Lars Vilks has indeed gone into hiding now, which is tragic. I’m relieved, though, that he says it’s probably temporary.

Lars Vilks, the controversial cartoonist who escaped unhurt from the café hosting the debate, told Channel 4 News he is now in hiding.

“I am at a secret place, totally unknown. I can’t give you countries or one place. I can only just say that I will remain here until we have a more clear picture of how things are looking and hopefully I will go back into a bit more normal routines within a few days or a week or so.”

By the way Channel 4 News? He’s not really “controversial” – not to reasonable people he’s not.… Read the rest

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The BBC is still at it. This must be a deliberate policy, not mere laziness or habit.

It’s at it in a story on what the Danish domestic intelligence agency knew about El-Hussein. Prison officials told them he was at risk of being radicalized. I would guess they are told that about a lot of people, and can’t closely monitor all of them.

Danish intelligence chief Jens Madsen acknowledged that El-Hussein had been “on the radar” of his services.

Mr Madsen said investigators were working on the theory that he could have been inspired by the shootings in Paris last month.

Lars Vilks told AFP news agency that police “did not step up security on Saturday. It was the

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The BBC reports that a police chief in al-Baghdadi, Iraq reports that IS torched 45 people there.

Jihadist militants from Islamic State (IS) have burned to death 45 people in the western Iraqi town of al-Baghdadi, the local police chief says.

Exactly who these people were and why they were killed is not clear, but Col Qasim al-Obeidi said he believed some were members of the security forces.

IS fighters captured much of the town, near Ain al-Asad air base, last week.

Col Obeidi said a compound that houses the families of security personnel and local officials was now under attack.

Shiraz Maher explains why IS does things like torching people to death.

Content warning.

Even by the barbaric standards

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What it’s like to be a child and a mother.

Many of the babies are born with complications, far from the nearest hospital, and the mortality rate for mother and infant is sky-high.

Nor does the future look rosy. The daughters of these child brides are born into a cycle of systemic abuse, violence and poverty.

“I thought I’d have a better life, but at the end, it didn’t turn out that way,” says Aracely, who was married to a 34-year-old when she was 11. When she was four months’ pregnant, her husband left, declaring the child wasn’t his. Now 15, she is raising her son on her own.

“During the time I was pregnant, he didn’t give me

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My friend Sadaf Ali has a post about the fact that far too many activist atheists talk over ex-Muslims and liberal Muslims instead of listening to them and/or helping them get a turn at the mic.

I was recently quote in Allie Conti’s article for VICE on this issue:

But Sadaf Ali, a Muslim turned atheist activist, says that many New Atheists are just grown-up version of the bullies who called her a “terrorist” as a kid.

“I’ve had to debate people often who make gross generalizations of Muslims and Muslim cultures,” she told me. “People hide their bigotry behind their promotion of atheism, and I think it’s disturbing.” She has a pretty easy solution to changing the movement’s alleged-racism

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There was a rally for free speech in Copenhagen tonight.

Via Twitter –

… Read the rest

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Via Grammarly –

… Read the rest

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Tom Gjelten at NPR did a typically NPR passive-aggressive story on “extreme” atheists and Craig Hicks and yadda yadda. I’ve been doing the same sort of thing ever since last Wednesday, but…I think without the passive-aggressive aspects. That’s been my intention at least. I’m up front about it – Craig Hicks freaks me out because we had friends in common, because his Facebook wall looks exactly like the walls of countless other bro atheists, because I don’t know but I fear his anti-theism – which I share – may have had something to do with the three murders he apparently confessed to. I don’t like the idea, and that’s exactly why I’ve been poking at it so hard.

But Gjelten…well … Read the rest

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Some people in Izmir protested the growing influence of Islam in schools in Turkey on Friday. They were dispersed by water cannons.

Education is the latest flashpoint between the administration of President Tayyip Erdogan, and secularist Turks who accuse him of overseeing creeping ‘Islamization’ in the NATO member state.

Riot police were out in force on Izmir’s streets, with water cannon being used to disperse banner-waving demonstrators who had gathered in the center of the city, according to pictures from Dogan news agency. At least one person was seen being led away by plain clothes security officers.

Parts of some regular schools have been requisitioned to create more places for students in “Imam Hatip” religious schools championed by Erdogan,

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I wrote this month’s column for the Freethinker yesterday. It’s a rather heated rejection of the “we must be responsible if we want to live in harmony with horrible ideas” approach. I don’t want to live in harmony with horrible ideas; I want to reject them, and explain my reasons for rejecting them.

It’s not always immediately clear which ideas are horrible. Sometimes it takes extended discussion and illustration and listing of examples to make the horribleness of a particular idea clear. That’s one major reason free speech is important, and why it often trumps other goods.

But some ideas we already know are horrible. We don’t need to keep reopening the question every hour, because we already know and … Read the rest

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Brilliant cartoon by Kevin Moore at The Nib – Parking Space Atheists.… Read the rest

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More on Turkey’s Family and Social Policy Minister Ayşenur İslam via an article in Today’s Zaman last November.

An activist who was kicked out of the Women and Justice Summit organized by the Women and Democracy Association (KADEM) on Monday has said Erdoğan committed an unconstitutional act by saying men and women are not equal.

