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“Apparently, Mayor Bowers never bothered to learn that President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 was repealed by President Gerald Ford, that the United States Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 to redress the fundamental unconstitutional nature of the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.

The Peshmerga took Sinjar back from IS on Friday, but the Sinjar that remains is shattered.

In Sinjar, Islamic State focused more on destruction than governance. In the aftermath of the Sinjar offensive, fresh Islamic State atrocities are coming to light. An officer of the Kurdish regional government forces known as Peshmerga confirmed that a mass grave with tens of bodies was found Saturday near the city, filled mostly with old women and some old men.

Just like the Nazis. The “selection” at Auschwitz and elsewhere was the same way: select out the people who can be fucked or worked or both; kill the old and the very young.

Meanwhile, more than a thousand Yazidi women have been kidnapped, according to the United Nations, and community leaders say many remain Islamic State slaves.

“Our girls are still imprisoned by Daesh,” said Mr. Ali, referring to another name for the terror organization. “They are sold in exchange for a bottle of Pepsi,” he said of dealings among the militants.

Walking vaginas, that’s all they are.

The militants not only killed and terrorized Yazidis, but turned their Sunni Muslim neighbors against them. Some Yazidis said their Sunni neighbors, who they considered friends, looted Yazidi houses and joined Islamic State in killings.

A few Yazidis said neighbors taunted them by text message or phone calls, daring them to return to the city.

Now Yazidis harbor bitter feelings toward Sunni Muslims, whom they accuse of either helping Islamic State or doing nothing to stop the damage.

You can see how that would cause bitter feelings.

An hour’s drive from Sinjar, at the Bajet Kandela refugee camp where at least 10,000 people are packed into tents, the suffering is a daily source of anger directed at Arabs. One of the Yazidi refugees, Barakat Garais, said he won’t forget and he won’t forgive his former Sinjar neighbors.

“Yazidis hate the Arabs for what they’ve done,” said the 35-year-old. “We can’t trust living next to them.”

IS goes on winning even in defeat.

Via Maryam:

Maryam Namazie ‏@MaryamNamazie 24 hours ago
After liberation, a female peshmarga destroys ISIS signboard ordering women to cover themselves with a niqab.