The linguist Deborah Cameron dissects the damaging allure of neuroscience for non-scientists who write books about female and male brains.

For every scientist doing her best to communicate the complexity of contemporary brain research, there are a hundred non-scientists—self-help gurus, life-coaches, marketing consultants—churning out what has been labelled ‘neurobollocks’, a species of discourse that purports to be scientific, but is actually, in the words of one article on the subject, ‘self-help books dressed up in a lab coat’.

You can picture them on the shelves at Barnes & Noble or Waterstones, in the Men Are From Mars section.

The language connection explains why over the years I have felt obliged to read such classics of neurosexism as Why Men Don’t Iron, which proclaimed on its cover in 1999 that ‘men’s brains are built for action and women’s for talking: men do, women communicate’; and The Female Brain, a bestseller in 2006, whose author was so convinced that women’s brains are built for talking, she reproduced the invented statistic that men on average utter 7000 words a day whereas women on average utter 20,000.  (As I explained in an earlier post, real research shows that women don’t talk more than men: where there’s a difference, it usually goes in the other direction.)

Anecdotally, I’ve never noticed men being shy about dominating conversations.

At the end of last month, the mainstream media were full of headlines like ‘Scans prove there’s no such thing as a “male” or “female” brain’ and ‘Men are from Mars, women are from Venus? New brain study says not’.

What occasioned these headlines was a research study which looked at a large number of structural features on MRI scans of over 1400 people’s brains, and found that only a small minority of those brains displayed consistently ‘male’ or ‘female’ characteristics. The majority were a mixture: they showed some of the characteristics previous research has associated more with male than female subjects, and some of the characteristics that previous research has associated more with female than male subjects. The conclusion the researchers drew was that if you examine the brain as a whole, there aren’t two distinct types that could sensibly be described as ‘male’ and ‘female’.

So will the people who write the “women gossip and men do math” books stop writing those books? Cameron doubts they will.

Maybe they should, but I very much doubt they will, because this is not the kind of popular science that’s written for laypeople with an interest in science. As the article quoted earlier observes, it’s more like self-help in a lab coat. Rather than starting from current debates in neuroscience, writers begin with familiar gender stereotypes (things like ‘men don’t listen’ and ‘women talk all the time’), and then cherry-pick a few studies whose results appear to support the argument they want to make (that these behaviours are ‘hard-wired’ in the brain).

…

Readers who buy books with titles like Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps are not looking for a nuanced, scientific discussion of sex and gender. They’re looking for a story that confirms their beliefs about how men and women are different, and reassures them that men and women will always be different no matter how much feminists shout and scream. It’s not about the science, it’s about the politics.

Men and women will always always be different. Some women will have male bodies, and some men will have female bodies, but that’s just a surface phenomenon that doesn’t mean anything. The real Woman and Man is inside the head, in the brain, choosing either the pink frilly skirt or the black tailored trousers. That’s that sorted.

Every generation of scientific sexists disclaims the errors and biases of its predecessors and assures us that today’s science is different. Yet in one fundamental respect it isn’t different at all: contemporary scientists may be offering a new explanation for sex-differences, but the differences they’re trying to explain are the same old collection of stereotypes and myths. Occasionally one of these does fade into obsolescence (no one today suggests that education shrivels the ovaries); but many are in the category of ‘zombie facts’ which have been around forever (sometimes they’re older than science itself), have never been supported by good evidence, and still refuse to die.

The belief that women are the ‘more verbal’ sex is a case in point. Every time I encounter yet another discussion of what neuroscience might have to tell us about this (and such discussions appear in the scholarly literature as well as the popular bollocks), I feel as if I’m reading an account of how unicorns evolved. How compelling I find the explanation is beside the point: there are no unicorns, and women don’t talk more than men.

Well ok maybe women don’t talk more than men…but women certainly are way more irritating than men when they talk, which if you think about it is kind of the same thing. That’s science.

