UK immigration: Polygamy, welfare benefits and an insidious silence | Mail Online This article by former Tory peer, Baroness Shreela Flather, appeared in the UK Daily Mail on Friday, and consists of a broad-brush attack on Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslim … Continue reading
Welcome to my dream school | Education | The Guardian This article appeared in the Guardian last Friday, but only now I’ve got round to commenting on it. I read it eagerly and think it’s an excellent blueprint for a … Continue reading
Last week, Richard Dawkins delivered a polemic on the British digital TV channel, More 4, against the principle of government support for faith schools. (It is available for viewing at 4 On Demand, although possibly only in the UK.) Faith … Continue reading
Does God Hate Women? is a 178-page tirade by Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom, editors of the atheist website Butterflies and Wheels, co-authors of A Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense and both senior editors on The Philosophers’ Magazine, on religious misogyny, … Continue reading
Today’s Observer carried an opinion piece by the co-author of a book called Does God Hate Women?, to be published by Continuum this week, which gives a brief list of the worst things religious people have done in the past … Continue reading
BBC NEWS Magazine: Clive James on feminism and democracy Clive James is arguing that the reason feminists are not loud on the issue of promoting democracy abroad when the alternatives are far worse for women is because this reminds them … Continue reading
Why are the authorities refusing to fund France’s oldest Muslim school, now facing bankruptcy? | Education | The Guardian Today’s Guardian Education supplement on how bigots in a north Paris education authority are using bureaucratic methods to deny a Muslim … Continue reading
George Monbiot, in the Guardian last Tuesday, on the link between religious belief and the anti-intellectualisation of US politics: Ignorant politicians are elected by ignorant people. US education, like the US health system, is notorious for its failures. In the … Continue reading
Yesterday, Harry’s Place published an article sourced from Gina Khan and one Paul Sikander, attacking Islamic courts and Muslim institutions’ marriage practices. I wrote a lengthy article yesterday, but a bug in my blogging client destroyed it, so this will … Continue reading
Islamophobia Watch - Home - Stop pandering to Muslims says ‘silent majority’ Last week an outfit calling itself “British Muslims for Secular Democracy” had their big launch party, attended by Baroness Kishwer Falkner and “former Islamist Ed Husain”. This is … Continue reading
This evening the American feminist academic Joan Wallach Scott, a professor of social science at Princeton, NJ, gave a lecture to promote her book, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, 2007) (reviewed in the New Statesman here). The lecture was … Continue reading
Melanie Phillips’s Diary; The Islamic duty to respect Israel Melanie Phillips, courtesy of “Arabs for Israel”, has found a selection of Qur’anic verses which supposedly enjoin Muslims to respect Israel - not the prophet (peace be upon him) of that … Continue reading
Islamophobia Watch drew my attention to an article by Barbara Smoker, former president of the National Secular Society, in the latest edition of the Gay Humanist Quarterly. The edition is freely downloadable but is an image-based PDF, which means not … Continue reading
Tobias Jones (of The Dark Heart of Italy fame) on militant atheists who behave like totalitarians, hiding among anti-sexists, anti-homophobes and anti-racists, but in reality seeking to erase religion totally from the Earth, starting with the public sphere. He saw … Continue reading