More from the Rohingya refugees.
Crowded under tarpaulin tents strewn with rubbish and boxes of water, the Burmese and Bangladeshi migrants speak of horrors at sea: of murders, of killing each other over scarce supplies of food and water, of corpses thrown overboard.
“One family was beaten to death with wooden planks from the boat, a father, a mother and their son,” says Mohammad Amin, 35. “And then they threw the bodies into the ocean.”
A woman who went on the lam with her four-year-old son to prevent him from being genitally mutilated at the behest of his father was arrested and imprisoned last Thursday and is now in federal court.
Heather Hironimus, 31, was arrested Thursday in the long-running dispute over the removal of her 4-year-old child’s foreskin. She went missing with the boy nearly three months ago and ignored a judge’s warnings that if she didn’t appear in court and give consent for the circumcision to proceed, she faced jail. [Read more…]
Maryam has a dreadful story of a young woman in Pakistan imprisoned awaiting trial on a charge of “blasphemy.”
Over a year ago, a friend of mine, a British Pakistani actor got in touch with me after his annual visit home to Lahore. He was very troubled by a blasphemy case that he had come across which appeared to have blighted the lives of two young people who had neither contacts nor money without which it is impossible to get out of a sticky situation in countries like Pakistan. He knew I was a long term member of Southall Black Sisters and wondered if I could help. But our funding covers services to women facing domestic violence in this country and only stretches to the Asian sub-continent if British Asian women have been abducted there in order to be forced into a marriage or abandoned there so that British Asian men may marry again. The fate of a young Pakistani woman languishing in a prison on false charges of blasphemy lay outside our remit, although not outside the bounds of our sympathy and solidarity. As I listened to the story and then spoke to ‘Mo’ and read the legal papers, I was very moved by their plight and decided I would do what I could to support them as an individual but with the support of all the contacts that SBS had forged in its 35 years of existence, including Maryam Namazie and the Council for Ex-Muslims of Britain (CEMB).
‘Esha’ was arrested in March 2012 for having torn up the pages of the Qu’ran. Although I disagree with the whole notion of blasphemy and find it ridiculous that a legal case should be fought on the basis of whether she did or she didn’t, what is worse is that she didn’t even do it. She had an argument with a friend of hers who then shopped her to the authorities. It is a common way of settling scores in countries like Pakistan. I have provided some of the statistics in another article. Her friend is prepared to drop the case if Esha pays her £20,000 and gets her a job in Dubai – none of which is within Esha’s reach.
Mr Biblical Gender Roles did a later post asking the vexed question, Is a husband selfish for having sex with his wife when she is not the mood?
That seems like an odd way of putting it. If she’s not in the mood he’s not really having sex with her, is he, he’s using her for sex for himself. But he of course doesn’t see it that way.
I feel that today we make far too many excuses for the sin of sexual denial in marriage, and as men of God we must address this issue without pulling punches.
That’s an unfortunate metaphor for the subject…or perhaps it’s not a metaphor.
Now we need to establish the key Biblical teachings about sex.
Ursula Halligan, political editor of TV3 in Ireland, has a wrenching piece in the Irish Times today, coming out and supporting same-sex marriage. She starts with a tragic example of the way religion can cause people wholly unnecessary self-loathing and misery.
I was a good Catholic girl, growing up in 1970s Ireland where homosexuality was an evil perversion. It was never openly talked about but I knew it was the worst thing on the face of the earth.
So when I fell in love with a girl in my class in school, I was terrified. Rummaging around in the attic a few weeks ago, an old diary brought me right back to December 20th, 1977.
“These past few months must have been the darkest and gloomiest I have ever experienced in my entire life,” my 17-year-old self wrote.
Here’s a funny thing: the Mirror reporting on more horrible behavior from Katie Hopkins, to wit calling an autistic nine-year-0ld rude names. But I noticed something particular about it…
The headline:
Katie Hopkins stoops to new low as she bullies autistic nine-year-old girl over weight and calls her a ‘t***’
The story:
You might not have thought it possible, but Katie Hopkins appears to have sunk to a new low as she has called a nine-year-old girl ‘a t***’.
The outrageous columnist was tweeting throughout Channel 4’s new show, Born Naughty?, where nine-year-old Honey was diagnosed with mild autism.
