The BBC returns to the subject of Malawian “hyenas” – men who are paid to “initiate” young girls into sex.

In July the BBC wrote about a Malawian man paid to have sex with young girls from his village, as part of a sexual initiation ritual. Later a Malawian woman, Natasha Annie Tonthola, contacted the BBC to explain how her experience of the ritual helped inspire her to campaign for the protection of women and girls. This is her story.

I’m the oldest of five children and I grew up in a village in the central district of Malawi, near the capital, Lilongwe, and I was 13 years old when the initiation ceremony happened.

My father was from a village near Mulanje, in the south of the country, and I was sent there for the ceremony after my first period. You don’t have a choice – it happens to every girl in the village.

They were told they would learn about womanhood. She was excited about it. No one told them it involved sex. They were told a man called a “hyena” was coming to visit them, but not that he would be putting his penis in them.

We each had a piece of cloth and we were told to put it on the floor. We were told that it was time to show that we knew how to treat a man, that we knew what to do for our future husbands. Then we were blindfolded.

You’re not supposed to show you’re scared, you’re not supposed to show you don’t know what’s happening to you.

The man comes, and he tells you to lie down, you open your legs and he does what he does. We weren’t allowed to know who the man was – only the elders know.

That’s an interesting touch. I guess it’s to teach them that it doesn’t matter who he is? Because they don’t get to choose who he is at any time? They just have to take it?

We were young girls, so we were tense, and this man would push our legs open. I found it painful. When he finished, I was relieved. The female elder came in and said, “Congratulations, you have finished the initiation ceremony, and you are a woman now.”

Many girls think this is normal because we are in a way brainwashed, we think it is OK because it is tradition.

But the hyena didn’t wear a condom, and some of the girls got pregnant. If the hyena has an STD, well…

Tonthola had a rough life and an abusive marriage, and she became an organizer.

My community organisation continued to educate people but it was hard, particularly when we were challenging traditions such as the use of hyenas and wife inheritance.

In some communities they told us: “Just because you are educated, doesn’t mean that you should tell us what to do. These traditions and customs have existed for time immemorial, and we’ve practised them for ages without any harm.”

But some elders and religious leaders listened, and some have stopped the practice in their villages.

In my community work I soon learned more about the barriers for girls in school. If families are going through a financial rough patch, they’re more likely to pay fees for boys rather than for girls. If girls drop out of school, the family is eager to marry them off rather than have them sit around the house all day. And many girls miss class because they can’t afford sanitary towels.

To try to solve this problem, one of the main things my organisation is doing is distributing eco-friendly reusable washable sanitary pads and pants. They come as part of a kit including pants with clips so that they stay in place and a waterproof bag, in case girls need to change them in school. They are biodegradable, but cost effective and durable – they last for five years. I’ve also expanded into nappies. I hope these will encourage much less waste to go into landfill.

In 2011 I realised I needed to establish a formal organisation, and that was the start of Mama Africa Foundation Trust. We have distributed so many sanitary towels that I have lost count. I call this initiative Project Dignity.

The female body is a handicap in so many ways. Natasha Annie Tonthola is a hero.

H/t Seth

Ken Silverstein wrote a piece in Harper’s in 2000, The Church of Morris Dees. A site with a dubious name posted a copy.

Cofounded in 1971 by civil rights lawyer cum direct-marketing millionaire Morris Dees, a leading critic of “hate groups” and a man so beatific that he was the subject of a made-for-TV movie, the SPLC spent much of its early years defending prisoners who faced the death penalty and suing to desegregate all-white institutions like Alabama’s highway patrol. That was then.

Today, the SPLC spends most of its time–and money–on a relentless fund-raising campaign, peddling memberships in the church of tolerance with all the zeal of a circuit rider passing the collection plate. “He’s the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights movement,” renowned anti- death-penalty lawyer Millard Farmer says of Dees, his former associate, “though I don!t mean to malign Jim and Tammy Faye.” The Center earned $44 million last year alone–$27 million from fund-raising and $17 million from stocks and other investments–but spent only $13 million on civil rights programs, making it one of the most profitable charities in the country.

Um. They raised $27 million from fund-raising and kept $14 million of it?

