Is Iran taking a turn toward the more humane and lenient? Is it becoming more forgiving of people’s failures to grovel to The Prophet enough? Or is it just that some courts are a little less fanatically theocratic than others? One high court, at any rate, swapped a death sentence for a two year theology sentence – still grim, but less permanent.

An Iranian man who was on death row for allegedly insulting the prophet Muhammad has had his sentence commuted to reading 13 religious books and studying theology for two years.

Soheil Arabi, 31, was arrested by members of the Iranian revolutionary guards in November 2013 in connection with Facebook postings which the Iranian judiciary deemed insulting to the founder of Islam. He was convicted of blasphemy and sentenced to death.

I’ll help him out. Mohammed had garlic breath. Mohammed was no fun at parties. Mohammed had terrible taste in shoes. Mohammed was a terrible cook. Mohammed sprayed spit when he talked.

The commuting of Arabi’s death sentence is the first such decision to have been taken by a judiciary court in Iran. It is not clear how many people are on death row in the country for blasphemy, heresy or other religious grounds. Last year a 37-year-old man was executed after being found guilty of insulting the prophet Jonah, making “innovations in the religion” and “spreading corruption on earth”. He had interpreted Jonah’s story in the Qur’an as a symbolic tale.

And for that he was killed. He interpreted an obviously magical or mythological story in an old book as just that, so a large state solemnly executed him.

We get inured to the weirdness of the way humans carry on. We have to, if we don’t want to spend all our time knocking our heads against hard surfaces, but then we don’t do enough to fix the problem. It seems so little to ask – treat old stories as just that, old stories, not as any kind of reason to kill people or punish them or force them to pretend to consider the old stories sacred. Back off. Don’t kill or punish or coerce people except for truly compelling reasons. Your devotion to your  particular old stories is in no way a truly compelling reason. Back off.

The state-owned Jamejam newspaper said Arabi was required to prepare a five-10-page summary of each of the 13 religious books he must read. He then has to write an article about religion and reference at least five -10 of those books. He should study theology for two years and report to the authorities every three months on his progress.

You don’t like our old story? Well! We’ll show you: we’ll make you spend two whole years studying our old story, so ha.

Nassim Papayiann, Amnesty’s campaigner on Iran, said: “International law clearly protects the right to criticise political leaders and religious institutions, even if the criticisms are thought to be shocking or offensive. A sentence that requires an individual to serve time in prison, study theology and read certain books as a punishment, if handed down for peacefully exercised their freedom of expression, clearly tramples over a range of rights, including the right to freedom of belief.”

Freedom of belief has been a rare thing in human history but by god it’s an important one.

Horrible news from Afghanistan:

Air attacks hit a Doctors Without Borders hospital in the battleground Afghan city of Kunduz early Saturday, killing at least nine hospital staff and injuring others at a facility that had been caring for hundreds already hurt in days of fighting, the charity said.

The U.S. military conducted an airstrike in Kunduz at the time that may have caused collateral damage, and the incident is being investigated, U.S. Army Col. Brian Tibus said.

At least nine people who worked in the hospital.

The attacks, which injured at least 37 other people and left part of the hospital in flames and rubble, came on roughly the sixth day of fighting between Afghan government forces — supported by U.S. airpower and military advisers — and the Taliban, which invaded the city early this week.

The global charity expressed shock, saying it had told all warring parties the exact location of the trauma center, including most recently on Tuesday.

The charity also said that it had alerted U.S. and Afghan military officials of Saturday’s attack, but that the attacks continued.

“The bombing continued for more than 30 minutes after American and Afghan military officials in Kabul and Washington were first informed,” the charity, known internationally as Medecins Sans Frontieres, said. “MSF urgently seeks clarity on exactly what took place and how this terrible event could have happened.”

And could they please not do it again.

Another piece on the quest for purity in lefty politics, this one in the New Statesman and by Richard Wallace. It’s getting to be quite a popular subject these days, no doubt because there are so many purist lefties cluttering up the place and no-platforming everyone in sight.