That’s why I’m cautious about hailing the ‘no such thing as a male/female brain’ study as a great leap forward, politically as well as scientifically. I do think the findings of the study are interesting, and I’m glad to see research evidence casting doubt on the idea of brain-sex. But I don’t think that gets to the root of the problem. The beliefs that are most damaging to women are not beliefs about the brain as such, they’re beliefs about sex-specific abilities and behaviour (like ‘women are no good at maths’ or ‘men can’t express their feelings’) which at the moment are often justified by appealing to supposed facts about the brain. Those beliefs may be reinforced by ‘the seductive allure of neuroscience explanations’, but they existed long before those explanations became available, and they could survive if those explanations were discredited.

No matter how much feminists shout and scream.

And now for something completely different from Saudi Arabia – the Independent reporting that they did indeed lie about the numbers of people who were killed in the crush at Mina during the hajj. Only a little – only by a factor of 3.

A stampede during the hajj in Saudi Arabia killed three times the number of people acknowledged by the Kingdom, according to the Associated Press.

A new count reveals at least 2,411 people died during the crush at Mina on 24 September, despite the official Saudi toll of 769 deaths not changing since 26 September.

That’s only 1642 people not reported. That’s only Saudi officialdom treating the pointless deaths of ONE THOUSAND SIX HUNDRED FORTY TWO people as not worth mentioning. That’s only the Saudi state trying to hide the fact that its combination of religious fanaticism and indifference to safety caused 1642 people to be crushed to death by a press of human bodies.

Iran was the most affected by the disaster, with 464 Iranian pilgrims killed. Mali lost 35 people, Nigeria lost 274 and 109 Egyptians were killed, according to the AP count.

Bangladesh, Indonesia, India, Cameroon and Pakistan all lost over 100 pilgrims, while many other countries across the globe where affected.

Well, you know. They’re foreign. They’re Shi’a. They’re African. They don’t matter the way Saudi people matter.

Tell me about the ummah again?

Saudi Arabia has spent billions on crowd control and safety measures for those attending the annual five-day pilgrimage, which is required of all able-bodied Muslims once in their lifetime, however the vast number of people taking part in the pilgrimage makes ensuring safety difficult.

What does the Indy mean “required”? Required by what or whom? It’s a “requirement” internal to Islam, and one that is clearly both onerous and dangerous. Secular news outlets shouldn’t refer to it as “required” in that casual way.

Saudi Arabia is all about what is “required” by Islam, and Saudi Arabia is a terrible place. The two facts are not unconnected.

A note from Maryam:

Delivered letter today to 10 Downing Street calling for end to parallel legal systems with one law for all, southall black sisters, Iranian Kurdish women’s rights organisation, centre for secular space and British Muslims for secular democracy.

A very worrying alert from Ensaf Haidar:

TOP URGENT: Saudi Prison administration transferred Raif Badawi to a new isolated prison and Raif started a hunger strike since Tuesday

The prison administration transferred today my husband Raif Badawi to a new isolated prison called Prison Shabbat Central, located in a deserted and isolated area – around 87 KM from Jeddah City.

This prison is designed for prisoners whose verdict has been confirmed with a final Adjudication. The Saudi government has repeatedly declared that Raif’s case is under review and is yet to be decided by the Supreme Court.

More on the Michelle Goldberg article.

Cohn estimates that there are about 20 gender-critical trans bloggers, though their Internet presences tend to wax and wane; some who were active just a few months ago have pulled back, while others have just begun. Among the most prominent are Snowflake Especial and Gender Minefield, as well as Gender Apostates, a group blog run by both trans and cisgender women. Like many other trans people, the trans writers behind these blogs have experienced a searing conflict between their physiognomy and their self-conceptions. Like the broader trans rights movement, they believe in fighting violence and discrimination against trans people. But they reject the idea that biological sex is mutable, though sex organs obviously are. They see a difference between living as a woman and being one. Perhaps most of all, they object to the strain of online trans activism that seeks to erase sex distinctions through language alone—for example, by designating the penis a female organ, or by removing the word “woman” from reproductive rights activism.

There are good reasons for objecting to that. Women are still an oppressed class, as women, so removing the word that names them from discussions of rights they are denied is a very bad idea.

