Via Ali Rizvi on Twitter:

In 2015 SArabia’s beheaded 150+ people, incl for “crimes” like sorcery: @SaudiEmbassyUSA @SaudiEmbassyUK #SueMeSaudi

Sue me.

Adam Taylor at the Washington Post reports that Saudi Arabia considers itself profoundly different from IS, and that it plans to persuade everyone of this by suing people who say otherwise.

Authorities in Saudi Arabia have long been annoyed that everyone keeps suggesting they are anything like the Islamic State. Sure, they say, perhaps some of the laws on the books may look similar to the punishments in the extremist organization, but the Saudi kingdom is a sovereign state that abides by the rule of law and uses these punishments with discretion.

Yes, it’s a “sovereign state,” for what that’s worth – which in their case is pretty much nothing. So it’s a sovereign state, so what? It’s a sovereign state with bad laws, bad judges, bad courts, bad government, bad ideas, bad you name it. It’s one of the worst countries on the planet.

According to a report in pro-government newspaper Al Riyadh, the Saudi justice ministry is planning to sue a Twitter user who suggested that a death sentence recently handed out to a Palestinian artist for apostasy was “ISIS-like.”

“Questioning the fairness of the courts is to question the justice of the Kingdom and its judicial system based on Islamic law, which guarantees rights and ensures human dignity,” a source in the justice ministry told the newspaper, according to a translation by Reuters. The ministry would not hesitate to sue “any media that slandered the religious judiciary of the Kingdom,” the source added.

Sue…where?

Maybe they’re thinking of libel tourism. They’ve done that before:

When Rachel Ehrenfeld wrote “Funding Evil: How Terrorism Is Financed and How to Stop It,” she assumed she would be protected by the First Amendment. She was, in the United States. But a wealthy Saudi businessman she accused in the book of being a funder of terrorism, Khalid bin Mahfouz, sued in Britain, where the libel laws are heavily weighted against journalists, and won a sizable amount of money.

The lawsuit is a case of what legal experts are calling “libel tourism.” Ms. Ehrenfeld is an American, and “Funding Evil” was never published in Britain. But at least 23 copies of the book were sold online, opening the door for the lawsuit. When Ms. Ehrenfeld decided not to defend the suit in Britain, Mr. bin Mahfouz won a default judgment and is now free to sue to collect in the United States.

That was 2008; the UK’s libel law has been somewhat improved since then, and the US has passed laws preventing people like Mr bin Mahfouz from suing here.

So where do the Saudis think they’re going to do this suing?

…the comparison to the Islamic State appears to be a particular bone of contention for the Saudi kingdom. Speaking to NBC News earlier this year, Interior Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Mansour al-Turki justified the use of capital punishments such as beheadings in the kingdom by saying the country’s Shariah-based legal system ensures fairness. “ISIS has no legitimate way to decide to decide to kill people,” Al-Turki said, adding that “the difference is clear.”

No, it isn’t, really. Yes there’s a legal system; no it’s not a good legal system or one that ensures fairness. The way Saudi Arabia decides to kill people is not legitimate either. Should we list all the people it’s killed illegitimately? All those maids beheaded on trumped up charges after they resisted rape or failed to serve the coffee hot enough? All those bloggers who dared to talk about liberal reforms?

So I guess I’d better get busy insulting Saudi Arabia more.

You wanted visuals of the walk to the Carmel end of the Pebble Beach golf course the other day. I didn’t take pics myself so here are a few from Pebble Beach the company and a blogger.

This is the famous and infamous 9th hole. You can see how it would be rather tricky to play – and hot damn it’s a pretty place to take a stroll.

Here’s how it looks as you approach it.

At the base of those cliffs there’s a little beach called Stillwater Cove.

This is approaching the far end – those houses are in Carmel, not on the course, and the beach is Carmel Beach.

This one is near the beginning rather than the end, but it shows the hills I mentioned.

You can see why playing a round there would be on people’s bucket lists.

Yet again the BBC treats Maryam Namazie and the ExMuslims as some kind of horrid contaminant if not just plain traitors.

I was interviewed by Anne-Marie Tomchak for thirty minutes for BBC Trending on 26 November. Despite my also having referred 4 ex-Muslims, including those who maintained anonymity whilst Tweeting for#ExMuslimBecause due to fears for their safety, the programme spoke to Mobeen Azhar and Rashid Dar, two men who identified themselves as Muslims, about my segment which was highly edited for BBC World Service on 28 November.