(I figure before long Freethought blogs will consist of maybe eight or nine 100% pure people generating anything up to twenty posts a month, which no one will read. Purity tends to be a tad boring.)

If you use Twitter a lot, you may have wondered exactly how to criticise large parts of the left without sounding like a bigot, a racist, or worst of all Richard Dawkins.

The legacy of what the internet calls “identity politics” is that the lived experience of an individual now not only informs a given debate, as well it should, but dominates it, leaving no room for dissent.

Coupled with the binary nature of the internet, in which layered ideas are pounded flat by the limitations of the format, a new discursive register has emerged: either you’re with us, to the most extreme interpretation of our ideas, or you’re against us. There are no in-betweens.

That’s the purity drive. Agree with 100% of my ideas with 100% conviction or be denounced as cis scum. Answer the question, yes or no. Are you now or have you ever. When did you last. Can you pronounce.

Try having a grown-up conversation about freedom of speech or immigration or austerity without the debate quickly descending into a face-off around each word’s representative categorical implications. Unironic use of the words free speech mark you as a libertarian, your stance on immigration makes you either pro or anti racism, and what you think about austerity implies whether or not class privilege courses inexorably through your veins. I am using this garish italicisation as is customary for non-integrated foreign words, because at this point they may as well be: these words have no longer have any original or literal meaning but represent only a wider cultural idea, like saying plus ca change or c’est la vie. 

Like intent isn’t magic and check your privilege and the other stock phrases.

We risk devaluing useful globules of language by repurposing them so often not as useful signifiers but as brands for the ideologically impure.

…

Think about when Charlie Hebdo recently published cartoons of Aylan Kurdi. The cartoons were many things – tasteless, offensive, upsetting – but instead the controversial magazine was accused of making fun of a young boy’s death. A cursory Google translation of the captions and an ounce of critical analysis confirms that this interpretation simply wasn’t true – but try typing that online without looking like you endorse Charlie Hebdo’s repugnant sketches.

I have. Repeatedly, I have, and that’s one reason I’m considered so very impure by the so very pure.

That’s okay. I’ve always been a muddy type.

There are conflicting claims about the death toll in the hajj stampede last week.

Iran says number of its citizens who died in the Hajj stampeded in Saudi Arabia last week has reached 464 – nearly double the previous toll.

Iranian authorities said there was no longer hope of finding any of the country’s missing pilgrims alive.

According to Saudi officials, 769 people died in the crush in Mina, near Mecca, and 934 were injured.

…

Iranian officials allege that the overall number of deaths is now more than 1,000. Pakistan, India, and Indonesia have also suggested death toll may be higher than the 769 reported by Saudi Arabia.

Another case where prayers don’t seem to do humans much good. They may be a big thrill for gods, I don’t know, but for humans…they can be disappointing even if not lethal.

Ah, no. Not at all. Not even close.

Think of “the 10 commandments” for instance, the ones people keep wanting to build statues to in public places. They don’t say a word about not being an asshole. Not a word about compassion or kindness or generosity; no golden rule; no don’t be evil; no be good to one another. Not. one. word. Most of it is about crawling to god, and the rest is just don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t envy. It’s an ethical desert.

Religion is about what human beings owe to god, it’s not about what we owe to each other.

The New York Times reports that there’s little to report on the Roseburg mass murder because law enforcement is still turning over rocks.

The last three paragraphs are somewhat striking though.

The issue of gun control has recently roiled Oregon. This year, state legislators passed a law closing a loophole for background checks on private gun sales, after years of trying to win support for it.

Sheriff Hanlin had forcefully lobbied against gun control after previous school shootings, but on Friday he told CNN that now was not the time to discuss gun control.

“We want to focus on completing this investigation, doing a thorough investigation,” he said. “And more importantly we want to focus on the families of the victims.”

Now is not the time to discuss gun control? The hell it’s not. Now is absolutely the time to discuss gun control, and the time to get gun control, too.

