Sexual Assault in Egypt

Maya at Feministing:

Another horrifying sexual assault against a woman journalist in Egypt is spotlighting the epidemic of harassment in the country–as well as the risks lady reporters regularly face across the globe. The attack against Natasha Smith, a British student journalist working on a documentary about women’s rights, during the post-election celebrations this past weekend closely echoes the attacks on Lara Logan and Mona Eltahawy last year. ...

Natasha Smith:

But in a split second, everything changed. Men had been groping me for a while, but suddenly, something shifted. I found myself being dragged from my male friend, groped all over, with increasing force and aggression. I screamed. I could see what was happening and I saw that I was powerless to stop it. I couldn’t believe I had got into this situation.

My friend did everything he could to hold onto me. But hundreds of men were dragging me away, kicking and screaming. I was pushed onto a small platform as the crowd surged, where I was hunched over, determined to protect my camera. But it was no use. My camera was snatched from my grasp. My rucksack was torn from my back – it was so crowded that I didn’t even feel it. The mob stumbled off the platform – I twisted my ankle.

Men began to rip off my clothes. I was stripped naked. Their insatiable appetite to hurt me heightened. These men, hundreds of them, had turned from humans to animals.

Hundreds of men pulled my limbs apart and threw me around. They were scratching and clenching my breasts and forcing their fingers inside me in every possible way. So many men. All I could see was leering faces, more and more faces sneering and jeering as I was tossed around like fresh meat among starving lions. ...

Muslim Women News:

Sawfat Hegazy, the pro-Muslim Brotherhood preacher who gave the sermon at Friday’s gathering in Tahrir Square, physically and verbally attacked two photographers covering the day’s events.

One photographer is a French freelancer, the other is a staff photographer for Egypt Independent.

The altercation took place on the side of the stage near Mohamed Mahmoud Street, before the arrival of Morsy, who took the presidential oath and delivered a speech in the square yesterday.

The two women were standing with other photographers and cameramen in the area when they were approached by a man who claimed to be from security, who told them to leave the area. They refused, saying there were many other photographers standing there and they were within a safe distance from the stage. ...

Stop Radical Islam has more.

The Future of Egypt

'My friend is Egyptian, a devout Muslim, a patriot and yet she is preparing a plan B of escape, as so many others here have done, because she fears Egypt is turning into another Iran. ...'

That is MSNBC's Charlene Gubash on the changes she's seeing in Cairo. The analogy to Iran is not idle: she's describing a country that, in living memory, was free and secular. Soon it may be neither.

Gubash continues:

Many felt it was improper to take the oath of office in Tahrir Square rather than before the Constitutional Court. "It's basically very amateurish," said Hisham Kassem, veteran publisher. "He made lots of mistakes to the point you think he's going to be a trial-and-error president... making a promise to hand over Omar Abdul Rahman, the first man to attack the World Trade Center. He will never be released. He is just going to annoy the Americans now," Kassem said.

"[Taking the oath of office in Tahrir] eroded his legitimacy. If he is banking on the street, it's not very savvy, his presidency will collapse in a year if he banks on that," Kassem added.

Thomas Jocelyn at The Standard (via PowerLine) has more:

In a rousing speech in Tahrir Square on Friday, Egypt’s new president, Mohamed Morsi, told the crowd that he will work to free Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, aka the “Blind Sheikh.” Rahman is currently serving a life sentence in a U.S. prison for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a follow-on plot against New York City landmarks.

Morsi’s call for Rahman’s return to Egypt was a curveball for all those Western watchers who are looking to brand the new president a moderate. At times, including during his speech on Friday, Morsi does use language that sounds quite conciliatory. But peppered throughout his rhetoric are troubling red flags.

Sheikh Rahman was a longtime ally of Osama bin Laden. The deceased al Qaeda master credited a fatwa authored by Rahman for providing the religious justifications for the September 11 attacks. Rahman has also served as the spiritual guide for Gamaa Islamiya and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, both of which are terrorist organizations that have been close allies of al Qaeda for decades.

