Today it’s Bamako’s turn.

Malian special forces have entered the Radisson Blu Hotel in Mali’s capital, Bamako, to end a siege by gunmen. The hotel says 138 people remain inside.

The gunmen stormed the US-owned hotel, which is popular with foreign businesses and airline crews, shooting and shouting “God is great!” in Arabic.

Malian officials said 30 hostages have been freed. State TV earlier put the figure at 80.

Three people have been shot dead and two soldiers wounded, officials say.

…

Air France says 12 of its crew have been successfully freed in the rescue operation; Turkish Airlines says five of its crew are out, but two remain in the hotel.

Twenty Indian nationals are in part of the hotel but are safe, according [to] the Indian embassy in Mali, while Chinese state TV reported four of 10 Chinese citizens caught up in the attack had been rescued.

The BBC is live updating.

We’re slowly getting more information about who was there this morning:

• 30 were hotel staff
• 20 were Indians
• 10 were Chinese
• Seven Algerians, six of whom were diplomats
• Six were Turkish airline staff
• Two were Moroccans
• Two were Russians working for Ulyanovsk airline
• Guinean singer Sekouba Bambino was there
• An unknown number of French, including 12 Air France crew
• US citizens are suspected to have been in the hotel

Some of the above have managed to escape but 138 people are still trapped in the building as security forces move floor to floor.

God is not great.

Update:

The BBC reports that all the hostages are out.

Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and its offshoot al-Murabitoun said they carried out the attack, according to an agency used by jihadists in the region.

At least 18 people have died and two soldiers wounded.

One of those killed was Geoffrey Dieudonne, a member of parliament in Belgium’s Wallonia region.

Germaine Greer gave that lecture at Cardiff. Nobody melted or imploded or spontaneously combusted or turned into a pillar of salt.

Uniformed police officers stood guard outside the lecture theatre and security officials guarded the doors inside, but in the end only about a dozen people turned up to protest peacefully. Greer told the audience that campaigners had been “trying to frighten me off”, but added: “Here I am.”

She did not mention the issue during her lecture, entitled Women & Power: the Lessons of the 20th Century, but during questions was asked about the controversy. Greer said: “They [trans people] are not my issue. It should be perfectly clear why not. I think 51% of the world’s population is enough for me to be going on with. I do agree that calling people names may add to their misery but it happens to old women every day.”

…

Protesters outside included present and former Cardiff University students who criticised the institution for paying Greer for the lecture. Mair Macey, a former Cardiff University student who now works for HMRC, said: “I really care about transgender people. Having Greer here reflects badly on the values of the university. There is no way she should be invited to give a distinguished lecture.”

Author Elwyn Way said: “We don’t think she should be given a platform like this and go unchallenged.” Way said trans people were suffering emotional and physical violence and needed to be protected rather than vilified.

But her lecture wasn’t about trans people. Preventing her from giving the lecture she was invited to give wouldn’t have made trans people better off in any way. It’s all just performance – “look at me, look at how much I care.”

The saga has caused a fierce debate about free speech and the practice of “no-platforming” speakers whose views might make them unpopular. Quinn said she was frustrated that the free speech issue was overshadowing what she saw as the more salient problem: Greer’s views.

Well look at it this way – suppose you forcibly locked Greer up somewhere to keep her from expressing her views. It would not be surprising is that overshadowed your opinion of her views. The bullying of her for her views overshadowed your worthless opinion on her views – that’s often how that works out.

Harvard Crimson reports a very bad thing:

Law School students and faculty members who walked into Wasserstein Hall on Thursday morning found that pieces of black tape had been placed over the faces of portraits of black professors that hang on walls inside the building. The tape has since been removed.

The incident prompted outrage from Law School affiliates, including second-year Law School student Michele D. Hall, who posted photographs of the vandalized portraits in a post on the website Blavity. “This morning at Harvard Law School we woke up to a hate crime,” she wrote.

Law Professor Ronald S Sullivan tweeted about it:

Ronald S. Sullivan ‏@ProfRonSullivan 7h
This is my portrait at the Harvard Law School. All faculty of color woke up to the same thing this morning.

What the hell is wrong with people?

The National Archives have photos from Manzanar.

