Fareena Alam flagged up this article — Afghanistan’s dirty little secret — which is about the Pashtun custom known as bacha bazi, in which boys dress as girls and dance for grown men who then take them home and sexually abuse them. According to the article, when US soldiers kept noticing local men walking with young boys and behaving in ways unlikely for a father, they hired an investigator who came out with a report titled “Pashtun Sexuality”, the contents of which startled nobody in Afghanistan but appalled Western forces. Some research suggests that half of Pashtun “tribal members” in southern Afghanistan are involved.
Earlier today I watched the Dispatches programme, Britain’s Secret Slaves (in the UK, you can watch it on their 4oD service), about the mistreatment of domestic workers in the UK. The first half, roughly, dealt with campaigners who try to get back passports that the workers’ former employers were holding on to, while they insist that the workers had no right to work for anyone else but them. There were tales of dreadful abuse, of pay well below the minimum wage, of workers not seeing their families (including their children) for years and being refused permission to travel home after their relatives had died, and of workers sleeping on air-beds in cupboards while their employers lived in mansions and shopped at Harrod’s.
Blood tests have confirmed that a mysterious series of cases of mass sickness at girls’ schools across the country over the last two years were caused by a powerful poison gas, an Afghan official said Tuesday.
… The spokesman, Dr. Kargar Norughli, said his ministry and the World Health Organization had been testing the blood of victims in 10 mass sickenings and had confirmed the presence of toxic but not fatal levels of organophosphates. Those compounds are widely used in insecticides and herbicides, and are also the active ingredients of compounds developed as chemical weapons, including sarin and VX gas.
Dr. Norughli did not explain why the confirmations had not been announced earlier.
But he emphasized that how the gas was delivered — and even whether the poisonings were deliberate — remained a mystery. There have been no fatalities, and no one has claimed responsibility for the episodes.
Many local officials had dismissed the cases as episodes of mass hysteria provoked by acid and arson attacks on schoolgirls by Taliban fighters and others who objected to their education. But the cases have been reported only in girls’ schools, or in mixed schools during hours set aside only for girls.
Organophosphates are also a common ingredients in sheep dips, and contact with sheep dips has been linked to poisonings of farmers and farm workers in western countries, with long-term debilitating neurological effects including depression and pain. The practice of putting such incidents down to “hysteria” will be familiar to anyone who has studied the history of chronic neurological illness in the West: Gulf War Syndrome and M.E. have both been the subject of such claims and even when outbreaks of M.E. have occurred, there have been those who have tried to put them down to “mass hysteria” as with these poisonings. Even multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease, before scientists worked out what was actually wrong with the patients, were put down to hysteria and some victims spent years in psychiatric hospitals because doctors were convinced that their symptoms were signs of mental illness — until the MRI scanners which were invented in the mid-1980s proved that wrong.
Last week I stopped watching EastEnders (this is a BBC soap opera set in a fictional mostly white east end of London, without any Bengalis or Somalis) because I finally became exasperated with how the unengaging, dislikeable characters kept making fools of themselves. I can’t remember which bit put me off, but it was something to do with somebody making a really ridiculous decision that would ruin his or her life. Was it Minty accepting a proposal from Sam Mitchell? Can’t remember.
Inayat Bunglawala drew our attention yesterday to an apology published in the Spectator, a British right-wing political magazine (a tedious rag where people flaunt whatever privilege and bigotry they might have). It reads:
Stephen Pollard and the Spectator apologise for the unintended and false suggestion in a blog published on 15 July 2008 that Islam Expo Limited is a fascist party dedicated to genocide which organised a conference with a racist and genocidal programme. We accept that Islam Expo’s purpose is to provide a neutral and broad-based platform for debate on issues relating to Muslims and Islam.
Stephen Pollard is editor of the Jewish Chronicle and the smears he wrote in an earlier edition were sourced from Harry’s Place.
France’s ban on the Islamic veil has little to do with female emancipation | Law | guardian.co.uk
Joan Wallach Scott, the author of The Politics of the Veil, on the real motivation behind the move to ban the niqaab in France:
The national assembly’s action came on July 13, as the country prepared to celebrate the birth of republican democracy in the revolution of 1789. Banning the burqa on the eve of the Fête Nationale provided a clear affirmation of true Frenchness.
