Now this is magical thinking I can respect!

Indigenous Australians pay their respects to the former member for Bennelong. (Via Oz Atheist)


Howard vs. Aboriginal Australians

Read more!

The Bill Muehlenberg Trophy: Joseph Massad

Joseph Massad, Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University, has published a book in which he argues that

there are no homosexuals in the entire Arab world, except for a few who have been brainwashed into believing they have a homosexual identity by an aggressive Western homosexual missionizing movement he calls "Gay International." [. . .] According to the author, "It is the very discourse of the Gay International which produces homosexuals, as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist" (emphasis added).

The claim is advanced in the third chapter of Desiring Arabs, based upon an earlier paper of his (“Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World”).

TEH GAY AGENDA is a familiar Christian Right meme, and
the idea that gays and lesbians do not exist in the Middle East has most recently been put by one Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Massad simply presents the homophobic ravings of Christian and Muslim fundies and expresses them in the idiom of postcolonial studies. As former Guardian Middle East correspondent Brian Whitaker observes in a review of Desiring Arabs,

Massad talks of a “missionary” campaign orchestrated by what he calls the “Gay International”. Its inspiration, he says, came partly from “the white western women’s movement, which had sought to universalise its issues through imposing its own colonial feminism on the women’s movements in the non-western world”, but he also links its origins to the Carter administration’s use of human rights to “campaign against the Soviet Union and Third World enemies”.

Like the major US- and European-based human rights organisations (Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International) and following the line taken up by white western women's organisations and publications, the Gay International was to reserve a special place for the Muslim countries in its discourse as well as its advocacy. The orientalist impulse … continues to guide all branches of the human rights community. (p 161)

Oddly, since this is central to his argument, Massad offers no evidence to substantiate his claim. There are plenty of reasons other than an “orientalist impulse” why gay rights activists might justifiably pay attention to Muslim countries (punishments for same-sex acts, for instance, tend to be heavier there, on paper if not always in practice, and the only countries in the world where the death penalty for sodomy still applies justify it on the basis of Islamic law) but that is not the same as reserving “a special place” for them in the discourse.

Then again, I suppose the demand that extraordinary claims of the kind Massad advances be supported by empirical evidence may be written off as another manifestation of Western imperialism. It gets worse:

State repression against gay people happens on a frequent basis across the Middle East. Massad, however, who claims to be a supporter of sexual freedom per se, is oddly impassive when confronted with the vast catalogue of anti-gay state violence in the Muslim world. Massad, unlike Ahmadinejad, does acknowledge that "gay-identified" people exist in the Middle East, but he views them with derision. Take, for instance, his description of the Queen Boat victims as "westernized, Egyptian, gay-identified men" who consort with European and American tourists. A simple "gay" would have sufficed. He smears efforts to free the men by writing of the "openly gay and anti-Palestinian Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank" and the "anti-Arab and anti-Egyptian [Congressman] Tom Lantos" who circulated a petition amongst their colleagues to cut off U.S. funding to Egypt unless the men were released. He then goes onto belittle not just gay activists (one of whom, a founder of the Gay and Lesbian Arabic Society, referred to the Queen Boat affair as "our own Stonewall," in reference to the 1969 Stonewall riot when a group of patrons at a New York City gay bar resisted arrest, a moment credited with sparking the American gay rights movement) but the persecuted men themselves. The Queen Boat cannot be Stonewall, Massad insists, because the "drag Queens at the Stonewall bar" embraced their homosexual identity, whereas the Egyptian men "not only" did "not seek publicity for their alleged homosexuality, they resisted the very publicity of the events by the media by covering their faces in order to hide from the cameras and from hysterical public scrutiny." Massad does not pause to consider that perhaps the reason why these men covered their faces was because of the brutal consequences they would endure if their identities became public, repercussions far worse than anything the rioters at Stonewall experienced. "These are hardly manifestations of gay pride or gay liberation," Massad sneers.

Joseph Massad: you are a disgrace to academia. Your brand of unscholarly and unsubstantiated rubbish feeds the hysterical paranoiac fantasies of the Horowitz crowd and their puppets in the Republican party--people who seek to restrict academic freedom and stifle the views of those with whom they disagree, and are just salivating for a cause celebre like yourself. Furthermore, it gives a free pass to the persecution of gays and lesbians in the Arab world, by coding any criticism of such persecution as "Western imperialism." Lift your game. Read more!

