Islam’s Homophobic Teachings Cannot Be Ignored as a Factor in the Orlando Mass Shooting

Hiba Krisht posted a series on Facebook asking us not to ignore the part Islamic teachings on homosexuality played in the horrific shooting at the Pulse. LGBTQIA Muslims and ex-Muslims all too often get erased, their struggles ignored, as we try to counter Islamophobic bigotry. It’s important that we recognize the dangers and challenges they face, even as we rightly point out that Muslims at large shouldn’t be attacked for the actions of a few.

This is not impossible. We manage not to target Christians for bigotry even as we argue against toxic ideas and teachings within Christianity. Finding the way to thread this needle starts with listening to the voices of LGBTQIA Muslims and ex-Muslims.

Hiba has given me permssion to collect and post her series here. Please add her blog to your regular rotation. Continue reading “Islam’s Homophobic Teachings Cannot Be Ignored as a Factor in the Orlando Mass Shooting”

Islam’s Homophobic Teachings Cannot Be Ignored as a Factor in the Orlando Mass Shooting
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White Terrorism and the War on Reproductive Rights: Further Resources

How fortunate the right wing must feel that some obliging Muslim terrorists* came along and massacred over a dozen people. They must feel they can turn the spotlight back on those awful terrible brown folks with the non-Christian beliefs, and get everyone to ignore the terrorists they themselves breed.

I’m not forgetting.

In fact, we’re going to have a bit of a linkfest right here to explore their fuckery. Continue reading “White Terrorism and the War on Reproductive Rights: Further Resources”

White Terrorism and the War on Reproductive Rights: Further Resources

An Army of “Lone Wolves”: The American Right’s War on Women’s Reproductive Rights

In my earliest memories, there were people bombing and terrorizing women’s health clinics. The anti-abortion crowd declared a war on women’s reproductive rights. I’m sure some of the people who declared it and who continue to fight it think they’re doing it for the precious babies, but you barely need to scrape a nail across the surface of their motivations to reveal the lie: if they really wanted to prevent abortion and help all those beautiful babies, they’d do much more than try to pass laws banning terminations and chuck a few free diapers at pregnant people. They’d be fighting tooth and nail to ensure everyone had access to safe, effective contraception. They’d be clamoring for laws strengthening the social safety net. They’d be pouring their hearts and funds into making sure children and parents have universal health care, robust food and housing programs, comprehensive education, affordable day care, and everything else it takes to help a baby be safely born, thrive, and become a successful adult.

Funny how their acute concern for precious babies ends with birth. Why, it’s almost like they have a fetus fetish – or are more interested in controlling women’s sexuality and reproduction than saving actual babies.

Many forced pregnancy fans limit their activities to electing anti-abortion politicians to office and shouting lies at pregnant people on clinic sidewalks. But others go much further. In this post, I have collected many links to show that there’s an awful lot of lone wolves out there. In fact, once we look at all those “isolated incidents,” once we peruse their very own rhetoric, and once we notice some patterns, it looks very much like an appreciable number of Americans, from proles to politicians, are inciting others to violence.

Some of them don’t even hide what they’re trying to do. Continue reading “An Army of “Lone Wolves”: The American Right’s War on Women’s Reproductive Rights”

An Army of “Lone Wolves”: The American Right’s War on Women’s Reproductive Rights

Religious Terrorists Are Killing the Women They Can’t Control (But They’re Not Islamic)

You’ve of course heard about the shooting at the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood that left three people dead and many more injured. There are all kinds of people running around right now trying to claim ridiculous shit, like the terrorist who shot up the place was a “gentle loner,” or was a leftist transgender woman. None of that’s true. We don’t know much about the asshole who did this, but we do know that all his neighbors were scared of him, he was an anti-Obama jackass who fell for those fake Planned-Parenthood-sells-murdered-baby-parts stories, and he was a Christian.

A lot of media outlets, politicians, and other people won’t want to call this terrorism, but it is. It’s a very specific form of terrorism, and it’s not just the shooter who’s the terrorist. There are many terrorists and their supporters involved in this attack and others that Planned Parenthood, along with various other abortion providers, have suffered. Some of them are running for President of the United States. Continue reading “Religious Terrorists Are Killing the Women They Can’t Control (But They’re Not Islamic)”

Religious Terrorists Are Killing the Women They Can’t Control (But They’re Not Islamic)

What Can We Do in the Face of Such Hate?

We can mourn for the three cities that were attacked: Beirut, Baghdad, and Paris.

Image is a black background with Beirut, Iraq, Paris, and Syria printed in white block letters. The i in each name has been replaced by a lit white taper candle.
Image via Eva Pagiatakis on Facebook.

