The hijab as a Confederate flag

June 4, 2017 • 11:22 am

Ali Rizvi gave an excellent talk yesterday at the Imagine No Religion meeting, a talk about how radical Islam has cowed Leftists by using the ambiguous but nasty term “Islamophobe”, which terrifies Leftists almost as much as the word “racist”.  That’s why criticism of Islam by the Left is much more muted than criticism of other faiths. And that is exactly what those Muslims (and organizations like CAIR) want: they want not only bigotry against Muslims stopped—and I fully agree—but they also want criticism of their faith stopped.

But I don’t agree that religious dictates should be immune from criticism: as Ali said, “Ideas do not deserve respect, it is people who deserve respect.” He added that those Leftists who either refuse to criticize Islam or—like the Islam-osculators at HuffPo—even hold it up as a force for good and a “religion of peace,” are thus victims of terrorism just as much as those who are afraid of being physically attacked. Such apologists are exactly what Islamist terrorists hope to produce—as they make their religion the only one immune from criticism.

I asked Ali what he thought of the hijab fetish we see in the West: the adulation of women wearing hijabs (even “voluntarily”), and the claim, made by women like Linda Sarsour, that veiling is somehow a sign of feminism and women’s empowerment. Ali’s reply was a good one, and went something like this:

“My wife has a good take on this. She sees the hijab in the same way she sees the Confederate flag. You’re free to wear it, just as you’re free to wave the Confederate flag, but be aware of what it stands for historically.”

Ali called for all of us to speak up against the pernicious and oppressive dictates of Islam (he’s an apostate, raised as a Muslim in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia). It is through our speaking up, he said, that we will eventually dispel the opprobrium attached to the term “Islamophobe.” In truth, “Islamophobia” means “fear of Islam,” not “fear of or bigotry against individual Muslims.” In the former sense, and as a critic of Islam and one fearful of its ideological consequences, I’m an Islamophobe.

Sunday: Hili dialogue

June 4, 2017 • 6:30 am

by Grania

Good morning!

In 1070  Roquefort cheese created in a cave near Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, France – accidentally, as the legend goes. In 1850 self-deodorizing fertilizer was patented in England (apparently still not available in Ireland). In 1982 “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,” released in the USA. Although the movie has become infamous for the Khhhhaaaaannn! moment, it is better than the memes that endless circle the Internet would suggest.

 

In 1984 Bruce Springsteen released “Born in the USA” which became an iconic anthem for a generation.

In the same year on the science front, a team under Dr. Allan Wilson at the University of California Berkeley cloned fragments of genes taken from the extinct quagga (a subspecies of the zebra), just over a century after the species’ demise. You can read the paper here. There has been a controversial program of “back breeding” in South Africa to create a quasi-resurrection of the species, however the animal only looks like the quagga and cannot claim to be genetically similar.

The last photograph of a living specimen
Zebras produced in The Quagga Project

And last, but never least, we head over to Dobrzyń to catch up on the doings of Hili.

Hili: Do you see what I see?
A: Not really. And what do you see?
Hili: A ladybird.

In Polish:

Hili: Czy ty widzisz to, co ja widzę?
Ja: Chyba nie, a co widzisz?
Hili: Biedronkę.

Attacks in London

June 3, 2017 • 7:14 pm

Coming back to my room for a moment before Dawkins’s talk tonight, I found that there had been two attacks in London: a van mowing people down, and stabbing attacks nearby.  At least one person is dead, and the authorities are calling it a “potential act of terrorism.”  How many more people will die like this, and what can we do about it. As I head downstairs for the talk, I’m deeply saddened. Please provide more details below if you can.

Evergreen State professors and staff sign “statement of solidarity” with the entitled and racist students

June 3, 2017 • 12:00 pm

About 55 Evergreen State College faculty and 23 College Staff have signed a “statement of solidarity” with the student protestors, which you can find here. (That’s more than a quarter of the faculty).

I reproduce the statement in its entirety (indented). It is an implicit criticism of biology professor Bret Weinstein as a racist, which he is not. He is being punished and ostracized for writing an email refusing to leave campus at the “request” of students of color on Evegreen’s “Day of Departure.” If you want to see the email that got Weinstein demonized, go here. The bolding is mine, and my comments are flush left.

[For distribution to the All Staff & Faculty DL, Greener Commons, and the Cooper Point Journal, with the expectation that it is a public document.]

June 2, 2017

As Evergreen faculty members:

We acknowledge that all of us who have power within the institution share responsibility for the racist actions of others. Furthermore, those of us who are white bear a particularly large share of that responsibility.