The Wonderful World of Magical Thinking XXVII

The week in fundie . . .

1. Texas law, with the Orwellian title "Religious Viewpoints Antidiscrimination Act," allows evangelical students to proselytise to captive audiences at public school assemblies. (Alternet)
2. Fundies--of both the Protestant and Catholic varieties--call for the shutting down of a San Francisco gay and lesbian festival and for the boycott of sponsor Miller's. (As one liberal pastor observes, a conservative Christian boycott of alcohol--isn't that a little like Hindus boycotting beef?) (The Bay Area Reporter)
3. Archbishop declares he would refuse communion to Rudy Giuliani. (via Morons.org)
4. The Red Mass: where Catholic archbishops have the annual opportunity to instruct the members of the US Supreme Court on how to vote on constitutional matters. (via TheocracyWatch)
   
5. God-fearing evangelical Christians--default moral exemplars to us all--gay-bash an Indian man to death in Sacramento. Apparently "God has 'made an injection' of high numbers of anti-gay Slavic evangelicals into traditionally liberal West Coast cities," according to the host of a Russian-language anti-gay radio show in Sacramento. "'In those places where the disease is progressing, God made a divine penicillin,'" he said. The murderers belong to a Latvian Pentecostal church linked to anti-gay activist Scott Lively, who in the 90s wrote a book comparing gay rights activists to Nazis. (Bartholomew's Notes on Religion)
6. William Dembski: evil atheist materialist scientists unfairly try to rationalise away the existence of angels (which Dembski insists are as real as rocks and plants and animals) with reason and science and whatnot. Evil atheist materialist scientists!
   

Religion as Child Abuse
Read more!

Shutting the door on darkies: it's what Jesus would do.

Image via the Jim Crow Museum

When he isn't bearing false witness on his CV, right-wing Catholic Federal Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews is declaring no more room at the inn for Sudanese refugees--you know, those people who are fleeing from a situation in which they run the constant risk of being raped or murdered by Janjaweed and Sudanese government forces--because he thinks they "have been slow to integrate with the wider community." The evidence for this claim--evidence that African refugees are less able to "integrate" (whatever that means anyway) into the Australian community than refugees from the Middle East or Asia--is for Cabinet's eyes only, so you'll just have to trust him. The Victorian police say he's spouting nonsense: "young African men accounted for less than 1per cent of the state's crime statistics and did not present a major difficulty for law enforcement," according to the Police Commissioner. But they're just "in denial," retorts Kev, who claims "anecdotal evidence suggests otherwise." Anecdotal evidence, you see, trumps statistical evidence. Textbook magical thinking. Kev missed his calling in life: instead of falsely claiming to co-author other people's books, he could be making a fortune writing his own books on Christian apologetics.

As even the folks at the Government Gazette are forced to conclude . . . Dog: meet whistle.

More at Mikey's.
Andrews on Mohammed Haneef
Read more!

"We have to kill them over here so I don't have to kill them back in Colorado"

The Nation is carrying a very disturbing report by Chris Hedges and Laila al-Arian on the brutality of US forces towards Iraqi civilians, and the effect this is having on some US soldiers once they return home and reflect on what they have seen and done.

In Iraq, Specialist Middleton said, "a lot of guys really supported that whole concept that, you know, if they don't speak English and they have darker skin, they're not as human as us, so we can do what we want."

According to some US vets, this involved the indiscriminate shooting of civilians, running civilian vehicles off the road and running down pedestrians, including children, firing on civilian cars and families at checkpoints and planting IEDs on civilian dead to make it look as if they were combatants. A soldier described a riot at Abu Ghraib prison:

Nine prisoners were killed and three wounded after soldiers opened fire during the riot, and Specialist Delgado's fellow soldiers returned with photographs of the events. The images, disturbingly similar to the incident described by Sergeant Mejía, shocked him. "It was very graphic," he said. "A head split open. One of them was of two soldiers in the back of the truck. They open the body bags of these prisoners that were shot in the head and [one soldier has] got an MRE spoon. He's reaching in to scoop out some of his brain, looking at the camera and he's smiling. And I said, 'These are some of our soldiers desecrating somebody's body. Something is seriously amiss.' I became convinced that this was excessive force, and this was brutality."