Highwater, for one, struggles to reconcile her convictions about gender with her desire not to hurt other trans women. “What I think a lot of trans people hear, if you suggest that trans women aren’t women, is, ‘Stop kidding yourself, you’re just a man, go back to living as a man,’ ” Highwater says. “That’s not what this means. The fact that I hold these views doesn’t mean that I think that trans women aren’t valid. It doesn’t mean that I don’t think they don’t have a right to live their lives the way they live their lives.”

So what does it mean? “I lived 40 years trying to live as a bloke,” Highwater says. “I’ve not experienced the things women have experienced. I’ve not been brought up that way. So why on earth would I want to claim that I’m a woman as much as any other woman? To me, it no longer makes any sense. What seems to be a much more honest approach is: ‘I am an adult human male who has suffered with a level of sex dysphoria for whatever reason for decades, and have now got to the point where I’ve had to make a social transition.’ ”

Michelle Goldberg has written an article about heretical trans women – you know, the ones who don’t buy the ever-shifting but always-binding Current Dogma of how one is allowed to understand and talk about gender.

Last month, a 42-year-old English accountant who goes by the pseudonym Helen Highwater wrote a blog post disputing the idea that trans women are women. Helen is trans herself; in the last few years, she says, she has taken all the steps the U.K.’s National Health Service requires before it authorizes gender reassignment surgery, which she plans to have in 2016. Yet she has come to reject the idea that she is truly female or that she ever will be. Though “trans women are women” has become a trans rights rallying cry, Highwater writes, it primes trans women for failure, disappointment, and cognitive dissonance. She calls it a “vicious lie.”

“It’s a lie that sets us up to be triggered every time we are called he, or ‘guys’ or somebody dares to suggest that we have male biology,” she writes. “Even a cursory glance from a stranger can cut to our very core. The very foundations of our self-worth are fragile.”

From the perspective of the contemporary trans rights movement, this is close to blasphemy. Most progressives now take it for granted that gender is a matter of identity, not biology, and that refusing to recognize a person’s gender identity is an outrageous offense.

The case of the Sri Lankan woman who was scheduled to be stoned to death in Saudi Arabia for “adultery” is going to be reviewed. That’s good news. Let’s hope they “review” the case so thoroughly that they decide to send her home instead of torturing her to death.

Harsha de Silva, the deputy foreign minister [of Sri Lanka], told parliament on Tuesday that an appeals court in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s capital, has decided to hear the case again following pleas by Sri Lanka’s foreign ministry.

…

The 45-year-old woman, who is married with two children, was working as a maid in Saudi Arabia. She was sentenced to death in August. The unmarried Sri Lankan man convicted alongside her was sentenced to 100 lashes. The foreign ministry has not revealed their identities.

Sri Lanka’s foreign minister, Mangala Samaraweera, met an official from the Saudi embassy in Colombo last week and expressed Sri Lanka’s concerns about the case. Samaraweera has also requested to speak to Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister to seek clemency for the woman.

While they’re at it, they might consider adopting a more humane and reasonable and rights-respecting system of laws.

The NSS reports:

A coalition of Muslim writers, activists and politicians has launched a “Muslim Reform Movement” rejecting violence and calling for a defence of secularism, democracy and liberty.

The reformers have issued a Declaration defending gender equality, freedom of speech and freedom of religion, stating that they are for “secular governance” and “against political movements in the name of religion.”

They have called for the separation of “mosque and state” and emphatically reject the “idea of the Islamic state”.

Activists from the group stuck their Declaration of Reform on to the front door of the Islamic Centre of Washington, a mosque the movement described as “heavily influenced by the government of Saudi Arabia”.

The preamble to the Declaration states: “We are Muslims who live in the 21st century. We stand for a respectful, merciful and inclusive interpretation of Islam. We are in a battle for the soul of Islam, and an Islamic renewal must defeat the ideology of Islamism, or politicized Islam, which seeks to create Islamic states, as well as an Islamic caliphate.

