Evidence Against Boris Johnson's Claim That Terrorists Are Literally Wankers.

Guest Post- Jessica Valenti On "Why Are Men Always Committing Terrorism?"

Diana Ramazanova always dreamed of controlling her own destiny, but when she was growing up in Dagestan, she was told she should marry a man and support his ambitions. Today, many years after a move to Turkey that changed her life she has achieved her ambitions. By becoming Istanbul's first female suicide bomber.

Women are still scarce in the jihadi community: all of the 9/11 plane hijackers were men, few female radical preachers exist and none of the attackers who killed twelve priviliged rapists at Charlie Hebdo magazine were women. As shocking as it is, it can no longer be denied; many Islamic extremists are sexist.

Women currently make up less than 10% of Al Qaeda's senior membership and ISIS refused to even provide a breakdown of their senior leadership. Nor is the misogyny confined to the major organisations, an astonishing 98% of British Muslims would disapprove of their daughters joining ISIS, 1 in 4 female jihadis will experience rape, sexual assault or loud tutting, 20% of 50 is 10, 85% of boys were icky by a Feministing commissioned poll.

Nor are terrorists providing a safe space for women to work. Some estimates suggest that ISIS controlled areas of Syria and Iraq have levels of rape that are almost as high as US college campuses.

With few role models to inspire women like Diana, it may seem that the future of jihad is in patriarchal hands, but increasingly groups of young females are challenging the patriarchy and doing it for themselves, “Yes, initially many there was a good deal of scepticism about what we were doing,” Rovzan Dudaev 23 of the Chechen Black Widows, “so we built an organisation to support and nurture young girls who are interested in slaying degenerate infidel pigdogs for themselves,” With support and rigourous monitoring programmes it looks like the future of the caliphate my be in safe, female hands after all.

Quote Of The Day

Garry Kasparov:

The difference between a genius & a politician. Alan Turing invents a computer to crack encryption. David Cameron wants to ban encryption.

 

Quote Of The Day (Stupidity Edition)

When journalists are killed for expressing their views, it is one step away from burning books, said Annette Gerhard, 60.

On Not Publishing Islamic Cartoons

It is fully understandable that many publications have declined to print the cartoons of the prophet Muhammed both by Charlie Hebdo and by the Danish cartoonists. It is all very well for a semi anonymous commentator to argue that they should be courageous enough to publish them, but editors have to think about the risk not just to themselves but to their staff. Especially if they have foreign correspondents in Islamic countries.

The editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard, has been very direct about why his newspaper would not publish the cartoons:

what right do I have to risk the lives of my staff to make a point? 

What is much more objectionable is denying the reason why they are not publishing them- the threat of lethal violence committed by Islamic extremists.

However other publications refuse to admit that they have been intimidated into not  publishing them, the Daily Telegraph's Will Heaven* argued on Twitter that "if terrorists killed a pornographer, we wouldn't publish porn", implying that it is for reasons of good taste not fear of violence that they won't print them.

This is disingenuous. When the newspaper covers stories featuring offensive images of Christianity such as the infamous "Piss Christ" the image is published so readers understand what the story is about.The same is true when antisemitic material is the subject of a report.The same is true of most news organisations.

In a way it also slanders the artists by telling readers that although the artists obviously did not deserve to be killed for what they have done, their work is obnoxious and perhaps deliberately provocative when that is often very far from the truth.

Some people were even claiming that the Danish cartoons were racist, which was a slur against the cartoonist but not one which is easy to refute when the images are hidden. This one for instance was actually critical of the newspaper's decision to run the competition but the artist is under a death threat for the rest of his life anyway.


By all means refuse to put your life on the line in order to publish cartoons, but be honest about the reason why.

* I use him as an example purely because I saw his tweets this morning, a lot of newspaper made similar arguments back in 2005.

Charlie Hebdo

The Charlie Hebdo massacre disturbs me more than most terrorist attacks I must admit, because unlike the slaughter of random people it is something that could make people change their behaviour to avoid. People will be ever more unwilling to satirise a religion that needs more satire than most.

How People's Minds Work

I was supposed to meet someone today to let me in to see a building, after a while with no one showing up I asked my office to find out where he was. I was then told his explanation was:

I saw him, asked if he was Ross and he said "no" and then drove off.

It didn't occur to him that the person saying he wasn't me, was not in fact me.

The Hungry Games

For some reason an upcoming Channel 4 comedy about the Irish Potato Famine is attracting criticism:

After creating uproar with its coverage of the unemployed in Benefits Street, Channel 4 is generating new outrage after commissioning a comedy series on the Irish potato famine, a tragedy thought to have cost a million lives.

The sitcom, called Hungry, has been revealed by Dublin-based writer Hugh Travers, who told the Irish Times that “we’re kind of thinking of it as Shameless in famine Ireland.”

 I say that it has attracted criticism but it may just be a couple of rent a quote busybodies but obviously it is delicate. It isn't that comedies set in bleak circumstances cannot work, Blackadder Goes Forth was hilariously scathing about the First World War and though I haven't seen it the film Life is Beautiful is a very well regarded comedy-drama set in a Nazi concentration camp. However when stepping on sensitive ground there is somewhat less room for error than elsewhere and if it goes wrong it could end up being the new Heil Honey I'm Home!:

a British sitcom, written by Geoff Atkinson and produced in 1990, that was cancelled after one episode aired. It centres on fictionalised versions of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, who live next door to a Jewish couple, Arny and Rosa Goldenstein.

Deep Roots

I am currently reading The Steel Bonnets by George MacDonald Fraser, which is a history of the border reivers- the violent and wild people who lived on the frontier of England & Scotland in the 16th century. The border culture is interesting both in itself and due to the impact it has had on the wider world. Both the Ulster Plantation and the slightly misnamed "Scotch-Irish" settlers of the USA's Appalachian backcountry derive mostly from the borderers.

I have not finished the book yet so will not attempt a review but one thing that did strike me was how many of the clans on the Scottish side of the border bear surnames which now crop up in the Scottish rugby team over the decades- Armstrongs, Beatties, Redpaths, Weirs and Irvines etc- reflecting that the region is the heartland of the Scottish game. Similarly a lot of the English surnames appear over and again among English footballers of North Eastern origins- Charltons, Milburns, Hendersons and Robsons among them.

There really is a very strong continuity of population in this country that goes back hundreds of years, with families often having lived in the same area over the course of many hundreds of years.

2015 Election Prediction

My prediction is that because this looks like the toughest election in the UK to predict in my lifetime, any predictions that are made will tend to reveal what the prognosticator in question wants to happen.

The US general election of 2000 is what I base this on, where Bush and Gore were "too close to call" for most of the year leading up to it and most liberal pundits predicted a narrow Gore win and most conservatives a narrow Bush victory. 

I'm inclined to go for a small Conservative majority based on the notion that 6 weeks of exposure to Ed Miliband will make the electorate realise they cannot risk putting him in charge of the country.

However I might be demonstrating the bias that I refer to by that prediction- there is certainly enough polling evidence to sustain any prediction from a solid majority for either Conservatives or Labour, or a breakthrough by insurgent parties like UKIP, the SNP and perhaps the Green Party- and in any case using one piece of evidence to make a prediction (Miliband's popularity) means I'm probably overlooking other evidence.

So the only safe prediction is that the Liberal Democrats will suffer.