What are the racist actions and who committed them? Is it Weinstein? If not, who else? And why do the white faculty and staff bear the lion’s share of his actions? This reminds me of the “confessions” during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

We acknowledge that we have a great deal of work to do in order to honor and live up to the demands made by student leaders during last week’s protests. (http://cooperpointjournal.com/2017/05/27/complete-list-of-student-demands).

We acknowledge that students of color and others who are underrepresented and underserved have been voicing their demands to us for some time (through the Students of Color Focus Groups of 2014, through their participation in authoring the Strategic Equity Plan from November, in Cooper Point Journal coverage, for example) and we have not yet truly listened and acted.

We acknowledge students’ right to protest, and affirm President Bridges’ recent decision not to use the misguided language of the current Student Conduct Code to punish the protestors.

“Misguided language”? Those students cursed and terrorized Weinstein and the college President, though we don’t know if any of them were involved in the threats that forced Weinstein off campus and made him and his family hid in an undisclosed location.

We vehemently reject the claim that students have been violent simply because they have been loud and emphatic. There is a difference between exercising the right to freely voice an opinion and inciting violence—and that difference has nothing to do with volume or forcefulness. We support the demands made by students and honor the positive institutional change they have already achieved through their protests.

They’ve also been racist in their demands that white faculty and staff leave campus, an act that Weinstein called “a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself.”

Our most urgent demands (below) center on the safety of those individuals who are currently most at risk. At the same time, we acknowledge that in the weeks and months to come our attention will need to turn to the larger structural issues students have identified.

You’d think that the individuals most “at risk” are Bret Weinstein and his family, who not only can’t be on campus because of the threats (his wife is also on the biology faculty), but have had to leave their home and go into hiding because of threats. But NOOOO . .  the individuals at risk are the students! For the “urgent demands” have nothing to do with Weinstein’s safety:

In solidarity with students, we commit ourselves to:

* Participating actively and self-critically in the annual mandatory trainings specified in the Memorandum of Understanding recently signed by the UFE and management bargaining teams.

* Holding each other accountable when we act in racist ways against our colleagues or our students, according to shared language and understanding developed in the trainings.

* Holding President Bridges accountable to the promises he made at the all-campus forum on May 26, 2017, and to the process of ongoing dialogue with student leaders.

I wonder if that includes the gumbo Bridge promised the students at his Humiliation Session (see 2:04 at this video).

* Actively supporting the Strategic Plan put forward by the Equity and Inclusion Council, including providing substantive support to the Vice President & Vice Provost of Equity and Inclusion tasked with implementing and extending their work.

I omit the names of the signers (see the document linked to above), but I am guessing that the faculty are almost all humanities professors and that there are few or no science professors. The College Fix (I can’t verify their assertion) says that “The statement is being circulated by Julie Russo, whose expertise is “media studies, gender & women’s studies, sexuality and queer studies,” and Elizabeth Williamson, whose expertise is English literature and theater studies, according to a Friday listserv email from Russo obtained by The College Fix.

Now there’s another “solidarity statement“, mentioned by the right-wing College Fix, one that explicitly calls for punishment of Weinstein, but it differs a bit from the one above, adding this:

* Demonstrate accountability by pursuing a disciplinary investigation against Bret Weinstein according to guidelines in the Social Contract and Faculty Handbook. Weinstein has endangered faculty, staff, and students, making them targets of white supremacist backlash by promulgating misinformation in public emails, on national television, in news outlets, and on social media.

Right now I’m investigating the situation and veracity of the second statement. Regardless, if either version is true, it is a shameful capitulation of the Evergreen faculty (and some staff) to the complaints of entitled students. Those students may indeed have grievances, but I have heard nothing tangible so far. As as far as I’m concerned, Evergreen State is a toxic cesspool of regressive leftism. No sane parent would send their student there—not if they wanted them to have a peaceful but rewarding college experience in which they hear and weigh diverse viewpoints.

h/t: BJ

INR, Evening 1

June 3, 2017 • 11:00 am

Yesterday was check-in and an evening social for the Imagine No Religion meeting in Toronto; it’s in the Airport Sheraton, so I doubt I’ll see anything of this lovely city.

The speakers did get nice rooms, though:

. . .with nice bathrooms. I LOVE hotels and have never gotten over the luxury of staying in one:

A kindly reader came up to me and gave me two bottles of Riesling in a wooden box, with the bottles shaped like cats! What a treat!

Self portrait with Hawaiian shirt:

Robyn Blumner, president and CEO of the the U.S. Center for Inquiry, with Leonard Tramiel, a physicist on the CfI board of directors.

The evening social had a poutine station, so my trip for dinner poutine was unnecessary. Here’s Richard Dawkins helping himself to poutine. The talks start in earnest today; the schedule is here. I speak Sunday at 2 pm.