I got through to speak to Anne Diamond (sitting in for Vanessa Feltz who's off having her gall bladder removed) today! The issue was a story picked out of the Daily Express (or Daily Spew as it's known in these parts) about Tower Hamlets council (Tower Hamlets is an area of east London with a heavy Muslim population) asking its councillors not to eat publically from next week onwards because a lot of their colleagues will be fasting. I think that this, in principle, is no big deal and quite a reasonable request, but obviously the Daily Spew thinks otherwise (how would they sell papers otherwise?). I said pretty much what I've said here, that the Spew has a history of stirring up hostility against Muslims with headlines like this one, and that as a driver I could not eat and drink while on the road or I could be fined for not driving with due care and attention. You can hear it here (about an hour and five minutes in; you need Real Player) until next Thursday; I intend to post a transcript of the conversation over the weekend insha Allah.
This morning, I was driving to work and was listening to the BBC London breakfast show, which features Jo Good and Paul Ross, who is every bit as irritating as his brother Jonathan (I had to turn him off in the end when he started practising the few bits of German he said he knew for a German caller who was telling us how they do things back home). Apparently there is some statistic that a fifth of accidents involve newly-qualified drivers, so there is some sort of consultation about whether restrictions ought to be placed on such drivers, such as having to attach a "P" (provisional) plate to the vehicle or not being allowed to drive on motorways or at night.
Recently three people I know visited Cairo. One of them, a Muslim of Somali origin who lives in Canada, spent two weeks there on the way to Dubai and Somalia; the other two, both relatives of mine, went on a day trip from Cyprus, where they had been enjoying a holiday. I have also been to Cairo; I spent two months and a bit there in 1999, learning Arabic (not much in the event). I think day trips to Cairo are a bad idea on many, many levels. Part of this is a bit of old-fashioned moralism mixed with new concerns about the environment; another is that a day trip to Cairo just does not do the place justice.
Radio 4's programme Sunday, its weekly religious affairs programme broadcast at 7am on Sunday mornings, today featured the "Islamic" marriage contract issue. You can listen to it here until next Sunday when the next programme is broadcast (it's a Flash application, no Real/Windows Media necessary); it starts at 30m 8s. Readers in London who listen to the BBC London station should listen out to see if Jumoke Fashola covers this issue on her late night show, which often deals with religious/spiritual matters; Vanessa Feltz (9am-noon weekdays) might cover it as well.
The Guardian today published a lengthy article about an MI5 report they had obtained (which was restricted), which stated that there was no real profile which could indicate what sort of young Muslim would get involved in terrorism. One important factor, though, was that a strong religious commitment meant one was less, rather than more, likely to get involved:
The majority are British nationals and the remainder, with a few exceptions, are here legally. Around half were born in the UK, with others migrating here later in life. Some of these fled traumatic experiences and oppressive regimes and claimed UK asylum, but more came to Britain to study or for family or economic reasons and became radicalised many years after arriving.
Far from being religious zealots, a large number of those involved in terrorism do not practise their faith regularly. Many lack religious literacy and could actually be regarded as religious novices. Very few have been brought up in strongly religious households, and there is a higher than average proportion of converts. Some are involved in drug-taking, drinking alcohol and visiting prostitutes. MI5 says there is evidence that a well-established religious identity actually protects against violent radicalisation.
The report also found that many of those involved had criminal backgrounds, and that the groups they involved themselves did not mind recruiting criminals:
"We have noticed that terrorist groups are remarkably tolerant of individuals with serious criminal histories. This is the case even when those individuals continue to be involved in very serious non-terrorist crimes, including drug-trafficking, assault and even rape".
The so-called Islamic marriage contract recently proposed by the Muslim Institute has attracted a lot of attention in the Muslim blogosphere lately, much of it negative, for reasons anyone who has read it will understand. It contains brazenly anti-Islamic elements, much of the rest is useless boilerplate, and they have dishonestly claimed (by placing their logos on the front) support from Muslim organisations which do not, in fact, support the finished product even if they supported the idea of such a contract before. Haitham al-Haddad, one of the imams at al-Muntada al-Islami in London, explained this, along with a lot of the other Islamic legal issues, in this series of YouTubed lectures. (More: Traditional Islamism, Muslim Matters with a letter from Sh. Tawfique Chowdhury of AlKauthar Institute, IslamicPolitik.)
