Maryam Namazie: Theo van Gogh, a film director and journalist, was assassinated in broad daylight in Amsterdam on November 2. He was repeatedly stabbed and his throat slit. They say his assassin has “radical Islamic fundamentalist convictions”. There is a debate on whether this is the act of an individual or the political Islamic movement. Why have you said it is political Islam?

Azar Majedi: This is not the first time we’ve seen that someone who has criticised Islam has been murdered. Political Islam has been massacring, torturing, executing and beheading people for the exact same thing in the Middle East, in Iran under the Islamic Republic of Iran, Afghanistan, the Sudan, and so on. Even when they are not … Read the rest

‘Islam against Islam’ is an interesting topic. The irony of a believer criticising the beliefs is provocative. I am not a Moslem; I am an atheist. However, I have lived Islam; I have firsthand experience of Islam. I was born within a religious conflict: a religious mother and an atheist father. From childhood, I began to see the flaws, the restrictions, the misogyny, the backwardness, the dogma, the superstition, and uncritical nature of Islam vis-à-vis the enlightenment, the freethinking spirit of atheist thinking.

I became an atheist at the age of 12.

The establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran after a failed revolution laid bare many other appalling and cruel dimensions of Islam, which we later came to label … Read the rest

Physicists Matt Young and Taner Edis are the editors of a new volume whose contributors are working scholars in the sciences touched by the newest expression of “creation science”: Intelligent Design (ID) Theory. Why Intelligent Design Fails is a patient assessment of all the scientific claims made in connection with ID. The half dozen science-enabled spokesmen for ID are the indispensable core group of an international neo-creationist big tent. Goals of the American movement are sweeping: they begin with a highly visible, well-funded, nationwide effort to demean evolutionary science in American school (K-12) curricula. ID is offered as a better alternative. The hoped-for result is the addition of ID to, or even its substitution for, the teaching of evolution. Which … Read the rest

“The Passion held the No. 1 position at the box office for three weeks, then dipped when Dawn of the Dead knocked it out of first position. Now in its seventh week, The Passion beat out last weekend’s No. 1 movie, [the] comic-book action-adventure Hellboy, which dropped 52 percent to $11.1 million . . ” Anne Thompson, New York Times, April 11, 2004.

The German Romantics revolted against the Enlightenment by inventing a poeticized Christianity in literature and art and by incarnating their reinvented religion in a spiritualized poetry, love, and nature. Since their spiritualization of art effected its transformations in an autonomous poetic realm, their political impact was slight. For the same reason, even the deeply … Read the rest

Yesterday Theo van Gogh, a journalist and a filmmaker, was brutally murdered in Amsterdam, Netherlands. He was murdered because he cared and dared to expose the inherent misogynism in and the brutal nature of Islam. An act, which sadly, nowadays calls for great courage, due to advancements of political Islam and the rise in religion’s influence in the society. He was murdered by political Islam, a reactionary movement that resorts to intimidation and terror as its main tools for gaining power and achieving its goals. This is not the first crime committed by this movement as a way to silence the critics of Islam and Islamists, and if we do not stand against it, it will not be the last. … Read the rest

Freud once wrote, “Intolerance of groups is often, strangely enough, exhibited more strongly against small differences than against fundamental ones.” This is certainly true of intellectuals. The problem is that if you look at anything very closely, including ideas and ideals, differences which appear small from the wider perspective suddenly appear very large indeed. And so it should be. It is precisely our ability to examine the objects of intellectual endeavour closely and discern differences invisible to the naked mind’s eye which allows us to deepen and extend our learning in the humanities and the sciences.

However, if we never step back and examine the broader picture, we can become blinded to some important features of intellectual life which should … Read the rest

The embrace of relativism by many leftist intellectuals in the United States, while it may not be politically very important, is a terrible admission of failure, and an excuse for not answering the claims of their political opponents. The subordination of the intellect to partisan loyalty is found across the political spectrum, but usually it takes the form of a blind insistence on the objective truth of certain supporting facts and refusal to consider evidence to the contrary. So what explains the shift, at least by a certain slice of the intellectual left, to this new form of obfuscation?

