This is no good. People need to know what Santorum is.

I know this is commonplace in Iran, but does Israel really want to go down that path?

The Swedish National Board for Youth Affairs, a government agency, has granted the Swedish Humanist Organisation money for a project aimed to combat Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and homophobia. This is absurd considering the Humanists’ record of accomplishment:

• They say Jews torture children
• They award opponents to minority rights
• They advocate monoculturalism
• They say Jews are sadistic people
• They portray Jews and Muslims as non-Swedes
• They oppose free speech
• They claim homophobia is natural

There is much more to say about them, but the irony is that this organisation is granted tax money to fight its own agenda.

59% in favour!

The definition, from the bill:

Public acts intended as propaganda for homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexuality and transgenderism among minors, are taken to include the uncontrolled spread of information that poses a danger to the health and the moral and spiritual development of minors, creating for them a distorted representation of the social equivalence of traditional and nontraditional relationships.

Protecting minors is the favourite argument whenever bigots want to make life hell for a minority group.

John Feffer writes about it.

“God—you know it’s a myth and you have a choice,” the signs read in Arabic and Hebrew. Well, morality is another myth, but would we do better without it?

The tedious thing about missionary atheism is this blind obsession with truth as correspondence. Say I can’t prove that anyone loves me, would it really be such an awful thing if I believed someone does?

One of the most entertaining online provocateurs has died.

Update: American leftists cannot hide their hate of the man.

A few friends of mine have put together a collection of stories and monologues, which will premiere tomorrow night at the MAF Theatre in Malmö.

While on the subject of upcoming events, on Sunday, I will be at the first ever Limmud in Lund. Limmud (לימוד in Hebrew) is something of an international movement promoting Jewish learning. Sunday will be filled with lecture and debate on a wide range of Jewish subjects. Read about it in Swedish here.

He did what he did best until the very end.

“With a crowd of same-sex couples and the eight out gay and lesbian members of the Maryland Legislature standing behind him, Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley Thursday afternoon signed the Civil Marriage Protection Act, which calls for legalizing same-sex marriage in the state,” Washington Blade reports.

Jonathan Neumann makes an interesting point.

Steve A. Wiggins on full-body scanners.

Sweet.

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Germany’s vision of an EU of fiscally prudent states held in check by tight budgetary laws and the threat of legal action came a step closer today.

The weekend is here and it’s time for Shabbat.

This is funny—and so very true.

“Sniffer dogs will be used to search schools in Landskrona municipality in southern Sweden after officials concluded that ‘attitudes toward narcotics have become more liberal’,” The Local reports.

The politicians need to cut down on weed. They’re getting paranoid.

“America’s third president was a deist, at best, who authored his own interpretation of the New Testament, removing all references to Jesus’ divinity,” Worldwide Religious News writes. “More significantly, he penned the phrase many social conservatives have in recent decades denounced, advocating a steadfast ‘wall of separation between church and state.’”

Personally, I love Thomas Jefferson and his idea of a secular state as much as I hate the thought of both the theocratic state endorsed by religious extremists and the atheist society advocated by some radical secularists. I want a liberal society where the state stays out of religion and religion stays out of politics.

“The mercurial Belarus strongman Alexander Lukashenko has declared he would rather be a dictator than be gay in an attack apparently targeting German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle,” the Telegraph reports.

“Thirty players in the National Hockey League have joined a campaign intended to promote gay and lesbian equality in sports with a television ad that will premiere during Sunday’s matchup of the New York Rangers and Boston Bruins,” The Raw Story reports.

Swedish atheist activist Eric “gays repulse me” Wadenius has a new friend. British Cardinal Keith O’Brien says countries that legalise same-sex marriage are shaming themselves by going against the natural law. There’s that biologist argument for homophobia again, this time with a baffling twist of linking homosexuality to slavery. Well, I know a few people—mostly radical feminists—who argue that marriage per definition is slavery.