Morris Dees doesn’t need your financial support. The SPLC is already the wealthiest civil rights group in America, though this letter quite naturally omits that fact. Other solicitations have been more flagrantly misleading. One pitch, sent out in 1995-when the Center had more than $60 million in reserves-informed would-be donors that the “strain on our current operating budget is the greatest in our 25-year history.” Back in 1978, when the Center had less than $10 million, Dees promised that his organization would quit fund-raising and live off interest as soon as its endowment hit $55 million. But as it approached that figure, the SPLC upped the bar to $100 million, a sum that, one 1989 newsletter promised, would allow the Center “to cease the costly and often unreliable task of fund raising. ” Today, the SPLC’s treasury bulges with $120 million, and it spends twice as much on fund-raising-$5.76 million last year-as it does on legal services for victims of civil rights abuses. The American Institute of Philanthropy gives the Center one of the worst ratings of any group it monitors, estimating that the SPLC could operate for 4.6 years without making another tax-exempt nickel from its investments or raising another tax-deductible cent from well-meaning “people like you.”

And, he says, they choose their targets to appeal to donors rather than to address the most urgent problems.

What the Center’s other work for justice does not include is anything that might be considered controversial by donors. According to Millard Farmer, the Center largely stopped taking death-penalty cases for fear that too visible an opposition to capital punishment would scare off potential contributors. In 1986, the Center’s entire legal staff quit in protest of Dees’s refusal to address issues-such as homelessness, voter registration, and affirmative action-that they considered far more pertinent to poor minorities, if far less marketable to affluent benefactors, than fighting the KKK. Another lawyer, Gloria Browne, who resigned a few years later, told reporters that the Center’s programs were calculated to cash in on “black pain and white guilt.” Asked in 1994 if the SPLC itself, whose leadership consists almost entirely of white men, was in need of an affirmative action policy, Dees replied that “probably the most discriminated people in America today are white men when it comes to jobs.”

Hmm.

A National Journal survey of salaries paid to the top officers of advocacy groups shows that Dees earned more in 1998 than nearly all of the seventy-eight listed, tens of thousands more than the heads of such groups as the ACLU, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and the Children’s Defense Fund. The more money the SPLC receives, the less that goes to other civil rights organizations, many of which, including the NAACP, have struggled to stay out of bankruptcy. Dees’s compensation alone amounts to one quarter the annual budget of the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights, which handles several dozen death-penalty cases a year. “You are a fraud and a conman,” the Southern Center’s director, Stephen Bright, wrote in a 1996 letter to Dees, and proceeded to list his many reasons for thinking so, which included “your failure to respond to the most desperate needs of the poor and powerless despite your millions upon millions, your fund-raising techniques, the fact that you spend so much, accomplish so little, and promote yourself so shamelessly.” Soon the SPLC will move into a new six-story headquarters in downtown Montgomery, just across the street from its current headquarters, a building known locally as the Poverty Palace.

So there’s that.

The Atlantic has a rather tepid piece on the SPLC’s target-placement on Maajid Nawaz.

Nawaz’s work has earned him detractors—critics claim he has embellished or neatened his narrative, some attack him for opportunism, and others question his liberal bona fides—but calling him an “anti-Muslim extremist” is a surprise. Unlike the likes of Gaffney and Geller, he doesn’t espouse the view that Islam itself is a problem; unlike Ali, who now describes herself as an atheist, Nawaz identifies as a Muslim.

That’s what I mean by tepid. Calling him that is more than a surprise, it’s a reckless and untrue calumny.

When I spoke to Nawaz on Thursday, he was both baffled and furious.

“They put a target on my head. The kind of work that I do, if you tell the wrong kind of Muslims that I’m an extremist, then that means I’m a target,” he said. “They don’t have to deal with any of this. I don’t have any protection. I don’t have any state protection. These people are putting me on what I believe is a hit list.”

And you would think that as an organization that tracks hate groups and violence, they would know that.

The report cited several counts against Nawaz. One is that he tweeted a cartoon of Muhammad—an intentionally provocative act, given that many Sunnis find it blasphemous to depict the prophet, but one that doesn’t fit neatly into the “anti-Islam” category.

