Category: female genital mutilation

Tuesday: Hili dialogue

July 16, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday July 16, 2024, and Corn Fritters Day, honoring another contribution of America to world culture. They’re best served with a lashing of maple syrup. Yum! These ones are sans syrup:

Missvain, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also National Fresh Spinach Day, National Cherry Day, World Snake Day, Holocaust Memorial Day in France and Guinea Pig Appreciation Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 16 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Trump won another one: the (Trump-appointed) judge in the case of his purloining classified documents case has dismissed the charges against him. Since this is a federal case, Trump would have been able to pardon himself (if that is legal) if he were elected in November. And I’m sure he would try in that situation. But oy! This man has incredible luck (or good lawyers):

A federal judge dismissed in its entirety the classified documents case against former President Donald J. Trump on Monday, ruling that the appointment of the special counsel, Jack Smith, had violated the Constitution.

In a stunning ruling delivered on the first day of the Republican National Convention, the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, found that Mr. Smith’s appointment as special counsel was improper because it was not based on a specific federal statute and because he had not been named to the post by the president or confirmed by the Senate.

The ruling by Judge Cannon, who was put on the bench by Mr. Trump, flew in the face of previous court decisions reaching back to the Watergate era. And in a single swoop, it removed a major legal threat against Mr. Trump just as he is set to formally become the Republican nominee for president.

Here’s what else to know:

  • Appeal expected: Mr. Smith’s team will almost certainly appeal the ruling by Judge Cannon throwing out the classified documents indictment, which charges Mr. Trump with illegally holding onto a trove of highly sensitive state secrets after he left office and then obstructing the government’s repeated efforts to retrieve them.

  • Possible election effects: Judge Cannon’s previous delays in this case had already all but ensured there could be no trial until after the 2024 election. If Mr. Trump wins, he could use his power over the Justice Department to have the case scuttled if it still exists.

  • Undoing precedent: The ruling rolls back nearly 30 years of how special counsels have gotten their jobs. Special counsels are governed by Justice Department regulations set through the statutory authority of the attorney general. That has been the case since the Clinton administration, when the previous law on independent prosecutors was allowed to lapse in the wake of the Whitewater investigations.

In a case that hinges on Constitutional law, this will surely be appealed, but, well, you know the composition of the Supreme Court. Things just get worse and worse.  . . .

*The Republican National Convention started yesterday in Milwaukee (as a sign of Ceiling Cat’s disapproval, we had a 3.4 earthquake west of the city early yesterday morning), and Trump will announce his choice for VP:

Former president Donald Trump indicated Monday that he would announce his selection of a running mate later in the day. More than 2,400 Republican delegates are gathering in Milwaukee for the four-day Republican National Convention at which they plan to formally nominate Trump to lead their presidential ticket for a third time and approve a party platform.

During the last 12 hours, multiple Donald Trump advisers have said they do not know whom he will pick as a running mate. Trump, ever the showman, likes dragging this out to the end — and building suspense. He has told multiple people that he does not want the news to leak, and he wants control over the announcement.

We will see the vice-presidential pick at 4:37 p.m. Eastern time, per a Trump adviser, when Trump makes the announcement.

This next bit surprises me:

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has been told that he will not be Trump’s vice-presidential pick, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Rubio was widely seen as one of the top contenders to be Trump’s running mate, after a bitter 2016 rivalry. The Florida Republican appeared with Trump last week at a Miami rally. His proponents argued that he could help attract non-White voters and touted his foreign policy experience.

I thought that with his name recognition and experience, Rubio would be a shoo-in, but I forgot that Trump doesn’t want a VP with any credibility or power, because they could butt heads and Trump always wants to be Top Dog.  I am now predicting that Trump will be elected, and no, I’m not at all happy about it. Out of 13 polls reported at FiveThirtyEight in which Trump comes up against Biden, Trump wins twelve of those. That’s significant by the sign test alone!

UPDATE: Trump has chosen, and his VP, and most likely the next VP of the country, is Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio:

Mr. Vance, 39, is a political newcomer who entered the Senate only last year, but he has spent that time methodically ascending the conservative firmament. Once an acerbic Trump critic — attacking Mr. Trump as “reprehensible” and calling him “cultural heroin” — he won Mr. Trump’s backing in his 2022 Senate race by wholly embracing his politics and his lies about a stolen election. The endorsement lifted him above a crowded field, and ultimately to the Senate.