The presenter Tomchak and the two Muslim men framed the entire discussion about apostasy and the basic human right to leave and criticise Islam without fear into one that was “hateful,” “bigoted,” “an attack on Muslims,” “Islamophobic,” “opportunistic,” “quite offensive”…

So the BBC actually thinks Muslims should not be allowed to leave Islam? It thinks Maryam and the ExMuslims are being “hateful” in saying Muslims can leave?

Why? The BBC is based in the UK. People in the UK are allowed to leave their religions (though it’s socially difficult for some, especially Muslims); that freedom is taken for granted. Why does the BBC make it its business to tell Muslims that they’re not allowed to leave their religion? Why does it treat her as some sort of criminal?

Tomchak and her “experts” insist that #ExMuslimBecause was “bad timing” due to the Paris attacks. For apologists,  the timing for dissent is never right.

Whilst we mourn our dead in Paris, we must not forget the countless others killed by ISIS and Islamists, including this very month in Lebanon, Nigeria, Mali, Iraq, Egypt, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan… as well as those executed perfectly legally via Sharia laws in Iran, Saudi Arabia… The refugee crisis is in large part due to this unbridled brutality.

In fact, if there ever was a “right” time to challenge Islam and Islamism, it is now.

And why would we not be allowed to do that in any case? It’s not the 13th century. We’re allowed to challenge ideas, ideologies, institutions. We’re allowed to challenge them and we’re allowed to abandon them. The BBC shouldn’t be saying or implying otherwise.

Maybe this example will help Tomchak and the BBC understand what they have got so very wrong (though I am not holding my breath). What they’ve done in their report on #ExMuslimBecause is similar to labelling critics of the Magdelene Laundries or Symphysiotomy as “strident,” “Catholic bashers” or “openly hostile to the Catholic Church.”

Of course there are people who do exactly that: apologists for the Catholic church and all its actions. But they tend to be cardinals or Bill Donohue; they don’t tend to be the BBC.

I know the BBC and its “Muslim community specialists” would have preferred us to raise #ExMuslimBecause in private over coffee. Regressive laws and fascist movements, however, are not pushed back over private chats but via normalising the taboo and through very public challenges and renunciations.

Every movement – from the demand to end racial apartheid, for gender equality, and LGBT rights – were battles fought in the public square. The right to apostasy and blasphemy is no different.

Remove all the BBC’s bogus accusations and one fact remains: the right to religion comes with a corresponding right to be free from religion. #ExMuslimBecause is part of the effort to bring about that hugely important change.

And the BBC should not be crapping on it.

Human Rights Watch on the murder of Tahir Elçi:

The November 28, 2015 assassination of Tahir Elçi, one of Turkey’s most prominent human rights lawyers and defenders, is a huge loss for the human rights community and all those who seek rule of law, democracy and justice, Human Rights Watch said today.  Human Rights Watch offered sincere condolences to the family, friends and colleagues of Elçi, head of the Diyarbakir Bar Association.

“This is a very dark day for Turkey – the murder of Tahir Elçi is a devastating blow not only to human rights activists but to all who want to see justice and rule of law prevail in Turkey,” said Emma Sinclair-Webb, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Tahir Elçi played a key role in representing victims of human rights violations and was critical of abusive tactics whether by the state or by armed groups.”

Elçi was shot in the head with a single bullet on a street in the southeastern city of Diyarbakır, where he worked and lived, shortly after holding a press conference in the old city. The full circumstances of the killing are at the time of writing unclear. A police officer was also killed nearby.

Elçi’s murder comes at a dark time for human rights in Turkey. The breakdown of the government’s peace process with the Kurds over the summer has seen a spiraling cycle of violence in the southeast.

Elçi had worked since the early 1990s as a human rights lawyer, first in the southeast in Cizre, his home town, and later in Diyarbakır, the largest city in region. He worked extensively to represent families of victims of egregious human rights violations by the security forces, including enforced disappearances and unlawful killings by suspected government agents.

Over many years, he played a key role in representing victims of these crimes before the European Court of Human Rights, and worked closely with international human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. He himself was a victim of torture and arbitrary detention, amongst other abuses, facts recognized by the European Court of Human Rights before which he and his colleagues also successfully brought their own case.

Turkey is on a very bad path.