See also:
Haditha massacre (Wikipedia)

US Soldier Atrocities in Iraq (CNN)


Read more!

Short story: the Marquis de Sade's "Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man"

This is actually a dialogue rather than a story. A priest is giving the last rites to a dying man who repents that he has not taken full advantage of the fact that he was "created by Nature with the keenest appetites and the strongest of passions and was put on this earth with the sole purpose of placating both by surrendering to them." The dying man then proceeds to state his case for atheism.

Despite the fact that the dying man seems not to have heard of the is-ought fallacy, he makes some good arguments that resonate well with current debates. His opponent is probably an unfair strawman, but I have heard a Christian apologist in a recent debate with Christopher Hitchens advance at least one of the priest's counter-arguments--the notion that the world has been created "broken" as an answer to the problem of evil.

The dialogue is far too long to reproduce here, so I'll just provide a link to the PDF:

"Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man"

Of course, more than just atheists have been influenced by de Sade's ideas:


Read more!

The Wonderful World of Magical Thinking XVIII

The week in fundie:

1. Homophobic street preacher whines about hypocrisy because he has been refused permission to march in a gay pride parade. (Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars. Incidentally, the WorldNetDaily article detailing the poor oppressed anti-gay activist's plight refers to said gay pride parade as a "gay" pride parade. Why the scare quotes? Are the participants not gay? Are they only pretending to be gay? Why do wingnuts do this? Are they stupid or something?)
2. Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, ultra-Orthodox Jews are threatening violence against this year's gay pride parade, having acted upon similar threats in previous years. (Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars)
3. And if you happen to be gay--or even if you're accused of being gay--in post-Saddam Iraq, it significantly increases your chances of being shot, burned and/or beheaded by Shi'a fundamentalist death squads. (Via uruknet) (Warning: follow the links at your own risk--they contain images that are definitely NSFW.) Isn't faith a wonderful thing?
   
4. Over in Pakistan, a Christian man has been sentenced to death for allegedly insulting Mohammed. (Via Richard Dawkins.net)
5. Confused by "NOMA?" US Republican Presidential candidate Sam Brownback unpacks it for you in an op-ed for the New York Times. The way to balance science and faith is to cherry-pick those elements of science which are consonant with your religious ideology (or could be interpreted to be so); if it doesn't agree with your religious presuppositions, you simply write it off as "atheistic theology posing as science." Simple, no? (Richard Dawkins.net) (More info. on the science-friendly Brownback campaign in this post)
6. New Zealand is set to get its own version of Ken Ham's Creation Museum. (Via Pharyngula)
7. Why some people resist science (Via Pharyngula)
   

Read more!

Beating up gays: it's what Jesus would do

The man in the photo above about to throw a punch at gay rights activist Peter Tatchell is, like those in crowd around him, an Orthodox Christian. He has turned up to protest against a small demonstration by gay rights activists--who are themselves peacefully protesting against the refusal of the Mayor of Moscow to allow a gay rights march--and he chooses to express his faith by beating up a man who has not threatened him in any way, and whose only crime appears to be that he is gay. Tatchell's assailant is motivated by faith-based hatred. And what I would like to know is this--what does he hate more: the "sin," or the "sinner?" Because it's really difficult to tell from the picture.

Regarding the bashings, it is only fair to point out that Orthodox Christians were not alone among the perpetrators--neo-Nazis and nationalists were also involved. Mindless homophobia makes for some interesting alliances. (And the Moscow police never lifted a finger against the homophobes, and instead threw their victims into jail. State-sponsored Christofascism.)

It is also only fair to point out that homosexuals have never really fared well in Russia: pre-revolutionary socialists saw them as symbols of capitalist decadence; and in the Soviet Union, homosexuals faced five years hard labour and mandatory "reparative therapy" (a technique favoured, incidentally, by many a god-fearing, bible-believing Christian in America). The post-Soviet era merely witnessed the replacement of one state church, Communism, with another: Orthodoxy; consequently, it has witnessed the replacement of an ideological justification for homophobia with a theological justification.

