Taslima Nasrin's Blog, page 37

Our sun has a tail. The length of the tail is no more than 1,000 times the distance from the earth to the sun. We know that comets have tails. Even though the sun is a star, not a comet, it can have a tail. Isn’t it amazing? I wish I had a tail too.

Pakistan is the country which not only makes the world cry, but it also makes the world laugh.

Muslims eat halal food, now they need halal google. They launched halalgoogling.

Muslim search engine ‘Halalgoogling’ launched.

A Muslim search engine that blocks forbidden content as per Islamic law has been launched. The press release said that ‘Halalgoogling’ gives results from leading search engines such as Google and Bing.

It added that the search engine has a built-in advanced special filtering system that blocks Haram content according to the Law of Islam.

According to the Express Tribune, a special and unique filter system in the search engine excludes forbidden content from its search results such as pornography, nudity, gay, lesbian, bisexual, gambling, anti-Islamic content.

The system has been designed to respect Muslim culture, the report stated.

Halalgoogling’s filtering system blocks pornography. But we know that despite being strongly intolerant of gay and lesbian people, Pakistan leads in the world for the most Google searches for gay porn. They search for hardcore straight porn as well. In this situation halal porn can easily be made for Muslims in Pakistan,porn actresses just have to wear burqas. As polygamy is allowed in Islam, Mutah marriage is allowed, why porn shouldn’t be allowed. Banning porn in Muslim countries doesn’t really make sense. If the prophet knew about internet porn, I am pretty sure, he would never have thought of banning it. He rather would have enjoyed it. Bin Laden, the very famous follower of the prophet was an admirer of porn films.

Everything can be Islamized or halalized. Even a murder. You just have to say ‘in the name of Allah I am committing a crime or killing him or her or them. Allah is great’, the murder will be halalized. Exactly the way animal slaughter is halalized. What if Pakistanis search for bomb making techniques or if sites that teaches how to use guns, and how to kill non-Muslims, ex-Muslims,Christians,Hindus, Jews, atheists? These sites have never been banned in Pakistan. Watching nudity is unIslamic, murdering people isn’t. Scary, isn’t it?

Religion is such a joke!

The Hindu god Shiva was washed away by heavy flood. Thousands of pilgrims, priests, people were washed away too. Kedarnath temple is one of the holiest Hindu temples dedicated to the god Shiva. The temple is located on the Garhwal Himalayan range near the Mandakini river in Kedarnath, Uttarakhand. It is now standing alone surrounded by death and destruction. The loss of human lives in the flash floods, cloudbursts, and landslide after heavy rainfall for 3 days since June 16 is amidst the worst in its history.

Instead of mourning the countless deaths, many god-believers are now getting deep into the euphoria because they’ve heard that a rock on the mountain prevented the Kedarnath temple from getting washed away during the horrifying flood..

Early Sunday, the tragedy began when a cloudburst happened upstream in the valley. What followed was incessant rains leading to huge floods that took everything along with them . A cloud burst happens when clouds come under huge pressure due to getting stuck in a valley. The result is them’ bursting’ thereby causing the entire water in them to drain down in an instant!

Due to this burst , huge rocks also broke away from the Kedar dome and started rolling in the valley. One of them apparently stopped just before the stone temple, thereby breaking the flow of the muddy water into two. This lead to shops, houses basically everything around the temple to be washed away in natures’ fury, but the temple survived!

Believers are busy thinking about the temple. How the almighty god apparently saved his temple and thus re-established the faith of his followers through this act! They thank god for saving the temple but they are not angry with god for destroying everything else and killing thousands of believers. They are not doubting about the existence of god, if there were a god, he would not have been so terribly monstrous.

Religion business will not be stopped at Kedarnath. The rock that fell from the mountain and saved the temple from being washed away is strongly believed by millions of people as an act of god. Now people will most likely start worshiping the rock. Blind beliefs are more crazy than flash floods, cloudbursts and landslides together. I thought Kedarnath tragedy would make people give up their faith in god, but in reality their faith became stronger than before. They’ve now got an extra idol to worship. The rock.

Why India, Europe should give asylum to Snowden.

Edward Snowden asked 21 nations for political asylum. He got nothing but rejection, proving once again that free speech is just a decorative item for most governments. India’s embassy in Moscow received Snowden’s request for asylum. His request was rejected within hours. Since then, there has been much discussion about India’s generosity over giving shelter to persecuted people—and so then, why not Snowden? India has in the past granted political asylum to Dalai Lama and many other rebels. Some even mention my name in the list.

I am not sure whether I should be considered a political refugee in India. I was thrown out of my country, Bangladesh, in 1994 and found myself landing in Europe. It was difficult for me to live in a place which has a totally different climate, culture and language from where I grew up. Since I knew I couldn’t return to my country, I wanted to come to India. But India kept her doors firmly shut. Towards the end of 1999, I was given permission to visit as a tourist.

I came to India not as a persecuted writer or as an asylum seeker, but as a European citizen. I eagerly chose India’s state of West Bengal as my new home. But when I was physically attacked by Muslim fundamentalists, instead of taking act­ion against them, the government kept me under house arrest. Not only that, I was repeatedly asked to leave the state and, preferably, the country. When a group of Muslim fundamentalists orga­nised a protest against my stay in India, I was thrown out of Bengal, the state that had been my home for years. Finally, the central government took charge and put me in a safehouse. But there was pressure from the Centre too for me to leave the country. I had to leave, but I did not give up. I am now given permission to live in India again. My enemies are just a handful of anti-democracy, anti-equality, anti-women, ignorant fanatics but yet India often hesitates to challenge them.

