Last evening at BlogHer08

Last night BlogHer08 rounded up with a huge party at Macy's, where we all had a great time. It was a great conference, and a lot of fun. There's a video interview of me at the shoe department (imagine that!) which will be up on YouTube (or maybe not). When it turns up I'll link to it.

I have to thank the fabulous Jane Goowdwin for her wonderful support and her friendship, which made the past four days a very happy experience.

Special thanks also to Morra Aarons-Mele, Lisa Stone and Elisa Camahort Page for inviting me.

Moving the blog has had a lot of bumps and now http://faustasblog.com appears to be down. For the time being, here's a photo of San Francisco at 6AM today.


The train ride home starts in California right now:




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Eight year old seeks divorce in Yemen

From Armies of Liberation and Jawa, Eight Year Old Seeks Divorce in Yemen

Yemen is ranked number one in the world in gender inequality. One study found that rural women work 17 hours a day on average. Domestic abuse is not considered a crime nor is it socially unacceptable. Women are required by law to submit to their husband's sexual demands-ie, there is no such thing as marital rape in Yemen. Rape is a largely under-reported crime because social mores blame the victim.

Bear this in mind when you read about this courageous little girl:


For the first time in Yemen 8-year-old girl asks for divorce in court

Nojoud Muhammed Nasser arrived at court by herself on Wednesday, April 2, looking for a judge to handle her case against her father, Muhammed Nasser, who forced her two months ago to marry Faez Ali Thamer, a man 22 years her senior. The child also asked for a divorce, accusing her husband of sexual and domestic abuse.

According to Yemeni law, Nojoud cannot prosecute, as she is underage. However, court judge Muhammed Al-Qathi heard her complaint and subsequently ordered the arrests of both her father and husband.
...
Nasser's uncle, who does not want to reveal his name, is following the case now as her guardian. According to her uncle, after Muhammed Nasser, the girl's father, lost his job as a garbage truck driver in Hajjah, he became a beggar, and soon after suffered from mental problems.

Thamer is in jail now. "Yes I was intimate with her, but I have done nothing wrong, as she is my wife and I have the right and no one can stop me," he said. "But if the judge or other people insist that I divorce her, I will do it, it's ok."

So far, no accusations have been made against her father, who was later released due to health problems, or Nasser's husband, who will remain in jail for further investigation.

"So far there is no case and no charges, as Nojoud arrived by herself to court asking just for a divorce," said Shatha Ali Nasser, a lawyer in the Supreme Court who is following Nojoud Nasser’s story.
...
Nasser confirmed that Nojoud Nasser's case is not the first of its kind in Yemen, but it is the first time that a girl went to court by herself to ask for a divorce.

Related:
At Dhimmi Watch, Iraqi Islamic scholar: Muhammad consummated his marriage with Aisha when she was nine, and there is no minimum age for marriage in Islamic law

Iraqi Expert on Islamic Law Calls to Allow Young Girls to Get Married: In Islamic Countries, Girls Get Their Periods at the Age of 8-10. Westerners Criticize the Prophet Muhammad for Having Sex with His 9 Year Old Wife, But Allow Fornication with Underage Girls

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NYT glosses over FGM

As regular readers of this blog know, I have been posting about female genital mutilation (FGM) for a long time. My position is as follows:

I do not care whether this is a tribal, religious, and/or cultural tradition at all, the practice of female genital mutilation is a barbaric custom that must be stopped.

Yesterday for some (probably insane) reason I picked up the dead-tree edition of the New York Times and found that the magazine has an eight-page full-color article and spread on the barbaric practice, titled A Cutting Tradition
Inside a female-circumscision ceremony for young Muslim girls


The description by Sarah Corbett makes it sound like the girls were going for a pedicure (emphasis added):

When a girl is taken — usually by her mother — to a free circumcision event held each spring in Bandung, Indonesia, she is handed over to a small group of women who, swiftly and yet with apparent affection, cut off a small piece of her genitals. Sponsored by the Assalaam Foundation, an Islamic educational and social-services organization, circumcisions take place in a prayer center or an emptied-out elementary-school classroom where desks are pushed together and covered with sheets and a pillow to serve as makeshift beds. The procedure takes several minutes. There is little blood involved. Afterward, the girl's genital area is swabbed with the antiseptic Betadine. She is then helped back into her underwear and returned to a waiting area, where she's given a small, celebratory gift — some fruit or a donated piece of clothing — and offered a cup of milk for refreshment. She has now joined a quiet majority in Indonesia, where, according to a 2003 study by the Population Council, an international research group, 96 percent of families surveyed reported that their daughters had undergone some form of circumcision by the time they reached 14.

