Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Just after posting a comment about the non-desirability of calling Female Genital Mutiliation FG “Cutting” instead, I check Twitter and see a tweet from Ex-Muslims Forum:

Grace Dent is a wonderful writer – here she is on FGM http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/the-book-of-mormons-lesson-in-genital-genocide-8554496.html …@gracedent +

So I’m reading it. Grace Dent has no truck with euphemism on this subject.

By rough estimates, there are 20,000 girls at risk of FGM in Britain and 66,000 coping with the botched consequences. There has never been a prosecution, either of a mother taking her child out of the country, or a cutter travelling into Britain. I’ve read cases about little girls in Stratford – home of Olympic hope – being whisked off to Mogadishu. Or of the Somali community in Glasgow where a three-year-old girl and a small baby were sabotaged with scissors. I don’t think polite, concerned mumblings about FGM wholly prepare anyone for the fact that in the majority of cases, after these botch jobs, the whole lot is gone. Here, we have women with missing sex parts.

And it’s mutilation. We’re not talking earlobes here.

Also problematic is the fact that FGM here affects mainly young British African girls of Muslim heritage. In Britain, we are at a sticky point with feminism, where large numbers of women have spent four or five decades being permitted education, the right to work and use contraception, and now believe feminism isn’t needed. No more rights needed here, thank you! “I’m not one of those feminists,” young British women bleat, as nearby, young girls are being whisked off to sunny Mogadishu or being hacked at in a back room in Stratford. This odd idea that “I have my rights, to hell with women globally” shames us. “I have my rights, but I don’t want to say anything remotely culturally insensitive” is a far graver problem still.

As for culturally insensitive – there are plenty of women working to end FGM right there in places where it happens. Be sensitive to their culture.

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An organization that represents some (or all?) doctors in Ireland has said no thanks to abortion legislation to protect the lives of pregnant women.

The Irish Medical Organisation (IMO) has rejected a motion calling for regulation in relation to the provision of abortion where there is a real and substantial risk to the life of the mother.

In a heated and occasionally bad-tempered debate at the organisation’s annual conference in Killarney, doctors also voted against a motion calling for legislation to allow abortion in Ireland in cases of rape or incest. They also voted against a motion calling on the Government to legislate for the provision of abortion for women with non-viable foetal abnormalities.

So the majority is fine with the arrangement that led to the death of Savita Halappanavar.

Wow.

 

The BBC’s Panorama asks, are Sharia councils harming women? It includes a bit of undercover video in which a guy sitting high up as if he were a judge gives a woman a lot of very bad advice. He tells her she should be “brave” and ask the husband who hits her why he does it. “Is it my cooking?” That way she can correct herself.

He also tells her that reporting the hitting to the police is the very last resort and that a shelter is terrible.

In a small terraced house in east London, a woman and her husband argue before an Islamic scholar who sits on a dais above them in a room that looks and feels like a court.

This is Leyton Islamic Sharia Council, and Dr Suhaib Hasan will decide if the woman can have a divorce. Her husband is refusing to grant her one and the couple have been coming here for a year.

She accuses him of refusing to work, ignoring the children and verbally abusing her. He vehemently denies it. When Dr Hasan orders the husband to leave the room, the woman breaks down in tears.

“I hate him, I can’t even bear to look at him, he has ruined my life,” she sobs.

Dr Hasan sends the couple away for another month to try to save their marriage, with the help of Allah.

Allah hadn’t helped before that point, so why would Allah help now?

The BBC article itself is somewhat confusing.

Leyton Islamic Sharia Council is Britain’s oldest Islamic council and one of the most active, hearing about 50 cases a month – mainly marital disputes. Nine out of 10 are brought by Muslim women from all over the country.

With an Islamic marriage, it is far easier for a man to divorce. The only way for women is through these councils.

“We are not here just to issue divorces,” says Dr Hasan.

“We want to mediate first. We try to save marriages so when people come to us we try to reconcile them.”

But Islamic rulings given here are not always in the interests of the women concerned, and can run counter to British law.

That statement “the only way for women is through these councils” is very confusing to me. Surely that’s simply false, because women can get divorces through the legal system…unless of course they are being forcibly prevented, but surely that would be against the law.

