Ah the way the left loves to devour its own. Nick Cohen says it has to do with the left’s self-image as the home of all righteousness.

Anyone who saw Gordon Brown and his aides in action, or watched the student left ban speakers for disagreeing with them, has found the myth of leftwing decency hard to swallow. But it has taken the triumph of Jeremy Corbyn’s “new politics” to finish it off.

Police are investigating a death threat madeagainst Neil Coyle, the Labour MP for Bermondsey, after he voted to allow the RAF to attack Islamic State in Syria. His colleague Diana Johnson said the abuse of Labour MPs who supported the action was horrendous. “‘Murderous cunt’ is one of the terms I have seen.”

…

Corbyn has ensured that everything the left once said about mainstream conservatives can be thrown back its face.

You want sexism? Long before the Syria vote, Liz Kendall and Yvette Cooper complained of misogyny, and not just from the Mail, which was more interested in Kendall’s “lithe figure” than her politics. You expect that from the Mail if you are a woman on the left. Indeed, you expect it if you are a woman on the right or any place in between. Cooper spoke with feeling at the Labour women’s conference about the shock she and Kendall felt at finding it in the one place she never expected it: the left, whose decent adherents called them “witches” and “cows” for opposing the great Corbyn.

Why? Self-righteousness, Nick says.

Brecht understood that the certainty of your virtue will lead you into cruelty. Leftwing men can treat women appallingly and leftwing agitators can mimic the language and tactics of the far right. They are so convinced of their righteousness they cannot admit their faults.

Leftists would behave better if they stopped acting like teenage vegetarians and found the honesty to acknowledge their kinship with the rest of compromised humanity. The Corbyn generation shows no sign of doing it. And it ought to be obvious by now that Labour people will be their targets.

Brecht’s communists spent as much time fighting social democrats as Nazis in the 1930s. The Corbynites’ real enemies are not Tories, whom they rather respect for standing up for the interests of their class, but Labour MPs who fail to show the required radical virtue and betray the leftwing cause. They don’t mutter darkly that there will be “no hiding place” for Tory MPs who voted in favour of bombing Isis. They don’t scream that Conservative women are “witches” and “cows”. They don’t deliver death threats to David Cameron.

Their virtuous hatred is righteously reserved for their own side and its ugliness will destroy the myth of leftwing decency more thoroughly than the right ever could.

The Independent on sharia courts in the UK, via Machteld Zee, a Dutch researcher who did her PhD on the subject.

“The judges were very friendly,” she says. “We chatted between cases. The problem is not that they were mean but the foundation of their judice acts in a system of sharia Islamic law, in which the principle focus is making women dependent on their husbands and clerics.

“One judge said: ‘Under Islam, we should reconcile marriages even if there is violence’. They don’t care. It was shocking:

they would have you cling to a marriage.

“There are also unfair custody statements. The woman has no idea this is a religious institution and she should go to a secular court [for her children’s interests] – and once she finds out, a British judge won’t switch parents after a few months.

“But in 2001, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that sharia law is incompatible with liberal democracy.”

In a sidebar, the Indy quotes a horrifying passage of dialogue:

One case Zee witnessed, at the Islamic Sharia Council in London, involved a married couple with children, who asked if the woman’s first civil divorce was recognised religiously. It included the following exchange:

Qadi: “You as a Muslim female, you should have known that you need a Muslim judge or an Islamic court or council for a divorce. Who told you that it was enough?”

Wife: “My friends and family. The UK divorce does not count as anything?”

Qadi: “It is going to be a difficult case. We are going to ask our scholars to give you the answers… Marriage is an act of worship”.

Husband: “But I thought Muslims in a non-Muslim country need to abide by the laws of the land of the country they live in?”

Qadi: “A secular judge does not do religious divorces. We have Islam. Secular courts do not have Islamic laws. Can a kaffir [non-Muslim] come in and judge Islamic matters?”

He told them something that’s not true – or, to put it another way, they were talking at cross-purposes. The couple don’t need a sharia divorce, and they do need to abide by the laws of the land of the country they live in. The qadi is talking in the language of a cleric, from the point of view of a bossy, coercive religion. Yes, a “kaffir” can give a secular divorce to a Muslim couple, it’s just that the qadi doesn’t like it.

Her book Choosing Sharia? is based on the 15 hours of cases that she saw at the council in London and another at Birmingham Central Mosque Sharia Council, alongside her extensive research into sharia law and other reports on sharia councils. She also investigated the Jewish Beth Din religious court, where she interviewed two judges.

Ms Zee’s analysis is blistering: these courts all treat women as less than equal and are incompatible with human rights law.

The Indy quotes a woman who works in a sharia court and says that’s all nonsense.

Some campaigners feel even more strongly than Ms Zee. On Thursday 10 December, the International Day of Human Rights, groups including One Law For All will deliver a petition of more than 200 signatories to 10 Downing Street calling for the government “to dismantle parallel legal systems.”

They say that with cuts to legal aid and funding for women’s groups, vulnerable women – who might be taking their first steps away from an abusive relationship – are even more likely to go to sharia councils where those like Iranian Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation’s Diana Nammi believe: “The whole system is stacked against women”.

Supporters of multiculturalism are reluctant to criticise sharia law, says Ms Zee.

Take a bow, Goldsmiths Student Union and Feminist Society and LGBTQ+ Society.

There’s a report out in the UK, about religion and diversity and public life yadda yadda…

And Malcolm Brown at the Church of England blog has a post about it. (Did I know there was a CofE blog? No.) Brown is slightly triumphalist, saying religion isn’t going anywhere so ha.

