‘[B]eing pissed off at the local college is not a valid legal doctrine for taking millions of dollars.’

An AAUP blogger demeans the Ohio jury in just the way the administration of Oberlin College has consistently done: The jurors are vindictive village idiots, unable to understand concepts like harm, defamation, and the rule of law, able to use the legal system only to stick it to the elitists down the block. For those who want to get rid of embarrassingly inexpert juries altogether, the lopsided outcome of the Oberlin trial ($44 million in damages and penalties to the college), in the Gibson Bakery case, is the icing on the cake.

Yet although this clearly was an angry jury, that doesn’t mean their verdict was dumb. The jury knows that Oberlin won’t in the end pay out that much money; they know that an appeal is thunderingly obvious. Appalled by the … well, let’s use the language of the AAUP blogger — a man who is sympathetic to Oberlin…

… Oberlin students behaved disgracefully, only to be exceeded by the incredibly stupid and repulsive actions and comments by Oberlin administrators. Protesters demanded a boycott over a case where the Oberlin students were clearly guilty (and later pleaded guilty) and there was no evidence of racial discrimination. They made accusations of past racism, but never presented any convincing evidence publicly. Oberlin’s administrators were even worse. They hurt Gibson’s business by refusing to stand up on their behalf and by boycotting the bakery for a time. They tried to intimidate Gibson’s into dropping charges against the Oberlin students by threatening to continue their boycott, and even asked the bakery to call the college rather than the police when students shoplifted in the future. And Oberlin’s administrators sent each other very dumb messages that alienated the judge and jury so much that the actual legal regulations about defamation [were overlooked].

Appalled by this behavior, which I suspect was felt as a personal attack on their community’s economy and reputation, the jury decided to communicate as forcefully as possible its unacceptable nature — perhaps with an eye to Oberlin eventually gaining some compassion and rationality along the way. As Bill Maher put it in lamenting Oberlin’s actions, “How do we get mainstream liberals to stand up to that faction?” One way is to jolt them awake with outrageous court awards; once awake, mainstream liberals might ask themselves why Oberlin has as a vice president and dean of students an angry factionalist, a woman way, way out of the liberal mainstream. That happened because no one’s watching. Now people are watching.

The Queen bestows OBEs on two anti female genital mutilation activists, which is great. The more publicity the better. But as one of them points out, you’ve got to start putting people in jail.

Here in the States we’re still working on putting No-Clits Nagarwala in the slammer. UD thinks that eventually this will happen. In the meantime, it’s nice to realize that her life and vocation are ruined, so she can’t cut up any more children.

It doesn’t seem to bother them that, even as their defense of full veiling is going down the tubes all over the burqa-banning world, their arguments remain the lazy, unelaborated claims – with broad-brush insults and fear-mongering thrown in – that everyone has heard and dismissed. Behold Zahra Jamal in Foreign Policy.

Her subtitle, in which she evokes the violence of virtually pan-European burqa bans now “crashing down” on these shores (Quebec may soon ban them), sets the hyperalarmist mood of a piece written in the aftermath of countless non-violent and orderly local, regional, and national full-veiling bans. What world is the author living in? And has it not occurred to her that, given present realities, she should make some effort to accommodate herself to ours?

The fundamental polemical quandary the serious burqa defender suffers is this: She seems doomed at once to assert the obviously “sordid” (Jamal’s word) nature of burqa opposition, and to note that huge left and right national majorities, as well as international courts, support bans. To put her position concisely: Everyone sucks.

From beginning to end, Jamal describes enormous populations desperately under the thumb of powerful white nationalists. Somehow these clever charismatic people are convincing mental and moral midgets like Angela Merkel to call for serious restrictions on the burqa.

“For centuries, many Western scholars, church elders, and political leaders justified colonial and imperial incursions with the call to save Muslim women from Muslim men, citing the veil as a symbol of oppression. In contrast, in European and Quebecois political and popular discourse over the past decade, hijabs and niqabs have come to symbolize terrorism, thus reconstituting Muslim women from cause to enemy, from subjugated victim to powerful terrorist. According to proponents, bans on religious coverings are meant to liberate Muslim women from oppression, emancipate them into secularism, and deter them from violence. Burqa bans thus simultaneously falsely frame veiled women as security threats and legalize Islamophobia.”

