Well great. No need to worry about all the poor sad tragic parents in Germany frustrated in their desire to snip off the end of their infant boy’s penis. They can haz circumcision. Yay!

The Cologne court ruling in June outraged Germany’s Muslims and Jews, and triggered an anguished national debate, by stating that ritual circumcision of under-aged boys amounted to “bodily harm” and parents should wait for their son to make his own decision.

Omigod I know, right? Wait for their son to make his own decision! How crazy is that?! If they wait, he’ll decide no! And that won’t do, because. So obviously they absolutely have to do it when he’s too small and altricial to refuse. That’s absolutely the only fair thing! If you know it’s something a person with a mature-ish brain would refuse to do, you totally have to do it to them when they are infants. This is God’s wish. God could have just issued the infants without the foreskin, but that would be too easy. [Read more…]

An Egyptian women’s rights activist, Dalia Ziada, gave a talk at Tufts a couple of days ago and said what we already know: that the revolution is not an egalitarian revolution, and is taking away women’s rights as opposed to expanding them.

The pro-democracy figure warns that the heady optimism that infused Cairo’s Tahrir Square last year is being slowly replaced by fear that the very political forces that helped sweep long-serving Hosni Mubarak from power are remaking Egyptian society into a rigid, religiously intolerant, patriarchal system. [Read more…]

What one can expect when right-wing theocrats get power – arrests and prosecutions for “blasphemy” because of a Facebook page. Yes really – a Facebook page.

A man was arrested last week in Evia, Greece, on charges of posting “malicious blasphemy and religious insult on the known social networking site, Facebook” according to a press release by the Greek police.

The accused, whose identity has not been made public, had created and managed the Facebook page Elder Pastitsios the Pastafarian… [Read more…]

There’s a new Jesus and Mo book!

And it has a foreword by Richard Dawkins, which RD has posted at RDF. [Read more…]

I’ve seen some strange exclamations about the “hunting down” of Justin Vacula, from a couple of people not…what shall I call it…not paid-up members of the Slime Institute. Exclamations that “vengeance is haunting Salem” and it really really was “a witch hunt” and the hunters (or is it witches?) are “vicious, hateful ideologues.” [Read more…]

And on the same day, in another part of the forest…

…another busy representative of another university Student Union meddled with another Atheist, Humanist, and Secularist Society. Reading University this time, and RUSU and RAHS. This time not a Jesus and Mo toon on a Facebook page, but a pineapple named Mohammed. [Read more…]

A good outcome. Not the best outcome, but a good one. LSE has ruled that its Student Union Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society does not have to remove any Jesus and Mo cartoons from its Facebook page, nor does it have to remove the prefix LSESU from its name. It has also ruled that the crappy things the LSESU said about LSESU ASH were crappy things to say (or rather, in bureaucratic language, that they were inappropriate).

LSESU ASH President Chris Moos made a statement on behalf of the Society’s committee, saying, ‘We wish that LSESU could have engaged with us originally in order to resolve the situation when it arose and remain disappointed that they have not apologised for their unjustified defamatory remarks against us. However, we are very pleased that no action is being taken to interfere with our right to free expression, nor to remain a society clearly affiliated with our university. The cartoons on our Facebook page criticised religion in a satirical way and we continue to reject any claim that their publications could constitute any sort of harassment or intimidation of Muslims or Christians. ‘

Andrew Copson, BHA Chief Executive, said, ‘It is good that free speech has not been curtailed at the end of this saga, but it is a great shame that non-religious students were let down by their union in this way. The conflation of offence with intimidation, which allowed this situation to escalate as it did, is totally out of place in a university, where the challenging of deeply held believe should be a routine activity.’

Good.

Another one. Another medical coughcoughcoughcough threatens to sue Simon Singh to make him stop saying the medical coughcoughcoughcough is full of coughcoughcoughcoughcoughcough. Josephine Jones collects all the links again, and many links there are.

The medical coughcoughcoughcough is a new “alternative health” magazine jauntily called What Doctors Don’t Tell You. Jones has a picture, so you can see what it’s like:

  [Read more…]

The Jerusalem bus company Egged has decided to stop carrying any advertising on its buses – not because it dislikes advertising but because of “Haredi violence and vandalism.”

“This matter has something important to say to Israeli society,” says [the religious freedom movement] Yerushalmim CEO Uri Ayalon. “We can’t abandon the capital city.  Today, there are no pictures of men or women in Jerusalem. Tomorrow,  there won’t be any in Tel Aviv. It’s inconceivable.”

“Egged’s  decision is absurd,” says [Rachel] Azaria, the [Jerusalem] councilwoman [and Yerushalmim activist who successfully petitioned Israel’s High Court of Justice to stop Egged’s and Cnaan’s censorship of women’s faces and bodies]. “If Egged buses are  vandalized, then instead of going to the police and demanding  enforcement, they’re making men and women invisible. It’s like not  letting the kids go out to recess if there’s a bully in school, instead  of dealing with the bully.”

Disappearing all women is the new normal.

At ur-B&W. Here is a big excerpt.

In the time it takes you to read this article, over 50 young girls will have their clitoris hacked out. What are you going to do about it?

Each girl will be pinned down, with no anaesthetic, whilst 8,000 nerve endings cringe at the touch of an unclean scalpel. Each girl will scream and writhe and howl – but you won’t hear any of them. Each girl will be irreversibly, unbearably, agonisingly mutilated.

“I heard it,” described Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “like a butcher snipping the fat off a piece of meat. A piercing pain shot up between my legs”. Skin rips, blood pours, cries screech. But it wasn’t over for her just yet: next “came the sewing… the long, blunt needle clumsily pushed into my bleeding outer labia,” thread weaving through thread to leave behind only a miniscule opening for urination and menstruation.

The scars of this torture, butchery on a factory-line scale – and that is the only way to describe it – will never fade. Premenstrual cramps, traumatic periods, an interminable stench of soured blood (caused by menstrual difficulties), problems with pregnancy and childbirth, pain during sexual intercourse, psychological damage and the risk of fistula are but a few of the long, long list of health complications that will haunt every girl’s adulthood. That’s if they survive the immediate blood loss, infection and severe trauma. It’s an experience from which a child may never fully recover.

Conservative estimates suggest that over 100 million women worldwide have been subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM). Article Five of the UN Declaration of Human Rights decrees that no one “shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”. And surely such human rights are universal; or else they are nothing.

Read on.