Maybe the Beeb means “the only way for women who are determined to have only an Islamic divorce from an Islamic marriage is through these councils”?

Or maybe it means something more sinister, something like “the only way for women who are trapped in these Islamic marriages and don’t know how to get a secular divorce is through these councils.” If that is what they mean I think they should have spelled it out.

As it is, it’s not clear to me why these women who get such horrible instructions from these Sharia councils don’t just decide the hell with Sharia councils and go the secular route instead.

In Leeds I met Sonia, a woman who suffered extreme violence from her husband, who punched and kicked her and threw her down the stairs. He also hit their son. When Sonia got a civil divorce, the courts would allow him only indirect access to the children.

Sharia courts are not allowed to interfere in child access matters, but when Sonia went to Leyton Islamic Sharia Council for a Sharia divorce, they told her she would have to give the children up to her husband.

“I couldn’t bear the thought of such a violent person having my children,” said Sonia.

“What was shocking was when I explained to them why he shouldn’t have that access to the children, their reaction was – well, you can’t go against what Islam says.”

Sonia stood her ground and eventually got Leyton Islamic Sharia Council to drop their demand.

That’s good, but much better would be to ignore Leyton Islamic Sharia Council altogether.

I met another woman who had tried to get a divorce from a different Sharia council in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire.

Ayesha’s husband was in prison for violence, but Dewsbury Sharia Council told her she would have to go to mediation with him.

“I said I can’t do that because he’s not even allowed near my house and because I am frightened, I can’t face him… but they didn’t take any notice,” she said.

Eventually Dewsbury Sharia Council agreed to see her without her husband but she had to face five men alone without legal representation. It took her two years to get a Sharia divorce.

God hates women.

A little slice of life in Nepal…

The 60-year-old woman was stripped naked and had her head shaved. She was fed excrement and badly beaten.

The woman was reportedly accused of using witchcraft to cause death and misfortune. The assault was apparently sanctioned by the village council.

Such attacks on vulnerable women are not uncommon in remote areas of Nepal.

Last year, villagers burnt alive a 40-year-old woman after claiming she was a witch.

 

So the Muslim Women Against Femen page posted a faked-up picture of Femen with a Holocaust denial written on one woman’s chest.

The unfaked up picture.

They’ve taken it down now, since they got caught at it.

Huh. So there’s a high school in Georgia that has racially segregated proms. If any non-white kids try to go to the white prom, the police are called and the non-white kids are escorted out. This is apparently not a hoax or a joke.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OopLZ-_dFw8

More goodies from the Muslim Women Against Femen Facebook page.

A message from a sister in Birmingham to Femen…

A sign held up: You talk about FREEDOM? Then let me be free to wear my HIJAB!!

Sister from France–> “My freedom is to wear my Hijab…I don’t do anything to please people.” Hear that Femen?

A woman in full hijab holding a sign saying “I chose my hijab by myself. I don’t need women using their breasts in protest to free me. My freedom is to wear my Hijab in front of my haters. #Muslimahpride #Femen

…I don’t do anything to please people. I don’t care.

What I do is to please my Lord, mind you!

This one is really creepy. A solid black cloaked head-and-shoulders shape, with a pink checked heart superimposed, saying

Femen get dressed. My dignity is in my hijab.

Oh yes, very dignity. It’s a solid black blob!

Also very creepy. A woman in solid black from head to toe, with one naked hand held out for balance…on a skateboard. That slogan again –

Ooops, forgot to be oppressed, too busy being awesome.

Right, there’s nothing more “awesome” than a woman shrouded in black from head to toe. It’s as “awesome” as a Jew in striped prison clothes or a slave clanking chains.

Still arguing about Amina and the protests and white-imperialist-Orientalist feminism. On Twitter for one.

this is where an intersectional approach is so vital. Attempting to impose white western “feminism” w/o listening to the very ppl they’re trying to “liberate” = doomed & counterproductive enterprise.

Sigh. “White western feminism” as opposed to the brown eastern kind which is just fine with arresting and whipping or stoning a woman who takes a picture of herself with her shirt off.

