It’s the details that get to you. One of the Penn State students on trial for manslaughter and a bunch of other stuff tried, at one time, to leave the deadly fraternity he had just joined. He was, one assumes, disgusted and humiliated by the hazing he’d undergone.

The president of the fraternity – himself facing the same array of charges in the long squalid death under his care of pledge Timothy Piazza – talks him out of it.

Too bad. The guy shoulda gone with his gut and gotten out. Now Gary DiBileo gets to have his life ruined, along with his frat brothers.

If you truly care, if you’re truly principled, you do something that actually attracts people’s attention. You don’t simply sit around while the leading imam at your mosque says disgusting things. With the support of the mosque. You quit.

A leader at one of Virginia’s largest mosques has resigned after the imam there made comments in support of female genital mutilation.

Imam Johari Abdul-Malik, who was director of outreach at the Dar Al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, posted his resignation Friday on his website.

Abdul-Malik says he’s leaving after “many reprehensible statements” by Dar Al-Hijrah’s senior imam, Shaker Elsayed, including his recent comments on genital mutilation.

I like “reprehensible.” But I like “many” even more. When this sort of thing happens to hit the news, public statements typically suggest the speaker was having a bad day or stumbled over his words blah blah. The miscreant himself, in his bizarre (and now recanted?) apology, suggested as much.

No, no, says his colleague. The guy preaches much that is reprehensible. So reprehensible, and so supported by the mosque, that Abdul-Malik has no choice but to leave.

Due to the lack of decisive leadership and on the part of the board of directors of The Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center and after many reprehensible statements made by the senior Imam, Shaker Elsayed, including the most recent statements on Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) or female circumcision and especially after his public recanting of his apology I hereby resign my position as Director of Outreach.

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Details.

“A lot of Muslims feel like they’ve been under attack and feel like they’ve made a lot of concessions since 9/11 and now they want to plant this flag on this hill,” [says one observer].

Hell of a hill.

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FGM is a practice that, by virtue of the gravity of the harms it causes, can appropriately be called evil, yet it is not done out of evil intent.

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The fundamental societal motive for FGM stems from a belief held by several cultures; cutting away a woman’s genitals leads to stable marriages. The rationale is that if the woman is incapable of experiencing sexual pleasure, she will not be tempted to seek it outside her marriage, and devote herself to satisfying her husband.

Cultural sovereignty must yield to universal human rights when some basic, objectively vital rights such as life, health, bodily integrity etc. (which most cultures do, or should, value) are violated. The argument is one in favour of universal rights, not identical practices, and hence, the diversity and uniqueness of cultures will continue, which is the essence of multiculturalism.

Did SOS simply read this sentence too early in the morning, or do we have a problem here?

The wrens chose this planter full of ferns
inches away from UD‘s front door.

I don’t know about their other babies, but
this one isn’t shy.

… but as a writer you want to remain calm and control your prose as you discuss the upcoming HBO movie. This prose has too much figurative language all over the place, creating the chaos of mixed metaphors. SOS has helpfully italicized the problem areas:

Make no mistake: there’s plenty of material to be mined for the HBO drama. The firestorm that ensued following the 2011 arrest of Sandusky nearly tore the Penn State community in half and caused a flurry of controversy in all areas of public conversation. Resurrecting these events and examining the tense subject matter through the lens of famed director Barry Levinson and the prowess of Pacino will be mighty fascinating.

This prose literally runs hot and cold, as we venture from a firestorm that neatly cuts a community in half to a snowy flurry. Mining and resurrections are thrown in for good measure, leaving the reader all of a mucksweat (to quote Bella Cohen).

‘CAL IS FUCKED BECAUSE OF ITS STUPID STADIUM DEAL’

The [University of California – Berkeley] stadium debt is so large that funding may have to come out of the school’s non-athletics budget soon. The school’s largest donors donate to both the school and the athletics programs, and any disruption of sports could decrease the overall amount of donations.

What’s a philosophy BA from Yeshiva, who is also the son of the university’s chancellor, up to lately?