On the first day of the conference activist Fikriye Yılmaz was silenced and forcibly removed from the room by security at the request of Family and Social Policy Minister Ayşenur İslam after Yılmaz attempted to ask a question during a speech by the minister.

Yılmaz, a member of the We Will Stop the Murders of Women Platform, spoke with Today’s Zaman about her experience

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Speaking of people being murdered for terrible petty self-regarding narcissistic reasons – in Turkey 20-year-old Ozgecan Aslan was murdered for having the audacity to resist being raped.

WOMEN’S RIGHTS ACTIVISTS in Turkey took to the streets yesterday in protest at the murder of a young woman after she resisted an alleged attempt to rape her, local media reported.

Hundreds of women gathered in Istanbul’s Taksim square chanting slogans such as “You will never walk alone!”.

The protesters also demanded that family and social policies minister Aysenur Islam, a woman, step down.

See if you can find someone whose name isn’t Submission.

On Friday, police discovered the burned body of 20-year-old Ozgecan Aslan in a riverbed in southern Turkey.

She

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About the Copenhagen shooter.

Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein has been widely named as the gunman who killed two people and wounded five at a cultural centre and synagogue in the Danish capital.

El-Hussein was not an immigrant. He was of Palestinian descent but his parents settled in Denmark before he was born. Like the gunmen in Paris, he turned against the country of his birth.

…

Classmates who spoke to the Ekstra Bladet newspaper (in Danish) remembered a loner with a hot temper who loved to discuss Islam and the Israel-Palestine conflict. He was not afraid to voice a hatred of Jews, said one.

So he was on the path to becoming a thoroughly terrible person, one with no … Read the rest

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In Dhaka today, a publisher’s stall at a book fair was shut down for displaying a biography of Mohammed.

Bangla Academy has shut down the Rodela Prokashani stall on the allegation of publishing and selling a translated book on Prophet Muhammad’s biography, which “hurts religious sentiment of people.”

Dr Jalal Ahmed, member secretary of the Amar Ekushey Book Fair, said: “The stall of Rodela Prokashani was shut down on Monday for publishing and selling a book [translated], Twenty Three Years: A Study of the Prophetic Career of Mohammad, which allegedly hurts people’s religious sentiments.”

“According to article 13.13 of Fair Regulations 2015, none is allowed to sell books at the fair that can hurt religious sentiments. The

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Wow. More dreck from the Guardian. This time it’s not so much the “we must defend free speech but not really” brand of dreck as the making up their own facts brand. Let’s play Spot the Mistakes.

First two sentences of the piece:

The attacks were in different continents and on people of different faiths and of none, but in the North Carolina university town of Chapel Hill and the Danish capital, Copenhagen, it was freedom itself that was the intended target. On Tuesday, three young Muslim students were gunned down in their Chapel Hill flat, apparently by a neighbour, Craig Hicks, who claimed their faith was an affront to his atheistic principles.

Is that a mistake or deliberately … Read the rest

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Islamic State is reported to have killed 21 Egyptian Christians it was holding captive.

A video has emerged purportedly showing the beheading of 21 Egyptian Christians who had been kidnapped by Islamic State (IS) in Libya.

The footage shows a group wearing orange overalls, being forced to the ground and then decapitated.

It was posted online by Libyan jihadists who say they are allied with IS.

It’s getting to be like living in an old myth, or in a wilderness full of bears. Or in Europe circa 1942.

The kidnapped Egyptian workers, all Coptic Christians, were seized from the coastal town of Sirte in eastern Libya, now under the control of Islamist groups.

On Friday, IS released pictures of

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The Guardian is prompt with the “but we must guard against the understandable temptation to be provocative in the publication of these cartoons” crap. Defend free speech, it cries. But don’t be provocative about it.

Great advice, were it not for the fact that that’s exactly what these shooters are saying. Hugh Muir writes:

We are in perilous territory. Slaughter as political protest cannot be defended. Free speech as legal and moral pre-requisites in a free society must be defended. But there are also other obligations to be laid upon those who wish to live in peaceful, reasonably harmonious societies. Even after Paris, even after Denmark, we must guard against the understandable temptation to be provocative in the

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Haaretz says Copenhagen police also arrested a suspect last night.

Police said they shot and killed a suspect in the attack, and that another suspected accomplice had been arrested. At the same time, police raided the Copenhagen home of the terrorist and found a gun.

The Danish intelligence agency said investigators have identified the suspect and that he is someone who had been on the agency’s “radar.” He did not reveal his identity.

Danish media reported police also raided an internet café in the Norrebro neighborhood in the capital and arrested two people. It was not reported if the arrests were linked to the shootings.

…

Hours after the attack, Danish police shot and killed a man near Noerrebro train

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As I’m sure you already know, the Copenhagen police tracked the shootings suspect to where he lived, there was gunfire, he was killed. No interviews, again. No doubt that was his intention, again.

The BBC account:

Police say they killed the man in the Norrebro district after he opened fire on them.

…

Police say video surveillance suggested the same man carried out both attacks. They do not believe any other people were involved.

…

Officials said the gunman fled by car. A black Volkswagen Polo was found abandoned a short distance away.

Police said the gunman then called a taxi to take him home.

They used information from the taxi driver to identify the address, near the railway

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