I was actually shaking with anger when I finished reading this.

For starters, it is not circumscision. It is mutilation. It doesn't take much to mutilate a woman's external genitals.

The procedure itself is designed to deprive a woman from enjoying her sexuality for as long as she lives and carries dire medical consequences.

My friend Phyllis Chesler was reading the NYT article, too, and has this to say, Exactly Who are the Barbarians? Female Genital Mutilation as Pictured in the West

What is a human rights atrocity with life-long and life-threatening consequences is here being presented as a "tradition," often a harmless one, sometimes not, but always a well-intentioned one.

According to the article, there is "little blood involved" - well, how bad can that be? And, "antiseptic is used" - well, this is not dangerous at all, is it? Finally, afterwards, the child is given a "celebratory gift" - what, am I the kind of westerner who, Grinch-style, would deny the child her gift in order to make my twisted, "racist" argument? As the article states , the child clutching (or drinking) her gift "has now joined a quiet majority in Indonesia."

These photographs were taken in 2006 on a day where 200 girls were genitally mutilated . In honor of the "prophet Mohammed's birthday," the Assalaam Foundation subsidized both the mutilation - and the "gift." According to the Foundation's chairman of social services, the cutting/mutilation will "stabilize her libido;" "make a woman look more beautiful in the eyes of her husband"; and "will balance her psychology."

Because you know, those husbands wouldn't want any hysteria getting in the way.

Ninety six percent of all Indonesian families have sliced their daughters’ clitorises right off.

No orgasms for you, you naughty, wicked hussy of a child.

In the article, an Italian physician who is also a World Health Organization official states: "To judge them (the female mutilators) "harsly is to isolate them. You cannot make change that way. These mothers believe they are doing something good for their children."

The Indonesian "cutting" is presented as less severe, less "extreme" than African versions. Oh yeah? Then why does one photo show us a child in extraordinary pain. Yes, right there in the New York Times. The caption is: "A girl cries as she is circumcized." Well, it's like being vaccinated, right? And there is a second photo of a highly anxious child just before the mutilation. This one is captioned: "A girl is soothed by an attendant before her circumcision."

The photographer has captured a live human rights atrocity in progress and we are seeing it in color with our morning coffee and croissants. Or bagels. Or muffins. Whatever.

Who exactly are the barbarians here? Those who genitally mutilate their daughters or those who deem the atrocity as something of a soft core "tradition" to be "enjoyed" at Sunday brunch?

Phyllis is unsparing in her indictement of the NYT's puff piece. She also links to Dr. Andrew Bostom's article, Clitoral Relativism—Female Genital Mutilation in "Tolerant" Islamic Indonesia where he quotes from the British Medical Journal

An August 1993 report in the British Medical Journal (abstracted here) on Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) stated plainly, in its summary conclusions:

Female genital mutilation, also misleadingly known as female circumcision, is usually performed on girls ranging in from 1 week to puberty. Immediate physical complications include severe pain, shock, infection, bleeding, acute urinary infection, tetanus, and death. Long-term problems include chronic pain, difficulties with micturition [urination] and menstruation, pelvic infection leading to infertility, and prolonged and obstructed labor during childbirth.

Not surprisingly, FGM is outlawed in theUnited States and most Western countries, and there are concerted efforts to eradicate this barbaric practice, globally.

But just today, the barbarism of FGM is indeed referred to "misleadingly" as "circumcision" in a quintessential culturally (or if you prefer, clitorally) relative depiction by Sara Corbett published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine

My other friend Mary Madigan notices that Sara Corbett has a history of perverting the truth.

All the same, the NYT has now slipped from moral equivalence, dhimmitude and political correctness into embracing child abuse and mysogyny.

Update
Pushing the limits of cultural relativism: the lighter side of cannibalism

Update 2
Can’t Drive, But Hey! There’s a Strong Sense of Family

Unsurprisingly, todays co-called “feminist” blogs are awash with false outrage at meaningless trivialities, like Michigan Tech’s president implying that women should not be pressured into attending college if their ambition is not higher education, the societal implications of the new “skinny” offerings on the Starbucks menu, a Post-It ad, and some half-baked rant about Chris Matthew’s treatment of Hillary Clinton. There is nothing dealing head-on with the horrors women around the world are experiencing at the hands of real Patriarchal societies whose laws, practices, and yes, backward version of religion have established an inescapably oppressive construct that is now affecting a brand new generation.