Shaheen Hashmat on Facebook:

My face when someone comes to an event on forced marriage and asks why we’re not campaigning against male circumcision 😂 ‪#‎fuuseforum‬ Photo by Julie Tørrissen

Apparently the “Vatican,” i.e. the pretend state that is actually just the Catholic church telling everyone what to do, can prosecute people for saying things. Reuters has the details:

Five people, including two Italian reporters, went on trial in the Vatican on Tuesday, to outrage from rights groups, on charges arising from publication of books in which the Holy See was portrayed as mired in mismanagement and corruption.

At the first session, dominated by procedural issues and dubbed “Kafkaesque” by one of the defendants, journalists Gianluigi Nuzzi and Emiliano Fittipaldi said they had done nothing wrong and had simply fulfilled their professional duty.

“I am incredulous in finding myself here as a defendant in a country that is not mine,” Fittipaldi told the court, adding that publishing news was protected by the Italian constitution as well as European conventions and universal declarations on human rights.

Calling all journalists: do more reporting on the Vatican aka the Catholic church. Make it hot for the all-male administration of the intrusive self-protective religion. Report all the things.

While the Vatican follows a 19th-century Italian criminal code that is no longer used in Italy, the fundamental approach to criminal trials is similar to the Italian legal system of magistrates and prosecutors. Unlike Italy, the Vatican does not have jury trials.

A criminal law making it illegal to leak documents was introduced in 2013 after another leaks scandal that preceded the resignation of Pope Benedict that year.

That’s unclear. Is the law an Italian law or a Vatican law? If it’s a Vatican law, how can it apply to people who aren’t part of the Vatican? If it’s an Italian law, why is it? Why would Italy be enforcing the Vatican’s desire to keep its crimes and fuckups secret? And why would the Vatican be prosecuting? It must be a Vatican law – but I can’t see how a Vatican law would apply outside the Vatican.

A Vatican prosecutor told the court that the Holy See did not intend to muzzle freedom of the press and that the defendants were bring tried for the way the documents were leaked by the officials and obtained by the journalists.

I’m not at all sure the Vatican aka the Catholic church has any right to have secrets, given its history and the claims it makes on all of us.

Both journalists complained they had been forced to accept court-appointed lawyers and had been given documents needed for their defense only days, or hours, before the trial started.

Fittipaldi told reporters that he had not met his lawyer until the trial was about to start. The court ruled that a senior Vatican judge would have to decide if outside lawyers could represent the two but that judge was out of Rome.

How very like the Catholic church. The church and the Mafia are basically the same institution.

The human rights watchdog, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), urged the Vatican on Monday to withdraw the charges.

“Journalists must be free to report on issues of public interests and to protect their confidential sources,” the OSCE’s representative on freedom of the media, Dunham Mijatovic, said.

“I call on the authorities not to proceed with the charges and protect journalists’ rights in accordance with OSCE commitments,” she said.

The whole thing is a complete outrage. I look forward to getting home so that I can be all over it like a bad rash.

I’ve been thinking I should do a little dictionary of Social Justice Bullshit. I say “little” because there wouldn’t be much to put in it…more of a page than a dictionary. But there are some words and phrases, and they could do with some beady-eyed interrogation. Intent isn’t magic; check your privilege; my feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit – you know the ones.

One word I really hate is “schooling.” Use it in a sentence, you say, so that we all know what we’re talking about. “I schooled her on the issue but she doubled down and went right on asking her terrible questions.”

You recognize it now, right? Used by “activists” entranced with their own certainty, to describe the way they disagreed with an Impure Person.

And you also see how it works, yes? It’s not that I disagree with Impure Person and we argued about it, it’s that I have the correct knowledge and Impure Person has lack of knowledge and needs me to school her.

I don’t think I’ve ever used the word that way. I certainly hope I haven’t. I have often thought people were talking about something they didn’t know enough about, like the ones who kept saying Charlie Hebdo is racist, full stop – but even when I thought that I hope I didn’t tell them I was going to “school” them.

But people who consider themselves outstandingly virtuous activists do tell each other they “schooled” the designated ignoramus of the moment, and I never see them telling each other what an asshole thing that is to say. They know they have the right take on the issue at hand, so they know that anyone who has a different take is simply wrong, end of story. There is no different take. This isn’t a world of different takes. There is what the schoolers tell you, and there is error, and those are the only two categories that exist.

You don’t have to think about it terribly long or hard to realize this way of looking at the matter is unlikely to enrich anyone’s stock of ideas. It’s more like trying to live by a recipe than it is like thinking.

