Saudi Arabia features fashion show with no models, only drones flying clothes down the catwalk

Well, Saudi Arabia, had a “Fashion Week” during Ramadan, but something was missing. Models—women models.  Instead of actual physical women wearing the clothes down the catwalk, they used drones.  Here you go. It’s creepy as all get out! Saudi arabia fashion show#fashionstyle #fashionshow 😀😁 pic.twitter.com/2Fsen9NMpc — Think Tank (@KaburgaAdam) June 6, 2018 Now it’s true, as News.com.au […]

Egyptian atheist gets kicked out of television studio

Reader Barry called my attention to this tweet by Richard Dawkins, and, unusually, MEMRI has put the 3-minute video (with English subtitles) on YouTube. I’ve embedded it below: Listen to this decent, intelligent young man trying to explain something, quietly & respectfully. The TV host yells at him, then kicks him out. Religion poisons everything.https://t.co/lopJE5HVZS […]

Iranian woman who removed hijab sentenced to two years in jail

It’s International Woman’s Day, so here’s a report of a non-U.S. woman being the victim of draconian laws. The Foreign Desk and The Guardian both report that an unnamed Iranian woman has been sentenced to two years in prison for removing her hijab.  Hijabs, of course, have been mandatory since the theocracy began in 1979. At […]

Saudia Arabia hosts its first women’s marathon

Gulf News reports that Saudi Arabia just hosted its first women’s marathon, presumably as part of its professed liberalization of women’s rights. It wasn’t a full marathon, but 3 km—about 1.9 miles. It did excite a lot of interest among the women, though, as 2,000 signed up within hours, and 1,500 actually ran. That was […]

Egyptian singers get prison time for joking about the pollution of the Nile and making “debauched” videos

We take it for granted in Western democracies that we can make fun of everything, including the government and politicians. But of course that’s not the case in much of the world, including Egypt. But it’s even worse: a popular Egyptian singer, Sherine Abdel Wahab, was just sentenced to six months in prison for joking about […]

Ex-Muslims of North America saves a soul

Need I note that I’m using the word “soul” metaphorically? From The Ithacan, the student newspaper of Ithaca College, we have the sad tale of Mahad Olad, a columnist for the paper who had a narrow escape from religious dogma. A sophomore, Olad was both atheist and gay, but had to hide it from his […]

Tweeticle: College student who wouldn’t try on hijab demonized, hijabis call for her expulsion

February 1 was World Hijab Day, devoted to furthering Islam by letting non-Muslims engage in sartorial cultural appropriation (see my post here). One of the pretenses made by some hijabis is that they find this garment of oppression “empowering” (see below). But here’s a case in which a hijabi was “empowered” to bully a non-Muslim […]

Ali Rizvi talks sense on Israel and Palestine

Unbeknownst to me, Ali Rizvi, author of The Atheist Muslim: A Journey from Religion to Reason (I blurbed the book) wrote a fine article on the Israel Palestine crisis that was published in PuffHo on July 28, 2014. (Click on screenshot below to read it, and you should.) Normally I’d kvetch about his publishing this […]

An apologist says that Islam is the best way to prevent sexual abuse

In the panoply of “this must be a joke but isn’t” articles, here’s one from the new Independent (click on screenshot to go there). The author, Qasim Rashid, is identified as “an attorney, author, and national spokesperson for the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community USA.” I was of course startled to read this, as the tenets of […]

Turkish schools ditch Darwin in favor of Muhammad

The new school year is about to start in Turkey, and, as I’ve reported before (here and here), the government has removed evolution from the secondary-school science curriculum—supposedly because it was (according to the head of the Board of Education) “debatable, controversial and too complicated for students.” Nobody believes that malarkey. It was removed because it […]