It followed a year in which President Sarkozy included a minister of immigration and national identity in his cabinet. The title of the new post conveyed the message that if national identity were in trouble immigrants were the source. The president and his minister called for a countrywide conversation on the meanings of national identity. There were to be contests and town-hall meetings to articulate what it meant to be truly French. When that effort fizzled, they came up with more draconian measures. Sarkozy proposed, this month, to take away the citizenship of foreign-born French citizens if they were convicted of crimes such as threatening the life of a police officer. Children born in France to foreign parents (once presumed to automatically qualify for citizenship) would be denied citizenship if there were any evidence of juvenile delinquency.
This month, too, began the expulsion of the Roma, said to be illegally camped throughout the country and responsible for all manner of crimes. Despite an outcry from those who denounced the expulsions as echoes of Vichy (the government that collaborated with the Nazis in the 1940s), these activities have made “security” a prime focus for politicians and public opinion pollsters. Whether it will deliver another term to Sarkozy in 2012 remains to be seen.
The immediate effect is to conjure a fantasy spectre in which foreigners endanger France and are made to take the blame for all its economic, social and political problems.
The people advocating bans on veils on supposed women’s rights grounds are, she says, never normally supportive of efforts to improve the lot of women; some of them have opposed laws on domestic violence and sexual harassment. It’s all about forcing people of foreign descent to adopt white cultural norms, along with white feminists thinking that they have the right to dictate what liberty means for all women.
There is also the myth (which Joan Wallach Scott mentions but does not refute) that 1789 was somehow the “birth of republican democracy”. It wasn’t. After that came the Reign of Terror, Napoleon and a period of restored monarchy; republicanism did not become stable in France until the Third Republic.
Last week, Richard Dawkins delivered a polemic on the British digital TV channel, More 4, against the principle of government support for faith schools. (It is available for viewing at 4 On Demand, although possibly only in the UK.) Faith School Menace set out a number of the most common arguments about why faith schools are bad: that middle-class parents fake religious observance to get their children into better schools, that they are able to openly discriminate, that they cause or foster divisions, and that the religious organisations behind them have influence far beyond their contribution to the school’s upkeep. Dawkins added two arguments more in line with his secularist/atheist tendencies: that they teach things that are proven to be false, particularly as regards evolution, and that they rely on indoctrinating children when they are most vulnerable to it.
Last week there was a news story about a man who faced the prospect of having a spinal cord injury inflicted on him surgically in Saudi Arabia as an Islamically-prescribed retaliatory penalty. The usual penalty for bodily injuries in Islam, if the victim insists on it, is retaliation in kind whether the injury consists of a punch to the face or the loss of an eye — or both. For someone to be surgically paralysed is going to seem somewhat extreme to a lot of people even if they would normally understand the principle of retaliation.
It’s been a long time since anyone I know posted a list of the phrases people put into search engines to get to their site. In my case, the most common phrase is simply “indigo jo”, but there are fair amount of searches for things related to Qt (the programming toolkit, not Long Qt Syndrome), various Islamic topics and ME. Interestingly, the third most used phrase is “shaun jenkins”, the former headmaster convicted of murdering his step-daughter Billie-Jo, and subsequently freed on appeal. I’m surprised that when people tapped in “cardiac hill aberystwyth”, my entry A Sentimental Journey from April 2007 was the first one that came up.
However, I am always most keen to see my referrer lists, to see who’s linking to my site, and lately I’ve noticed that these statistics are being filled up with sites which obviously have nothing to do with mine and had no reason to link to it. The past few months I’ve noticed that most of the sites which appear in my referrer lists (i.e. the lists of where people had supposedly found the link to my site and clicked it) are the same kind of sites which commonly appear in email spam, i.e. a lot of sites advertising stuff, and particularly dodgy and sleazy stuff.
I hope the people behind Awstats (the stats program my web host uses) find a way of distinguishing fake referrals from real ones, because my lists are becoming next to useless. My lists are private, but a lot of people make their stats public and I guess that’s the problem: it’s a way for these sites to get free advertising, up their Google ratings and so on. Surely those who develop public stats display software should employ spam filtering or Nofollow, so that there is no motivation to post false referrals.