Warning: This entry may contain some satire.

Shulamit Binah on religion in Israel.

Bryan Fischer is so mad it’s funny.

Cool.

Robots who self-identify as homosexual-hating Jews and Christians are phoning people in Ohio. In the future, robots will do all political work.

The Israeli nightmare: Too early, too early, oops! Too late!

Ingvar Kamprad has been ranked as Europe’s wealthiest man in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney are neck and neck in the polls. It’s so very depressing. I can’t understand how anyone could vote for Santorum. The man makes the Pope look liberal.

The Movement for Reform Judaism in Britain has officially backed same-sex marriages.

Here is an article about the attitude towards same-sex marriage amongst the Jewish movements in America.

The Swedish Humanist Association has a habit of copying the far right in its criticism of Jewish and Muslim people. A Christian think tank called Seglora Smedja has devoted a few articles to exposing the organisation’s xenophobia. This has upset the atheist activists to the extent that they have now filed charges again Seglora Smedja in religious court.

Read the complaint in Swedish here.

The Jewish festival Purim began at sundown. Today, Jews around the world celebrate the memory of Esther, who saved the Jewish people from destruction in Persia about 2,500 years ago.

Seen in the picture is Jan Lievens’s Feest van Esther (1625).

Why, because, according to Jesus Dias, “Tim Cook is gay but gray, he needs all the color he can get.”

I have just seen the latest film by director Steven Soderbergh, and it’s the best one he has made since Traffic (2000). The new film, Contagion (2011), is about a sudden eruption of a global pandemic and it made me think of how fragile human civilisation really is.

Recommended.

The sun erupted Tuesday evening, and the effects should start smacking Earth in a few hours.

“I am heartened by the ever-increasing number of prominent African-Americans, both religious leaders and civil rights icons, who are embracing the freedom to marry for same-sex couples,” Laura W. Murphy writes.

Edward-Isaac Dovere on Netanyahu’s “Ahmadinejad Purim spiel.”

“Homosexual behavior has been documented in hundreds of animal species, but the same does not hold for gay-bashing,” Will Oremus writes.

I like this part:

Researchers believe that gay sex is even rewarded in certain species. For bonobos, sexual activity serves as an instrument of social harmony: It reinforces bonds and keeps the peace. For instance, when a female bonobo migrates into a new group, she often ingratiates herself to the clan’s other ladies by having a lot of sex with them. Far from being shunned, this homosexual behavior is welcomed. And former Stanford researcher Joan Roughgarden has argued that among male bighorn sheep bisexuality may be the norm; those that don’t participate end up as outcasts.

Those progressive bighorn sheep.

I know a few people whom I think would love their own man caves, but what about men in same-sex relationships?

Cannabis smokers caught with less than 10 grams of the drug will now only be subject to a small fine.

Kevin Stea recalls how his life was forever changed when he travelled the world with Madonna during her Blond Ambition tour.

I loved that show. It’s seems like an eternity ago.

“A campaign funded by the religious right has effectively rewritten the constitutional separation of church and state in education,” Katherine Stewart writes.

A new opinion poll carried out in twelve Arab countries suggests a majority supports a state without religious interference. It also suggests most Arabs consider Israel and America bigger a threat than Iran.

Marwan Bishara writes about the poll at Al Jazeera.

Hamas leadership heads to Egypt, Israel’s government is on high alert.

Hagai Segal on why Israel must act on Iran.

War is looming. Problem is that this is precisely what Iranians want. Europe is—as usual—blind to Iran’s provocations and involvement in the attacks on Israel. When Israel can’t take it anymore, Europe will—as usual—blame the war on Israel. Mainstream media will go on about “Israel’s attack on Iran”, and that will be he only story most people will hear about.

