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Gun Control’s Biggest Problem: Most People Just Don’t Care Very Much

by Neil4262623928 Posted on October 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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David Atkins writes about the problem of getting gun control legislation passed:

There is a broadening schism in the activist community between those who focus on nuts-and-bolts electoral and legislative politics, and those who spend their energy on issue-area visibility and engagement….Election work and party involvement is increasingly seen as the unhip, uncool, morally compromised province of social climbers and “brogressives” not truly committed to the supposedly “real work” of social justice engagement by non-electoral means.

….There is certainly great value in persuasion, engagement and visibility model….But gun politics in the United States shows above all the weaknesses and limits of the engagement model. The vast majority of Americans support commonsense gun laws….Numerous organizations have engaged in countless petitions and demonstrations to shame legislators into action from a variety of perspectives, but it essentially never works.

….The reason that the United States cannot seem to do anything about guns is simply that the NRA and the vocal minority of the nation’s gun owners mobilize to vote on the issue, while the large majority that favors gun safety laws does not….Gun control will pass precisely when legislators become more afraid of the votes of gun control supporters than they are of gun control opponents. That will only happen when interested organizations invest in field work—that much maligned, unsexy work of precinct walking and phonebanking—to mobilize voters on that issue, and when liberal organizations work to unseat Democrats who do the bidding of the NRA and replace them with ones who vote to protect the people.

I’m not sure Atkins has this right. The problem is in the second bolded sentence: “The vast majority of Americans support commonsense gun laws.” There’s some truth to this, but there’s also a big pitfall here, and it’s one that liberals are especially vulnerable to. I routinely read lefties who quote polls to show that the country agrees with us on pretty much everything. Voters support teachers, they support the environment, they support financial reform, they support gun control.

But this is a bad misreading of what polls can tell us. There are (at least) two related problems here:

Most polls don’t tell us how deeply people feel. Sure, lots of American think that universal background checks are a good idea, but they don’t really care that much. In a recent Gallup poll of most important problems, gun control ranked 22nd, with only 2 percent rating it their most important issue. Needless to say, though, gun owners are opposed to background checks, and they care a lot.
Most polls don’t tell us about the tradeoffs people are willing to make. In the abstract, sure, maybe a majority of Americans think we should make it harder to buy guns. But if there’s a real-world price to pay how willing are they to pay it? A few months ago, a Pew poll that pitted gun control against gun rights found that gun rights won by 52-46 percent.

There are lots of polls, and some of them probably show a greater intensity among those who support gun control. A lot depends on question wording. But that’s sort of my point: If you get substantially different responses because of small changes in question wording or depending on which precise issues you ask about (background checks vs. assault weapons, gun locks vs. large-capacity magazines) that’s a sign of low intensity.

Atkins is certainly right that Democratic legislators won’t act on gun control until voters are mobilized, but that puts the cart before the horse. You can’t mobilize voters on an issue they don’t really care much about in the first place. In this case, I think the folks who prioritize issue-area visibility and engagement probably have the better of the argument. Until voters who favor gun control feel as strongly as those who oppose it, all the field work in the world won’t do any good.

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Gun Control’s Biggest Problem: Most People Just Don’t Care Very Much

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Two Questions About Hillary Clinton’s Email Server

by CarmeloPerkinson Posted on October 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Lots of people have asked lots of questions about Hillary Clinton and her email server. That’s fair enough. But I’ve got a couple of questions for the people with all the questions. There might be simple answers to these, but they’ve been bugging me for a while and I still don’t really understand them. Here they are:

One of the most persistent suspicions is that Hillary set up a private server in order to evade FOIA requests. But this has never made any sense to me. What could possibly have led either Hillary or her staff to believe this? There’s simply nothing in either the statute or in the way it’s been applied in practice to suggest that official communications are beyond the reach of FOIA just because they’re in private hands.

On a related note, what was going on in the State Department’s FOIA office? They received several FOIA requests that required them to search Hillary’s email, and responded by saying there was no record of anything relevant to the request. But the very first time they did this, they must have realized that Hillary’s email archive wasn’t just sparse, but nonexistent. Did they ask Hillary’s office about this? If not, why not? If they did, what were they told? This should be relatively easy to answer since I assume these folks can be subpoenaed and asked about it.

