DFR Daily French Roast

Anne is reading …

The 2011 Nobel Peace Prize laureates, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, right,liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee, left and Yemeni activist Tawakkol Karman, center, pose on December 10. Image Odd Andersen, AFP/Getty Images

“My sisters, my daughters, my friends — find your voice,” Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf said after collecting her Nobel diploma and medal at a ceremony in Oslo.

Tawakkol Karman is the first Arab woman to win the prize and the youngest peace laureate at age 32. The journalist is the founder of the human rights group Women Journalists without Chains, and is a member of the Islamic party Islah.

Accepting her prize, Karman paid tribute to Arab women and their struggles “in a society dominated by the supremacy of men.”

Leymah Gbowee, 39, challenged Liberia’s warlords as she campaigned for women’s rights and against rape. In 2003, the Nobel laureate led hundreds of female protesters through Monrovia, demanding swift disarmament of fighters, who continued to prey on women, after the peace deal.

“We used our pains, broken bodies and scarred emotions to confront the injustices and terror of our nation,” she told the Nobel audience in Oslo’s City Hall. via USA Today

Bananas, Cucumbers & Sexual Arousal

Fethi Belaid, AFP / Getty ImagesWriting for The Daily Beast, Muslim journalist Asra Q. Nomani pulls no punches in The Fatwa Against Women Touching Bananas and Other Stupid Islamic Orders.It was rumoured out of India this week that a Muslim cleric “residing in Europe” issued a fatwa or religious ruling, banning Muslim women from touching bananas or cucumbers because they resemble a penis and could be arousing to women, causing them to think of sex.

Searching now, Bikyamasr has an update out of Egypt. The controversy — silly as it seems — has caused Egyptian Islamic scholar Sheikh Gaber Taye’ Youssef to express serious doubts that if a sheik really did issue such a fatwah, it is “nonsense and wrong”.

After the famous fatwah that said “A man can work with a woman to whom he’s not a brother, father, uncle, or son, if he drinks her breast milk first — a confirmed fatwa for certain and one cited by Normani, fatwas have become a farce.

Nowadays, you can get a fatwa to validate any point you want to make. I call it “fatwa shopping.”

The Best of TED

Huff Po has partnered with TED.com to produce the 18 Best of TED 2011 countdown of important ideas for the coming year. The videos are focused on things you can do to help shape the world in positive ways next year. Today’s post is #12 Less Stuff, More Happiness — contrary to what that dippy, self-centered woman in the holiday Amazon commercial tells you.

Before embedding what we find to be the worst, most insincere commercial of the holiday season, we want to take a moment to compliment the TED gender scorecard so far. In 2012 we will be relentlessly counting the presence of women in media, as opinion-makers, TED speakers and guests on talk shows. We’ve “had it” with seeing so few women’s faces and reading women’s opinions. With the first seven videos posted, the current TED score is 4 men, 3 women.

Texas Redistricting Fast Tracked to Supreme Court

The decision will most likely come down to Justice Kennedy, as the United States Supreme Court blocked a three-judge panel in Texas that overturned the state’s redistricting plans, stating that they will take the case. Even though Texas governor Rick Perry — he of the totally lousy Texas A&M report cards in math, economics and science famously referenced just yesterday the eight Supreme Court Justices, America has nine and it’s Justice Kennedy who will make the decision on Texas redistricting.

Not only did Gov Perry not know the number of Supreme Court Justices, he could not name unprompted the activist judges he railed against in Des Moines, Iowa. After mumbling “not Montemayor … ” he was corrected with “Sotomayor” and then stumbled and bumbled his way onto Kagan, too. Justice Ginsberg was spared Perry’s wrath for some reason.

At stake are Republican-led initiatives all over America that redistrict with a desire to split minority neighborhoods in half, attaching them to white neighborhoods but never with a majority stake in the new district. Theoretically, the redistricting initiatives favor Republicans at least in Texas and may well strike down gains made under the Voting Rights Act in terms of minority representation in Congress.

Read on at The Atlantic. For the record, the gender scorecard on Voices at The Atlantic is 7 men; 1 woman. Of the 7 men, 1 appears to be a non-white male.