Three women respond to a benighted article in the Guardian about the burqa.

When we sat down in the front we were instantly approached by a young man who refused to look at me and my female companion but told us very forcefully that we immediately had to move to the back of the bus. We told him calmly that what we were doing was entirely legal but he refused to hear and told us that we were shayetz, abominations. Luckily we had a male companion who had joined us who told him to quiet down.

… After trying to rip down the sticker on the bus stating it’s legal for anyone to sit where they want to, the man came back towards us and with rage told our male companion that it was ridiculous for him to defend two shiksas.

This is the latest dispatch from one of Israel’s freedom riders, women who sit in the front of public buses in that country.

The response from the ultra-orthodox man in this scene is typical. Eventually one of these women will be injured, or killed.

UD proposes that Israel turn this problem over to its medical establishment. The law works slowly. Sometimes it doesn’t seem to work at all. Sedation would be an effective, short-term, safety measure. These men are a danger to themselves as well as others.

Wired surveys the night of the living dead which is Righthaven, the company which has the distinction of having sued your blogger, UD.

… and they’ve got excellent noses for it. The new Kansas State University mascot – a catwoman who appears at football games and tells you to recycle – smells not merely of propaganda but of heavy-duty moral scolding. Just the sort of thing you want at a sports outing.

Subjected to mass ridicule, EcoKat has been quietly put down by her university handlers. Long live freedom.

… in the country’s recent banning of the burqa, says Time magazine.

Not strange at all. Same thing has happened in other European countries who’ve banned it, and will, UD predicts, continue to happen. Wherever you are on the political spectrum, you’re likely to recognize the lack of basic human rights when you see it.

Yes, it’s come to this in Israel. Women from Hebrew University now ride buses through religious neighborhoods specifically to test whether a recent court decision that – get ready for it – women don’t, like blacks in America before Rosa Parks, have to sit at the back of the bus is actually being honored.

Internships are available for American college students:

Amy Milin, a recent Florida Atlantic University graduate, rode 60 buses during her three-month internship… “There were times a group of people crowded around me and said I don’t belong here and I’m ruining their religion,” she said.

These women are on the front lines of gender justice. That these battles have to be fought in Israel is a shondah.

Last summer, at just this time, my freedom to blog ended.

I lay next to my husband in bed one afternoon and said to him:

I’m going to stop. I’m going to shut the whole thing down and not write another word. This firm that has sued me – Righthaven – they could sue me again, for something else I’ve excerpted from a newspaper. Any other firm with the Righthaven business model could also sue me. Righthaven is seeking damages of hundreds of thousands of dollars from us. They’re going to take my domain name. All because I excerpted part of a newspaper article. I named and linked back to the source of that excerpt, the way millions of bloggers do every day. I got no commercial benefit from it, because my blog has no advertising. But a man just came to our door and served me with legal papers that say that if I lose this copyright infringement case they’ve filed against me we will be ruined. I don’t have any choice. I have to shut down University Diaries.

My husband looked at me and said

No you don’t. No you won’t. Do some research. Find out about Righthaven. What they’re doing sounds completely nuts. We’re talking about a total – and seemingly unfounded – threat to your freedom to express yourself. Calm down. Keep a cool head. Call a lawyer who knows something about this.

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Now that the Righthaven enterprise is collapsing – now that they’re losing all of their cases (I turned out to be one of hundreds of American bloggers carpet-bombed by Righthaven), now that their legal staff is abandoning them (The Righthaven lawyer who sued me has expressed regrets about having worked for Righthaven. If I were facing the possibility of lawsuits and sanctions because of my association with Righthaven, I’d say the same thing. Yet in our phone chats, this person was thrilled with his job. Quite the eager beaver.), now that numerous judges have said that Righthaven never had standing to sue in the first place, I can look back on this experience and see that it was a lesson, a hard lesson, for UD, in American freedom, and in the rule of law that sustains American freedom.

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It was also a lesson in trust. Having decided to settle with Righthaven rather than pay who knows how much and suffer how much protracted misery to defend myself, I could have become cynical about a legal system that can prey on people like me and chill their speech.

Instead, I’ve watched one judge after another express rage against Righthaven for what it’s done. I’ve watched public interest outfits like the Electronic Frontier Foundation take on pro bono cases for Righthaven targets and win them big. I’ve watched legal and free speech groups all over the country respond aggressively and successfully to this threat.

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Back to last summer. I talked to a lawyer – a wonderful man who told me exactly how to get Righthaven out of my life right away, which is all I wanted.

Throw money at them. They only want money. They have zero interest in going to court. Tell them you’ll give them this much (He named an amount.) and they’ll take it. Or they’ll ask for a little more…. But are you sure you don’t want to litigate? We’re eager to defend you. We’re eager to shut Righthaven down. You will without question win the case.

What would it entail?

Well, first we’d have to depose you… How much experience have you had of the law?

Okay. Send them an email. Remember to say (He told me exactly how to word it.). And if you have any questions or concerns at all as this moves forward, I want you to call me.

What do I owe you?

Nothing.

