stupid is as stupid does and endangers the whole to serve fake “beliefs” An effort to end all non-medical exemptions for childhood vaccinations in Maine was in limbo on Thursday after the state Senate voted to amend it to allow parents to keep opting out on religious grounds.
Tag Archives: WorldNews
It’s painfully clear: today’s Congress wouldn’t have impeached Richard Nixon | Richard Wolffe
Too many Republicans no longer believe that the Constitution is more important than the party.

The Republican-dominated Congress clearly thinks it’s no longer an impeachable offense to abuse power
There was a point during the Senate’s alternate grilling and chilling with Attorney General Bill Barr when you could hear the ghost of Richard Nixon crying.
Nixon took one final helicopter flight from the White House a generation too soon. He shuffled off this mortal coil a decade too early for redemption.
Venezuela: Maduro thanks military and denounces ‘senseless coup-mongers and traitors’

After a botched attempt to overthrow him, Maduro holds ‘march to reaffirm the absolute loyalty of the armed forces’
Nicolás Maduro has thanked Venezuela’s military for resisting what he branded a treacherous “imperial” plot to topple him this week by sparking a conflict that would justify foreign military intervention.
“Loyalty is a value that you either have or you don’t … I know you will not fail the homeland,” Maduro told troops during an early-morning parade in Caracas that was broadcast on state television.
Anti-Semites Don’t Just Hate Jews. They’re Targeting Freedom.
No wonder gunmen are coming for us.
Why Barr Can’t Whitewash the Mueller Report
We have a system in place for our government to uncover evidence against a sitting president. And it’s working.
Joe Biden wants us to forget his past. We won’t | Adolph L Reed Jr and Cornel West

As times have changed, Biden’s expressed retrospective misgivings about some of his earlier actions and stances. That’s not enough
After much huffing and puffing, Joe Biden has officially entered the race for 2020. In his announcement, he indicated his intention to hit the ground running immediately in early primary states, especially South Carolina.
We were struck by the emphasis on South Carolina. The state’s Democratic presidential primary has taken on iconic status at least since 2008, when candidate Barack Obama’s victory there, on the heels of a victory in the Iowa caucuses three weeks earlier, propelled him toward the nomination. In 2016, South Carolina stood out among the commentariat as the crucial test of a candidates’ ability to appeal to African American voters, and Hillary Clinton’s overwhelming win fueled the contention that she was a much stronger candidate than Senator Bernie Sanders among African Americans and other voters of color.
Tunisia invokes sharia law in bid to shut down LGBT rights group
Tunisia should think again

