Just another nerd.
Norman Finkelstein will be speaking on campus here later this week at the invitation of the local anti-war folks. A Google search on him brings up a lot of pro-Finkelstein materials (much of it from racist hate sites and individuals), but not a lot of critical pieces about his books. If anyone knows of any articles, blogs, whatever that critique Finkelstein’s bizarre views, please post links here or e-mail me at [email protected].
Thank you.
The National Organization for Women’s Political Action Committee and the National Women’s Political Caucus both endorsed Carol Moseley Braun’s candidacy for president in a move that really underscores where both groups are.
First, Braun is largely a symbolic candidate who was recruited to run for office in large part to try to peel away minority voters from the Rev. Al Sharpton. Second, like the two groups endorsing here, Braun’s vision of feminism is a creature of the far Left.
NOW president Kim Gandy summed up the current state of the sort of feminism that her group represents, saying,
We are particularly please that out of a field of strong progressive candidates, the strongest feminist candidate turns out to be a woman.
Yes, Braun is such a strong candidate that in a Labor Day weekend poll, she garnered the support of a whopping 2 percent of registered Democrats.
The only genuine surprise here is that neither group wanted to wait to see if Sen. Hillary Clinton might jump into the race.
Source:
2 feminist groups back Moseley Braun. Julia Malone, Cox News Service, August 26, 2003.
Poll: Many voters unable to name Democratic candidates. Greg Wahl-Stephens, Associated Press, September 1, 2003.
A man who plead guilty to committing rape in Nigeria recently had his death by stoning set aside after his lawyers plead insanity.
Salimu Mohammed Baranda admitted that he committed the rape of a nine year old girl and apparently refused to defend himself against the charges. According to the BBC, though, family members convinced him to appeal the death sentence and his lawyers claimed that he was insane at the time he committed the crime.
An Islamic court of appeal in Nigeria overturned the conviction and ordered the man committed to an asylum for evaluation.
The BBC story on the overturning of the sentence noted that human rights groups had not exactly jumped all over Salimu’s sentence,
Salimu’s case was a particularly important one for those opposed to such strict Islamic punishments on moral grounds.
In all other cases of stoning punishments being handed down by the Sharia court it has been for those, almost all of them women, who had committed the consensual act of adultery.
Defending a rapist — and worse, one that had admitted his crime — was not something most human rights groups have gone out of their way to do.
But it is the system of justice that is being used here that is the problem. Stoning someone to death for rape is just as barbaric as stoning someone to death for having consensual sex. Both outcomes are the product of a corrupted vision of justice.
Source:
Nigeria stoning verdict quashed. Dan Isaacs, August 19, 2003.
Nigeria stoning verdict quashed. United Press International, August 19, 2003.
In August, the Bureau of Justice Statistics released the results of the 2002 National Crime Victimization Survey. Crime rates from the latest NCVS survey were the lowest ever recorded since the survey began in 1973.
The number of rapes and sexual assaults remained largely unchanged from 2001, however, at 0.4 per 1,000. Comparing the two year averages from 1999-2000 to 2001-2002, rape and sexual assault were slightly lower in the latter period. Although rapes and sexual assault seems to have stabilized (in part because the rate is so low that it is difficult to detect changes), the rape and sexual assault rate in the United States has fallen 56 percent since 1993.
Moreover, the level of reporting of rape and sexual assault to police has steadily risen during the same period.
Sources:
Criminal Victimization, 2002 August 2003, NCJ 199994.
US crime hits 30-year low. The BBC, August 25, 2003.
The BBC has done some excellent reporting over the past few months about the continuing problem of grooms and their families demanding large dowries from brides and occasionally resorting to violence if the dowries are not forthcoming.
The issue was brought to the forefront again in May of this year when 21-year-old Nisha Sharma had her husband and his mother arrested under India’s 1961 Anti-Dowry Act. Sharma told police that initially her husband-to-be did not request a dowry but just minutes before the planned wedding demanded $25,000 from Sharma’s father.
When Sharma’s father explained he did not have that kind of money, the groom and his family members assaulted Sharma’s father.
Other women have not been so lucky. The BBC cited Indian government statistics claiming as many as 7,000 women were murdered by their husbands and/or in-laws in 2001 in disputes over dowry payments. Indian domestic violence activist Ranjana Kumari told The BBC,
Somteimes women are tortured to squeeze more money out of their families and in extreme cases they’re killed. Then the husband is free to remarry and get another dowry.
According to the BBC, the dowry problem is one of the factors driving Indian families to use sex-selective abortion (also illegal in India) in order to avoid having female children.
Sources:
India’s dowry deaths. Lucy Ash, the BBC, July 16, 2003.
Dowry demand lands groom in jail. Rajyasri Rao, The BBC, May 14, 2003.
The World Wildlife Fund recently publicized a Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature survey of the hippopotamus population in the Democratic Republic of Congo. That survey estimates that the hippo population has declined from a high of 29,000 in the early 1970s to only about 1,300 specimens today.
Of course the Democratic Republic of Congo has been racked by war and corrupt governance during much of that period, so it is hardly surprising that poachers and others have been killing hippos with impunity. What is genuinely surprising is the perverse effect that the ban on the trade in ivory has had on hippo populations. According to New Scientist,
In recent years, hippo meat has become a delicacy in parts of central Africa. Furthermore, the present worldwide ban on the trade in elephant ivory has meant hippo teeth, which can grow to 60 centimeters or more long, have become a valuable substitute.
This switch is darkly ironic, because hippos are now much rarer than African elephants. The global hippo population is now estimated at about 150,000, but there are more than half a million African elephants.
African nations where elephants are plentiful have repeatedly petitioned for a resumption of the world ivory trade (limited lifting of the ban, usually to sell pre-ban ivory stocks, has taken place occasionally since 1989).
Sources:
Poaching causes hippo population crash. NewScientist.Com, August 29, 2003.
Poachers will wipe out hippos in Congo, WWF warns. Reuters, August 28, 2003.