Yes, it did. Certainly some European countries are stepping up efforts to throw parents who do this to their children in prison. But that action against a long-established global assault on the youngest and most vulnerable can at best, in an end-of-year roundup, be said to be gathering pace is its own sort of scandal.
And if this particular Kenyan culture celebrates bloodying primary schoolgirls’ genitalia in the public square (the little ones, after all, “handed themselves voluntarily to the circumcisers”) it’s not the business of the state to try to stop it, even if Kenya happens to ban FGM.
There was some violence in one town as police broke up the fun; six people were arrested, and the authorities claim that when they identify the parents of the two slashed girls, they too will be arrested.
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No surprise that there will be resistance to anti-FGM efforts. You’re interfering in two of humanity’s most basic, most beloved activities:
[He] moved the party sharply left on austerity, spending on public services, tax cuts for the working poor, and a higher minimum wage. He outflanked the far right on Brexit and shamelessly echoed the left on economic policy.
This is Trumpism without Trump. A conservative future without an ineffective and polarizing nutjob at the heart of it. Johnson now has a mandate to enact this new Tory alignment, and he will be far more competent than Trump at it. Unlike Trump, he will stop E.U. mass migration, and pass a new immigration system, based on the Australian model. Unlike Trump, he will focus tax cuts on the working poor, not the decadent rich… [If Boris succeeds,] he will have found a new formula designed to kill off far-right populism, while forcing the left to regroup.
The political sweet spot in the next few years will be a combination of left economics and a celebration of the nation-state… If Johnson succeeds, he’ll have unveiled a new formula for the Western right: Make no apologies for your own country and culture; toughen immigration laws; increase public spending on the poor and on those who are “just about managing”; increase taxes on the very rich and redistribute to the poor; focus on manufacturing and new housing; ignore the woke; and fight climate change as the Tories are (or risk losing a generation of support). That’s where the GOP will have to go if they want to recover from becoming an authoritarian cult.
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Also: An interview before the election with Nimco Ali.
An Irish court has found a couple guilty of having someone pop by and perform FGM on their one year old. The child practically died; the act was only discovered because the parents were good enough to take her to an emergency room rather than allowing her to bleed to death.
Now we will see whether Irish justice has the will to send them both to prison (the father may soon be deported; but let’s hold off on that until he has served a sentence), and to find a non-depraved family to raise the child.
Uh… What was that first thing? Well, it wasn’t in Alan Dershowitz’s original defense of his legal activity, but UD thinks he must have overlooked it, so she has added it to his list. Dershowitz is not merely the legal savior of Claus von Bulow, OJ Simpson, Michael Milken, Mike Tyson, and a raft of other innocents; he also helped keep the world safe for female genital mutilation by assisting the defense of Jumana Nagarwala. Don’t sell yourself short, Dersh! You’ve done so much for the civil liberties of butchers.
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And your life’s work on behalf of Jews has been awfully selective, hasn’t it? When John Yoo called Jewish war hero Alexander Vindman a traitor on a Fox news segment which included you, you smiled and said the White House legal team needed more people like Yoo.
Both you and Yoo have been backtracking like crazy – unsurprisingly, Vindman’s lawyer is preparing to go after Yoo for slander – and I can’t blame you. Nor can I blame the 92nd Street Y for having nothing to do with you.
England, Australia, and America’s fight against female genital mutilation is, er, cutting-edge civilizational work. All three nations are fighting the good fight against this appalling and popular practice, and I gotta tell you. It ain’t easy. Here in America we’ve got brilliant baby-cutting defenders like Alan Dershowitz enduring very bad publicity to advise our own homegrown, Johns Hopkins educated (!) cutters on how to avoid prosecution. England is also having a devil of a time prosecuting mothers who abuse their little girls in this profound and repulsive way. But, like Australia, both countries are getting there.
Indeed, the latest Australian case is instructive. All of these court systems need to keep in mind that the mothers are going to lie through their teeth. I didn’t do it what are you taking about I’m a simple ignorant woman this is all over my head it didn’t happen my daughters are making it up someone else must have oh their clitoral hoods are missing wherever can they be I know they’re around here somewhere… A Somalian mother of two daughters took them to her home country to have some mindless stone-wielding person destroy them for life; when she got back she was arrested for “removing a child from the state for female genital mutilation.”
Having traumatized the girls for good by hacking off their genitalia, their mother destroyed them again by coaching them to lie in court and deny what they told social workers – that they were brutally hacked at in Somalia, with their mother standing next to them. Um, oh no, we just made it up cuz a stepsister gave us money to lie…?
The stepsister in question denied she asked the girls to lie to police or that she bribed them.
She maintained she had tipped off Child Safety services after learning of the mutilation seven months later, when the family returned to Australia.
I gotta tell you. Everyone deserves a defense in a court of law. I know, I know. But you’ve really gotta be desperate for money, or as …….. (you choose the adjective) as Dershowitz to defend people like this.
The mother was convicted.
Hell hath no fury like Harvard’s most famous professor scorned. Judge Preska has rejected Dershowitz’s hilarious claims about his right to savage to his heart’s content one of his buddy Jeffrey Epstein’s sex slaves; in response, this hero of the pro-female genital mutilation movement is reportedly calling on his grateful clients to have a go at Preska.
