Jenny’s Pennies

From the BBC.

A German citizen has gone to court in an attempt to force his government to seek the extradition of 13 suspected CIA agents who allegedly kidnapped him. Khaled al-Masri says he was abducted in December 2003, flown to a US detention centre in Afghanistan and tortured. Mr Masri was released in May 2004 after his captors allegedly told him he had been mistaken for someone else.

I wish him the best of luck - it’s absolutely appalling that you could be kidnapped and tortured “by mistake” and then receive no compensation what so ever.
And towards the end of the article:

Mr Masri says his case is an example of the US policy of “extraordinary rendition” - a practice whereby the US government flies foreign terror suspects to third countries without judicial process for interrogation or detention. He says he was kidnapped in the Macedonian capital, Skopje, in 2003, flown to a secret prison in Afghanistan, nicknamed the “salt pit” and tortured there. On his flight to Afghanistan, he says, he was stripped, beaten, shackled, made to wear nappies and drugged. Mr Masri says he was finally released in Albania five months later after the CIA realised they had got the wrong man. He told the BBC in February 2007 he had been “traumatised” by his experiences.

Why the hell do they put scare quotes around the word traumatised? Of course he was traumatised, he was freaking kidnapped, taken to a ghost prison and tortured. And then finally after five months of hell the Central Intelligence Agency - what kind of intelligence do they operate on?! - realized they had the wrong guy. Dear BBC “editor”, I think you would be traumatised by that too.

In Northern Ireland, four main political parties have managed to come together and actually agree on something. Unfortunately, it’s not on a good thing: they want to keep abortions extremely restricted. Today, women in Northern Ireland have no right to an abortion even if they are pregnant as a result of rape or incest. Abortion is only allowed in case of severe fetal abnormalities or a clear threat to the woman’s life. Some abortions are still done in Northern Ireland at the discretion of the doctor, but otherwise women are forced to go elsewhere in the UK or Europe to get the procedure and pay for it in private, which thousands also do. But this of course means that women without the financial resources (to obtain an abortion in the UK costs about £1,000) are left in an extremely difficult situation. It is reported that 11% of GPs in Northern Ireland have seen attempts by women to perform amateur abortions on themselves.

Now, there are attempts to extend the 1967 Abortion Act, so that it will finally apply to Northern Ireland as well. But the political parties the DUP, Sinn Féin, the UUP and the SDLP don’t want that, and for the first time they have overcome their political differences and agreed on a major issue: women in Northern Ireland should not have the same rights as women elsewhere in the United Kingdom.

Read Laura Canning’s column on this issue over at the Guardian’s “Comment is free”.

I don’t think I have any readers in the UK, but if you happen to be a British citizen and support equal reproductive rights for women in N.I., go to Pro-Choice Northern Ireland and learn what you can do.

(I guess this post means I’ve sunk even deeper into the “Culture of Death”. I am, however, in good company: read this great column by George Monbiot!).

Today’s oh-dear-God-should-I-laugh-or-cry is found at Sadly, No! by way of Fistful of Euros. It’s the halp-halp-the-scary-Muslims-are-coming-BOOGA BOOGA BOOGA-blog Gates of Vienna* who presents us with a map of what Europe will look like in 2067, unless we start deporting/converting/killing/rounding up/turning away Muslims and produce more white babies. Where is Europe headed? they ask (in trembling voices). Well, apparently towards this:

So, we’ll have the Muslim states (with funny names like Al-Lemania and Al-Italia!), the Russian federation and the Russian protectorates, a demilitarized zone and some “neutral” states, which besides seemingly ever-neutral Switzerland also includes the Czech Republic (huh?!?). Germany will for some inexplicable reason be divided along the old iron curtain borders and Yugoslavia will magically reunite. Also, Turkey seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth.
This map is like one of those “find five faults” picture games times a million.

And as Alex Harrowell at a Fistful of Euros aptly points out: if this whole thing is about demography, do they really think that Russia doesn’t have a demographics problem?

Yeah, I need to stop laughing now, my stomach hurts.

*I ain’t linking, but click on the Sadly, No! link and continue from there.

Dutch politician Geert Wilders has released his anti-Islam film “Fitna”. It was quite comical today when editorial writer Per Gudmundsson (Svenska Dagbladet) on page 4 in the paper questions whether the movie really exists and complains how it has been stopped by politicians, the media and companies like Google, and then in the same paper, on page 21, there is an article about how the movie is available on the internet. And it’s very Google-able. Per Gudmundsson has noted his mistake.

From what I have read about the movie (I’m sorry, but I’m not going to watch it. Scold me all you want for it, but I’m not) it doesn’t really seem like an insightful work of art. Selected quotes from the Quran blended with pictures of the terrorist attacks on New York, London and Madrid, of executions and stonings and other such terrifying things. More pictures of the Quran, and then in the end the sound of a page being ripped out, said to be a page from a phone book, and then a call to the Muslims themselves to rip the “evil pages” out of the Quran.