I’m not surprised India refused Snowden asylum. How can a country give asylum to a person chased by the almighty US when it panics over giving a residence permit to a secular writer? But with India, one underst­ands; it can’t afford to take risks or make any big political mistake now. Indeed, a Eur­opean country should have given Snowden asylum. They have a long tradition of defending writers and journalists. Compared to India, they have a much older, truer democracies, and violation of rights and free speech is a rarity there. It’s time for Europe to show they are not mere colonies of the US. However glorious a past India may have had, it can not afford to face possible US sanctions. If democracy were practised everywhere, and if it were not reduced to mere elections, independent voices from independent countries would have been respected. As it stands, the human species is yet to make the world an evenly civilised place. We ordinary people pay the brunt, we sacrifice our dignity, honor, rights and freedom. I really feel sorry for Snowden. If I were a country, I’d have given him asylum.

I attended two atheist-humanist conferences in last two months. One was in Kamloops, Canada and another was in Dublin, Ireland.

Canada conference’s topic was Imagine no religion.



You can listen to almost everyone here.

Ireland conference’s topic was Empowering women through secularism. Here you will get to listen to all great speakers.

It was a privilege to meet great scientists, humanists, and great thinkers of our time in both conferences. We do not waste our time by repeating there-is-no-god, because we all are pretty sure that there is no god. Rather we talk about science, education, secularism, women’s rights, rights of LGBTQ and many other important issues. Our aim is to make people better people and to make the world a better place. Atheism alone can not do everything.

When we are not on the stage, we do not forget to have some good time for ourselves.

Here we are:

Daniel Dennette, PZ Myers, Ophelia Benson, Sean Faircloth, Michael Nugent, Jane Donnelly, Annie Laurie Gaylor, Nina Sankari, Maryam Namazie and me are there.

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Next time you should try not to miss great conferences on atheism, secularism, feminism, and humanism.

Not only in Egypt, sexual violence against women occurs everywhere in the world. Women are exploited, insulted, oppressed, beaten, threatened, harassed, tortured, raped, killed by no other beings but men, their fellow humans.

Yes, you are right. You have heard exactly what Menz say.

For ‘some’ guys? Come on

Men don’t rape. Aliens from other planets do.

Here I would say ‘men’ instead of ‘white men’.

I love cartoons. Don’t you, also? Why don’t you share some hilarious cartoons about ‘menz’ issues?

Caroline Fourest, the courageous French writer, and I have joined a Tunisian secularists’ demonstration held in Paris day before yesterday.

We showed our solidarity towards Tunisian secularists and Amina as well.

We have been campaigning for Amina,the Tunisian Femen activist.

FREE FEMEN

Francois Hollande, the President of France is going to visit Tunisia in July. We ask him to remember four names, Amina, Pauline, Josephine and Marguerite. A Tunisian, a German and two French women. Four FEMEN. They are now in prison. Three of them, including two French activists, just scoop four months in prison for protesting topless in front of the courthouse. An act considered “indecent assault, indecent and disturbing public order”. It was a peaceful protest, demanding the release of Amina, the first Tunisian Femen, which is even arbitrarily detained for several weeks.

Her crime? She wrote a word on a wall. Femen. A word on the wall made 40,000 Salafists angry on May 19. Amina has been accused of “indecency”, “grave desecration” and “conspiracy.” Amina would be sentenced to 6 to 12 years in prison. Amina, Pauline, Josephine and Marguerite are political prisoners. They are not the only ones to endure this kind of repression since the revolution. Ghazi Beji and Jabeur Mejri, two bloggers were sentenced to seven and a half years in prison for blasphemy. One in absentia. He had to take refuge in France. The other is serving his sentence in terrible condition. The Franco-Tunisian journalist, Hind Meddeb continued for denouncing the severity of the sentence of rapper Weld el 15: two years in prison for singing an irreverent song to the police.

The filmmaker Nadia El Fani can not return to the country of her childhood, where she faces up to six years in prison for having made a film about secularism ”Secularism Inshallah”! Her lawyer has also recently been persecuted for “sodomy”. Through these highly political judgments, the Tunisian justice shows a terrible face: nice with terrorists and hard with free spirits.

We are not asking the president not to go to Tunisia. Rather, he should go there for the release of these political prisoners. Undaunted by those who cry to interference or convene the past. Nothing, not the “stability” of Franco-Tunisian relationship or economic interests that justify overlook these unjust laws and how they are applied. François Mitterrand, at the time, was able to forget the diplomatic modesty to defend the cause of dissidents during his trip to Moscow.

Today, dissidents are in Tunis, Cairo, Algiers, Doha, Riyadh, wherever international theocratic attempts to gain ground on democracy and universal values.

On behalf of its voiceless dissidents, we ask the president to challenge his counterpart, the Tunisian president who claims to be a former activist of Human Rights, who had taken refuge in France when he was even persecuted under the former regime, but is silent about violations of the basic right to freedom of expression by its own government.

When President Hollande will be in Tunis, he should demand the release of Amina (18), Pauline (27), Josephine (age 19) and Marguerite (22 years), not because both of these political prisoners are French nationals, but because women’s rights and the right to freedom of expression are universal. This trip will be a challenge for the French president, whether these words have at all any meaning.

At Caroline’s house in the evening, Femen leader Inna Shevchenko came. Inna had to leave Ukraine because Christian fundamentalists were threatening her for cutting down the holy cross. Franco-Tunisian film maker Nadia El Fani also came. We all raised our voices to free Amina who is now in a prison in Tunisia.

Freedom of expression is still a distant dream.