Obama said in his statement yesterday that people were going to say he’s politicizing this, and then he went on to say that we should be politicizing it, because what is it if not political? Damn right.

He also said prayers don’t do anything to stop these mass shootings from happening. CNN kept reporting that last night as his saying prayers no longer do anything to stop these mass shootings from happening, but that’s not what he said. CNN inserted the “no longer.” Fabulous reporting there, CNN: stick in words that he did not say, that change the meaning. He simply said prayers don’t do anything to stop them. That’s an interesting thing for a Christian to say, because Christians are mostly supposed to believe that prayers do do anything, even if we mere humans can’t tell exactly what that anything is. A Christian is expected to think that without prayers there would be more mass shootings, or something along those lines. Obama didn’t take the opportunity to say that, and instead he said the opposite. He said the truth, which is that they don’t do anything to stop mass shootings.

Here is Woman’s Hour. The discussion of feminism and free speech among Caroline Criado-Perez, Jane Fae and Jude Kelly is the first segment, ending at 13:54.

A few notes and bits of transcription:

Jane Fae talks about talks about absolutism in politics.

Caroline Criado-Perez talks about ideological totalism and purity politics.

…there is a dogma, and if you have ever stepped outside of that dogma, then you are tainted and impure and you cannot be allowed to speak.

…if you don’t toe the party line your very presence can cause trauma.

Jane Fae talks about that “people are talking about you” thing. She’s been told that Julie Bindel is dangerous, Bea Campbell is dangerous – no, she doesn’t believe that.

CCP:

I don’t think opinions can make someone unsafe.

They talk about no-platforming, and CCP says the no-platformers are dishonest about it, they say they’re just expressing their views and similar. She mentions the no-platforming of Kate Smurthwaite, which I blogged about extensively at the time – here and here and here and here and here and here.

So later in the program, at 34:40, the presenter Jenni Murray said this:

If you were listening earlier to our conversation about censorship and no platforming, you may remember that Caroline Criado Perez said that effectively the comedian Kate Smurthwaite had been no platformed from Goldsmith’s Student Union. They have got in touch and said she was not no platformed or banned by Goldsmith’s Student Union, no policy exists to that effect, the decision to cancel the show was made by the Comedy Society president after conversations with the performer 24 hours before the show was meant to happen, she made the call at the last minute based on facts later found to be unfounded such as the claim that there were going to be protests and this was balanced by the fact that only eight tickets had been sold anyway.

Thus shitting on Kate all over again. The “eight tickets” excuse is and always was bullshit, because the show was free to students, so they never expected to sell a bunch of tickets.

Notice how tidily Goldsmith’s rushes to confirm what Caroline said about the dishonesty of no-platformers.

Public relations to the rescue.

The Jack the Ripper museum in east London has been ridiculed for attempting to organise a counter-protest against a planned demonstration by the same activist group that last weekend targeted a breakfast cereal cafe.

That’s a terrible opening paragraph. Look – an activist group is planning a demonstration against the horrible Jack the Ripper “museum” in east London, the one that told planners it would be a museum about women’s history. (Yeah, their history of getting murdered, haw haw haw.) The “museum” tried to organize a counter-protest. People are, quite rightly, laughing at the “museum” for doing such a pathetic thing. (And for calling itself a museum.)

The anarchist group Class War has called for protesters to shut down the privately run attraction on Sunday. Flyers circulating on Twitter accuse the museum of “the glorification of sexual violence”.

It has already been the scene of protests and was branded a “sick joke” by residents of Whitechapel when it opened. Its planning application had promised it would be “the only dedicated resource in the East End to women’s history”.

But hahaha it turned out that was a sick joke, aka a big brazen lie.

The owners of the museum issued their call for community action through a public relations firm, Joshua Walker PR. Describing Class War as an “extremist political group”, it said that on Saturday “thugs smashed the windows, frightened staff and customers and thrown [sic] paint outside the Cereal Killers cafe.”

