Last Thursday BBC Radio 4 broadcast a Report programme in which they attempted to “investigate” the links between British university Islamic societies (or ISocs) with terrorism, on the basis that Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalib, who attempted to blow up a plane near Detroit last Christmas, had been president of the ISoc at University College London. In doing this they turn to some of the familiar talking heads, Ed Husain among them, giving the societies themselves a voice only at the beginning. (Available on iPlayer apparently permanently.)
At the end of December there was an article by Hadley Freeman in the Guardian, characterising the past decade as a decade of fakery: fake science, fake politics and fake friendships connected only by Facebook. At the time, I criticised the article, but things I’ve learned over the past couple of weeks have put the issue of online friendships into sharper relief as there are people to whom this could be the only means of having any social life.
Tags: hadley freeman, lynn gilderdale
In 2002 Teresa May, the chairwoman of the Tory party appointed by Iain Duncan Smith, told the party’s conference that people called her party the “nasty party” and that their base was too narrow as were their sympathies on occasion. Norman Tebbit noted that this “nasty party” won three general elections but that it was never really a nasty party but a party which “took some very hard decisions”. However, besides its reputation (particularly towards the end) of a party which closed hospitals and taxed the poor, it also became widely associated with the bigoted remarks of a few of its MPs. Among them was David Evans, MP until 1997 for Welwyn and Hatfield, who gave a speech to sixth-formers in his constituency in which he referred to “some black bastard” who raped a schoolgirl, said he believed the Birmingham Six were guilty (they spent fifteen years in jail for an IRA bombing but were cleared on appeal) and said of his female Labour opponent, who was a school inspector and a magistrate, “she’s a single girl, lives with her boyfriend, three bastard children, lives in Cambridge” (i.e. out of the constituency).
Does anyone remember what Robert Kilroy-Silk was like before he wrote that column in the Daily Express — AKA Daily Spew — saying that the West owes Muslims nothing, being as we are all limb-choppers and women-repressers etc., and then tried to make a name for himself by getting involved with UKIP?
A YouTuber who suffers from ME has published a recording of his chat show from the early 1990s, in which ME is discussed over 40 minutes with various medical professionals including a neurologist, a psychiatrist, Dr Anne Macintyre (who interviewed the Gilderdale family for a separate documentary in the early 1990s) and various ME sufferers and their relatives. Kilroy talks over them incessantly, in at least two cases jumping in on them before we could hear the point the speaker was trying to make, and generally raising the pitch until people are shouting over each other. And this is all about ME, a condition which makes people sensitive to noise among other things.
It was said of Hilary Lister, the quadriplegic lady who sailed solo round the coast of Britain and is liable to stop breathing from time to time as a result of the condition which causes her disability, that if she were to die suddenly, it is better that it happens when out on the waves than in front of daytime telly. This video shows how bad British daytime telly can be.
It’s in five parts: [Part 1], [Part 2], [Part 3], [Part 4], [Part 5].
Those women with cut-glass accents are a blast from the past as well. You don’t hear that much anymore. I thought I remembered the early 1990s well, but there’s a lot I’ve forgotten, it seems.
I’ve been following the media coverage of the Lynn Gilderdale attempted murder trial with some interest as I found it quite emotionally affecting, and have found most of the coverage to be sympathetic to Lynn’s mother, Kay Gilderdale, who was acquitted last Tuesday. It now turns out that Panorama, the BBC documentary series, had been following Kay Gilderdale on and off for about a year, as well as interviewing others associated with the drive to liberalise Britain’s assisted suicide laws, such as Jane Campbell (AKA Baroness Cambpell of Surbiton, a title I find quite amusing) who has spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) and is passionately opposed to such changes in the law. The Daily Mail has covered the story extensively, mostly sympathetically although there have been a couple of critical voices there. I have also come across a blogger and a Guardian columnist who were exactly the opposite.
Tags: anne atkins, daily mail, kay gilderdale, lynn gilderdale, panorama
Last week, Apple launched its long-awaited tablet computer, which was something of a surprise to me as I had read that Steve Jobs had earlier given an explanation, at length, as to why he thought tablet computers were not a good idea. Now that Apple have made a success of their iPhone, they’ve upscaled it and produced a machine with the same OS but is just a bit bigger. Naturally, the launch had the fanboys raving, while others made a mockery of the name, saying it sounded like a “lady product” and that a later version of it might have wings.
Earlier this week, a mother named Kay Gilderdale was acquitted of the attempted murder of her daughter Lynn in December 2008. Lynn Gilderdale had been bed-bound since the age of 14 with severe ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis), which is a form of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). She was paraplegic (earlier on in her illness, she had been functionally quadriplegic, but she remained without feeling or movement in her legs) and unable to speak or swallow. The Daily Mail printed an interview with her mother in today’s edition. (More: Sarah Ismail @ Pickled Politics.)
