So many of my friends shared this piece by Jemima Lewis in the Telegraph. (Yes, the Telegraph. Why do you think I mentioned the many friends?)

A primary school in Hartfield, East Sussex, held a “transgender day” recently, to encourage the tots to explore issues of gender-fluidity.

But was it to encourage them to explore? Or to teach them the formulas they’re expected to repeat. The current version of transgender dogma doesn’t welcome exploration, as Lewis points out.

I want my children to be open-minded about gender and sexuality. I want them to have the run of the dressing up box, from Cinderella to Spiderman, for as long as they feel drawn to sparkly nylon. I want the boys to feel able to cry, and their sister to punch them in the head. As far as is possible in a world full of stereotypes, I want them to steer clear of pigeonholes. And right now, gender politics seems to me nothing but floor-to-ceiling pigeonholes.

You can be agender, bi-gender, cisgender, demigender, graygender, intergender, genderless, genderqueer or third gender – but by God, you will accept a label. Go gingerly when applying it in public, though, especially if you are unpractised and over-40: this new language is as orthodox and closely-policed as any medieval catechism.

That doesn’t put it strongly enough. All those labels are for people under-40 (or better yet under-30 or can we say under-25?) who are the first people ever to have realized that men can like skirts and women can like driving fast. Except of course that they’re not, but they think they are, so their views on the subject are not as enlightened or enlightening as they think they are.

The rules of gender-fluidity have been laid down incredibly fast, and have already calcified into a set of unchallengeable truths. You are how you feel. Gender identity is a self-realisable truth. I have no doubt that there are some children – a tiny minority – who suffer from gender dysmorphia right from the off, and will never feel comfortable in the body they were born into. But most children, left to their own devices, can change identities a hundred times a day and move up and down the gender spectrum without ever requiring a change of label.

Trans activists, like old-school misogynists, are forever patrolling the perimeters of male and female behaviour, making sure we all adhere to some kind of type.

And how funny that is, because it’s exactly what feminism was meant to free us all from.

By “funny” of course I mean tragic and disgusting.

The “industry” that like to gamble with other people’s money and make us pay for it when the gamble doesn’t go their way – that industry doesn’t like Elizabeth Warren because she thinks it should be sensibly regulated in order to avoid global financial meltdown like the one in 2008. Since this highly useful and public spirited industry doesn’t like Warren, Republicans also don’t like Warren.

A Republican congressman on the House Committee on Financial Services thinks Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), one of the most vocal advocates for Wall Street reform, needs to be “neutered.”

Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-Mo.) made the comments during a panel discussion at an American Bankers Association conference Wednesday. According to Politico, Luetkemeyer said people needed to “find a way to neuter” Warren, whom he called the “Darth Vader of the financial services world.”

And the financial services world, of course, is pure Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker, right? Pocketing huge profits while taxpayers pick up the pieces at the same time as they lose all their savings.

Nita Chaudhary, co-founder of UltraViolet, an advocacy group working to expand women’s rights, said the comments showed how GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump’s rhetoric had seeped into political discourse.

“Luetkemeyer should immediately apologize to Senator Warren for his offensive language,” she said. “There is plenty of room for disagreement in Washington, but resorting to sexist name-calling should have no place in our political discourse.”

Oh come on, where would we be without sexist name-calling? The sluts and bitches would run everything, am I right?

My internet connection will be fixed Monday (it’s an actual physical problem with the physical infrastructure, not my technical incompetence), so posting will probably still be light until then.

Meanwhile here’s something to read by the excellent Sarah Ditum.

Boys grow up by getting bigger, stronger, louder. The things that a male child is encouraged to be good at are, by and large, things esteemed in the male adolescent too. But for girls, adolescence is a time of loss. Becoming a woman means giving things up, explains Deborah Cameron in The Myth of Mars and Venus, and taking up new and feminine occupations: “In particular, [girls] abandon physical play: instead of using their bodies to do things, they start to focus on adorning them.” Somewhere in the passage between being a child and becoming a grown-up, girls learn that our bodies are not ourselves, but a portable property that we must cultivate, display, and trade for the best bargain we can make.

I stopped climbing trees. I learned to shave my legs. The grazes on my knees faded. The scabs on my shins bloomed where my clumsy razor peeled away ribbons of skin. I was embarrassed to sweat. There were no lunchtime games of netball for girls at my school – just the option to walk circuits of the field, talking, looking, always wary of a rogue shot from the boys’ football game. I decided I was not a physical person. It would be undignified to run – and so began a long career of dodging PE, which got even easier once I was at secondary school and could claim period pains. I was not a physical person, I was just rendered physically incapable of taking part by my female physiology.

