John Sargeant at Homo economicus blogs about Maryam’s Secular Conference 2014 which took place in London this past weekend.

Imagine a conference where over two thirds of the speakers are women. From across the world. Artists, professors, authors, journalists, human rights activists. One who feared having children because of the threat to their lives.

…

Moved when another recounts being abducted and held hostage the last time she attended such a conference as this; the fear from her voice pulling on your heart strings. Tears dripping onto your iPad as you blatantly tweet in your own name what is being said without a second thought of your own safety. That the song from a band in Indonesia called “Sister In Danger” is not lyrical invention. When protestors of a movie in Tunisia move their hand across their Adam’s apple in a slicing motion it is not just bravado.

A professor recounts hearing shots ring out on campus one evening. He rushed out to a former student who had become a faculty member. Bleeding to death, no other staff came to aid one of their own. There is no one else from the university either to join the professor at the mourning prayers. The assassinated man is Ahmadi, and even in death his blood can not wash away his heresy in a Pakistan State that declares them non muslims. He never was one of them after all, in life or death.

So that’s their idea of god. No need to bother with a devil then.

I did not have to imagine these voices – because Maryam Namazie gave them a platform. The conference was filmed and you can read my live tweets clicking on the tweet above, and following my timeline.

Here’s his Twitter: https://twitter.com/JPSargeant78

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Salman Rushdie gave a PEN/Pinter Prize Lecture the other day and used the occasion to talk about “jihadi-cool,” the Telegraph reported.

The so-called “jihadi-cool” image romanticises Isil, using rap videos and social networking to recruit followers – posing with AK-47s and bragging about their “five star jihad” in videos showing fighters lounging around in luxury villas as they urged the destruction of the West.

Rushdie defined “jihadi-cool” as “the deformed medievalist language of fanaticism, backed up by modern weaponry”, saying: “It’s hard not to conclude that this hate-filled religious rhetoric, pouring from the mouths of ruthless fanatics into the ears of angry young men, has become the most dangerous new weapon in the world today”.

I think he’s right. I think the element of adventure, excitement, glamor, flash, let’s pretend in terrorism gets too little attention.

He said: “A word I dislike greatly, ‘Islamophobia’, has been coined to discredit those who point at these excesses, by labelling them as bigots. But in the first place, if I don’t like your ideas, it must be acceptable for me to say so, just as it is acceptable for you to say that you don’t like mine. Ideas cannot be ring-fenced just because they claim to have this or that fictional sky god on their side.

“And in the second place, it’s important to remember that most of those who suffer under the yoke of the new Islamic fanaticism are other Muslims…

“It is right to feel phobia towards such matters. As several commentators have said, what is being killed in Iraq is not just human beings, but a whole culture. To feel aversion towards such a force is not bigotry. It is the only possible response to the horror of events.

“I can’t, as a citizen, avoid speaking of the horror of the world in this new age of religious mayhem, and of the language that conjures it up and justifies it, so that young men, including young Britons, led towards acts of extreme bestiality, believe themselves to be fighting a just war.”

The language that conjures it up and justifies it is very important. Language is very important, just as ideas are very important. They aren’t just the froth on the coffee.

Rushdie was speaking as he accepted the PEN Pinter Prize, established by the writers’ charity English PEN in 2009 in memory of the Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter.

The prize is awarded annual to a British or British-based writer who “exemplifies the spirit of Harold Pinter through his or her engagement with the times”.

Each year the winner shares the prize with an international writer who has risked their own safety in the name of free speech. Rushdie chose Mazen Darwish, a Syrian journalist and lawyer who is currently in prison.

There are so so many to choose from.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

More on the realities of the Magdalene laundries at TheJournal.ie.

ALTHOUGH PREVIOUS REPORTS and testimonies reveal that labour in the Magdalene Laundries was forced and wholly unpaid, conditions harsh and the incarcerated women completely deprived of their liberty, suffering both physical and emotional abuse, survivors are still searching for an apology and redress.

Although the State gave the nuns who ran the Laundries direct capitation (per-head) grants and valuable contracts for commercial work, it has failed to offer that apology or any type of redress.

It’s shocking, isn’t it – forced unpaid labor in harsh conditions, with no escape, and with physical and emotional abuse – not as punishment for crime but as torture for being female and poor and possibly or actually sexual. Not in 1860 but well into the 1990s. Ireland committed war crimes against the female half of its own population.

Justice for Magdalenes (JFM) believes – and provides evidence to back up its claims – that there was State involvement in the operation of the Magdalene Laundries as places to send women, often known as “problem girls”, affected by pregnancy outside marriage, poverty and crime.