Can you detect an argument in here? There’s nothing ‘in contrast’ about rejecting the burqa as both an instrument of oppression and a security risk. There’s no religious warrant for it, all ISIS, Taliban, and al Qaeda women and girls must wear it, and it has been used to hide the identity of terrorists and ordinary criminals. In its extreme physical muzzling, it creates a population of women overwhelmingly unlikely to become assimilated into modern open European countries. So, nu?

Weirdly, most of the subsequent essay reviews the spectacular success of burqa bans in Europe, across the political spectrum. Surely this amazing massing of votes and judicial decisions against full-veiling demands a powerful counter-response, one that begins with an effort to understand the determination of millions of ordinary people to ban the burqa.

“Ultimately, veil bans are about the sordid view that human diversity is a threat, and—similar to the flurry of state abortion bans in the United States—women’s bodies must be disciplined and regulated by the state rather than by women themselves to safeguard the nation.”

Yeah, if you want to see the flourishing of human diversity at its various best, take a look at a community of burqa wearers… Veil bans are, among other things, a rejection of the sordid practice of trapping ten year old girls under cloth – of men disciplining and regulating the bodies of helpless children.

Jamal’s essay is so lazy that UD begins to think burqa-defense has degenerated into virtue signaling. The author knows perfectly well that the tidal wave (to use her metaphor) of burqa banning is unlikely to be stopped, even if you spit Islamophobia and white supremacy at everybody. In lieu of serious appraisals of the banning trend, and serious arguments against banning, burqa defenders are left with vacuous indignation.

It does no good to state the obvious to some people – quoting here from Christopher Hitchens –

[W]e have no assurance that Muslim women put on the burqa or don the veil as a matter of their own choice. A huge amount of evidence goes the other way. Mothers, wives, and daughters have been threatened with acid in the face, or honor-killing, or vicious beating, if they do not adopt the humiliating outer clothing that is mandated by their menfolk. This is why, in many Muslim societies, such as Tunisia and Turkey, the shrouded look is illegal in government buildings, schools, and universities. Why should Europeans and Americans, seeking perhaps to accommodate Muslim immigrants, adopt the standard only of the most backward and primitive Muslim states? The burqa and the veil, surely, are the most aggressive sign of a refusal to integrate or accommodate. Even in Iran there is only a requirement for the covering of hair, and I defy anybody to find any authority in the Quran for the concealment of the face.

Some people will still enjoin us to “listen to women’s voices,” as if annihilating yourself as a presence in the world by wearing a burqa or niqab is a page out of Our Bodies Ourselves. They will assure us that banning the burqa makes the state into an “active instrument of patriarchy” – as if the burqa itself is not, for millions of people, the globe’s most eloquent expression of the most repressive patriarchy imaginable.

At least this writer is honest enough to note the huge, and growing, number of full or partial burqa/niqab bans, especially across Europe; but she’s not honest enough to note the absence in those countries of significant social problems arising from the bans. Or to note the enormous majorities – including, in many cases, among Muslims – for the bans.

Absolute kleptocracy corrupts absolutely; and if you’re not careful, seventy percent of your population is going to vote for a clown who, as his first act, dissolves your parliament.

… are at it again, bless them. The latest protest took place at Tehran University, where students have had it all the way up to here with the morality police threatening them unless they veil.

It takes unbelievable guts to go up against the enforcement fuckers – you can certainly go to jail, and the enforcement fuckers are also more than willing to beat you up.

‘Course around here, in the free west, you’ve got women holding Everyone Wear a Hijab in Solidarity with Hijab-Wearers rallies, and UD‘s got nothing against that; but she wonders why the same people never seem to hit the streets in support of women – seriously endangered women – who don’t want to veil themselves.

The strongest loathing of the burqa is from within.