I occasionally try to remember when I stopped climbing trees. I was stopped by age almost-fifteen because we moved back to town and the place we moved to had no big climbable trees. It’s possible that I was still climbing them until that move; I can’t remember. I hope so.

Guest post by Lady Mondegreen.

If you want evidence of the contempt of Conservative punditry for the working-class whites who vote for them, look no further than the National Review:

Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America…

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.”

The Right needs little excuse to lecture poor people on how it’s all their own fault, but I’m pretty sure that David French and Kevin Williamson are going on about “Personal responsibility” here in order to disavow any personal moral responsibility on the part of movement Conservatism for the rise of Citizen Trump.

Where I apparently agree with Kevin Williamson (the original piece is behind a paywall, so I’m going by this “defense,”) is, we both think Trump’s supporters have a sense of aggrieved entitlement.

We disagree about the nature and causes of that imagined entitlement. Williamson seems to think the poor whites attracted to Trump are morally dysfunctional (and uppity re their betters at National Review) because that damned Welfare State has conditioned them to expect that the government won’t let them and their children starve. I think that they’re morally culpable for buying into the racism and xenophobia that the Right has been exploiting for decades, that lets them blame their economic problems on black and brown people, and foreigners.

But those economic problems are real. They cannot be handwaved aside with that handy conservative mantra “Personal Responsibility.”

Strangely enough, the full text of Ordinary Men is available online, in more than one place. Here’s one. I wonder if it’s some sort of public interest thing.

Here’s a bit from where it started getting really hard to continue (but it all was, and it’s cumulative):

When the first truckload of thirty-five to forty Jews arrived, an 
equal number of policemen came forward and, face to face, were 
paired off with their victims. Led by Kammer, the policemen 
and Jews marched down the forest path. They turned off into the 
woods at a point indicated by Captain Wohlauf, who busied 
himself throughout the day selecting the execution sites. Kam- 
mer then ordered the Jews to lie down in a row. The policemen 
stepped up behind them, placed their bayonets on the backbone 
above the shoulder blades as earlier instructed, and on Kam- 
mer 's orders fired in unison. 

In the meantime more policemen of First Company had 
arrived at the edge of the forest to fill out a second firing squad. 
As the first firing squad marched out of the woods to the 
unloading point, the second group took their victims along the 
same path into the woods. Wohlauf chose a site a few yards 
farther on so that the next batch of victims would not see the 
corpses from the earlier execution. These Jews were again forced 
to lie face down in a row, and the shooting procedure was 
repeated. 

Thereafter, the "pendulum traffic" of the two firing squads in 
and out of the woods continued throughout the day. Except for 
a midday break, the shooting proceeded without interruption 
until nightfall. At some point in the afternoon, someone "orga- 
nized" a supply of alcohol for the shooters. By the end of a day 
of nearly continuous shooting, the men had completely lost track 
of how many Jews they had each killed. In the words of one 
policeman, it was in any case "a great number." 32 

When Trapp first made his offer early in the morning, the real 
nature of the action had just been announced and time to think 
and react had been very short. Only a dozen men had instinc- 
tively seized the moment to step out, turn in their rifles, and 
thus excuse themselves from the subsequent killing. For many 
the reality of what they were about to do, and particularly that 
they themselves might be chosen for the firing squad, had

probably not sunk in. But when the men of First Company were 
summoned to the marketplace, instructed in giving a "neck 
shot," and sent to the woods to kill Jews, some of them tried to 
make up for the opportunity they had missed earlier. One 
policeman approached First Sergeant Kammer, whom he knew 
well. He confessed that the task was "repugnant" to him and 
asked for a different assignment. Kammer obliged, assigning him 
to guard duty on the edge of the forest, where he remained 
throughout the day. 33 Several other policemen who knew Kam- 
mer well were given guard duty along the truck route. 34 After 
shooting for some time, another group of policemen approached 
Kammer and said they could not continue. He released them 
from the firing squad and reassigned them to accompany the 
trucks. 35 Two policemen made the mistake of approaching 
Captain (and SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer) Wohlauf instead of Kam- 
mer, They pleaded that they too were fathers with children and 
could not continue. Wohlauf curtly refused them, indicating that 
they could lie down alongside the victims. At the midday pause, 
however, Kammer relieved not only these two men but a 
number of other older men as well. They were sent back to the 
marketplace, accompanied by a noncommissioned officer who 
reported to Trapp. Trapp dismissed them from further duty and 
permitted them to return early to the barracks in Biigoraj. 36 