We can extend our empathy and aid to the survivors of these attacks, and to those refugees fleeing the terrorist violence Daesh has caused in Syria and other parts of the Middle East. Continue reading “What Can We Do in the Face of Such Hate?”

What Can We Do in the Face of Such Hate?

Hello, World. Still Fucked Up, I See: Elliot Rodger Edition

Not that I expected it to improve dramatically while I was sleeping, but I have to say, a few things we’ve been pointing at and shouting “HELLLOOOO THERE’S A PROBLEM HERE” have been rather emphatically highlighted by certain recent actions. I shall be exploring them in between marathon snooze sessions. In between, we shall have nothing but lovely happy fun picture time round here, because from what I’m seeing, ya’ll could use the break.

So, misogyny. Continue reading “Hello, World. Still Fucked Up, I See: Elliot Rodger Edition”

Hello, World. Still Fucked Up, I See: Elliot Rodger Edition

Now is the Time When We Come Together

Rage settles to righteous anger. Shock becomes determination. In the aftermath of a disaster, we have our chance to rise to our feet, scrub our faces dry on a sleeve, and roll up those sleeves to get to work. We help heal the wounded, comfort the bereaved, fix the damage, and set things as right as we can.

If your faith in humanity wavered, remember: some people ran toward the blasts. The Red Cross had all the blood and funds it needed within hours. People all over the world stepped up immediately to do whatever they could. A few would rip apart: many will put back together.

We will come together and lift each other up. Fall seven; up eight. That’s us. That’s people.

I’ve listed as many resources as I could find. Let me know what I’ve missed.

Continue reading “Now is the Time When We Come Together”

Now is the Time When We Come Together

To the Boston Bomber(s)

You’re a fucking coward, whoever you are.

I don’t know who you are. I don’t know if you’re a domestic or foreign coward, or a single coward or many. Doesn’t matter. I don’t need your name and your back story to know you’re a fucking coward. Only cowards plant bombs where innocent people and children will be out enjoying a race. Only cowards run away so they don’t have to deal with the aftermath of what they’ve done.* Continue reading “To the Boston Bomber(s)”

To the Boston Bomber(s)

In the Face of Terrorism: Norway, the Myth of a Madman, and a Better Way

Image Source Guardian.co.uk

This man is a terrorist.

Blond, blue-eyed, solidly middle-class, raised and educated in a Western democracy, yes.  He’s far from the al Qaeda foot soldier everyone expected when news of the Oslo bombing and subsequent shooting on Utoya island broke.  Some are calling him Norway’s Timothy McVeigh, and that’s apt: both of them were home-grown terrorists who decided to express their dissatisfaction with their societies by building farms out of fertilizer and parking them in front of government buildings in hopes of maximum mayhem.  But Anders Behring Breivik proved a far more ambitious fanatic.  The fact his body count didn’t exceed McVeigh’s isn’t due to anything more than somewhat poor timing and excellent police work.

This is Norway’s Oklahoma City in more ways than one.  I remember when we all thought the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building must have been bombed by Arab terrorists, back in the early hours before McVeigh got arrested for traffic violations and the truth that even good ol’ American boys could be terrorists fell down upon us.  Norwegians are a bit shocked at themselves for their assumptions, but let’s face facts: most of the people we encounter blowing up selves and others these days are, indeed, Muslim.  A few too many people, especially in my country, made the leap from “could be” to “must be” far too quickly, but the initial suspicion wasn’t completely unfounded.  When Islamist fanatics tell the West repeatedly and often they’re determined to blow our shit up, it’s not silly to think of them when a bomb goes off.


But people like Breivik and McVeigh remind us that terrorism is not the exclusive method of Middle Eastern extremists.  And this is something we must accept.  Even blond, blue-eyed native sons can be terrorists.  When someone engages in mass slaughter for political and religious motives, with the intent of terrorizing society into compliance with their views or destabilizing the government they despise, they have committed acts of terrorism, no matter how white and Christian they are.  This is something some people seem to forget, the moment the suspect turns out to have a pale complexion.  People stop using the word “terrorist” and start using words like “madman” and “mass murderer” instead.  The terrorist goes from being a terrorist to some lone weirdo who must be an anomaly.


Breivik is not.  Breivik is a cold, calculating, far-right son of a bitch who hasn’t a trace of remorse.  He is a man with a cause who planned his act of terror carefully.  He was as driven by ideology as any other political terrorist, and to call him delusional or insane is an insult to people with genuine mental illnesses.  He’s a product of right-wing ideology, not mental disease or defect.