About a week ago, the Swedish Humanist Association—an atheist organisation—filed a complaint against a Christian think tank at a religious court over comments made about the Humanists’ xenophobia. Basically, the think tank pointed out that the Humanist Association has an anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish rhetoric that is indistinguishable from the rhetoric of far-right political party Sweden Democrats. I agree with the think tank. The Humanist Association has decided to go down the road of xenophobia and placed itself very, very close indeed to the extreme right in its defamatory portraits of observant Jews and practising Muslims as immoral savages.

To my surprise, I learned today that a critical article by two rather prominent members of the Humanist Association has been posted on the organisation’s official blog. Sadly, the article shows no understanding of the danger involved with slandering minority groups, but it does criticise the atheist leadership for its attempts to silence its critics. The two authors make the note that it is inappropriate to demand of Muslims to stay silent when they are humiliated by Islamophobic artists while suing everyone who dares to voice harsh criticism of the Humanist Association.

Read the article in Swedish at Humanistbloggen.

You go, Clegg!

The former Mossad chief is a careful man.

Here’s a guy who really, really tries to make bigotry a cool thing. How do you think the gay people in the audience felt when he talked about them as deviants who might as well have sex with animals?

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But party dissent lingers…

The right-wing conspiracy lunatics at World Net Daily have really made some funny stuff. Unintentionally, I’m sure.

I would not be surprised if the arsonist is a white, male “critic of Islam”.

The Palestinian terrorists are not really good at keeping the peace, are they?

A New political play in Britain has raised some questions. Its creator, Lloyd Newson, argues that state multiculturalism has inadvertently led to a cultural relativism, which leads to a toleration of intolerant positions on women’s rights, gay rights, and other liberal progressive issues.

Newson might have a point, but I would argue that cultural relativism only holds that there is no objective truth in ethics and that morality generally is based in culture. To be a cultural relativist doesn’t mean one has to tolerate oppression. The problem with ethics, however, is that everyone thinks that he or she is right, and without some recognition of cultural relativism, everyone can take upon himself to oppress those who don’t share his moral opinions. This is why xenophobes believe they have the right to criminalise harmless practices important to a minority group. The moral objectivist sees himself as both judge and prosecutor because he “knows” the moral truth his opponents are simply too stupid to realise. That self-righteousness gives him the right to subject minorities to forced assimilation, i.e. monoculturalism.

I predict a baby boom in the gay community.

This is bad for the Jewish state.

According to a new American study, circumcised men have a slightly lower risk of developing prostate cancer than those who still have their foreskin.

Edmund Sanders on Israel’s Druze soldiers.

Twitter closed down a string of accounts purporting to be authored by the Syrian dictator and his wife.

We can’t have the poor dictator and mass-murderer feel humiliated, can we?

According to Amnesty International, Syrians detained during the ongoing uprising against dictator Assad have been subjected to widespread torture that amounts to crimes against humanity.

Mark Thompson makes an interesting point when he speak about “what blasphemy feels like to someone who is a realist in their religious belief”.

The Swedish government is looking at extending a current ban on smoking to include several outdoor spaces in a bid to reduce children’s exposure to the dangers of second-hand smoke.

Wouldn’t it be easier to ban children in public places? Or, better yet, help children enjoy the pleasure of first-hand smoking?

I’m joking, but I really think this overprotecting government is bigger a threat to children than smoking adults. Children must be exposed to reality. And reality is that not all adults do good things. The world is full of smokers and other “misbehaving” people.

The idiots renamed Gayday Magazine “Garbage Day Magazine”.

Anti-Semitism is really becoming mainstream in Sweden. In a Stockholm church, a group of anti-Israel artists has an exhibition marked to the public with a poster showing Jews eating away on Palestine. To compare Jews to rats was popular in Nazi propaganda, such as the 1940 film The Eternal Jew by Joseph Goebbels.

Read about it in Swedish at Dagen.

Update: The people responsible for the picture have apologised.

It’s becoming obvious that the Swedish Humanist Association has some serious problem with its image. Too many people consider them a bunch of xenophobes when they depict Jews and Muslims as immoral savages who mutilate children for no reason.