Some policemen who did not request to be released from the 
firing squads sought other ways to evade. Noncommissioned 
officers armed with submachine guns had to be assigned to give 
so-called mercy shots "because both from excitement as well as 
intentionally [italics mine]" individual policemen "shot past" 
their victims. 37 Others had taken evasive action earlier. During 
the clearing operation some men of First Company hid in the 
Catholic priest's garden until they grew afraid that their absence 
would be noticed. Returning to the marketplace, they jumped 
aboard a truck that was going to pick up Jews from a nearby 
village, in order to have an excuse for their absence. 38 Others 
hung around the marketplace because they did not want to 
round up Jews during the search. 39 Still others spent as much 

time as possible searching the houses so as not to be present at 
the marketplace, where they feared being assigned to a firing 
squad. 40 A driver assigned to take Jews to the forest made only 
one trip before he asked to be relieved. "Presumably his nerves 
were not strong enough to drive more Jews to the shooting site," 
commented the man who took over his truck and his duties of 
chauffeuring Jews to their death. 41 

After the men of First Company departed for the woods, 
Second Company was left to complete the roundup and load 
Jews onto the trucks. When the first salvo was heard from the 
woods, a terrible cry swept the marketplace as the collected Jews 
realized their fate. 42 Thereafter, however, a quiet composure — 
indeed, in the words of German witnesses, an "unbelievable" 
and "astonishing" composure — settled over the Jews. 43 

 

But then it gets much worse.

The thing is…it’s so horrifyingly easy to get people to kill other people. We know that; we see it every day; but it’s still horrifying.

I’ve been reading Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors, and as an offshoot from that this morning I read some of chapter 7 of Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men. I would have read more but I had to stop because I couldn’t take it. I’d forgotten how horrible it is reading it.

It’s about a police battalion, made up of middle-aged men because all the younger men were in the military, who were assigned to kill all the Jews except the able-bodied men (who were sent to a work camp) in a Polish village by walking them into the woods, making them lie down, and shooting them.

It’s horrific, and at the same time it’s instructive. I plan to continue once I get my strength back.

Metro UK on yet another incident of gender segregation connected with a university:

An Islamic society at a top university has come under fire after segregating men and women at a gala dinner by using a large screen running through the middle of the group.

The Muslim society at the London School of Economics sat guests on either male-only or female-only tables at the dinner on Sunday night with a 7ft screen between the two groups.

In case the women all got pregnant from seeing the men.

They also had to use different phone lines to order tickets. Because…what? I have no idea. It can’t be something Mo said, since there were no damn phones then.

he sold out event, organised by the society which claims to have hundreds of members, was held at Grand Connaught Rooms, in Holborn.

It was greeted with a mixed reaction with some Muslims saying they felt ‘intimidated’, while the head of LSE’s student union, who attended the meal, telling the MailOnline she ‘had no problem’.

Nona Buckley-Irvine, the head of LSE’s SU,  said the atmosphere was ‘comfortable and relaxed’.

Not very thoughtful then, is she. She should have a problem. I hope she would have a problem if Muslims were segregated from everyone else.

‘I had a lovely time at the dinner and barely noticed the separation between men and women,’ she told MailOnline.

No doubt the patrons at whites-only lunch counters said the same thing 50-odd years ago. It’s easy to barely notice bad things done to other people.

She added: ‘Where groups would like to organise themselves in a way that fits with their religious, cultural and personal beliefs, both genders consent, and there is no issue I have no problem.

‘It is not for me to decide what is right or wrong with our Islamic society and they are one of the most inclusive societies I have ever worked with.’

Sigh. Yes it is. I know it’s awkward, but yes it is.

Pictures posted online by the society after the event only showed the men’s side with one guest taking a light hearted approach to the segregation.

Ew!!! Her face is actually blurred out! That’s what they do in Saudi Arabia! London is not in Saudi Arabia. Fucking hell.

Halima at Tales of Courage is disgusted.

The latest entry into the tragic chronology of gender segregation at British universities is the unsettling incident at London School of Economics (LSE). The LSESU Islamic Society decided to hold a segregated event (with cleverly personalised invites to “brothers” and “sisters”) for their members and unsurprisingly some LSESU officers happily joined in this sordid affair. The General Secretary of the LSESU Nona Buckley-Irvine was very pleased about the event and declared that as a feminist she saw no problem with this gender segregation. I mean, I guess if brown Muslim women want to have their rights reduced, why should she care? As a privileged white feminist she clearly has no concern in this matter – for her it was a simply colourful cultural exchange where cute Muslims sit separately in case some lustful event takes place between the opposite genders. Inequality against brown women is not a concern.

Inequality tourism without even leaving London; how exotic.

She was an Islamist herself when she was a teenager.