I’m on duty today, at work, doing my job. One of my jobs. The others involve writing; this one, my main breadwinner, involves being the temporary resident human of a lovable dog. So here I am hard at work, looking out at the Pacific Ocean while the dog sleeps next to me.

We just got back from a long walk on the Pebble Beach golf course. This time I took us all the way to the Carmel end of the course, which I haven’t done before. It’s a long and spectacularly beautiful walk – yes even with golfers and golf carts and sand traps in view.

I was thinking as we walked that for many of the people playing there it’s a bucket list experience. That gives it an extra something – emotional charge, I guess. The views  – of the hills behind Carmel, Carmel Bay, Point Lobos, the ocean, the cliffs that drop from the course down to the water – could not have been more breathtaking than they were today. It was very busy, so we had to be careful not to get in the players’ way, and it felt very festive. People made a fuss over Cooper, and wished they’d brought their own dogs.

This morning we went to the beach here (Spanish Bay, a few miles from Pebble) about 6 o’clock, as the moon was low in the west and the clouds were turning pink in the east. Thundering surf, a mile of empty beach, hundreds of shorebirds skittering back and forth at the edge of the surf…it’s one of my favorite things here. Soon we’ll go back there for the sunset.

I put in a lot of hours on this job!

Another reason not to run away from home to join Islamic State, besides the fact that they’re murderous woman-hating humanity-hating theocratic horrors: they’ll kill you if you try to leave.

(But really the first is far more important. The first is about countless other people you harm by joining IS; the second is only about you.)

The Times of India tells us of one teenage runaway:

A teenage girl who ran away from her Vienna home to join ISIS in Syria has reportedly been beaten to death by the group after trying to escape.

Samra Kesinovic, 17, travelled to Syria last year with her friend Sabina Selimovic, 15.

The two became a ‘poster girl’ for ISIS, also known as Islamic State, appearing on social media websites in images showing them carrying Kalashnikovs and surrounded by armed men.

But by October that year there were reports quoting friends of the two women saying Ms Kesinovic had been sickened by the killings she witnessed and wanted to come home.

I wonder what she thought the Kalashnikovs were for. Target practice?

According to local Austrian media Ms Kesinovic was murdered by the group as she tried to flee the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa.

…

A report last year by David Scharia, a UN counter-terrorism expert, that a 15-year-old girl of Bosnian origin from Austria who had joined ISIS had “disappeared” is now thought to refer to Ms Kesinovic.

Mr Scharia said: “We received information just recently about two 15-year-old girls, of Bosnian origin, who left Austria, where they had been living in recent years …one was killed in the fighting in Syria, the other has disappeared.”

Both Ms Kesinovic and Ms Selimovic were children of Bosnian refugees who fled to Austria in the nineties to escape the war in their country.

The chains of history. Milosevic persecuted their parents, and they ended up joining a different band of persecutors. It would be so nice if human beings could go for more than five minutes without persecuting someone.

Via Barry Duke at The Freethinker –

Prayar Gopalakrishnan, above, the new head of the famous Sabarimala temple in Kerala, sparked outrage after saying that women would only be allowed to enter the temple after a machine was invented to check their ‘purity’.

According to this report, Gopalakrishnan told reporters at the Kollam Press Club:

These days there are machines that can scan bodies and check for weapons. There will be a day when a machine is invented to scan if it is the ‘right time’ for a woman to enter the temple. When that machine is invented, we will talk about letting women inside.

That’s so interesting, isn’t it? I wonder if Prayar Gopalakrishnan has any idea how he got here. I wonder if he realizes how heavily his existence depended on his mother’s reproductive equipment, including menstruation. I wonder if he has any clue at all that menstruation isn’t “impure” or “dirty” but just the shedding of the endometrial lining that would have nourished an embryo had one been implanted – an embryo like the embryo that Prayar Gopalakrishna once was. That stuff is fetus breakfast lunch and dinner, and it’s very kind of women to provide it. It is not a reason to banish women from things.

Fucking patriarchal religion.

Vyckie Garrison has an article at Raw Story about godless people giving thanks.

Amanda Marcotte’s is the first (the list is alphabetical by first name):

I’ve been doing Friendsgiving long before they called it that, and I’m grateful to have such wonderful, loving friends to eat a bunch of food with and to chat about our mutual obsessions without judgment. Oh, and without praying. I’m in my 30s and still have no idea what to do when people are praying.

