amina, or women in the Middle East, who is this protest for? In truth, it is just a convenient vehicle for organisations like Femen to reveal their true, Islamophobic colours. This was about the arrogant belief that a certain breed of feminism is the ultimate goal and that anyone who disagrees is to be aggressively condemned, dismissed and scorned – including the very Muslim women who work day after day against sexism in countries like Tunisia.

Says Susan Carland, revealing her true, liberalismophobic colors. It’s not “arrogant” to think that a particular way of doing things is better than others; Carland herself is arguing just that. She’s chosen the wrong one, that’s all.

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

I’m not sure the best way to start an opinion piece is announcing your own longstanding boredom with the subject, and yet how often one sees that very thing – as in Chris Orlet’s sparkling-fresh commentary on (groan) the new atheists in the American Spectator.

I long ago lost interest in the God Wars, the bombastic clashes between Christians and the New Atheists over whether the Man Upstairs exists, whether He is good or evil, whether Judeo-Christianity has been a blessing or a curse. Put simply, whether Christopher Hitchens is resting in peace or roasting on a spit.

Oh haha, it’s all so funny, such a weary joke. Why is that then? Why are we supposed to simply take it for granted that criticism of religion and theism is wrongheaded and adolescent? No really, why? It’s not as if religion makes nothing happen! It’s not as if it’s just obviously defanged and harmless, let alone obviously beneficial and without bad side effects.

And as for adolescent, how cheap is that stupid cheap shot in the last sentence?

Today, when I hear snide comments from atheists – who often assume I too am an unbeliever because my knuckles do not drag the ground – I spontaneously slip into Defender of the Faith mode. I wait patiently while he (for it is almost always a he) rants about the Inquisition, the trial of Galileo, the pedophile priest scandals, the pope’s silence during the Holocaust, and a thousand years of Jewish pogroms.

Well that’s enormously big of him, isn’t it. Note the same assumption, made slightly more explicit – all that is so passé, so uncool to talk about. Why? Why would it be?

And by the way no it’s not almost always a he. Hello “it’s more of a guy thing” yet again.

He admits all that, he says generously, but there’s more to it.

How, for instance, can one overlook the role faith communities have played in health care? In my city nearly all the hospitals are run by religious organizations like the St. Louis-based Franciscan Sisters of Mary, who operate 18 nonprofit hospitals in four states, partner with more than 40 rural hospitals, and run two nursing homes. The Mercy Health Ministry, also headquartered here, operates 28 hospitals throughout Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, and Kansas. (Fly-over states. Who cares, right?) Franciscan nuns also founded nearby St. Anthony’s Hospital, while the Jesuits run a local medical school whose doctors treat mostly inner-city patients.

Oh jeezis that’s a terrifying fact, and he doesn’t even realize it. He doesn’t even realize that this is not benevolence or charity but a takeover, and a way to impose religious rules on helpless captive people. This is the only way the Catholic church can force its stinking theocratic anti-human rules on unwilling people: by grabbing up all the hospitals. It’s horrifying that Orlet is ignorant enough of the consequences that he boasts of the completeness of the takeover. I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt in assuming it’s ignorance as opposed to deliberate indifference.

Perhaps the largest provider of social service programs in our area is Catholic Charities. What do they do? What don’t they do? Their programs provide shelter, counseling, and education to battered women, as well as treatment to women with addictions and mental illness. Their professional counseling agencies offer education and mental health services. There is day and residential treatment for troubled youth, including diagnosis, treatment, education, and healthcare. For families, Catholic Charities provides expectant parent counseling, and foster care, adoption, and residential services.

All of it Catholic. Notice that it apparently doesn’t even cross his mind that Catholic “counseling and education” to battered women might have some flaws, as might all the rest of the services he lists.

I am still waiting for a single atheist group to open a hospital or school, offer free health clinics, beds for the homeless, food for the hungry, or transportation for the elderly. I have yet to see worshipers of the flying spaghetti monster establish a prison ministry or send their members overseas to feed the hungry and clothe the naked.

The issue isn’t atheist groups, it’s secular groups, and of course there are secular groups that do all those things. Apparently Orlet prefers his charities to have theistic strings attached.

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

Then there’s Rehtaeh Parsons.

Why do teenage rapists post pictures of themselves raping someone on the internet? Just because they can?

Well, that, plus the fact that their brains haven’t finished developing yet, and the frontal cortex is where you get impulse control and all that.