He’s using malicious charges of anti-Semitism to further his criminal conspiracy.

[Shalom] Lamm cast himself and his project as victims of anti-Semitism even as he was in the process of conspiring to corrupt village elections. “If you’re a conspiracy theorist and you think the Jews control things and are pulling puppet strings, then this all looks like this grand conspiracy,” Lamm told the Forward in February of 2014. “It’s basic anti-Semitism. You would have to be a believer in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to think that we could actually manipulate the world this way. It’s a complete absurdity.”

That very month, Lamm was working to get around opponents in the village government by enrolling ineligible voters to vote in village elections, according to the indictment filed against him in December. He and others created fake back-dated leases to make it seem as though the new voters lived in the village, and even put toothbrushes in their purported homes to make them seem occupied.

Next move: Anti-Semites in the court system forced him to plead guilty.

Virginia offers one-stop shopping for all of your genital mutilating needs, at a mosque already famed for having housed two of the September 11 hijackers. It’s never too soon to take your ten-year-old down to the leading imam at Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, where he’ll put you in touch with people who will cure her of hyper-sexuality as easily as one-two-three. (Footage of the imam’s fgm talk is embedded in the link to Daily Mail.)

Various folks at the mosque are shocked – shocked – that talk of forcible little-girl-clitoris-slashing is going on at Dar al-Hijrah — from the leading imam, no less — and they promise they’re going to do something about it pronto. Meanwhile, what a blessing for neighbors of that mosque when they decide it’s time to do something about the nymphomaniacs in their houses – make a beeline for Dar al-Hijrah. As this Daily Beach columnist writes: ‘AND NOW, FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION COMES TO AMERICA’.

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And remember the global rallying cry of FGM:

TWO HUNDRED MILLION TEN-YEAR-OLDS CAN’T BE WRONG!

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“Imam Elsayed should be charged by Virginian prosecutors for inciting criminal conduct,” says [Senior Director of the AHA Foundation] Amanda Parker…. “Americans must wake up to the scale of this problem. The Centers for Disease Control estimate that 513,000 girls are at risk of FGM in the United States, more than 30,000 of whom live in Virginia, making it seventh in the nation in terms of numbers of women and girls at risk of or who have undergone FGM.”

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Most activists agree that ultimately, the message against FGM has to come from within the community to truly take root. “If we are to come to total eradication, it has to come from the community, it cannot come from outside, [says one activist].”

So kudos to one of America’s highest-profile mosques for not only saying and doing nothing about FGM, but for featuring a lead imam who promotes it.

Making $115,000 is easy when you’re asked to write a report for an interest group with whose policy positions you agree. It’s even easier when you figure no one actually reads policy reports like these; the interest group sends the report along to reporters and legislators and again no one reads them; or if they read them it’s rapid skimming for a quotation or two. Piece of cake.

Pity this University of Tennessee report-writer, though: He quite reasonably assumed he could cut and paste something and no one would read it and he’d get paid — end of story. But in this case it turned out to be a blind lateral move. Cuz the advocacy group hired (unknown to the original report-writer) another guy to also write a report for them. They showed this other guy our guy’s work. This other guy immediately recognized that our guy “had replicated a significant portion of work, word-for-word and without citation, from [this other guy’s] colleague.” A lawyer for the advocacy group (there’s a lawsuit, natch) adds: “The Initial Report also copied portions of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Inter-Governmental A1 Relations, Study A-121, and a brief by the U.S. Department of Justice.”

So our guy threw a blind lateral – he took from here and he took from there without glancing over to see whether his main source might be standing right here on the field right next to him.

UD‘s favorite part of this plagiarism story involves the amazing chutzpah of the plagiarist (a guy who specializes, by the way, in media ethics), who “admits,” through his lawyer, that “he tried to fix the report, adding additional footnotes and attribution, to suit the foundation and even threw in some additional research for free.”

