This year’s Templeton Prize winner is an African woman who has made it her life’s work to destroy this scourge. Her against-all-odds life story is every bit as inspirational as you’d imagine. At age 85, she’s busy training hundreds of midwives at the hospital she founded.
Color UD mildly shocked but pleased to see this quite explicit article. Reading its concern about how best to have a clitoris, and then enjoying the sometimes hilarious comments on the piece (“Yes, yes. But what about inflation?”), UD kept thinking about the simple solution to the problem offered all over the world to more than two hundred million women.
Haha, I mean not offered; imposed. When they’re children.
IF THEIR CLITS OFFEND THEE, CUT THEM OFF.
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As long as we have people like Alan Dershowitz in the United States (and, on the other side, Ilhan Omar), female genital mutilation will continue to be a popular option among some groups even here. England’s got a rampant case of it.
Entire religious groups, like India’s Dawoodi Bohra, make it the centerpiece of their spiritual practice.
It’s nice that the 164.8 million women in the US get to live in a country whose paper of record cares about their sexual pleasure. It’s disgusting that 200 million (and growing) women – children – outside the US endure the forced amputation of sexual pleasure.
The brilliant lawyer who came to the defense of a conspiracy of doctors slicing off the genitalia of many eight year old girls in Michigan cannot understand why people don’t like him.
I don’t get it either. The stories he can tell around the dinner table!
So they like do it under cover of night and lie to the little girls that they’re going for a trip to an amusement park or whatever haha. And then the doctor ties her down because you know she’s gonna bolt when she figures out… Hey why aren’t you guys laughing?
In the wake of Ghislaine Maxwell’s resounding guilty verdict, most people have their eye on the fate of sketchy Prince Andrew; but people like UD, who write about universities, are more interested in Jeffrey Epstein’s stable of Harvard girls (see this brief discussion), prominent among whom is the most peculiar Alan Dershowitz, Harvard’s highest profile emeritus, and a man accused of having sex on several occasions with an underage Epstein slave.
A most peculiar man. My headline is a sentence from the beginning of his book The Vanishing American Jew and ya know it makes me wonder what’s goin on what’s goin on…
On the simplest level, given Dershowitz’s lifelong gnawing ambition, you could argue this is a clever thing to say if you want to launch a best-seller that appeals to Jews of all stripes – the sentence squeezes into itself, and allows Dershowitz to identify with, every possible iteration of “Jew.”
You could be less cynical and applaud the man’s ecumenicism or something… But if you’re secular and you make a point of joining a raft of religious congregations it’s …. peculiar. Why does he do that? Does he actually attend (on a revolving basis?) each of them? Is he, at this late date (he’s 83) still at sea, bobbing from one religious practice to another?
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If you look at the ferocity with which he has, in his legal practice, defended female genital mutilators, and, more to the point, in his writing, defended male genital mutilators (he calls people opposed to circumcision Nazis), it’s clear that he’s really not out to sea at all; far from being secular, he fervently defends the most grotesque and fundamentalist of religious practices.
I mean, this isn’t just defense for the sake of money or attention – his heart’s really in it. Religious people who want to nick away at infant clitorises deserve the highest possible representation.
It’s hard to imagine a truly secular person convincing herself that female genital mutilation is a defense-worthy form of religious freedom. And since most decent people find FGM appalling, it’s hard to imagine any respectable attorney taking on the vile Dawoodi Bohra sect and its ways. But Dershowitz calls the millions of decent people opposed to male baby mutilation Nazis, and the millions of decent people opposed to female baby mutilation enemies of religious liberty.
No one with these views – views he forcefully writes about/acts upon – can comfortably be called secular. Not to mention his membership in four Jewish congregations.
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Most peculiar. And not to put too fine a point on it, but – does the fact that he stands accused of child sexual abuse seem not entirely out of line here?
Now that we’re done with Ghislaine Maxwell, we may be able to answer this question… “Harvard lawyer Alan Dershowitz vehemently denies wrongdoing but he has questions to answer. His primary accuser, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, stands by her story that she was required to have sex with him on multiple occasions.” Oh, and plus: I hope someone somewhere at Harvard is beginning to think about damage control.
The only consolation: Now lots of people know about India’s sickening Bohra community; they also know the now-notorious name Jumana Nagarwala.
UD again calls on Johns Hopkins University to rescind her medical degree.
You got our traveling band of secret clit slashers out of trouble once; but now the feds are after us again with a whole new set of charges! Alan, as pious as we, understands that God wants – demands! – circumcision as much for our girl babies as for our boy babies, and he put his whole heart and soul into our first trial. Our worry is that Alan’s personal struggle against sex trafficking charges will make him less available than he was before. But our hope is based upon the fervency of his defense of child circumcision.
[Dr. Morissanda] Kouyaté said he’d noticed the misconception that FGM is embedded in African culture and has seen that belief perpetuated even in academia.
“FGM is never part of any culture because culture is the sum of good practices, it’s the sum of the values of a group of human beings or entire countries, it is added value,” Kouyaté said. “Culture is positive. Cutting the genitals of girls is not a part of culture, it’s just tradition, bad tradition.”
“When I asked my former husband why he had this done, he literally said: ‘So that she doesn’t get turned on,'” she says.
Two snapshots from an article about an upcoming FGM trial in god-forsaken Ingushetia, Russian Federation. A woman’s ex-husband secretly had their nine-year-old daughter held down by four strangers while another stranger sliced off her genitals.
Bravo, says the leading mufti.
Maybe the doctor who performed it will get a fine or something, which is I guess about as much as one might expect. Given local depravity.
… won’t amount to much, especially if you’re a woman. And in any case thousands of Sudanese are already in the streets, incredibly pissed off that they will have a slightly harder time slicing their babies’ clits off and killing infidels and homosexuals.
UD‘s talking about that country’s recent withdrawal of some of their more macabre sharia morsels. FGM for instance is indeed illegal now, but it’s been illegal in Egypt for years and even so almost ninety percent of the girls living there today have been relieved of that obscenity, the capacity for female sexual pleasure.
UD assures you that the only cutting edge Sudan is on is this one.
Yes, Sudan has just criminalized female genital mutilation. But Egypt criminalized it in 2008, and declitification continues there (and in many other places) with real gusto. UD is afraid it’s just too satisfying to castrate, disfigure, and torture us.
It’s so unfair to go after her parents and the butcher! Just consider the following:
- She was begging for it.
- It’s a much-loved national tradition.
- Islam demands it.
- If she retains a clitoris she will be a whore.
- If we used anesthesia that would cost more; it would as well fail to communicate to the child that a girl’s agonized bleeding to death is beautiful in the sight of god.
- Egypt hasn’t jailed anyone else for slaughtering little girls via their genitals. Why us?
And with that, Ireland’s justice system sentenced two do-it-yourself infant genital mutilators to several years in prison.
They practically bled their one-year-old to death until they thought better of it and took her to the hospital, where they lied and lied about just how her clitoris and chunks of her vagina had fallen bloodily off.
UD‘s heart goes out to the defense lawyer who had to argue for clemency because after mortally injuring their baby her clients compassionately checked her into an emergency room.
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.