Generally speaking, the reason I’ve been skeptical about this whole affair is that the nefarious interpretations have never made much sense to me. What Hillary did was almost certainly dumb—as she’s admitted herself—and it’s possible that she even violated some regulations. But those are relatively minor things. Emailgate is only a big issue if there was some kind of serious intent to defraud, and that hardly seems possible:

Hillary’s private server didn’t protect her from FOIA requests and she surely knew this.
By all indications, she was very careful about her email use and never wrote anything she might regret if it became public.
And it hardly seems likely that she thought she could delete embarrassing emails before turning them over. There’s simply too much risk that the missing emails would show up in someone else’s account, and that really would be disastrous. Her husband might be the type to take idiotic risks like that, but she isn’t.

School me, peeps. I fully acknowledge that maybe I’m just not getting something here. What’s the worst case scenario that’s actually plausible?

POSTSCRIPT: Note that I’m asking here solely about FOIA as it applies to the Hillary Clinton email server affair. On a broader level, FOIA plainly has plenty of problems, both in terms of response time and willingness to cooperate with the spirit of the statute.

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Two Questions About Hillary Clinton’s Email Server

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Here’s Why I Doubt That Hillary Clinton Used a Private Email Server to Evade FOIA Requests

by RobtKirkland Posted on October 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Thanks to the endless release of her emails, we’ve learned something about Hillary Clinton that hasn’t gotten much attention: As near as I can tell, she’s sort of a technology idiot. She asked her aides for information that she could have Googled in less time than it took to ask. She needed help figuring out how to use an iPad. She didn’t know her own office phone number. She used a BlackBerry. She had trouble operating a fax machine. She was unclear about needing a WiFi connection to access the internet.

In other words, when Fox News reporter Ed Henry asked whether Clinton’s email server had been wiped, and she answered, “What, like with a cloth or something?”—well, that might not have been the sarcastic response we all thought it was. She might truly have had no idea what he meant.

As for setting up a private server with just a single account in order to evade FOIA requests, it looks as though she’s genuinely not tech savvy enough to have cooked up something like that. She probably really did just think it sounded convenient, and nobody stepped in to disabuse her of this notion.

So what was the deal with FOIA? I don’t know, and I suspect we’ll never know. But I’ll say this: there were obviously people at State who knew that Hillary used a private server for email. The folks who respond to FOIA requests are responsible for figuring out where documents might be, and in this case it was just a matter of asking. Apparently they didn’t, which is hardly Hillary’s fault. The alternative is that they did ask, and Hillary’s staff flat-out lied to them and said that she never used email. You can decide for yourself which sounds more plausible.

POSTSCRIPT: After writing this, I decided to do some Googling myself to check a few things. And it turns out that I’m not, in fact, the first to notice Hillary’s technology foibles. Just a few weeks ago, Seth Myer did a whole late-night bit about this.

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Here’s Why I Doubt That Hillary Clinton Used a Private Email Server to Evade FOIA Requests

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The World Economic Forum Delivers a Report Card on the US Economy

by DeanaRqopw Posted on October 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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So how’s the ol’ US of A doing under the free-market-hating presidency of the socialist Barack Obama? Probably badly, I’ll bet. Let’s see what the World Economic Forum has to say. Their latest set of competitiveness rankings came out today, and among countries with populations over 10 million, the US was….

First. How about that? But it was probably even better before Obama took over, wasn’t it? Let’s see. In 2009 we ranked #1 among big countries with a score of 5.59. This year we’re #1 with a score of 5.61. That’s hard to fathom. But there you have it. Our competitiveness in the global free market seems to have improved a bit during Obama’s tenure. I wonder if Fox News will bother reporting this?

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The World Economic Forum Delivers a Report Card on the US Economy

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American Weapons and Support Are Fueling a Bloody Air War in Yemen

by PatsySummerfield Posted on August 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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On the night of July 24, Saudi-led coalition warplanes began dropping bombs on two residential compounds in the Yemeni port city of Mokha. A shaky video shot at the scene, a housing site for workers at a nearby power plant, shows a night cast in amber light with a soundtrack of explosions and screams. The video, released by Human Rights Watch (HRW) last week (see below), then shows the lifeless bodies of two young men, one with a stream of blood running from his eye, the other with a gaping wound where the side of his torso had been.