But he also does the thing religionists always do: he pretends we can’t do without religion because religion is the source of all the good things.

[T]he common assumption that religion is in decline and can safely be relegated to the margins of our cultural life is simply wrong. Patterns of religious observance and affiliation are changing, but religion shows no sign of going away or allowing itself to be relegated to the private sphere. The CORAB report understands this. It is precisely because religion remains a potent factor in understanding British life that the Commission set itself up in the first place. And it is good that the report strongly affirms the notion of the Common Good to which the great majority of the world’s great faiths are committed, and calls for much greater religious literacy among opinion-formers and policy makers.

Wait. Stop right there.

That is a shameless falsehood. It is not true that “the great majority of the world’s great faiths” are committed to “the notion of the Common Good.” That’s horseshit. It’s secular morality that focuses on the common good, and what it is and how we figure out what it is and how it relates to the many idiosyncratic notions of the good that individuals want to pursue. Secular morality. This world morality. Religions focus on an imagined other world, and especially, most of them, on an imagined other-worldly Divine Personage. Religions pay attention to the common good as an afterthought at best, and they define it in terms of the imagined other world and its ruling Divine Personage. Often they ignore the common good altogether in favor of the good of themselves –  the One True Religion.

It’s true that many people see their religion as a conduit for morality, for pursuit of the common good – but their religiosity can always confuse them about what the common good actually is.

And this is where the CORAB report misses its mark. It recognises the enduring social significance of religion and grapples with changing patterns of belief and non-belief. It sees some of the problems generated by the prevalence of the inaccurate story of religious decline and irrelevance in the face of “progress” – but it reaches, not for solutions that reflect how religious belief and religious institutions actually work in changing contexts, but for the fiction that the state should adopt some kind of neutral position in order to accommodate (and, presumably, manage) the diversity of religions and beliefs within society.

This is a fiction because nobody comes from nowhere. There is no neutrality; no “trusted umpire” to hold the coats whilst “religions and beliefs” slug it out in the public square. Secularism is a belief structure just as much as Judaism or Sikhism – though, arguably, with a less developed history, literature and philosophical depth.

No, it isn’t. Secularism is not “thick” in the way religions are; it doesn’t rest on willful belief in fictional entities; it doesn’t rest on “belief” in general. Secularism isn’t a belief system, it’s a methodology.

The fond belief that a secular society can somehow embrace all religions equally is contradicted by the fact that most of the great world faiths present in this country prefer to be part of a polity in which the historic religion of the country is part of the formal structures of governance, rather than a secular polity which marginalises all religions.

So, a clear endorsement of theocracy then: yes, clerics should be part of the state, backed by all the power of the state. Good plan; see Saudi Arabia for how well it works in practice.

And then Brown argues the opposite of what he just said.

A problematic assumption underlies much of the report’s reasoning – problematic, because, in a document which seeks to find ways forward acceptable across a spectrum of religions and beliefs, it adopts uncritically the narratives and priorities of one point of view. The root of the fallacy lies in the report’s erroneous assumption that the growing number of people who report that they have “No Religion” can safely be assumed to be, de facto, humanists and that, ergo, they can be adequately represented by humanist organisations – of which there is, of course, only one of any size.

The idea that “No Religion” means “Humanist” has underlain the public posture of the British Humanist Association for years. They have deployed it to argue, for example, that the funding for humanist chaplains in the NHS should reflect the proportion of people with “No Religion” in the country. The sleight of hand is possible because the terminology of “religion and belief” allows “belief organisations” to sit around the table alongside the representatives of world faiths, despite the fact that these secular member organisations only resemble religious organisations in a few respects.

A couple of paragraphs up, secularism was a belief system, but now no religion and humanism are definitely not belief systems. He seemed to be defining secularism broadly when he claimed it’s a belief structure, but now he defines no religion and humanism so narrowly that they have few beliefs. Looks like having it both ways.

In the end, the report’s apparent bias toward a version of liberal humanism may be less about lobbying than a failure to engage with more contemporary thinking and literature which can be found on the political left and right, among many of the great world faiths, and among many profound thinkers who espouse no religion or belief. This is the rising tide of post-liberal thought which understands that neutrality is a myth which tries to contain and control plurality whilst claiming to support it. Post-liberals value, instead, the reality of embeddedness in social groupings and the richness of narrative-formed community.

“Post-liberal thought” – I hadn’t heard of that before. Is it a new word for postmodernism? Whether it is or not, it’s creepy. It’s basically the idea that you can’t have freedom, because “embeddedness” is better.

We have seen in recent weeks how secularist assumptions of “neutrality” fail to reflect the imagination and priorities of our apparently irreligious population. The furore over the church’s “Just Pray” initiative which saw an advert based on the Lord’s Prayer banned by the cinema chains to almost universal public opprobrium (even Richard Dawkins weighed in against the cinemas), shows that modes of religious observance are changing but that secular neutrality is no solution. The significance of prayer has also been shown in the way school children have valued the opportunity to use the “anachronism” of collective worship to deal with the emotional aftermath of dreadful events like the Paris shootings. Abolishing collective worship would leave no space to express corporately this aspect of being human – and approaching the moment without specific reference to some religious or belief tradition is impossible. It could be Islam, it could be humanism, but in reality, the historical embeddedness of Christianity in Britain means it is to the Christian tradition that people turn when, despite describing themselves as having “no religion” they need to acknowledge the profundity of a shared experience too overwhelming for propositional knowledge to handle.