After trying to mobilise supporters with the Twitter hashtag#PROTECTELONDON, the statement concludes: “It’s time for locals and local business to band together and show that we won’t accept it! Join the Jack the Ripper Museum and other local businesses and locals to counter-protest Class War.”

Whoops, a slip-up there, they called themselves a local business. Real museums don’t usually call themselves businesses.

Jane Nicholl, of Class War, ridiculed the call for a counter-demonstration. “If that’s what they want it really is going to be class war,” she said. “It’s going to be posh businesspeople of the area up against working class warriors.”

Nicholl said she and several other activists had been invited to tour the museum, and all had been disgusted by what they saw. “We all left in absolute shock. It’s just so disturbing. I’m pretty tough, but I just couldn’t get the images out of my head. It’s just very unpleasant.

“The whole museum is like the workings of a sick mind,” she said. “If any women who had been sexually assaulted walked past that place and saw what was on offer … it’s just horrible.”

No, it’s educational! Like any other museum!

Yet more cis privilege.

According to David Futrelle (and others) the shooter at Umpqua CC told Reddit his plans yesterday.

This is beyond fucked up. In this archived thread from 4chan’s /r9k/ board, the alleged shooter at Umpqua Community College told fellow channers yesterday of his plans to shoot up a school today. He didn’t specify which school, mentioning only that it was in the “northwest.” /r9k/ is a board heavily populated by so-called “incels,” and the media is reporting that the apparent shooter regularly posted bitter complaints about his lack of success with women,

Screenshots below:

Here’s his first comment warning fellow channers not to go to school today if they live in the northwest.

There’s a whole lot more, and that’s only a small sample, because Futrelle doesn’t have the stomach to collect more. I don’t have the stomach to collect any.

Cis privilege in real life.

Via Indian Atheists:

Oh great. Yet another one.

At least 10 people killed in a mass shooting at a community college in Oregon.

The Oregon State Police confirmed that at least 10 people were dead at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon.

The sheriff’s office in Douglas County, which includes Roseburg, told CBS News that the threat was over but would not comment on the condition of the gunman.

There were many other injured victims, according to multiple law enforcement sources. Some of those injured are in critical condition.

The goddam Second Amendment should be repealed.

Woman’s Hour (BBC Radio 4) tomorrow is going to talk about free speech and feminism; Caroline Criado-Perez and Jane Fae will be on. It’s on at 10 a.m. in London but also archived for listening later so we can all hear it.

Two speakers have pulled out of a feminist conference in protest after campaigner Jane Fae withdrew saying she was effectively being silenced because she had written about pornography. Is this evidence of increasing intolerance and efforts to actively censor views which might offend?

It’s more complicated than that, but they didn’t have room for the complication. Jane Fae withdrew because people were “concerned” about her presence, and she didn’t want there to be a stink that would interfere with the conference, so she withdrew.

Ian Dunt says the censors are on the back foot at last.

Efforts to ban secular campaigner Maryam Namazie from speaking at Warwick University have been reversed. Then yesterday, feminist campaigners Caroline Criado Perez and Julie Bindel pulled out of the Feminism in London conference in protest at efforts to no-platform fellow panellist Jane Fae. We are seeing the first signs that the tide is turning in the free speech debate. Event organisers are finally coming under as much pressure from free speech defenders as they are censors.

(Quick declaration of interest: I went to Warwick for my MA, I’m close friends with Perez[,] and Fae regularly writes for this website. None of that has any bearing really, but it’s worth mentioning because online censors – from the Corbynistas to the safe spaces lot – struggle to accept that anyone holds opinions for any reason other than self-interest. I might as well beat them to it.)

He runs through what happened with Warwick and Maryam, and is brought up short at the same place I was.

When Warwick Student Union looked into the writing of Namazie, who had been invited to speak to the local secular society, they found that “a number of articles written both by the speaker and by others about the speaker indicate that she is highly inflammatory, and could incite hatred on campus”. They added: “This is in contravention of our external speaker policy”.