Morsi’s call for Rahman’s freedom is, therefore, the latest red flag. ...

For more on Morsi's speech, see Al-Jazeera.

The thing I want to emphasize here is that the path to secular liberal democracy is not a one-way street.

Leap Second

PhysOrg has an update on when the next "leap second" will be added to the world's timekeeping systems.

A leap second will be introduced on 30 June 2012 following a decision made by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) earlier this year. This could potentially be one of the last ever leap seconds added, as a decision may be made in the next few years to abolish the practice.

So tomorrow will be 86,401 seconds long. Try not to panic.

Leap seconds are added to Co-ordinated Universal Time (UTC) to keep the time scale from atomic clocks within one second of that determined by the rotation of the Earth. The time scale produced by atomic clocks is much more stable and reliable than that based on the Earth's rotation, and without leap second adjustments the two would diverge by ever increasing amounts.

That would be bad. Wouldn't it?

There is ongoing debate over whether or not to abolish leap seconds and allow atomic time to gradually drift away from solar time. For now, a decision has been deferred until 2015, but if agreement is reached then to abolish the leap second, the second added on 30 June 2012 could be one of the last.

Brace yourselves. But I've got to say, the arguments for doing away with the leap second sound pretty compelling:

Some countries have proposed that leap seconds should be abolished because of the difficulties they cause for systems reliant on precise timing, and the time and effort needed to programme them manually into equipment, with the resulting risk of human error. They also argue that the need for predictable timekeeping outweighs that for a link between civil timekeeping and the Earth's rotation.

I wholeheartedly agree. And while we're on the subject, maybe we can finally kill off Daylight Saving Time.

Congress and Economic Mandates

Orin Kerr at Volokh:

Under the Chief Justice’s opinion, real economic mandates are beyond the power of Congress. Congress can’t force action where there was none. Congress can’t say you must act or else go to jail, for example. The individual mandate is constitutional because despite the name because it’s not really a mandate. Congress called it a mandate, to be sure, but in practice it’s really just a small tax. And the enforcement mechanism is pretty light. So you really don’t have to get health insurance: You just have to pay the smallish penalty if you decide you don’t want it. So Congress lacks the power to say that you go to jail if you don’t buy health insurance. But Congress does have the power to encourage you to get health insurance by imposing a tax if you don’t, as long as the tax isn’t so coercive that it’s really more than just a tax. ...

Read the rest at the link.

Obama the Exotic

Why are the left so fixated on the idea that President Obama is being discriminated against on the basis of his skin color, his exotic name, and his putative Muslim religion?

I'd like to submit that it's because they are obsessed with those things themselves. There's something appealing and romantic there, and there's the added bonus that you can hide behind the charge of "prejudice" whenever the object of your fascination is criticized.

To be more precise about it, there's a hyper-vigilance for any hint of negative bias - but no awareness of the possibility of positive bias. The leftists will not admit to being enthralled, smitten, infatuated with those very same characteristics.

Obviously, that is itself prejudice, but they'll never admit it. To acknowledge positive bias toward "marginal" or "minority" groups would call into question the basic assumption of entitlement liberalism - the assumption that white Christian prejudice is so universal that it can only be countered by a compensatory bias.

It is obviously true that there still exists in America today, an element of the old, pernicious white racism and Christian supremacism. But I think it's also true that these things are in decline, and that there are other forms of discrimination that the leftists aren't so fond of talking about.

To acknowledge that at some times, in some places, there might be a positive benefit to NOT being white or Christian would endanger the system. So, for example, Elizabeth Warren's Cherokee ancestry may not be questioned.

But back to Obama. Where did people get the idea that Obama was born in Kenya?

Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. ...

Whether or not Obama personally wrote or edited the text of his bio in the 36-page pamphlet, he allowed the words to represent him.

Now, where do people get the idea that Obama is a Muslim?

Christian Demonstrators in Dearborn: What the News Didn't Show You

Via Atlas. These folks are no heroes of mine (their next stop is demonstrating at a gay pride event), but they're exercising their right to free speech. The response by the Muslims - and more importantly, by the Dearborn law enforcement - is instructive.