“The State regarded the Magdalene Laundries as an opportunity to deal with various social problems – illegitimacy, poverty, disability, so-called licentous behaviour, domestic and sexual abuse, youth crime and infanticide,” the group writes in its 145-page submission to the Government’s Inter-Departmental Committee set up to probe exactly what happened between the 1920s and 1990s.

“Deal with” them how? Long sentences to slave labor for the profit of the Catholic church.

The committee has delayed issuing its report, so Justice for Magdalenes has provided a redacted copy of its document to every TD and Senator at Leinster House. JFM says the document provides rock-solid evidence of government complicity.

This year’s submission details how no one in senior government sought to understand how the Magdalene Laundries operated. JFM believe that the fact that the religious orders were in control was “enough” to excuse official inquiry, inspection or regulation.

It says that there was “no statutory basis at all between 1922 and 1960 for incarcerating any of the women”. “None of them were detained lawfully,” the report continues.

All the women had no choice whether to stay. One survivor from High Park Magdalene Laundry in Drumcondra remembers:

Every window in the building, every window had bars on it…All the doors, every door was locked.

That’s theocracy in action – a state so blindly trusting of a religious sect that it allows that sect to impose mass imprisonment without trial or hearing or due process of any kind.

Many believe they were taken from their original lives as “cheap labour” with the excuse of it being for their “own safety”.

We worked long hours every day…scrubbing, bleaching and ironing for the whole of Cork – hotels, hospitals, schools, colleges – for which the nuns charged, of course, though we never saw a penny. It was an industry and they were earning a fortune from our labour.

Work in the Magdalene Laundries was hard. It involved lifting heavy weights in very hot temperatures and the use of toxic chemicals. The clothes for one machine weighted 200 lbs, or 90 kgs.

The working conditions were absymal.

We worked in great heat associated with the laundry machine and mangles.

You could stand in half a foot of water sometimes down in the laundry all day.

The laundry work was hard too. I often got bleach in my eyes. It was a sore does. It would be sore for days. And the soap would burn your hands.

Other external witnesses told JFM:

By Jesus, they worked hard. They broke a lot of sweat in that laundry. The laundry was very hot. It was just basically a sweathouse just to provide Joe Public out there with nice clean sheets.

The girls could get burns from pouring in soap, splashing into their eyes or pouring in bleach, raw bleach, which they would dilute by 50 per cent…And sometimes these carboys (10 gallon containers) would break and the bleach would go everywhere and it was a nightmare. And the fumes of the bleach alone were dreadful.

Another manager recalls have one woman lost her arm in a bad accident on a hot roller ironing machine.

And the living conditions were just as shit.

Breakfast was generally porridge, while sausage, potatoes and cabbage made up the bulk of the rest of their meals.

I was extremely thin and sickly…the convent cared for us with absolutely the minimal standards.

Another survivor recalls how they “got one egg a year” on Easter Sunday morning.

There was also “no such thing as education” – “no reading, writing” and “for the most part…intellectual development was ignored”.

And all of this was administered by the Catholic church in Ireland.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

One story of one woman who was sent to a Magdalene Laundry at age 16 and never got out, but died there after 35 years of slavery.

Samantha Long’s mother Margaret Bullen was placed in Gloucester Street (now Sean McDermott Street) Laundry c.1967 and died 35 years later, never having been released into society and her own home. Margaret died of an illness known as Goodpasture Syndrome, a disease of the kidneys and liver – one of the causes is exposure to industrial-strength chemicals such as those used in the Laundries.

So that would be 2002. Just twelve years ago, Ireland – the Celtic tiger – was holding a woman in slavery until she died of a disease probably caused by the slave labor she did for 35 years. Twelve years ago. Ireland.

Margaret Bullen was sent to the notorious High Park industrial school and Laundry in Drumcondra at age three, then to a special school at age thirteen after she was certified mentally unfit for education, but fit for work. Then at around sixteen she was sent to the Magdalene Laundry where she was enslaved for the rest of her life.

(In Ireland, from c. 1967 to 2002.)

She became pregnant – twice – with Samantha and her twin sister Etta, and later with another daughter, while officially under the care of the Gloucester Street nuns. The circumstances of these conceptions are again shrouded in mystery but Samantha says her conversations in later life with her mother when they were reunited led her to believe that Margaret had been the victim of sexual abuse and predators several times.

There was no education, no education and I, you know, I honestly believe for a long time she didn’t know how she got pregnant, she just knew that somebody hurt her once and then she had babies. I really believe that. She didn’t make that connection, I know that for sure. She was no, she didn’t have a boyfriend, let’s put it that way. And that’s the politest way that I can say that.