When I was a young impressionable 15 year old, my exposure to the world of universities was through my HT sister who took me to ISOC & HT events held at university lecture halls. Obviously they were gender segregated as well. Mostly the “sisters” would sit at the back, and if you’re lucky, on the left side. I found it odd, but also I thought something like “oh wow look they are accommodating us and my, my, one day the glorious Khilafah will be here and we can be like this everywhere!” It was fascinating for me to see the marriage of young aspirational Muslim students being all political and engaging on this platform in an “Islamic” way. But I also remember it made me feel uncomfortable in that why was being a woman so lustful? I felt ashamed of my body and thought this was God’s way of reminding me of my potential fitnah.

And that’s one compelling reason the whole idea is so hideously wrong.

At home I was intent on making this go as Islamically as possible too. Never mind it was undermining my rights – but hey we do what God askes of us slaves. At my sister’s wedding that year I created a big fuss at home over gender segregation at her wedding. My sister and I went to lengths to hire a hall which would accommodate our gender segregation aims. On the wedding day we managed to upset most of our uncles (with whom we had grown up with and known since childhood) because we didn’t let them enter into the “sisters” area to see the bride. Our uncles (non-mahram kind) were cultural Muslims and found our new fundamentalism astonishing and disrespectful. They were so upset they decided to boycott the wedding!

Well done them! But she just thought they were rude, at the time.

Now though? She’s fought free.

Thankfully I grew up and wanted full equality as a woman. Today, I stand firmly against gender segregation because it is discriminatory. While I once participated in it and enforced it, my personal journey has led me to now reject it. I was a child when I did such things. When I left Islam, this was one of the associated beliefs that I also happily let go of. The UCL debate between Laurence Krauss and Hamza Tzortzis was the first time since I left Islam that I gone to a debate at a university and I was faced with enforced gender segregated seating. That day my feelings were so mixed. Here I was 12 years later and I didn’t want to sit in the “sisters” area. I didn’t want to be discriminated against for being a female. I wanted to sit with my partner and friends. The events of that day will be etched in my mind forever. I remember I wanted to get up and move to the men’s area, in Rosa Park’s style, but I felt crippled and afraid. I was afraid of the stigma attached to this act. At that point it was so vividly clear to me that all those years ago when I went to HT talks at universities perhaps there were woman there like me today, who didn’t want to be discriminated but felt ashamed to speak up against it on the day.

Times have now changed and I will speak up. I will speak up against it at home, in public and most definitely to the non-Muslim women and men at British universities who make it their business to support gender segregation. To them I say: You are not part of this community, you have no understanding, so please mind your business. Either help us reform our communities and spaces or refrain from making it worse. It is not islamophobic to criticise human rights violations promoted by the Islamist ideology. It is not an attack on Muslims. You either help us or quit being part of the problem.

Help or get out of the road.

So who is Merrick Garland?

Let’s consult the Beltway establishment first, which is to say the Washington Post:

President Obama on Wednesday nominated Merrick Garland to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, calculating that choosing the highly regarded jurist who has served presidents from both parties will ultimately force Senate Republicans to drop plans to block his nomination.

Garland, the 63-year-old chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and a moderate, does not fit neatly into a category that is likely to mobilize Democratic voters in an election year. He is the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia, not a “first” in the way an Asian American or black female nominee would have been.

Not firsty, but not WASPy either. Then again this looking for First boxes to tick, in the form of various Identity Categories, is more than a little creepy…even though at the same time I’m always hoping for more of exactly that – more women, and if they’re also brown or otherwise outside the usual pattern, all the better. You know how that is? Thinking it would be a good thing while also thinking it’s tacky the way we keep noticing, and listing, and categorizing? Anyway…Jewish immigrants from Russia probably didn’t get here with a drawer-full of silver spoons jutting out of their mouths.

Anyway he’s collected compliments from all directions, and that will make it harder (but doubtless far from impossible) for Team Republican Assholes to refuse to confirm the nomination. The Post sagely suggests that Obama did this on purpose. Ya think?

And while Obama was composed, and even a bit defiant in his remarks, it was Garland’s visible emotion that seemed to raise the stakes for Republicans in what will surely be a protracted political fight his final year in office. The former federal prosecutor choked up as he thanked the president for giving him “greatest honor of my life,” aside from when his wife of nearly three decades agreed to marry him, and kvelled about how his mother was watching him that very moment on television, “crying her eyes out.” His father, he added with regret, was not alive to witness it.

Was she verklempt?

After the announcement, Senate Republican leaders reiterated that they did not intend to vote on the nomination because they believe the next president has the right to fill the vacancy left by Justice Antonin Scalia’s death last month.