Click to embiggen.

To see more go to the archive and search for Manzanar then select “images.”

Another church horror, this one in a suburb of Melbourne.

From the 1970s to the late 1990s, a string of priests abused children in the Australian outer eastern Melbourne suburb of Doveton.

Father Thomas O’Keeffe was a violent offender who tortured some of his altar boys in his time in charge of the Holy Family Parish in the 1970s, Ms Last said.

The article doesn’t use the word “Catholic” until more than halfway through, and then only twice. These are Catholic priests, protected by the Vatican.

Father Peter Searson liked to walk around the Holy Family Primary School playground carrying a revolver and dressed in army fatigues.

…

Broken Rites also believes the independent commissioner for the archdiocese’s Melbourne Response has abuse complaints against Searson from his earlier parishes in the 1960s. His only conviction was for physically assaulting an altar boy, for which he received a six-month good behaviour bond in 1997.

Searson had a fetish for confessional, former Holy Family Primary School principal Graeme Sleeman told Victoria’s child abuse parliamentary inquiry.

Some of the children would say “Father’s creepy”.

They were frightened of Searson. They did not want to go into the church when he was there. They did not want to go to confession with him.

Parents complained regularly about the priest’s treatment of the children, Mr Sleeman said.

And nothing happened. Nothing at all.

Sixty parents and parishioners petitioned for the priest to be removed, yet nothing happened.

Mr Sleeman resigned in frustration in 1986, hoping it would force the church authorities to take action. Instead he was cast aside.

A later teacher, Carmel Rafferty, was told when she started at the school that children were not safe around the priest and staff must be vigilant.

Children reported being abused by Searson, begging for safety.

Ms Rafferty told the Victorian inquiry she felt her career was jeopardised after she raised Searson’s behaviour with senior Catholic Church representatives.

All of them male.

The parish appears to have became something of a dumping ground for problem priests, Dr Chamley said.

“There was a series of problem priests and they all seemed to end up down there. These priests were dropped in there and it was hoped that the problem was going to go away and unfortunately it didn’t,” he said.

Another Doveton priest sexually abused women, Ms Last said.

The number of offending priests in Doveton could be six in a row over 35 years according to Ms Rafferty’s inquiry evidence: the four pedophiles and two who abused women.

Why use Doveton, home to many battlers and factory workers, as a dumping ground? Ms Rafferty had a theory.

“For the archdiocesan people who do the placing I suppose they figured out it was a community of people who would not wake up too quickly, if they had a problem priest in their midst, and a community of people who would be brought up to believe in obedience and loyalty, and the mystique and aura of the priesthood.”

Sure. They don’t put priests like that in neighborhoods where people with power and clout live – that would be silly!

The Manzanar Committee puts out a statement written by Gann Matsuda.

(Manzanar is the name of one of the horrible “camps” in which Japanese-Americans were interned – aka imprisoned – after Pearl Harbor.)

On November 18, the Manzanar Committee repudiated statements by David Bowers, Mayor, Roanoke, Virginia, in which he used the unjust incarceration of over 110,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry as justification for his demand that Syrian refugees be denied asylum in the Roanoke area.

In an official statement, Bowers said, “I’m reminded that President Franklin D. Roosevelt felt compelled to sequester Japanese foreign nationals after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and it appears that the threat of harm to America from ISIS now is just as real and serious as that from our enemies then.”

That’s one of the most bizarrely wrong-headed uses of a historical analogy I’ve ever seen. Yes, Roosevelt “felt compelled” to do that – compelled by the racist xenophobia of a segment of the population, which he didn’t have enough moral courage to rebuke and reject.

The whole thing is based on a ludicrous notion of nationality or ethnic identity, as if all ethnically Japanese people were somehow ethnically loyal to the contemporary government of Japan and the emperor of Japan and the expansionist military policy of Japan. It’s mind-blowingly racist given the fact that Americans with German ancestry were not arrested and imprisoned in camps*.

On top of all that it gets the facts wrong: it was American citizens of Japanese ancestry who were put in camps.

Is it too much to expect of politicians, even mayors, that they have some knowledge of their country’s history before running for office?