Don’t do that. Don’t pretend there’s “white western” feminism or human rights or liberalism as opposed to brown eastern ones. Human rights are universal; that is the whole point. The whole point is to make them exceptionless, because if we don’t we’re right back where we started – with “we have to kill all the Jews/Tutsis/Bosnian Muslims/gays/apostates/Hindus/whatever it is this weeks.”

because Femen are “protesting” Islam so listening to Muslims is indispensable.

It is? Why? When I’m protesting Catholic interference with health care is listening to Catholics indispensable?

No. We get to protest and dispute and criticize institutions and systems of ideas without “listening to” their adherents. We may want to listen or we may not, but it’s certainly not a requirement, or indispensable.

And then, what would that even mean? What would “listening to Muslims” mean? There are a lot of Muslims. How do we go about “listening to” them?

We don’t. We just choose a particular set we want to listen to and then refer to them as “Muslims” and what we’re doing as “listening to Muslims” so that everyone will think we have our finger on the pulse of “the Muslim community.” It’s all bullshit. This particular person was listening to some Muslims who dislike Femen and the protest about Amina’s arrest or kidnapping, and treating them as if they were all Muslims.

I challenged her in fewer words on Twitter.

Oh? So when protesting fascism, “listening to” (i.e. agreeing with) fascists is indispensable?

Omigod how dare I, fascism is totally different from Islam.

oh ffs listening =/= “agreeing”. & p big diff between Nazism as ideology & Islam as a religion with c.1bn adherents, numerous sects, wildly differing practices from person to person.

But person to person isn’t the issue, or relevant. The issue here is Islam joined to state power. (Also I didn’t say Nazism, I said fascism.) Islam joined to state power is not all that radically different from fascism.

& while fascism and feminism are utterly incompatible, Muslim feminists most certainly exist!

Yes, but they are mostly making a mistake. Islam is not their friend. Islam is not feminist. Being both is making a mistake, just as being a Catholic feminist is a mistake. I know the idea is to liberalize the religions from within, but I think that’s a mistake; I think it’s much better to get out of them, so that they will have less power and influence instead of more.

No, sorry, we are allowed to choose, and I choose universalist secular liberal feminist egalitarian values over reactionary theocratic ones. I choose universalist secular liberal feminist egalitarian allies over reactionary theocratic ones.

There’s a Facebook page, Muslim Women Against Femen. It’s as gruesome as you’d expect.

 

Right, nothing like a cool pair of shades to negate the yards of black cloth wrapped around the head.

A blood-chilling post on FGM by Musa Okwanga. His mother is a GP and she’s been looking into the issue of FGM for some time. She gathered several women from Somalia, Egypt and Sudan in her living room to talk to her and her son.

One of them spoke of the agony that the procedure still caused her three decades later.  Frequently, when bent over with pain, she would receive little understanding from those in her community who did not know what she had experienced.  “Sometimes they just call you lazy”, she explained.

Three decades of crippling pain caused by a mutilation that serves no useful purpose.

This, she said, is how it typically happens.  When you’re six years old, girls in the year above at the local school, or madrassa, go and have the procedure done; after that, they return to school and they tell you that you’re dirty for not having gone through it.   “We look up to them like they’re big girls”, she said. At that point, the young girls will go to their mothers and ask when they can have it done too.  Then they go and have and it done; and, she says with a wry laugh, “then you get disabled”. (more…)

Well here’s a horrible piece of crap posted at Jezebel. Callie Beusman looks down on the protests in support of Amina because Islamophobia and white and European and blah.

While it is unquestionably necessary, brave, and noble to stand with Amina (who is reportedly not free to move or speak safely), the protests were distressingly and distractingly Islamophobic. A photo from one of shows a white woman with crescent moons covering her nipples, wearing a fake beard, a unibrow penciled in with eyeliner, and a bath towel on her head. Another photo, highlighted on FEMEN’s Facebook page is of a topless woman protesting at a mosque in San Francisco (because, when you’re fighting the good fight of “TITS AGAINST ISLAMISM,” standing topless in front of any mosque anywhere will do) with the following caption:

TODAY IS AMINA TOPLESS JIHAD DAY. I was at the Islamic Mosque in San Francisco. Some Arab guy tried to grab my sign and pushed me in a violent way. My friend stopped him. MY BODY IS MY TEMPLE.

