This is not a case about abortion

I have been receiving lots of triumphant mail from anti-choice people claiming vindication, that abortion is wrong, and demanding to know how I can possibly support abortion rights after hearing about the case of Dr Kermit Gosnell. Gosnell ran an abortion mill in Philadelphia, and was a hack who maimed and killed women while doing abortions on demand, for a substantial fee. He was unqualified, uncertified in obstetrics and gynecology, and his facility was unmonitored and relatively uninspected. He gave untrained, inexperienced staff critical jobs in the surgery — he allowed a 15 year old high school student to handle anesthesia. He killed a patient by overdosing her on drugs, and is also charged with killing 7 babies in late-term abortions.

Gosnell is precisely the kind of butcher the pro-choice movement opposes. No one endorses bad medicine and unrestricted, unregulated, cowboy surgery like Gosnell practiced — what he represents is the kind of back-alley deadly hackery that the anti-choice movement would have as the only possible recourse, if they had their way. If anything, the Gosnell case is an argument for legal abortion.

It is entirely appropriate that this monster be shut down and charged with serious crimes against women. This isn’t the first death for which he’s responsible; another woman died of a perforated uterus, others suffered from punctured internal organs, others were left sterile by his botched work. The most shocking news is that this guy has been chopping up poor women since 1979, and that the last time the state actually inspected his facilities was in 1993. Why have people looked the other way and allowed this to continue for 30 years?

He has also been charged with the murders of seven babies, and there I have to disagree. There has to be a difference in degree, or the mothers of those infants would also have to be charged as collaborators (they were all willing volunteers for this medical procedure, and they knew the result would be termination of their pregnancy). They haven’t, and they shouldn’t. Much noise is being made about the “horrific” killings, but late term abortions, even the ones done in clean, properly maintained facilities with well-trained personnel, are always necessarily bloody and unpleasant affairs, like most surgeries. The important word there is “necessary”. Late term abortions should be carried out when it is essential for the life and health of the woman, who is the most important participant in these circumstances, and opening the door to accusing doctors who perform necessary operations as murder is a dangerous precedent.

Gosnell committed many crimes. He posed as a qualified practitioner of his art, when he wasn’t. He did not maintain a medical facility in an appropriate manner. He had even less qualified people do life-threatening work. He lied to women about their pregnancies. He mutilated and killed women. He did harm. That should be what generates public outrage, not the fact that he did abortions.

It wasn’t just shoddy, it was fraud

The infamous Andrew Wakefield study that claimed to find a link between autism and vaccinations is still being scrutinized, and the latest investigation has uncovered evidence of faked data.

A new examination found, by comparing the reported diagnoses in the paper to hospital records, that Wakefield and colleagues altered facts about patients in their study.

The analysis, by British journalist Brian Deer, found that despite the claim in Wakefield’s paper that the 12 children studied were normal until they had the MMR shot, five had previously documented developmental problems. Deer also found that all the cases were somehow misrepresented when he compared data from medical records and the children’s parents.

Children died because of the hysteria fomented by the contemptible Wakefield. How does that guy live with himself?

Here’s how: he’s in denial. Watch Anderson Cooper call an apoplectic Wakefield a liar.

Antisemitism still thrives

This is a very grim video; the myth of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion still lives on Muslim television. When it starts, you might be able to laugh a bit — did you know the Jews drain the blood of young boys to make matzoh balls? — but by the end, where some evil cleric is gloating over old footage of dead and dying Jews in Nazi prison camps (“look at the corpses, Allah be praised!”) and that he hopes the followers of Allah will be the next to carry out this holy work, I give you fair warning that you might well be too sickened to continue.

New Trends in Arabic Anti-semitism from Henrik Clausen on Vimeo.

I’m not a fan of Israel’s policies — they’re becoming what they oppose — but there’s clearly no possibility that they could simply stop fighting for their existence and live in peace and tolerance with neighbors who promote the kind of hate shown above.

From Nunavut to Lourdes

Eric Dejaeger is a Catholic priest and pedophile who benefited greatly from church policy: when it was learned that he was a child-raping monster, the Catholic Church did the upright, moral thing and kept him on as a priest, but simply shipped him off to the Canadian north where he’d only be raping the Inuit. When the law caught up with him even in that remote place, he fled…and guess where he found shelter and employment? Back in the arms of Mother Church, of course.

