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 School Menace set out a number of the most common arguments about why faith schools […]
Lost Voices is published by Invest in ME, a British charity which concentrates on promoting research into the causes of, and a possible cure for, the debilitating neurological disease, myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME); they have organised conferences in London addressed by the major scientists involved in such research, mostly from the USA. I ordered the book […]
BBC4 recently broadcast a three-part series entitled Women, which was meant to give some kind of history of feminism from the radicals and “libbers” of the late 1960s and early 1970s through to the young feminist activists of today. Part 1 focussed on the early period or “second wave”, featuring interviews with Marilyn French, Germaine […]
I didn’t watch the Muslim Driving School programme, which was on BBC2 last Tuesday (at the right time to clash with Defamation, which I reviewed in my last entry), but I finally got round to seeing it just now, and I was pleasantly surprised. It was all shown in the north of England around Manchester, […]
Continue reading about Muslim women driving, and contrasts on niqab
Defamation, a documentary researched and presented by the Israeli journalist Yoav Shamir, was part of More4’s True Stories slot and was on Tuesday night. The idea that anti-Semitism was somewhat overhyped and used to muzzle criticism of Israel is not new, but what many people don’t know is how obsessed the media and state in […]
Continue reading about Defamation: perception and reality of anti-Semitism
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, with a particular focus on Muslims (more than on Islam, as we will see insha […]
Revelations: Islamic school (Channel 4, 5th July 2009) was an 50-minute documentary following two Muslim girls in Nottingham through a year at a fee-paying Islamic school (a mixed primary with an all-girls secondary). The younger girl is Asian, and her parents want an Islamic education for her after seeing how her older sister has turned […]
Continue reading about Review of Channel 4′s “Revelations: Islamic school”
I’m sure Michael Moore needs no introduction to most of my audience: many of us have been painfully aware of his clumsy attacks on the Bush administration since about 2000. I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 almost as soon as it opened in London, and was disappointed to see a list of factual errors in the film, which ruined its impact for me (from a conservative source, but the list is well-referenced). Another criticism of his stance, from an Afro-American Muslim woman on a Yahoo list I used to read, was that he was concerned with “disarming minorities” and that anyone of a minority who consented to being disarmed was a fool. This film, however, is about a rather less controversial topic - American medicine, and the stranglehold he claims the insurance industry have on it.
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