That’s so schewpid. There is no such “right.” I think I have the right to shout “fire!” and get everyone to leave this library while I sit here in peace. Except that I don’t think that.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), taking the Senate floor after the nomination was announced, vowed to continue blocking its consideration.

“It seems clear that President Obama made this nomination, not with the intent of seeing the nominee confirmed, but in order to politicize it for purposes of the election,” he said. “The American people are perfectly capable of having their say — their say — on this issue. So let’s give them a voice.”

Wtf? What sense does that make? How does that seem clear at all? It seems very occluded to me. And the American people already had their say, when they re-elected Obama in 2012. He’s still serving that term. There is no rule that says he can’t nominate a candidate now, and it is considered a bad idea to leave a Supreme Court vacancy open for a pointlessly long time.

Then the article goes on with a lot of inside-baseball political stuff. Horserace stuff. Yawn.

Originally a comment by Freemage on Reporter arrested at Trump rally for filming while brown.

Ariel

March 14, 2016 at 1:53 pm

I’m watching this from far away, although, I must say, I’m more and more interested in the upcoming American election.

Recently I’ve gone so far as to read an article in our press titled “The most complicated electoral system in the world”, explaining the details of the American voting system. The experience was traumatic. I’m still shaking. And it is all *your fault*!

Anyway, I’m not particularly surprised that the police got nervous intervening during clashes in which some police officers were hurt. Yeah, I know – attacks against the journalists are always newsworthy, but still. When shit happens, people become nervous and the journalists – or, in general, those at the frontline – are particularly vulnerable. Do you think that the journalists became a special, selected target? If so, this would be a real worry indeed (justifying to some degree the accusations of fascism). But is it the case?

Well, this may be a case of chocolate and peanut butter–two great tastes of fascism, blending into a new and utterly terrifying whole.

You see, the Chicago PD have a long history of violence against PoCs, and they’ve resisted any effort at making them accountable. In particular, for years they used the state’s wiretapping law to justify prosecuting citizens who dared to record them while they were on the job. That finally got shut down by the state Supreme Court–and even then, prosecutions continued for several months while the cops feigned ignorance.

I also point you to the Laquan McDonald case, one of the many ugly incidents that has been behind the Black Lives Matter movement. A cop pretty much outright murdered a teen in front of five other officers, and the various institutions involved pretty much sat on the case in order to ensure it wouldn’t interfere with Emanuel’s re-election campaign.

So, the cops here are primed for just this sort of fascist thuggery.

I’ll note, too, that the official law enforcement folks have been involved in other instances at Trump rallies–in one, it was the Secret Service that pummeled a protestor; in another, the local sheriff’s officers decided to tackle the protester who got sucker-punched. I’m not suggesting active collusion, here–just the convergence of natural allies.

Sorry about lack of activity here, I’m having dire connection problems and may be some time.

But fortunately I live only 3 blocks from a library, so I can connect here except for Fridays. Then the question becomes how long I can bear to stay, what with diseased people coughing wetly one day and the next day twitchy teenagers thrashing and squirming opposite me while staring maniacally in my direction and writing with a pencil held by all the fingers, which is the oddest and clumsiest way of holding a pencil I’ve ever seen. At the moment however it’s very tranquil, with reasonable people sitting quietly typing or reading. So I should be able to accomplish as much as one post. Maybe even two.

At Fitnah, Maryam talks to Marieme Helie Lucas about gender segregation:

Maryam Namazie: Universities UK’s guidance first said (though it has now been withdrawn as a result of pressure) if women are not made to sit at the back of the room but are segregated alongside men, since none are disadvantaged, then there is no discrimination. Your views?

Marieme Helie Lucas: Whether at the back or on the side, the old argument is always that this is done to protect women – for their own good, of course, and by doing so to restrict their freedom of movement. By the same logic, some twenty years ago, Bangladesh suddenly restricted women from leaving the country as there was a lot of trafficking of women in the region. What appeared to be their solution was NOT to arrest pimps-protectors, but to prevent women from travelling without a wali (a male guardian from their family). Please note that Bangladesh does not even abide by the Maliki School, in which the institution of wali is legal.

What is discriminatory is to assign a place to somebody, whatever that place may be. It says: keep to your place; to women’s place!

In other words it enforces the gender binary…and in a world where that has always meant men dominant and women subordinate, men great and women not up to much, it’s pretty much impossible to enforce the gender binary without enforcing male dominance and female subordination.

Maryam Namazie: Separating men and women isn’t necessarily discriminatory and can reflect personal preferences, such as women-only gyms on women-only refuges.

Uh oh. That could get her in trouble.