Manzanar Committee Co-Chair Bruce Embrey rejected Bowers’ remarks out of hand.

“Mayor Bowers may be just one of many who are using the despicable terrorist acts in Paris for political gain, but his outrageous statement exposes the dangers of unbridled xenophobia, racism and racial profiling during times of crisis,” he said. “How anyone, much less a public official, can cite the World War II incarceration of the Japanese American community as rationale for any policy in this day and age is simply outrageous.”

“Apparently, Mayor Bowers never bothered to learn that President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 was repealed by President Gerald Ford, that the United States Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 to redress the fundamental unconstitutional nature of the forced removal, and that Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush apologized to those incarcerated without charges, without due process, simply because they looked like the enemy.”

Embrey emphasized that Bowers is not alone, in terms of his ignorance of our nation’s history, as well as his blatant political opportunism.

“While it took decades of struggle, Congressional hearings, and intense lobbying by many to win the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, there are some in our country who fail to understand the illegal and unconstitutional nature of Executive Order 9066,” Embrey lamented. “The text of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 cites racism, wartime hysteria, and the failure of political leadership as the driving forces behind the incarceration of the Japanese American community. Unfortunately, these words can easily describe what is going on today.”

No more Manzanars, thank you very much.

H/t Chris Clarke

*Correction – according to History Matters, some German and Italian resident aliens were interned, and a small number of citizens were.

Although it is not well known, the same executive order (and other war-time orders and restrictions) were also applied to smaller numbers of residents of the United States who were of Italian or German descent. For example, 3,200 resident aliens of Italian background were arrested and more than 300 of them were interned. About 11,000 German residents—including some naturalized citizens—were arrested and more than 5000 were interned.

But given the fact that more were arrested than were interned, there must have been some winnowing process, which means there must have been some criterion in addition to ancestry. That’s just what there wasn’t in the case of the Japanese internments.

Jeremy Duns has an extended exposé of the risible Twitter personality Mo Ansar. One section of it is illuminating about what may be something a lot of people are doing on Twitter (which would explain people who seem to spend hours every day doing it).

Ansar’s main base of operations is Twitter, where his persona often appears charming and reasonable. It is a Potemkin persona, designed to impress bookers from TV and radio shows as well as to curry favour with media figures. It’s a method he has honed over several years, and it goes like this: he sees something in the news that he feels he can use to lever himself into the media, usually something related to Islam or Muslims. Media bookers often search Twitter to see how people are discussing the news, and frequently invite pundits on as a result of conversations they have on the site.

Ohhhhh. I can think of several people who must be trying to do that. (Otherwise the waste of so much time and effort is inexplicable.) There are definitely people who claim to be writers and even journalists but have never written anything but tweets.

Ansar takes a position on Twitter he knows will appeal to the media, often a controversial one. In most cases, some people will disagree with him, but several users will support his points and perhaps tweet media figures directly to ask them their view of what he is saying or even to ask why he has not been featured on their programme yet. Ansar also often tries to involve high-profile figures connected to the issue in his conversations, including their Twitter handles so they will see what he is saying – if they then argue against his position, there is a strong chance someone in the media will see it and he’ll be asked on to provide ‘the other side of the story’ or simply ‘the Muslim viewpoint’.

Well surely not all that strong – there must be thousands of people doing the same thing. Again, I can think of some without even looking.

So he casts out his lure. In some cases, nothing happens. But sometimes an unsuspecting booker for a news programme will be searching Twitter and come across the conversations he is having on the issue in question. Who is this Mo Ansar, they wonder. The name rings a bell. Is he someone they could conceivably have on? They check his profile and see he has over 30,000 followers on the site and that his profile includes photographs of himself in deep conversation with Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight and with Russell Brand. Clicking through to the link to his website on his profile, they see he has been on the BBC many times, as well as Sky, Channel 4, CNN, Al Jazeera and Russia Today. A search of his name on YouTube reveals these appearances to be genuine. He even has a Wikipedia entry about him. He is someone. So they send him a tweet asking if they could have his details, and soon a car is making its way to his house to take him to the studio.

While all those other poor dweebs don’t have the photos of themselves talking to Jeremy Paxman, so it’s all for naught.