Haitham al-Haddad (a "salafi" imam based, if I remember rightly, at al-Muntada al-Islami in west London) has given a lengthy response to the recent "Islamic" marriage contract published by the Ghayasuddin Siddiqui front organisation, the Muslim Institute. It's a YouTube video in seven parts and starts here. This has attracted a lot of hostility from Muslims online, despite having claimed the support of the Muslim Council of Britain, which it doesn't have, and the Islamic Shari'ah Council, which it also doesn't have. Insha Allah, more from me on this later.
As you can see, I have changed the theme for this blog. I had not intended to do this when I upgraded my Movable Type installation last week, but the old templates did not support the new features in the new version of Movable Type, and having tried to copy the new features into my old templates and failed, the only thing left was to set up a new blog and copy all the old entries in. So here it is.
The main new feature is that you can now register to comment with OpenID, which means you can sign in with your WordPress.com or LiveJournal ID as well as with the old TypeKey. The old rules still apply: once you post a decent comment (i.e. one which doesn't contravene my site policies), I approve you and all your subsequent comments pass straight onto the site; others are moderated. I have not copied all the old articles (as opposed to blog entries) over yet, but there's still time insha Allah.
Recently I had an exchange with an old school acquaintance who accused me of defending an enemy of my country, namely Abu Hamza, on my blog. Abu Hamza is currently in jail, having served most of a sentence in the UK for inciting racial hatred, and awaiting extradition to the USA on suspicion of some sort of conspiracy to start a terrorist or jihadist training camp in Oregon. While I dithered over continuing the discussion with this individual, I was provoked into writing this by reading this article in last week's New Statesman, about others facing extradition to the USA under the same odious treaty being used to extradite Abu Hamza.
Yesterday, the Policy Exchange published a report which suggested that the government should stop trying to revive the north, and instead build lots of new houses around London, Oxford and Cambridge and encourage ambitious northerners to move down here. Despite the Policy Exchange's close links with the present Tory leadership, Cameron has dismissed the report, while the Guardian had a substantial G2 feature on the virtues of the north (lovely people, great scenery, and hey, it's a great place for the arts as well). David Cameron called it barmy, and stated that "Conservative policy is focused on the good work of continuing the resurgence of cities across the north of England", and also towards keeping regional development agencies where they are working.
As a southerner myself, I have my own concern about the suggestion about people clearing off down south in large numbers, which is that the cost of living in London is difficult enough as it is; has anybody seen the cost of buying or renting a property? Even if they build a whole load of new boxes in the Thames Valley or around Oxford and Cambridge, these will not be good enough for ambitious incomers, from the north or anywhere else, who will want either proper houses, or nice new flats or studios, in the cities or in desirable suburbs, not in some new estate orphaned on the Thames estuary. These places will become ghettoes.
The Policy Exchange mob have their own agenda, and their own prejudices. One suspects that state-sponsored regeneration is anathema to them anyway, but no doubt they just want to get "their people" out of the "God-forsaken" north with all its small towns divided into "white trash" and Asian ghettoes. Besides their total ignorance of the north itself, which has thriving and well-regarded universities, they seem to think that Oxford and Cambridge are the only places besides London where a self-respecting person might settle, when in fact they are hardly the most industrialised places in the south. Cameron noted that the report's main author was soon off to Australia; one wonders what country he was living in when he wrote this nonsense.