In an attempt to save face, Staffan Gunnarson, Vice-President of the European Humanist Federation, has written an article defending the organisation against those of us who object to the bigoted slander of minority groups. Funnily, his does so without mentioning what the Humanists’ critics object to. Instead, he writes lengthily about what Humanist organisations in other countries have done to fight xenophobia. He rambles on about Humanist achievements in Norway and how American Humanists feel it necessary to apologise for the Christian Right. This has absolute nothing to do with the criticism of the Swedish Humanist Association and the blunt xenophobia that many of its members voice in public forums.

Gunnarson writes that the Humanist movement defends freedom of religion and equal rights for all. I’m sure this is what all the policy documents say, but the problem with the Swedish Humanists is that they interpret equality as conformism. Freedom of religion is, according to them, the right of the state to ban religious practice and force minority groups to abandon their religious culture. A number of vocal Swedish Humanists have, in recent years, made the claim that cultural Christianity is all good, whereas cultural Judaism and cultural Islam are barbaric and immoral. The only way for a Jew or Muslim to get approval from the Swedish Humanists is to abandon his or her religion and culture, eat pork, dress Western, and partake in the denouncement of his or her people.

Jews and Muslims are tolerated by the Swedish Humanists only as long as they don’t behave as Jews and Muslims. To the Swedish Humanists, equal rights for all mean everybody’s obligation to conform. Those Swedes who value subcultural tradition are simply bad people; victims of irrational superstition, foreign tribalism, and backward thinking.

Read Staffan Gunnarson’s article in Swedish at Humanistbloggen.

Tyler Deaton says, “The very premise of this bill is to take away rights.” And he is right. It’s very wrong to have referendums on minority rights.

A sound fear.

Karl Vick analyses the Iran situation.

Here’s the cure for male homosexuality.

This is unbelievable. People actually drive around with anti-Obama bumper stickers saying, “Don’t Re-Nig”. But the company who made them has shut down.

I wrote about this yesterday, but it’s now international news.

Update: More at The Local and the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Richard Allen Greene on the Iran situation.

The upper house of the Swiss parliament has approved legalizing adoptions by same-sex couples.

Pope Shenouda III of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria has died.

Straight men flirt with, and then rob, gay men in the Castro.

Israel’s intelligence service Mossad agrees with American assessments that there is no hard evidence that Iran has decided to build a nuclear bomb. I’m not so sure.

The economy has become so bad that wives are having sex with their husbands because they can’t afford batteries.

Straight humour.

Haviv Gur writes about surprising results in a new survey.

I don’t know what to think about Izabo’s song.

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Nazi or lunatic? Maybe both:

Berlin police said Sunday the suitcase contained less than 10 fireworks, no trigger mechanism and posed no real security threat. The 40-year-old suspect also attempted to throw newspaper articles featuring swastikas on the embassy grounds.

Robert McCrum makes the case for thinner books.

I agree. I prefer shorter novels. The problem is that the publishers’ sales departments want thick books because consumers tend to buy them. I guess the idea is that they get more pages for their money. Hopefully, this obsession with many pages will become history when more people read e-books.

Police sources say a gunman has opened fire at a school for Jewish children in the southwestern French city of Toulouse, killing at least one person.

Update 1: Three people dead.

Update 2: Several people wounded.

This is from a 2011 Reason article, so not news at all, but I love the end sentence: “Liberals and conservatives may love people more than do libertarians, but love of liberty is what leads to true moral and economic progress.”

China’s gay community is demanding equal rights.

Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf defends law criminalizing homosexuality.

In the investigation of the fatal shooting attack on a Jewish school in Toulouse, French police are hunting three soldiers who were sacked from the army in 2008 over claims they were neo-Nazis.

Something nice to look at.

If you hook up on Craigslist, you deserve to get caught.

Vandals have sprayed paint swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans on tombstones.