The signatories add that they “support the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by United Nations member states in 1948.”

That’s key. Islamists don’t support the UDHR. The Cairo Declaration is an alternative DHR that makes all the rights subject to compliance with Sharia. If a stated right doesn’t comply with Sharia, out it goes.

Rejecting violence, the preamble goes on: “Facing the threat of terrorism, intolerance, and social injustice in the name of Islam, we have reflected on how we can transform our communities based on three principles: peace, human rights and secular governance. We are announcing today the formation of an international initiative: the Muslim Reform Movement.”

The founders of the group include Muslims and public figures from Canada, the UK and the United States, including Usama Hasan of the UK-based Quilliam Foundation.

The organisers are now calling for support from “fellow Muslims and neighbours”.

The Declaration says the movement stands for “universal peace, love and compassion” and rejects “violent jihad”.

“We stand for the protection of all people of all faiths and non-faith who seek freedom from dictatorships, theocracies and Islamist extremists.”

They reject blasphemy laws and sexism.

“Every individual has the right to publicly express criticism of Islam. Ideas do not have rights. Human beings have rights. We reject blasphemy laws. They are a cover for the restriction of freedom of speech and religion. We affirm every individual’s right to participate equally in ijtihad, or critical thinking, and we seek a revival of ijtihad.”

Farahnaz Ispahani, a former Pakistani politician and signatory of the Declaration, said: “If Muslim minorities in non-Muslim countries are to be protected, we must demand the protection of non-Muslims within Muslim-majority countries.”

The Declaration also singles out gender equality and the protection of women’s rights, stating: “We support equal rights for women, including equal rights to inheritance, witness, work, mobility, personal law, education, and employment. Men and women have equal rights in mosques, boards, leadership and all spheres of society. We reject sexism and misogyny.”

Good luck to them!

The president of the Goldsmiths ISOC has resigned, because too many people had saved his homophobic tweets and were giving him grief about them.

Goldsmiths Islamic Society (ISOC) President Muhammed Patel has resigned from his position after a motion of no confidence.

The society released a statement via its Facebook page today and although the group did not say what allegations were attributed to Patel that led to his resignation, it is believed that the President published a series of homophobic messages via his Twitter account, which has recently been deleted.

The committee have elected an interim leader who has yet to be named. Patel declined to comment when approached by The Leopard but an ISOC member assured The Leopard that Patel would be publishing an apology this evening.

Oh yes? Where is it then? It’s one in the morning there now, so evening is long gone.

Let’s look at that Facebook statement:

Goldsmiths Islamic Society Statement:

In light of recent allegations attributed to, Muhammed Patel, a meeting was called to discuss a motion of no confidence. Soon after Muhammad tendered his resignation and it was accepted by the committee.

In the interim, the committee will appoint an acting president to serve for the remainder of the academic year.

The committee would like to extend gratitude to all societies on campus specifically the FemSoc and LGBTQ societies’ for their continued support in the face of inaccurate assertions, threats and Islamophobic messages. Hate speech of any kind has no place in our society.

Goldsmiths Islamic Society

But of course Maryam didn’t engage in any hate speech. It’s kind of hate speech-like to say she did.

And notice that they don’t say what the allegations were. Brave heroes.

Another resolution from the NUS Women Conference:

Motion 512: Dear White Gay Men: Stop Appropriating Black Women

Conference Believes:

1. The appropriation of Black women by white gay men is prevalent within the LGBT scene and community.
2. This may be manifested in the emulation of the mannerisms, language (particularly AAVE- African American Vernacular English) and phrases that can be attributed to Black women. White gay men may often assert that they are “strong black women” or have an “inner black woman”.
3. White gay men are the dominant demographic within the LGBT community, and they benefit from both white privilege and male privilege.
4. The appropriation of Black women by white gay men has been written about extensively. This quote is taken from Sierra Mannie’s TIME piece entitled: “Dear white gays, stop stealing Black Female culture”:

“You are not a black woman, and you do not get to claim either blackness or womanhood. There is a clear line between appreciation and appropriation. I need some of you to cut it the hell out. Maybe, for some of you, it’s a presumed mutual appreciation for Beyoncé and weaves that has you thinking that I’m going to be amused by you approaching me in your best “Shanequa from around the way” voice. I don’t know. What I do know is that I don’t care how well you can quote Madea, who told you that your booty was getting bigger than hers, how cute you think it is to call yourself a strong black woman, who taught you to twerk, how funny you think it is to call yourself Quita or Keisha or for which black male you’ve been bottoming — you are not a black woman, and you do not get to claim either blackness or womanhood. It is not yours. It is not for you.”