Mes petites, you gotta love it. I mean, not just the word “fix.” Oops, just a little fine tuning needed… there! Fixed! Not just the word “additional.” Oh, all right. If you really insist, I’ll go back and futz with the report, you annoying nit-pickers…

Datz nothing! He even “threw in some additional research for free.” They should be paying him! With his first-rate research skills, he did some pro bono work for them – out of the goodness of his heart. And now they’re still suing him! And they still want their money back!

And it doesn’t end there! Our guy “is arguing that even if he is guilty of plagiarism, only the authors of the works from which he stole can pursue legal action for copyright infringement.” The foundation points out that the plagiarism is on them; if the other guy hadn’t found it and told them about it, it would have made the foundation look like … well, let’s not be unpleasant and use adjectives to characterize the sort of person who does what our guy does and then tries to clean up the mess the way our guy has… If you don’t have anything nice to say, as our mothers instructed us, don’t say anything at all…

With a community of around 3.5 million people, Britain has fewer Muslims than France. But while the British media regularly covers France’s blighted banlieues and the outrage sparked by the French ban on veils in public institutions, it often overlooks the excesses of unchecked, unregulated multiculturalism back home.

A 2010, BBC Panorama report found more than 40 Saudi Students’ Schools and Clubs in the UK and Ireland were using Saudi textbooks, many of them with anti-Semitism or homophobic messages. The Panorama team found books explaining the details of Sharia amputations for thieves.

Sharia courts continue to operate across the UK despite a 2016 government inquiry into the treatment of women by such courts. A number of British Muslim women’s rights groups have opposed the sharia courts, but they continue to operate behind closed doors.

This blog about universities has long followed the reduction of a few British campuses to medieval nightmares. They spawn beheaders. They sponsor guest speakers who call for the deaths of homosexuals and Jews and apostates.

Theresa May is even – reportedly – looking into a burqa ban, something an overwhelming majority of British people have supported for years.

So I wouldn’t bother.

COME A LITTLE BIT CLOSER

(Sing it with me!)

In a hidden room just the other side of the building
She was held down there givin’ me looks that made me feel guilty
So I started walking away
She was just eight years old that day
And I knew, yes I knew I should leave
When I heard someone say, yeah

Come a little bit closer
We’ll capture you quick
You’re going to prison
For that little nick
You’re all alone
And the trial will be long

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(Written in honor of the upcoming trial.)

And that’s why Baylor University is where it is today!

It’s a real red-letter day for university sports at that most fervent sports school, Penn State. Not to be outdone by America’s rape capital, Baylor University athletics, Penn State now waves goodbye to a president and a vice-president as they both go behind bars for child endangerment. Graham Spanier gets “two months to be served behind bars and two more to be served under house arrest,” while his vp gets “two [months] to be served in jail and four under house arrest.”

As for the Penn State athletic director whose talk a few years ago at a Knight Commission meeting in Washington was so disgusting, cynical, and insulting a whitewash of university sports that UD and others in the audience audibly groaned and laughed as he spoke: He gets “7-23 months with three months to be served in jail and four more under house arrest.”

Pardon my French, but UD can’t tell you what sweet poetic justice it is that this asshole is going to jail.

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A university president in prison for child endangerment! And all because he was afraid of Joe Paterno and his creepy band of Happy Valley fanatics. But anyway. That’s ancient history. Today we all focus our attention on that other dominant force on the campus of Penn State University: fraternities.

From a Deadspin comment thread:

Don’t worry- few Penn staters will be outraged. They’re too busy being outraged that people might expect their fraternities to act like civilized people.

UD‘s friend Jay Smith offers a very popular course on the history of college athletics that so terrifies faculty and administrators at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill — a place that felt perfectly comfortable offering for twenty years Julius Nyang’oro’s Bullshit for Jocks course — that they’ve cancelled it.

Ol’ UD is more than familiar with the Kafkaesque absurdities of football factories like UNC; but she will admit that the leadership of a school peeing itself at the thought of an eminent historian offering a course on a subject arguably more urgent than any other for corrupt jock-worshippers like UNC to think about is – well, hilarious. Truly a new low.

Here’s a school made sordid by athletics, and it’s now trembling at the possibility of merely thinking about the roots of its depravity.

Read the emails in this article.