From Times of Israel:

The Knesset approved a law late Monday night that bans the display of underweight models in Israeli advertising, prohibits ads from abroad if they feature models deemed underweight, and requires advertisers to note when images have been visually manipulated to make the models appear thinner.

This is pure madness on so many levels. Firstly, advertisers, too, have free speech. Secondly, the government should not have opinions on how people look. Thirdly, what about the much bigger problem with overeating? Is a ban on pictures of fat people next step?

At least one boy under the age of 16 was castrated to cure his homosexuality while in Catholic Church care in the 1950s.

The question is valid.

Jeffrey Goldberg writes about the Iran situation at Bloomberg.

Baroness Ashton is a fool.

We need new leadership after this.

Kim Milrell:

Slamming and bashing Israel may be the new national sport in Sweden, at least in the media, but I still don’t believe that Swedes in general hate Israelis, Jews or the Jewish state—I believe that they simply do not know better. And how can they know if no one tells them?

Aaron David Miller has written a great article about the popular lies surrounding alleged Israeli influence over America, but those who like these lies will surely dismiss him as a Jewish agent.

In an interview for liberal magazine Neo, Malmö mayor Ilmar Reepalu accuses the local Jewish community of strong links with the xenophobic Sweden Democrats. He bases this accusation on a public meeting at the congregation where attended by Kent Ekeroth, a prominent member of the Sweden Democrats. According to Reepalu, this shows that Jews and neo-Nazis join in their hatred of Muslims. Ekeroth dismissed this, and says that he faced more opposition to his anti-Islam politics from the Jewish community than from leftist politicians.

Read about it in Swedish at Neo.

Ken Livingstone is a mad communist who loves Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro, so it comes as no surprise that he hates Israel and Jews. It’s part of the same extreme-left package.

What’s the male equivalent to “catfight”? Anyhow, that’s what the Republican primary is now.

The Official Council of Swedish-Jewish Communities has written a letter to the Social Democratic Party’s leader, Stefan Löfven, to complain about the latest anti-Semitic rants from Malmö Mayor Ilmar Reepalu.

Read the letter in Swedish here.

At least 943 Pakistani women and girls were murdered in 2011 for allegedly defaming their family’s honour.

Christianity is the only religion that doesn’t violates human rights. Jews and Muslims violate human right when they practise their religion because it includes observance and not faith alone. And religion is faith, nothing else. With this narrow definition of religion, religious freedom is guaranteed by free speech and it’s up to anyone to decide, from hour to hour, if they are Christians, Muslims, or Jews. That is, basically, what Per Dannefjord, board member of the Swedish Humanist Association, says in a seminar on freedom of religion.

This is bullshit. No one can decide for himself that he is a Jew. Sure, it’s up to every person to believe in whatever he or she wants, a Gentile can observe all the mitzvoth, but that does not make he or she a Jew. There is no conflict between being Jewish and being an atheist, even though Jewish status is determined by Jewish law. Since the Jewish homeland was re-established in 1948, the Jewish status is also a legal matter. The right to settle in the state of Israel is awarded every Jew, and it has nothing to do with Dannefjord’s silly definition of Jewishness as mere matter of religious belief.

The anti-Jewish lobby is getting stronger by the day in Sweden. I thank previous generations of Jews for establishing the state of Israel. In a near future, if people like Dannefjord get their way, Jewish life in Sweden will be impossible. What Dannefjord and the Swedish Humanist Association are advocating is a state where forced assimilation is legitimised by a redefinition of equality—“equality” that requires of everyone that they adapt to the custom of the majority group.

This is a typically xenophobic lecture. Dannefjord uses all the rhetoric known from all bigoted movements. For example, he says that everyone has a limit to their tolerance, and that those Jews and Muslims who defend their right to circumcise their sons most likely wouldn’t tolerate other types of religious oppression—such as honour killings, female genital cutting, child marriage, etcetera—and therefore act selfishly when they argue for their rights.

