Indigo Jo on September 2nd, 2010

Fareena Alam flagged up this article — Afghanistan’s dirty little secret — which is about the Pashtun custom known as bacha bazi, in which boys dress as girls and dance for grown men who then take them home and sexually abuse them. According to the article, when US soldiers kept noticing local men walking with […]

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Continue reading about SF Chronicle cluelessness about Afghan paedophilia

Indigo Jo on August 18th, 2010

It’s been a long time since anyone I know posted a list of the phrases people put into search engines to get to their site. In my case, the most common phrase is simply “indigo jo”, but there are fair amount of searches for things related to Qt (the programming toolkit, not Long Qt Syndrome), […]

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Continue reading about Web stats spam

Indigo Jo on August 5th, 2010

Since my last entry on the bigoted ravings of Christina Patterson in last week’s Independent, Patterson herself has written a follow-up piece on all the demented people who have written to her and blogged about her and called her a b*tch, etc., and of course there are a number who have written to her privately […]

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Continue reading about Christina Patterson again: London’s human zoo

Indigo Jo on August 1st, 2010

I was alerted to an article by one Christina Patterson (former director of the Poetry Society and literary programmer at the South Bank Centre in London) setting out what she considers the “limits of multi-culturalism”, which ends before you get to what she sees as the insulting stand-offishness of the Orthodox Jewish population of North […]

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Continue reading about Haredis and FGM: like a newly caught fish

Indigo Jo on July 27th, 2010

The past few days have seen one ghoulish story about Jon Venables (or the person formerly known as such), one of the two boys who murdered a toddler, James Bulger, on Merseyside in February 1993. The latest one concerns the weight he’s allegedly piled on by gorging on snack foods in his supposedly luxurious secure […]

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Continue reading about Tabloid feeding frenzy over Venables

Indigo Jo on July 14th, 2010

Yesterday Jon Gaunt, the talk show host who used to run the morning show on BBC London, lost an attempt to appeal against a censure by Ofcom, the British broadcast media regulator, against his former employer, the AM talk station TalkSport (another of whose former presenters was George Galloway). Gaunt had called a councillor from […]

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Continue reading about Jon Gaunt: gatekeepers and free speech

Indigo Jo on July 1st, 2010

I was just listening to the BBC London station (94.9FM) and the top story in their news bulletins at the moment seems to be the fact that some Muslim parents are withdrawing their children from music lessons because playing instruments is against Islam. The story isn’t on the BBC News website but is on the […]

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Continue reading about Slow news day: Muslim kids and music

Indigo Jo on June 23rd, 2010

Scott Rosenberg: WordPress – A Key Link in Blogging’s Evolutionary Chain « WordPress.tv This is a 55-minute video about the history of blogging and how websites developed into blogs, which I found linked off my WP admin page. It’s quite interesting, but there’s one point I’d disagree with, and I posted a comment on the […]

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Continue reading about WordPress 3.0, and why WordPress stole MT’s thunder

Indigo Jo on May 27th, 2010

Black Women are Perceived as a Threat (from Womanist Musings) I wrote about the relationship of Muslims to “white privilege” here last May as part of a carnival organised by Brooke of Rolling Ruminations, and followed it up with a post about how complaints about discrimination by convert Muslims are sometimes met with responses like […]

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Continue reading about What part of this is a privilege?

Indigo Jo on May 24th, 2010

Earlier today, Dr Andrew Wakefield, who published a study in the Lancet, a major British medical journal suggesting that the triple vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) might be a cause of autism, was struck off the British medical register by the General Medical Council, which found him guilty of serious professional misconduct. The […]

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Continue reading about Wakefield, vaccines and ME

Last week a guy called Paul Chambers was fined a total of £1,000 (all but £385 of which was either costs or a “victim surcharge”) for posting a tweet threatening to blow up an airport. The guy was delayed at Robin Hood Airport near Doncaster and posted the message which read, “You’ve got a week […]

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Continue reading about White guy threatens to bomb airport, gets slap on wrist, much whingeing ensues

First of all, this past week has been ME Awareness Week as I mentioned several times in my last article. This fact has got lost in all the election talk as might have been expected, although I’m sure many in the ME community found that disappointing, but nonetheless some media outlets found space to cover […]

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Continue reading about Guardian on ME and retroviruses, and other press coverage

Indigo Jo on May 11th, 2010

This week is ME Awareness Week ([1], [2]), and a number of media appearances and articles have been scheduled, including two appearances from Kay Gilderdale (on Radio 2 today and, allegedly, on GMTV tomorrow morning) as well as from Criona Wilson, the mother of Sophia Mirza who died from complications of ME in 2005, in […]

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Continue reading about Jeremy Vine meets Kay Gilderdale again

Indigo Jo on April 30th, 2010

Jerusalem Post: Rejecting the burka As Muslims it’s been our recent experience that many of the voices raised loudest against Muslims in the west have connections to Israel, particularly in the United States but also in the UK; they include radical Zionists, secular Jews who like to police which types of Muslims the left, in […]

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Continue reading about JPost editorial tells Europe how to deal with Muslim women

Indigo Jo on April 11th, 2010

Yesterday (Saturday) morning, I got to speak on the Late Show with Joanne Good on BBC London (94.9FM). She was doing a feature on bad comedy, specifically an incident in which Frankie Boyle, a former panellist on the BBC TV show Mock the Week, challenged a woman in the front row of his audience after […]

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Continue reading about Me on the Late Show: transcript

Indigo Jo on March 31st, 2010

Some of today’s papers carried a “the world’s gone mad” kind of story about how a pet shop owner, a great-grandmother no less, was given a £1,000 fine and will be made to wear an electronic tag to enforce a 7am-7pm curfew after being caught selling a goldfish to a 14-year-old boy. The story was […]

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Continue reading about The old white lady and the goldfish

Last night I got word that my blog had been named in a British government report as the fourth most influential “pro-Islamic” blog. The report, published by the Home Office as a PDF file, is based on research carried out by David Stephens of Nottingham University in early 2008. The report claims that the blogging […]

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Continue reading about IJB fourth most influential “pro-Islamic” blog, says government report

Indigo Jo on March 24th, 2010

The Sun today put out a story alleging that female suicide bombers were being fitted with bombs disguised within breast implants so that they couldn’t be detected by airport screening devices, according to “terrorist expert” Joseph Farah. Supposedly, the method was picked up in “chatter” among terrorists in Yemen by British intelligence services after the […]

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Continue reading about Bombs in breast implants?!

Indigo Jo on March 7th, 2010

Last week, Umar Lee posted his parting message to the Muslim blogging community, after his blog had been offline for some weeks. His reasoning was twofold: one is that all the best blogs (Sunni Sister, Izzy Mo, Tariq Nelson, Amir of Mujahideen Ryder etc) have been closed down or become inactive and the medium and […]

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Continue reading about Why I still blog

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 […]

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Continue reading about The real value of online friendships (Hadley Freeman revisited)