Oy! Vance was a Never-Trumper, and then quickly changed his mind when he saw the breadth of Trump’s coattails. This is one example of what hypocrites politicians can be. Now he’s an Always Trumper!

*The Wall Street Journal reports on the big failure of the Secret Service embodied in Trump getting shot:

Donald Trump’s near assassination presents the biggest crisis for the Secret Service in decades. At the heart of what will be a torrent of investigations: How was a 20-year-old lone shooter able to take up an exposed firing position on an open rooftop not much more than a football field away from the former president?

Scrutiny is likely to focus heavily on the Secret Service’s advance work to secure buildings near the Butler, Pa., rally, including one belonging to American Glass Research where Thomas Matthew Crooks was perched when he shot at Trump.

“The reality is there’s just no excuse for the Secret Service to be unable to provide sufficient resources to cover an open rooftop 100 yards away from the site,” said Bill Pickle, a former deputy assistant Secret Service director. “And there’s no way he should’ve got those shots off.”

Robert Pugar, an Allegheny County resident and off-duty police officer who attended the rally, said he noticed the law-enforcement snipers looking through their binoculars shortly before the shooting happened. “I kept saying to myself, I wonder if they see something. It just caught my attention…or is that just how they pan the horizon?” Pugar recalled.

A day later, Pugar said he was still taking it all in. With all the top-notch security technology available today, “how did somebody get 130 yards away without being recognized?” he asked. “We couldn’t even park within a mile. So how does somebody get on the very first building away from the stage, on the rooftop?”

. . .One witness outside the event told BBC that he saw an armed man crawling on top of a building and pointed him out to law enforcement.

“I’m thinking to myself, ‘Why is Trump still speaking, why have they not pulled him off the stage?’…The next thing you know, five shots ring out,” the witness said.

This puzzles me, too, especially because of the guy who was interviewed by the BBC (see yesterday’s tweets), and who reported the potential shooter on the roof to both local law enforcement and the Secret Service. Apparently nobody paid any attention.

*How do the Palestinians now feel about Hamas after the misery the organization has wreaked on the Gaza strip?  A survey reported in the Jerusalem Post is NOT heartening:

More than nine months after the Israel-Hamas war began, many Palestinians are convinced that the “day after” in the Gaza Strip will be a return to the pre-Oct. 7 era, in which the Iran-backed terrorist group still has control of the coastal enclave. For them, the “day after” means going back to the day before the Hamas-led attack on Israel.

Today, Palestinians fall into two groups: those who hate Hamas but think that under the current circumstances it is impossible to remove it from power, and those who want Hamas to stay in power because they embrace it and its extremist ideology.

. .When asked who the public would prefer to control the Gaza Strip after the war, 61% (71% in the West Bank and 46% in the Gaza Strip) answered Hamas. Only 16% chose a new P.A. [Palestinian Authority] with an elected president, parliament and government, while another 6% chose the current P.A. but without its president, Mahmoud Abbas.

When asked to speculate about the party that will control the Gaza Strip after the war, a majority of respondents (56%) answered that it would be Hamas.

It is also interesting to see that an overwhelming majority of Palestinians (75%) oppose the deployment of an Arab security force in the Gaza Strip. In this regard, these Palestinians have actually endorsed Hamas’s stance, which opposes the deployment of non-Palestinian security forces in the Gaza Strip.

. . . . . Not hiding their dissatisfaction in private, some P.A. officials are disappointed that Hamas still controls the Gaza Strip more than nine months after the war began.

“We thought it would only take a few weeks to remove Hamas from power,” stated one official. “However, several months later, Hamas remains in place and continues to have complete authority over civilian affairs. In addition, Hamas still has many fighters.”

Another P.A. official said that he had anticipated a fall in Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians as the war drags on and more Palestinians lose their lives.

“We see that the opposite has happened,” the official stated. “According to polls conducted after Oct. 7, Hamas’s popularity is rising. This is due to the widespread belief that Hamas is winning the battle. If you watched [the Qatari-owned network] Al-Jazeera, you would also come to the same conclusion—that Israel has been defeated,” he said.