Informed Comment: The Irrelevance of Bin Ladin
Juan Cole on why the latest Bin Laden tape is most probably faked, as its contents are not in keeping with his past style and wasn’t picked up by agencies which monitor radical Islamist websites:
Another clue: the alleged Usamah listed only one grievance, that of Palestine, and he framed it in terms of the suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza. Wouldn’t he have some concerns about the US drone strikes on the positions of al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the northwest of Pakistan and in Afghanistan? About Obama’s escalation of the Afghanistan war? If this is a recent audio, as shown by the reference to the December 25 attack, why not gloat about the attack on the CIA forward operating base by an al-Qaeda double agent only a few days afterward?
It is not like him to attempt to steal the thunder of Hamas in Gaza, and Hamas has already told al-Qaeda to butt out. Moreover, if all he has to offer is a lament about Gaza, then there is nothing distinctive about that. It makes him seem as though he is hitching his wagon to someone else’s star. Bin Laden comes from a business background, and one of his principles was always to seek leverage. When a Muslim radical group already has a lively insurgency going, he feels, there is little point in his putting money and resources into it. That is one reason he never focused on Palestine. He is about encouraging operations that would not otherwise be undertaken, as against US embassies in East Africa, the USS Cole at Aden, and New York and Washington.
The diction about the suffering people in Gaza, moreover, is not Bin Laden’s style. Contrary to what is often alleged, his concerns with Palestine go back to at least the 1980s, and are real and central to his ideology. The al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan in the 1980s used to get together and give each other sermons on the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem on a frequent basis. Bin Laden’s partner until 1989, Abdullah Azzam, was a Palestinian activist who thought that fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan was more realistic than the PLO struggle against Israel at that point in time, and more likely to redound to the cause of political Islam; but Palestine was always on the agenda for the future.
He notes also that “nobody in the Muslim world seems to care” about the tape or whether he issued it or not, and that Al-Jazeera “demoted” it, giving a former US ambassador an unusually long space in which to rebut it. If it is him, “it is a pitiful Bin Laden trying to stay relevant by grandstanding and stealing others’ thunder”.
There is a letter in the Observer today in response to an article from last week’s paper from Nick Cohen, who said that the Chilcot inquiry won’t declare Blair a war criminal and disputed the claim that the war in Iraq was illegal. The letter reads:
Having been shouted down by opponents in what passes as debate for years, it was a profound relief to read Nick Cohen articulating the moral high ground on which the Iraq war was based (“Blair will never be branded a war criminal”, Comment).
It is so simple. The cases for going into Rwanda, Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Iraq are identical: people were being murdered in their thousands. End of story. You can’t support intervention in the first three but not in Iraq. Saddam killed for 30 years and his sons were carrying on murdering.
Opposition to the war is fuelled largely by anti-Americanism in general and a hatred of Bush in particular and, yes, I think he’s a twerp too.
But how can you possibly support such a monster by opposing his removal? How could you and then claim any moral high ground? You should be ashamed of yourselves.
Yesterday a man who attacked someone who had burgled his house and terrorised his family had his sentence cut and suspended (having had his conviction overturned) and released. Also yesterday, a woman who had killed her brain-damaged son by giving him an overdose of heroin was jailed for life, with an unusually low tariff (or minimum time to be served) of nine years. The release of the first man, and the crime of the second, are both being linked to mercy.
Taj Hargey is no stranger to long-time readers of this site: he is notorious for his anti-Shari’ah publicity stunts and for being able and willing to come out and attack Muslims in the press, first of all on the BBC’s Panorama in 2005 and since then mostly in the Times. Now, his so-called Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford has got some publicity (in the Oxford Times, albeit appearing on their website for anyone to read) for holding marriages between Muslim women and non-Muslim men, which is unlawful by consensus in Islamic law.
Thunderbird 3 has been out for a few weeks now, although I’d been using it on Linux since well back in the beta days. It was actually the standard version of the software on Fedora 11, which I was using on my “big computer” (the Dell I got a year ago) and it’s blazingly fast compared to the old one - if you delete a message, it’s just gone, just like that.
Only problem was, when I switched to Ubuntu on this machine, it downgraded me to version 2 again, and when I switched again, to openSUSE v11.2, I got upgraded back. And when that happened, Thunderbird 3 seemed broken - I couldn’t adjust the standard font because the entire preferences window appeared to be broken. It just came up as a blank window. I tried downloading the source code and compiling it myself, but the problem persisted.
I reported it as a bug to Mozilla, and it was eventually suggested that my profile was the problem. I just had to rename the folder containing my old profile, and start Thunderbird (or Shredder, the working title for version 3 which appears when you self-compile). And it worked fine. Clearly the yo-yo upgrading had corrupted my profile, so if anyone’s having problems, that’s the first thing you need to do.
Also, anyone who’s been following my tweets closely knows that I’ve kept my Android phone which I said I was going to send back last month. What the commenters recommended (basically installing Taskiller, which knocks off programs which hog the processor) did the trick, and I didn’t have to install a custom version of the operating system. Besides, I was too addicted to being able to read my friends’ tweets, moderate my blog comments (using the wp2Go app) and even read the odd website on the go.