My Google News feed for BURQA has gone mad. With Sri Lanka in mind (that country is in the process of banning it) India is going there; and I don’t know if you’ve noticed but India is a very big very contentious place. Everybody’s screaming and threatening to cut everybody’s head off about the burqa.

As a dedicated burqa-banner, UD would like to state the following: There’s a reason – hundreds of reasons, really – why India is the number one worst place in the G20 to be a woman. Read the brief report at the link to get a sense of just how grotesque it is to dare to be a female fetus, let alone a girl/woman/widow there. Franchement, much as UD applauds worldwide efforts to ban burqas, all such efforts in India are gonna do is make the numerous men there who want to abort, prostitute, or assault their women even more bloodthirsty. Fuggedaboutit.

Take heart. For two reasons.

1.) Johns Hopkins University med school grad Jumana Nagarwala will not, it’s true, be convicted on FGM itself – because a judge concluded the federal law against it is too weakly written. However:

The [Nagarwala] case … isn’t dead without the female genital mutilation charges. The defendants still face conspiracy and obstruction charges that could send them to prison for 20-30 years, if convicted, though more appeals are in the pipeline.

UD takes further comfort in the thought that Nagarwala’s life, with years and years of appeals, and her name entirely besmirched, is as ruined as the lives of the hundred-plus seven-year-old girls her slash-happy ways ruined.

2.) And even with passionate clit-cutting defenders like Alan Dershowitz supporting her, there’s the business of the United States Congress intervening in the whole disgusting mess.

In a move that could revive Detroit’s historic female genital mutilation prosecution, Congress has intervened in the case, saying the Department of Justice gave up too easily on the law that makes the cutting practice illegal.

… “The Trump Administration’s sudden refusal to advance legal arguments to defend a long-standing federal statute criminalizing this horrific act disrespects the health and futures of vulnerable women and girls,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a statement Wednesday. “Once again, the House is called upon to defend the constitutionality of a duly enacted law and to protect people’s lives.”

The war to keep the United States free of barbaric practices (Dershowitz is also way keen on the mutilation of infant boys’ genitals and woe betide the evil anti-semites who’d try to ban that) is a war, not a battle. Congress will do its part; increasingly strong state laws against FGM will do theirs, etc. The drawn-out appeals process in Michigan will keep Nagarwala’s name and her crimes in the news. We’ll get there.

The burqa has been a background story for awhile. To be sure, one country after another around the world has been restricting or outright banning this grotesque garment, and when each new law gets passed, there’s some press attention. But now that Sri Lanka, in the wake of the latest extremist atrocity, has banned them, the burqa’s on the front page again.

And what UD has long predicted – vanishingly few people and organizations are objecting to the ban – does seem to be underway, in Sri Lanka and around the world. So far, in all the articles and opinion pieces about it, UD has only found one attack on Sri Lanka’s new policy. More common has been acceptance without comment, or enthusiastic approval.

I’m not sure what’s taken the wind out of burqa-defenders’ sails – and maybe they’ll regain their energy – but I’m thinking the 2017 decision of the European Court of Human Rights not only to uphold but rather eloquently to defend Belgium’s burqa ban began the discouragement. Defenders were always up against large majorities of pro-ban citizens (85% of Swedes; 66% of Brits, for instance) in all countries in which the burqa is an issue, so… you know… democracy and all… And for all their talk of so few women wear it (not true; in England, which still allows them, numbers are going up) and it has nothing to do with national security and it’s perfectly possible to assimilate these women into our country as full citizens and it’s a religious obligation, a personal choice, and I don’t want to talk about the eight year old girls you see wearing them … for all of that, opponents just don’t seem to be making their case at all.

You can see the problem if you look more closely at Megara Tegal’s attack on the policy. Of course she shouts islamophobia, but given the sort of countries that now have bans – Denmark, for instance – it’s very very difficult to throw that one against the wall and make it stick. Eventually Tegal will have to call virtually every European country, along with increasing numbers of Muslim countries, islamophobic (Morocco; Algeria; Egypt’s close to banning them). So let’s see what else she’s got.