Unfortunately, as Tatchell himself notes in a recent Guardian piece, these events are not unique to Moscow:

Across much of the former Soviet empire, gay rights are one of the main battlegrounds of the struggle between liberty and authoritarianism. Hungary and the Czech Republic are two rare examples of ex-communist states that have made the transition from tyranny to democracy and, in large measure, embraced gay human rights. In Russia, Latvia, Poland, Belarus, Lithuania and Moldova, however, the situation is very different. Freedom of expression and the rights of sexual minorities are still hedged with restrictions.

In these countries, unreconstructed puritan communists have joined forces with ultra-nationalists, neo-Nazis and religious fundamentalists to orchestrate a homophobic backlash against the claims of their lesbian and gay citizens for equal rights and non-discrimination. The issue that has ignited this backlash is the refusal of gay people to remain in the shadows, invisible and ashamed. Their out and proud claim on public space and for the right to protest has prompted the banning of Gay Pride marches, from Riga in the west to Moscow in the east.

These bans are much more than an attack on gay and lesbian people. They are a full-scale resistance to moves towards modernity, tolerance, progress and human rights. Gay people are the target and symbol. But it is freedom of expression itself, and the right to dissent, that is being quashed.

Poland, for instance, is led by a coalition of rabidly homophobic conservative parties. A senior member of one of them, The League of Polish Families' Wojciech Wierzejski, was quoted as saying, in response to the 2006 gay rights parade in Warsaw, that "if deviants begin to demonstrate, they should be hit with batons." At other gay rights parades in the country marchers have been pelted with eggs and beaten by the good citizenry. A government-appointed children's television watchdog is currently investigating whether the Teletubby Tinky Winky is homosexual. Recently, Education Minister Roman Giertych, also a member of the The League of Polish Families, called for a ban on "the propagation of homosexuality" in Poland's schools. Giertych is affiliated with the neo-Nazi All-Polish Youth, whose members at counter-demonstrations in 2005 declared: "We’ll do to you what Hitler did with Jews."

All this nastiness, of course, has to be seen in the context of the war on secularism being waged by Europe's religious leaders, particularly Pope Benedict. According to an op-ed in the International Herald Tribune,

Benedict's religious alternative is not some form of theocratic absolutism. On the contrary, the Pope is a staunch defender of secularity — the separation of church and state. Benedict wants to disentangle the church from the state, but without divorcing religion from politics, because only a religion freed from subservience to the state can save modern culture from itself.

Evidently, "saving modern culture from itself" involves re-asserting Bronze Age views on sexuality and fostering a society in which people have to live in fear because of their sexual orientation.

See also: Dispatches from the Culture Wars and Lines from a Floating Life. Read more!

The Wonderful World of Magical Thinking XV

The week in fundie:

1. Christian students cry "persecution!" because they're not allowed to abuse homosexuals at their high school. (via Pharyngula)
2. Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort claim that they can prove God's existence without the Bible . . . by referring to the Ten Commandments. Kirk and Ray: YOU FAIL. (See the unedited Nightline debate between Cameron/Comfort and the Rational Response Squad here, and see also the recap by FriendlyAtheist)
3. Pope Benedict threatens to excommunicate Catholic politicians who don't force their religious beliefs regarding abortion on the populace. (Austin Cline)
4. Meet Jesus' favourite Congresswoman. (via Pharyngula)
5. School bus driver fired for gay personal ad. (Dispatches from the Culture Wars)
6. Pakistan's legislature considers a bill to execute people for leaving Islam. (Dispatches from the Culture Wars)
7. WorldNetDaily: "STARBUCKS HATES GOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" (via Dispatches from the Culture Wars)
8. UPDATE: Hundreds of thousands of homophobes attend gay hate rally in Rome.
   

Read more!

Hated to death: a gay lynching in Jamaica

Pam's House Blend reports on a gay-bashing in Jamaica, one of the most virulently homophobic societies on the planet.
A 2004 Human Rights Watch report concludes that the pervasiveness of homophobia in Jamaican society is such that it is jeopardising efforts to combat HIV/AIDS in that country, where HIV/AIDS is still seen as a "gay disease." It also contains the following description of what can happen to gays and lesbians who speak out:

On June 9, 2004, Brian Williamson, Jamaica’s leading gay rights activist, was murdered in his home, his body mutilated by multiple knife wounds. Within an hour after his body was discovered, a Human Rights Watch researcher witnessed a crowd gathered outside the crime scene. A smiling man called out, “Battyman [homosexual] he get killed!” Many others celebrated Williamson’s murder, laughing and calling out, “let’s get them one at a time,” “that’s what you get for sin,” “let’s kill all of them.” Some sang “boom bye bye,” a line from a popular Jamaican song about killing and burning gay men.