Callie Beusman is missing the point. Yes “some Arab guy” is not a helpful thing to say but then neither is “a white woman.”

Further down is a cartoon of a woman crawling out from under her burqa to light on fire the beard of a caricature of a Muslim man (or should I say “some Arab guy”?). In the comments, a woman posted a link to an Al Jazeera article about Muslim women counter-protesting the protest, as they rightfully feel that it was condescending and imperialistic in both tone and intent.

Well I “rightfully feel” that Carrie Beusman is being condescending herself, and that “imperialistic” is just stupid rhetoric.

The counter-protest, Muslimah Pride Day, calls for women to speak out for themselves on social media:

[P]lease post pictures of your beautiful selves, whether you wear hijaab, nikaab or not. This is an opportunity for Muslim women to get a say and show people that we have a voice too, that we come in many different shapes and sizes that we object to the way we are depicted in the west, we object to the way we are lumped in to one homogenous group without a voice of agency of our own.

FEMEN needs to recognize that Muslim women do in fact have agency, and the idea that Muslim women are helpless, passively indoctrinated by the alleged evils of Islam, and desperately need of Western feminist help is oppressive and orientalist. Patriarchy is not specific to Islam — although there are inarguably extreme and truly saddening examples of misogyny in the Muslim community, patriarchy is a global issue. Furthermore, feminism is not only a Western institution — to assume that Muslim women need someone to “speak for” them is insulting to all the grassroots political organizing and activism that Muslim feminists have done. It’s disturbing how a the rhetoric of “women’s liberation” has been co-opted to justify aggression, violence, and prejudice against Muslim communities. In what way is it appropriate to “rescue” women by indulging in and re-circulating essentializing, stereotyped, and offensive depictions of their culture?

How incredibly patronizing it is to assume that that is “their culture.” How patronizing and ignorant to assume that “Muslim women” are a monolith and all identify with the most harshly repressive and punitive elements in their “culture.” How ignorant to assume that all “Muslim women” adore the hijab and the niqab and rejoice to be urged to post pictures of themselves wearing them. How blinkered and parochial to disappear all liberal secular universalist rebellious Muslim women from the picture and side only with the most traditionalist and reactionary ones.

It’s what Maryam calls the racism of low expectations.

 

Guest post by Dan Bye in a comment on She said the s word.

Does everyone know the Mr Men series of children’s books, originally by Roger Hargreaves (since his death the franchise has been picked up by his son)?

There was a subsequent series of Little Miss books, which you could see as a response to accusations that the original series was too male-orientated. The accusation wasn’t without some substance, but if you compare the Mr Men characters with the Little Miss characters, you notice something very interesting.

Here’s the list of books, in case you don’t know them:

http://www.mrmen.com/en/books.html

Notice a few things (I’m generalising, but the stereotypes are there nonetheless).

First of all, the male characters seem to be grown-ups.   The Little Miss characters seem not to be, in general.

Secondly look at the way positive and negative characteristics are constructed.  Some are common, so you have Little Miss Chatterbox as well as Mr Chatterbox, and Little Miss Greedy as well as Mr Greedy.

You have Little Miss Bossy, Little Miss Fickle, Little Miss Brainy, Little Miss Contrary, Little Miss Dotty, Little Miss Giggles, Little Miss Princess, etc etc.    These are quite gender specific.  There’s no Mr Brainy, but there is Mr Clever.   Note the difference.

Thirdly, some of the Mr Men embody *activity* -Mr Bump, Mr Tickle. They *do* things, and what they do defines them for the purpose of the book. There are few female equivalents – almost all are abstract personality factors. There’s Little Miss Somersault, I guess.

There was a point to this. Oh, yeah, stereotypes!

So Sheryl Sandberg was on the Daily Show on Wednesday. Guess what she said. That women are held back by a lot of things…and one of them is stereotypes. Yes stereotypes. Omigod! Radfem alert! Somebody summon franc hoggle to fantasize about kicking her in the cunt!

But we’re also held back by stereotypes. Go to a playground and you’ll hear little girls called bossy! You don’t hear little boys called bossy, because we expect boys to be assertive and lead.