Muslim women who have covered their faces for over 20 years, are now afraid to leave their homes.

Think of it – there are women in the world who have never gone outside without entirely covering themselves in black. Even their digits; even their eyes (you’ve seen the get-ups that only give the wearer one eye-hole)! I’m afraid I don’t respond to this statement as an argument; I respond to it as a horror. Nor does what Tegal fails to mention – these women are very likely afraid to leave their homes because their husbands will beat them if they go outside uncovered – help her case. She’s up against the obvious – the burqa is an insanely blatant mark of the worthlessness of women within certain tribes.

Begum allegedly … stitched IS fighters into suicide bomb vests so that they could not remove them …

Those allegations are believed to come from the interrogation of other Western IS members by the CIA and Dutch Military Intelligence, but have not been verified.

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Some Brits are unhappy about having to pay for her legal representation.

Tory MP Philip Davies [said] the decision was “absolutely disgusting“.

He said: “How she has been allowed to sponge off taxpayers’ money to get back into a country that she hates is absolutely ridiculous.”

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Here’s the right way to look at it. England should be willing to spend large sums to keep this woman and others like her out. Think of it as part of the defense budget. And don’t forget:

Both [violent Islam and fascism] evidently suffer from a death wish. It is surely not an accident that both of them stress suicidal tactics and sacrificial ends, just as both of them would obviously rather see the destruction of their own societies than any compromise with infidels or any dilution of the joys of absolute doctrinal orthodoxy. Thus, while we have a duty to oppose and destroy these and any similar totalitarian movements, we can also be fairly sure that they will play an unconscious part in arranging for their own destruction, as well.

The German Minister [of the interior] said it would be a “good move” to set up an international court that would try foreign jihadists rather than have Germany and other nations repatriate fighters and their families back to their home countries, especially since “terrorism is an international issue,” according to Die Zeit.

“That’s always better, for me, than bringing all ISIS fighters of German nationality [back] to Germany,” before trial, he noted.

“If several states have a prosecution claim, the trials should be conducted there. Trials should be conducted where ISIS fighters are now in detention, for example in Iraq,” the official said.

The reluctance of countries all over the world to repatriate the WE 🖤 DECAPITEES folks will almost certainly mean the creation of an on-site international tribunal for them. This article makes clear that there will be immense difficulties in putting such a thing together. But there is probably no alternative.

And he just did it again.

In a 27-page memorandum, [Laith] Alebbini’s lawyers called what he did a “thought crime.”

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His lawyers explain that he just didn’t understand what he was reading. Stuff like this.

The clear difference between Muslims and the corrupt and deviant Jews and Christians is that Muslims are not ashamed of abiding by the rules sent down from their Lord regarding war and enforcement of divine law. So if it were the Muslims, instead of the Crusaders, who had fought the Japanese and Vietnamese or invaded the lands of the Native Americans, there would have been no regrets in killing and enslaving those therein. And since those mujahidin would have done so bound by the Law, they would have been thorough and without some “politically correct’ need to apologize years later. The Japanese, for example, would have been forcefully converted to Islam from their pagan ways—and if they stubbornly declined, perhaps another nuke would change their mind. The Vietnamese would likewise be offered Islam or beds of napalm. As for the Native Americans—after the slaughter of their men, those who favor small-pox to surrendering to their Lord—then the Muslims would have taken their surviving women and children as slaves, raising the children as model Muslims and impregnating their women to produce a new generation of mujahidin. As for the treacherous Jews of Europe and elsewhere —those who would betray their covenant —then their post-pubescent males would face a slaughter that would make the Holocaust sound like a bedtime story, as their women would be made to serve their husbands’ and their fathers’ killers.

[Quoted here.]

… here she is, a child immediately buried under a burqa, relieved of her clitoris, vagina, and existence, raped at eight years of age by a man she was married off to, snuffed out in an honor killing.

Since 1990, the estimated number of girls and women in the US who have undergone or are at risk of [FGM] has more than tripled.