I’m starting to “get” Maryam Namazie’s difficulty

Back in 2011, Maryam Namazie, then a participant on FtB, wrote a report about the difficulty of addressing institutional misogyny in Islam without being swept up in xenophobic, reactionary politics from the far-right. Whereas Namazie’s many criticisms advocate for the limitation of Islam in government as an institution, the far-right sails straight past this distinction to then scapegoat Arabs and Middle Easterners as a whole.

And I finally got a taste of it myself following a #MyStealthyFreedom forum.

This forum was a discrete way for Iranians to send out pictures of what it was like being subject to the Revolutionary Court. It released videos of arrests performed by the so-called “morality” police, and also published the aftermath of public whippings for violating various fatwas. The hashtag refers to an act of subtle rebellion in Iran, taking pictures without one’s legally mandated hijab in public.

The founder of the campaign, Masih Alinejad, is obviously then pissed off at the United States for closing its border to Iran. And what is remarkable is that the same American commentators who claimed to support the struggle of Iranian women trying to escape the oppressive thumb of the Iranian Islamic Republic flipped on a dime to justify their xenophobia.

“It’s to keep out terrorists.”

This, on a page, about supporting individual liberty.

I don’t understand the extent moral relativism would have to infect your brain for this to be a logically consistent position.

You support the individual liberty of Iranian women to unveil without penalty from their government…

…but they should stay where they are because terrorists??

The patriot’s capacity for cognitive dissonance will never cease to amaze me.

-Shiv

 

LOOK THEY FINALLY CALLED A WHITE TERRORIST “TERRORIST”!

The FBI in Kansas foiled a plot to bomb a Mosque and finally a media source–if not a mainstream one–calls the white plotters terrorists. Content Notice for violent racism and xenophobia:

The feds arrested three members of a right wing militia for allegedly planning to detonate explosives at an apartment complex in Garden City, Kansas, with Somali Muslims specifically the target, law enforcement announced at Friday.

The men were Curtis Allen and Gavin Wright, both 49, and of Liberal, Kansas, and Patrick Eugene Stein, 47, of Wright, Kansas, according to a Department of Justice press release. Their arrests Friday morning were first reported by CBS News.

The attack was allegedly planned for the day after Election Day, law enforcement said at a press conference. The men were recorded calling the immigrants “goddamn cockroaches” and “fucking raghead bitches” in recordings, according to court documents. They planned the attack as a response to the Orlando massacre, as well to the fatal shooting of Oregon occupier Lavoy Finicum, the docs said.

They are facing domestic terrorism charges, which, if they are convicted, could result in a maximum sentence of life in federal prison, law enforcement said.

…

An affidavit signed by FBI special agent Tracey Jenkins (embedded below) details law enforcement’s investigation into the group’s activities. The men were operating in a group that called itself the Crusaders and in an overlapping organization known as the Kansas Security Force, according to the affidavit.

“These are militia groups whose members support and espouse sovereign citizen, anti-government, anti- Muslim, and anti-immigrant extremist beliefs,” the affidavit said.

The investigation uncovered stockpiles of firearms and explosive materials, as well as a manifesto, Beall said at the press conference.

“One of them said, ‘The bombing would wake people up,'” Beall said.

According to the affidavit, the men were recorded numerous times by an unnamed FBI source discussing their plans while smearing Muslims and immigrants.

“The only good Muslim is a dead Muslim,” Stein said in a recording, according to the affidavit. He later added: “If you’re a Muslim I’m going to enjoy shooting you in the head.”

The suspects allegedly planned to attack the housing complex, where approximately 120 people live and where one of the apartments was used as a mosque, the officials said. They planned to use four vehicles, each filed with explosive and parked at each corner of the parking lot, to create a big explosion, according to the affidavit.

Yes, obviously the answer to a terrorist plot executed by an American citizen is to start a terrorist plot targeting American immigrants.

How did I not think of it sooner?

-Shiv

 

Edit October 23: Changed a reference to the targets being refugees to immigrants.

Out Magazine glorifies fountain of shit-spewing, Milo Yiannopoulos

ThinkProgress has an open letter addressed to Out Magazine over its soft-ball profile of the alt right’s deep-fried-awful-battered-in-bullshit posterboy, Milo Yiannopoulos.

We are all painfully aware that gay, white, cisgender male narratives have too-long dominated queer media, including those of us who are ourselves gay, white, cisgender men. Just this week, we saw our sisters at AfterEllen.com have to cease editorial operations because a company decided that lesbians were not profitable enough — oblivious to how many bi and lesbian women found important community there. The excess of this narrow branding of the queer community results in erasure of all those who are not highlighted, an erasure that allows stereotypes, discrimination, and abuse to continue unabated against those invisible intersections.

