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I agree with Jack Straw’s decision not to let Ronnie Biggs go free. He has served, in total, a third of his sentence, and the parole board, despite recommending his release (on the grounds that he is so physically frail that he is no longer a threat to anyone), have reported that he has no remorse for his crime. Biggs took part in what became known as the Great Train Robbery in 1964, in which the driver was coshed over the head; he never worked again and died six years later. Biggs escaped from prison after 15 months, lived for decades in Brazil which had no extradition treaty, was not extradited when there was one as he had sired a Brazilian citizen, and returned voluntarily in 2001. The fact is that if he had served his time, he would have been released decades ago. Judging by reports from his family today, his health is failing anyway, so keeping him locked up will mean he is not a drain on the public purse for much longer. Perhaps it might be true that had he committed the crime today, he would have received less than he got, but then, parole is not a right. I also strongly oppose letting people off their just deserts on the grounds of decrepitude; if someone evaded justice in their youth, and was brought back to it (or stupidly walked back to it, thinking they would get off lightly) in their old age, they should be shown no more mercy than they showed at the time. Yesterday, the government decided to withdraw the franchise of National Express, a coach operator, for running long-distance trains on the East Coast Main Line, which despite its name, runs from London to the north-east, including most of Yorkshire, Newcastle, Edinburgh and Glasgow (most of its journey is nowhere near the east coast, much as the West Coast Main Line doesn’t run along the west coast for any part of its journey). I am still surprised that this company was ever allowed to run train franchises anyway; it has a conflict of interest as it is the country’s biggest coach operator, actually owns its coaches and doesn’t need a franchise to use the roads. Anyway, it found that it couldn’t keep up its franchise fees and so the government decided to pull its franchise. Yakoub Islam drew my attention to Denis MacEoin’s promotional piece for his Shari’ah-bashing report for Civitass, published on Comment is Free. It contains a series of stupid misrepresentations of aspects of the Shari’ah, obviously intended to deceive his non-Muslim readership. Any Muslim who has read a few basic books on the subject knows that his interpretations are baseless. Another baseless MacEoin report - this time on Shari’ah councils Denis MacEoin has published yet another of its Islam-bashing reports, this time attacking “Shari’ah courts” in the UK, or rather, Muslim arbitration tribunals (more here). The Daily Mail led this morning with the revelation that “Britain has 85 Sharia Courts”, which quotes the Civitas director David Green as alleging that “for many Muslims, sharia courts are in practice part of an institutionalised atmosphere of intimidation, backed by the ultimate sanction of a death threat”, a fantasy based on prejudices about “how Muslims behave”, with no need for actual evidence. In the past couple of weeks I’ve noticed something startling appearing on the Muslim ‘net: conservative Muslims attacking the Pakistani Taliban. These include a series of posts from Abu Eesa ([1], [2] with links to four more) and the news that a great-grandson of Maulana Qasim Nanotwi, a founder of Darul-Uloom Deoband, has condemned the Pakistani Taliban as “more jahiliyya than Islam” (here is the BBC report in Urdu; not sure if there’s an English translation anywhere). This is a surprising turn, as I converted in a town where the Muslim community is dominated by Deobandis, and support for the Afghan Taliban was strong at the time. I was just watching a BBC programme called The Real Hustle, in which the TV people play supposedly real cons on unsuspecting members of the public, and then reunite them with their money or belongings and ask them to allow their experiences to be filmed, presumably as a public service. Today’s focussed on holiday scams, and one of them didn’t seem like a very real hustle to me. The programme had some guys set up a “left luggage” facility in a shop unit, with lockers installed and people encouraged to rent the lockers and deposit their things. At the end of the day, men would come in vans and remove the lockers, complete with the customers’ things. Just for added believability, there were about eight or ten columns of lockers and the guys arrived in short-wheelbase, low-height Mercedes vans. I’m not sure if you could have fit one of these columns in the back of one of those. How believable is this? That scam would require a lot of vans and a lot of men, and would be very obvious, and given the density of CCTV in this country, it would be spotted probably well before they got the chance to remove the lockers. Has it ever happened? Some of the scams on that programme were more than credible, but this one smacked of inventing a con just to make a juicy bit of TV. So, why is MySpace losing out? Has anyone been on any MySpace sites lately? The inconsistent user interface, with the photo albums looking totally different from the profiles, the backgrounds people are able to use, which make the text difficult to read; the music, which starts playing every time you load someone’s profile and you