A deeper search online would have brought up the numerous exposés of him, but Ansar is counting on the fact that people booking current affairs programmes will be under pressure and in a hurry, and is hoping his exposure has passed them by or been forgotten. The above strategy is carefully constructed and relies on a series of deceptions. Several of the Twitter accounts retweeting his views, arguing in his favour with others and alerting high-profile broadcasters to him are simply Ansar himself operating aliases, or ‘sockpuppets’, as they are known. He has at least ten sockpuppets on Twitter. With some of these, he is far more open in his sympathies for Islamist extremism than he can be on his usually piously moderate account in his own name, which affects a tone of being above the fray. At least two of these identities have been foul-mouthed and abusive, and he’s used them to smear people he regards as enemies, such as Maajid Nawaz, presenters Nicky Campbell and Iain Dale and the historian Tom Holland, who he compared to Anders Breivik. Evidence and more background on how he did that from behind an acount he called ‘The Truthteller’ is here, and I describe his use of ‘Ann Fields’ and related accounts here.

A cunning plan, for sure.

Barry Duke at The Freethinker tells us:

Iain Lee has lost his job as a presenter for BBC Three Counties radio after calling an anti-gay Christian group representative ‘a bigot’ during a debate on homophobia.

Lee made the comments to Libby Powell, a lawyer for the Christian Legal Centre, who was appearing on breakfast show to defend homophobic Pentecostal preacher Barry Trayhorn who had read out verses from the Bible condemning homosexuality during a service at a prison.

The presenter described the passages, and Libby’s belief in them, as “homophobic” and “bigoted” during a heated debate.

He asked her “Do you support bigotry?” and, when Libby defended her stance, said:

You’ve chosen not to question it, because you’re a bigot.

So the BBC doesn’t want him presenting things for them any more.

I suppose I can understand why the BBC doesn’t want its presenters calling people names, even names like “bigot”…but even so, I find it a tad sickening.

The on-air row arose from Reverend Barry Trayhorn’s reading of 1 Corinthians, Chapter 6, Verses 9-11 at HMP Littlehey in Cambridgeshire in May 2014.  He was working as a gardener at the prison.

Trayhorn subsequently said he felt “compelled” to resign from his job and brought a case of constructive dismissal.

Ok, so let’s have 1 Corinthians 6:

Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men¹⁰ nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.

It’s that weirdly impoverished morality again, the same one that’s so striking in the “ten commandments” – nothing about cruelty or torture or rape or abuse or exploitation or violence – it’s all either “vices” or property crimes. It sweats the small stuff while ignoring the large. It is indeed a morality for bigots.

But it doesn’t do to say so.

Update: The SOAS SU Twitter account says it’s not true, and they’ll investigate tomorrow to find out where the story came from.

SOAS Students’ Union ‏@soassu 40 minutes ago
There was no vote to no-platform @monaeltahawy, we are not sure where this story came from.

Ophelia Benson ‏@OpheliaBenson 23 minutes ago
@soassu @monaeltahawy Nor a vote that she not be allowed to give a talk, but a panel instead?

SOAS Students’ Union ‏@soassu 18 minutes ago
@OpheliaBenson @monaeltahawy no, no vote.

Will investigate further tomorrow where this story came from to see what has happened.

So, good.

Original post:

In the You have got to be kidding department –

Mona Eltahawy tweets that the SOAS Student Union has voted not to let her speak.

Mona Eltahawy ‏@monaeltahawy 5 hours ago
And I just found out that SOAS student union voted to not let me speak at invitation of some students. Union insisted on panel & not me alone

Mona Eltahawy! Who had her arms broken by the Egyptian police during a Tahrir Square demo. What do they think she is, an agent of imperialism?

Apparently, some students don’t like my views. This is brilliant! I was getting worried why I wasn’t being prevented from speaking at UK uni’s.

We’re literally about to take off but I had to share this SOAS nonsense &say while I’m glad my views upset some,what a shame they’re scared.

The student who invited me – a feminist – is understandably angry & upset. More when I land.

I’m pretty pissed off myself.

Originally a comment by SA Wells on Changing the subject again.