It begs the question, of course: what is it that these women are afraid of? Is it so simple as a fear of the demon of multiculturalism, or a fear of being perceived as intolerant that leads them to do nothing more than pay lip service to the cruelty? Or is it something more? If this was such an innocuous practice, they certainly would not object to undergoing it themselves, but you would, rightfully, find none that would, so it cannot be that they believe this kind of thing is merely an artifact of a bygone era. Something must be preventing them from acknowledging a real cause for concern, a real plight of gender equality…something bigger.

It remains to be seen of course. Tomorrow, feminists across the country will celebrate a court decision that paved the way for international policies encouraging abortion as a legitimate reproductive right, which has in turn empowered countries to impose one-child policies, and for women in those countries to take advantage of international help to commit a genocide of the female gender — allowing nearly 60% of all female babies born in China and India to be killed.

So much for tolerance. Its time for a new idea.

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Female Genital Mutilation destroys lives in Britain

Warning: Post may not be suitable for workdue to graphic descriptions of FGM procedures

Let me make myself clear on this:

I do not care whether this is a tribal, religious, and/or cultural tradition at all, the practice of female genital mutilation is a barbaric custom that must be stopped.Again, I don't want the issue clouded by any kind of ethnic/religious bias. THE PRACTICE ITSELF must be condemned.

Additionally, I must stress again that FGM is a social custom, not a religious practice, which has been reiterated in this MEMRI video.

The UK's Daily Mail has a well-researched article on FGM that you should read,
The unspeakable practice of female circumcision that's destroying young women's lives in Britain

Most people will be unfamiliar with this practice, which involves removing part or all of the clitoris, the surrounding labia (the outer part of the vagina) and sometimes the sewing up of the vagina, leaving only a small opening for urine and menstrual blood.

It is carried out for a variety of cultural reasons. Such is the secrecy that surrounds the practice that even those aware that it occurs in large swathes of Africa and Asia will be shocked to learn that it is prevalent in Britain.

During a highly disturbing, four-month investigation, however, we uncovered evidence that thousands of British-African girls, in towns and cities throughout the country, have been forcibly "cut".

By conservative estimates, 66,000 women and girls living in Britain have been mutilated. This figure, accepted by the Metropolitan Police, came in a report by a volunteer organisation funded by the Department of Health and carried out with academics from the London School of Tropical Hygiene and the City University.

The article states that political correctness rears its cowardly head, again:

The Met team also educates regional police forces about FGM, and speaks to mosques, community groups and local authorities.

Usually their visits are well-received, but we found that at least one London council declined to publish material highlighting the suffering and danger the practice causes - for fear of offending ethnic African residents.

This kind of attitude incenses Detective Inspector Hamilton. "We are all becoming very culturally sensitive," she says. "People are a bit frightened of saying 'You can't do this here' because people shoot back with 'But it's our culture'.

Among them,

Several leadings Imams have openly condemned the practice. This, though, does not deter its proponents, who maintain that it is their inalienable right to live according to their traditional beliefs and customs, rather than conform to British values. Indeed, some argue that the freedom to carry out FGM is a fundamental principle of our multi-cultural society.

Let's look at the dictionary definition of inalienable:

not alienable; not transferable to another or capable of being repudiated

FGM is worthy of repudiation, and as civilized people we must repudiate it. The "freedom" to carry out FGM is the "freedom" to carry out (and without the benefit of anesthesia) the following,

• Remove the clitoral hood with or without removal of part or all of the clitoris.


• Remove the clitoris together with part or all of the labia minora.


• Remove part or all of the external genitalia (clitoris, labia minora, and labia majora) and stitching and/or narrowing of the vaginal opening leaving a small hole for urine and menstrual flow


• Or,
  Pricking, piercing, stretching, or incision of the clitoris and/or labia;
  Cauterization by burning the clitoris and surrounding tissues;
  Incisions to the vaginal wall;
  Scraping (angurya cuts) or cutting (gishiri cuts) of the vagina and surrounding tissues; and
  Introduction of corrosive substances or herbs into the vagina to cause bleeding or for the purpose of tightening or narrowing it.

Now, read that again carefully.

The physical health consequences of FGM are horrendous. The psychosexual and psychological health are equally severe.

Ponder each one of those items and tell me WHO in their right minds would defend the inalienable right to perform any of these barbaric butcherings.

