Taslima has a post about her trip to Strasburg for the 25th Sakharov Prize anniversary.

I tweeted a lot in the last few days. I was at the European Parliament to celebrate 25th Sakharov Prize anniversary. All the Sakharov Laureates were there except Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, Hu Jia, Jafar Panahi and a few others. Shirin Ebadi the Nobel Peace Prize winner came to represent Nasrin Sotoudeh, the Iranian lawyer who received Sakharov Prize last year. We attended many conferences, seminars on Human Rights, official lunch and dinner.

But she didn’t get to talk to Malala Yousafzai.

After she got the Sakharov prize we the Sakharov Laureates took family photos. In the photo below, Martin Schulz, the

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Aha so Doug Phillips of Vision Forum has resigned as top boss of VF because he had An Affair with A Woman. The blog Diary of an Autodidact has a thorough analysis.

Douglas Phillips has three major claims to fame, all of which are related to a certain view of gender.

The first, as I partially discussed in my post on his connections to White Supremacy, is his belief that there is a single explanation for modern evils. Let me state this clearly, because I think it tends to be lost in all the static.

The foundation, the CORE of the Vision Forum doctrine is that “Feminism™” is THE cause of all modern evils.

That is, that the

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I’m very late in catching up with the Ex-Muslims of North America. The prod was seeing a tweet of mine – about Universities UK and the gender segregation trainwreck – favorited by Sadaf, and looking to see who she is. She’s one of the founders.

While not fully comprehending the gender essentialism ingrained in the religion and its practices, Sadaf always felt that gender equality would never be attainable under Islam or her own Afghan culture. and has since pursued the creation of an inclusive safe-space for Ex-Muslims. While working with the Toronto group and staying connected with the global online communities, Sadaf has come to know the dangers, the troubles, and the alienation of being an Ex-Muslim.

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Via Twitter:

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Not Egypt, for sure. Al Jazeera talks to some.

For a time after the 2011 uprising against former president Hosni Mubarak, there was greater freedom of expression in the country, and atheists began to be more publicly assertive. Yet at the same time, the power and influence of conservative Islam grew, with the election of Mohamed Morsi as president and Islamist parliamentary candidates’ success at the ballot box.

Gabr is a member of an atheist group that meets up for drinks and goes to concerts together. When the group began in 2011, it had three or four members. Now it has close to 100, including men and women, ex-Muslims and ex-Christians.

“All of them are angry, in a way

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A commenter pointed out Ghetto benches, which was a form of segregation I hadn’t heard of before.

Ghetto benches or bench Ghetto (known in Polish as getto ławkowe)^[1][2] was a form of official segregation in the seating of students, introduced in Poland‘s universities beginning in 1935 at Lwow Polytechnic.^[3] By 1937, when this practice became conditionally legalized, most rectors at other higher education institutions had adopted this form of segregation.^[4] Under the ghetto ławkowe system, Jewish university students were forced, under threat of expulsion, to sit in a left-hand side section of the lecture halls reserved exclusively for them. This official policy of enforced segregation was often accompanied by acts of violence

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A news release from the Freedom From Religion Foundation:

November 22, 2013

The Freedom From Religion Foundation and its co-presidents Annie Laurie Gaylor and Dan Barker have won a significant ruling with far-reaching ramifications declaring unconstitutional the 1954 “parish exemption” uniquely benefiting “ministers of the gospel.”

“May we say hallelujah! This decision agrees with us that Congress may not reward ministers for fighting a ‘godless and anti-religious’ movement by letting them pay less income tax. The rest of us should not pay more because clergy pay less,” Gaylor and Barker commented.

U.S. District Judge Barbara B. Crabb for the Western District of Wisconsin issued a strong, 43-page decision Friday declaring unconstitutional 26 U.S. C. § 107(2), passed by Congress in

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Maryam has drawn up a petition.

Universities UK: Rescind endorsement of sex segregation at UK Universities

Sign that sucker!

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