That unrepentant one has thought deeply and then pronounced. He has expanded on the elegant brevity of ‘How appropriate that a smug, shitty, rightwing publication like “Butterflies and Wheels” shares the name of a sentence in a book that is key to the plot of an idiotic movie like “Shattered”‘; he has explained what is shitty (smug and rightwing we can figure out for ourselves) about B&W.

[A] fountainhead of Islamophobia…There is the usual defense of the Danish Mohammad cartoons, etc. There are attacks on other religions as well…

So maybe ‘Islamophobia’ is a little inaccurate? Never mind.

In addition to religion, the website mounts attacks on multiculturalism…Kenan Malik, a Spiked Online regular, seems to be a designated hitter

Tom Clark points out that ‘an essential disagreement between secularists and their opponents is epistemological, about how we hold and justify our factual beliefs.’

Are they arrived at empirically, by consideration of public evidence potentially available to any observer (so that the evidence is intersubjective, not merely subjective), or are they more a function of religious tradition or faith? Are beliefs held to be fallible and thus corrigible by open inquiry and empirical testing, or are they held to be the infallible and unquestionable deliverances of authority, whether scriptural or institutional?

Yup; that’s an essential disagreement all right. In fact without that disagreement the others kind of drift away like smoke, because they are at least in principle resolvable … Read the rest

Okay this is a joke.

Clerics need to “restore the dignity of women,” Juan Jose Tamayo, director of theology at Madrid’s Juan Carlos III university, told a roundtable on Thursday, July 17…”Women have been forgotten and marginalized in religions,” Tamayo said as reported by the AFP news agency. “They are organized hierarchically and patriarchically, excluding women in all fields of knowledge and religious matters.”

Yes indeed – and Juan José Tamayo is urging the Vatican to reverse its position on women in the church and allow them to become priests and bishops and popes, is he? He’s urging Muslim clerics to do the same? I don’t know, maybe he is, but since this conference was organized by the World … Read the rest

The Egyptian Centre for Women’s Rights did a study on sexual harassment.

Sexual harassment of women in Egypt is on the increase and observing Islamic dress code is no deterrent, according to a survey published this week…ECWR head Nihad Abu El-Qoumsan said that even veiled women who were victims of harassment blamed themselves. Western women who took part in the study demonstrated a strong belief in their entitlement to personal safety and freedom of movement, she says, but this was totally absent among Egyptian respondents. No-one spoke about freedom of choice, freedom of movement or the right to legal protection. No-one showed any awareness that the harasser was a criminal, regardless of what clothes the victim was wearing.

So…’Western’ … Read the rest