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A day later I’m at a doctor’s appointment and my cell phone rings and it’s eager beaver. We begin negotiating. I say to my doctor

I know how obnoxious it is for someone to interrupt what’s going on and talk on their cell phone. I’d never think of doing this ordinarily; but I’ve simply got to get through this conversation now.

He nodded and said he’d be back in a few minutes.

And that was it. The rest was signing and faxing and scanning, end of story.

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Of course they’d frightened me right down to the ground. Of course I was very angry. But I had the money to make Righthaven go away very fast. Many of its other targets don’t, and it’s been painful to follow their stories.

Like me, most of these people write non-commercial blogs with an interest in – as UD‘s tagline goes – changing things in American political and social life. Many are retirees, veterans, disabled people. For months now, their lives have been nightmarish, filled with fear that they will lose everything they own because they quoted a few lines from a newspaper story.

That’s pretty much over now. Although things are still ugly, and Righthaven, cornered, continues to snarl, it’s gradually being put down. Beset by people fighting back and draining the firm’s resources, and, again, currently facing sanction, Righthaven seems to have stopped filing new cases. Already filed cases are being dismissed en masse.

Yet a lot of damage has been done, and that’s damage that you don’t ever really undo, even if you compensate people.

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The upside (UD, a ridiculously obstinate optimist, always looks on the bright side) of this experience, viewed now from the distance of a year and from the knowledge of Righthaven’s likely collapse, is pretty obvious. This Fourth of July, none of it is abstract. None of it is patriotic bromides. I’ve had my run-in with unfreedom, and I’ve watched the institutions of my country take firm action against unfreedom.

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UPDATE.

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Another update.

… about whether we’re becoming decadent and late imperial and all.

What makes political decadence possible is the luxury of a secure international position, which makes it possible both to meddle in various global problems where our vital national interests are not really at stake (Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, etc.) and permits Americans to think that it’s perfectly ok to put climate change deniers, religious fanatics, former body-builders turned actors, and other unqualified individuals in high office.

That sort of thing.

[T]he Weiner episode mark[s] the culmination of several months during which other sideshows involving outrageous male behavior — John Ensign and John Edwards come to mind — dominated news coverage at a moment when our country’s future really is on the line.

That sort of thing.

UD would only ask y’all to calm down and think this through.

We not long ago elected an eminently serious, eminently qualified president, for instance.

And vice-president.

We pay our taxes. Etc.

You want decadent, look at Italy, where they elect Berlusconi and don’t pay their taxes. In a recent New Yorker post about Strauss-Kahn, Adam Gopnik reported that

[F]or lovers of France and French life, there is something deeply depressing … [in] what many in Paris see as the “Italianization” of French life—the descent into what might become an unseemly round of Berlusconian squalor…

The very fact that we react strongly to trivialization and irresponsibility in our country’s politics suggests that we know what it means to be politically respectable. Did you see what President Obama did to Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner?

Let France glance over at Italy and worry. It has plenty to worry about. We have much less.

… the European Court of Human Rights has winner written all over it.

The application states the principal applicant is the husband who “expects and instructs” his wife to wear the burqa, a full-body covering that includes a mesh over the face, as well as the niqab, a face veil that only leaves an opening for the eyes.

But he will be at risk of prosecution under French law if he crosses the Channel because he will admit that “he expects and instructs his wife to wear the niqab/burqa”.

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UPDATE:

When I see a woman in a burqa, my feelings are of revulsion. Not of the women themselves, of course, but of the culture and the men who require this of them. Not only do I want to set them free, I want to protect my own daughter from the sight of what appears to me as forced subservience.

Boston College law professor Kent Greenfield describes exactly what happened to UD ten years ago, in Virginia’s Pentagon City Mall, as she walked with her ten-year-old daughter. At the sight of three women in burqas, UD immediately, instinctively, put her hands over her daughter’s eyes.

Greenfield concludes:

It’s time to have an American conversation about the burqa. It will not be the same as a European conversation; it will take into account distinctive American ideals, some of which — like liberty and equality — inevitably conflict. We should not presuppose that the conversation will be simple or have only one possible outcome.

Yes.

An Australian commissioner instructs citizens to stop talking about burqas.

Victoria’s anti-discrimination watchdog wants the burqa debate shelved because it puts Muslims in danger.

Equal opportunity and human rights commissioner Helen Szoke said yesterday that constantly airing the issue threatened the safety of Muslim women on public transport and in other public places.

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“Shelve all debates,” said Mr UD when
I told him about Commissioner Szoke.

“Those deliberative democracy types
are really annoying.”

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[image found here]

Here’s the unveiled verity of a serious university education: It provides a place for you to change in serious ways. It shakes you up.

A Dartmouth undergraduate, Leah Feiger, writes in the school newspaper that she thought she knew how to feel about the burqa. It was about freedom to practice your religion.

Enter Nazila Fathi from Iran. A reporter for The New York Times, Fathi has been instrumental in providing the Tehran perspective and has written countless on-the-ground articles exploring political and social development in an ever-changing Iran. Fathi visited Dartmouth’s campus on May 6 to give a lecture regarding reporting in her native country and touched on the issue of the burqa.