have to stop it, five seconds after loading it … Facebook has its problems and annoyances, admittedly — the contents changing about a second after you go back a page, for example — but at least the look and feel is consistent from page to page. It does its job as a social networking site. MySpace is a musicians’ homepage service, which allows music to be shared easily and event notices to be put out. Facebook doesn’t offer much of that, but its facilities for users other than musicians are vastly superior. There is also the “snowball effect” of people joining as their friends join. However, another important reason is that advertising revenues are declining, and I’ve seen this myself on my Google AdSense revenues which haven’t reached $16 any month this year. A lot of these free blogging and networking services depend on advertising, which makes them vulnerable in times of recession. I have long held the suspicion that a “blog crunch” is likely, in which free services made possible by advertising, corporate off-cuts and companies based on long-shot business models which have never made money become unviable and disappear. How long this takes is difficult to predict, but there is a distinct chance of some of us one day finding that our blogs are simply no longer there. More: Web Worker Daily (HT: Faraz). There is a letter in today’s Guardian in response to the long saga of the intervention by the Prince of Wales in the planning dispute in Chelsea. The letter is from Georgine Thorburn of the “Chelsea Barracks Acton Group”, and asserts that her organisation had opposed the development proposed by Richard Rogers’ practice on the site of the disused Chelsea Barracks well before Prince Charles decided to intervene (there is another, from a local resident who also opposed the development, and one from a former president of Riba who supported it). Rogers has complained that Prince Charles’ intervention comes from an unelected royal who should keep his nose out of “democratic” planning decisions. Letters: Time for moderation in the blogosphere | Technology | The Guardian A letter from yesterday’s Guardian in response to the scandal over the unmasking of the “Night Jack” police blogger by the Times (the short version is: a policeman who ran an anonymous blog won an award, the Times found out who he was and decided to tell the world; meanwhile, his superiors disciplined him and he pulled the blog, and was named in the Times last week), in which the author pleads for people to clean up their act if they wish to continue being anonymous while online:
He suggests having two parallel comment forums: a polite one, and an anything-goes one. Surely most serious bloggers just wouldn’t want to host an anything-goes forum anyway, but as anyone who’s ever read the comments appended to news stories on virtually every major news website can tell you, they are often filled with bile and comments like “if they don’t like it here, let them go home”, particularly when they have anything to do with Muslims or Islam. What I’d prefer is to be able to read the published articles without the comments. Tom Meltzer on the phenomenon of fair-weather rage | Life and style | The Guardian This article has an astonishingly charitable attitude towards cyclists who hit pedestrians and then get angry with them, but suggests that fair weather brings out an awful lot of cyclists who don’t know how to do it properly because they would otherwise drive. As a regular myself, I have to say that a lot of real regulars use cycle routes which aren’t widely known, i.e. the back lane routes rather than main roads. However, the idiots are out in all weathers and are not seasonal cyclists. I have to say that stupid cyclists bother me hugely as both a cyclist and a pedestrian, including those who cycle recklessly along shared, or outright pedestrian-only, streets, or along pavements without good visibility when there is a perfectly good road right next to them. A few weeks ago, I was outside the Kingston Guildhall and heard some guy shout “CYCLIST!”, twice, basically to clear “stupid pedestrians” out of his way as he turned out of the main road from Esher into the Market Place, which is a dead-end leading to a shared foot/cycle road. This moron was cycling at speed through an area where there are lots of pedestrians and thought he had the right to do it without slowing down. I’ve also seen plenty of people cycling in Clarence Street, which is a pedestrianised street and often crowded, but some of these people don’t even ride slowly, they barrel along, and on one occasion I was coming out of a shared path and one of these morons nearly shot into my side from the pedestrianised bit. I’m not one to harp on the law to people, but if they want to ride illegally, why can’t they at least do it considerately? These idiots risk bringing consequences such as closures of shared paths — or worse, compulsory insurance and number plates — on all of us. I’ve been getting a lot of tweets lately about talk of a ban on the so-called burqa in France, the latest chapter in the long saga of the French obsession with what Muslim women wear on their heads (Muslim responses: 1, 2. I’m sure I’m not the only Muslim who gets annoyed at the tiresome use of the term “burka”, a term almost never used within the community to refer to the garment under discussion here. The term actually refers to the all-in-one “shuttlecock” garment worn by Pashtun women in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and