Stoking

The BBC is still at it. This must be a deliberate policy, not mere laziness or habit.

It’s at it in a story on what the Danish domestic intelligence agency knew about El-Hussein. Prison officials told them he was at risk of being radicalized. I would guess they are told that about a lot of people, and can’t closely monitor all of them.

Danish intelligence chief Jens Madsen acknowledged that El-Hussein had been “on the radar” of his services.

Mr Madsen said investigators were working on the theory that he could have been inspired by the shootings in Paris last month.

Lars Vilks told AFP news agency that police “did not step up security on Saturday. It was the same as we had previously”, confirming that he had since gone into hiding.

The cartoonist stoked controversy in 2007 by drawing pictures of the Prophet Muhammad dressed as a dog and has been under police protection since 2010.

There they are, at it again – firmly blaming Lars Vilks for drawing a cartoon that in just about any other context would be simply a cartoon, like any other. There they are again, dishonestly and damagingly saying that Lars Vilks “stoked controversy” when he simply drew a cartoon.

Image result for lars vilks cartoon

They really really really need to stop doing that.

The ability to shock and terrify

The BBC reports that a police chief in al-Baghdadi, Iraq reports that IS torched 45 people there.

Jihadist militants from Islamic State (IS) have burned to death 45 people in the western Iraqi town of al-Baghdadi, the local police chief says.

Exactly who these people were and why they were killed is not clear, but Col Qasim al-Obeidi said he believed some were members of the security forces. [Read more…]

Platforms

My friend Sadaf Ali has a post about the fact that far too many activist atheists talk over ex-Muslims and liberal Muslims instead of listening to them and/or helping them get a turn at the mic.

I was recently quote in Allie Conti’s article for VICE on this issue:

But Sadaf Ali, a Muslim turned atheist activist, says that many New Atheists are just grown-up version of the bullies who called her a “terrorist” as a kid.

“I’ve had to debate people often who make gross generalizations of Muslims and Muslim cultures,” she told me. “People hide their bigotry behind their promotion of atheism, and I think it’s disturbing.” She has a pretty easy solution to changing the movement’s alleged-racism rap: Giving people besides Dawkins and Harris a prominent platform.

That would help. It would help with a lot of things.

It’s a familiar problem with how the media operate, which is that once X gets called as an expert then X becomes that expert you always call when you want an expert. It’s a stupid & lazy shortcut which seems to be damn near impossible to overcome. [Read more…]

But some experts see

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.

[Read more…]

Where girls and boys are taught separately

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.

The horrible idea filter

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.