Perhaps not unexpectedly, Public Defender Earl Witter blamed the victim.

Public Defender Earl Witter resorted to the vernacular yesterday as he advised members of the gay community to "hold your corners", and avoid flaunting their sexual preferences in the face of those who are repulsed by their behaviour.

Condemning violence in all forms, particularly against homosexuals, the public defender, however, warned members of the gay community that if they continued to shove their tendencies on others who found it repugnant, it might incite violence.

"It may provoke a violent breach of the peace," Mr. Witter told The Gleaner yesterday evening.

Writing in the Guardian, Decca Aitkenhead suggests that Jamaican homophobia is a legacy of "400 years of Jamaican history, starting with the sodomy of male slaves by their white owners as a means of humiliation." She also cites Jamaica's extreme poverty and dilapidated health, education and law enforcement systems: "for many the only support comes from churches, many of which dispense a fire-and-brimstone religion that is not merely homophobic, but designed to discourage independent thought." What is needed on the part of the West is not vilification, Aitkenhead concludes, but debt relief, fair trade and investment: "If that happened, homophobia would soon organically dissolve." Bullshit.

Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars Read more!

Honour killings

The 7.30 Report has a story about Arab women in a small city in Israel who are speaking out against honour killings in their community. One woman turned her own son in to the police after he killed his sister:

INSPECTOR LIMOR YEHUDA: It is terrible to know that in the era of 2007 and such terrible murders happen. Women that get murdered for the way they dressed or the way they talked, maybe because they talked on the phone with someone or looked at some guy or even didn't look at some guy, for stupid, stupid reasons or for no reason.

DAVID HARDAKER: Last year, 19‑year‑old Reem Abu Ghanem was murdered. Her crime was to turn her back on the man that her family had picked for her to marry and fall for another. Her killer turned out to be her older brother, a respected paediatrician who Reem had trusted for protection. He smothered Reem in a cloth soaked with anaesthetic drugs from his hospital. He believed he'd killed her. His four brothers threw her body into the boot of a car. They drove to a field on the outskirts of town to a deserted and derelict house, where they would dispose of her down an old well, but when they arrived, it turned out that Reem was not dead after all.

So she was still alive. Do you know, did they do anything at that point before throwing her in?

INSPECTOR LIMOR YEHUDA: Yeah, yeah. After she cried, after she begged for her life, they used a stone to hit her on the head. And then she was still alive, she didn't die from the injury. And she was then thrown out into the well like this. Alive, semi‑injured, bleeding, I guess. It's terrible. It's so cruel, so vicious. But to throw someone alive when is your relatives, your own flesh and blood, right? It's, it's very, very difficult to bear.

[. . .]

Reem's older brother was arrested after a tip‑off from a prison informant. Despite the crime, the women of Joh Arish remained silent until the killing this year of another of their number. Hamda Abu Ghanem, also 19, was shot in the head nine times, as she lay in her bed upstairs alone in her house. Her killer was her own brother. This time, the women broke their silence. For the Ramle police, it was extraordinary.

INSPECTOR LIMOR YEHUDA: Wow - huge, huge step. When we are talking about this murder case, it's like a big step because we learned that among the years, there were like eight murders in the same family, Abu Ghanem family. The women are getting murdered one by one. All of a sudden, we're all like in shock - they decided to talk.

DAVID HARDAKER: The woman that went to the police was Imama Abu Ghanem, the mother of Hamda. She gave police the evidence to charge her own son.

IMAMA ABU GHANEM (translation): In the Koran, there is no order, murder your sister, and I've asked my son, “Why didn't you put the rest of your bullets in your own head?”

Honour killings in the Arab world are perpetrated by Muslims and Christians alike, having originated in Hammurabi and Assyrian legal codes that predate Islam and Christianity. This might upset a few people, but no society that tolerates such crimes against humanity can reasonably be described as rational or civilised.

UPDATE: For more background on honour killings in Israel and Palestine, see this Haaretz piece. (via Amal A) Read more!