It’s worth interrogating that sentence. It suggests that any idea which raises passions must be banned on campus.

Which would ban most ideas that are of any value.

The campaign against the ban exploded overnight, helped by the high-profile support of people like Richard Dawkins, Nick Cohen and Ben Goldacre. This online response is crucial. The armies of censors online can be terrifying. There are thousands of them and they are extremely aggressive. They scare individuals and they scare institutions. People, naturally, don’t want to spend days under an avalanche of abusive tweets and Facebook messages. They also don’t want the blogs and social media accounts of their friends and loved ones to be trawled over by these strange online armies for material to be used against them. Most normal people back down in the face of this type of attack. It’s partly why institutions have proved such easy targets.

And that’s exactly why I made as much noise as I could, and did in earlier examples too, such as when Trinity College Dublin went all weird on Maryam.

A similar situation played out yesterday, when it emerged that Fae was stepping down from the Feminism in London (FiL) conference. Fae is a moderate, articulate and very well-read commentator on a range of issues, including pornography, obscenity law, efforts at online filtering and a range of other matters. She is also transgender. Some radical feminists took issue with her supposedly because of her views on pornography and sex work, although the vitriol aimed her way afterwards suggests there is a significant element of transphobia at work too.

“The problem is that certain peeps had created a situation via a whispering campaign in which backing became irrelevant,” Fae wrote to me in an email. “We were damned if we went ahead, damned if we didn’t…so I attempted to tiptoe away quietly…which was sort of working until yesterday, when it all went nasty. I am now at the centre of a shit storm, as are some of my nearest and dearest. My ex, for instance, has had to take her old blog offline because people appeared to be mining it for dirt to use against me.”

Were they going through her Twitter and Facebook too? It’s always fun when people do that. “Oh look – here’s a joke from six months ago that we can take out of context to use against her.”

This is the standard tactic adopted by the online censors: demands that organisers remove someone from an event followed by an intimidation campaign against them online. In this case the organisers did not remove Fae from the event. Everyone involved praises them for their intentions and their good nature. But they did not necessarily support her either. They told her of the situation and tried to manage it, but Fae, keen to avoid it costing them the conference, stepped down. This is how free speech is destroyed in modern Britain – not by laws, but by taking the easy route in the face of organised campaigns.

And that’s why Caroline Criado-Perez and Julie Bindel withdrew, with regret and sorrow. Hunt quotes Bindel:

“It is particularly difficult for me to do so because FiL is one of the few feminist conferences that dare include me on their programme (in case of disruption from anti-feminists claiming I am transphobic, biphobic, Islamophobic and whorephobic). In fact, FiL had, in previous years, left me off the programme (but had me speak) in case the smooth-running of the conference suffered as a result. This year I told the organisers that I would only agree to speak at the event if my name were included in the programme, to which they agreed. It therefore feels particularly upsetting to find that the organisers are once again being bullied about one of their speakers, Jane Fae, this time on the grounds that she has expressed and still holds some pro-pornography views.”

Respect to both of them.

It is sad to imagine the organisers, who clearly support broad inclusive debate, seeing their event fall apart around them as these warring factions challenge the other side’s right to speak.

But applying this sort of pressure to organisers is the only way to ensure free speech is no longer degraded in this country. Until this week, all the pressure came from one end, with just a handful of commentators raising the alarm about it. Now we are seeing social media being utilised to support free speech.

We’ve seen that before, too, but this time it worked.

Helen Lewis reminds us what a novelty in the world women’s rights really are.

Consider Switzerland for instance, where women didn’t get the vote until – wait for it – 1971.

Audiences are surprised because Switzerland is supposedly full of People Like Us: it’s an affluent western European nation, not a sand-blasted theocracy or a dirt-poor African dictatorship. And People Like Us believe in women’s equality. Don’t we?

This posture of racially tinged complacency underlies most of the frequent backlashes endured by western feminists. It’s a version of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, which hailed western liberal democracy as the final form of human government: “Come on, ladies. You’ve got the vote. You’ve got the ability to own property. Some of you are even wearing trousers. Why are you so uptight? No one is taking those away from you!”