Why is the PA so disappointed at Hamas’s popularity in Gaza? Because they are mortal enemies: the PA wants to control Gaza, but lost in the elections in 2006 (but refused to give up power, causing Hamas to stage a coup). The PA and Hamas are mortal enemies, united only by their hatred of Jews. This brings up the question of a Palestinian state: how could it possibly be run if the two parties vying for power hate each other?

*Some good news for once: Gambia, which has banned female genital mutilation (FGM), has rejected a bill that would overturn the ban. That reversal would have been a first:

Lawmakers in the West African nation of Gambia on Monday rejected a bill that would have overturned a ban on female genital cutting. The attempt to become the first country in the world to reverse such a ban had been closely followed by activists abroad.

The vote followed months of heated debate in the largely Muslim nation of less than 3 million people. Lawmakers effectively killed the bill by rejecting all its clauses and preventing a final vote.

The procedure, also called female genital mutilation, includes the partial or full removal of girls’ external genitalia, often by traditional community practitioners with tools such as razor blades or at times by health workers. It can cause serious bleeding, death and childbirth complications but remains a widespread practice in parts of Africa.

Activists and human rights groups were worried that a reversal of the ban in Gambia would overturn years of work against the centuries-old practice that’s often performed on girls younger than 5 and rooted in the concepts of sexual purity and control.

Religious conservatives who led the campaign to reverse the ban argued the practice was “one of the virtues of Islam.”

So much for the assertion that FGM has nothing to do with Islam. And look how prevalent it is!:

In Gambia, more than half of women and girls ages 15 to 49 have undergone the procedure, according to United Nations estimates. Former leader Yahya Jammeh unexpectedly banned the practice in 2015 without further explanation. But activists say enforcement has been weak and women have continued to be cut.

The first prosecutions occurred last year, when three women were convicted for bringing their daughters to be cut and performing the practice. The cases sparked a public debate, and some said the prosecutions inspired the attempt to reverse the ban.

UNICEF earlier this year said some 30 million women globally have undergone female genital cutting in the past eight years, most of them in Africa but others in Asia and the Middle East.

More than 80 countries have laws prohibiting the procedure or allowing it to be prosecuted, according to a World Bank study cited earlier this year by the United Nations Population Fund. They include South Africa, Iran, India and Ethiopia.

It’s telling that although Gambia banned the practice in 2015, and more than half of the women still get mutilated, the first prosecutions occurred only in 2023. That means that the status quo is in force: the practice is banned but so widespread that it won’t be much enforced. It’s barbaric.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili gives good advice:

Hili: It’s the height of summer.
A: What about it?
Hili: We have to watch out for ticks.
In Polish:
Hili: To jest pełnia lata.
Ja: I co?
Hili: Trzeba uważać na kleszcze.

*******************

From Stacy:

From Cat Memes:

From Science Humor:

From Masih; another woman blinded in one eye for protesting. Here’s the translation from Farsi:

21 months and 4 days have passed since the shot in my eye. But I still carry this wound on my life, as if this wound was placed on my life to prove my evolution. But not that I have reached absolute evolution, but on the path of evolution there is a deep wound of my soul calling: “Stay, don’t move, the world is passing, your sky will also see the splendor of justice.”

From Malcolm: The link doesn’t seem to work, but if you can find a video of this remarkable cat, put it in the comments.

From J. K. Rowling, snarky as usual:

Jumping spider fails the mirror test, displays to itself:

Sound up! I bet they were never again invited on the Sullivan show:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I retweeted:

Two tweets from Matthew. First, lovely bioluminescence in the sea:

Chimp train, which Matthew said would “cheer you up” (he means me):

The ACLU loses its way

June 7, 2021 • 9:15 am

I was always a big fan of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), admiring their single-minded dedication to preserving our civil liberties, most notably those specified by the First Amendment. But they also saved my bacon when I took the government to court for drafting me illegally as a conscientious objector. When I went to they ACLU, they started a class-action suit (I paid nothing) that we won, resulting in the release from service of myself and several thousand other guys.