But even so. All this random meanness and cruelty floating around…it’s the worst thing about the internet, and it’s just fucking toxic.

We need an even simpler rule. “Don’t be shitty” – something like that. When in doubt, don’t be shitty. If you blurt something out in a heated moment, take it back or apologize or at the very least stop there. Don’t draw targets on people and then follow them around forever after.

Reteah’s death comes on the heels of Steubenville, Ohio and months after British Columbia’s tragic Amanda Todd case — the Canadian teenager who tragically took her own life last October. This repetitive tale is exhaustingly familiar: young guys do something terrible to a teenage girl, in person and cyber-bullying ensues, then the guys get away with it unscathed (unless Anonymous and/or the Ohio courts get involved).

Yeh that’s not a good pattern.

Then there’s the fact Rehtaeh’s bullying is considered a “community issue” by Nova Scotia’s justice minister. According to him: “As a community, we need to have more dialogue with our young people about respect and about support to educate our young boys and our young girls about what’s appropriate behaviour, what’s not appropriate behaviour.”

This begs a second question, since when is young boys taking a picture of a rape of a 15-year-old girl and then distributing it considered an issue for the community to handle?

Should be raises a second question, but never mind – yes what? Rape and then passing around photos of the rape – that’s more than bullying. It’s not something to have a “dialogue” about.

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

Merger Watch is on it.

The MergerWatch Project

We believe that in medical care, the patient’s rights must come first.

Across the United States, community hospitals are merging with other hospitals or health systems to relieve financial stress. When the merger is with a religiously-sponsored health system that uses doctrine to restrict care, the consequences can be serious for patients.

That’s for damn sure.

What they do is repair work though. I want to work on the “this is totally unacceptable” part. I want to get religion the fuck out of health care, period.

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

Sigh. Another win for being mean.

A gay man was arrested this week at a Missouri hospital after refusing to the leave bedside of his sick partner.

Roger Gorley went to Research Medical Center in Kansas City, Mo., on Tuesday to visit Allen, his partner of five years. But when he got there, a member of Allen’s family asked him to leave, according to Kansas City Fox station WDAF. When Gorley refused, hospital security allegedly handcuffed him and forcefully removed him from the premises. Now he cannot visit Allen at all because of a restraining order filed against him.

Whoever that member of Allen’s family was – boooo to you. That’s horribly mean. Don’t do that.

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

Pausing for a touch of levity…a postmodernist plagiarist reactionary chief rabbi. That’s what I call covering all the bases!

The chief rabbi of France has resigned after admitting to plagiarism in two books and to deception about his academic credentials.

The Paris Central Consistory, the top Jewish religious organisation in France, announced Gilles Bernheim’s resignation but gave no further details.

Bernheim, 60, a modern Orthodox Jew who was elected to the seven-year post in 2008, was respected by other religious leaders as an active participant in interfaith dialogue. His booklet opposing the government’s plan to legalise same-sex marriage won praise from the former pope Benedict.

Ahhh isn’t that sweet – an interfaith dude who opposes same-sex marriage and gets praise from Ratzinger. And plagiarizes.

Last month a blogger accused him of copying a 1996 text by the late French post-modernist philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard for use in his book Forty Jewish Meditations, published in 2011. After initially denying the report, Bernheim later admitted that Lyotard had written the disputed passage.

I deny it! I say the passage was written by Derrida.

Last week another blogger accused Bernheim of plagiarism in an earlier book, published in 2002, and L’Express magazine revealed that Bernheim had not earned the prestigious title of philosophy professor that was often attached to his name.

Ok but he really authentically does oppose same-sex marriage.

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

To repeat: it can happen here. Already, now. We don’t have to wait for “personhood” laws; it can happen now.

If it is determined that nothing can be done that would allow the woman to continue her pregnancy, the established standard of care for unstable patients who are miscarrying is an immediate surgical uterine evacuation. In the case of such a patient, immediate uterine evacuation reduces the patient’s risk of complications, including blood loss, hemorrhage, infection, and the loss of future fertility. A delay in treatment may subject a woman to unnecessary blood transfusions, risk of infection, hysterectomy or even death.

That’s clear enough, I think.

Some Catholic hospitals, contrary to the opinion of leading Catholic ethicists and theologians, apply the Directives to prohibit doctors from providing any treatment to a woman having a miscarriage if there are still fetal heart tones, even when a doctor has determined that nothing can be done to save the pregnancy and the woman’s health is placed at risk by delaying immediate treatment.