The Out profile of Yiannopoulos represents the peak of this harm. Here is awhite supremacist whose entire career has been built on the attention he can get for himself through provocation. His attacks against women, people of color, Muslims,transgender people, and basically anybody who doesn’t like him are as malicious as they come, and he catalyzes his many “alt-right” followers to turn on any target he deems worthy of abuse. This puff piece — complete with a cutesy clown photoshoot — makes light of Yiannopoulos’s trolling while simultaneously providing him a pedestal to further extend his brand of hatred. Indeed, he does so in the profile itself, openly slurring the transgender community, which Out published without any apparent concern.

As members of the LGBT media, we believe we all must hold ourselves and each other to a higher standard. Many of us are members of the LGBT community ourselves, and we all develop content that serves the LGBT community either directly as an audience, or on its behalf by educating broader audiences about our politics and our cultures. We thus have an obligation, at a minimum, to ensure that what we publish — no matter how crass or sensationalized it may be — avoids fostering harm to queer people. Out failed in this regard.

Add my name to the list of signatories. Fucker couldn’t lose access to his internet fast enough. May every microphone he bloviate into break before he gets the chance to speak.

-Shiv

Defending the indefensible

You’ve probably heard by now that a number of beaches in France have banned the burkini. Far from a rational response, these policies are absurd, sexist, racist, immoral and entirely indefensible. And yet, I see many arguments even from so-called free thinking people defending this policy.

Excuse #1: The French have been victims of a string of terrorist attacks and are scared

This might be a reasonable explanation for how the owners of these beaches thought this was a great idea, but it does not actually excuse the policy. A random Muslim on the street is no more culpable for the Nice or Paris attacks than I am for the routine Planned Parenthood terrorist attacks carried out by self righteous white Christians. It is racist to presume that every brown-skinned person is complicit in the attack because they are not, AT THIS EXACT SECOND, protesting or otherwise condemning the violence. That is a backward and perverted idea of justice.

They’re people. They have errands to run and chores to do. Even though every mosque goes on record to condemn a terrorist attack the moment it happens, this is not enough. Brown people who are on their way to the grocery store? They’re complicit in the violence! Taking time to do housekeeping or paying the bills? Tacit approval! Engaging in self care–including trips to the beach? That’s practically an endorsement! Arrest! Deport! Publicly humiliate!

You wouldn’t try to argue I’m complicit in poverty because I don’t donate 100% of my earnings to shelters. You shouldn’t try to argue that because Muslims may have spoons invested elsewhere they agree with terrorists, particularly when they do adhere to your ridiculous demands and condemn the attacks anyway. Neither Muslims nor brown people should have to prove their humanity to you.

Fuck off. Fear does not justify irrationality, it causes it. Have some fucking perspective. After all, many of the victims at Nice were Muslims.

I have a question. What does the burkini ban actually solve? Are you intercepting finances directed towards ISIS? Disarming dangerous people?

Oh, here’s a good one, Excuse #2. “Liberating women.”

Excuse #2: We’re liberating women.

[Read more…]

No, Washington Post–it’s not an “unusual fixation.” It’s called racism, and it’s quite common.

Let’s play a game called “edit out the whitewashing in this Washington Post article:”

Khalid Jabara was worried.

Last year, his mother had been jogging through the family’s quiet Tulsa neighborhood when she was nearly killed in a vicious hit-and-run. Police quickly arrested Vernon Majors, who, according to a police report, confessed to the crime and even offered a motive, calling the Jabaras “filthy Lebanese.”

On May 25 of this year, however, Majors bonded out of jail.

That’s when he returned home — right next to the Jabaras.

Must be some of that “tough on crime” policy to let loose an attempted murderer.

On Friday, Khalid learned that his next-door neighbor, the man accused of harassing his family and attacking his mother, was now armed.

Not “attacking.” Attempting to murder. Let’s not beat about the bush here.

“Khalid called the police stating this man had a gun and that he was scared for what might happen,” his sister, Victoria Jabara Williams, wrote on Facebook. “The police came and told him there was nothing to be done.”

Police useless until there’s a body? Say it ain’t so.

[Read more…]

Western transphobes want you to know how much better they are than Arabic transphobes

People.com commentators want you to know Muslims are alright as long as they’re discriminating against trans women.

Or–wait, no, they want you to know you’d be EXECUTED in Islam! You’re lucky you can be sent to prison for peeing in America or that one of the presidential candidates is representing the most rabidly anti-LGBT platform in the party’s history!

GiGi Gorgeous was denied entry to the United Arab Emirates because she is transgender.

So, what do these Western commentators do to demonstrate how much more civilized the West is? Why, up the ante on transphobia to demonstrate how much better we have it, obviously.