Some commenters I have read are of course hailing Wilders’ film as a very important wake up call to us in the west. How? What does the movie accomplish? To me, it seems to add nothing new - any one can pick up a Quran at a book store (albeit translated unless you read Arabic) and the movie clips are of the same kind readily available on the internet, and in many cases, on our TV screens during the evening news. An internet documentary, of which there are twenty a dozen. A tired provocation.

It seems as if the right wing populist parties and the extremist islamists are living in some kind of symbiosis - they can’t exist without each other. For the extremist islamists, the movie is yet another reason to preach their hate, and for the anti-Islam populists, the protests become yet another reason to preach their hate and make yet another movie or caricature. And on and on it goes. Sigh.

What I want to know is - if the anti-Islam crowd are so hell-bent on defending our freedom and our way of life against the said onslaught of scary scary Muslims, what is their proposed solution to the “Islam problem”? Because all of the solutions which comes to my mind run quite contrary to that beloved freedom and democracy they so want to defend. So, what do they propose? Deporting all Muslims? Converting them to another religion by force? Forbid all expressions of Islam (however that one will work)? Invade all Muslim countries, kill their leaders and forcibly convert the population to Christianity (the Ann Coulter solution)? Make being a Muslim a punishable crime (and what should be the punishment? re-education? death? prison?)? Round up all Muslims and put them in special camps? What is the idea?

I haven’t heard anyone in the right wing populist anti-Islam crowd actually propose a solution to the perceived problem. It’s like when pro-choicers ask the pro-life crowd what the punishment for having an abortion should be. The answer is — crickets. Or some mumbling about “but that’s not what I meant”. It’s easy to rail and chant and make movies and provoke, but when they are called on the consequences of their ideas, they are mostly speechless.

PS. nowhere in this post have I questioned the right of Geert Wilders to make the movie and to show it. He has every right to do that, no matter how stupid it is. That is not the point.

So the Vatican, through Bishop Gianfranco Girotti, head of the Apostolic Penitentiary, has put a new spin on the thou-shalt-not-list and added seven “social sins” to the good old fashioned seven deadly ones. According to Bloomberg the new ones are:

1. “Bioethical” violations such as birth control
2. “Morally dubious” experiments such as stem cell research
3. Drug abuse
4. Polluting the environment
5. Contributing to widening divide between rich and poor
6. Excessive wealth
7. Creating poverty

That list looks quite politically correct to me (with the exception of the first two or maybe three). They also seem to coincide with the original deadly sins quite a bit - wouldn’t contributing to the widening divide between rich and poor, excessive wealth and creating poverty be the same as greed and maybe gluttony? Anyway, I do agree with the Vatican that it is “sinful” to pollute the environment and to create poverty and such, even though I don’t have the need to live in fear for eternal damnation in order to try and be a decent human being. For me it’s more of a common sense of solidarity and responsibility for the planet we live on and for my fellow human beings. But to each their own.

Many blog commenters that I have read sarcastically note that child abuse and pedophelia has not made the list. Of course, Girotti had something to say about the subject too:

Girotti was asked about the many “situations of scandal and sin within the church,” in what appeared to be a reference to allegations in the United States and other countries of sexual abuse by clergy of minors and the coverups by hierarchy.

The monsignor acknowledged the “objective gravity” of the allegations, but contended that the heavy coverage by mass media of the scandals must also be denounced because it “discredits the church.”

Funny, I thought that the child abusers and the people who have protected them and covered up their crimes would be the ones who have discredited the church. Get a grip Girotti.

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon has also commented on the “we need to breed”-nonsense that I wrote about yesterday. She also has a video from the Nation that summarizes the article.

And, today in Dagens Nyheter, the latest statistics from SCB (Swedish bureau of statistics), that show that more people are getting married and having children in Sweden than in previous years. Marriages are up 5 percent from 2006 (to the highest number since 1968, if you discount 1989 when a change in law regarding pensions for widows/widowers made many people drive into marriage-ville) and births are up 1.4 percent. In 2006, we had a excess of births over deaths of 15 692. So no, we are not going extinct. Of course, we don’t know how many of those births that are of the “right” babies (you know, blond, blue-eyed and born of God-fearing parents who only had sex to create that baby). But there it is.
If you’re into statistics, SCB has it all in English here.

British pilots who served in the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) during World War II will be given a special merit award. Of the people who worked for ATA, 15 women and 100 men are alive today. Their job was to fly Spitfires, bombers and other aircraft between bases and back to factories for repair, and also to ferry them up to the front line where the fighter pilots would take over.

Even though they were not allowed to fight, ATA duty was not without danger. Amy Johnson, the first female pilot to fly alone from Britain to Australia, was one of the 154 ATA pilots who were killed during their work.

Another female pilot was Wendy Sale-Barker, aunt of the Conservative politician Lord James Douglas-Hamilton. From the BBC article:

Lord James said that on one occasion his aunt crashed on her way from Cape Town to Cairo and had to be rescued from the Kenyan bush.