Mine changes “thankful” to “glad”:

I don’t love the word “thankful” in this context, I suppose because it sounds too personal and who would that person be if not some version of “God”? But I’m very glad to live in a world with…sunsets, rain, music, dogs, cats, chocolate, mountains, oceans, forests, books, art – even the Internet. I’m very glad I live at a time when and in a place where women are allowed to go outside without asking anyone’s permission. I could go on this way forever.

I could, too. I’m glad the brakes worked yesterday afternoon when that massive double-semi abruptly changed lanes right in front of us (Cooper was in the back seat) on Highway 1 outside Carmel. I’m glad those 4 (or more) foxes we encountered on the golf course last night at 10:30 eventually stopped following us. I’m glad my pulse rate is gradually going back down.

About ISIS and Joyce Carol Oates and humanity and whether or not there’s anything good to say about groups like ISIS or the people who join ISIS…

Here’s my view. I don’t think there is anything good to say about ISIS as a group. Its purpose and actions are rooted in a theocratic loathing of human beings. Its prxis is about what you would expect from such a loathing.

But the people who make up ISIS? That’s a very different question. Some may be thoroughly horrible yet still redeemable, some may be thoroughly horrible full stop, some may be more deluded than horrible. I don’t know. There are a lot of such people, and it’s all but certain that they vary along that continuum.

But Oates’s question was about ISIS the group. ISIS the group doesn’t resemble, say, the Catholic church, which includes some wonderful people doing wonderful work, and which also includes people doing more or less useful, compassionate, etc work but with churchy strings attached, and people doing good work who also do terrible things. It’s a mixed bag. ISIS not so much. Hizbollah does some useful work along with other kinds, but ISIS, as far as I’ve ever heard, doesn’t. It conquers people and kills all the ones it doesn’t enslave. It’s not sweet.

People who join ISIS and help with its projects may be redeemable but even if they are…they have a heavy load to bear for the rest of their lives. People can change, people are seldom all one thing, but it seems safe to say that belonging to ISIS is not good for the character.

So I’m here on the peninsula again so posting will probably be light for the next few days.

The Pacific ocean is just over there and it’s caaalling me.

I like my job. Both my jobs.

I’m on the road – specifically, on a bench at the San Jose airport which seems to be the only spot next to an electrical outlet in the whole place. (Wouldn’t you think? In the heart of Silicon fucking Valley?) I’m here in the interval before the 4:05 shuttle to Monterey.

Anybody else on the road? Or just out for a walk? Tell us stories of your travels.

The BBC tells us the Archbishop of Canterbury suddenly noticed something.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has said the terror attacks in Paris made him “doubt” the presence of God.

The Most Reverend Justin Welby told BBC Songs Of Praise he had prayed, asking “where are you…” after the attacks.

Really?! The Paris attacks! And nothing before that? None of the Boko Haram attacks, which have killed thousands? Not the murders in the Emanuel AME church in Charleston? Not the genocides in Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia? Europe? Africa? He must be quite astonishingly inattentive…much like god, if his god exists.

He said his reaction to the attacks had been “first shock and horror and then a profound sadness”, heightened because he and his wife once lived in Paris.

Oh well that explains it. I suppose he and his wife never lived in Sarajevo or Auschwitz.

The archbishop said: “Saturday morning, I was out and as I was walking, I was praying and saying: ‘God, why – why is this happening? Where are you in all this?'”

“He said ‘in the middle of it’ and also in answer from Psalm 56 – ‘he stores up our tears in a bottle, none of our sufferings are lost,'” he added.

In the middle of it? So he was shooting then?

And as for that bit from Psalm WhoCares – don’t insult us.

Sarah Ditum wrote about gender and her daughter last January.

Not all the encouragement you received has been positive. You did a term of judo, then you stopped because some boys in the class began shoving the few girls who attended. They didn’t tell you this was because you were a girl, but it was because you were a girl: they decided this class was their space, so they pushed you around till they pushed you out. “Push them back, and harder,” I wanted to say – you are going to grow up tall and powerful, and right now most boys your age are smaller than you – but fighting is only going to get you in trouble, and anyway, in a few years their violence will exceed anything you can offer.

And when all of you are grown up they will find non-violent ways of pushing you out, but push you out they will.

The YouTubers your brother watches use “pussy” as an insult. I talk to him about this, but that doesn’t stop his friends from watching, can’t excise this disgust from your social world.

Also “cunt,” “twat,” “bitch,” “ho,” etc.

It would be nice to live in a world where people just didn’t want to talk to each other that way.