I don’t believe it was “an intentionally provocative act” because I don’t think provocation was Maajid’s goal. I think his goal was what it said on the tin: to point out that Muslims don’t have to be outraged by cartoons like the Jesus and Mo one, and that it’s better to be relaxed about such things. He no doubt knew that some people would decide to be provoked by it, but that doesn’t mean he posted it in order to provoke them. Subtle, I know.

The most interesting is the fourth point, because it highlights a peculiar dynamic: The SPLC and Nawaz are each accusing the other of McCarthyism. The report states:

In the list sent to a top British security official in 2010, headlined “Preventing Terrorism: Where Next for Britain?” Quilliam wrote, “The ideology of non-violent Islamists is broadly the same as that of violent Islamists; they disagree only on tactics.” An official with Scotland Yard’s Muslim Contact Unit told The Guardian that “[t]he list demonises a whole range of groups that in my experience have made valuable contributions to counter-terrorism.”

Nawaz disputes the claim. Quilliam says the list in question was an appendix to a larger report, and simply a list of British Muslim organizations; in fact, he says, the point was to say that such groups should be legal, even if they were extremist, so long as they were not violent. “It wasn’t a terror list,” Nawaz said. “We were saying, don’t ban these groups. We’ve gone through the looking glass. It’s the direct opposite of my life’s work.”

…

Mark Potok, a senior fellow at SPLC who wrote the report (and has a long resume of similar work on extremists), told me that Quilliam’s list of groups was the linchpin of the case for Nawaz as an anti-Muslim extremist.

Well that seems like an incredibly weak and pathetic linchpin.

While Nawaz demanded a correction, retraction, and apology, Potok said none was coming.

One thing that seemed to particularly irk Nawaz was the fact that the report came from SPLC. While the group is controversial—and particularly loathed on the American right—Nawaz’s objection was that he has known and respected their work for years. “It lends the wingnuts a level of credibility,” he said.

Well exactly. If it were just some twerp, we would all have pointed and laughed and then moved on. The SPLC is not just some twerp, but it seems to have waded into this without doing any proper research.

A lawyer and law professor says the FBI director did a bad and possibly illegal thing.

The F.B.I. is currently investigating the hacking of Americans’ computers by foreign governments. Russia is a prime suspect.

Imagine a possible connection between a candidate for president in the United States and the Russian computer hacking. Imagine the candidate has business dealings in Russia, and has publicly encouraged the Russians to hack the email of his opponent and her associates.

It would not be surprising for the F.B.I. to include this candidate and his campaign staff in its confidential investigation of Russian computer hacking.

But it would be highly improper, and an abuse of power, for the F.B.I. to conduct such an investigation in the public eye, particularly on the eve of the election. It would be an abuse of power for the director of the F.B.I., absent compelling circumstances, to notify members of Congress from the party opposing the candidate that the candidate or his associates were under investigation. It would be an abuse of power if F.B.I. agents went so far as to obtain a search warrant and raid the candidate’s office tower, hauling out boxes of documents and computers in front of television cameras.

The F.B.I.’s job is to investigate, not to influence the outcome of an election.

Such acts could also be prohibited under the Hatch Act, which bars the use of an official position to influence an election. That is why the F.B.I. presumably would keep those aspects of an investigation confidential until after the election.

And that is why, on Saturday, I filed a complaint against the F.B.I. with the Office of Special Counsel, which investigates Hatch Act violations, and with the Office of Government Ethics. I have spent much of my career working on government ethics and lawyers’ ethics, including two and a half years as the chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, and I never thought that the F.B.I. could be dragged into a political circus surrounding one of its investigations. Until this week.

By way of full disclosure he tells us what candidates he has supported in this election process – three Republicans and then Clinton.

On Friday, the director of the F.B.I., James B. Comey, sent to members of Congress a letter updating them on developments in the agency’s investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s emails, an investigation which supposedly was closed months ago. This letter, which was quickly posted on the internet, made highly unusual public statements about an F.B.I. investigation concerning a candidate in the election. The letter was sent in violation of a longstanding Justice Department policy of not discussing specifics about pending investigations with others, including members of Congress. According to some news reports on Saturday, the letter was sent before the F.B.I. had even obtained the search warrant that it needed to look at the newly discovered emails. And it was sent days before the election, at a time when many Americans are already voting.