In fielding a question about her opinion of the French government’s viewpoint on the burqa, Fathi responded, “I can’t speak objectively since I don’t support wearing it. If you want to wear it, go back to where you’re from.”

You can sort of see people in Fathi’s audience shifting around uncomfortably. An astonishingly strong, and unpleasant, statement, eh?

Shakes you up.

… and we’re off! The French ban (the first of many, UD predicts, in Europe) has really gotten people talking, and UD is thrilled. Time for a real debate on the total cloaking of women and female children.

At the University of British Columbia, Farzana Hassan gave a lecture on April 16 in which she called for Canada to “pass a law denying public services to women in burqas.”

When she was finished, Najma Mohammed of the B.C. Muslim Association stood up and said she felt insulted.

Which doesn’t take us anywhere near a real debate. But let’s see what else Mohammed said.

Mohammed went on to accuse Hassan of “inciting differences” so that she can make money selling books, DVDs, videos, and CDs.

She said she wears her hijab because she wants to; no one insists that she do so. (Hassan’s law would apply only to the burqa.)

… Hassan asked, “Do you have a question?”

To that, Mohammed replied: “I’m not giving you a question. It’s a statement. I don’t think you are worth a question.”

Still not much progress toward a real debate.

Hassan cited the murder of a sixteen year old Canadian girl who refused to wear the hijab; she described “four-year-olds who are being coerced into wearing the hijab because, you know, the philosophy is they need to get into the habit of wearing it so that when they attain puberty — when this becomes mandatory according to them — they will not object to it.”

Mohammed failed to respond to any of this.

Mohammad needs to sit down and think about how she’s going to defend making children wear hijabs and burqas.

But meanwhile, the main thing is that France has galvanized debate on the matter. The university is a very good place to stage that debate.

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Peter Worthington:

What a woman wearing a burqa in a free society is saying, is that she is a repressed individual, the property of a man, someone who believes in sexual mutilation, and is a prisoner of cultural dogmatism.

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(Update: I originally identified the author of this statement as David Frum. UD thanks a reader for the correction.)

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Oh. Whoops! I thought women could debate. Sorry.

A woman at the University of Doha in Qatar asked German President Christian Wulff why Germany bans burqas in school.

“The conscious decision to cover yourself up clashes with the duty of the state to educate its children,” he said. “Showing your face is part of a free society.”

A person wearing a burqa in Europe appeared to be calling into question the equality between men and women, Wulff said. “But we don’t want to question this equality.”

Bravo.

Newt Gingrich’s speech at the University of Pennsylvania on Tuesday quickly took a turn for the dramatic when the first student to question him brought up his admitted extramarital affair and accused him of being “hypocritical” for espousing moral values.

“You adamantly oppose gay rights … but you’ve also been married three times and admitted to having an affair with your current wife while you were still married to your second,” Isabel Friedman, president of Penn Democrats, said to Gingrich. “As a successful politician who’s considering running for president, who would set the bar for moral conduct and be the voice of the American people, how do you reconcile this hypocritical interpretation of the religious values that you so vigorously defend?”

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Update: Salon’s Alex Pareene quotes Gingrich and then comments:

“I believe in a forgiving God, and the American people will have to decide whether that their primary concern. If the primary concern of the American people is my past, my candidacy would be irrelevant. If the primary concern of the American people is the future… that’s a debate I’ll be happy to have with your candidate or any other candidate if I decide to run.”

The American people are concerned about the future! Which woman will Gingrich next leave his wife for, and how embarrassing/ironic will it be?

Gingrich will continue pretending to run for president until early March, when he “expects an announcement” about whether or not he will continue pretending to run for president.

… to this book, Promises of 1968: Crisis, Illusion, and Utopia, an essay by Karol Edward Sołtan appears (UD‘s too lazy to slash the l).

But put that aside. This post is about Heller. (Mr UD remembers walking Heller back to her hotel from the Promises of ’68 conference.)

It’s about Heller and four of her colleagues in philosophy departments in Hungary. From an article in Science Insider:

It began last summer with what authorities describe as an anonymous tip to police that taxpayer-funded grants for philosophy research were being misspent. A police investigation began, but nothing was heard about it until last month. On 8 January, the office of the prime minister, Viktor Orbán, announced to the press that it was launching its own investigation into the use of grant money awarded to five Hungarian philosophers. The scholars have received grants totaling 440 million forints—about $2 million—to support dozens of research projects, postdocs, and students. The commissioner in charge of the investigation, Budai Gyula, did not name specific charges but implied that there was evidence of wrongdoing.

Outside Hungary, some journalists have called the move a government attack on dissidents. But the right-leaning Hungarian media took a different tack, according to critics. “The press has depicted these philosophers as a criminal gang,” says István Bodnár, a philosopher at the Central European University in Budapest. One of the accused philosophers, Agnes Heller, has appeared on YouTube (in English) to make the case that they are being persecuted.

Here’s Heller’s YouTube.

Here’s an open letter from members of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences to the president of that organization. There’s an online petition.

This latest attack aligns nicely with the Hungarian government’s new law repressing free speech.