It’s such a coercive mentality, this. To tell us that “approaching the moment without specific reference to some religious or belief tradition is impossible” is sheer bullying. It’s not impossible at all, and clerics should stop telling us it is.

NUS women had a conference last March. They issued some resolutions. Some of them are blood-curdling. Like this one for instance:

Motion 405: Trans Inclusion in the Women’s Campaign: Siblings, Not Cisters

See what they did there? Cisters? Sisters is a bad word, because…because it means female sibling, and there are trans people, so we can’t use words that mean female or male any more – like woman for instance. So it turns out that trans women aren’t women? Because it would be not inclusive to call them that?

Conference Believes:
1. The student women’s movement must strive to be a trans inclusive environment.
2. The definition of Women for the NUS Women’s Campaign is “all who self-define as women, including (if they wish) those with complex gender identities which include ‘woman’, and those who experience oppression as women.” This contains people whose preferred pronouns are not “She” or “her” (e.g “they”) and that they do not identify with the term “sister”.
3. The use of the term “sisters” is exclusionary of some women.
4. There are more than two genders and we should always recognise this.
5. Misgendering someone is an act of violence.
6. When women know each other within in a personal capacity or within certain cultures and religions, the term “sister” can be appropriate.

They’re serious. They think the word “sisters” excludes some women. Well what women? Not trans women, surely, because the word “sisters” wouldn’t exclude them if the word “women” didn’t – so what the fuck are they talking about? What do they even think they’re talking about?

And then – of all the things to get rid of – the lovely practice from union organizing and civil rights work and feminism and other progressive movements of calling each other sister and brother – of all the things to get rid of.

Oh and also? Misgendering someone is not an act of violence.

It may be extremely unkind and insulting, when done deliberately; I strongly reprobate intentional unkindness; but that’s still not an act of violence. Rhetorical overkill ends up undermining itself.

If these people are the future…I feel very sorry for the future, that’s all. Global warming and this. It’s not fair.

A public Facebook post by Simi Rahman that has gone viral.

Every Muslim humanist is asking themselves a question I first asked myself in September 2001.

How do you tell a radical Muslim from a moderate peace loving one?

And here is my train of thought.

The 9/11 hijackers reminded me of boys I had gone to school with in Dubai in the 80s and 90s. They were the same age, background, and modern enough to have listened to 80s pop and chased girls. Meaning that just like most young people in the Muslim world, we weren’t that religious.

So, I thought, maybe I could locate the differences between them and me, and at some point I would identify a breakaway point. Something they would do that I never would. And it took me a while to realize this, and now with the California shootings, it has reaffirmed for me, that indeed, when it comes to being able to tell a moderate from a radical in Islam, you can’t.

You really can’t tell until the moment before they pull the trigger, who is moderate and who is jihadi. Tashfeen has broken our moderate backbone, by revealing that she lived among us, unnoticed, normal, experiencing motherhood, enveloped in our secure community and yet, had radicalized.

And that’s the problem, that there are many others like her with exactly the same beliefs, who may not have been ignited yet by a radical cleric, but if the opportunity presented itself, they would follow. They’re like a dormant stick of dynamite, waiting for the fuse to be lit. The TNT is already in there.

What’s it made of? Not the 5 pillars, belief, charity, prayer, fasting and pilgrimage. Not the sayings of the prophet as to how to lead a good and just life. Not the celebration of Eid ul Fitr.

It possibly glimmers through in the fealty that Allah demands during the Eid ul Adha, when Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son as a sign of his superior faith is commemorated in a sacrifice and celebration very much like the American Thanksgiving, with family and food. But without the football. And oh yes, the fratricide.

It is there in the silence one must maintain during prayer, brooking no interruptions, because it would make the prayer invalid. It is there in the severity of the hijab when it is followed to a tee. Not a hair can show. It is there in the forced separation of men and women at social gatherings.

It is present in every act that is performed that excludes us from the mainstream. It is present in the very concept of Us and Them. Because the only way we remain Us is to reject Them. The only way to be an exemplary Us is to reject westernization at every turn. Halal only is a sham, constructed out of this notion of meat that has been cut a certain way. It’s the same meat. And yet there is a magical difference that people will attest to in all seriousness.

I hope she’s not right. It’s a very grim outlook if she is.

She herself got out.

I dropped prayer, stopped feeling guilty for not praying. I drank alcohol, in moderation like most people do in the west, and I didn’t instantly turn into an alcoholic. I dropped the need to cover to my ankles and wrists, and wore regular clothes. Bacon. I mean, seriously, it’s bacon, I don’t have to explain how good it was. I turned to look back at the wall from the other side, and it was…a relief. I relief to lose that fear of apostasy. To realize there was no such thing, it was purely in my mind. The ideas that had worn a groove in my mind, the guilt, the anxiety, the self flagellation for being a bad Muslim, all were gone.

And now, looking in the rear view mirror, I cannot recall what that felt like. I can’t recall what believing used to feel like, because it’s not as if there’s an absence. It’s not like I miss it. No, in its place has come a more robust understanding of humanity, philosophy, history, human nature and yes, even of religion.

A realization that the future is everything. There is no heaven or hell. Or rather, we no longer need a heaven and a hell to curb us into moral behavior. We have evolved. We know more of the universe, too much to be afraid of it anymore. We know more of this earth, and we know that every human being is made of exactly the same material. There is no Us, no Them. There is only We. We need to move on. We need to break free. We need to scale the wall so we can push back against the forces that seek to snatch our children’s minds and bodies. We need to protect them, we need to inhabit our own intelligence instead of surrender it in the service of an archaic structure of beliefs that make absolutely no sense to follow in this day and age.

