An apple, a pear, a plum, and a toaster
Victoria A Brownworth has thoughts on Julie Bindel and no-platforming.
The University of Manchester Student Union thinks lesbian feminist writer and activist Julie Bindel is worse than ISIS.
If that sounds extreme, it is. Manchester SU could not come to a conclusion on whether or not ISIS, unarguably the world’s worst terror group, should be sanctioned by MSU, but they were unanimous that Bindel should be.
Take that in for a moment.
I have. I’ve been taking it in since Monday.
As co-founder of the feminist anti-violence group Justice for Women, Bindel has been no-platformed previously for speaking out on a range of gender issues. She is actually best known for her writing and speaking on sex trafficking of women and girls, for which she has also been no-platformed.
Invited to be on the panel with Bindel is Milo Yiannopoulos, an editor at the right-wing news magazine Breitbart. Yiannopoulos is also a men’s rights activist who has written extensively about the “fantasy” of rape culture and as recently as Oct.4 was a counter-demonstrator at a celebrity Slut Walk, carrying a sign comparing rape to the Harry Potter fantasy world of J.K. Rowling.
Yiannopoulos has also written that lesbian domestic violence is far more prevalent than male-female domestic violence and has written many blatantly misogynist, lesbophobic and transphobic columns.
As recently as Sept. 22, Yiannopoulos asserted on Twitter that “Maybe trans has nothing to do with any psychiatric disorder–it’s just second-class citizens (men) who want female privilege.”
Bindel is one of only a handful of speakers under a country-wide ban by the National Union of Students (NUS), a confederation of more than 600 student unions throughout the U.K. Also on the banned list: the terrorist group Al-Muhajiroun, the racist English Defence League, the British National Party, the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, which is dedicated to creating a global caliphate under global Sharia law and…Julie Bindel.
Not comparable. I keep saying that, but it can’t be helped. Not comparable.
“Manchester SU could not come to a conclusion on whether or not ISIS … should be sanctioned by MSU, but they were unanimous that Bindel should be.”
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?
An excellent find! Very interesting – not so much the point about incomparability of Bindel and ISIS (too obvious to be interesting, isn’t it? Well … isn’t it?), as all of the rest. In fact, I don’t remember reading *any* text authored by a feminist writer, containing so strong and categorical indictment of no-platforming. No evasions, no prevarication, no attempts to escape awkward questions:
She writes about students and universities – that’s the context. She says that students shouldn’t be allowed to no-platform just like they are not allowed to go drunk to a class. One step further and she would be more radical than me (I consider myself quite radical on the issue).
In the light of recent developments (the banning of Milo) I find also the following remarks of Brownworth very remarkable. Here is the first one:
But hey, that’s nothing – this is just about righ-wing views in general. However, further we read:
As I said, no evasions, even though:
But she doesn’t say it. In fact, she says exactly the opposite.
Let me add only that after reading this, I’ve got a lot of respect and sympathy for Ms Brownworth.
Oh, my.
I’ve just discovered on the net that Victoria A Brownworth is a “known TERF”. I swear that I didn’t know it earlier – scout’s honour! For this reason, I recant everything.
It really doesn’t matter
that I still consider her post excellent and that it wasn’t about trans issues at allwhat she wrote. She is a TERF. Therefore, I recant.Al-Muhajiroun, and Hizb ut-Tahri(r). but not ISIS?
What does it take to get their attention, or in this case, switch it off?