The Belgian-born priest, who became a Canadian citizen in 1977, is wanted for three counts of indecent assault on a male and three counts of buggery for incidents involving minors and alleged to have occurred between 1978 and 1982 in Igloolik. These charges were laid after he completed a five-year sentence in April of 1995 (a penitentiary stint, a halfway house then probation) for abusing children in Baker Lake, then part of the Northwest Territories, now part of Nunavut. Dejaeger left Canada before his first court date in June of 1995 and a bench warrant was issued for his arrest.

Six years later, the Interpol red alert was circulated. Nine years after that, in May of this year, Belgian journalist Douglas De Coninck published an article detailing Dejaeger’s life on the lam. The priest worked with pilgrims in Lourdes and participated in masses. A member of the Oblate Order of Mary Immaculate, he was living at the order’s villa in Blanden. Several months after the article appeared, Dejaeger voluntarily turned himself in at the Leuven police station.

Unfortunately, the Belgian police just turned him loose again, stating that there was no extradition order from Canada. He’s on the run again. Given his history, I can guess where we’ll find him: turn over a few churches, and he’ll be found nestling amongst the friendly priests.

But let’s not just blame religion! There’s also another nasty story here, of secular authorities turning a blind eye to his activities. He’d been brought before a Canadian judge who didn’t seem to think Dejaeger was such a bad fellow.

Oddly, Justice Ted Richard of the Northwest Territories Supreme Court wrote in his sentence decision that Dejaeger was not a pedophile even though “it does not appear that he stopped this activity on his own but only when he was caught.” It’s unclear how he was caught.

Dejaeger admitted to, among other sexual acts, having anal intercourse with boys and digital vaginal penetration with girls. Yet Richard seemed to praise the priest’s restraint:

“Because of the age of the victims of these assaults, consent is not an issue or a factor to be considered. However, it should be noted in fairness to the offender here that no violence was used in committing these assaults,” Richard wrote 20 years ago.

Priests don’t use violence, usually. They’ve got the shackles of tradition and dogma to hold their victims down for them.

And of course the real crime here is that these monsters in dog collars were dumped on the native peoples of Canada to rip their way through several generations, and there is no sign of remorse for that from the Vatican.

6 August 1945

History is not going to judge us kindly for this crime against humanity. Never again.

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In the following waves [after the initial blast] people’s bodies were terribly squeezed, then their internal organs ruptured. Then the blast blew the broken bodies at 500 to 1,000 miles per hour through the flaming, rubble-filled air. Practically everybody within a radius of 6,500 feet was killed or seriously injured and all buildings crushed or disemboweled.

Japanese doctors said that those who had been killed by the blast itself died instantly. But presently, according to these doctors, those who had suffered only small burns found their appetite failing, their hair falling out, their gums bleeding. They developed temperatures of 104, vomited blood, and died. It was discovered that they had lost 86 percent of their white blood corpuscles. Last week the Japanese announced that the count of Hiroshima’s dead had risen to 125,000.

I am completely unswayed by the argument that the bombing saved American lives by convincing the Japanese that their cause was hopeless. If that were true, why not bomb a nearby deserted atoll as a demonstration? Why bomb two cities over the course of several days? Why not pick a military target rather than a civilian center? This was an act of callous terrorism.

Still arguing? Go watch this fabulous dialog between AC Grayling and Christopher Hitchens, discussing Grayling’s book, Among the Dead Cities. Grayling makes the same argument I do, that the bombing of civilians was immoral and to little material effect. The surprising thing, though, is that I expected Hitchens to go all militaristic, but he doesn’t; he actually deplores the area bombing campaign. He draws a stronger conclusion — he thinks the complete and unambiguous defeat of Nazi Germany was necessary to allow rebuilding of the country, but he thinks the attempts to destroy the German culture with devastating firebombing was not a rightful act.

Hey, UK! How do you reconcile these two facts?

This is a rather horrifying article about young girls reading Harry Potter one moment, and then dragged off to get their clitorises chopped off. It’s got these nasty little details like, if you pay extra, you can get the butcher to use a clean knife.

But there’s an odd disjoint here, too. It’s the UK, a modern western nation. They have laws to prohibit mangling children.

The UK Prohibition of Female Circumcision Act 1985 makes it an offence to carry out FGM or to aid, abet or procure the service of another person. The Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003, makes it against the law for FGM to be performed anywhere in the world on UK permanent residents of any age and carries a maximum sentence of 14 years imprisonment. To date, no prosecutions have been made under UK legislation.

That’s clear: a strict law and strong penalties, but no prosecutions — so it must be an effective law, right?

Wrong.