The FGM Education and Networking Project is making great strides in ending this barbaric practice.

UPDATE
Via SC&A, three links to those defending FGM:
Besotted multiculturalist anthropologists defend female genital mutilation
Cultural rights or human rights: the case of female genital mutilation
Healing the wound

Update 2
Genital Mutilation Practice Growing In Britain

(ht/ Pamela)
Previous posts on FGM and female genital mutilation.



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Saudi punishes gang rape victim with 200 lashes

Saudi Arabia: A Woman's Misery in the Merciless Kingdom

(h/t Siggy

The death of feminism and Islamic gender apartheid in tonight's podcast

Tonight Dr. Phyllis Chesler joins Siggy and I to talk about women's rights and Islamic gender apartheid.

In an interview last year with The Guardian about her book The Death of Feminism, Phyllis explained,

Western feminism's failure to confront the problems raised by Islam, Chesler believes, is a result of the creation of a hierarchy of sins, "an intellectual culture in which racism trumps gender concerns". The example she cites as the embodiment of wrongheaded priorities is "gay and lesbian movement activists rooting for the Palestinians who, meanwhile, are very busy persecuting homosexuals, who in turn are fleeing to Israel for political asylum".

The result, she argues, is that "instead of telling the truth about Islam and demanding that the Muslim world observes certain standards, you have westerners beating their breasts and saying, 'We can't judge you, we can't expose you, we can't challenge you.' And here in the west you have a dangerous misuse of western concepts such as religious tolerance and cultural sensitivity so that one kind of hate speech is seen as something that must be rigorously protected. That means, principally, lies about America and lies about Jews."

In our society moral relativism has started to reach new lows, particularly in academic circles. Witness this article by Roger Sandall about the film Masai Women where anthropologist Melissa Llewellyn-Davies describes female genital mutilation as "a bit like a white wedding." Llewellyn-Davies spared us the horror of this rite by doing some judicious editing,

According to his 1993 report on the editing of Masai Women, the girl's agony was in fact recorded on audio tape during filming, and "a lively debate took place in the cutting room later about how the issue should be handled". One view was that "perhaps the girl's screams should be heard, thus giving symbolic expression to what was visually too horrific."

To this kind of judicious editing (both moral and cinematic) Phyllis has issued a challenge:

The way I see it: Everything is at stake, it's all up for grabs, this is no time for nihilistic or tedious party lines. This is not the time to think in ways calculated to please or to least offend one's peers. My goal is quote the opposite. I do not want to offend my good feminist friends; on the contrary, I would like to bring women and men together - from both the right and the left - in order to make a real difference. This is a time when we, the good people, have to think clearly, creatively, boldly, and morally.

Join us this evening at 9PM Eastern for a most interesting discussion.




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Two girls, the Saudi Religious Police, a mobile phone and a can of pepper spray

Jules Crittenden and Blue Star Chronicles have it:
Saudi Religious Police Attacked by Girls (emphasis added)

Dammam, Asharq Al-Awsat- Members of Khobar's Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice were the victims of an attack by two Saudi females, Asharq Al-Awsat can reveal.

According to the head of the commission in Khobar, two girls pepper sprayed members of the commission after they had tried to offer them advice.

Head of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice in the Eastern province Dr. Mohamed bin Marshood al-Marshood, told Asharq Al Awsat that two of the Commission's employees were verbally insulted and attacked by two inappropriately-dressed females, in the old market in Prince Bandar street, an area usually crowded with shoppers during the month of Ramadan.

Notice how the crowd didn't take the Religious Police's side, either.

According to Dr. Al-Marshood, the two commission members approached the girls in order to "politely" advice and guide them regarding their inappropriate clothing.

It gets better:

Consequently, the two girls started verbally abusing the commission members, which then lead to one of the girls pepper-spraying them in the face as the other girl filmed the incident on her mobile phone, while continuing to hurl insults at them.

YouTube, please.

The Eastern Province's head of the commission also revealed that with the help of the police his two employees were able to control the situation.

The two females were then escorted to the police station where they apologized for the attack, were cautioned and then released.

Way to go, girls!

I predict that demand for pepper spray and video phones will continue to increase among Saudi females.

And then there's the handy-dandy Taser C2, especially designed "for independent, self-reliant women", available in four designer colors for $299.95. I wonder if they ship to Saudi.