We have to break the chains in our own minds in order to do any of this. And it is scary. Especially when you’ve believed your whole life in the concept of blasphemy. Especially when you know that to openly come out and reject these beliefs would be to risk alienation, to be ostracized and maligned, rejected and alone. And in many cases, dangerous to your own person.

So maybe that is where we should start. By encouraging Muslims to create safe spaces to challenge the logical fallacies and inconsistencies, not between translation to translation, but between Islam and the modern world.

I think it is. I think we should encourage people to leave their religions, or at least to hold them as loosely as possible. Religions tightly held are not safe for human beings.

P.K. Balachandran reports from Colombo in the New Indian Express:

Four Muslim Members of Parliament, including a cabinet Minister, shouted down Tamil National Alliance (TNA) MP M.A.Sumanthiran, when he mentioned the term “Shariah” while speaking in parliament on Friday on a Saudi Arabian court’s order to “stone to death” a Lankan women for committing adultery.

She was scheduled to be killed on Friday but the Saudis paused because she has appealed the sentence.

Sumanthiran, also a leading Supreme Court lawyer, said that laws regarding the mode of punishment in various countries should be looked at afresh, from the human rights angle. He mentioned stoning in Saudi Arabia, flogging in Singapore and the use of the electric chair in some states in the USA as examples of practices which need to be reviewed. He further said that countries cannot prevent people from across the world questioning laws which violate human rights and cannot use religion to stall intervention. He pointed out there has been international intervention in Sri Lanka to restore human rights in the island and Lanka has accepted it.

Quite right; well said. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a thing, and people across the world get to say so. We get to object to violations of human rights, and to talk about the institutions that perpetuate them. Religions should never be allowed to violate human rights or serve as justification for violations of human rights.

When the Tamil MP proceeded to ask if the Shariah law sanctions stoning to death, S.M.Marikkar, Rishad Bathiyudeen and two other Muslim MPs, shouted him down. Bathiyudeen insisted that Sumanthiran has no right to talk of Shariah law. Islam and Shariah law should not be dragged in when the entire House is engaged in saving the maid in question, Bathiyudeen argued. Sumanthiran’s contention that he had the right to speak on any religion so long as he is not offensive was rejected.

What nonsense. Saudi Arabia is an officially Islamic country, where Islamic law is the law and justifies the endless flagrant violations of human rights. Of course Islam and Sharia have to be “dragged in” when they’re at the root of this grotesque “punishment.”

Speaker Karu Jayasuriya’s pleas to the Muslim MPs to let Sumanthiran complete his speech fell on deaf ears. Even Minister Lakshman Kiriella’s assurance that anything hurtful to Islam could be expunged, failed to pacify the four Muslim MPs.

A defensive Sumanthiran said that he is not attacking Islam and that he is an avowed  friend of the Muslims. In fact, only recently, he had incurred fellow Tamils’ wrath when he described the en masse expulsion of Muslims from North Lanka by the LTTE in 1990 as “ethnic cleansing.”

Funny how it’s possible to do both, isn’t it. One can both defend Muslims against rights violations such as ethnic cleansing, and defend Muslims and non-Muslims against rights violations such as stoning to death and criminalization of sex, apostasy, atheism, not wearing hijab, and similar.

Jamie Palmer takes a long hard look at the pro-Islamist left and its shameful behavior to Maryam and other ex-Muslims, secular Muslims, apostates, refuseniks.

And so it was that when ISOC misrepresented the event as an unhappy tale of marginalization and Islamophobia, both the Goldsmiths Feminist Society and the LGBTQ+ Society quickly released statements pledging their support and solidarity with ISOC.

“We support them,” FemSoc soberly declared:

…in condemning the actions of the Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society and agree that hosting known islamophobes at our university creates a climate of hatred. 

Two days later, the LGBTQ+ Society came up with this:

We condemn AHS and online supporters for their islamophobic remarks, attitudes, and harassment. If they feel intimidated, we urge them to look at the underpinnings of their ideology. We find that personal and social harm enacted in the name of ‘free speech’ is foul, and detrimental to the wellbeing of students and staff on campus.

In a positively craven gesture, the Goldsmiths Student Union has since written to Namazie requesting that the recording of the event be removed from youtube. (She refused.)

Students, lefty students, siding with theocrats against their opponents and victims. Here’s a newsflash in the form of a generalization: theocracy can never be part of the left. Theocracy is inherently reactionary. Theocracy is all about arbitrary unaccountable power, and the left is all about resisting arbitrary unaccountable power. UK students really need to wake up and figure this out.

The dismal spectacle of radical queer activists, feminists, and sundry other progressives, professing solidarity with Islamists is at once fascinating and enraging. Whatever kind of higher education survives in ISOC’s utopian caliphate, it’s certain that no feminist or LGBTQ+ societies will be permitted to exist.

But for radical university students in the West, their lives of almost unparalleled opportunity, privilege, and comfort are a source of considerable guilt and anxiety. So conspiratorial notions of omnipresent oppression have been contrived against which they oblige themselves to struggle. This idea is supported by claims that liberal democracy is a sham, that objectivity is illusory, and that reason is elitist. And since all that makes rational discussion virtually impossible, debates about ideas are transformed into competing professions of woe, decided by whoever turns out to be subject to the greater degree of structural oppression.

