Punch up.

Cartoon by Chip Bok.

H/t Pieter Breitner

… Read the rest

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CEMB partay on June 20th.

Join us for appetisers, drinks, music, speeches and laughs to celebrate the CEMB’s 8th anniversary.
Saturday 20 June 2015, 1500-1800 Hours at a location near London Kings Cross/St Pancras stations

Speakers and acts include: Philosopher A C Grayling, Iraqi British Singer Alya Marquardt, Secular activist Aliyah Saleem, Council of Ex-Muslims of Morocco Founder Imad Iddine Habib, Comedian Kate Smurthwaite, Author Kenan Malik, Southall Black Sisters Director Pragna Patel, CEMB Spokesperson Maryam Namazie and more.

Tickets: £18 (waged); £10 (unwaged)

To register, please email your name and mobile number to exmuslimcouncil@gmail.com. You can purchase your ticket(s) via Paypal or by sending a cheque made payable to ‘CEMB’ to: BM Box 1919, London WC1N 3XX.

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What’s wrong with this picture?

The caption on the page:

Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK

To insult someone, to be offensive, provocative or racist is not only uncivilised, rude and disrespectful, but also causes societies to live in misery with anger and tension. Those that find this acceptable or support this concept should enlighten us why this is beneficial to society/an individual. How can we expect to build civilised, unified societies if we encourage everyone to insult one another? To respect others is a basic human property.

What rule exists for one community, should exist for others too; the double standards of free speech controlled by those in power against the powerless needs to be eliminated. There needs to

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One silver lining…

Norway has scrapped its longstanding blasphemy law, meaning it is now legal to mock the beliefs of others, in a direct response to January’s brutal attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

The proposal to rush through the change was made in February by Conservative MP Anders B. Werp and Progress Party MP Jan Arild Ellingsen, who argued that the law “underpins a perception that religious expressions and symbols are entitled to a special protection”.

“This is very unfortunate signal to send, and it is time that society clearly stands up for freedom of speech,” the two wrote in their proposal.

Quite right. To an American it seems strange to see a Conservative proposing it … Read the rest

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Originally a comment by veil_of_ignorance on A sneer too many.

I have now read this obscurantist, condescending, self-indulgent essay several times, trying to find some sentence, which resolves its apparent, more than prominent contradictions.

Many other commenters have already pointed out that Zakaria never mentions Islamism, never speaks of the heterogeneity of opinion in the Muslim community regarding CH, regarding blasphemy, regarding religion and politics; instead she speaks of Muslim opinion and Muslim subjectivity as if there was only one. All while permanently lamenting the fact that Muslims are ‘otherized’ in Western society, i.e. viewed as monolithic group and represented in malevolent terms. The irony of this was of course not lost on me; and it struck me that … Read the rest

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Sometimes showing people the doors, showing them that the doors are not locked, that they can walk through them any time they like, can cause them pain. Sometimes people want security and enclosure so badly that they don’t want the doors to be open. They see us as violating their freedom to believe that there are no doors, by showing them so clearly where the doors are and how free of locks they are.

This is collateral damage. There is possible collateral damage with most things we can say and argue. Some people don’t want to hear that men are not the natural permanent superiors of women, or that white people are not the natural permanent superiors of everyone else. … Read the rest

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The thoughts in the previous were prompted partly by reading Caroline Wyatt’s summing up of the Charlie Hebdo discussions at the BBC.

The deaths at the magazine prompted waves of soul-searching about free speech, and whether cartoons that deliberately set out to offend are worth defending – especially when they sought to mock and satirize a religion and a figure that so many hold dear.

That kind of claim prompts such thoughts. Yes, many hold their religion dear; yes, many hold particular figures – however long-dead – in their religion dear. Is that a reason to treat the religions and the figures as taboo? It can’t be, because that very holding dear is one of the mechanisms that keeps … Read the rest

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So what are we supposed to do? If we accept the idea that challenging Islam inevitably means challenging the followers of Islam, i.e. Muslims, what are we to do about that? Stop challenging Islam, in order to avoid giving pain to Muslims or pleasure to people who like to bully Muslims?

The concern is a real one. It is of course true that challenges to a religion will give pain to some of its followers, assuming they are aware of them. We don’t know how large a fraction of those followers, or how severe the pain will be, but we can be reasonably sure neither number will be zero. It’s also true that challenges to a religion will give a … Read the rest

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Stephen Eric Bronner, at the beginning of Reclaiming the Englightenment, talks about Horkheimer and Adorno and about the ethos of the Enlightenment and says that making sense of it

is impossible without recognizing what became a general stylistic commitment to clarity, communicability, and what rhetoricians term “plain speech.”

Horkheimer and Adorno thought they needed a very difficult style in their resistance to the culture industry.

Their esoteric and academic style is a far cry from that of Enlightenment intellectuals who debated first principles in public, who introduced freelance writing, who employed satire and wit to demolish puffery and dogma, and who were preoccupied with reaching a general audience of educated readers. [pp 8-9]

Who employed satire and wit to … Read the rest

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Wretched news on the UK election front, of course. The Tories got an actual god damn majority. All my UK friends are saying goodbye NHS. Miliband, Clegg and Farage have all resigned as party leaders.

The one silver lining is that George Galloway LOST to Naz Shah. The horrible Islamist bully from the “Respect” party lost to a Muslim woman from Labour.

Goodbye George. Become obscure.

Snaps from yesterday via Furqan Naeem:

 … Read the rest

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Originally a comment by veil_of_ignorance on Myths about Charlie Hebdo.

There are quite a few voices from the Left who not only explain Islamism but who also downright justify it as the “will of the people” or voice of the marginalized. Irrespective of the fact that Islamism is as petty bourgeois as it can get. Beyond that, there are clear links between certain parts of the Left and Islamist organizations – Galloway is a good example, as is StopTheWar, as is Amnesty/CAGE.

On the other hand, progressive voices from the MENA region are oftentimes ignored or played down. The American Left’s solidarity with the Rojava cantons – one of the most impressive progressive projects in the last 20 years … Read the rest

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