The head of Universities UK which issued the guidance endorsing segregation of the sexes says: “It is possible for women to choose to be educated in an all-women environment. It’s not something which is so alien to our culture that it has to be regarded like race segregation, which is totally different and it’s unlawful and there’s no doubt about that whatsoever.” Are racial and gender segregation incomparable? Why is it that everyone can see the distinction between a black university and racial apartheid but when it comes to gender, it’s not as obvious?

Marieme Helie Lucas: This is a very crucial question that I have debated a lot, including more than twenty years ago with feminist friends in the USA. While sex segregation was rapidly expanding in Algeria under the heavy weight of the first fundamentalist preachers and religious groups, I was trying to warn them about the potential backlash of their gender segregation policy in the name of feminism.

Many of our feminist weapons have been turned against us along the years… and I have come to this very sad conclusion that we were not smart enough to think, as thinkers and philosophers should, about all the facets of the concepts we were grappling with. Just think of our feminist praise for diversity, whilst all along we knew that difference was used to legitimise the racist South African apartheid regime, or the segregationist states of the USA. This concept is now used to legitimise the imposition of differences on women that make them unequal in the name of religion, ethnicity or culture.

It’s a very difficult question. I’m not sure there is a problem-free answer – I think there are problems either way.

On the other hand it’s not terribly difficult to argue that the motivations of Islamists are different from the motivations of feminists.

Then they talk about cultural relativism, and Helie Lucas says:

There is a relativist culture of non commitment and neutrality that has been expanding – certainly in the West, under the influence of liberalism, of human rights organisations and of political correctness and the fear of appearing racist. Accordingly, everything is equal; everything has to be respected on par – the right of the capitalist and the right of the worker, the right of the one who holds the gun and the right of the one who runs for his life away from the gun… It is high time to admit that there are conflicting rights, antagonistic rights.

It seems to me that progressive people have forgotten the virtues of being partisan. I want to stand for the right of the worker, not that of the capitalist, for the right of the man who runs for his life, not for the right of the man who holds the gun, and for the right of women to live their lives without interference from extreme-Right religious people.

Maryam talks about the trick of portraying oppressive practices like gender segregation as a matter of “rights” and Helie Lucas tells a couple of stories along the same lines:

At the beginning of the 70’s in Algiers I had two similar experiences:

I was in a queue waiting to vote when the man before me handed eleven (11, you read well) ID cards for all the women in his family whom he was voting for to the voting booth authority. I objected that this was illegal; the staff at the voting booth, the very person who was supposed to guarantee the respect of law accused me of being against the right of women to vote. These women, he said, could not get out of the house, hence their only way of voting was by giving their IDs to the male in the family. And who was I, a woman, objecting to women’s rights as citizens; how dared I?

Also in the early seventies, when for the first time a non-indigenous form of veiling appeared in the streets of Algiers, in fact an early Iranian style of chador that women in Turkey still wear, a sort of long rain coat on trousers, with a tight head scarf, it was labelled ‘the students’ dress’. Most female students in Algiers, especially during the first decade after independence, usually wore western clothes and did not cover their heads. It was clearly an offensive from Muslim fundamentalist groups; they were doing a lot of social work and, together with other goods, would distribute to poor families the so-called students’ dress, in fact the early model of  what was to become ‘the Islamic dress’. Orhan Pamuk described the same thing in Turkey, saying that it was virtually impossible to refuse this ‘gift’ while accepting all the others indispensable ones.

When I raised the issue of veiling young women, I was told that I was preventing women access to universities; that I was denying women the right to study! Without this outfit, fundamentalists said, fathers would not allow girls to go to university (a blatant lie, as Algerian fathers after independence were most willing to send all their children to university, boys and girls alike; schooling was entirely free and lunch was provided), hence I was depriving girls of their right to education by questioning their alien outfit…

We get that here too – all the religious fundamentalists insisting on their “rights” and their “freedom” to harm other people because Mr God said they could.

Huffington Post reports:

CBS News reporter Sopan Deb was arrested Friday night while covering protests surrounding Donald Trump’s canceled rally in Chicago.

Deb, who has covered the Republican presidential front-runner‘s candidacy since last summer, was filming video of a man whose face was bloody and lying on the ground near police at the time of his arrest, according to a “CBS This Morning” report Saturday.

“Deb continued to roll as police kept watch,” the CBS report noted. “Without warning, Deb was grabbed from behind and thrown to the ground.”

A police officer placed his boot on Deb’s neck to keep him in place on the ground, according to the account he provided his network.

Illinois State Police charged Deb with resisting arrest though the network reported that neither his video, nor that of a nearby film crew, showed any sign of resistance. The reporter can also be seen on video identifying himself as a credentialed member of the media.