“Honey can’t complete the autism assessment as she is too busy being a complete t***. But the s*** mum assessment is complete #bornnaughty,” Katie tweeted.
See there? It appears that “twat” is too rude (in the sense of “obscene”) to spell out. But how can that be? I’ve been told that it’s not even mildly rude in the UK, that it’s actually a different word from the US one, which we can tell because it’s pronounced differently. I’ve been told that even the queen says it.
But if that’s true, why does the Mirror asterisk it?
More from that article about ex-Muslims.
[Imtiaz] Shams, who seems remarkably self-possessed for his young age, agrees that there are particular gender issues that afflict disillusioned Muslims. To this end he has tried to link up with feminist societies at universities. “But there’s a real problem in this country,” he says. “People don’t want to touch anything to do with leaving Islam. Especially in universities, where the politics are insane.”
He has a point. In recent times the National Union of Students have refused to condemn Isis on the grounds that is would justify Islamophobia. Shams believes that this kind of gesture and the NUS decision last month to lobby alongside Cage, the militant Islamic prisoners pressure group, undermines the position of dissenting Muslims. “What it does is to say to reformists and secularists, you’re not really Muslims.”
Andrew Anthony has an excellent long piece in the Graun about ex-Muslims.
It starts with the fact that leaving Islam can be dangerous.
The danger is confirmed by Imtiaz Shams, an energetic 26-year-old who runs a group called Faith to Faithless, which aims to help Muslim nonbelievers speak out about their difficult situations. Shams has a visible presence on YouTube and has organised several events at universities. “I am at physical risk because I do videos,” says Shams. “I don’t like putting myself in the firing line, but I had to because no one else is willing to do it.”
As real as the potential for violence might be, it’s not what keeps many doubting British Muslims from leaving their religion. As Simon Cottee, author of a new book The Apostates: When Muslims Leave Islam, says: “In the western context, the biggest risk ex-Muslims face is not the baying mob, but the loneliness and isolation of ostracism from loved ones. It is stigma and rejection that causes so many ex-Muslims to conceal their apostasy.”
To be fair, that’s also true of ex-Christians, at least in the US. It’s less true of exes from liberal versions of either religion, and more true of exes from the illiberal versions. The problem of ostracism and loneliness is an issue for both. That’s why Vyckie Garrison has been such a help to women who leave the Quiverfull movement, as Maryam has to ex-Muslims.
[Sulaiman] Vali comes from a strictly religious Indian-heritage family. He was born in Kenya and moved with his parents and six siblings to England when he was 14. As outsiders, his family stayed close – “I always knew if I wanted anything they’d be there for me,” he says.
His father is an imam who follows the puritanical Deobandi scholastic tradition of Islam that has influence over a third of Britain’s mosques. All through his teenage years, when adolescents typically rebel, and even at university, Vali dutifully followed his father’s faith. Occasionally some of what he calls the more “barbaric punishments” found in sharia law troubled him, but he put his discomfort to one side. “I would just think, if God wants it, fine.”
And now let’s drop in on the people in Biblical Christianity Land to see what they have to say about the vexed question of whether or not a husband owns his wife the way a boy-farmer owns his livestock. (What to do with the analogy when the farmer is a woman is a question we will leave for another day. This is a visit to Biblical Christianity Land, after all. I’m not sure the laws of Biblical Christianity Land permit women to own farms and livestock.)
Let’s consult Mr Biblical Gender Roles for his take on this question. The answer is probably in the title of his post: You don’t pay for the milk when you own the cow!
Originally a comment by AJ Milne on Stop all that reckless breathing!
I got thinking a bit about the carbon footprint of cycling a while ago; I do cycle to work now and then (at 28K, kinda a long haul, and annoyingly, I can’t fit the time in right now, due to other parental duty things, but I probably will be again in a week or two)…
What I was generally hearing (with the billion hedges/estimates you need to build in in our annoyingly complicated economies–and see one high-level estimate here): it’s almost always better to cycle (and I drive a Prius, which is pretty low impact, as cars go). But depends a bit on what you’re eating. Some foods, if you count transportation and the way they’re raised/grown, are pretty high impact, so probably, counting all that, you can wind up making more CO2 that way, but it would be an unusual meal… [Read more…]