I’m sure you see the problem before I point it out. Isn’t that…trans-exclusionary? To tell men they’re not women, and that they don’t get to claim womanhood? Isn’t it trans-exclusionary to tell anyone that, because if people identify as women then they are women? Isn’t Sierra Mannie doing a very wrong thing by saying that? Aren’t women absolutely forbidden to say that anyone is not a woman? That’s certainly the impression I’ve been getting.

Conference Further Believes:

1. This type of appropriation is unacceptable and must be addressed.
2. Low numbers of Black LGBT women delegates attend NUS LGBT conference. This can be attributed to many factors, one of which may be the prevalent appropriation by white gay men, which may mean that delegates do not feel comfortable or safe attending conference.

But there again – isn’t it trans-exclusionary to call it “appropriation” when men pretend to be identify as women?

Conference Resolves:

1. To work to eradicate the appropriation of black women by white gay men.
2. To work in conjunction with NUS LGBT campaign to raise awareness of the issue, to call it out as unacceptable behaviour and, where appropriate, to educate those who perpetuate this behaviour.

How do they know the white gay men aren’t women? How do they know?

The filmmaker Jennifer Hall Lee asks why British women are being called “Islamophobes.”

“We are in the ISIS era.”

Houzan [Mahmoud], a Kurdish woman who is a representative of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, made that proclamation at the recent Feminism in London conference. She was on a panel of four feminists called, “Unlikely Allies: Religious Fundamentalism and the British State,” that focused on the connection between Islamic fundamentalism and British law.

I attended this panel to hear Maryam Namazie, an Iranian Muslim-born woman who lives in London and is a spokesperson for One Law for All, a group that opposes Sharia law in Britain. I was unprepared for the bluntness of the talk about ISIS and the extreme pressure progressive feminists are putting on these women to be silent and to curb their critique of what they see as an untenable situation for Muslim women there.

When Mahmoud said that “We need to reclaim the left and feminism,” and that it is a “historical task and necessity,” the audience erupted into applause. Clearly this is an important topic of discussion in the UK.

But why would these women on this panel feel the need to reclaim feminism? Because they are branded as Islamaphobes by progressives and feminists in the UK for their criticisms of Sharia councils and Islam.

“Progressives” like the LGBTQ+ Society at Goldsmiths; “feminists” like the Feminist Society at Goldsmiths.

I’m fascinated with the new dynamic that’s being creating between what were once opposing groups – feminists and fundamentalists. But now some feminists are aligning with fundamentalism? I believe the use of the word “Islamophobe” is being used as a tool to shut down critical thought about male-dominated religions and the negative impact they have on women. As Namazie said, “Progressives no longer believe in self-expression, they believe in self censorship.”

So what does this all mean for me? I am Catholic and have long been a critic of the Catholic Church. Catholicism is rife with sexism. I consider it a male-dominated religion that preserves the top power spots for men. Moreover, the gown-wearing priests, who boldly opine on women’s roles in society and private lives, are just a religious variation on ‘mansplaining.’

To deny women the opportunity to be priests is discrimination. My right to say so does not make me a Catholic-phobe.

And “Islamophobe” isn’t parallel to “Catholic-phobe” anyway; it would have to be “Muslim-phobe” to be that.

Mahmoud says of the word Islamaphobia, “I think this in itself is racist.” She compared the well-worn history of progressives and feminists who have criticized religion as part of their feminist analysis of patriarchy. As a woman with a Muslim background she claims the same right. Yet these same leftists do not support her right to reject religion, as they would probably support mine.