Remember when Trump was just a blowhard real estate developer? Now we get a living breathing fascist, scaring the fuck out of everyone and working up the crowds.

Last month, a Secret Service agent choke-slammed Time magazine photographer Chris Morris after he left the pen to cover a Black Lives Matter protest.

On Friday, Breitbart News reporter Michelle Fields filed a police report related to Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski allegedly assaulting her after the candidate’s Tuesday night press conference.

Oh well, it’s only the free press.

IS is nostalgic for the way women were treated like shit in the prophet’s day.

Locked inside a room where the only furniture was a bed, the 16-year-old learned to fear the sunset, because nightfall started the countdown to her next rape.

During the year she was held by the Islamic State, she spent her days dreading the smell of the ISIS fighter’s breath, the disgusting sounds he made and the pain he inflicted on her body. More than anything, she was tormented by the thought she might become pregnant with her rapist’s child.

But no problem, because he made her take birth control pills. When she was sold to another man, the pills went with her.

According to an obscure ruling in Islamic law cited by the Islamic State, a man must ensure that the woman he enslaves is free of child before having intercourse with her.

Strain at a gnat and swallow a camel, eh? Enslaving women for the purpose of raping them is just fine, and Mo and his boss Mr The God are both totally down with it, in fact they kind of think men who don’t enslave women are losers. But it’s terribly important that she not be pregnant when he rapes her.

In its official publications, the Islamic State has stated that it is legal for a man to rape the women he enslaves under just about any circumstance. Even sex with a child is permissible, according to a pamphlet published by the group. The injunction against raping a pregnant slave is functionally the only protection for the captured women.

The Islamic State cites centuries-old rulings stating that the owner of a female slave can have sex with her only after she has undergone istibra’— “the process of ensuring that the womb is empty,” according to the Princeton University professor Bernard Haykel, one of several experts on Islamic law consulted on the topic. The purpose of this is to guarantee there is no confusion over a child’s paternity.

So you’d think they’d stop with the pills after a month, so as to have a shot at creating more soldiers for Mr The God, but apparently this is one of those belts and suspenders things.

J., an 18-year-old, said she had been sold to the Islamic State’s governor of Tal Afar, a city in northern Iraq. “Each month, he made me get a shot. It was his assistant who took me to the hospital,” said J., who was interviewed alongside her mother, after escaping this year.

“On top of that he also gave me birth control pills. He told me, ‘We don’t want you to get pregnant,’” she said.

When she was sold to a more junior fighter in the Syrian city of Tal Barak, it was the man’s mother who escorted her to the hospital.

“She told me, ‘If you are pregnant, we are going to send you back,’” J. said. “They took me into the lab. There were machines that looked like centrifuges and other contraptions. They drew three vials of my blood. About 30 or 40 minutes later, they came back to say I wasn’t pregnant.”

The fighter’s mother triumphantly told her son that the 18-year-old was not pregnant, validating his right to rape her, which he did repeatedly.

What a pretty story. “Here, Sonny darling, she’s yours to rape. Enjoy!”

H/t Helene

Shaheen Hashmat won a True Honour award from IKWRO, the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation, last week.

LONDON, March 11 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – At 12 years old, Shaheen Hashmat left her family home in Scotland to escape the threat of forced marriage to a stranger in Pakistan. At 13, she attempted suicide.

Hashmat, who now campaigns against forced marriage and “honour based” violence, says Britain urgently needs better mental health services for girls and women escaping these situations.

“There needs to be far more training about the increased risk of suicide and the impact of family estrangement,” said Hashmat, who won the True Honour 2016 award on Thursday for her bravery in standing up to honour abuse.

She talks about it in this stunning video from Deeyah Khan’s Fuuse. Be prepared to be shaken like a rag doll when you watch it.

Hashmat, now 33, grew up in a strict Pakistani family in which every aspect of her life was policed from the TV she watched to the people she spoke to and even the way she sat.

She was beaten and saw others in her family beaten too. Her two older sisters were forced into marriage as teenagers after being sent “on holiday” to Pakistan.

As she grew up she started to challenge what was happening around her. “If I had stayed the physical abuse would have increased because I was seen as being out of control and becoming too westernised,” she told Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“Forced marriage is a way of disciplining a woman who wants to make her own life choices. I was seen as having an attitude problem so I’m sure I would have been put on a plane, like my sisters were, and made to marry a stranger.”

Her sisters and the police and social services helped her escape, but once she did it wasn’t all rainbows and rejoicing – it was estrangement and heartbreak.

But the shock and difficulty of adjusting to her new life and the estrangement from her family took its toll. One year later she took an overdose and ended up in hospital for a week.