CONTENT NOTICE FOR EVERYTHING

[Read more…]

What do the Cologne rapes and the Pulse shooting have in common?

Y’all didn’t have a single iota of fucks to give about violence against minorities until you could blame a Muslim for it.

Content Notice: Mentions of suicide, a description of the murder scene, plus the stuff that is probably apparent given the title of the article.

I speak, of course, of a very particular tract in this conversation, which means if this doesn’t sound like you, then this post isn’t directed at you. If you want an even hand, a level contribution to the discussion, go here or here. I’m sure there are other very reasonable arguments being made, but I need you to understand one thing:

Orlando was a message, and I am among its recipients.

This is not something I can cover without breaking into tears. This is not something I can cover without being reminded why high bridges and the edges of knives look so attractive. This is not something I can cover without picturing my family, my chosen family, on the floor of that nightclub, their phones ringing in their own blood while I’m frantically calling them. This is not something I can cover without thinking about all the stupid snapchats and videos and pictures they send me, knowing that in different circumstances it could have been footage of the last seconds of their life.

This is not an issue I have the benefit of distance from. I can’t lounge around in a chair and pontificate from the pipe in my hands.

A lot of people are jumping into this conversation. And it’s bad enough that I can’t simply mourn this attack on my community, it’s bad enough that I can’t even be angry at who I want without cishets shouting at me and telling me how I should be outraged, it’s bad enough that my Queer Latinx brothers and sisters witness this crime be literally whitewashed, I have to find that my attempts to seek out solidarity, are met with people who have never shown any inclination for giving a single fuck about anti-queer violence until it was a brown man who pulled the trigger.

This is shady as fuck. I see you, crawling out of the woodwork.

Where the fuck was your outrage, when trans women were dying in the streets at the hands of cis men?

Where the fuck was your outrage, when the pressures placed upon us claimed a body count that was nearly a coin flip?

Where the fuck was your outrage, when Queers were offing themselves because they had been told, over and over, by Christians and Muslims and Atheists alike, that their lives were disgusting and unimportant?

Where the fuck was your outrage, when North Carolina stripped Queer Americans of their rights?

Were you at the vigils?

 

The Edmonton vigil for Orlando

The Edmonton vigil for Orlando

 

Source: wiki commons

 

 

Were you at the protests?

protest2

Also the Edmonton vigil.

 

Source: static DNA India

The parades?

Source: Edmonton 2016 Pride festival, edmontontourism.

Source: Edmonton 2016 Pride festival, edmontontourism.

The fucking memorials??

Source: Times of Israel

 

 

Where the fuck have you been?

I don’t believe for a moment that you give a shit about Queer people except for our utility in being the foundation of your hate. When you’re absent from everything to do with us, when you’re ignorant of the violence we face from every organized religion and then more outside it, nearly every culture on this fucking planet, you can’t suddenly claim to give a shit about Queer deaths. I could paint my walls with the mugshots of every person who has murdered one of mine, and yes, there would be brown folks up there, black folks up there, Asian folks up there, and a whole lot of fucking white folks up there too.

But you are silent, absent, until now. Because the shooter claims membership to the Almighty Boogeyman of your fragile fucking psyche, has a brown name and brown skin, and is nominally a Muslim.

Islam is used to justify homophobia. Christianity is used to justify homophobia. Judaism is used to justify homophobia. Pseudoscience is used to justify homophobia. Racism is used to justify homophobia. Sexism is used to justify homophobia. DO YOU THINK I FUCKING CARE WHY SOMEONE SHOOTS ME?

Don’t you fucking tell me who I should be afraid of, that I ought to spurn the Queer Muslims holding my hand at the vigil, that the Christians offering prayers condemning hate and violence ought to be shunned, that the First Nations howling their grief in Cree as they appeal to someone or something I’ve never been introduced to are not my allies, because they believe in something impossible. They were there. You weren’t. Their tears were as real as mine. They may believe in fairy tales but at the end of the day, they were still fucking there, they’ve always been there, and they will continue to be there.

I know exactly who to watch.

After all, he was a gun-toting, queer-hating, hypermasculine, wife-beating, aspiring cop who shared fantasies about killing people. He’s your fucking poster boy.

-Shiv

Source.

Signal boosting: Middle Eastern feminist edition

=AtG=

Linda Sarsour hosts a political talkshow on Youtube, and keeps herself busy by getting so much (so frickin much) done on the ground. Her activism was galvanized by the 9/11 hysteria, as is probably the case with most intersectional Muslim feminists. I started paying attention to her for her opposition to Islamic conservatives by being able to engage in debate in Arabic, blasting them for their anti-black racism, among many other things. Her channel is by no means prolific, but she’s a little preoccupied doing the things. Just keep an eye out for her in the news and on Twitter!

Slay, Linda, slaaaay.

-Shiv