Maryam Namazie is one of the most important and courageous human rights campaigners that I have the privilege to know and work with.
She has launched a new website at MaryamNamazie.com which will cover all of her work, videos, press coverage, photos and more.
Atheist Ireland is happy to have helped Maryam to design and host this website, and I would like in particular to thank our secretary Helen O’Shea for her excellent work on this project.
Maryam is the Spokesperson for Fitnah – Movement for Women’s Liberation, Equal Rights Now, One Law for All and the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain.
She hosts a weekly television programme in Persian and English called Bread and Roses, which is broadcast in Iran and the Middle East via New Channel TV.
She was the keynote speaker at Atheist Ireland’s World Atheist Convention in Dublin in 2011, and she spoke at our International Conference on Empowering Women Through Secularism in 2013.
Maryam and Atheist Ireland both share the view that we should respect and protect the rights of Muslims as people, while strongly challenging the human rights abuses imposed by Islamism on Muslims and others.
She has moved her blog from the discredited FreeThoughtBlogs network, where some bloggers focused more on smearing secular activists than challenging the threat of Islamism and other religions to human rights.
Maryam speaking at World Atheist Convention in Dublin in 2011
Maryam speaking at EWTS conference in Dublin in 2013
Maryam speaking to me on Bread & Roses in 2015
This is great news for secularism, and for feminism, both of which need critics of Islamism who identify with the Left. Sadly the main critics have tended to be right wing commentators who see the struggle as one of Islam vs Christianity rather than Islamism vs secularism.
I’m surprised she stuck it out at FTB so long. This is much more of a blow to FTB than the loss of the nobodies who fled to the Orbit; this is an actual activist living – and acting – in the real world.
Hi Michael,
I’m not very well versed in computer and web design lingo but I would like to make a comment about Maryam’s new website. Overall it looks good, but that top banner (or whatever it’s called) that scrolls through three different images is a bit hard to read. The first image that appears is most especially difficult because the color of the text is almost the exact same color as the background.
Sorry to be critical, but I think visitors to the site should be immediately engaged by what they see rather than having to strain to read quite illegible text. (I did make numerous changes to the brightness of my laptop screen to see if I could get the text more visible but it didn’t help.) Once again, I’m sorry to be critical, but my criticism is meant constructively.
Critics of Islam are rare- death threats, accusations of xenophobia, Islamophobia and racism will drive many critics underground or away from public eye which is exactly what Islamists want.
We now have a situation where even pointing this out (as Dawkins has recently) will get you into hot water. We cannot afford to be complacent. How long did it take to domesticate Christianity for it to become the relatively benign influence it is today in Europe? Islam on the other hand, is a different beast.
The situation is so bad that I even have to clarify myself because of the propensity with which even fellow secularists will accuse me of advocating some form of genocide:
1 I don’t believe ALL Muslims are violent or supportive of theocracy
2 I don’t believe Muslims should be treated as an inferior people
3 I don’t believe in the demolishen of mosques or holy places
4 I don’t believe in suppressing religious beliefs or practises which do not infringe on the rights of others.
Kind regards,
An Islamophobe
Ardent Skeptic, thanks, I’ve passed that message on.
Maryam Namazie is no doubt a courageous person. Unfortunately, she is also a member of the Central Committee of the Worker-communist Party of Iran. She has just replaced one crazy belief system for another. It always saddens me to see that otherwise smart people still need to cling to some kind of organized faith.
In addition, I don’t think that a communist takeover of Iran would be much of an improvement over the rule of the theocrats. (What is it with this idolizing of ‘workers’ anyway? Are they somehow better people?) In short, I have very mixed feelings about Ms Namazie. She is still a religious nutter in my book.
I have to say that I agree to some extent with Jan. I don’t feel quite as strongly as Jan but anyone who thinks communism is a good idea must be either entirely ignorant of history or a complete utopian thinker and entirely ignorant of human nature. Either way, someone I regard with a healthy dose of scepticism.
Her appearance on Sam Harris’ podcast was also a disaster. She came across as incredibly petty. Perhaps this was just a bad conversation but it certainly didn’t do much to elevate my opinion of her. Her re-tweeting of garbage articles about Harris since the podcast has removed any respect I might have had for her as a person. I was impressed with her handling of some Islamic-thugs trying to ruin a talk she was giving and I’m sure she is sensible on some issues but it is difficult to get excited about her doings at this point 🙂
@DBone,
You say “The situation is so bad that I even have to clarify myself because of the propensity with which EVEN fellow secularists will accuse me of advocating some form of genocide”
In my experience is almost exclusively fellow secularists and feminists who deploy this nonsense charge.
It has gotten so bad I no longer consider myself on the left. This is entirely because the left has morphed to a fair extent into a censorious parody of the right. Moralising, prudish in some cases and most worryingly; fanatical. Conservatives are not just wrong on the issues to the new left, they are wrong or morally defective as people. It is an obscene mockery of what the left was just 10 or 15 years ago.
I find her a mixed bag. I’m glad she left FTB. But just because we see eye-to-eye on somethings doesn’t mean I endorse her broader beliefs (like Communism).