Tags: awstats, referrer spam
This actually happened a couple of months ago, but I thought I’d comment on it now since it appeared again in Invest in ME’s August newsletter (top article): a doctor named Martin Scurr who has written a medical column in the UK Daily Mail for years has finally, after attending IiME’s conference in May, admitted that he was wrong in having “blamed ME on psychological or behavioural causes” and that it was actually a genuine physical disease. The article can be found here (at the bottom of an article on piles) and it’s illustrated with a stock “sleepy woman” picture (with the same lighting fail as in the picture accompanying the article I commented on here) rather than one of any number of readily-available pictures of real ME sufferers. While it’s good that one prominent doctor has admitted that this illness is real, it’s ridiculous that they remained sceptical for so long when there always had been plenty of evidence of a physical cause. (More responses here.)
This is something I got through a tweet from 5CC or Tabloid Watch, but Osama Saeed jogged my memory about it. An election campaign card which was used by Phil Woolas during his (successful) campaign against the Lib Dems in Oldham in May has just come to light in which he claims that the Lib Dems “plan to give hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants the right to stay”. The brightly coloured A6-sized card is illustrated with an image of the Danish cartoon demo with banners saying “behead those who insult Islam” and similar slogans.
BBC News - Vodafone backs down in Android row
Vodafone (a major UK mobile phone network) have backed down after pushing what looked like an Android operating system upgrade for the HTC Desire phone, but was in fact a set of branded applications and bookmarks (including one for a dating site) which couldn’t be removed from the phone. Users were expecting an upgrade to version 2.2 of the system itself; Vodafone will now deliver a barely changed version of that in a couple of weeks.
I’ve been waiting for an upgrade to my HTC Hero (T-Mobile G2 Touch) for months now — T-Mobile have been saying that an upgrade to Android v2.1 (not even v2.2) would be coming real soon now since about February I think. Then they said that it’s being pushed out “over the air”, but the stock version of Android that came with the phone has had the function to check for system updates removed. I’ve been told (by third parties on the T-Mobile forum, not even by an official announcement from the company) that I’d have to install a more recent release of the old version of Android, then it would let me upgrade to version 2.1 automatically. That’s pretty pathetic.
Just going through the moon sighting reports on this page (it may still be giving virus warnings when you try to load it; it doesn’t affect me as I use Linux) and one negative sighting is very notable:
Not Seen: Muhammad Sohail (MCW member) from Iquique reported: I have not seen the moon for Ramadan; I started looking for the moon from 18:25 upto 19:25. The sky was quite clear. So, Ramadan will satrt on Aug 12, 2010.
Iquique is in northern Chile, and this is one of the first places on any continent that the new moon is visible each month. The actual first place is further south, in the Valparaiso area on the Chilean coast.
So, if it’s not visible, in a clear sky, on the coast of Chile, how can it possibly be visible in Saudi Arabia, where a sighting was reported (and then broadcast on satellite TV)? And why are Muslims all around the world jumping when the Saudis say so, when they have no need to let the Saudis influence them? Some of these places (e.g. Taiwan) are east of Saudi Arabia, so a sighting there has no bearing on visibility in their own countries.
In the UK, the so-called “Coordination Committee of Major Islamic Centres and Mosques of London” agreed that Ramadan began today. This outfit represents a mere handful of mosques, such as Regent’s Park, East London, Westbourne Park, al-Muntada and Leyton (and since when was Leyton a major mosque?). In reality, it represents mosques with either a substantial Arab worshipper base, a “salafi” bias, or with connections to the Gulf countries. While they happen to be some people’s local mosques, the majority of mosques in London don’t belong to it and they have no right to claim any greater importance than any other mosque.
