Hahahahahahahaha this is the funniest headline I’ve seen in awhile – it’s in the Independent –
You must admit.
Ok so what’s the problem? What rights are they neglecting? Prisoners’? Children’s? Foreigners’? Asylum seekers’? Those of the disabled?
No, none of those. It’s the rights of Mohammed and Islam that Norway has been neglecting. [Read more…]
New news from Nigeria – Monica Mark reports in the Guardian:
For two weeks, retired teacher Samson Dawah prayed for news of his niece Saratu, who was among more than 230 schoolgirls snatched by Boko Haram militants in the north-eastern Nigerian village of Chibok. Then on Monday the agonising silence was broken.
When Dawah called together his extended family members to give an update, he asked that the most elderly not attend, fearing they would not be able to cope with what he had to say. “We have heard from members of the forest community where they took the girls. They said there had been mass marriages and the girls are being shared out as wives among the Boko Haram militants,” Dawah told his relatives. [Read more…]
A piece by channel4 news on April 25th:
Amid mounting public fury and an international outcry over the fate of 230 kidnapped Nigerian teenaged girls – now missing for nearly two weeks – the mother of one of the girls has warned that unless they are rescued urgently, she and other parents would likely be collecting their children’s dead bodies.
Speaking by telephone from Chibok, the town in north-eastern Borno state where the girls were kidnapped from their school in the middle of the night, a distressed Mrs Rahila Bitrus told Channel 4 News of her family’s anguish and accused the Nigeriangovernment of failing to act fast enough.
“They’d assured us they would rescue our children but today, it’s 11 days since the abductions and we still haven’t seen our daughters,” she said. “We are going through the very worst moment of our lives. [Read more…]
[It’s Borno, not Burno]
#BringBackOurGirls Very little is known about what the authorities are doing to bring back the 200+ girls abducted whilst at school. Even the exact figure of the girls taken is different between reports. These are precious lives and, if you care, we need to keep the pressure on the Nigerian Government and international organisations to rescue these girls. Sign now at: https://www.change.org/
en-GB/petitions/ over-200-girls-are-missing- in-nigeria-so-why-doesn-t- anybody-care-234girls
A joint press release: ‘Wills without bigotry – protest against the Law Society’
About 70 protesters rallied outside the office of the Law Society to condemn their endorsement of discriminatory sharia law on April 28 2014. The protest was organised by anti-racist, feminist and human rights groups, namely One Law for All, Southall Black Sisters, Centre for Secular Space, and London School of Economics SU Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society. Chris Moos was the master of ceremonies of the rally.
At the protest, Pragna Patel, director of Southall Black Sisters called upon the Law Society to withdraw its guidance:
“Our message to you is this: Wake up: You are the Law Society and not a body advising on the compatibility of the law with religious principles! You have no business in normalising discriminatory religious principles in the legal culture and practice of this country. Your business is to ensure that the law is human rights compliant and not anti-rights compliant. Your business is to tear up the guidance. Your business is to stand with us on this side of the fence and on this side of history.” [Read more…]
We’ve noticed many times how jeremiads about religious freedom seem to go in only one direction – freedom to refuse service to gay couples, freedom to refuse to perform medically necessary abortions, freedom to shield child-raping priests from the law. Mark Joseph Stern at Slate points to an example from silence as opposed to jeremiad.
On Monday, the United Church of Christ brought a federal lawsuit against North Carolina’s marriage laws, which were amended in 2012 to ban gay unions. What interest does the United Church of Christ have in toppling the state’s homophobic ban? Under North Carolina law, a minister who officiates a marriage ceremony between a couple with no valid marriage license is guilty of a Class A misdemeanor and can be thrown in jail for 45 days. And since gay marriage is illegal in North Carolina, that means any minister who dares celebrate a gay union in his church may face jail time.
I’m not certain why Ross Douthat, Ramesh Ponnuru, Mollie Hemingway, and other vociferous conservative defenders of religious liberty aren’t vocally outraged about this fact. [Read more…]
Jessica Valenti points out one of the ways women are given special treatment.
When I argue with a sexist, there’s an inevitable point at which he will call me “sweetheart”. (I like to think of it as shorthand for “you’re winning”.) If I’m really making him feel foolish, he may resort to “bitch”. “Ugly” is the last refuge of the hopelessly destroyed.
I’ve been writing about feminism on the internet long enough that these names don’t really bother me. But nothing is more grating than when a man I don’t know – in comments, Twitter or real life – calls me “Jessie”. [Read more…]
The BBC’s correspondent in Nigeria, Will Ross, reports on the agonizing wait.
Almost two weeks after they were driven away from their boarding school in the town in the middle of the night, parents are desperate for news of their daughters.
[Oops, editor needed. That should be “Almost two weeks after their daughters were driven away from their boarding school in the town in the middle of the night, parents are desperate for news of them.”]
A resident of the small town of Gwoza in the remote north-east said on 25 April she saw a convoy of 11 vehicles painted in military colours carrying many girls.
This will be of little comfort to the parents as it suggests at least some are now even further from home, close to the Cameroonian border. [Read more…]
Pablo Flores pointed out another Facebook page about street harassment, this one started by a young woman in Argentina. My Spanish is minimal and rusty but I can get some and anyway there’s the Translate button. Acción Respeto: por una calle libre de acoso.
Here’s a cartoon posted there:
Here’s a sad finding from sociologists in gender studies – girls view sexual violence as normal.
(April 2014) – New evidence from the journal Gender & Society helps explain what women’s advocates have argued for years – that women report abuse at much lower rates than it actually occurs. According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), 44% of victims are under the age of 18, and 60% of sexual assaults are not reported to police. [Read more…]