That’s Christina Hoff Sommers’s whole shtick, and it’s avowedly Richard Dawkins’s reason for being so angry with American feminists. Feminism won, women have all the rights and equality, move on.

But this smugness is unwarranted, as a quick glance around the world – or five minutes with a history book – will show you. The advances in women’s rights that we enjoy today are incredibly recent. Chiswick Women’s Aid, the landmark shelter in west London, was only opened in 1971, the same year women were getting the vote in Switzerland. Rape in marriage became a crime here only in 1991 – the assault that prompted the defining court case happened the same the week that All Around the World by Lisa Stansfield topped the charts.

For a more extreme example, take foot-binding. When I first read Jung Chang’s family history, Wild Swans, I was amazed to learn that the author’s grandmother had had bound feet. It was disorienting to realise that someone alive today could know a woman whose feet had been deliberately bent and broken as a child in order to stuff them into 3in shoes.

Yes, I thought before reading further, and we still deliberately mutilate women’s feet, in a milder form. Lewis goes on to say that.

round the world, equally gruesome practices which stem from the same motive – inscribing subjugation on the female body – persist, from female genital mutilation to breast ironing. Even among People Like Us, in liberal western democracies, only one half of humanity is routinely encouraged to wear shoes that restrict our movement and damage our tendons and ligaments. We can’t see the strangeness of that because it’s woven into the fabric of our culture.

[I think that “only” is a typo, because it doesn’t make sense; hence the line through it.]

I can see the strangeness of it. I see it when I see couples in party clothes, the men walking freely and the women mincing and teetering as if…well as if their feet had been mutilated.

In her BBC documentary The Ascent of Woman, Amanda Foreman met 84-year-old Wang Huiyuan, one of the few surviving women whose feet hads been bound. She explored why the practice persisted for so long: it was perpetuated by women, because they believed it was a way to gain an advantage in a male-controlled marriage market; and it functioned as a class signifier, because peasant women working in the fields could not afford to cripple themselves.

Those two forces still underpin the pressure towards femininity today, however much we in the west congratulate ourselves on the softer, more palatable way it is expressed. We must also remember that the fact that women participate in their own oppression does not mean it is “natural” or inevitable. Instead, it shows that divide and rule is an endlessly useful tactic for maintaining the status quo.

That’s why choosy choice feminism is not the best feminism has to offer.

If you ever want to know why feminists are so bloody angry, this is why. All our triumphs are provisional, contested. The ground must be constantly defended and patrolled.

Still don’t believe me? Look across the Atlantic, where 42 years after Roe v Wade rightwing lawmakers want to deprive Planned Parenthood of federal funds used to give poor women breast cancer screenings because the organisation also provides abortions (even though these are not paid for by tax dollars). Or look closer to home, where women’s refuges are struggling because of cuts to council budgets, and a succession of high-profile men are given acres of newsprint to demand anonymity for those accused of rape, even though the evidence shows false allegations are rare and anonymity would make serial offenders far harder to catch.

Take care of your feet.

Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood, testified before a Congressional committee yesterday. NPR describes the hearing as contentious, which puts it with typical NPR mildness. NPR provides five audio clips from the five hours of testimony. The first and longest is a remarkable, and all too familiar, example of shouty bullying and interrupting and demanding simple answers to complicated questions. I’ve always loathed demands for simple answers to complicated questions, and after this past summer, I loathe them even more.

The more than five-hour hearing was oftentimes contentious. Richards defended her organization on several fronts. She said the videos released by the anti-abortion group Center for Medical Progress were misleading and she said her organization does not receive federal funding for most abortions.

Republican lawmakers for their part questioned why Planned Parenthood should continue to receive federal funding if many Americans don’t agree with abortions.

That’s a fatuous question. Federal funding isn’t contingent on the agreement of all Americans. It doesn’t work that way; it can’t work that way.