Five years ago Saudi Arabia's religious police stopped 15 schoolgirls from leaving a blazing building, and stopped men who tried to help the girls and warned "it is sinful to approach them".

Things are changing.
----------------------------------------------------------
TOMORROW at 9PM Eastern
Cinnamon Stillwell and Rachel Ehrenfeld, author of Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed - and How to Stop It will discuss libel tourism with Siggy and I

Join us!


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The Minneapolis bridge, and today's items

UPDATED
with video

The bridge connecting downtown Minneapolis and the University of Minnesota collapsed at 6:05 PM last evening. Of course the first blogger I thought of was my friend Captain Ed, since I know that his entire family live in the city. Fortunately his family is OK,

I have spent the last half-hour finding my son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter. They're OK, and now we have to wait to see who isn't.

Today he's following up: Death Toll To 9 As We Wait For Sunrise

Doug Ross has photos.

Update
A friend just sent me this:

-------------------------------------------------------------
Via Larwyn, Barack Obomber
-------------------------------------------------------------
The Smoking Gun on the Muslim Brotherhood's Agenda
-------------------------------------------------------------
From Maria,
Finally, someone agrees with me regarding plastic surgery: Fifty? No, it's not the new thirty

Instead of succumbing to ageorexia, the disease that's crippling middle-aged women (and younger ones, too) up and down the land who wish to do battle with sagging, wrinkles and bulges, I've decided to preserve what I can without resorting to cosmetic surgery, and live with what I can't. My eventual decision not to succumb to Botox, lunchtime lasers or the knife was reached after a recent trip to New York.

I happened to be staying on the Upper East Side, where the matrons of Madison Avenue hang out and walk their Pekinese. These uniformly wealthy women, with access to the shiniest cosmetic scalpels in the business, looked eerily identical, like the aged aunts of the Stepford Wives.

Not good, not youthful, but most definitely weird. Some of my friends back home are heading the same way. I decided I'd rather look saggy than paralysed.

-------------------------------------------------------------Also via Maria, Airline lost your bag?
-------------------------------------------------------------
More blogging later. I have a follow-up post to yesterday's My neighbor and Fred.

The war against women rages on

UPDATED. Please scroll down
Hitchens (via Betsy), writing about last week's car bombs in the UK (emphasis added)

Only at the tail end of the coverage was it admitted that a car bomb might have been parked outside a club in Piccadilly because it was "ladies night" and that this explosion might have been designed to lure people into to the street, the better to be burned and shredded by the succeeding explosion from the second car-borne cargo of gasoline and nails. Since we have known since 2004 that a near-identical attack on a club called the Ministry of Sound was proposed in just these terms, on the grounds that dead "slags" or "sluts" would be regretted by nobody, a certain amount of trouble might have been saved by assuming the obvious. The murderers did not just want body parts in general but female body parts in particular.

I have posted on the effects of sexual rage and terrorism, on clerics who say that raped women are to blame because they're not wearing chastity belts, on how breasts are sawed off manekins in Iran, how women have been killed for not wearing a veil, and on the practice of honor killings. According to U.N. statistics, more than 5,000 women and girls die across the world each year in so-called "honor killings."

As the Muslim Women's League Position Paper on "Honor Killings" explains (emphasis added),

The problem of "honor killings" is not a problem of morality or of ensuring that women maintain their own personal virtue; rather, it is a problem of domination, power and hatred of women who, in these instances, are viewed as nothing more than servants to the family, both physically and symbolically.

Dymphna has posted on how feminists are accepting female genital mutilation as part of "diversity". The willful blindness of these feminists is absurd, if you don't understand that the Jihadi movement is the proper heir of Marxism-Leninism.

Radical islamists are at war against women, against women education, against women themselves.

In Pakistan, Islamist extremists have bombed at least four girls' schools and circulated violent threats warning girls to stay at home.

And then there's the officially encouraged wife beatings, which are everyday and mundane by comparison, but still part of the war:

Hitchens continues (emphasis added),

The most noticeable thing about all theocracies is their sexual repression and their directly related determination to exert absolute control over women. In Britain, in the 21st century, there are now honor killings, forced marriages, clerically mandated wife-beatings, incest in all but name, and the adoption of apparel for females that one cannot be sure is chosen by them but which is claimed as an issue of (of all things) free expression. This would be bad enough on its own and if it were confined to the Muslim "community" alone. But, of course, such a toxin cannot be confined, and the votaries of theocracy now claim the God-given right to slaughter females at random for nothing more than their perceived immodesty. The least we can do, confronted by such radical evil, is to look it in the eye (something it strives to avoid) and call it by its right name. For a start, it is the female victims of this tyranny who are "disenfranchised," while something rather worse than "disenfranchisement" awaits those who dare to disagree.