Eric Allen Bell, Global Infidel

If you're just tuning in, let me introduce liberal filmmaker Eric Allen Bell, who's the author of the blog Global One TV: A Blog for Mystics. In 2010, he started working on a film covering the protests against a large mosque under construction in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Eric initially took the side of the Muslims - but then something happened.

Eric Allen Bell, once a strong supporter of the controversial mega-mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, has reportedly switched positions on the matter after learning more about terrorist attacks overseas, and reading books on Islam.

A fixture at court hearings and protests in 2010, the California native and self-described liberal even started making a movie about the situation called “Not Welcome,“ where he depicted mosque critics as ”southern Christian bigots,” in the words of the Huffington Post, before making the switch.

“Of course, Muslim Americans making up less than 1 percent of the total population in this country, the idea that 1 percent will arm themselves and take over is nothing short of paranoid and psychotic nonsense…” he said at the time. Now, he says the mosque is built on a “foundation of lies,“ and maintains there is both ”mysterious money” and a suspicious motive people need to be aware of.

Now Eric has a new site ... it's called Global Infidel TV. Go check it out.

Nora Ephron

Roger Simon remembers Nora Ephron.

It’s scary when people you knew and considered your (rough) contemporaries start dying.

I didn’t know Nora Ephron well, but we were friendly acquaintances in the 1980s when we shared the same agent and would bump into each other at parties. I even remember meeting her father Henry — also a screenwriter and director — at an Edgar Award ceremony in 1986 when I was nominated and lost. They graciously came up and congratulated me anyway. It was the best part of the evening for me.

Naturally, I followed Nora’s career after we drifted apart. How could you not? ...

Read the rest at the link.

In Norway, Da'wah Hits a Rough Spot

Remarkable video highlights the difficulties facing Muslim missionaries in Norway. Salient theme: People - and religions - are judged by their actions. Also, at 4:50, discover the insidious threat that is sapping the da'wa community's spirits.

The Edge

She is in love, love with the edge –
where thought falters thin,
where sun browns the feathers,
singes the hair on the head
and the knuckles, white from flapping;
wind dries the sweat and glues the eyes
open, like the eyes
that greet the dead,
meet the dead
over the edge.

At night, chasing the edge –
cut her wrists and drank herself white,
blood dripping
over the edge.
White blindness from headlights of cars,
mad dogs snarling behind the stars,
bloodless the stars sing,
and wind in her ears –
she is in love
she is in love.

- Stephanie McLintock

Oh, hell.

After 35 years and 1669 strips, Matt Groening to quit "Life in Hell".

The Last Jews of Tunisia

Michael Totten:

Jews lived all over the Middle East and North Africa for thousands of years, and they lived among Arab Muslims for more than 1,000 years, but they’re almost extinct now in the Arab world. Arabs and Jews didn’t live well together, exactly, but they co-existed five times longer than the United States has existed. They weren’t always token minorities, either. Baghdad was almost a third Jewish during the first half of the 20th century. Morocco and Tunisia are the last holdouts. In Tunisia, only 1,500 remain.

What happened? What changed? Islam didn’t happen all of a sudden, nor did the arrival of Arabs in Mesopotamia, the Levant, and North Africa. Both have been firmly in place since the 7th century. A far more recent cascade of events transformed the region, and for the worse: the occupation of Arab lands by Nazi Germany and its puppet Vichy France, the Holocaust, post-Ottoman Arab Nationalism, Israel’s declaration of independence, and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

As a consequence of all that, rather than the Arab invasion or the rise of the Islamic religion, almost the entire Arab world is Judenrein now. And since the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic Republic regime in Iran, relations between Arabs and Jews are worse than they were at any time during the entire history of either.

Yet 1,500 Jews hang on in Tunisia. The ancien Ben Ali regime kept them safe, as has Tunisia’s relatively tolerant and cosmopolitan culture. But what will become of them now that Ben Ali is in exile and his government is overthrown?

I met with Haim Bittan, the chief rabbi of Tunis. ...

Read the rest.