A day and a half later, HRW researcher Belkis Wille went to the scene of the bombing and asked the power plant’s housing supervisor if people had died in a particular apartment unit. “All of them,” Ali Ahmad Ragih answered. “How can you expect people to survive such a situation?…Bodies were taken out. Pieces of bodies. Hands…heads.” When the survivors tallied the damage, they determined that nine bombs had fallen, killing 65 civilians, including 10 children, and injuring dozens more.

Human Rights Watch has called the attack an “apparent war crime,” one that implicates the United States and the United Kingdom due to their supporting roles in the conflict, in which Saudi Arabia and nine other nations are conducting air strikes against Houthi rebels who effectively ousted the government of President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi in January. “Providing direct support to military operations, such as information on targets, would make the US and the UK parties to the armed conflict, and bound to apply the laws of war,” Human Rights Watch noted in a recent report.

The United States maintains that it plays a noncombat advisory role in Yemen. Yet one day after the Saudi-led air campaign, dubbed Operation Decisive Storm, was launched on March 26, the Pentagon announced the expansion of its role by providing Saudi Arabia with bombs, aerial refueling, logistics support, and intelligence—including live feeds from surveillance flights “to help Saudi Arabia decide what and where to bomb.” Additionally, the United States has equipped Saudi Arabia with billions of dollars worth of weaponry, including bombs and fighter jets.

So far, it is unknown who built or provided the bombs dropped on Mokha in July. “There are very few remnants left on the ground after these air strikes,” making it difficult to accurately identify the weapons, says Ole Solvang, a senior emergencies researcher at HRW. (A State Department official confirms that the United States provided support in the July 24 attack, but did not provide details of the type of support.)

Five days after Saudi Arabia launched Operation Decisive Storm, the first civilian casualties were reported: 31 civilians were killed in an air strike that hit a dairy factory, according to the United Nations. Reports of widespread civilian deaths have continued. As of July 21, the civilian death toll in the Yemen conflict has reached at least 1,693 with another 3,829 injured, the majority from coalition air strikes, according to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Saudi Arabia is currently the world’s largest importer of American arms. According to the Congressional Research Service, Washington and Riyadh inked $90 billion in weapons sales between 2010 and 2014, including the transfer of fighter jets, attack helicopters, missile defense systems, armored vehicles, and missiles and bombs. A 2010 deal worth $29 billion included 84 new F-15SA jets, and thousands of bombs to be loaded onto them. In April, a State Department official told Defense News that the United States is “making every effort to expedite security assistance to Saudi coalition forces.”

The body of a man is uncovered in the rubble of houses destroyed by Saudi air strikes in Sanaa, Yemen, in June. AP Photo/Hani Mohammed

Just two days after HRW accused Saudi Arabia of human rights violations, two new arms deals between the Saudis and United States were announced. One was for $500 million worth of explosives, detonators, fuses, and guided missile systems. Patrick Wilckens, an Amnesty International researcher on arms control and security trade, notes that this deal “seems to be specific to replenishing stock of the particular munitions that have been used in aerial bombardments.” The other sale was of $5.4 billion worth of PAC-3 Missiles and associated equipment, parts, and logistical support, meant to “modernize” and “replenish” Saudi Arabia’s missile stockpiles. The sale, US officials noted, would help “promote stability within the region.”

For many years, the United States armed the Saudis with little expectation that the weaponry would be used in combat. “The theory was that the Saudis mostly bought this stuff to cement the relationship with the United States, and the US would protect them if they were in a jam militarily. It was almost like a tacit alliance sealed with arms deals,” says William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. “Much of this equipment used to mostly just sit around. Now it is less a symbolic gesture and a money thing and is more likely to end up in the middle of a war.”

