Last week I heard the news that a 14-year-old boy with severe autism, Alex Spourdalakis, had been murdered by his mother and another female carer in a suburban area near Chicago after they had made appeals to get what they considered suitable care for him. Alex himself was first given an overdose of painkillers and when that failed to kill him, they stabbed him in his chest. They then attempted to take their own lives by an overdose, but were found alive and are now in custody, charged with first-degree murder. The American media (the story was not broadcast in the UK, although the Daily Mail reported it on their website) branded it a “tragedy”, quickly attributed the murder to the difficulty of caring for a boy with a learning disability, and implied that it had been waiting to happen. This is the stock response to the murder of a disabled child, and it’s wrong. (More: Ariana Zurchner, David Gorski @ Science-based Medicine, Wendy Baskin, Michael Scott Monae jr, Jo Ashline, Kassiane @ Time to Listen, Same Difference.)
Alex Spourdalakis: an atrocity, not a tragedy
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Yesterday a 21-year-old Somali woman from London was 
As the dust settles on the Woolwich murder, so the vultures are starting to circle and the ground is being prepared for generalised attacks on the Muslim community, however much it was made clear that ordinary Muslims condemn the murder and were not responsible for it. The Sun has another front-page story about a video’ed “rant” (meaning a lecture or speech) given by Anjem Choudary in an office in London (the same report was reproduced in the Evening Standard); 
In the wake of the conviction of Mark Bridger yesterday for killing April Jones, a 5-year-old girl he kidnapped from a green on a housing estate in Machynlleth, mid Wales, last year, the focus has been on his fondness for child and child-abuse pornography which was found on his computer (along with other abusive images and film, including a rape scene from a film which had been copied to a video tape without the rest of the film). The Daily Mail 
Last Friday at 1pm, Jeremy Vine had a slot about Islam and Muslims on his talk show on BBC Radio 2 — nice timing. This was, of course, prompted by the brutal murder of a soldier in Woolwich last Wednesday. Who should turn up on his show this time than Taj Hargey, yet again, as well as Usama Hasan from the Quilliam Foundation. The former spouted his usual rubbish, blaming “mullahs” who teach standard Islamic beliefs for the deranged behaviour of the two men who were members of al-Muhajiroun but struck out on their own. Usama Hasan told a slightly more interesting story about how he fought in the jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s before beginning his “path to moderate Islam” after 9/11. There were, of course, no other guests representing the Muslim community. The programme can be found 
Last week seven men from Oxford were found guilty of various sexual offences, including rape, for ‘grooming’ young girls and ultimately raping and allowing other men to rape them. Many of them were in local authority care and others (as in Rochdale) were placed in care by their parents in an attempt to stop the abuse that they were complaining about, but carers refused to listen to the girls’ and their parents’ complaints, in one case telling one of the victims that it was ‘inappropriate’ to talk about the issue at that time. On Wednesday’s Jeremy Vine show on BBC Radio 2, he had two guests: John Brown of the NSPCC’s sexual abuse programme, and Taj Hargey, an “imam” that the media commonly wheels out to issue sweeping negative generalisations about Muslims. The programme can be listened to 
Last week Professor Stephen Hawking pulled out of a conference in Israel, reportedly as part of an academic boycott of Israeli institutions on the grounds of it operating an Apartheid-type regime against its Palestinian subjects. The decision prompted a number of Israeli sympathisers to reassess their views of Hawking from being a genius who triumphed over adversity to being a “stupid cripple” who should hurry up and die, or similar, but one Israeli law firm recommended that Hawking 
I received a letter today from the Attorney General’s office, in response to 
Recently there has been a major outbreak of measles in South Wales, thought to be largely the result of large numbers of parents not getting their children vaccinated during the MMR scare of 1998. Despite the scare, and its author, having been utterly discredited in the years since, there remains an industry seeking to ‘cure’ autism through purging the body of mercury, supposedly the agent (delivered in the MMR vaccine) that caused the condition. It’s not only autism: chronic illnesses in general are held up as reasons not to vaccinate and anyone with a chronic illness apparently triggered by a vaccine is seen as an easy mark, as I saw a couple of weeks ago when a friend of mine, who has severe ME, sought the advice of an