And you know where that leads to? It turns out it leads to circular firing squads, where putative radicals purge their own radical colleagues while the actual oppressors sit back and laugh.

It would be bad enough if university activists were simply indifferent to Islamist ideology and its victims. But when they go out of their way to attack people like Namazie as a bigot and an oppressor, and to dismiss her arguments and experiences as therefore unworthy of consideration, they make the lives of all campaigners against fundamentalism considerably more difficult. Apart from the aggravation caused by having to deal with the abuse and defamation itself, it forces them to fight a war on two fronts.

I have seen Namazie speak a number of times, and on each occasion she has had to waste time explaining the exasperating moral blindness of people whose support for secularism and universal human rights ought to be a foregone conclusion. But those who recoil from politically incorrect music or an infelicitous joke find they have nothing to say about honor-based violence, forced marriage, the execution of gays and apostates, or the veiling, stoning, subjugation, and genital mutilation of women. Afraid to be seen to lend their support to racist and Imperialist ‘narratives’, they instead assuage their guilty consciences by denouncing those whose activism shames their silence.

Fortunately it’s not the whole of the left. Obviously it’s not: Maryam herself is very much of the left. The fight against theocracy is a left-wing fight. But while not the whole it is a dismayingly large fraction.

The cabaret performer Lili La Scala took the late train home last night after a performance in London. She likes to use the 55 minute trip to wind down. Last night a bunch of guys had other plans for her.

I stepped on to the train and assumed my usual corner seat, the one right at the front with a little table. Within a minute or so, five chaps of a rather burly description with shaved heads and assorted football wear, had claimed the seats around me.

They tried to strike up conversation but I’m rather taciturn on my homeward journey so I fended off the questions. However, now I feel bad about that, it was bad manners to not want to talk about myself to gents I’d never met, so I thought I might remedy my error and answer them right here.

Where have I been? I’ve been to work.

“You’re beautiful.” Thanks. I wasn’t looking for a late night affirmation from five men I’ve never met. I’m not sure any lone woman would welcome this sort of attention over and over again. Whilst you stare at them in a rather obsessive way. But, you know, thanks.

But not really. Guys, don’t do that. Don’t treat women as public property. That’s a simple enough rule isn’t it? Not hard to grasp? Don’t treat women as public property. Don’t surround them. Don’t hedge them in with your burly bodies. Don’t pester them. Don’t try to force them to talk to you. If they’re happy to chat, that will be obvious; if they’re not happy to chat, leave them the fuck alone.

“Your eyes are blue. I like blue eyes. Blue is my favourite eye colour.”
And a few more times, just in case I hadn’t heard. Not creepy at all.

“Are you naked under your coat?”  No. No I’m not. It’s winter. Who wants to travel home on a train at 11pm wearing nothing but a coat in winter. And you can see my blue dress under my coat. So I’m not sure why you’d ask this question.

Am I a ghost? No. If I were a ghost, I’d certainly haunt somewhere more salubrious than a train.

“Stuck up cunt.” I’m not. I just don’t want to a) fuck you b) make inane conversation with five drunk men I’ve never met before. Who’ve already asked me if I’m naked under my coat.

What was that we’re always being told about how “cunt” is not a hostile epithet for women in the UK? How it names only men? 

And then there’s “stuck up” – which implies that the only polite, democratic, egalitarian thing for her to do is chat with anyone who wants to chat with her, whatever her own plans may be. In other words, she’s public property.

You want to cum on my face. That’s nice. Really nice. Such a kind offer but, you know, I’m on my way home from work. I’ve done a show this evening, my serotonin and adrenaline have been absorbed by those glorious, happy faces, so I’m kind of tired. It was a Christmas show, so wrangling the audience and persuading them to my will took a lot of energy.
Also, we’ve never met.

Oh, you touched my foot. It’s ok, I can move my foot over here, closer to my other foot and further away from your feet. I’d hate for you to get the wrong idea, like I’m enjoying the taunts, jibes and come-ons from all five of you. I mean, I obviously am, right? You chaps are having a huge giggle. And me? Well, I’m stony silent, staring at my phone with my headphones on (FYI, noise cancelling doesn’t mean total noise blocking), shrinking into the corner whilst you mime something that appears to be me gargling, no not gargling, gobbling your man seed. I wouldn’t go down the mime road, if I were you chaps. Though, it was utterly clear to me so maybe it could be a career path for you once you stop hassling women on trains.

What’s depressing by this point is that no passengers intervened.

At that point she stood up and told them off, then moved to another seat.

I have the right to travel home in silence.
I have the right to travel home alone.
I have the right to not make small talk with drunk men I’ve never met.
I have the right to not be intimidated

I have the right. Women have the right. Every single woman has the right.

Just take your words and your looks and your, frankly awful, mimes and just go to fucking hell, you pieces of shit.

You are not taking my right to feel safe away from me. I am woman and have the right to exist in space without the fear of unwanted, unasked for attentions.

I was worried. I was scared and I was shaken.

Women are not public property.

Hey all you aspiring playwrights out there, and you working playwrights, and you who hadn’t thought of writing a play before but just might think of it now – here’s a thing for you:

CALL FOR PLAYS

The First Annual Freethought Onstage Festival will be held the week of August 7-13, 2016, at the Haymarket Theatre in Lincoln, Nebraska. Play submissions will be accepted beginning December 1, 2015. The deadline for submission is April 1, 2016. Winners will be announced in early June.