“The suicidal feelings have been a regular experience throughout my life, and that’s a huge part of the reason why I’ve started doing the work I’m doing now,” said Hashmat who now lives in London.

She cites a survey which indicates Asian women are more than twice as likely to commit suicide as women from other backgrounds in Britain, with family violence seen as a key factor.

It would be surprising if it were otherwise, wouldn’t it. Girls must end up feeling like worms.

Hashmat has since written about her experiences in a blog, challenging the taboos around mental health which are particularly strong in Asian communities.

Her dream is to set up a mental health service for women who have fled forced marriage and honour abuse.

“Estrangement from the people with whom you have created many of your most important memories – wonderful as well as awful – can be overwhelming,” she said.

“You are also often leaving behind a whole community and trying to make a new life in a completely new culture. That’s incredibly difficult.”

She’s a hero.

Helen Griffiths at Human Rights Watch says hashtag solidarity with women and girls is nice, but what’s needed is action.

Last weekend, I attended a Women of the World event in Cambridge, England, where experts from several sectors discussed what exactly is preventing girls from getting into and staying in school. They agreed that numerous factors play a role, including early marriage, pregnancy, disabilities, lack of accommodation for menstrual hygiene, cultural beliefs, and traditional caregiver roles.

These barriers are not new.

And what do they all rest on? The material reality of being female – of being the sex that gets pregnant, that bears the children, that lactates. (The disabilities part is the exception – either sex can be disabled in a variety of ways.)

Nor is this a new debate. Some 63 million girls are currently denied access to education, their birthright, and there has been little change in the gender gap in recent years. Girls remain twice as likely as boys to be out of school. Almost 16 million girls alive today and aged 6 to 11 will never go to school if current trends persist. Current government policies are already failing another generation of girls. Yet, as one panelist reminded us, this is the generation that, if educated and empowered, could end child marriage for their own daughters.

There are international laws that oblige states to implement the right to education, but of course international laws are not easily enforced.

The recurring message from panelists was that, despite the range of barriers, political will to implement the legal framework and support from nongovernmental groups can see this right made reality.

We’ve been saying that girls need access to education for decades. After another week of talk about girls’ rights and calls for change, we need to see concrete action, including concerning the allocation of resources and development of specific plans, policies, and timelines. It’s time to help those 63 million girls regain their birthright and to secure it for those who are coming next.

That would make a good change.

I’ve always hated snowmobiles – at least, I have since encountering one racing all over a Seattle park after a heavy snow one day back around 1980. I know they have their uses, though, as long as the people using them aren’t mean bastards. But one snowmobiler is a very mean bastard.

One dog has been killed and multiple dogs have been injured by a snowmobiler in what appears to be an intentional attack on competitors in the Iditarod Race in Alaska.

Iditarod veteran Aliy Zirkle was the first to report an attack.

A snowmachiner had “repeatedly attempted to harm her and her team,” the Iditarod Trail Committee says, and one of Zirkle’s dogs had received a non-life-threatening injury.

Zirkle reported the attack when she arrived in Nulato, Alaska, in the wee hours of the morning, and race officials and law enforcement were notified.

Then Jeff King, a four-time Iditarod champion who was behind Zirkle, reported a similar encounter.

King’s team was hit by a snowmobiler, injuring several dogs and killing one — Nash, a 3-year-old male.

That’s a very mean bastard.

Zirkel went on with the race, leaving one dog behind. King said, “I’m not gonna let this schmuck take any more of the fun away.”

More on the mess in South Sudan, from the UN.

11 March 2016 – A new United Nations report on the human rights situation in South Sudan published today describes a multitude of horrendous violations in “searing detail,” in particular by Government forces, including cases of civilians burned alive or cut to pieces and a teenage girl being raped by ten soldiers.

Although all parties to the conflict have committed patterns of serious and systematic violence against civilians since fighting broke out in December 2013, the report says State actors bore the greatest responsibility during 2015, given the weakening of opposition forces.

The scale of sexual violence is particularly shocking, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) notes in a news release. In five months last year, from April to September, the UN recorded more than 1,300 reports of rape in just one of South Sudan’s ten states, namely oil-rich Unity.

“The scale and types of sexual violence – primarily by Government SPLA forces and affiliated militia – are described in searing, devastating detail, as is the almost casual, yet calculated, attitude of those slaughtering civilians and destroying property and livelihoods,” said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein.

He said the quantity of rapes and gang-rapes described in the report must only be “a snapshot” of the real total, with women and girls being considered “a commodity” as soldiers moved through the villages. Although this is one of the most horrendous human rights situations in the world, it has been more or less “off the international radar,” he added.