Speaking about the honour, he said: “I think they were able to fly every bit as well as the men and they did not receive the recognition which many of us feel they deserved.

“It is very refreshing indeed that they are now receiving that recognition belatedly, but they did give invaluable service to their country - notwithstanding their quite excessive modesty.”

I wanted to be a fighter pilot when I was younger, but physical obstacles made that impossible. These ladies were so cool and I would never have their guts!

Kathryn Joyce of The Nation has written a long article called “Missing: the ‘Right’ Babies” about the so called “demographic winter of Europe” - that the “West” is failing to produce enough babies and is in danger of becoming “out-breeded” by the Muslim immigrants and their purportedly numerous offspring. From the article, a quote by former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who quit the republican presidential race in the beginning of February:

“Europe is facing a demographic disaster” due to its modernized, secular culture, particularly its “weakened faith in the Creator, failed families, disrespect for human life and eroded morality.”

This nativist “pro-family” movement is a mess of sexism and nationalism blended with religious extremism. For them, women’s liberation, contraception, gay rights, divorce, abortion, and secular humanism is to blame for the demise of Europe. The movement is spearheaded by American right-wing Christians, but has the backing of politicians and organizations in Europe. Even Muslims are sometimes allowed into the unholy alliance - when it comes to blocking rights for women and gays at the UN, these people are happy to gang up with Iran and Saudi Arabia. But when it comes to babies, they want the right babies - white babies.

But for this to work, women need to dedicate their lives and their wombs to this demographic warfare. And I have a suspicion that the way they want to do this is not by implementing true family-friendly policies: not by ending work place discrimination against women who have children, not by making life easier for single parents, not by improving child care and education, addressing poverty, and ensuring access to equal and affordable health care.

This quote by Paul Mero and Allan Carlson, writers of The Natural Family Manifesto, says it all:

“Above all, we believe in rights that recognize women’s unique gifts of pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding.”

If they want to get me behind the idea of preserving “Western culture” they will have to include in their definition of this culture all the progress that we have made in the last decades and that makes me happy to live in Sweden: the possibility for women to have careers outside the home or the schoolteacher/nurse option, the advancement in rights for gays and in how non-heterosexuals are viewed in the society, the right to choose one’s own religion or lack thereof, the ability to chose and control the number of children you have, and so on.

But this is not what they wish to preserve. To them, all the things which I see as good and positive developments, are a threat to “our way of life”. In their logic, by allowing freedom for women and freedom of (or from) religion, we are being overrun by people who treat their women miserably and advocates killing all the infidels. Funny how their world views coincide…

(Update: the article is also reprinted over at Alternet; it’s always interesting to read the comments section there.)

A week ago, in a hospital in Naples, Italy, a woman was recovering from her anaesthesia after having a (completely legal) abortion. Then, police entered the hospital and started interrogation the woman, still in her hospital bed. They also seized the aborted fetus as “evidence”. The woman, who in Italian newspapers has been identified by her first name Silvana, was 39 years old. (Read the New York Times article here, Dagens Nyheter in Swedish here)

The police had acted on an anonymous tip that the abortion had taken place later in the pregnancy than the law allows (in Italy the limit is 24 weeks). But the hospital showed that the pregnancy had been terminated at 21 weeks, well within the limit, after that a test had showed severe fetal deformities.

Why is it acceptable to treat a woman like this? Even if the police were to investigate it, surely there is a better way than to bust into the hospital ward in a way that Carmine Nappi, the chief of obstetrics at the hospital, likened to an anti-Mafia raid. Here is a woman who just has undergone a physically and emotionally painful experience, and the police thinks that is a good time to interrogate her?!

The event has led to protests in Italy, in defence of the country’s abortion law, with the participation of Health Minister Livia Turco who said: “we are defending a law that is close to us”.

In Italy, abortion has been legal for 30 years. The subject is of course controversial, since the Catholic Church has a huge influence on Italian politics and society. Parliamentary elections will be held mid-April, and abortion has now become a pivotal issue in the election campaign.

Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is expected to win the election and has promised to change the abortion law if he wins. He has also backed a campaign for getting the UN to declare a universal moratorium on abortions (I can’t wrap my head around this, and I really wish I read Italian so I could see how on earth he argues for this idea). The campaign was started in December last year, by Giu­liano Ferrara, editor of conservative newspaper Il Foglia (which is used as a campaign platform) and former minister in a Berlusconi government.

So while the anti-choice crowds are gathering strength, the partly liberal-Catholic center-left block is unsure of how to act, according to Dagens Nyheter. Last week, a web campaign was launched to compel the politicians to defend the abortion law. It says: “Enough is enough. The clerical offensive against women has become unbearable. But equally unbearable is the lack of reactions from the center-left.”

I wish the women of Italy best of luck. And Silvana, the woman who was harassed by the police and used as a tool by people who couldn’t care less about her and her feelings, I wish you well also.

Cara of the Curvature writes about the story here.