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Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz once dared his accusers to sue him in the ongoing controversy over his role in the alleged abuse of underaged girls in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. One did just that. Virginia Giuffre has claimed that she was forced to have sex as an underaged girl with friends and acquaintances of Epstein, including Dershowitz. Dershowitz called her a liar on multiple occasions. She sued him for defamation and U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska in New York has rejected Dershowitz’s motion to dismiss and held that Dershowitz will have to face a trial on her claims. Former judge Paul Cassell has also leveled charges against Dershowitz as one of the abusers.
… Dershowitz will now face a full trial that will focus on whether the allegations of his abuse of the underaged girl was clearly a lie. Truth is a defense to defamation, but that will require a full airing of the underlying allegations. It is the trial that Dershowitz had publicly called for but later sought to avoid through a motion to dismiss.
Female genital mutilation is …. think of it as cultural rape. England ain’t happy to be hosting so much of it, and its health secretary has just announced a bunch of new clinics across the country dedicated to dealing with this grotesque import.
Large numbers of students boycotted a lecturer at Trinity College who declared that mutilating the genitals of little girls can be, you know, more than fine under the right circumstances. He was denounced by every doctor in Ireland, and by the head of the Muslim community there. A professor of medicine at the school said he’d quit if Trinity didn’t infibulate Mr Calm Down Little Girl It Ain’t So Bad.
Well the dude was an adjunct and easily removed, but of course he’s suing now for back pay or whatever. Apparently he wants to be made intact again.
There is no room in this country, not one inch, for these gruesome practices. Nothing—not a witless respect for the cultural traditions of others, not a craven impulse to avoid looking intolerant—nothing should stop us from protecting every single American girl from being abused in this manner. Nothing should stop us from unequivocally prohibiting this kind of savagery, least of all the absurd insinuation that to do so would be somehow racist or ethnocentric. We do not reject FGM because it is practiced primarily by dark-skinned people, or because it is often erroneously presented as an Islamic commandment. We reject FGM because it is barbarism.
We have planted every flag we have in the name of civilization, and it is time to plant one now. America is the inheritor of that long tradition that slowly, over centuries, produced John Locke, Mary Wollstonecraft, Abigail Adams, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Luther King Jr. Want to fight the patriarchy? Look no further than Somalia, where women are disbarred from making every major decision, including that most delicate and tender decision of how to manage one’s own fledgling sexuality. The Somalis take that right from 98 percent of their girls when they cut them open and rip away parts of their vagina. But this is America. These are our girls. And we don’t do that here.
Ilhan Omar’s brushoff of Maryum Saifee’s urgent and pertinent question about female genital mutilation earned Saifee an NPR interview, during which she pointed out that since plenty of children in Omar’s own district suffer this abuse, it’s kind of rich of her to get all huffy and refuse to deal with the issue. Here’s more of what Saifee said:
[We need to be willing to talk about] misogyny within our own community… [N]obody talks about FGM. [It’s a ].. squeamish topic.
[Also problematically,] it is politicized as an anti-Muslim issue. [But this] doesn’t give the community a free pass not to talk about it. [In any case, FGM is not merely a local issue; it is an international] human rights issue. [It is] systematized child sexual abuse with a sharp object…
[There’s] very low literacy on this issue, [and people need to be educated about it; silence of Omar’s sort is just the opposite of what’s needed].
Pennsylvania is about to become the 34th state to ban female genital mutilation; the law passed unanimously in the Senate and in the “House by a vote of 196-1, with only state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, D-Philadelphia voting against it.”
Yes, Kenyatta alone stood up against the crowd for the right of seven year olds to have their clitorises and vaginal lips chopped off and then to have what’s left bleeding between their legs sewn up by some random person. Every girl deserves the right to sexual numbness and a lifetime of pain and infections, and Representative Kenyatta is working hard every day to make sure that right is protected.
If you’re one of his constituents, be proud. You have voted into office the only politician in Pennsylvania with the guts to go to bat for the forced amputation of female genitals. UD thinks the guy should run for president:
America Needs an Infibulation
Leave No Clit Behind
Yes We Can Cut!
… Alan Dershowitz’s work is never done. Having finished advising for the defense team of a notorious alleged clit-slasher, he now moves on to his own defense in a defamation/sex trafficking case.
[W]hy are we so reticent about the clitoris? Why is … mention of it … deemed too sordid for BBC news?
The big difference here seems to be that while the vagina has an obvious functional utility, the clitoris exists entirely for female pleasure. It seems that the issue stems, not from the provocative nature of a word, but our continued societal taboo regarding women daring to enjoy sex. Sure, we can see depictions of women shrieking with pleasure plastered all over any porn site. But that is exactly the point. Female sexual enjoyment remains exclusively in the realm of the forbidden.
Lucy McCormick, The Guardian
Australia this time, with a mother feeling for some reason compelled to lie through her teeth about having arranged a procedure she thinks comes “from God.” The jury found her guilty in a matter of minutes. Send enough mutilators to jail and the baby-slashing rate will go down.