She refers to these progressives as “white people [who] can ridicule, criticize and break away from Christianity.” She saw discrimination in the way liberals use Islamaphobia to shut down protestors because they are “people from a Muslim origin [who] reject their religion and all forms of religiosity.”

[Gita Sahgal] said, “Multi-culturalism and multi-faithism shrinks secular space.” In other words, by seeing society as just a collection of homogenous groups of people identified by religion we deny their individuality as citizens.

We also give short shrift to all the other ways people can “identify,” in other words all the other things that matter to people.

We are living in a strange time of shifting allegiances, demands for censorship and pleas for safe space. And feminists, when they align with the male religions who attempt to shut down the anti-religion feminists, shrink the secular space.

In fact, a dramatic moment at the panel discussion crystalized the debate when towards the end of the presentation, as audience members were asking questions of these brave feminists, a white woman stood up and criticized them. She labeled them Islamaphobes and then abruptly left the room, clearly not willing to engage in further discussion.

Mahmoud says in general of her critics, “Their criticism will not silence us, because we have a just cause, we own it, we know more about it and we continue to expose all religions for their hypocrisy and women hating.”

When feminist allies turn their backs on secular feminists in favor of allegiances with male-dominated religious groups, we are indeed living in the ISIS Era.

 

But we are also resisting.

The NY Times has more on what the FBI and other agencies are discovering about Tashfeen Malik and Syed Farook. None of it is cheerful or consoling. None of it says: this was a peculiar, one-off event with peculiar motivations that are most unlikely to be duplicated anywhere else. It says the opposite of that.

The main point is that they were both “radical”; they no longer think that Malik “radicalized” Farook.

Investigators say they have learned through interviews with people who knew Mr. Farook for several years that he had militant views before he met Ms. Malik online and married her in Saudi Arabia.

“At first it seemed very black and white to us that he changed radically when he met her,” said one of the officials who declined to be identified because of the continuing investigation. “But it’s become clear that he was that way before he met her.”

And she was probably that way before she met him.

A fuller portrait of Ms. Malik emerged in Pakistan, where she completed a degree in pharmacology at Bahauddin Zakariya University in Multan.

Ms. Malik also spent a year studying at an Al-Huda center, a conservative religious school for women in Multan, a city in central Pakistan, officials said Monday. Officials at the center said she enrolled in an 18-month course to study the Quran in 2013, just as she completed her degree at Bahauddin Zakariya. But she left before finishing the course, telling administrators she was getting married.

There you go, you see – 18 months to study one book. What can anyone get from such a thing but fanaticism? No one book is the answer to everything, or the guide to everything. That’s all the more true when the one book is not one by a physicist or a philosopher but rather one by a purported prophet who lived a very long time ago and had minimal education. You could perhaps study, say, Montaigne’s essays for 18 months without wasting your time. They make up a very fat book and they provide material for further exploration. He’d done a lot of reading himself, and his mentality was the opposite of a prophet’s mentality. But Mohammed was no Montaigne, in so many senses. Montaigne detested religious warfare and coercion; Mohammed loved nothing better. Immersion in the Koran is not a healthy thing.

Farrukh Chaudhry, a spokeswoman for Al-Huda, an international chain of religious schools geared toward educated and often affluent women, said that Ms. Malik stopped her studies with the group in May 2014. A few months later, she was granted a K-1 visa, known as a “fiancé visa,” that enabled her to travel to the United States, according to American officials.

Critics in Pakistan have long said that Al-Huda, which urges women to cover their faces and to study the Quran, spreads a more conservative strain of Islam. But it has never been directly linked to jihadist violence.

That’s beside the point, unfortunately. That’s the festering sore at the heart of this whole subject. Narrow pious religious fanaticism tends toward hatred of others who don’t share the religion, and thus ultimately toward violence. Not all religious fanatics go on killing sprees. Yay, what a relief, thank fuck for small favors. Not all do, but some do, and that’s a fact.