Oh oh oh! That’s crazy talk!! That’s the diametric opposite of skepticism!!! Where’s the evidence?! Where’s the peer-reviewed science?! Where’s the PhD in sociology?! Where are the three whole classes in Women’s Studies? That’s misandrist, and professional victim, and femistasi. Paula Kirby needs to talk to Sheryl Sandberg and set her straight.

And so we’re trying to change that. You know, rather than call our little girls bossy, we should say “my daughter has executive leadership skills.”

Cheers and applause.

Then Stewart suggests, hesitantly and as if it were a new thought, that a woman saying this kind of thing gets a slightly more heated reaction than a man would.

Stewart: Why do you think women are judged more harshly in these arenas?

Sandberg: So our stereotypes – and again, these are deep, these start in childhood – are that men should lead, men should speak up, men should have opinions.

Does that sound familiar at all? Just a tiny bit?

Women should nurture, help others, sit back. The National Retailers Association printed up T shirts, onesies, for babies – the boys’: smart like Daddy; the girls: pretty like Mommy. Not in the 1950s; two years ago.

And so, when women speak out, when women are successful, they are less liked, while when men speak out, they are better liked.

That sounds a little bit familiar too. Just a little bit. Goats. Excuse me, something in my throat. Goats, goats. So sorry – anyone got a cough drop? Goats, goats, goats.

Then she says we can change it, and we should, because if we can understand the stereotypes, they can change.

Yes! But in the process – we will hear a lot of shit from a lot of shitlords. A LOT.

Then Stewart hits a nail on the head –

It seemed easier to change the access to power than to change the cultural pressures that women face.

Exactly. Harriet Hall, Paula Kirby: please note. If Stewart can see that, why tf can’t you?

Sandberg tells a story of her friend Rachel who told her daughter, age 5, that women who succeed are less liked while men who succeed are more liked, and the daughter’s response was…”Well then Mommy I would just do less well at work.”

Change this please. Let’s do this thing.

Oh guess what! Thunderfoot has yet another video about why he hates feminism so much. It’s chapter 3 in this exciting series. What inspired this one? Richard Carrier’s talk at the American Atheists convention in Austin last weekend. I was at that talk. I thought it was damn good – but then I have reasons for thinking that, which Thunderfoot doesn’t share.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95LG9crl3yo

He starts with Richard talking about doing atheism and other things – which one would think needn’t be particularly contentious, because who wants to do nothing but atheism all the time always? But Thunderfoot claims it’s doing things the wrong way around, because

most sensible people start out as critical thinkers and because of that methodology that results in them becoming atheists.

So how does that make it “the wrong way around”? (Even assuming it’s true, which I doubt it is.) Here’s a fun fact: it’s possible to do critical thinking about god and the status quo, god and sexism, god and social issues.

Then he splices together a lot of instances of Richard saying “harassment” in a part of the talk. Well yes, he did, because that’s what he was talking about. Well, he shouldn’t have been, shouts Thunderfoot.

They really do make me feel that atheism’s primary problem isn’t sexual harassment creating a toxic environment, it’s professional victims creating a toxic environment. And also people like Carrier, who are absolute in their support that we should pander to these professional victims. I should remind you that this guy was actually invited to talk at this conference.

That’s their case – that’s what they’ve got. The problem is not sexual harassment, the problem is people who object to sexual harassment.

It’s possible, indeed easy, to think of situations in which that would be the case. It could always be the case that there is little or no X, and there are people saying there is a lot of X, and that makes a problem. But it isn’t the case that there is little or no sexual harassment among atheists. Phil Mason is just being a callous shit in pretending otherwise. That’s what he does.

The rest of the vid is frankly not very interesting, except for the part where he cites PZ’s “little harem of elite feminist whiners.” That’s a good one – every single word apart from “of” is a calculated insult.

Which is where we came in. Enough with the calculated insults already. To quote a friend, “debate or stfu.”

I have a good idea. I’m going to go out on a limb here, but I truly think that people who run human rights agencies for governments ought to support human rights.

Cue fireworks! But that’s what I think. Call me a dangerous radical, but that’s what I think.

Not so the Brazilian House of Representatives, apparently.