And so is that.

This is now. It’s not the future, it’s not hypothetical; it’s now, and it happens.

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

It’s good that someone is paying attention. The European Court of Human Rights is.

A  report from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) Committee of Ministers published yesterday has called on the [Irish] Government to implement legislation to deal with abortion.

So that women won’t be refused medically indicated abortions because doctors and hospitals are afraid of prosecution.

In its sixth annual report, Supervision of theExecution of Judgments and Decisions of the ECHR, the committee of ministers urged the Government to “expedite” the implementation of the A, B and C judgment on abortion, delivered by the ECHR in 2010.

The judgment is included in a list of cases requiring “enhanced supervision” to ensure implementation.

The A, B and C judgment found the absence of any implementing legislative or regulatory regime which provided an “accessible and effective procedure” to establish the “possibilities for a lawful abortion where there is a risk to the mother’s life” was in breach of article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Let’s hope Ireland’s government is listening.

The committee said “the general prohibition on abortion in criminal law constitutes a significant chilling factor for women and doctors due to the risk of criminal conviction and imprisonment”. It “invited the Irish authorities to take all necessary measures”, to implement the judgment.

As Dr Astbury has just been confirming.

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

Sofia Ahmed of “Muslimah Pride” does not like Femen. She has reasons.

What Femen are doing is highly counterproductive and detrimental to Muslim women across the world.  For me and hundreds of other women who have got in touch with me over the past few days, their tactics are a part of the ideological war that is going on between neo-colonial elements in the West and Islamic societies. Their aim is not to emancipate us from our presumed slavery, but instead reinforce Western imperialism and generate consent for the ongoing wars against Muslim countries.

That “for me and hundreds of other women” is interesting, since it’s followed by a factual claim as opposed to an interpretation. “For me,” she says, the aim of Femen is to reinforce Western imperialism and generate consent for the ongoing wars against Muslim countries.”

You know what? I don’t believe a word of that. I don’t believe that is Femen’s aim.

It seemed that many other Muslim women across the world agreed with my stance and what followed was a defiant and vocal rejection of Femen’s invitation. Instead of ‘getting naked’ Muslim women from across the world tweeted and uploaded pictures of themselves to Facebook in their hijabs, niqabs, and western attire. They held up signs telling the world why they were proud of their identities and did not need racist Islamophobic women to dictate to them on how they should dress.

Instead they needed a made-up god and a long-dead “prophet” and a bunch of male clerics to dictate to them on how they should dress. Is that it?

Oh, is that racist Islamophobic of me? No, it fucking isn’t. I don’t despise all these bullying rules about women and veils and bags and tents, haram and halal and go back inside, because they’re racial, I despise them because they’re bad in themselves.

In our open letter to Femen we referred to them as ‘colonial feminists’ to describe Femen’s activities.  I believe it is the most apt term to describe their particular brand of feminism. From Helen of Troy, the face that launched a thousand ships, to the pretext of female liberation surrounding the invasion of Afghanistan, women have always been used as pawns by men as an excuse to wage war. Femen are just the latest chapter in the long history of gender imperialists that manufacture consent and provide ideological foregrounding to justify going to war. By dismissing the role of western countries in the oppression of Muslim women and focusing solely on Muslim men they are only working to demonise Islam, not liberate Muslim women.

That’s pathetic. She would have at least a semblance of a case if she said Femen are playing into the hands of people who want to justify going to war (but who the hell is keen to go to war right now?), but to say they’re doing that themselves? Please.

She’s swallowed a keg of jargon and that’s all she’s got – the familiar phrases come out one after the other.

Femen’s reliance on the overused media tropes of the modern western values versus traditional Muslim values is creating a dichotomous representation of the ‘self’ (West) and ‘other’ (Muslims)…Frantz Fanon…The hyper-sexualisation of Femen’s campaign and the insistence on Muslim women to strip naked as a gesture of emancipation is  a tell-tale symptom of Orientalist fantasies…Femen’s universal imposition of the neocolonial agenda… Femen have continued to display a flagrant disregard for our agency and have consistently tried to downplay the legitimacy of our collective voices. Femen have tried to dismiss our campaign using conspiracy and conjecture…

Conspiracy and conjecture! Look again at your first paragraph before you accuse other people of that.

The Ex-Muslims forum on Twitter are arguing with Muslimah Pride a good deal.

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

Via Ex-Muslims Forum on Twitter @CEMB_forum

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