Ms. Malik and fellow students studied and interpreted the Quran — a typical line of study at Al-Huda, which focuses heavily on Islamic scripture. “Quran for all; in every hand, every heart,” reads the slogan on the group’s website. Before leaving in May 2014, Ms. Malik had requested information about completing her studies by correspondence, Ms. Chaudhry added. “We sent her the documents by email, but never heard back,” she said.

Al-Huda, founded in 1994, sometimes draws women who turn to the group after their children have grown up, sometimes causing friction in their families as less pious members complain of being pressured to conform with a more conservative family lifestyle.

The more piety leads to the more coerciveness. It would be nice if more piety always meant more Quaker-type virtues, but it doesn’t.

“They are trained to be activists and reformers, bringing people back to what they call the ‘real’ Islam, true and pure,” said Faiza Mushtaq, an assistant professor of sociology at the Institute of Business Administration in Karachi, whose Ph.D. study focused on Al-Huda.

And that’s why they’re dangerous.

The organization’s founder, Farhat Hashmi, is based in Canada, but she has a large following in Pakistan, which has grown partly through the use of social media. Officials with the group emphasize that while it is conservative, it has no links to violence. Critics largely accept that idea, while countering that the group may foster a dangerously narrow mind-set.

Exactly. The fact that conservative-religious group X doesn’t tell its members to pick up the gun doesn’t mean it doesn’t inspire or motivate them to do so.

“Religious conservatism and piety are not the only thing institutions like Al-Huda spread,” said Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani ambassador to the United States now at the Hudson Institute, a think tank in Washington. “Their teachings have a strong dose of ‘Muslims are destined to lead the world’ and ‘the corrupt West must be confronted.’ ”

Religious zealotry is what it is, and not something else.

The Vatican. Again.

A group representing victims of sexual abuse at the hands of Catholic priests has blasted the San Diego Catholic Diocese for appointing a priest who admitted to destroying documents detailing sexual assaults to oversee their sex abuse hotline.

The San Diego Catholic Diocese appointed a priest who destroyed documents detailing sexual assaults to oversee their sex abuse hotline. A priest who covered up sexual assaults will be overseeing a sex abuse hotline. A fox who dines on chicken every night will be guarding the hen house.

[Father Steven] Callahan is listed as the Victims’ Assistance Coordinator on the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego website — with a phone number to call the priest as well as an email address.

In a court deposition in 2007, after approximately 150 men and women filed suit against the San Diego diocese over sexual abuse claims, Callahan admitted to destroying documents in the early 90’s implicating a fellow priest.

…

According to attorney Irwin Zalkin, who was representing about third of the victims, Callahan admitted under oath that he destroyed personnel files in the early 1990s, with Zalkin calling it evidence of a cover-up.

“He claims he was following Canon Law, but no one in the diocese destroyed these records till he came along,” Zalkin claimed before adding, “They came in and destroyed priests’ confidential files, they destroyed important seminary records and engaged in a cover-up that precluded people trying to prove up their claims.”

Also? Besides? Fuck Canon Law. Priests are subject to the law-law, just like everyone else. Priests don’t get to protect rapists just because they’re priests.

“When nuns or priests are assigned to these hotlines, we believe church officials are using them to keep abuse reports quiet,” said Tim Lennon of SNAP in an emailed statement.”If they sincerely want victims to call and get help, bishops would have lay social workers—not ordained clerics or lawyers—respond to these deeply wounded and mistrustful individuals.”

It’s almost as if the church is using victims to tell them which priests they need to protect or send to a distant parish.

An album of twenty photos of nature photographers at work.

Really?

A tweet:

Anne Thériault ‏@anne_theriault 9 hours ago Toronto, Ontario
“biological sex” and “female body” are definitely transphobic red flags

Really?

At that rate, is anything not a “transphobic red flag”?

And why female body but not male body?

Why is it always women and feminists who are in the cross-hairs? Why is there so much talk of TERFs but zero talk of TEMRAs? Why is it always women and feminists? Why is it always women and feminists?

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.