Human rights organizations say the United States isn’t doing enough to ensure the coalition is minimizing civilian casualties while deploying American weapons. “The fact that the US is a strong partner and is providing huge amounts of weapons, logistics, and expertise could be a cause for concern,” says Amnesty’s Patrick Wilckens. “The US, along with the UK and other governments, needs to put in place precautionary measures if there is a risk that some of their equipment will be used in bombing raids that could contravene international humanitarian law. We did research specific strikes and did find that there were not sufficient precautionary measures put in place to avoid civilian targets.”

Asked what preventative measures the United States is taking to mitigate potential casualties in Yemen, the official, who asked to remain unnamed, says, “Since the start of military operations in Yemen, we have called upon all sides to comply with their obligations under international humanitarian law, including by taking all feasible measures to minimize harm to civilians.”

The Saudi coalition has also deployed US-manufactured cluster munitions that have been banned by more than 100 countries due to the danger they pose to noncombatants, which have harmed civilians. Reporting from Yemen in Rolling Stone, Matthieu Aikins recently described meeting a man who claimed that “a huge cluster bomb” had hit as many as 50 homes, killing and injuring dozens. The strike occurred in an area where “there are no military bases,” the man said. Aikins himself saw the casing of a cluster bomb and a half-exploded 1,000-pound bomb that were both made in the United States.

The Obama administration has downplayed concerns about civilian casualties from coalition bombing. On May 6, less than two months into the Saudi bombing campaign, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest stated, “We certainly are pleased that the Saudis have indicated a willingness to scale back their military efforts, but we haven’t seen a corresponding response from the Houthi rebels.” Two days later, the Saudi coalition reportedly dropped leaflets on the cities of Sadaa and Marran, declaring them “military targets” and warning the residents to evacuate by seven that night. On July 6, in responding to a question on the Saudi-led coalition’s repeated destruction of civilian homes, State Department spokesman John Kirby said, “I’ll let Saudi Arabia speak to their operational capabilities and performance.”

Meanwhile, the administration has been making new arms deals with coalition members, which include some the largest recipients of US weapons and security assistance. In late May, the Pentagon announced a new $1.9 billion arms deal to Saudi Arabia that included 10 MH-60R Multi-Mission Helicopters, 38 Hellfire missiles, and 380 Advanced Precision Kill Weapons System rockets. Not long afterwards, an arms deal was reached with the UAE for more than 1,000 guided bomb units for use in Yemen and against ISIS. Notably, that deal includes the sale of MK84 bombs, which contain more than 800 pounds of high explosive. An Amnesty International investigation released in July identified fragments of a US-designed MK84 bomb, manufactured in 1983, that had destroyed three houses in a Yemeni village and killed 10 members of a single family, including 7 children. Amnesty says the same type of bomb has been used by the coalition across Yemen, including a strike that killed 17 civilians in May.

Shortly after the attack in Mokha, a resident of the housing complex that was bombed guided HRW’s Belkis Wille through the rubble. “I gathered all my daughters in my arms,” he recalled. “Here, in this place, I shielded them.” He led Wille to his home. “It was peaceful in here…There were children’s smiles here. They died,” he said as tears turned to anger. “They’re gone. Gone because of the war…the war…the war.”

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American Weapons and Support Are Fueling a Bloody Air War in Yemen

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Here’s What You Need to Know About MERS

by Boyce74F42 Posted on June 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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More than 2,800 people remain under quarantine in South Korea as an outbreak of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) continues to spread. With 95 confirmed cases and nine deaths, this is the second largest outbreak of the mysterious virus—the first was the initial one in Saudi Arabia in 2012. Since then, around 85 percent of cases have occurred in the Middle East, but MERS has been documented in 25 countries, including two cases in the United States last year. Now, health officials in the United States and abroad are preparing for the possibility that the disease could spread even farther. Here’s what we know so far:

What is MERS?
MERS primarily affects the respiratory tract. Typical symptoms include shortness of breath, coughing, and fever (but some have also reported diarrhea, vomiting, and even kidney failure). It is caused by a coronavirus, a family of viruses that generally produce mild symptoms associated with the common cold. The coronavirus behind MERS (MERS-CoV), however, is different from the rest—and far more dangerous. With a 40 percent fatality rate, it has killed about 450 people since it was first discovered in 2012.