It’s taken me some time to decode that too, but I think I get it. The claim is that any recognition that genitals are relevant to gender is bad and wrong; because in order for the claim that “trans women are women full stop” to be true, all women would have to be women for the same reason, viz. an internal sense of gender identification. This of course flies in the face of the observable reality, which is that almost all women (or men) or regarded as women (or men) because they were born with female (or male) bodies and were told that that makes them girls/women (or boys/men) and they do not feel the sort of dysphoria that would lead them to identify as trans.

In other words, there are in reality multiple senses in which someone can be a woman, of which the most common – sense 1 – is being a person born with a female body and not being trans; one much less common – sense 2 – is being a person born with a male body but being trans and identifying as a woman. Workable trans advocacy is based on advocating that senses 1 and 2 be treated as equivalent for most purposes, and that people who are women in senses 1 or 2 have equal human worth. Unworkable trans advocacy, e.g. the sort of thing that got Ophelia hounded off FtB for thinking, seems to rely on denying sense 1 entirely and insisting that all women are women because they identify as women. To me this seems like advocating for gay rights by claiming that everybody is straight.

This feeds over in several odd directions, one in particular being the claim that if a person is female in the identity sense, then their body is female, tout court, as being the body of a female person. This of course relies on ignoring that there’s a sense of male/female for bodies (bluntly, having tab A or slot B) which doesn’t have to map onto the sense of male/female for persons. This seems like a deliberately or unconsciously Orwellian move to disable the language – and it ignores the way languages work anyway. The word “head” has different senses as applied to a human body, a geographical feature (Beachy Head), a sexual act, a pint of beer, an organisation, or a steam engine, but this doesn’t cause any actual difficulties; yet the word “female” apparently cannot be permitted any such polysemy.

Amy Poehler has a thing I didn’t know about, called Smart Girls. As part of that, she has this highly appealing video in which two women – who say they are each other’s fiancées – explain about female bodies, starting with menstruation. I wish I could be besties with both of them. Cameron Esposito and Rhea Butcher, they’re called.

Good, right? Great idea?

Most commenters on the Facebook post about it think so, but there’s an exception.

Hey Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls. I think you are doing a great job empowering cisgender girls–but that’s about where it stops. All kids with vaginas, breasts, or any of the parts that you refer to as “the female bod,” deserve to be empowered and well educated about their bodies.

Bodies are not as simple as “female” and “male” and neither is gender. And it is harmful to teach children (especially girls) that they are a sum of their genitals. (i.e. that a certain genital configuration=female. that is outdated and hurtful)

This post equates womanhood with vagina– and that is very hurtful to trans girls. It is also hurtful to intersex kids, trans boys, and nonbinary trans kids. Body parts and gender are both spectrums.

I think you do a great amount of work, but I really think you could make a stronger effort to include (rather than isolate and exclude) all kinds of underprivileged genders–girls, trans kids, and intersex kids. These kids deserve to learn about their bodies too.

Same old shit – stop talking about girls, stop telling girls about their bodies.

H/t Jen

George Ongere has a guest post at CFI about Ron Lindsay’s visit to CFI-Kenya. (I was looking forward to seeing George Ongere at the CFI conference last June, but he couldn’t get a visa. Many disappointed people there.)

On November 10 and 11, 2015, CFI President and CEO Ron Lindsay visited CFI–Kenya. Ron’s visit during this time was very important because he was coming to officially launch the Humanist Orphans Center, which is a project of CFI–Kenya, located in the rural of Kisumu County. While launching the center, Ron stressed the importance of education to the growing generation and explained the commitment of the Center for Inquiry to supporting vulnerable children living in disadvantaged areas to make them realize their potential.

Since 2013, through the support from CFI, we have managed to sponsor 11 orphans’ schooling. In this arrangement, we have paid school fees, bought uniforms and books, and helped their guardians to provide some of the children’s basic needs by distributing foodstuffs. We are glad for the continued support from CFI to this particular program that has enabled us to sustain the program.

…

Apart from launching the Humanist Center, Ron also had the opportunity to visit our offices at Varsity Plaza, located inside Maseno University. Thereafter, he met the campus Maseno University group at Kisumu Hotel and gave a powerful presentation about humanism.

Read the whole thing and see the photos of the children and university students.