Some of the more harrowing details of Samantha’s testimony recount how her mother was denied society, education, wages and other basic rights for most of her life. This extract recalls Samantha and Etta’s first meeting with Margaret in the Gresham Hotel when they were 23 and had traced her as their biological mother. (Samantha and Etta were adopted by a loving couple in Dublin and later moved to Sligo in childhood.)

Margaret was only 42 at the time but looked much older. She was carrying a handbag but it was completely empty, because she didn’t own anything nor did she have any money. Samantha recalls:

And, she was just lovely, and she was asking extremely innocent questions like, she, it was the first time she ever had coffee and it was very exciting for her to have coffee and she hadn’t seen brown sugar before either and obviously in the Gresham there was brown and white sugar cubes on the table and it was all very fancy to her. And she was just overjoyed to be there and absolutely wowed by everything.

She looked, she looked like a pensioner. I couldn’t believe she was forty-two, I kept looking, I kept looking into her face to find a forty-two year old and I couldn’t, because she had the face of hard work, that face that you see in so many women that have just had to work too hard and have never had a rest and have never had anyone to take care of them or tell them to put their feet up, and who have just, just worked too hard. Because, as I said on the radio a few years ago, this was slavery and I don’t use that term lightly and I’m not an emotive person but slavery is a form of work for which you get no pay and you can’t leave and these were the white slaves of Ireland and they were never emancipated. And nobody stood up for them until now, until you guys (Justice for Magdalenes) did.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The alleged sexual assaults in the Sayreville case are worse than I’d imagined.

Graphic details of what allegedly happened inside the locker room at the school were also revealed in a report Wednesday on NJ.com.

The report stated that “a freshman football player would be pinned to the locker-room floor, his arms and feet held down by multiple upperclassmen. Then, the victim would be lifted to his feet while a finger was forced into his rectum. Sometimes, the same finger was then shoved into the freshman player’s mouth.”

What is wrong with people.

Six of them were arrested on Friday evening and a seventh was being sought.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Tehmina Kazi talks about secularism and Islam, and how the former is good for the latter. She argues that secularism actually adds to the Islamic discourse, because there’s a long tradition of critical thought in Islam.

It makes sense you know. If all religions and none are treated equally, then people are more likely to feel safe discussing and exploring.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

A Fox News station in Arkansas asks a question on its Facebook page. It asks: Is this method of restraining juveniles torture?

The Yell County Juvenile Detention Center uses this restraint mechanism called the “wrap system”. Some juvenile detainees call it “torture”. Now, the Arkansas Department of Human Services has sent a cease and desist letter to Yell County officials asking them to stop using the device. What do you think about the wrap system?

It supplies a photo of the “restraint mechanism”:

Yes, that’s torture. Thank you for asking.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Meanwhile, in Tanzania, they’ve been killing “witches.”

Tanzanian police have charged 23 people with murder after seven villagers were burned alive on suspicion of witchcraft.

Though the attacks in Murufiti, a village in the western Kigoma region, happened on Monday, reports only surfaced with the arrests.

Five of those killed were aged over 60, the other two were over 40.

A Tanzanian human rights group estimates that 500 suspected witches are killed in Tanzania annually.

Five hundred. In just one country.

Witnesses say some of the victims were attacked with machetes and their homes burned.

The son of one of the victims, Josephat John, told Tanzania’s Mwananchi newspaper: “When I returned home in the evening, I found the body of my mother lying 10 metres away from our house, while the body of my father was burnt inside the house.”

Murdered because of a delusion.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

A British man spent 20 days in jail in Morocco for “homosexual acts.” He’s now been released and has returned to the UK and he reports that the experience was…a nightmare.

He said prison conditions were “horrendous”, with inmates as young as 10 and as old as 90 being held “for nothing”.

“I can hardly move my arm now, from 20 nights sleeping on the floor – I just want to go home and sleep in a soft bed,” he said.

He had no idea about the campaigning for his release carried out by his family, who said they were “ecstatic” about his return.

“I’m so proud of them – I couldn’t have a better family,” Mr Cole added.

He said the attitudes to homosexuality in Morocco “are about 100 years out of date”.

Another man, Jamal Jam Wald Nass, who was with Cole was also jailed, and Cole doesn’t know what happened to him. He and his family plan to consult their legal team to find out how they can help him.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

So tweeted Brianna Wu, along with a series of explicitly threatening tweets she received, and

The police just came by. Husband and I are going somewhere safe.

Warning: explicit sexualized violence.

Can we take this seriously now?

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)