Despite the high mortality rate, the virus isn’t highly contagious and is considered less infectious than similar diseases like SARS.

How does it spread?
MERS, which can affect both humans and animals, is believed to have originated from bats, but health officials trace the first human case, in Jordan, to an infected camel. They don’t yet know exactly how that happened, but the World Health Organization has advised against the consumption of raw camel milk and camel urine—yes, camel urine— as a protective measure. While sick camels are considered the primary source of animal-to-human transmission, experts believe that most human cases spread through close contact with infected people, as the majority have been clustered within health care facilities. Symptoms typically appear between five days and two weeks after exposure.

Until more is known—and because MERS symptoms are often initially confused with less serious illnesses—experts have issued the usual recommendations for people living in or traveling to affected areas: Wash your hands, try not to hang around sick people, and don’t touch your eyes, nose, or mouth without disinfecting first.

Who’s at risk?
The virus hasn’t made an appearance in the United States since last year, when two health workers contracted the disease while traveling to the Saudi Arabia. (Both made full recoveries.) But MERS has continued to spread rapidly since then, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has cautioned that we may see new transported cases in the coming months. While travel restrictions haven’t yet been issued, the WHO encourages extra hygiene measures for anyone going into affected areas, especially when visiting hospitals or places with camels.

The WHO reports that those with already weakened states of health, including anyone with diabetes, renal failure, chronic lung disease, or compromised immune systems, are most at risk for serious complications and death, but in large outbreak areas like South Korea, the virus has affected many people who are otherwise healthy.

What’s being done to stop it?
There is no vaccine or cure for MERS, and the South Korean health care system has faced criticism for overcrowding in hospitals that may have hastened the virus’ spread. But South Korean officials are taking drastic measures to contain both the spread of the disease and the associated fears. 2,000 schools have closed, and government officials are enforcing quarantines for people who might have been exposed even if they don’t have symptoms and are monitoring potentially infected people via their phones.

Meanwhile, a team of WHO experts and public health officers, who have been working in outbreak areas of the Middle East, have deployed to South Korea to learn more about the virus. So far they have confirmed that, despite initial fears that MERS had become more contagious, it hasn’t mutated much from the original strain found in the Middle East.

The WHO is also ramping up its symptom surveillance and reporting, training health officials, and conducting risk assessments to try to stop MERS outbreaks from happening in other areas around the world.

The CDC, which has been preparing since the last time MERS made its way into the United States, has increased lab capacity to detect the virus in those who might come into contact with infected travelers (like flight crews, airport medical service units, and customs agents).

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Here’s What You Need to Know About MERS

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How US Cluster Bombs Banned by Most Countries Ended Up in Yemen

by Bernard6504 Posted on June 9, 2015

Mother Jones

On April 29, three adults and a child came across some fist-sized canisters on the ground outside of Baqim, a Yemeni town controlled by Houthi rebels. To the 10-year-old boy among them, they “looked like toys.” Out of curiosity, they picked up the cannisters, which then exploded. All four were injured; a nurse told Human Rights Watch that the child was wounded in the stomach, and one of the adults received injuries to his face, torso, thigh, and crotch. Considering the kind of damage that cluster-bomb submunitions can cause, they’re lucky to still be alive.

Fighter jets from the Saudi Arabia-led coalition have been carrying out strikes against Houthi rebels since late March, when Yemeni President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi fled the country. Now, according to two recent Human Rights Watch investigations, they are also using cluster munitions, some supplied by the United States. The first HRW report was published on the heels of mounting concern over the growing toll of civilian casualties from the air campaign—more than 1,800 people have been killed as of late May; at least 135 of them were children. The second report found evidence that US-supplied cluster munitions deployed near populated areas are harming civilians.

Here’s a look at why American cluster bombs, which have been banned by more than 100 countries, are being used in Yemen.

How cluster bombs work: Cluster bombs can be dropped from aircraft or fired from rockets, mortars, and artillery. When they open in mid-air, as many as several hundred submunitions, or bomblets, spread out over a wide area and explode. While the weapons are designed to target military installations and convoys, anyone nearby can be struck. Bomblets that fail to detonate or self-destruct can become de facto land mines. Bombs like those found in Baquim, explains Megan Burke, director of the Cluster Munition Coalition “remain on the ground until someone or something comes along and triggers that explosion.”