This past week, two major British M.E. organisations, the Young ME Sufferers Trust and the ME Association, issued a joint statement ([1], [2]) condemning as “unethical” a study, scheduled to start in September, of the so-called Lightning Process on children with “CFS and ME”. The research team, awarded £164,000 from the Linbury Trust and the Ashden Trust and is led by Dr Esther Crawley, “Consultant Paediatrician, Royal National Hospital for Rheumatic Diseases, Bath, CFS Clinical Lead for Bath NHS FT and a Senior Lecturer, University of Bristol”. Dr Crawley is also the medical adviser to the Association of Young People with ME (AYME). (Invest in ME also commented on this study in their March/April 2010 newsletter; scroll down to “Lightning Process — the Falsehood of Magical Medicine”. Update: the 25% ME Group, which represents severely affected people and their carers, have issued this statement in .doc format; see here for views of some ME activists on this subject. Greg Crowhurst, a nurse who cares for a wife with severe ME, suggests that the study will in fact include nobody with genuine ME.)
Yesterday the Daily Star (the Black Hole to you and me), a London tabloid from the same pig-sty as the Daily Express (AKA Daily Spew), ran a story about the “scandal” of the borough of Harrow in north-west London serving up halaal meat in all but one of its ten secondary schools, and from the coming September, all of them. As I remember hearing, the borough protested that the matter was actually decided at each school, not in the education department, but as with the “Muslims get swimming pool blacked out” story that turned out to have been a huge distortion, this was presented as some sort of scandal in which council jobsworths imposed Muslim values on everyone.
Tags: vanessa feltz
Since my last entry on the bigoted ravings of Christina Patterson in last week’s Independent, Patterson herself has written a follow-up piece on all the demented people who have written to her and blogged about her and called her a b*tch, etc., and of course there are a number who have written to her privately saying they’re thinking exactly what she’s thinking. There are also some letters in both yesterday’s and today’s paper, and those in today’s all pull apart claims made in Patterson’s original article as well as her defence against being regarded as Islamophobic or anti-Semitic.
Tags: christina patterson
Yesterday, the BBC station Radio 4 ran a feature on the so-called Court of Protection, the body set up to manage the financial affairs of those who are incapable of doing it themselves, such as those with dementia, brain injuries or lifelong learning disabilities. They covered three cases, one of a man with Down’s Syndrome whose mother had to jump through numerous hoops to remain in control of his affairs after he became adult, one of a man who suffered brain injuries in a motorbike accident but who has since regained much of his mental function, and a woman with dementia whose friend struggled to get her niece out of her business after she brutally killed the lady’s cat and then proceeded to steal thousands of pounds from her account.
I was alerted to an article by one Christina Patterson (former director of the Poetry Society and literary programmer at the South Bank Centre in London) setting out what she considers the “limits of multi-culturalism”, which ends before you get to what she sees as the insulting stand-offishness of the Orthodox Jewish population of North London and the supposed 500 to 2,000 “British schoolgirls” sent abroad to undergo genital mutilation every year, not to mention all the 3-year-old girls in hijaab she sees. The Harry’s Place article where I found the link was, of course, more concerned with the four initial paragraphs on the Orthodox Jews, but she finds space for a broadside against Muslim women and squeezes in an attack on faith schools at the end too.
Tags: christina patterson
Yesterday it was reported that Ian Huntley, the man convicted of the murder of schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in Soham (a village near Cambridge, in England) in 2002 and who was attacked by a repeat robber who attempted to cut his throat is planning to sue the Prison Service for failing to protect him, and could receive up to £20,000 (although he is unlikely to ever personally see the benefit of it). The Daily Mail also reported that the legal action could cost “the taxpayer” up to £1m. Various “victims of crime” groups have responded to the media invitation to denounce Huntley for bringing the suit, among them Lyn Costello of “Mothers Against Murder and Aggression”, who turned up on Sky News earlier today, “campaigner Ann Oakes-Odger” and Norman Brennan of the Victims of Crime Trust, who said that if Huntley was successful, his victims’ families should sue him.
The past few days have seen one ghoulish story about Jon Venables (or the person formerly known as such), one of the two boys who murdered a toddler, James Bulger, on Merseyside in February 1993. The latest one concerns the weight he’s allegedly piled on by gorging on snack foods in his supposedly luxurious secure prison cell; previously, he’s supposed to have bragged (according to “sources” from his luxury prison) that the sentence was “a result” and that he’d be out in two years. They also claimed that he was housed in Cheshire, supposedly near to the place where he committed the murder (actually, the nearest parts of Cheshire to Bootle are miles away from there).
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