Submission Guidelines:

•  Plays are to be submitted in standard playwriting format.
•  Length: 10 minutes to 2 hours will be considered; if your running time in reading is longer than 2 hours, and your play is accepted, you will be asked to edit the play to a 2 hour running time
• Plays must be on a freethought theme. This can range from doubt about religion to outright atheism. Any and all themes related to freethought are eligible for consideration.
• Plays should be submitted without any identifying information. The play document should include the title of the play, cast list, and the body of the play. Pages need to be numbered.
• In a separate document and e-mail, submit the following:
• A cover sheet with the title of the play and playwright contact information
• A short biography of the playwright
• A brief synopsis of the play, suitable for including in advance publicity
• Fee of $10 will be charged for all submissions to help cover the costs of the festival. For payment information, go to freethoughtonstage.com
• You agree to attend the festival if your play is accepted. You will be provided with a reading and response to your play as part of the festival.

Submissions: e-mail submission to freethoughtonstage@gmail.com; use Freethought Onstage as your subject line. Send coversheet in separate e-mail to the same address; use Freethought Onstage and the title of your play as the subject line.

Go for it!

Tom Owolade has some thoughts on the Goldsmiths feminists and LGBTQ+ activists.

Before examining the underpinnings of the Atheist and Humanist society ideology, one should first examine Goldsmiths’ Islamic society.

In 2011, they invited to speak at their annual dinner Abdurraheem Green and Hamza Tzortzis. Green believes that a husband is permitted to beat his wife if she misbehaves, and that homosexuality should not be permitted in society; Tzortzis has supported child-marriage.

In 2014, Goldsmiths Islamic society invited Cage Prisoners – a group whose dalliance with terrorism and extremism is well-documented. CAGE has supported a wide range of Islamist terrorists – from Abu Hamza to Anwar al-Awlaki. The deputy director of CAGE, Asim Qureshi, has twice refused when interviewed on TV to answer whether he thinks adulterers should be stoned to death.

So the feminist and LGBTQ society think it appropriate to ban a vocal opponent of wife-beating, lethal homophobia, apostasy laws and terrorism, whilst supporting a society that promotes and invites misogynistic and homophobic Islamists. No-platforming for left-wing critics of Islamist oppression; safe-spaces for thugs that endorse theocratic fascists: this is the dysfunctional moral compass now crippling the mainstream student left.

Why is that? Why are they so blind to the reality of the Islamist groups they rush to support? What kind of mushroom do you have to nibble to get that way?

[W]hat we have here is a culture of progressives, disaffected by liberal principles, pointedly incurious or delusional about the people they’re defending, marginalising the voice of someone who speaks up for vulnerable people. For people who don’t have the benefit of languidly complaining about safe spaces; for people who don’t have the benefit of coming out as gay to their parents or telling them they’re atheist or having a boyfriend; people who dare to behave in a way that doesn’t suit the stereotype of brown people, and instead think for themselves. People who don’t cry or wallow in shallow victimhood because they’re offended by the misuse of a pronoun or the wearing of problematic clothes. These people are alone because the student left has abandoned them in pursuit of the solipsistic politics of grievance.

I’ve noticed that. The solipsism. I’ve noticed the huge overlap between the people who declared me a Banned Person and the people whose conversation (i.e. blog posting and social media) is mostly about…themselves. There’s a thing there. I don’t quite know what to call it or how to organize it, but it’s there. Bloggers who write 5000 words about Dear Self on Monday, then 5000 words about That Evil Terf on Wednesday, then 5000 words about Dear Self on Friday. What’s the connection between the two? I don’t know, but I think there is one.

Whatever it is, it doesn’t make for good politics.

James Bloodworth pointed out an extraordinary claim by Stop the War yesterday:

Say what?

Benn does not even seem to realize that the jihadist movement that ultimately spawned Daesh is far closer to the spirit of internationalism and solidarity that drove the International Brigades than Cameron’s bombing campaign – except that the international jihad takes the form of solidarity with oppressed Muslims, rather than the working class or the socialist revolution.

No. It isn’t.

The kind or type or category of internationalism and solidarity that drives Daesh is profoundly different from the kind or type or category that drove the International Brigades. (Here I’m talking about the individuals who joined the IB, not the Stalinists who ran them and ended up purging them.) The “spirit” that drives Daesh is far closer to the “spirit” that drove Franco and the falangists than it is to the one that drove the IB. Franco crushed the Spanish Republican government for Catholicism and the clergy as well as for the monarchy. Daesh has very little in common with the people who joined the IB and a great deal in common with Franco and company. The mere fact that Daesh attracts people from all over the planet is far from enough to make it comparable to the IB.

The ummah is not like the global community that Marxists or human rights campaigners have in mind. The ummah is defined by a single religion, called Submission. It assumes the non-existence of other religions, and to the extent that the other religions persist, their members are not part of the ummah. People who have no religion are also not part of the ummah. People who were once (voluntarily or by birth) members of Submission who have left are really not part of the ummah.

The ummah is ruled by a book, one single book. It has a “prophet” who is to be treated as quasi-divine. This “prophet” issued a lot of rules 14 centuries ago, and submission to those rules is the whole duty of the ummah. Punishments in the ummah are harsh.

The ummah is not any kind of utopia or Better Place. The Stoppers are terribly confused.

Harry’s Place has more. Stop the War took the post down but here’s a cache.

More comments from the Goldsmiths LGBTQ+ post declaring solidarity with Goldsmiths Isoc and condemnation of Goldsmiths ASH.