separately to the mask consisting of cloth over metal, worn by some women in the Emirates. The niqab, which is the veil with the headband, usually with layers so that the woman can cover or expose her eyes while leaving the rest of her face covered, is not the same thing as the burqa. This is a classic shibboleth: a practice, or a manner of speaking, which gives away something about someone. Historically, the term meant a pronunciation which gave away the tribal background of the speaker, and you can read about the origin of the term here. Whenever you see someone talk about the burqa, or burka as it’s commonly spelled, in reference to Muslim women in virtually any country except Afghanistan, Pakistan and the UAE, you know that this person doesn’t know much about what he’s talking about and quite possibly doesn’t care. What other examples of such give-aways have you come across? What are the things which, when you hear them said, you think that this guy’s a know-nothing or an Islamophobe? Update: One I just saw by “habibi” at Harry’s Place:
“It’s not in the Qur’an” … but it doesn’t mean it’s not part of Islam (I’m not talking about the burqa specifically here, just about the use of this excuse to de-legitimise Muslim customs). More video footage has turned up of British police using violence against political activists, this time two women protesting against the proposed Kingsnorth power station. As with some of those who were involved in ‘policing’ the G20 protests in London, the offending officers had their identifying numbers covered. Fit Watch campaigners describe how they were arrested and bundled to the ground from the Guardian today (FIT stands for “forward intelligence team” and are the guys who film protesters; anyone who has been on any demonstration will have seen them). Watch the video here. After writing my last entry linking to Yahya Birt’s response to the abortive “debate” at Conway Hall, London, between Anjum Choudhary of al-Muhajiroun and Douglas Murray of the so-called Centre for Social Cohesion, my attention was drawn to Murray’s blowing of his own trumpet at Comment is Free. As Yahya noted, Murray claims he acted in good faith, communicating with the “Global Issues Society” and realising only on arriving at Conway Hall that the whole thing was an “ambush”. I find the explanation implausible to say the least. Yahya Birt has posted an article on the incident earlier this week at Conway Hall, London, in which the “Centre for Social Cohesion” (run by Douglas Murray; a Civitas offshoot run out of the same building as the Tory think-tank, Policy Exchange) were to debate the al-Muhajiroun front group, the “Global Issues Society”: How not to deal with al-Muhajiroun As he points out, some basic research on the GIS would have resulted in it becoming obvious that they were an al-Muhajiroun front, because among other things, all their previous events had involved al-Muhajiroun representatives. I would agree that a ban would give Anjum Choudary’s gang more credibility than they really deserve, but more importantly, it would not stop their activities, as their antics since 2005 have demonstrated, and Choudary’s relentless media appearances. As for the CSC, more important to them than highlighting the case for a new ban on al-Muhajiroun is to give the hostile elements in the Muslim community a higher profile so as to make Islam itself look more hostile. Yahya invites suggestions as to how to deal with this problem. Recently while in London, I’ve seen adverts for the new high-speed commuter trains to go from London to Kent, which run along the new Channel Tunnel link. That line runs out of St Pancras, a north London station, across east London and crossing the Thames by a tunnel out past the Dartford river crossing. The only major town it passes through is Ashford. New trains have been delivered, known as the Javelin, which have a top speed of 140mph, and will form a high-speed commuter service for which passengers will have to pay a premium. Some BBC journos have been taking a test run. Am I the only person to fail to see the point of this service? The whole point of high speed lines is to make longer distances possible to travel more quickly by not stopping at every small town. No part of Kent is more than 80 miles from London (Ashford is much less). No town has a population approaching 100,000. Instead, it consists of a collection of small to medium-size towns dotted over what is actually not a very wide area. Some of the bigger towns are further west, like Maidstone and Tonbridge, and therefore do not get a look-in although it might be possible to improve the service to those places along the old lines. The line was built to run trains to Paris and Brussels, both several hundred miles from London, and the Eurostar train has a top speed of 186mph. Running commuter trains with a top speed of 140mph, which will not be travelling even that fast because they will be slowing down to stop at Stratford and Ebbsfleet, will degrade that service somewhat. Clearly, this was intended as a sweetener for commuters in Kent, but Kent has one of the densest rail networks in the whole country already, with trains running to all of the south London terminals (there are six). When Eurostar customers start complaining of delays because of lines being blocked by commuter trains from small towns in Kent, the ‘investment’ in these trains will start to look like more of a waste of money.