But about five years ago the ACLU went off the rails, at least in my view. Instead of defending civil liberties and free speech, they began to ponder whether free speech and social justice might be incompatible in some ways, with words actually constituting “violence” that could hurt minorities. The real derailing, resulting in today’s split ACLU, began in August, 2017, when the ACLU won the right for far-right groups to demonstrate in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia instead of outside the center city. That demonstration, of course, led to violence, right-wing marches complete with bigoted slogans, and, eventually, to a white-supremacist protestor driving his car into a crowd, killing Heather Heyer. But I don’t hold the ACLU responsible for the death, though some do.

Although the ACLU was already morphing from a civil rights organization into a social justice organization, the Charlottesville debacle made many members and administrators rethink their mission. And since then the transformation has been more rapid, as described in a New York Times article (click on the screenshot below). It’s not the social-justice mission I object to so much—though some of the ACLU’s stands, like wholeheartedly supporting the right of transgender women, even those medically untreated, to participate in women’s sports, are wrongheaded—but to the fact that there are dozens of organizations already fighting for all forms of social justice, while the ACLU was unique in the singlemindedness of its mission. Now, at least on campus, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is taking over its job, but without the same dosh or resources backing the ACLU.

Although I’ve written about this before, the article has a lot more “inside” quotes both for and against the new mission of the ACLU.

An intro (we’ve met Ira Glasser before):

The A.C.L.U., America’s high temple of free speech and civil liberties, has emerged as a muscular and richly funded progressive powerhouse in recent years, taking on the Trump administration in more than 400 lawsuits. But the organization finds itself riven with internal tensions over whether it has stepped away from a founding principle — unwavering devotion to the First Amendment.

Its national and state staff members debate, often hotly, whether defense of speech conflicts with advocacy for a growing number of progressive causes, including voting rights, reparations, transgender rights and defunding the police.

Those debates mirror those of the larger culture, where a belief in the centrality of free speech to American democracy contends with ever more forceful progressive arguments that hate speech is a form of psychological and even physical violence. These conflicts are unsettling to many of the crusading lawyers who helped build the A.C.L.U.

The organization, said its former director Ira Glasser, risks surrendering its original and unique mission in pursuit of progressive glory.

“There are a lot of organizations fighting eloquently for racial justice and immigrant rights,” Mr. Glasser said. “But there’s only one A.C.L.U. that is a content-neutral defender of free speech. I fear we’re in danger of losing that.”

And here’s the scary bits, which I put in bold:

One hears markedly less from the A.C.L.U. about free speech nowadays. Its annual reports from 2016 to 2019 highlight its role as a leader in the resistance against President Donald J. Trump. But the words “First Amendment” or “free speech” cannot be found. Nor do those reports mention colleges and universities, where the most volatile speech battles often play out.

Since Mr. Trump’s election, the A.C.L.U. budget has nearly tripled to more than $300 million as its corps of lawyers doubled. The same number of lawyers — four — specialize in free speech as a decade ago.

Some A.C.L.U. lawyers and staff members argue that the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech and the press — as well as freedom of religion, assembly and petitioning the government — is more often a tool of the powerful than the oppressed.

“First Amendment protections are disproportionately enjoyed by people of power and privilege,” said Dennis Parker, who directed the organization’s Racial Justice Program until he left in late 2018.

To which David Cole, the national legal director of the A.C.L.U., rejoined in an interview: “Everything that Black Lives Matter does is possible because of the First Amendment.”

After Charlottesville, the ACLU began its shift, which I’m sure will go further. I wrote at the time about how the organization issued a memo beginning to back off defense of free speech. A quote from today’s NYT piece:

But longtime free speech advocates like Floyd Abrams, perhaps the nation’s leading private First Amendment lawyer, disagreed. The new guidelines left him aghast.

“The last thing they should be thinking about in a case is which ideological side profits,” he said. “The A.C.L.U. that used to exist would have said exactly the opposite.”

And the old ACLU was right. If you don’t keep freedom of expression as an inviolate principle, then speech is subject to the vagaries of not only who controls the government but also, like now, of which ideological views are considered acceptable. Right now we’re seeing this clash play out largely on college campuses, often through official ideological announcements as well as deplatformings, disinvitations, and cancellations of speakers. And this is where FIRE has picked up the torch, for the ACLU doesn’t get much involved. Even here the clash between free speech and offense has led to the University of Chicago’s violating its own principles of academic freedom and free expression.