I didn’t watch the Muslim Driving School programme, which was on BBC2 last Tuesday (at the right time to clash with Defamation, which I reviewed in my last entry), but I finally got round to seeing it just now, and I was pleasantly surprised. It was all shown in the north of England around Manchester, so it reflected a certain type of British Islam, but there were a variety of ages of women and they were not all Asian. There was one lady who was said to have immigrated as a newlywed at the age of 13 (13? To the UK?) and now had to learn to drive because her former taxi-driver husband was increasingly ill and unable to work, a Mum in her late 30s who had to take her kids to school, and a convert in niqab who was competing with her husband as to who’d learn to drive first. One of the instructors was an Asian male local imam (Deenporters tell us that he is with Minhaj-ul-Qur’an) and the other was an Asian niqabi in her 30s. In the UK, you can see it until Tuesday on iPlayer.
Defamation, a documentary researched and presented by the Israeli journalist Yoav Shamir, was part of More4’s True Stories slot and was on Tuesday night. The idea that anti-Semitism was somewhat overhyped and used to muzzle criticism of Israel is not new, but what many people don’t know is how obsessed the media and state in Israel are with it. Shamir started by showing clippings from Israeli newspapers in which the words “anti-Semitism” and “Nazi” appear with some regularity.
I just watched the online copy of last night’s “discussion” between Anjum “Andy” Choudhary of al-Muhajiroun (which will no doubt have a new name by the end of this week, as the government has decided to ban them under anti-terrorism laws) and Maajid Nawaz of the Quilliam Foundation. This follows a familiar pattern of pitting Choudhary against people who are the opposite end of the spectrum from him in the expectation that the audience will see sparks flying even if they don’t hear much of what’s said as they both talk over each other. A few years ago, they did the same (after the “no-go area” nonsense in Leyton) with another member of that group up against Saira Khan from The Apprentice on Radio 2. This time, the host was Jeremy Paxman and the venue was Newsnight, on BBC2.
I’d just like to send out a warning to certain people that the rules on abusive comments apply to everyone. I’ve been refusing quite a few comments recently because they contain insults to other commenters. The rules are that personal insults and playground insults are banned, and will result in deletion, and this applies to Muslims as well as everyone else, even when the abuse is against someone I might be expected to dislike. I don’t want this blog to become a venue for a slanging match between other people.
Recently some of my Facebook friends joined a group called something like “I won’t buy the Independent again if Rod Liddle becomes editor”, and I thought briefly of joining. But I haven’t. The simple reason is that I almost never buy the paper anyway, because it’s boring. It’s a paper consisting of shrill front-page headlines with fairly middle-of-the-road news coverage and opinion pieces by people I either don’t care for or have never heard of.
Still, its takeover by Rod Liddle, who has a long record of misogyny and racism (whatever he might like to call it), would be a disaster for both the British media and for the paper itself. The paper isn’t really a liberal paper anymore, but Liddle’s editorship would lead it to be the poor third cousin on the right-wing broadsheet market. What could happen is that the paper could end up as an outlet for a vicious brand of bigoted right-wing thought for the lower middle-classes, away from the neo-cons of the Times and the High Tories of the Telegraph. There isn’t a broadsheet which caters to this kind of mentality, although the Spectator already does. However, it would lose a fair proportion of its existing readership.
It goes to show how lax the ownership rules in the British media are. This whole idea comes from the Russian businessman, Alexander Lebedev, who clearly wants to make a bit of money by stoking pointless controversy and bigotry, like so many British media barons. It should be stopped.
Yesterday William Peace AKA Bad Cripple commented on a recent case in Canada in which a French family were denied permanent residency because they have a daughter who has cerebral palsy (and, according to the authorities, “developmental delay”). David Barlagne and his family were advised when in France that his family would have no difficulty on account of the daughter’s disability if his business proved to be a success, and it has been, but they have been rejected, and face deportation, because the daughter is deemed “medically inadmissible”.
Recently the “Muslim extremist” organisation currently trading as Islam4UK — really al-Muhajiroun — announced that they were planning a march through Wootton Bassett, the town just outside Swindon through which the motorcades bring the bodies of fallen soldiers after they land at RAF Lyneham. Needless to say, this has produced outrage in pretty much every quarter, including the Government, military circles, the local community and even the Muslim community. The government threatned to ban the march, while Sir Hugh Orde, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), formerly of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, warned that the march should not be banned because groups had a right to march, even if people found their views unpleasant.
I’m stopping to type this on my phone in the middle of a long trudge through the snow and ice on the back streets between Kingston and New Malden. I’m using the back streets to avoid a common hazard of British urban snow, namely narrow pavements sloped into main roads.
There is one of these on the Richmond Road just on the way out of Kingston, which also happens to pass by the town’s big Sainsbury’s supermarket. I had to cling to railings at one point to keep from falling into the path of the traffic.
I know they can’t grit every road, but they should make an effort to keep these pavements clear. It’s only a matter of time before someone does fall and get seriously injured or killed.
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