This clarifies, for me at least, how extraordinary and reprehensible Comey’s action was.

Taslima tweeted this BBC feature:

Purnima Shil was gang-raped in northern Bangladesh at the age of 13 and she has not been allowed to forget it. Twelve years later, because of the stigma that attaches to rape victims in some parts of the country, someone shamed her by creating a pornographic Facebook page in her name – with her photograph and telephone number. This story is part of the BBC’s Shame series, which examines a disturbing new phenomenon – the use of private or sexually explicit images to blackmail and shame young people, mainly girls and women, in some of the world’s most conservatives societies.

The video is only 3 minutes. It’s powerful.

A tiny history lesson via Kevin Lamarque at Newsweek/Reuters.

Clinton’s email habits look positively transparent when compared with the subpoena-dodging, email-hiding, private-server-using George W. Bush administration. Between 2003 and 2009, the Bush White House “lost” 22 million emails. This correspondence included millions of emails written during the darkest period in America’s recent history, when the Bush administration was ginning up support for what turned out to be a disastrous war in Iraq with false claims that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and, later, when it was firing U.S. attorneys for political reasons.

Like Clinton, the Bush White House used a private email server—its was owned by the Republican National Committee. And the Bush administration failed to store its emails, as required by law, and then refused to comply with a congressional subpoena seeking some of those emails. “It’s about as amazing a double standard as you can get,” says Eric Boehlert, who works with the pro-Clinton group Media Matters. “If you look at the Bush emails, he was a sitting president, and 95 percent of his chief advisers’ emails were on a private email system set up by the RNC. Imagine if for the last year and a half we had been talking about Hillary Clinton’s emails set up on a private DNC server?”

Most troubling, researchers found a suspicious pattern in the White House email system blackouts, including periods when there were no emails available from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. “That the vice president’s office, widely characterized as the most powerful vice president in history, should have no archived emails in its accounts for scores of days—especially days when there was discussion of whether to invade Iraq—beggared the imagination,” says Thomas Blanton, director of the Washington-based National Security Archive.

Welllll maybe there was a lot of football to watch during those days. No, maybe he had a cold. No, maybe the Internet was down. No, maybe he just did everything over the phone.

…in 2003, a whistleblower told the National Security Archive that the George W. Bush White House was no longer saving its emails. The Archive and another watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (which had represented outed CIA agent Valerie Plame in her case against the Bush administration), refiled their original lawsuit.

The plaintiffs soon discovered that Bush aides had simply shut down the Clinton automatic email archive, and they identified the start date of the lost emails as January 1, 2003. The White House claimed it had switched to a new server and in the process was unable to maintain an archive—a claim that many found dubious.

Bush administration emails could have aided a special prosecutor’s investigation into a White House effort to discredit a diplomat who disagreed with the administration’s fabricated Iraq WMD evidence by outing his CIA agent wife, Plame. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who was brought in to investigate that case, said in 2006 that he believed some potentially relevant emails sent by aides in Cheney’s office were in the administration’s system but he couldn’t get them.

But that’s ok because REASONS.

The supposedly lost emails also prevented Congress from fully investigating, in 2007, the politically motivated firing of nine U.S. attorneys. When the Democrat-led Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed related emails, Bush’s attorney general, Alberto Gonzalez, said many were inaccessible or lost on a nongovernmental private server run by the RNC and called gwb43.com. The White House, meanwhile, officially refused to comply with the congressional subpoena.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) called the president’s actions “Nixonian stonewalling” and at one point took to the floor in exasperation and shouted, “They say they have not been preserved. I don’t believe that!” His House counterpart, Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.), said Bush’s assertion of executive privilege was unprecedented and displayed “an appalling disregard for the right of the people to know what is going on in their government.”

In court in May 2008, administration lawyers contended that the White House had lost three months’ worth of email backups from the initial days of the Iraq War. Bush aides thus evaded a court-ordered deadline to describe the contents of digital backup believed to contain emails deleted in 2003 between March—when the U.S. invaded Iraq—and September. They also refused to give the NSA nonprofit any emails relating to the Iraq War, despite the PRA, blaming a system upgrade that had deleted up to 5 million emails. The plaintiffs eventually contended that the Bush administration knew about the problem in 2005 but did nothing to fix it.