This is precisely the type of argument I’m faced with when I debate gay rights. Homophobes love to make the case that same-sex marriage is wrong because paedophiles are not allowed to marry children, and since gay activists don’t argue in favour of paedophile marriage, they are selfish and insincere. So, as long as gay activists don’t embrace all types of paraphilia, they are dismissed as hypocrites. Only the majority culture, being it heterosexual or Christian, has the right to set norms for everyone else to adjust to.

Take a look at Per Dannefjord’s face. It’s the face of modern xenophobia. He produces lies about Jews and Muslims, and the audience clap along like the bigoted fools they are. As a Jew, I’m offended—but I’m no longer surprised by anything the Swedish Humanists say to delegitimise and dehumanise minority groups.

Read more in Swedish at Humanistbloggen (I’m sure they will tell you how irrelevant my criticism is, being the disgusting queer Jew that I am).

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The British government wants halal and kosher meat to be labelled as such. Good. Makes it easier to find for those who want it. But all the talk about cruelty annoys me. How is killing an animal by hunting it with guns any less cruel than halal and kosher slaughter?

Eric Scheie makes some comment on the ongoing culture war that makes me think of what I wrote about the Swedish Humanist Association yesterday. This particular “culture war” is simply about forcing Jews and Muslims to do what the secular Christians want. Is our request to be left alone really too much to ask for? I’d say no.

I have some objections, but still think all dogmatic atheists should read Julian Baggini’s manifesto. It’s tiresome with all the “you are superstitious, irrational, and evil” rhetoric from organised atheism.

In a report on the British extreme right, Matthew Goodwin of Nottingham University and Jocelyn Evans of Salford University found that a its supporters believe violent conflict between different ethnic, racial, and religious groups is inevitable, and that it is legitimate to prepare for armed conflict.

Read about the “Fit 2 Fat 2 Fit” campaign. I have read several similar stories about people experimenting with body weight and how surprised they are by the judgemental rudeness displayed towards big people.

America’s oldest private military academy is holding its first gay pride week.

Slovenians rejected in a national referendum a new family law that included a clause that would allow same-sex couples to adopt children.

Ever wondered what the three angels who visited Abraham and destroyed Sodom looked like? Well, here’s Ludovico Carracci’s vision. Looks very Greek to me.

This past weekend, more than 200 same-sex couples gathered in Ohio to engage in what they called the “biggest illegal mass wedding ever held.”

Isn’t it a bit ironic that Venezuela’s de facto dictator has to go to Cuba for cancer treatment after turning his own country into a 21st-century socialist paradise?

The anti-Israel lobby is so eager to tell lies, lies, lies.

Apparently, yes.

The Swedish Royal Court has published several new pictures of Crown Princess Victoria and 3-week-old Princess Estelle.

(Photo copyright: Kungahuset.se)

The disgusting immorality of the homophobic lobby revealed in new documents.

“The ongoing process of Jews leaving European continent is tragic but unavoidable,” Giulio Meotti writes.

How many people in this crowd have seen molly?

Gay men are worth 2.5 times as much in advertising.

The head of the Jewish community in Stockholm says of Malmö Mayor Reepalu, “Regardless of what he says and does from now on, we don’t trust him.”

It might become the biggest crash diet in film history since Christian Bale’s for “The Machinist”.

Norway’s Jews are calling for the police to begin recording all anti-Semitic crimes reported in the country after noting eleven cases of harassment, vandalism, and threats in a single month.

Who needs a sex anyway?

Australian drug maker Biota reports the success of a new antiviral compound that could cure the common cold.

Remember that you can’t lie on Twitter!

Once again, creation is at odds with the homophobic lobby.

Irshad Manji, via Usman Ahmedani, “Moderate Muslims are so consumed with western colonialism that they’ve diverted themselves from dealing with the imperialists inside Islam.”

I don’t give a damn about Earth Hour, but it is fun nonetheless.