One.

I understand your wish to show solidarity, but I don’t understand your choice to necessarily take sides in this matter, nor do I understand the side you’ve chosen.

Try investigating what Maryam mentions several times as one of the central issues – conflating Islam, Islamism and Muslims – making it impossible to criticize an ideology without being called a bigot by people who can’t tell apples from oranges.

There are real people suffering very real pain right now. They are partially suffering because we in the west fail to identify and point out the actual problems, and hide behind political correctness out of fear of being labelled an “Islamophobe”.

I’m quite disappointed in your position, and I hope you’ll reconsider your allegations towards not just Maryam, but the enormous group of humanist supporting her views and supporting the millions of Muslims who are subject to discrimination and violence caused by a twisted interpretation of Islam and a lack of criticism of the same.

Two. (Kate won’t mind her name being included.)

Kate Smurthwaite I find this beyond unbelievable. Goldsmiths ISOC is the same organisation that recently hosted Hamza Tsorzis. A an who has openly compared homosexuality to bestiality and has never retracted or apologised for such a statement. How can you feel it acceptable that he be heard while Maryam Namazie is shouted down, has her equipment compromised and every effort is made to intimidate her. Surely you can see the hypocrisy in this? Would it not be possible to do your actual job of standing up for LGBT rights rather than getting involved in supporting a group who are not representing the majority of Muslims and who are demanding the right to have their extreme views shielded from challenge or debate?

Three.

Goldsmiths LGBTQ+ Society just a couple points, these people walked into her speech then proceeded to interrupt her and then became aggressive and tampered with her property. One tells her to shut the f up?! Would your stance be a different story if it were say Peter lababra or WBC behaving this way. I support women’s rights and I’m shamed by your comments, as a gay man I do not agree with you, I condemn those disrespectful and disruptive actions of those men, you are wrong.

Four.

I am on the LGBT committee of another London university and an ex-Muslim. I am utterly disgusted by your continued support of the Isoc society after watching the video. You owe Maryam Namazie an apology, who has bravely supported international gay rights for many years. You are traitors – not for being Islamist apologists – but for so stubbornly sticking with your misinformed and misguided statements. Maryam is a champion for voicing the LGBT rights of people living in countries governed by sharia. Gobsmacked by your statements.

Five. (Ali also won’t mind having his name on it.)

The video is out in public now, and despite the Goldsmiths Students’ Union trying their best to shut it down, it is going viral. Everyone is learning that the Goldsmiths LGBTQ+ Society may quite possibly be the most self-hating and misogynistic LGBTQ community in the world. But then again, there are Latinos supporting Donald Trump.

Six.

While your experience with ISOC may have been just so fluffy and positive, you do realize you have chosen to side with theocratic authoritarianism over free speech, don’t you? Blasphemy is not a crime, especially not if you claim the secular ideals that protect free speech, free thought, and free expression. While people of course have the right to whatever religion they choose, or no religion at all, they don’t have the right to never have their ideas and beliefs questioned, criticized, or even ridiculed. No one has the special right to not have their feelings hurt, especially if it’s over ideas and ideologies, which have no rights at all.

University is for being exposed to different ideas, including those you may disagree with, indeed including those you may find offensive. It’s not for inoculating yourself from anything that might make your taint clench up.

You have the right to your position, but your position is wrong. In every state where the theocratic ideals of Islam are in full effect, and there is no separation of church and state, the plight of LGBT people trapped under these regimes is absolutely deplorable. And for you to side with theocratic integrity over the right to call that shit out is a betrayal, not just of the liberal secular ideal, but of your entire movement.

For shame if you can feel it.

Seven.

Hmm. Let’s see. The “brothers” sat in front of a camera and then behaved so as to ensure that they were the center of attention. But that’s not consent? If I walk behind a reporter during a newscast, do I get to complain afterward that my face appeared on television? Would you say that’s not consent either?

I think it’s obvious that your society is a confused bunch with neither liberal principles nor a backbone upon which to stand when their defense is required. Hence, your masochistic willingness to act in alliance with Islamofascists who would gladly shout you down in any situation in which you were seeking to acquire the rights that ex-Muslims and Muslim reformers are fighting for due to all too many societies and cultures that lack them – it must be nice being so privileged that you don’t have to take the actual oppression of gays, freethinkers, women, etc. in Islamic societies, or threats to them at home seriously, and instead feel that you have the moral high ground in befriending the bullies of the minority within the minority.

I saw only one that semi-supported them.

Laurie Penny says a thing at the New Statesman.

Title and subhead:

If men got pregnant, abortion would be legal everywhere

The concept of women deciding when, whether and how to have children, is still a threat to the status quo.

In other words, all together now: if men got pregnant abortion would be a sacrament.

Laurie Penny cites the murders at Planned Parenthood and a Belfast judge’s ruling that “abortion might just be permissible in cases of rape, incest or foetal abnormality” and suggests that there’s a pattern.

The concept of women having actual goddamned agency over their lives and bodies, the idea that we might get to decide when, whether and how to have children, is still a threat to the status quo. We grudgingly allow women to make decisions related to sex and reproduction as long as they feel an appropriate degree of guilt, and hoard that guilt away in private. Have an abortion? You’d better be sorry about it for the rest of your life. Get pregnant without a partner? Be prepared to spend 18 years explaining yourself. Leave paid work to have a child? You’re lazy, spoiled and frivolous. Carry on working after your kids are born? You’re cold, selfish. Get sterilised? You’re an unfeeling, unnatural monster. Whoever you are, if you have a uterus and dare to make a decision about what comes out of it, shame on you. Shame is the overarching theme here, shame and scorn for anyone with the temerity to behave as if their own humanity is important.