When I was an undergraduate I volunteered to go door to door for Zero Population Growth to promote the liberalization of … Read the rest

Maryam Namazie: Let’s talk about the horrendous and tragic situation in Beslan. We know that over 1,000 people were held hostage. Over 300 were killed. 150 plus of those so far are children. It is an immense human tragedy. Are there any words that can describe what’s happened there?

Bahram Soroush: It is extremely difficult to come up with the right words to describe this tragedy. It is on a horrendous scale; of an unbelievable magnitude. It is very hard to try to put yourself in the place of those parents who lost their loved ones. I don’t myself remember having witnessed a terrorist action where children were taken hostage on such a scale and used as a bargaining chip. … Read the rest

A ban on conspicuous religious symbols in state schools and state institutions has caused heated debate regarding secularism vs. religious freedoms, giving us the opportunity to reiterate our defence of secularism and women’s and children’s rights. While Islamists and their supporters have proclaimed that banning religious symbols in schools and state institutions is a ‘restriction of’ ‘religious freedoms’ or ‘freedom of belief’, ‘religious intolerance’, ‘a violation of women’s and girls’ rights’, ‘racist’, ‘discriminatory’, and so on, we believe the truth is simple and quite contrary to what they claim. In brief:

The ban is pro-secularism not a restriction of religious freedoms and beliefs: A ban on conspicuous religious symbols in state schools and institutions is but one step toward secularism … Read the rest

The situation of the present state of psychoanalysis and of the current reputation of Sigmund Freud is well documented and cogently (and patiently!) presented in Professor Crews’s “Reply to Holland.”(1) In my view, and in the opinion of several other Freud scholars, the continuing ability of Freudian rhetoric to deceive is even more dangerous and difficult to resolve than Crews allows.

And, alas, the kind of staged public jousting whereby Fred Crews will accept the publication for the Spring/Summer issue of The Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine (vol. 9, no. 1) of “a commentary on both submissions [that of Holland and the reply of Crews] by the psychiatrist Peter Barglow” seems to be `loaded’ from the start.

Barglow is a … Read the rest

16 year old Ateqeh Rajabi was publicly hanged in the city centre in Neka in the northern Iranian province of Mazandaran on 15 August for ‘acts incompatible with chastity’ after having been arrested a few months earlier for having sexual relations. She had no attorney at any stage of the farce.

During the ‘trial’, she expressed her outrage at the misogyny and injustice in society and ‘judicial’ system and even removed some of her clothing. The lower court ‘judge’ was so incensed by her protestations that he personally put the noose around her neck after his decision had been upheld by the ‘Supreme Court’.

In some reports on her execution, Ateqah has been labelled ‘mentally incompetent’.

I suppose it could … Read the rest

Introduction

Any field dealing with “origins” – archaeology, historical linguistics, general history – has seen its share of nonsense, usually painting a glorious past for whatever ethnicity or social group is involved. Thus a hypothesis popular with (certain) feminists and neo-pagans has an egalitarian, matriarchal, peaceful paradise all throughout the neolithic – until patriarchal, warlike, horse-riding nomads destroyed it all (with the exception of what survives underground in today’s Wiccan movement, of course). Another example may be “Afrocentric” pseudohistory, which ascribes incredible technological advancement to ancient Egyptian society, which happened also to be the cradle of ancient Greek philosophy and culture. In these two examples, pseudohistory serves a clear political goal, which could be regarded as progressive – the emancipation … Read the rest

The opposition to transgenic crops by environmental organizations is beyond rational explanation, since the introduction of transgenic crops has led to significant reductions in pesticide use in the U.S., as well as in other countries such as China in which transgenic crops are grown. Herbicide tolerant crops have allowed for the expansion of conservation tillage, which conserves soil, water, and biodiversity, and saves fuel along with reducing pesticide use (Fernandez-Cornejo and McBride, 2004, 27). In addition to the absolute reduction, the “substitution caused by the use of herbicide-tolerant soybeans results in glyphosate replacing other synthetic herbicides that are at least three times as toxic and that persist in the environment nearly twice as long” (Fernandez- Cornejo and McBride, 2004, 28, … Read the rest