The Khalifites are, thankfully, a group one does not encounter often as a Muslim these days, but they seem to come in waves when they appear. In the mid-1990s, during the heyday of the old Usenet newsgroups (apologies to any old ARPAnet hands who think Usenet's real heyday was back in the 1980s or earlier), they briefly hijacked the group soc.religion.islam (see this article, originally posted there in 1995, and this, by a Salafi, posted in 1996). They are a group founded by Rashad Khalifa, an Egyptian (allegedly, originally Copic Christian) immigrant to the USA, which believes in some sort of mathematical miracle in the structure of the Qur'an, and when they found two verses which allegedly did not conform to it, they pronounced that they should be excluded. They also totally reject the Sunnah, claiming that it is nothing but a load of hearsay. The group has a week's residency at the New Statesman's Faith Column (last week, it was the turn of a representative of the Alevis of Turkey), which means they will get the benefit of a bit more publicity.
Ziauddin Sardar, in the current New Statesman, has a worthwhile argument about some recent government idea to "set up a board of Muslim theologians" in order to "steer the more radical elements of the Muslim community away from violent extremism and issue fatwas on controversial issues such as the position of women and loyalty to the UK". He thinks this is "bonkers", and suggests instead that any such committee should be elected by the Muslims themselves and consist of people other than "beards", rather including women, young people, Muslims other than Asians, and professionals other than "theologians".
I partly agree with this; a state-appointed consultative council only has so much legitimacy as a representative of popular opinion. When king Fahd of Saudi Arabia set up an appointed consultative council, it was generally dismissed and one local liberal said it had as much power as a flock of sheep. A council of "theologians" consisting mostly of Asian imams with one or two representatives from Central Mosque would be seen as just another talking shop, particularly by Muslims outside the communities represented.
On the other hand, fatwas, whether on loyalty to the UK or anything else, can only be issued by people qualified to give them, and this usually does mean "beards", i.e. religious scholars who studied in traditional religious schools or somewhere like al-Azhar. It is simply not permitted in Islam to take fatwa from someone who is unqualified, or even from a council of various experts where the religious scholars were outvoted. Of course, they do not have to be old, or Asian, but they are usually male. Even then, when a religious scholar starts saying things the government wants him to say, people switch off, and any such council will have no effect on the youth who are already radicalised. It will, if anything, damage the image of the imams in this country among young people who are at risk of such a transition.
The Guardian today had this feature on descendants of Nazis, including a shirt-tail relative of Adolf Hitler, who became Jews, and in one case a rabbi, supposedly to cleanse themselves of the sins of their fathers. Naturally, this aspect of their conversions is what was focussed on:
I walk through the Old City, pondering my encounter with this strange, kindly man. Something seems to be missing from his story. To stand in front of a rabbi whose father was in the SS and to hear he became a Jew because he doubted the Trinity is absurd. So I telephone Dan Bar-On, a professor of psychology at Ben Gurion University, and a world expert on the psychology of the children of perpetrators. He tells me, flatly, pitilessly: "The motive of the converts is to join the community of the victims. If you become part of the victim community, you get rid of the burden of being part of the perpetrator community." He interviewed Shear-Yashuv for his book Legacy of Silence. "For me," he says, "Shear-Yashuv [a rabbi whose father was in the Waffen-SS but has himself served in the Israeli army] represents a person who ran away from the past."
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has a confused ramble in today's Independent, lamenting the fact that joining the European Union has decreased in popularity since 2002, when the figure was 70% in favour (by 2006, it was half that). It appears that it has been frustrated a few times too often, with various European politicians insisting that Turkey has no place in the EU. Alibhai-Brown sees the turn in attitudes of a betrayal of post-war European ideals:
Western Europe promised to confront its heart of darkness after the war and Holocaust. Zero tolerance against anti-Semitism was the ransom that had to be paid and was, rightly and properly. But other racisms have been allowed to grow and ancient enmities reawakened. Fresh hate victims have been found to fill the continent's gaping pits. Black migrants are treated like vermin, including in those EU countries known for easy charm; Muslims have had to accept institutionalised prejudice and Turkey has been treated as an abject and alien supplicant who must be kept that way. An essentialist, Christian definition of Europe has been settled upon, arguably one of the most self destructive of EU ideologies.
(More: Ginny.)