Fear and Hatred on the Streets of Luton from the Sunday Times A very long and comprehensive article (you can also see it in four parts here: [1], [2], [3], [4]) on the unrest in Luton prompted by the tiny protest by al-Muhajiroun against the soldiers’ parade in March. You will notice that it includes the story of the Sikh mayor of Luton who was attacked by one of these numbskull racist hoodlums who couldn’t distinguish him from a Muslim (there have been Sikhs in Britain for as long as there have been Muslims), which was not reported in the media despite its relevance. Some of those involved in organising the white protests in Luton have a history of football hooliganism, as exposed in the Daily Mail, although they have since pulled the article. An update about a case I blogged about a few months ago: Fata Lemes, a 33-year-old Muslim woman of Bosnian origin who sued her employer, a Mayfair bar, for sexual discrimination after they made her wear a low-cut and revealing red dress at work, has won her case (HT: Islamophobia Watch), albeit a relatively tiny sum (£2,919.95). The Times report says that the employer is now seeking to re-open the case after they saw her Facebook pictures, one of which show her wearing “a plunging T-shirt revealing her cleavage”. Of course, a Muslim woman shouldn’t be working in a bar, but she does not wear hijab and was not seeking to do so at work. This is about women maintaining dignity in the workplace, and women shouldn’t be expected to present themselves as “sexually available” to male drinkers (male bar staff were not being expected to wear the undignified uniform). What she wears on the beach is of no importance; women (and men for that matter) do wear much less on the beach in the West than they do at work, and most beaches are not full of leery half-drunks with wandering hands. There is an implication that she is a hypocrite, but if this was not a Muslim woman, the idea of undressing on the beach while expecting dignified dress at work would not seem at all strange. Yesterday, there was another of Nick Cohen’s rambling pieces in the Observer, drawing a moral equivalence between those who deny that the 9/11 attacks were the work of al-Qa’ida (so-called truthers) and Holocaust deniers. He compares the rantings of James von Brunn, the man who murdered a guard at the Washington Holocaust museum, to things he heard said by Gilad Atzmon at a recent symposium on anti-Semitism in Oxford. If it hadn’t been for someone posting Atzmon’s account of the event to DeenPort, I would not have known what Cohen did not tell us in his ramble yesterday, namely that Atzmon was there to debate with Cohen and David Aaronovitch. Yesterday I upgraded my install of Wordpress to version 2.8, and although I was apprehensive about upgrading (being an adherent of the school which prefers patched, i.e. bug-fixed, versions to fresh ones), it turned out to be a huge improvement on the old one. Wordpress v2.7.1 seemed to have enormous problems with plugins, with a number of those I activated having simply no effect, such as the anti-nofollow and “possibly related posts” plugins. They actually work in version 2.8. The Flickr plugin did not, however. I have had two minor problems. The first was that the customisations I had made to my theme stopped working and the image I was using stopped appearing. However, I soon found that the new version has a new way of accessing theme variables, and I made a small change and everything worked again. The second is that the auto-upgrade system has stopped working, but that only means I that if I have plugins which need upgrading, I have to do it “the hard way” by downloading them to my hard drive and uploading them to my website; previously, Wordpress itself would download it and extract it. A minor annoyance and one I expect will be fixed fairly soon. |
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Copyright © 2009 Matthew J Smith - All Rights Reserved |
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Back in the 1990s, I was a big fan of the Liverpool-based TV soap Brookside (I got into it just as the body-under-the-patio story was hotting up and got out after the storylines got too sensationalised and silly), and one of the principal characters was David Crosbie, a wannabe Tory gent who was a virtual stereotype of the Tory culture of the mid-1990s: meddlesome and mean-minded and always on one moral crusade or another, yet unable to keep his own nose clean, jumping into bed with what his wife called a “blue-rinse barrage balloon” called Audrey Manners, who fell for his claim to be a Major, and having to fend off the press when his brother-in-law, a Tory MP, committed suicide after a sex scandal.
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