Why they’ve been banned: Cluster munitions were first deployed in 1943, when Soviet forces dropped them on German tanks. Due to the danger they pose to noncombatants, they were banned by the Convention on Cluster Munitions, a 2008 treaty signed by 116 nations. Tens of thousands of civilians—a third of them children—have been maimed or killed after encountering the unexploded ordnances in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Kosovo, Iraq, and beyond.

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How US Cluster Bombs Banned by Most Countries Ended Up in Yemen

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Saudi Arabia’s Shiny New Air Campaign Not Working Any Better Than Anyone Else’s

by ValorieSilver Posted on April 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Back when Egypt started bombing Libya and Saudi Arabia started bombing Yemen, American conservatives were jubilant. That’s the kind of swift, decisive action Barack Obama ought to be taking against our enemies in the Mideast. Never mind that this already was the kind of action he had taken. It didn’t really count because he had been too slow to ramp up attacks and had demonstrated too little bloodthirstiness in his announcements. Did he really want to “destroy” ISIS or merely “degrade” it? Dammit man, make up your mind!

This weekend, though, the LA Times reminded us that regardless of who’s doing it, air strikes alone simply have a limited effectiveness in wars like this:

Officials in Saudi Arabia, the region’s Sunni Muslim power, say the air campaign is dealing a decisive blow against the Houthis, whom they view as tools of aggression used by Shiite Muslim-led Iran in an expanding proxy war….However, residents say the strikes have done little to reverse the territorial gains of the insurgents and restore exiled President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi to power in the quickly fragmenting country.

….Security experts question whether the coalition can achieve its goals through airstrikes alone. Saudi officials have not ruled out sending in tanks, artillery and other ground forces massed along the frontier. But Saudi leaders appear wary of such a move against the Houthis, hardened guerrillas who belong to an offshoot of Shiite Islam known as Zaidism.

The last time the Saudis fought the Houthis in the rugged mountains of northern Yemen, in 2009, more than 100 of their men were killed. Pakistan’s parliament voted Friday to stay out of the conflict, a blow to the Saudis, who had reportedly asked the country to send troops, fighter jets and warships.

“This war will turn Yemen into Saudi Arabia’s Vietnam,” said Mohammed al-Kibsi, a veteran journalist and commentator in Yemen’s capital, Sana, where the Houthis seized control in September.

Air strikes are useful components of a wider war. But to the extent anyone can truly win these conflicts in the first place, it’s going to take ground troops. Lots and lots of well-trained, well-equipped, and well-motivated ground troops. Saudi Arabia is “wary” of committing ground troops in Yemen and Pakistan is staying out. In Iraq, it’s still a big question whether the Iraqi army is up to the task. And to state the obvious, even among America’s most bellicose hawks, there’s no real appetite for sending in US ground troops.1

This is just the way it is, and everyone knows it. Air strikes can do a bit of damage here and there, and they can serve as symbolic demonstrations of will. But none of these conflicts—not in Yemen, not in Iraq, not in Syria, and not in Libya—are going to be affected much by air campaigns alone. They need ground troops. If you loudly insist that Obama is a weakling as commander-in-chief but you’re not willing to commit to that, you’re just playing political games.

1And don’t fall for the “special ops” ploy. Politicians who want to sound tough but don’t want ruin their careers by suggesting we deploy a hundred thousand troops in Iraq again, are fond of suggesting that we just need a bit of targeted help on the ground from special ops. This is clueless nonsense meant to con the rubes, but nothing more.

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Saudi Arabia’s Shiny New Air Campaign Not Working Any Better Than Anyone Else’s

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The Ultimate Guide to Womanhood, According to the Female Jihadis of ISIS

by UCNMatthia Posted on February 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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ISIS’s men aren’t the only ones publishing magazines and manifestos anymore. Last month, the al-Khansa Brigade—the entirely female ISIS militia that spreads pro-ISIS propaganda and recruits Middle Eastern women for ISIS service—reportedly published a semiofficial Arabic guide for women on living life under ISIS rule. On Thursday, the Quilliam Foundation, a London-based counterterrorism think tank, published a translated version of the guide.