A row has erupted in Brazil after the House of Representatives elected an evangelical politician with homophobic views to run the country’s Human Rights and Minority Commission.

Hmmyes you see that’s my point – I think that’s a bad fit.

Marco Feliciano has previously said AIDS is a gay cancer and that Africans are cursed.

The Latin America Bureau reports he stated: “Noah’s curse on his grandson, Canaan, lingers in Africa, therefore leading to all the hunger, diseases, ethnic wars.”

In another comment, he wrote that the “rot of homosexual feelings leads to hatred, crime, rejection”.

Is that the right kind of experience and training for a job running the country’s Human Rights and Minority Commission? I say no. I realize that sounds strange and unfamiliar, but nevertheless – I say no.

You know Nate? He needs help getting to Women in Secularism 2. Any surplus will go to CFI.

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/affording-the-hotel?c=home

If you want something specific from the conference, like a SurlyRamic if Amy’s selling them, some autographs, or anything else, just let me know when you donate and I’ll be sure to get that for you.

And maybe a guest post here, hmm?

Crommunist has a hilarious terrifying fantasy warning about what’s really been going on all this time…

One particularly funny tragic and blind passage at the beginning:

Up until now, my position on this kind of over-wrought conspiracy mongering has been fairly consistent: FTB is not the boogey-man; it’s a network of blogs that (mostly) existed before there was a network to begin with. Atheism+ isn’t ruining atheism; it’s a reaction to the fact that it was already ruined for a lot of people. Skepchick is not rounding up all male atheists to throw them into a witch’s cauldron of menses and liquid misandry.

At least so he thought. Read on.

 

Anthony Grayling was on the Colbert Report last night. Again! It was his second time. He was on the first time two years ago, right after he was on a book tour here for The Good Book. He came to Seattle on that tour and as long-time readers may remember, I had tea with him. It was a memorable afternoon. It was great to see him again at the AA event. The AAs loved him.

Amanda Knief (dedicated ED of American Atheists) was in the audience at the Colbert Report, and apparently she’s the one you can hearing whooping.

Now Stewart has to have Dave on. Has to. He keeps sniping at atheists, so it’s time to invite Dave.

I don’t have Richard Reed’s phone number (nor do I know that Richard Reed is the real name of that particular harasser), so in lieu of picking up the phone and giving him a jingle, I’ll do a post about his argument for the legitimacy of photoshopping pictures of people’s faces onto goats post.

Where I “harass” Barack Obama and Ophelia Benson

There is still a lot of talk in the skeptic community about “harassment”, and what constitutes it. Ophelia Benson claims that people photoshopping her constitutes harassment. In this post, I will show how ridiculous that idea is!

Here is a goat. Lets call him Clive:

Now, lets say for sake of argument that I want to mock Barack Obama. I could do that by putting his head on Clive and putting a crude message on the picture:

Now, according to Ophelia Benson, photoshopping constitutes harassment, so does the above image harass Barack Obama? I don’t think so!   Let’s apply the same thing to a picture of Ophelia:

Now, who would consider either of the above pictures to be “harassing” of Barack Obama or Ophelia Benson? Only the hypersensitive or the histrionic I guess!

 

So his argument is: it’s ok to photoshop Obama’s face onto a goat, therefore it’s ok to photoshop my face onto a goat.

It’s my view that there are some steps missing between his premise and his conclusion. I also have grave doubts about his premise.

Uh oh. Shut down the machinery. Blow the siren. Step away from the handle. Put your safety gear on.

You’ve been doing it wrong. All this time. It’s not 666. It’s 616.

Oh my god – well no wonder then! No wonder it didn’t work! No wonder we’re still here and not there. No wonder it never got airborne. No wonder the gell didn’t set. No wonder the plan never came to fruition. So that’s two thousand years down the crapper.

Ellen Aitken, a professor of early Christian history at McGill University, told Canada’s National Post, “This is a very nice piece to find. Scholars have argued for a long time over this, and it now seems that 616 was the original number of the beast.” But, if 616 is correct, according to Revelation 22:18, there’s now a lot of people that brought the Bible’s curses upon themselves, and those foolish enough to have repeated their false teachings.

It’s a very grim outlook for those people. Very grim indeed. I hope their passports are up to date.