We need to get over this tendency to think that our native sons and daughters are nuts when they adhere to home-grown extremist ideologies.  When their ideologies lead them to commit stunning acts of terror, we need to stop comforting ourselves by thinking they must be aberrations.  They belong in the same category as other people we call terrorists.  Terrorism is not merely a foreign phenomenon.  Terrorism is a method any extremist can use, and native extremists do.  It’s just that, with a few spectacular exceptions, our home-grown extremists haven’t been quite as good at it.  That, unfortunately, could easily change.  And we won’t be prepared to handle them if we insist on seeing our very own terrorists as something qualitatively different from other sorts.

What Breivik has reminded us is that terrorists can and do arise even in the most peaceful, progressive societies.  Wherever there are politically disaffected people with a martyr complex and the belief that violence will serve them where the ballot box has not, you’re at risk of having some despicable shits load up on bombs and bullets and attempt to change the political landscape by force. 

What can a society do, in the face of that?

Norway appears headed in the right direction.  So far, their people and their leaders have understood that the answer to terror is to not be terrorized.  They’re standing strong on their values and their democracy.  They’re not leaping immediately to create a national security or police state.  This has pushed them in the opposite direction from what Breivik seems to have intended, and that’s exactly the right response.  You won’t get terrorists to stop terrorizing by letting their attacks succeed.  All you’ll do is help them destroy your cherished society.  You may not remake it in the image they intended, but by giving in to the terror, by letting fear strangle your freedoms, you’ve handed them a win.  That’s not the way to go, and I’m glad to see Norway understands that.

What can a society do, in the face of terror?  Do what Norway is doing: catch the terrorist(s) who did it.  The fact that they took this terrorist alive, right in the middle of his shooting spree, is outstanding.  That denied him martyrdom, which takes a lot of wind from his sails and gives those desiring a glorious death for the cause something to think about, should they decide to attempt an act of terror themselves.  It also makes it much less likely that there will be further terrorist attacks undertaken as acts of revenge.

You might notice Norway hasn’t shipped Breivik off to some military installation to be tortured.  They’re using no “enhanced interrogation.”  He’s being afforded due process.  Under Norwegian law, it appears he’ll even have a chance at freedom in 21 years.  Never mind that his chances are about equal to Charlie Manson’s.  The point is that the criminal justice system is handling him just fine, without going to extremes, staying within the boundaries set by an extremely civilized society, up to and including affording him proper representation, and yet they are perfectly confident that society has nothing more to fear from this murderous piece of shit.  They’re completely right.  Democracies do not have to adopt totalitarian tactics to handle terrorists.  They should not.  Doing what my own country is doing – suspending constitutional rights, eroding civil liberties in the name of “security,” destroying i
ts moral authority by engaging in torture – doesn’t lead to a safer society, but one in which the terrorists, both home-grown and foreign, have all but won.

We have to accept the fact that we’re never going to be perfectly safe.  Even if we completely closed our beautiful open societies, even if we crushed dissenting voices, arrested people for showing the slightest tendency toward ideas that sometimes lead to violence, even if we turned every building into a bunker and strip-searched every citizen several times a day, we’d still be at risk from people who hold extreme beliefs and aren’t afraid to risk their lives in order to kill for their cause.  Better, then, to live in freedom.  We can take precautions, harden targets and give law enforcement the tools they need to mitigate our risks and deal with those terrorist acts we couldn’t prevent, without destroying our civil liberties and our democracies.  But let’s not make the mistake of living in terror.  Let’s accept that there are risk inherent in any type of society, and some risks are more acceptable than others.  I’d rather risk getting killed by an extremist than live under a dictatorship in the name of security.  I’d rather risk dissenting voices that might get out of hand than silence all but the most bland.

I’d rather not fight terrorism with bigger guns, escalating the violence and spiraling us off into endless conflict.  I’d rather fight Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg’s way:

At a press conference in Oslo, Stoltenberg, pictured, said that those guilty for the atrocities would be brought to justice and that the attacks would bring “more openess and more democracy” to the country.
“No one will bomb us to silence. No one will shoot us to silence. No one will ever scare us away from being Norway,” Stoltenberg said.
“You will not destroy us. You will not destroy our democracy or our ideals for a better world,” he added.

I wish my own country had followed Norway’s lead, rather than letting fear all but destroy everything that made her great.

All of us, every single democracy faced with terrorism both native and foreign, can do better.  We must recognize terrorism for what it is, no matter who perpetrates it, and deny those terrorists the satisfaction of remaking our great societies into small and fearful ones.  If we don’t, we are lost.

In the Face of Terrorism: Norway, the Myth of a Madman, and a Better Way

Feds Express a Decided Interest in Sean Hannity's Pal Hal

Quick, my darlings, to the wayback machine! Remember this bit o’ drama last January?