The war rages on.

Related
45 Muslim doctors planned US terror raids

A group of 45 Muslim doctors threatened to use car bombs and rocket grenades in terrorist attacks in the United States during discussions on an extremist internet chat site.

Police found details of the discussions on a site run by one of a three-strong "cyber-terrorist" gang.

They were discovered at the home of Younis Tsouli, 23, Woolwich Crown Court in south-east London heard.

One message read: "We are 45 doctors and we are determined to undertake jihad and take the battle inside America.

"The first target which will be penetrated by nine brothers is the naval base which gives shelter to the ship Kennedy." This is thought to have been a reference to the USS John F Kennedy, which is often at Mayport Naval Base in Jacksonville, Florida.

The message discussed targets at the base, adding: "These are clubs for naked women which are opposite the First and Third units."

Update, Friday 6 July:
Jihad's Target: Women

Islam’s record of treating women is abominable. Islamic gender apartheid targets Muslim women for maximum punishment (lashing, stoning to death, political gang-rape, honor-murder) when they are in any way perceived or misperceived as even slightly independent (e.g. if they want to marry men of their own choosing, divorce dangerously abusive husbands, or simply attend college.) But, even when they have committed no such "crime," many Muslim, Arab, and African women are genitally mutilated; most Muslim and Arab women are routinely beaten as daughters and wives. They are forced to "cover" their hair, faces, bodies, and threatened with maximum punishment when a wisp of hair or too much ankle is showing. They are forced to accept and embrace polygamy and purdah (physical sequestration).

These onerous practices have penetrated the West. Increasingly, masked and silent women are appearing on our streets; their presence is oddly menacing. At the very least, they clearly do not approve of your ways because they have chosen a visibly different path. The fact that some women may view hijab and niqab as a legitimate and humble expression of religious submission or freely choose to be modestly "covered" as a way of proclaiming themselves "off-limits" to western secular promiscuity does not change the fact that their presence also constitutes a walking advertisement for jihad.

The article is by Phyllis Chesler and Nancy Kobin. Phyllis Chesler is the author of

Obi's Sister has more links.

Cross-posted at MNM



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Pyjama mamas of the world, please get dressed!

I don't blog in pajamas; I blog in regular daytime clothes. Aside from vanity (since I believe I look better fully dressed - you'll have to trust me on this) the reason is that I won't go out of the house in pajamas and it's easier to dress for whatever the day brings from early on in the day.

There's also a psychological aspect: since both The Husband and I are self-employed, dressing in casual-Friday style clothes really does a lot towards my having a professional frame of mind. (That is doubly so if you do video teleconferences, which I do.)

Otherwise you end up looking like The Dude in The Big Lebowski wearing pajama bottoms everywhere you go, and talking to your clients like they were your long-lost buddies.

Unfortunately there's a fashion trend that emulates The Dude's sartorial standards. I wish I had $5 for each man, woman and child I've seen wearing pajama bottoms in town. Listen to me, and listen well, please:

The only people who look good wearing pajamas outside the house are too young to be able to read, and I learned to read at age 3

And another thing: people can tell if you're not wearing underwear and it's not a pretty sight. That's another reason why you look so awful in pajamas.

I believe it all got started in the 1990s when slinky dresses that back in the olden days would have been marketed as slips started turning up on the red-carpeted runways of the world. Then it was silk dressing gowns and trousers. I reacall that the late Princess Diana caused a stir when she showed up wearing that at an event. From silk tops and bottoms being the rage it was only a short leap of drawers to the shapeless flannel currently favored by the hoi-polloi.

This trend has been around for quite a while now, and it must be a "sticking-it-to-the-man" sort of thing because few things look sillier than a student at an Ivy League university going about town in $5 pajamas which should never see the cruel light of day.

Or maybe that's all the money he/she had left for clothes after paying $50,000 a year for tuition, room, board, and expenses.

I doubt that very much.

Mercifully, I have been spared the sight of non-student adult men hanging around town in pajamas, but I have seen one or two at the shore going out in surgical scrubs, top and bottom. The last thing I want to see at the beach is an surgeon approaching. But that, too, is part of the outdoors pajamas trend.

