There was a rally for free speech in Copenhagen tonight.
Butterflies and Wheels
Gnu atheism, women's rights, internationalism, universalism, and gossip
Tom Gjelten at NPR did a typically NPR passive-aggressive story on “extreme” atheists and Craig Hicks and yadda yadda. I’ve been doing the same sort of thing ever since last Wednesday, but…I think without the passive-aggressive aspects. That’s been my intention at least. I’m up front about it – Craig Hicks freaks me out because we had friends in common, because his Facebook wall looks exactly like the walls of countless other bro atheists, because I don’t know but I fear his anti-theism – which I share – may have had something to do with the three murders he apparently confessed to. I don’t like the idea, and that’s exactly why I’ve been poking at it so hard.
But Gjelten…well let’s see.
Outrage over the murder of three young Muslim Americans in North Carolina last week has gone international. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation said Saturday that the killings reflected “Islamophobia” and “bear the symptoms of a hate crime,” but local authorities say they don’t yet know what motivated the murders.
Some people in Izmir protested the growing influence of Islam in schools in Turkey on Friday. They were dispersed by water cannons.
Education is the latest flashpoint between the administration of President Tayyip Erdogan, and secularist Turks who accuse him of overseeing creeping ‘Islamization’ in the NATO member state.
Riot police were out in force on Izmir’s streets, with water cannon being used to disperse banner-waving demonstrators who had gathered in the center of the city, according to pictures from Dogan news agency. At least one person was seen being led away by plain clothes security officers.
Parts of some regular schools have been requisitioned to create more places for students in “Imam Hatip” religious schools championed by Erdogan, where girls and boys are taught separately. Almost 1 million students are enrolled in those schools, up from 65,000 when AKP came to power in 2002.
Sort of a Turkish Tony Blair then.
I wrote this month’s column for the Freethinker yesterday. It’s a rather heated rejection of the “we must be responsible if we want to live in harmony with horrible ideas” approach. I don’t want to live in harmony with horrible ideas; I want to reject them, and explain my reasons for rejecting them.
It’s not always immediately clear which ideas are horrible. Sometimes it takes extended discussion and illustration and listing of examples to make the horribleness of a particular idea clear. That’s one major reason free speech is important, and why it often trumps other goods.
But some ideas we already know are horrible. We don’t need to keep reopening the question every hour, because we already know and because the ideas are so horrible that they do damage and harm. It can be worthwhile to discuss such ideas in classrooms or seminars, but that doesn’t mean that they have to be discussed in every newspaper and chat show. Should we be sitting down for a serious conversation with Boko Haram in order to come to an understanding? No. Boko Haram has murdered some 30 thousand Nigerians. There’s nothing to discuss. Its members may be rehabilitatable, but its ideas are the ideas of murderers.
But you won’t find Boko Haram in a Copenhagen coffee shop or a Paris newspaper office. It’s not Boko Haram that keeps getting threatened and killed for trying to have a conversation.
Brilliant cartoon by Kevin Moore at The Nib – Parking Space Atheists.
More on Turkey’s Family and Social Policy Minister Ayşenur İslam via an article in Today’s Zaman last November.
An activist who was kicked out of the Women and Justice Summit organized by the Women and Democracy Association (KADEM) on Monday has said Erdoğan committed an unconstitutional act by saying men and women are not equal.
On the first day of the conference activist Fikriye Yılmaz was silenced and forcibly removed from the room by security at the request of Family and Social Policy Minister Ayşenur İslam after Yılmaz attempted to ask a question during a speech by the minister. [Read more…]
Speaking of people being murdered for terrible petty self-regarding narcissistic reasons – in Turkey 20-year-old Ozgecan Aslan was murdered for having the audacity to resist being raped.
WOMEN’S RIGHTS ACTIVISTS in Turkey took to the streets yesterday in protest at the murder of a young woman after she resisted an alleged attempt to rape her, local media reported.
Hundreds of women gathered in Istanbul’s Taksim square chanting slogans such as “You will never walk alone!”. [Read more…]
Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein has been widely named as the gunman who killed two people and wounded five at a cultural centre and synagogue in the Danish capital.
El-Hussein was not an immigrant. He was of Palestinian descent but his parents settled in Denmark before he was born. Like the gunmen in Paris, he turned against the country of his birth. [Read more…]
In Dhaka today, a publisher’s stall at a book fair was shut down for displaying a biography of Mohammed.
Bangla Academy has shut down the Rodela Prokashani stall on the allegation of publishing and selling a translated book on Prophet Muhammad’s biography, which “hurts religious sentiment of people.”
Dr Jalal Ahmed, member secretary of the Amar Ekushey Book Fair, said: “The stall of Rodela Prokashani was shut down on Monday for publishing and selling a book [translated], Twenty Three Years: A Study of the Prophetic Career of Mohammad, which allegedly hurts people’s religious sentiments.” [Read more…]