We’re already aware that the white-supremacist crowd is already creating a higher level of security concerns surrounding Barack Obama’s inauguration.

So somehow it probably figures that Sean Hannity’s old pal Hal Turner would be out there leading the parade of nutcases making threats around the events.

According to Mark Potok at the SPLC, Turner has gone public this week with his threats:

On Friday, neo-Nazi threatmeister Hal Turner, amplifying on an earlier posting suggesting that it would be a good thing to use an unmanned drone carrying explosives to attack the crowds, said a mass murder of those attending the festivities “would be a public service.” “I won’t say what may happen Tuesday but I will say this,” Turner wrote on his blog. “After Tuesday, the name Hal Turner may live in infamy. Let it be known that I saw what was necessary and decided to do what had to be done. I make no apology to those affected or their families.”

Earlier, on Jan. 11, Turner had posted photos to his blog, under the headline “My Inauguration Dream,” of a small, unmanned drone, an electronic guidance system and sticks of dynamite as he laid out one method of attack. He also discussed the possibility of sending up balloons filled with helium and a “payload” and fitted with fuses that would explode the balloons over the crowds. And he displayed a grainy video that purported to show that method being tested. “Too far fetched?” Turner asks of a possible balloon attack. “It got tested and it worked! … Watch the video and imagine what payload, other than the index cards taped to the outside of the test balloons, might be substituted? HMMMMMM. Might be something messy? Something contagious? Something deadly? Ahhhh, such possibilities!” Then, last Thursday, he posted an update, saying: “All the assets that need to be in-place for next week are now in-place; deep within the security perimeter. Everything is a ‘go.’ We have crossed the Rubicon; let history judge us well.”

Hal, you poor silly shit. You’re too much of an assclown to pull of your dreams of wholesale death and destruction, and you made a ginormous ass of yourself blustering threats you couldn’t follow through on. But hey, congratulations – if it was just attention you were seeking, boy, you sure got it:

Today, FBI agents went to the New Jersey home of white supremacist blogger/radio host Hal Turner and arrested him “on a federal complaint filed in Chicago alleging that he made internet postings threatening to assault and murder three federal appeals court judges in Chicago in retaliation for their recent ruling upholding handgun bans in Chicago and a suburb,” according to a statement released by the Justice Department. A summary of Turner’s dangerous tirade against the judges:

Internet postings on June 2 and 3 proclaimed “outrage” over the June 2, 2009, handgun decision by Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook and Judges Richard Posner and William Bauer, of the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, further stating, among other things: “Let me be the first to say this plainly: These Judges deserve to be killed.” The postings included photographs, phone numbers, work address and room numbers of these judges, along with a photo of the building in which they work and a map of its location.

Turner’s posts also “referred to the murder of the mother and husband of Chicago-based federal Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow in February 2005,” saying, “Apparently, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court didn’t get the hint after those killings. It appears another lesson is needed.” In the Justice Department statement, U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald — who announced the charges — said, “We take threats to federal judges very seriously. Period.”

Oh, yes, they do, Hal – yes, they do. And they’ll probably want words about your Inauguration Day threats, too – forms a pattern of escalating murderous ideations, y’see.

It’s okay, Hal. I’m sure you’ll only get a few years, considering all you’ve done so far is make terroristic threats. And I’ll betcha your old pal Hannity’ll be happy to come visit you in prison. No, really. I mean, he hasn’t got a reputation to defend, and the Faux News audience is so far gone they’ll probably rally round you like a martyr.

I mean, a right wing dumbfuck enough to say this about Sanford’s little dereliction of duty…

The two silliest defensive responses from before he fessed up:

“It is refreshing that Mark Sanford is secure enough in himself and the people of South Carolina that he does not view himself as an indispensable man.” (Erick Erickson)

And:

“Are [Cassie] and I married to the only real men left in the entire freakin’ country? Do we only want Momma’s boys or Daddy’s girls in the White House from here on out? Teddy Roosevelt is doing backflips in his grave right now: apparently no one is allowed to go on a writing retreat, take a road trip, or hike, hunt, or fish if they have any political ambitions at all. Unbelievable.” (Little Miss Attila)

…is certainly dumbfuck enough to make excuses for you. They’ll probably write you in prison and everything.

Hell, you get enough of a following going, you might even get the Charlie Manson treatment. How would you like being seen as someone so likely to incite murder and mayhem that you have to be locked up for life, eh? That’s fame, that is.

Couldn’t have happened to a better racist asshole, I’d say.

Feds Express a Decided Interest in Sean Hannity's Pal Hal