As someone who felt sufficiently opposed to the 2003 invasion of Iraq to join the protest marches and to attend Stop the War Coalition meetings, it is a source of great sadness to me what a shrivelled, irrelevant self-parody the British anti-war movement has become. It seems hard to believe it now, but for a couple of months in early 2003, the Stop the War Coalition seemed to be the vehicle for something huge. Schoolchildren were walking out of their classes in protest; between 750,000 and 2 million people (depending on whose estimates you believe) swarmed through the streets of London on February 15th; ordinary, middle-of the-road people – the kind you don’t normally see on a protest march – … Read the rest

International TV Interview with Fariborz Pooya and Bahram Soroush

Maryam Namazie: We received an email from an irate ‘concerned happy Muslim Iranian’ critical of your [Bahram Soroush] statements on the incompatibility of Islam and human rights. He said, ‘it is obvious that you hate your own culture and religion and have a vendetta against anything Iranian and anything Islamic’. He made a suggestion: ‘if you hate our culture and our religion, then I suggest that you go and change your faith and tell people that you have no country and leave us alone’! Now this is something you hear a lot from cultural relativists; that it’s ‘our culture’ and ‘our religion’. Can you expand on that?

Bahram Soroush: They are … Read the rest

Is psychoanalysis a science? The Spring/Summer 2005 issue of The Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine (vol. 9, no. 1) will contain a debate on the scientific merits of psychoanalysis. The exchange will include a 2000-word summary by the literary critic Norman N. Holland of his essay “Psychoanalysis as Science”; a 1000-word critique by Frederick Crews; a reply from Holland to that critique; and a commentary on both submissions by the psychiatrist Peter Barglow. Holland’s full essay can already be found on the Web here. In anticipation of the SRAM publication, concerned readers may be interested in an early view both of Holland’s summary version and of Crews’s response to the longer piece. The editor of SRAM has granted permission … Read the rest

Abstract

Current objections to psychoanalysis as untestable and unscientific ignore two facts. First, a large body of experimental evidence has tested psychoanlaytic ideas, confirming some and not others. Second, psychoanalysis itself, while it does not usually use experimentation, does use holistic method. This is a procedure in wide use in the social sciences and even in the “hard” sciences.

Psychoanalysis as Science

My essay, “Psychoanalysis as Science” [1] makes two points. One, although ignored in the “Freud wars,” experimenters have in fact generated much empirical evidence for the validity of at least some of psychoanalysis’ theory of mind. The oft-repeated mantra, “There is not a shred of scientific evidence for psychoanalysis,” is simply false. Two, part of the devaluing of … Read the rest

Islamic Sharia law should be opposed by everyone who believes in universal human rights, women’s civil rights and individual freedom, freedom of expression, freedom of religion and belief and freedom from religion. Islamic law developed in the first few centuries of Islam and incorporated Middle Eastern pre – Islamic misogynist and tribal customs and traditions. Shari’a developed not only from the Koran and the Sunna but also through juristic reasoning and interpretation and hence different sects. We may ask how a law whose elements were first laid down over a 1000 years ago can be relevant in the 21st century. The Sharia only reflects the social and economic conditions of the time of Abbasid and has grown out of touch … Read the rest

In my speech, I will argue against the Islamic tribunals and will discuss how the Islamic Sharia law brutally violates human and women’s rights. I will try to demonstrate how Islamism and multi – culturalism are a united camp against universal human rights in Canada. At the end, I will emphasise the urgency of stopping the Islamic tribunals in Canada.

As we all know, Islamists in Canada have recently set up an Islamic Institute of Civil Justice to oversee tribunals that would arbitrate family disputes and other civil matters between people from Muslim origin on the basis of the Islamic Sharia law. This is the first time in any western country that the medieval precepts of the Sharia have been … Read the rest

Recent events in both France and England have again focused attention on the wearing of the veil, headscarf or hijab by women from Muslim communities. Is this, as Islamists claim, an issue of religious freedom? Or is it rather, as many women of Muslim origin would argue, about oppression?

The French government, who recently banned the wearing of headscarves in schools and public institutions are in no doubt. Nor was the judge in Luton, England, who decided that requiring a Muslim girl to wear a standard school uniform – and no veil – was not an infringement of her religious rights.

Suddenly the veil has become a major issue. Veiling the heads and bodies of little girls and adolescents has … Read the rest