Last Tuesday a British court upheld the right of a Sikh girl living in south Wales to wear the kara, or Sikh bangle, to school. Her school, Aberdare Girls', bars all religious symbols and all jewellery other than watches and simple ear studs. Because she insisted on wearing the bangle, which is one of the mandatory five "K" symbols of the Sikh religion, the school segregated her, preventing her from going to the toilet without supervision, or to the playground or canteen at all, and making her sit on her own in a room with a teaching assistant. (More: Sunny Hundal, also at Pickled Politics.)
Douglas Murray on Islamophobia in Standpoint
Standpoint magazine is a recently-launched magazine published by the Social Affairs Unit, and appears to be an attempt at a serious political and cultural magazine for the centre right (and one must admit, there is nothing of the sort in the UK - the Spectator is a terrible bore nowadays). Murray is an inveterate Islamophobe, and a few examples of his rhetoric can be found here. He also runs the so-called Centre for Social Cohesion, which published last Sunday's report on the attitudes of 600 Muslim students. The article is yet another attack on Peter Oborne's documentary, It Shouldn't Happen to a Muslim, and takes apart the common theme that the Muslims of Europe are the "New Jews".
Following last Sunday's report (PDF) by the "Centre for Social Cohesion" (in reality, a right-wing think tank largely geared towards raising suspicion about Muslims) alleging that a large proportion of Muslim students support killing in the name of Islam, a number of organisations have put out a joint statement, which is reproduced over at Islamophobia Watch:
Technorati Tags: eclipse, java, books, ebay
For anyone interested in Java, I've put two books on the subject up for sale on eBay: SWT/JFace in Action by Matthew Scarpino (Manning, 2004) and the Java Developer's Guide to Eclipse by Jim D'Anjou et al. Reserve price on both books is £5 (plus £3.10 p&p - they're heavy books, but you can pick it up from me if you're local), or you can "buy it now" at £14 each. At the moment there are no bids, so if you're interested, bid - they go for about £25 online, and are both in more or less new condition. I intend to put other books up (mostly computer books I don't use anymore), and my listing directory is here.
Yesterday, with the water off in my part of town because of a burst water main in Wimbledon (which flooded not only the street but also South Wimbledon tube station), I headed up London to spend the afternoon. On the way down Oxford Street to my favourite hang-out -- Foyle's bookshop -- I saw a mock auction going on in one of the shop units. A mock auction, for anyone not aware of these things, is a scam auction in which various plants in the audience get all the good stuff. The public, meanwhile, bid for what looks like bargains but get garbage, and tend to only discover this when they open the packaging later, by which time the scammers will have gone.
Anyway, I saw a police car go past, and tried to wave at the cops inside but was too late. After hanging around for a while, trying to interest the security guards in the Curry's Digital shop opposite, who told me it was not their problem, I went down to Charing Cross Road, and there I did find a police car. After failing to stop it once, it went round the block, and when it passed me, I told the cops inside that there was a mock auction going on down Oxford Street. Before I'd finished my sentence, they just said, "we're busy".
I said, "oh, you know about it?" and they just said, "no, we're busy". They had a Chinese-looking woman in the back, but they were not driving fast and did not have their blue lights or sirens on, so they did not look that busy to even let me finish telling them about an ongoing crime so that they could pass the details on. Mock auctions stand out a mile - they are "auctions" going on in places where they never normally do, namely vacant shop units, and there is always a crowd around them which usually spills out into the street. It would only have taken a few cops to go in there and bust the lot of them, and there was no big event on, no football match, no riot. If such a thing were to happen it could dissuade the scammers from trying to pull this trick so obviously again. Perhaps they were just enjoying the warm weather.
Technorati Tags: max mosley
Yesterday Max Mosley, the president of the International Automobile Federation (FIA), which manages Formula 1 racing, won £60,000 from the News of the World which printed a story about his enjoying some sort of sado-masochistic orgy with prostitutes with a Nazi theme. The suit was not for libel - he did not deny the central claim, only the bit about the Nazi overtones - but for invasion of privacy. The News of the Screws complained that the British press was became less free yesterday because of privacy laws emanating from Europe. Boo hoo.
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