I speculate that now that certain high-profile celebrities are in the clink, the next thing will be orange prison overalls. That should be ugly enough that it might push pajamas out of the outdoors scene.

All the same, pajamas should remain indoors.

Well, a lot of people don't share my opinion. Outdoor pajama-wearing is such an international trend that I found this today at the Beeb: School puts stop to 'pyjama mamas'

Nightwear has become an eyesore for the principal of one east Belfast primary school.

Joe McGuinness of St Matthew's Primary School has written a letter to parents asking them not to wear pyjamas while they drop their children off at school.

Mr McGuinness's letter said the trend was setting pupils a bad example and was also making staff uncomfortable.

He said as many as 50 women were gathering at the school gates in their nightwear every morning.
...
"The 'pyjama mamas', as they're known, are the women who would leave their children to school in their pyjamas and, go about their business, go to the supermarket and go about their daily lives wearing their pyjamas," he said.

"What Joe McGuinness is arguing, it shows a lack of respect and it is showing a very bad example to the children."

I agree with the respect part: taking care on your clothes and grooming shows that, no matter how tough things are, you have retained at least a modicum of self-respect.

While you're at it, sweatpants that have large print on the bottom do not look good, either. JUICY really isn't.






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The American feminists' silence on the subjection of Islamic women

Christina Hoff Sommers writes about The Subjection of Islamic Women And the fecklessness of American feminism,

The condition of Muslim women may be the most pressing women's issue of our age, but for many contemporary American feminists it is not a high priority. Why not?

The reasons are rooted in the worldview of the women who shape the concerns and activities of contemporary American feminism. That worldview is--by tendency and sometimes emphatically--antagonistic toward the United States, agnostic about marriage and family, hostile to traditional religion, and wary of femininity. The contrast with Islamic feminism could hardly be greater.

Sommers explains,

One reason is that many feminists are tied up in knots by multiculturalism and find it very hard to pass judgment on non-Western cultures. They are far more comfortable finding fault with American society for minor inequities (the exclusion of women from the Augusta National Golf Club, the "underrepresentation" of women on faculties of engineering) than criticizing heinous practices beyond our shores. The occasional feminist scholar who takes the women's movement to task for neglecting the plight of foreigners is ignored or ruled out of order.

Sommers mentions Katha Pollitt, who

casually places "limiting young people's access to accurate information about sex" and opposing abortion on the same plane as throwing acid in women's faces and stoning them to death. Her hostility to the United States renders her incapable of distinguishing between private American groups that stigmatize gays and foreign governments that hang them. She has embraced a feminist philosophy that collapses moral categories in ways that defy logic, common sense, and basic decency.

I can't say that I would expect decency from the American feminists. After all, these are the women which, as I have said before, equate women with their gonads and see nothing wrong with a lesbian statutory rape, which is even presented as a "salvation".

Phyllis Chesler has written eloquently about the feminist establishment's unwillingness to take on Islamic sexism,

She faults it for "embracing an anti-Americanism that is toxic, heartless, mindless and suicidal."

In the irony-poor mindset of the feminist establishment, there is no notion that believing that our culture is ruinous for women, while failing to see the horrors routinely perpetrated against women in Arab countries and in other parts of the world, shows their argument in all its emptiness.

Unfortunately, it is suicidal not only for the feminist establishment, it is lethal to women all around the world.

Update
Via Dreams Into Lightning, Is Phyllis Chesler right?

Next stop, Caracas

After veiling herself with an Hermes scarf (which I immediately recognized), Nancy's probably selecting some nice red shirts and berets: she's going to visit Hugo, the self-declared Communist in charge of Venezuela.

American Spectator says that Nancy would not meet with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe,

"She has third parties who have encouraged her not to take the meeting,"

including MoveOn.org. Apparently their excuse is human rights.

To make matters worse,

Nancy Pelosi is not only having her staff make plans for a trip to Venezuela to meet there with dictator Hugo Chavez, she has also asked staff to apply for a visa to travel to Tehran.

Yes, Tehran, that paragon of human rights.

But then, we all know how fond Hugo is of his little friend:

I'm sure Nancy wants to keep them both happy.

Here's some fashion advice with a bilingual, multi-culti slant, Nancy: When in Tehran, tapate las lolas.

Update A scream in broad daylight

Update, Wednesday 2 May: The Red Hat Society
President Uribe's Popularity Soars After Snub By Gore

Killed by stoning

Yet another instance of the conditions women live under in the Middle East:

WARNIING: THE VIDEO IS SO HORRIBLE I WILL NOT DIRECTLY LINK TO IT. I could not bear watching it.
Have You Ever Seen A Woman Stoned To Death? Publius Pundit has the video.