The guide was published by the al-Khansa Brigade’s media arm and portrays the “ideal model for Muslim women,” according to its author, who describes it as “semiofficial” because ISIS leadership didn’t specifically approve it or endorse it. The guide is necessary, the author writes, because the role of the Muslim woman has become so confused by others “that both she and we have forgotten it…and (the reason for) our existence in this world.”

The 10 chapters are divided into three sections, combining quotations from the Koran and the Prophet Muhammed’s teachings, also known as hadiths, with the author’s experiences. The first part lists the failings of Western society in feminism, education, and science and the positive alternative offered in Islam. The second is an eyewitness account of life in ISIS’s strongholds, both the Mosul, Iraq, and Raqqa, Syria, and the third attempts to link life within the boundaries of the so-called Islamic State to life beyond, in Saudi Arabia and other parts of the Arabian Peninsula.

The Quilliam Foundation‘s translator notes that the existence of the third chapter section, as well as the fact that the guide was never translated into English or another Western language by ISIS, suggest that Arab women are the primary audience—that it wasn’t meant for broader distribution. “There has been a huge amount of speculation about what the role of the women who join Islamic State—often dubbed jihadist brides—is,” wrote Quilliam Foundation director Haras Rafiq in a press release. “This translation…allows us to look past the propaganda bandied about on social media by Western supporters of IS, enabling us to get into the mind-set of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of women who willingly join its ranks.”

For example, the author describes how women should conduct their daily lives in terms of study and community service. A woman’s one “true purpose,” she writes, is to serve a man, which is true “even in ‘liberal’ states and for today’s ‘free’ societies.” According to the author, a girl may be married between the ages of 9 and 17. Once she is a wife, she must remain at home, her face and body nearly always covered.

There are some exceptions. Women who join jihad are chosen for that life, but how is not described. Others who study religion, practice medicine, or teach are able to leave their homes and go into the world, but only for three days a week.

The author’s description of life in the war zones of Mosul and Raqqa is in radical contrast to other reports from the devastated areas. She traveled there, she wrote, to “check on the happy situation that Muslim women face” under Sharia law. She writes that “a sense of security” has swept over the land, with people living peacefully despite the ongoing battle with the US-led coalition; hospitals, shops, and schools, she adds, are much improved since the so-called Caliphate began.

The treatise concludes with a message to all enemies: “Throw the sputum of your culture, your civilization, and your thinking into the sea. God fights you and you are not of us and we are not of you.”

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The Ultimate Guide to Womanhood, According to the Female Jihadis of ISIS

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That Time Badass Feminist Queen Elizabeth II Gave Saudi Arabia’s King a Lesson in Power

by JonelleGoforth Posted on January 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Great Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II is known to have a wicked sense of humor, and some mean driving skills. One day back in 1998, she deployed both spectacularly to punk Saudi Arabia’s late King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz. Back then, Abdullah was a Saudi crown prince visiting Balmoral, the vast royal estate in Scotland. The Queen had offered him a tour of the grounds—here’s what happened next, according to former British ambassador to Saudi Arabia Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles:

The royal Land Rovers were drawn up in front of the castle. As instructed, the Crown Prince climbed into the front seat of the Land Rover, with his interpreter in the seat behind. To his surprise, the Queen climbed into the driving seat, turned the ignition and drove off. Women are not—yet—allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia, and Abdullah was not used to being driven by a woman, let alone a queen. His nervousness only increased as the queen, an Army driver in wartime, accelerated the Land Rover along the narrow Scottish estate roads, talking all the time. Through his interpreter, the Crown Prince implored the Queen to slow down and concentrate on the road ahead.

Royal custom discourages repeating what the Queen says in private, Cowper-Coles explained, but the anecdote was corroborated by Abdullah, and became, in the diplomat’s words, “too funny not to repeat.”

Abdullah went on to cultivate the image of a reformer as king. One thing he didn’t change, despite the Queen’s badass stunt: women still can’t drive in Saudi Arabia.

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That Time Badass Feminist Queen Elizabeth II Gave Saudi Arabia’s King a Lesson in Power

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