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  • thabet 5:03 am on September 12, 2010 Permalink
    Tags: , , , , sexuality,   

    A Saudi diplomat is seeking asylum in the US, because he is gay:

    A ranking Saudi diplomat told NBC News that he has asked for political asylum in the United States, saying he fears for his life if he is forced to return to his native country.

    The diplomat, Ali Ahmad Asseri, the first secretary of the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles, has informed U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials that Saudi officials have refused to renew his diplomatic passport and effectively terminated his job after discovering he was gay and was close friends with a Jewish woman.

    In a recent letter that he posted on a Saudi website, Asseri angrily criticized his country’s “backwardness” as well as the role of “militant imams” in Saudi society who have “defaced the tolerance of Islam.” Perhaps most provocatively of all, he has threatened to expose what he describes as politically embarrassing information about members of the Saudi royal family living in luxury in the U.S.

    If he is forced to go back to Saudi Arabia — as Saudi officials are demanding — Asseri says he could face political persecution and even death.

     
  • plimfix 4:27 am on November 20, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , , sexuality   

    Omar Sacirbey poses the question, “Did the alleged Fort Hood shooter lose control, at least in part, because he was sexually frustrated?” My question is, what has mass murder got to do with self control? No, no, no, I can’t hold it in any longer, I’ve got to – shoot 13 people dead..? Omar collates a range of opinion. –”All these men are so sexually deprived so much so that the sperm has gone to their brain, and they implode,” wrote Ani Zonneveld, a female Muslim activist– echoing Bin-Bazian teachings on masturbation. –”I’m skeptical,” said Kecia Ali, a religion professor at Boston University. People have tried to link Islamic extremism and sexual frustration for years, she said, but a causal relationship “was a bit of a stretch.”– It’s an absurd notion, Kecia. A more interesting interrogative would be this: why is the original question taken seriously? Brainstorming – confusing issue with relationship between extremist violence and hypermasculinity, the trend for psychological explanation, the relationship between racism and sexuality exemplified by phalloplethysmography

     
    • Buzz 1:55 pm on November 20, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Sexual frustration is one among many triggers that I don’t think should be completely discounted. In San Francisco, once in a while, they have this weird “parade” downtown in the financial district that makes a helluvalot of noise. No, it is not Gay Pride.

      Palestinians and their supporters march up one side of town and Israelis and their supporters march up the other side. They meet along one street in the middle of the city. Palestinians are partitioned to one side and Israelis are partitioned off to the other side. Police on horseback and foot patrol the middle and the whole gathering takes up a city block. It is loud and very emotional. Every kind of over the top emotion is on display. It is quite upsetting even for the objective outsider. People yell and cry and curse the opposing side. This goes on for about 20-30 mins. Then everyone disperses.

      I wondered what the point of this bizarre annual event was. And it struct me. This is a bloodletting. People are blowing off alot of the anger and violent feelings they have in the most innocuous manner possible.

      Sexual frustration, especially among young men, can build aggressive and irritable feelings. Someone already unhinged could be pressured by lack of healthy social outlets including sex. Violence and sexual are primitive aspects of the human brain and system and they are unfortunately intimately related in brain structure.

      • plimfix 2:29 pm on November 20, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Too true. People were often hacked to death my monks in the middle ages.

        • pi.info 2:39 pm on November 20, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          In all places and at all times.

          Japanese scholars maintained that Japanese Zen was the perfection of Buddhism, one that overcame the pacifism and weakness of Asia. This created the strange practice of sending Zen missions to Buddhist countries. It also promoted the idea of Japanese superiority over and “responsibility” for its Asian neighbors. The government sought to legitimate its exploitive occupation of East and Southeast Asia in part by appealing to Zen’s role in creating a “pan-Asian” Buddhism capable of resisting Western colonialism.

      • Hicham Maged 5:35 am on November 21, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        In addition to what Buzz mentioned, there is another important aspect about Fort Hood shooter that I wonder how/why reports do not foucus on which is his carrer as an army psychiatrist. He is not a normal citizen!

    • Rabiya 4:03 pm on November 21, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Do you remember that computer programmer who shot a bunch of women to death before ridding us of himself in Pittsburgh, PA a few months ago? All the media outlets said it was because he hadn’t gotten any (as he whined about on his blog). Women didn’t respond to this obviously creepy guy’s very needy neediness and didn’t sleep with him and so he had no choice but to hate them and kill them. I hope that’s not going to happen here (Oh, if ONLY he could have gotten married, those people would be alive today).