While the ACLU continues to take traditional civil liberties cases, it’s now sometimes taken stands opposite to what it would done in the past. For example, Chase Strangio, the transgender ACLU staff attorney in charge of that part of the new mission, has called for censorship of Abigail Shrier’s book on gender dysphoria. Censorship—from the ACLU!

To wit:

And the ACLU opposed the Title IX changes made by the Trump administration (one of the few laudable things it did) assuring a fairer process in sexual-misconduct hearings in college.

Further, below you’ll see a tweet from the ACLU of Ohio not only jettisoning the presumption of innocence, but ignoring that the officer criticized here was trying to prevent a murder. It’s madness for the ACLU to issue a statement like this (yes, official tweets are statements) violating not only the known facts, but the principle of “innocent until proven guilty.” In fact, from what I know so far, the police officer acted correctly.

I mourn the new direction of the ACLU, but of course that’s the direction that everything is going. While the organization will still do good stuff involving social justice, it will also do questionable stuff, as we’ve just seen. And I can’t think of a single case in which their past defenses of the First Amendment have been deplorable.

If the First Amendment and free speech is to be preserved, it must be preserved for everybody, with a few exceptions already carved out by the courts. We don’t need more exceptions, especially to placate those who equate speech with violence.

Here’s a humorous prescription by Katie Herzog. I agree, though we don’t need an ACLU Jr., as there are already plenty of those organizations.

And here’s a list of my posts, with links, describing and mourning the ACLU’s new direction:

The ACLU backs off defending free speech in favor of promoting social justice

New improved standards proposed for adjudicating sexual misconduct in college; ACLU opposes them for “inappropriately favoring the accused”

The ACLU defends the right of biological men to compete in women’s sports

ACLU continues defending the right of medically untreated men who claim they’re women to compete in women’s sports

ACLU joins lawsuit allowing biological males to compete in women’s sports

h/t for Herzog tweet: Eli

Dublin couple sentenced to long jail terms for female genital mutilation

February 10, 2020 • 12:30 pm

It’s been hard in the West to really punish people for female genital mutilation (FGM); for example, in a recent and widely reported case, a doctor performing FGM in the U.S. was largely exculpated because the judge ruled that federal laws prohibiting FGM were unconstitutional.) And, I suppose, there’s the bias that this barbaric procedure is an aspect of “culture”; as the doctor (a Muslim woman) argued, she was simply following a “religious custom”.

While FGM is widespread in Africa and Asia, it’s largely, as Heather Hastie pointed out in 2017, a Muslim practice—almost entirely so in Asia. Of the four schools of Sunni Islam, as Heather notes in another post, “Two of them, the Hanbali and Shafi’i schools, consider FGM obligatory, while the other two, the Hanafi and Maliki schools, recommend it.” This is one of the ways that religion poisons everything.

But now, as the BBC reports, we have a first, at least from Ireland: two parents were jailed for a long time for a serious incident of FGM practiced on their 21-month old daughter. Click on the screenshot to read:

The father, 37, was sentenced to five years and six months in prison, while his wife, a decade younger, got 4 years and nine months. Their identities are being withheld to protect the daughter, though their origin is given as African (no religion specified). The details are horrifying, and remember—this is in Ireland! As the BBC reports:

The couple, of African origin, were also found guilty on one count of child cruelty on the same date.

The trial heard they did not carry out the FGM themselves but had “aided and abetted, counselled or procured” it.

They subsequently attended hospital with their daughter, claiming the child sustained her injuries by falling backwards onto a toy.

Several medical experts disputed this account.

Paediatric surgeon Sri Paran told the court the child would have gone into shock within 20 hours had her bleeding not been stopped.

He concluded her injury could not have been accidental when he performed a procedure to stop her bleeding and referred the case to the Garda (Irish police) for investigation.

Sentencing the couple, Judge Elma Sheahan said the offence had resulted in serious harm to the child, who may suffer psychological or psycho-sexual effects in the future.

She said the couple had shown a lack of remorse and had not provided any insight into what had occurred.

This is but one instance where religious (or cultural) “customs” must bow before the secular laws of the country in which they’re practiced. And the sentence in this case is sufficiently long that it should serve as a deterrent. The issue is, as always, since this is done on young girls and often in a religious community, it’s difficult to catch. The children themselves can’t report their own mutilation, and others are unwilling to do so.