One rule for them, and another rule for everyone else.

Russia has lost its seat on the UN Human Rights Council.

Russia narrowly lost its seat on the main United Nations body devoted to human rights on Friday, signaling international dismay over the military power’s conduct in Syria.

The vote was to select countries to represent Eastern Europe on the United Nations Human Rights Council. Russia lost by two votes to Croatia and by 32 votes to Hungary. All 193 members of the United Nations General Assembly voted, and when the results were announced, there was a “small intake of air” in the large hall, said the New Zealand envoy, Gerard van Bohemen.

He said he believed that Russia’s conduct in the war in Syria, including the aerial bombardment of Aleppo, “must have played a part.”

The US got kicked off during the Bush administration.

The Human Rights Council is politically influential. Its responsibilities include establishing panels to investigate human rights abuses in specific countries. Human rights advocates had hoped that the council would impanel an inquiry into rights abuses in Yemen. It was vigorously opposed by Saudi Arabia, which was re-elected Friday for another three-year seat.

“It’s hard to imagine the atrocities happening in Aleppo were not on the minds of those casting their ballots today,” said Akshaya Kumar of Human Rights Watch, which had vigorously lobbied against both Russia and Saudi Arabia in recent weeks. The group called for competitive elections for all geographic blocs.

Saudi Arabia is still on it (which is outrageous), Russia isn’t. Inches.

Silentbob alerted us to a juvenile elephant (not a baby) making sure her favorite human isn’t getting swept down the river.

Of course the first thing that everyone said, including me, when the Bundy verdict came out was that it will send a message to all the other “public lands are for us to exploit!!” crowd that they can get away with it. Of course.

The shocking acquittals of Ammon and Ryan Bundy, along with five other militants, in the armed takeover of an Oregon wildlife preserve is already emboldening anti-government extremists.

Two of the Bundy militants’ loudest cheerleaders, Nevada Assemblywoman Michele Fiore and blogger Gavin Seim, are already signaling that additional actions may be taken against the federal government.

Let’s secede! And have a civil war! That was so much fun last time, and now the carnage would be massive.

Fiore, who lost her re-election campaign in the Republican primary, told a reporter that the not-guilty verdicts were a message that Americans need to stand up to unlawful behavior by government employees.

https://twitter.com/KirkSiegler/status/791795235684769792

Like working in wildlife refuges and unlawful shit like that. Yee-ha!

No, the investigation into Clinton’s emails hasn’t “re-opened.” The FBI is trying to fuck with the election.

FBI Director James Comey alerted Republican members of Congress on Friday that bureau investigators would review some additional emails that might relate to Hillary Clinton’s email server. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), the chairman of the House Oversight Committee who has already vowed to spend the next several years investigating Clinton should she be elected president, quickly rushed to announce the news, falsely claiming that the case had been “reopened.”

https://twitter.com/jasoninthehouse/status/792047597040971776

And other Republicans followed suit, and news outlets took the bait, and Trump  gloated, and yadda yadda.

Though nothing in Comey’s letter said the case was being reopened, an array of news outlets repeated Chaffetz’s incorrect characterization. NBC News initially posted a story with this framing, later changing the headline and ledeto drop the claim. USA Today tweeted, falsely, that the FBI director had said the probe was being reopened. The Hill and Bloomberg also got the facts wrong.

But hey, that’s ok – it’s no big thing. It’s only whether or not the lying thieving sexually assaulting narcissist gets access to scary levels of power or not. No worries.

Despite the initial overreaction to the news, NBC’s Pete Williams has already reported that the newly found e-mails were not originally withheld by Clinton nor her campaign, the emails are not from Clinton, and the letter was sent to the Congressional leaders “out of an abundance of caution.” The AP reported that the emails did not come from Hillary Clinton’s private server. NBC’s sources called the story less than a game-changer.

But that did not stop Clinton’s critics from trying to turn it into one.

Because an exciting, though false, news item is always worth risking the fate of a country of 350 million people.

Via Pink News on Twitter:

Russia's UK embassy mocks Westerners as 'gay pigs' https://t.co/UmFaritp8S

— PinkNews (@PinkNews) October 24, 2016

Gay pigs in a concentration camp, at that – and cowering before a huge, biceps-displaying Russian bear.