      • shams 4:28 pm on November 21, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        yeah….im pretty damn sick of this false equivalence, Fourth.
        When Hasan enlisted in1988, the Bush Doctrine hadn’t killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi muslim civvies.
        One has to wonder if he was forced to listen to returning GIs tales of atrocity perpetrated against muslims as part of treating them for their PTSD.
        Like being tortured, I imagine.

    • Adonna Joseph 8:35 am on November 22, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Yes, let us provide another Islam excuse for killing. How sad, how sad. It is never my fault when i do something wrong.

    • Adonna Joseph 8:45 am on November 22, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Hey Plimfix, people are often hacked to death in the name of Islam everyday! You dont need to blame someone else 500 years ago. Lets talk about sexual slavery today as promoted by Islamic men between Africa and The Middle East. Where are you balls!

      • shams 9:31 am on November 22, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        we have chattel slavery of women and children in this country.
        the conservative movement seeks to restrict womens rights over their own bodies every day in this country.
        And google Yearning For Zion. … the southwest corner of my state is infested with filthy polygs practicing “spirit marriages” to get around anti-polygamy laws.
        South Carolina refused to pass the woman’s suffrage amendment until 1970.
        WECs that live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

    • Adonna Joseph 12:32 pm on November 22, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      To compare the politics of rights of women in the USA and the real slavery and traficing of over One Hundred Thousand children and women being sold in Africa and the Middel East is just illistrates your desire to ignore the truth. Well I am not surprised you existence depends on ignoring the truth. Oh yes tell me that some WEC is making them sell women and children. I am sure its not Islam.

      • shams 3:40 pm on November 22, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Like I said, idiot.
        Glass houses.
        We were a slave nation, membah?
        When will you ignorant godbotherers get a clue that IT ISN”T YOUR FRACKIN’ BIDNESS??????
        The US sowed these dragons teeth.
        The bitter harvest will be with America for a long, long, longlonglong time.

    • Adonna Joseph 4:38 pm on November 22, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Now your a slave buying nation. I guess you like that better. The only thing yur a slave of is Islam. Free your self man. Lets see it only takes 36 states to ratify the 19th Amendment and make it the law of the land in 1920. When the other states ratified is meaningless. And how about the girls of Islam are you still stoning them to death? Gee thats right out of the dark ages. I am a free women (black) and American.

      • Dan 5:16 pm on November 22, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Adonna, how about you black chicks free yourselves from the enslavement of materialism? You know, cashing those welfare checks so you can make 10 year payments on that Escalade with 24″ dubz of yours? Free yourself from the victimization mentality that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have forced you morons into? Even Bill Cosby has called out victimizing twats like yourself for the morons you lot are.

        Generalizations are a bitch, aren’t they? If you can’t handle the heat, then step out of the kitchen.

        Note: I’m not really a racist and I only resorted to making these posts to give Adonna a taste of her own medicine. I’m not racist if I have numerous color TV’s, each with different colors you know?

    • Adonna Joseph 5:29 pm on November 22, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      We black girls have been that way in history. We have learned. Now we know abuse when we see it. And it looks like Muslim men. Sorry Dan. No vail here. But its been fun talking.

      • shams 6:45 pm on November 22, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        lol, so you are an ignorant black godbotherer.
        That doesnt give you any validity….it just makes you extremely rare….and possibly a member of teh Angry Estrogen Posse.
        Was some man bad to you Adonna?
        you sound like that other wee black chick, Aayan Hirsi Ali.
        lol

        • Dan 6:48 pm on November 22, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          A lot of African-Americans don’t consider Somalis black anyways so sucks for Hirsi Ali

    • plimfix 5:01 pm on November 23, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      There I was, 16 responses to one of my blogs, thinking – woo, hoo, some intelligent debate about an issue I’m interested in. Whoops, apparently not.

      • shams 8:22 pm on November 23, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Well…it was an irrelevent post.
        Dr. Major Hasan wasn’t sexually frustrated……he was tortured into insanity by a fail system that would neither treat him or let him leave.
        It had nothing to do with sexual frustration or al-Islam.
        The mission changed to causing vast quantities of muslim deaths and Dr. Major Hasan could neither support that or……leave.

        • Shams al-Nahar 7:38 pm on November 24, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          There is going to be a trial.
          We will learn first hand of Dr. Major Hasan’s attempts to leave the military, and of their refusal to allow to.

          The truth will set you free. ;)

  • johnpi 7:49 pm on October 7, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , , , sexuality, ,   

    Sex braggart gets five years, 1,000 lashes.

    JEDDAH: The Summary Court here sentenced Wednesday the 32-year-old Saudi sex braggart Mazen Abdul Jawad to five years imprisonment and 1,000 lashes to be executed in installments for boasting about his sexual exploits on the LBC weekly program “Bold Red Line” in mid-July.
    ….