Gateway Pundit has the story,

On or around April 7, 2007... Du'a Khalil Aswad, a 17 year old Kurdish girl was murdered by public stoning after running away from home for a so-called honour crime. Du'a was a member of Iraq’s Yezidi religious minority from the village of Bahzan in northern Iraq. She was killed by a group of men and in the presence of a large noisy crowd in the town of Bashika, near the city of Mosul. Some of her relatives may have participated in her stoning.

Amnesty International reported that Du'a Khalil Aswad's murder is said to have been committed by relatives and other Yezidi men because she had engaged in a relationship with a Sunni Muslim boy and had been absent from her home for one night. Some reports suggested that she had converted to Islam, but others deny this. Initially, she was reportedly given shelter in the house of a Yezidi tribal leader in Bashika, but her killers stormed the house, took her outside and stoned her to death. Her death by stoning, lasted for some 30 minutes.

Today in Erbil... Capital of the Kurdish region of Iraq, women and men came together to protest the murder of Du'a Khalil Aswad. The demonstration was organised by 90 NGOs and attracted protestors from across the whole Kurdish region.

Gateway Pundit has a post on the protests following this horrible crime.

According to Wikipedia, the Yezidi are not Muslim, and they are ethnic Kurds. The crowd did yell Allah Akbar.

In Yazidism, there's the underlying misogyny:

One of the key creationism beliefs of Yazidism is that all Yazidis are descendants of Adam rather than Eve

May that poor girl's soul rest in peace.

Today at 3: The Gathering Storm Radio, and today's items

Today at 3:30 EST/12:30PST I'll be a guest at The Gathering Storm Blog Radio Show. My thanks to The Gathering Storm for having me as their guest.
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Two ACLU Leaders Causing Harm in Virginia
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Read Michael Fumento's latest article, The Fighting Killions, about an extraordinary military family.
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In Honor of International Women's Day: Phyllis Chesler Unedited, also posted at Kesher Talk.
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Read about the Secular Islam Summit, held in St Petersburg, FL this week.
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ACLU's Charles Rust-Tierney: Case Simply Bizarre
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One for the "no sh*t, Sherlock" file: Cubans land during US coast drill

Gang rapes as revenge

I first read about this in Pamela's blog yesterday,

A gang of serial rapists has been prowling the North, raping Jewish women as revenge for IDF actions in the West Bank, police revealed Tuesday after arresting six suspects.

"We are raping Jews because of what the IDF is doing to the Palestinians in the territories," one of the six suspects told investigators from the Northern District Central Investigative Unit (CIU) during questioning. During their questioning and their brief appearance at the Nazareth Magistrate's Court Tuesday, none of the four main suspects indicated that they felt remorse for their actions.

This is the latest in a long tradition where clerics call for chastity belts, because women are uncovered meat. We're looking at a culture where

Rape is learned behavior in the home. Peter is absolutely correct in describing the insidious sexual dichotomy of Muslim male supremacy over the lowly denigrated female. Pierre underscored the degree to which a family will defend its own rapist because of alleged "honor." Why should it surprise us that they have moved out into the streets and feel entitled to rape?

At the ideological level which Gudrun has so aptly introduced into this discussion, we encounter the classic practice of taqiya, lit. 'guarding one's self' more commonly thought of dissimulation and its insidious behavior of orchestrating jihad by every possible means in a clandestine manner. Rape is just one more weapon in the jihadi arsenal for Dar el-dawaa and Dar ash-shahada.

This morning Sigmund, Carl and Alfred looks at the reaction from the Left. What reaction there is.

SC&A does bring up a crucial point,

Terror and hate- and the defense of terror and hate- are driven by an ideology of evil, period.

Freedom and democracy are antithetical to hate and terrorism because freedom usurps the power of the terrorist. With out the power to instill fear and punishment, the terrorist is nothing.

In the Middle East, the icons of freedom are the US and Israel. Freedom of all kinds, success and ever growing potential are what the terrorist must destroy. Prosperity is the fifth column the terrorists fear most. They cannot abide by a culture that is prosperous, because that culture seeks growth and progress. The terrorists cannot abide economic and educational progress because those things weaken their grip.

In the meantime, it's time to teach women to protect themselves with firearms, because that's what things have come to.

Cross-posted at MNM