Some 500 to 2,000 British schoolgirls will be genitally mutilated over the summer holidays. Some will be taken abroad, others will be “cut” or circumcised and sewn closed here in the UK by women already living here or who are flown in and brought to “cutting parties” for a few girls at a time in a cost-saving exercise.

It’s happening right now. It seems to me that there ought to be 500-2000 arrests in the UK this year, maybe more, since they’ve got a 7 year backlog of neglected criminality.

If medical neglect of children can be a prosecutable crime here in benighted America, why isn’t the UK doing something to stop active, vicious mutilation of children?

What fresh torment can we perpetrate on young girls?

How about breast ironing? When I first read about it, I wondered how it would even do anything — but then you discover that they heat stones until they’re hot enough to cause pain, and press these instruments of torture to their chest daily for months. And who carries out this sadistic abuse? Their loving mothers. To make them unattractive to men, who might otherwise get them pregnant.

Don’t watch the video if the sight of scarred breasts bother you.

One in four girls in Cameroon are having this done. It seems to me that sex education and prophylactics would be the less destructive way to prevent pregnancies, and probably more effective, but…did you know that approximately 25% of the population of Cameroon are Catholic?

Stop the Stoning of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani

If you do nothing else. Please take a moment and sign the Petition.

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/2/stop…
http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/s…

Contact information for e-mailing the White house.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/

And the President of Iran
http://cp.president.ir/en/

His e-mail (possibly)
[email protected]
http://www.siawi.org/article882.html

And some other details that might help
http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/s…
Currently there are only 427 signatures on this site. I am sure there are other Petitions out there. I think making people aware is the most important thing. That and voicing our condemnation of this sentence.

This woman needs to be released.

A glimpse of a theocratic world

Nope, I’m going to call this story debunked. A commenter has pointed out that Jhelum has several established Christian communities and is not the monolithic Islamic city the story implies, so it looks like this is a complete fabrication by Compass Direct News, a Christian propaganda outfit. The only stories here are that Christians lie to feed their martyr complex, and sometimes I’m fooled.

Jamshed Masih is a police officer in Pakistan who also happens to be a Christian. He transferred to a town dominated by the local Muslim cleric, Maulana Mahfooz Khan. In a story that sounds like the beginning of a Western, Khan warned Masih that Jhelum was his place, and he wasn’t going to stand for any filthy Christian scum livin’ in this here town. Local businesses refused to serve his family, there was a lot of tension…if this were a movie, you’d expect the new sheriff in town to be cleaning up the intolerant boss.

This wasn’t a movie, though, and the real world never seems to resolve itself so neatly. Instead, while Masih was away, Khan accused his 11 year old son of blaspheming against Allah, roused up a mob of good devout Muslims, and murdered Masih’s wife and four young children. The only blasphemy described is that neighbors heard the children singing hymns at breakfast time.

Yes. They were slaughtered because they did not practice Khan’s religion of peace. And because children were singing songs Khan did not like.

Masih has filed a legal complaint. The police administrators have refused to accept it or do anything, because Khan is powerful in the area, and because, after all, the children were blaspheming against Islam.

No human being should ever have to live under a theocracy, the most barbarous and inhuman form of government anyone has ever developed.

God needs more blood

Molly Norris, the cartoonist who launched “Draw Mohammed Day” (and who later withdrew herself from the event, citing her fear of persecution) has just been put on a hit list, calling for Muslims to murder her.

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The man calling for her death is this Yemeni cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, a pleasant looking fellow who also cheerfully encouraged the Fort Hood massacre. You wouldn’t know it to look at him, but behind that smiling face is the mind of a hateful monster.

He’s from the US. He claims to have served as an imam in California, Colorado, and Virginia. And now he’s holed up in Yemen, advocating death for cartoons.

I can’t tell what’s going on here. Did Islam turn him into a psychopath? Or do psychopaths just find a happy home in Islam? Either way, Allah is an abomination that poisons people’s minds. It might reassure me of the good intentions and harmlessness of faith if I saw Muslims rioting in cities around the world, protesting the infamy that people like Awlaki bring down on Islam…but I won’t hold my breath waiting for it.

I just noticed — there’s a poll at that link.

A radical cleric has called for the execution of a U.S. cartoonist after she launched a project called “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.” Do you support the cartoonist’s lampoon?

Yes. She was making a statement protected under the First Ammendment. That’s her job. 41%
No. She knew Islam forbids drawing the likeness of Mohammed. This is insulting, not fun. 51%
Not sure. 7%

Disillusion me some more, people. A majority thinks the problem here is with a cartoonist drawing a teacup?