    [Defense attorney] Al-Jumaie has insisted all along that this is a matter for the Ministry of Culture and Information to review. He filed a complaint on behalf of his client against LBC for allegedly editing down and re-contextualizing a long video shoot into a minutes-long segment aimed at portraying Abdul Jawad in the worst possible light. The lawyer contends that the court should have waited until the complaint with the ministry was resolved.

    Al-Jumaie also criticized the ruling for not summoning anyone from LBC. Malik Maktabi, the host of “Bold Red Line,” would not comment on the case.

     
  • thabet 2:36 am on July 7, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , , sexuality   

    The New Iraq… a lot worse than the Old Iraq for some.

     
  • johnpi 9:51 pm on June 23, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , , , , sexuality   

    Speaking of images of Arab night life, Muslimah Media Watch has a critique of the “Funky Arabs” video from Jad Choueiri:

    My biggest problem with this music video is not the gratuitous amounts of flesh on show by the scantily clad women–which let’s face it, has become the norm in many similar Arabic music videos–but the political implications of Choueiri’s message. Because if not a parody, then the video is certainly a textbook case of cultural appropriation. Listening between the lines, you could well take home the message: the only way we can prove we are not evil is if we try to erase our identities and emulate selective (read: the most materialistic) aspects of Western culture.

    Choueiri’s only concessions to Arab culture: bellydancing and shisha smoking, of course! Nothing else we have “over here” is worth anything anyway. The orientalist image is complete once an x-ray machine shows us that a woman is carrying on her person handcuffs, a mask, and a whip. Arabs are all hypersexual, doncha know?

     
    • razib 10:09 pm on June 23, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      two points

      1) the video is talking about arab culture. muslims and arabs like to emphasize that muslim != arab, and to a lesser extent arab != muslim (considering that this is a lebanese video that makes total sense), so howz come *muslim* media watch is focusing on this?

      2) i think the criticism of the crassness of this sort of stuff is totally cool personally. but i would, unfortunately, add the dehumanizing sexualized materialism might be most prominent in western culture, but it hooks into the “Id” of many human societies, no matter cultural context. instead of focusing on the orientalism, or western aspects of these things, i think a better long term project would be a cross-cultural front against “bling-bling” satisfaction-now tendencies which seem to be accompany modern capitalism.

      • johnpi 10:44 pm on June 23, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Ethar is on to something when she writes, “emulate selective (read: the most materialistic) aspects of Western culture.” To a great extent the participants here are dressed down tourists ‘slumming’ it in a one-dimensional stereotype fed by the worst fantasies about ‘Westoxification.’ Therefore, Ethar’s conclusion has it backwards: I don’t think they are devaluing Arab culture so much as they are playing in a devalued Western culture stereotype, from which most of them will probably return, get married and settle into conservative cultural defaults later in life.

        a better long term project would be a cross-cultural front against “bling-bling” satisfaction-now tendencies which seem to be accompany modern capitalism.

        Agreed.

        • razib 11:13 pm on June 23, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          yeah. i kind of felt that way. people can totally see different things in the same images. i can accept that such videos could *both* be orientalist and occidentalist, depending on your viewpoint. i don’t think there’s some “objective” assessment of these sorts of things. on the last point, both the west and the islamic world tends to focus on exoteric aspects of each culture that the other finds objectionable. but the key issue are the inner-values. there is a culture war going on across the world. there’s no excuse, IMO, for apologizing for subsistence level premodernity. we want people to grow wealthy enough to have some affluence. but that doesn’t mean stripping away all values aside from immediate satiation. i don’t think that the west has a monopoly on this tendency, i think it’s simply our common human “baser nature” derived from the constant battle on the malthusian margins.

        • razib 11:14 pm on June 23, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          also, from another perspective you could say that the video was a bit racist, exploiting a stereotype of black hip-hop bling-bling culture. a house with a thousand rooms and all.