Judicial harassment and rise in arrests under anti-sodomy law add to climate of tension and fear
One of the Arab world’s most visible advocacy groups defending the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people is facing closure following legal threats by the government.
Association Shams has been officially operating in Tunisia since 2015, helping the country’s LGBT community repeal article 230 of its penal code, a French colonial law, which criminalises homosexuality with up to three years in jail.
The Niqab ban and the politics of distraction
Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
As of last Monday, Sri Lanka is taking a seat at the table next to a list of 13 other countries from across the world who have passed legislation banning the niqab or face veil.
Amidst incensed murmurs from certain parliamentarians, and following a discussion with the country’s main Islamic theological body, the All Ceylon Jammiatul Ulema (ACJU), the President’s office has announced that ‘any garment or item which obstructs the identification of a person’s face would be barred.’ Sri Lanka has been under emergency regulations following the Easter Sunday attacks which killed over 250 people. The ban will hold until emergency regulations are lifted.
Ever since the identification of the all-male terrorists behind the massacre as members of militant group ISIS, Muslim women -for some inexplicable reason- were to bear the hardest brunt. Instances of headscarved Muslim women being refused entry at various supermarkets and prominent establishments was followed by the usual scaremongering via alarmist infographics doing the rounds yet again ‘educating’ the public of the differences between the burqa, hijab, and chador.
A victory indeed for both anti-Muslim voices, as well as to many within the Muslim community seeking to audibly amputate themselves from a supposedly dated form of Islam – one that they claim has no bearing to inherent Sri Lankan Muslim identity. A view that discards the notion that any religious or ethnic identity is fluid, in flux, and subject to constant evolution.
The grand slam, however, is primarily for the current political establishment, members of whom are probably high-fiving each other as a result of this kneejerk symbol-politics manoeuvre on having supposedly successfully placated the public of their fears of homegrown terrorism. A move that bleeds hypocrisy for it comes at the cost of subliminally ‘othering’ an already marginalised segment of a minority community, while at the same time PSA’ing for peace and coexistence in this time of crisis.
What is most insulting to the intelligence of our society, however, is that amidst all this brouhaha, only few have questioned the actual relevance of this new ban to the current state of our security affairs.
No eye witness report nor CCTV footage showed that any of the suicide bombers from any of the coordinated attacks across the country were on that day wearing the niqab/burqa/chador at the time of inflicting their terror. The men were in fact dressed in men attire, with faces completely exposed. It might serve to add here also that they weren’t dressed in traditional Muslim man garb either.
How then did the face veiling Muslim woman get pushed under the bus as the most identifiable sign of radicalism?
It is obvious that the government was cornered into passing this legislation, as was the ACJU too in having to support this move. While all communities have only their praises to sing for the exceptional work of the security forces in tracking down the attackers within only just hours, the country’s elected leadership was in dire need of respite following what many experts claim was a massive intelligence failure, a blunder involving the wrongful identification of a terror suspect, and incompetence in the handling of events overall. A distraction was desperately required. Something needed to give, and it just so happened that the niqab-donning Muslim woman was the easiest scapegoat.
To an outsider unfamiliar with Muslim religious symbolism, the face-veil can come across as alien, even unnerving. And while our first instinct is to otherwise in an attempt to help deal with the discomfort of dealing with any unknown, a woman out in the street in a niqab is -for as long as anyone can remember- most certainly not an oddity that has compelled anyone to stop and recite their final rites.
The misguided belief that the face veil is a marker of extremism isn’t and hasn’t ever been based on any empirical research. If studies were to be carried out, results would show that Muslim women in general -let alone those with a face cover- have a little role to play, if any, for acts of terror committed in all the countries that have banned them.
Contrarily, there is a clear proven relationship between terrorist attacks and increases in recorded Islamophobic incidents against Muslims, with women being disproportionately targeted. One can then dare infer that being visibly Muslim carries a greater risk to oneself, than to the people around them.
The niqab ban has been put in place as a security measure they say – a flexing of muscles towards any semblance of radicalisation that will deter any future acts of terror in the country. Naturally, the perpetuating of this ideological hegemony is doing Muslim women no favours. If anything, the ban is a wholly counterproductive one, in that it ostracises an already marginalised segment of a minority community – a sliver of a percentage out of the 10% that is the country’s Muslim population.
If -as commonly believed- veiled Muslim women are being hopelessly persecuted, the ban will serve only to increasingly confine these women to their homes, under the control of the men accused of governing their lives, and further disconnected from being able to assimilate with society. Even more dangerous, there are studies which prove that having to live in an environment that is aggressively policed on the basis of belief is more likely to harbour radicalisation.
The absurdity of the non-connection of the attacks with the niqab ban aside, this in itself should be a war cry for secular feminists advocating for everyone’s basic right to the civil freedoms of a liberal society. Where now are the proponents and ambassadors so wholly soaked in the ‘Muslim woman saviour complex?’ A segment of Muslim women has been forbidden from wearing what they feel best represents their Sri Lankan Muslim identity. They were not consulted before this legislation was passed, nor were they given the chance to show their willingness to cooperate on instances where identification was required.
Ludicrously, discourses surrounding veiled Muslim women are paradoxically lobbed back and forth according to the convenience of the times. In times of world peace, they are oppressed and subservient to patriarchal whims and fancies, while in the immediate aftermath of a terror attack there are hostile and threatening, capable of devising all kinds of evil. They are either victims of violence or the perpetrators of it.
This age-old preoccupation with Muslim women’s attire is in actuality a gross conflation of conservatism with extremism. In claiming that a strip of cloth holds the answer to combatting a severe global threat is trivialising the greater issues at hand. If there was a direct correlation between the attacks and veiled individuals, legislation forbidding the covering of the face in public would be wholly justified. But there is none.
Muslim women shouldn’t be faulted for the cracks in the state’s china. In not being able to answer the hard questions of accountability, lapses in acting on available intelligence, and general good governance, those at the top should leave well alone and consider hiding their faces instead.
Police Director in New Jersey Used Racist and Sexist Slurs, Inquiry Finds
The police director of Elizabeth, N.J., has rebuffed calls to resign, and the mayor has declined to remove him.
Facebook Frenzy: How the German Right Wing Dominates Social Media
A comprehensive analysis has revealed the degree to which German right-wing populists from the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party are dominating the social media landscape. They might be getting help from abroad.
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