Right. And why is that? Because women, as a class, are subordinated, treated as inferior, denied rights, considered not fully human. Why is that? Partly because they’re the ones who have the babies. It’s a loop.

I am sick of explaining to misogynists that women are people whose choices and autonomy matter. Instead, let’s go back to considering the seahorse. Consider how different the world would be if the people with the capacity to bear children were the people society already considered fully human. Consider what would happen if men got pregnant.

If men got pregnant, abortion would be available free of charge and without restriction in every town and city on earth. No man would be expected to justify his decision to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. It would be enough for him to say, “I don’t want to have this baby.”

And so on, with conditional example after conditional example. If men got pregnant, so many things would be so different.

In point of fact, some men do get pregnant. Transsexual men have borne children, but their experience is not part of the popular understanding of reproductive rights – because people don’t get pregnant, women get pregnant, and when you get down to it, women aren’t really people. The structure of modern misogyny is still grounded on the fear that women might one day regain control of the means of reproduction and actually get to make their own decisions about the future of the human race- but you cannot force a person to give birth against their will and consider them fully human.

If men got pregnant, we would not be having this conversation. The fact that we still are shows how far we’ve got to go before equality becomes reality.

Will she be accused? Will she get away with it? News at 11.

Originally a comment by iknklast on They never accused.

You’re right, I have the right not to invite you to my party, and do it on the flimsiest of reasons. But you also have the right to complain about that, loudly, to all your friends, and anyone who will listen (and even to those who won’t, because they have a right to walk off while you’re talking). This isn’t about birthday parties, or even events. This is about an attitude that is becoming increasingly pervasive, where women are not only not being invited to events, they are being smeared as transphobic or TERF, and at times being disinvited to speak, or being invited to speak by one group who is then targeted or who is not permitted to bring in the person they would like at their party. This is more like if I do invite you to my party, and the next door neighbor comes around and says because they heard some vague hearsay, they’re not going to let you come to my party (or maybe landlord would be a better analogy, since there is a power relationship there).

In short, this is about shutting up women who want to talk about women’s issues. This is a longstanding, pervasive problem that goes back through recorded history (and probably further). This is about finding a lever where progressive, feminist women are willing to shut down conversation about women, keeping us still down in a place where we are unable to talk about the things that concern women. A woman who questions the essentialness of gender is a pariah in many of these circles.

Of course, many of these women have other fora in which they can speak, and they are published widely. It isn’t that their voices are totally silenced. It’s that there is a progressing trend to shut down the entire concept of women and women’s issues, and persuade people to view those women who promote “the wrong kind” of feminism (or who someone vaguely perceives as promoting “the wrong kind” of feminism) as being evil, racist, transphobic monsters. And yes, I use the word monster advisedly. That seems to me to be the ultimate goal, given the language and the heated rhetoric surrounding these women.

This is more about people trying to claim these women are like Rush Limbaugh than it is about any situation that has shut down Rush Limbaugh.

For the sake of completeness of information –

Goldsmiths Students Union has a brief statement…a brief, nasty, insinuating, hateful statement.

Maryam Namazie Talk – Holding Statement

Emil Allard

This matter is currently under investigation and we are not in a position to comment further. Goldsmiths SU are aware of a video that has been posted online without consent of the attending students, we have contacted the speaker and requested that this video [be] removed.

Any further statement will be posted in the news section of this website.

See what they did there? They made it appear as if Maryam or ASH or both did something wrong, and as if no one else did.

They also, probably without fully realizing it, admitted to trying to hide the record of how the (all male) bullies in the front row of Maryam’s talk carried on.

And now the Goldsmiths LGBTQ+ Society has joined the reactionary Goldsmiths Feminist Society in solidarity not with the secular feminist human rights campaigner Maryam Namazie but with the people – the men – who tried to bully her into silence at her talk on Monday. Yes that’s right. Solidarity with the bullies who did their best to shout down a woman advocating religious freedom and human rights.

Following recent events on- and offline, we would like to state and show our solidarity with the sisters and brothers of our Goldsmiths ISOC

We condemn AHS and online supporters for their islamophobic remarks and attitudes. If they feel intimidated, we urge them to look at the underpinnings of their ideology. We find that personal and social harm enacted in the name of ‘free speech’ is foul, and detrimental to the wellbeing of students and staff on campus.

In our experiences, members of ISOC have been nothing but charming, patient, kind, and peaceful as individuals and as an organization.

We hope this series of events prompts reflection in all parties involved, but also onlookers. Allyship consists of apologies, bearing with and deconstructing discomfort, respecting the necessary privacy of safer spaces, and opening our hearts to humans unlike ourselves.

We can all stand to improve in this area- which ideally is a daily, humbling practice and not a label.

Friends tell me they (the LGBTQ+ Society) have been deleting comments ever since, no matter how polite. They left this comment on their own post ten hours after posting (and after deleting all comments to that point):

Goldsmiths LGBTQ+ SocietyWe stand by Isoc and our statement is not negotiable. We reserve the right to moderate the comments and all islamaphobic, racist or inflammatory comments will be removed. Attempts have been made to flood this page in order to silence us, and we will not allow it to continue nor back down from our position.

How heroic! They won’t back down from their courageous stance with the bullies and against the human rights activists.

H/t David and Rosie