    • sui sen 11:40 am on June 24, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      This is the classical exampe of modernity gone bad. Since most Arab countries are under repressive rulers, Arab people would find it quite hard to understand and manage freedom they see in the West. Both the conservatives and the liberals in this part of the world would agree to interpret democracy and freedom as the right to do whatever they want without limitations or restrictions. So for the conservatives complete rejection of “western” democracy and for the liberals complete liberation without regards to the traditions of their ancestors. This is because they have not been allowed to taste the trial and error of developing a democratic society. For hundreds of years Arabs were and still are under occupations from foriegners and from the tyrants of their own kind and thus they have not actually been given the chance to see “real” democracy in action. The increasing sexuality of most music videos and even soap operas and tv programs in the arab world is a manifestation that arabs as a people are longing for true freedom in social, political, and economic scenes and yet could not express such longing in public platform so they tend to focus more on self-expression and as far as we can see they have been expressing themselves in far worse manner than the western world…A copycat would always be worse than the original. While sexuality is the west can be considered as an art form, here in arab world it is plainly a cheap version of perverted pornography…

      The Muslims of SoutheastAsia like in Malaysia and Indonesia are tasting democracy too and yet you can not find women in music videos exposing their flesh as what arabs are doing. The situations of the people are different and seldom you can find conservative Malaysian and Indonesian clerics denouncing or rejecting democracy…

      The Arabs would still have to learn more and while waiting for that, I would prefer to turn off my TV when those cheap pornographic music videos are being played…

      What a waste of time and resources.

  • johnpi 6:12 pm on June 6, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , , , , , , , , sexuality,   

    One of the values of all of the stories coming out of the Gulf Arab states right now about sex therapy and sex issues are just the examples of the range of struggle that people live with that may make others feel less isolated in their misery and seek help/improvement:

    In Saudi Arabia and other countries where the genders are rigorously separated, many men have their first sexual experiences with other men, which affects their attitudes toward sex in marriage, Ms. Lootah said.

    “Many men who had anal sex with men before marriage want the same thing with their wives, because they don’t know anything else,” Ms. Lootah said. “This is one reason we need sex education in our schools.”….

    She reels off stories from her practice in rapid fire: the Emirati military officer whose wife had an affair because he was away from home too much; the woman who thought fellatio was against Islam (not true at all, Ms. Lootah notes); the wife who discovered her husband dressing up as a woman and going out to gay bars. She seems bent on showing that there is a whole world of sexual confusion that would benefit from open discussion.

     
    • Sansislam 6:57 am on October 25, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Islam is a dumb nonsensical political movement disguised as a peacful religion. That fact is Muslims are typically complexed about sex because this instituion and it’s teachings are oppresive and hypocritical. For example you be immodest around your spouse or slaves. So the Koran is more concerened with your appearance than the fact that you have slaves. This is absolutely insane!

      (This comment has been edited for foul language).

  • johnpi 7:20 pm on April 22, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , , , , sexuality   

    Rob at Arabic Media Shack has discovered more reports of the emo/goth alt identity (re)appearing among Muslims, with a report from Egypt that “security forces detained three people on suspicion of belonging to the group” after some chalk drawings appeared on a sidewalk somewhere. He quotes this, from the Egypt Daily News:

    (More …)

     
  • thabet 2:01 pm on April 20, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , , , , , , sexuality   

    “For many Muslim women, the ideal man is a fair-skinned, blue-eyed hunk who doesn’t drink and observes Ramadan”.

     
  • plimfix 3:17 pm on April 11, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , , massad, mcclintock, , , sexuality   

    Desiring Arabs will venture to show that modern and contemporary Arab historiography developed to a considerable extent around the repudiation not only of men’s love for boys but also of all sexual desires it identified as part of the Arab past and which the European present condemns and sometimes champions.” The introduction to Joseph A Massad’s intellectual history would seem to be in the same territory (if not quite the same city) as that of Anne McClintock’s (although she is not referenced in Massad’s bibliography), but I wonder whether Massad will be able to compete with McClintock’s rivetting analysis of Hannah Cullwick.

     
  • thabet 5:31 am on March 19, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , , , sexuality,   

    The London Borough of Waltham Forest may seek the prosecution of parents who withdrew their children from LGBT history week. The prosecution will be sought on the grounds that the withdrawal of the children was ‘unauthorised’.

     
    • Hamza Isa 5:48 am on March 19, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      astaghfirallah,

      my kids will NOT be attending such lessons.Outrageous

    • null 8:06 am on March 19, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Qiyamat is near

    • aziz 9:37 am on March 19, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      This is a great case study of the difference between being an American liberal and a British liberal.

    • plimfix 3:11 am on March 20, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      There is a local academic (non-Muslim) where I live who supports such moves. I don’t. There is a huge void between believing LGB sexualities are at odds with your faith and denying their social reality (and misrepresenting gay people as a social threat). Most Muslims don’t realise the degree to which contemporary Muslim attitudes towards LGB people are shaped by homophobia imported under colonial rule. Prior to that, LGB people in Muslims were more likely to be mocked. Moreover, disagreements over the alleged Quranic injunction against gay sexuality are not new (which is actually about xenophobic gay rape, IMHO).

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