Indigo Jo Blogs

Last weekend Janet Street-Porter wrote for the Independent rubbishing the entire medium of blogs, while Yasmin Alibhai-Brown last monday wrote for the same paper suggesting that bloggers must have no life (you can read the opening extract here; the whole article is paywalled). I got this from Bloggerheads via Saracen. This is not the first time I've seen articles in the print media claiming that blogs are just verbal diarrhoea; Zoe Williams, in the New Statesman in 2004, called blogs "diaries of nobodies":

As such, their main constituency is bored students and, consequently, their natural writers are bleak, nihilistic layabouts, prostitutes, people pretending to be prostitutes, Dungeons and Dragons freaks and nail bombers. There should be no place in this medium for politicians, "foremost journalists", wannabe think-tankers, soi-disant serious novelists or campaigners of any sort.

Continue reading "Blogs and their relevance (or lack thereof)" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Alhamdu lillah, Safiyyah Ally has resurrected her blog with a couple of posts (the two on the front page) on the recent arrests of a number of people in Toronto on terrorist charges. (She also has a rather nice front page with a picture and resumé, with plans for pages containing speeches, writings and projects.)

Posted by Indigo Jo at 9:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A few interesting entries at Islamophobia Watch which I'll deal with in one entry, insha Allah:

(1) There's a panel debate this Wednesday at University College London, including Dr Hisham Hellyer, Tariq Ramadan, Dr Abdul Wahid of HT, and three others. The topic is "The Future of Europe in Islam" (a provocative title, to be sure - are they sure they don't mean the Future of Islam in Europe?). The debate will be held in the Chemistry Auditorium in the Christopher Ingold Building (20 Gordon St, London WC1). Tickets can be booked here; proceeds to the Muslim Youth Helpline.

(2) Brian Whitaker posted an article about Ayaan Hirsi and Irshad Manji entitled False Prophets at Comment is Free today. He also recommends this article by Laila Lalami in The Nation.

(3) Chris Doyle of the Council for Arab-British Understanding had this article published in the Observer yesterday. Also, she has an op-ed in the New York Murdoch Post today, referring to an "attempt to get the Muslim community to tackle its extremism", as if we had the security forces necessary to root out these people ...

Posted by Indigo Jo at 6:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Little Green Footballs alleges that they received a death threat from a machine owned by Reuters last Friday. The threat came after someone posted a link to a LGF article in response to an article by the Muslim Council of Britain's media secretary Inayat Bunglawala, who himself works at Reuters, at Comment is Free about the Da Vinci Code. LGF obviously suspected Inayat Bunglawala as the author, although given that Reuters is a big organisation, it could have been an awful lot of people and it now turns out that it wasn't Inayat Bunglawala.

Continue reading "Inayat Bunglawala in death threat controversy" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

MediaGuardian.co.uk | Media | The anarchy and the ecstasy

Further from the earlier link about female "pundits" and the abuse they get, Georgina Henry reports on the culture at Comment is Free (the Guardian's comments blog), the "raging argument about professionalism versus amateurism - with sub-headings covering language, anonymity, accountability, democracy, censorship and the art of conversation" and "the anti-semitism and Islamophobia that dances round any piece about Israel/Palestine, and the incoherent abuse, the swearing, the false statements, the ill-disguised misogyny, the intimidation and the downright nastiness that fuels so many comments". There's a particular focus on the ugly, personally-directed response to a post by a young Muslim woman on Islam and liberalism. (More: Pickled Politics.)

Posted by Indigo Jo at 8:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Faraz from Irrelevant Opinions is back after his break, with a report on his trip to France and Switzerland and on the situation of the Muslim youth there (and a few photographs).

Irrelevant Opinions: Back in the Saddle

Posted by Indigo Jo at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Last week Joe Kaufman posted to FrontPageMag.com an article regarding a resolution passed by the Student Government at the University of South Florida which supported the dismissal of Sami al-Arian, recently acquitted on terrorist charges. The student paper printed two articles supporting the college's decision; according to Kaufman:

One of the letters drew the ire of a teenage girl named Danya Shakfeh. In the future, she would see to it that this “problem” would not be repeated.

Kaufman's article diverges into a general broadside against a vast swathe of Muslim organisations and, in particular, a number of Muslim blogs. It demonstrates that he has a hostility not only to Muslim opponents of the state of Israel, but in effect to any mildly assertive Muslim. It is also one of the shoddiest pieces of writing I've ever seen, and easily the most insulting to its readers' intelligence. (More: here, here, here; also see this earlier entry.)

Technorati Tags: david+horowitz, joe+kaufman, neocons

Continue reading "Shoddy Joe Kaufman cuts my work out for me" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 11:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

Anyone reading this who has a blog and runs Linux or has some interest in programming: I've restarted work on my old college project which was to develop a blog management app using Qt, which also works on Macs (indeed, it's written mostly on a Mac) and Windows but mainly on Linux. QTM is in an early stage of development right now, but you can presently write entries, format them and submit them if your blog uses Wordpress or MT (sorry, not Blogger as yet). More details and a few screenshots are here, insha Allah.

Posted by Indigo Jo at 1:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The Sharpener: Quaking under the jackboot of political correctness. Or not

Recently a hawkish hack writer in the Times and Spectator, among other places, published a pamphlet through Civitas, entitled The Retreat of Reason* ([1], [2]), in which he argues that "truth" comes in two forms - the factually correct and the politically correct, which may be entirely different. So the "politically-correct" truth is that the rise in AIDS is because teenagers have too much unsafe sex, whilst the "factual" truth is that it is because of African immigration. The whole thing strikes me as a one-sided reply to a one-sided view: it's not teenagers who are at fault, but African immigrants; it's not skinheads who are behind the rise in anti-semitic attacks, but Muslim youths; the idea that the truth is actually a mixture of both doesn't seem to occur - if not to Anthony Browne himself than to whoever wrote this press release (and to Melanie Phillips, who parrots it.) The complete text is available in PDF format here, hat tip: The Bewilderness.

More: Talk Politics, Robert Sharp.

Posted by Indigo Jo at 11:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (16) | TrackBacks (0)

Not much to add to this particular story myself, but brother Abu Sinan has been working on exposing the deception behind the so-called Religious Policeman, who purports to be a Saudi exile in London but actually does not seem to be an Arab at all, writing like a native English speaker and being apparently incapable of translating from the Arabic media himself, preferring to use the work of MEMRI and of real Arab bloggers - not all of them willing. By such clangers as thinking that a real Saudi blogger called Farah is a man, he demonstrates over and over that he is not really an Arab. More on the situation: [1] by Jihad al-Khazen at Dar al-Hayat (in Arabic); [2] by Kuwaiti blogger Haitham Sabbah with a partial translation, [3] also by Abu Sinan.

Posted by Indigo Jo at 12:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (15) | TrackBacks (0)

OK, so who's heard of the Weblog Awards, 2005? The first I heard of them, the finalists had been announced, and people were being asked to vote for which of the top 20 were to be the best in their respective categories. I only found out because the Daily Ablution was encouraging its readers to vote for it, and Harry's Place, despite being among the finalists itself, was encouraging its readers to vote for Normblog. I had at least heard of these websites and, with the exception of Normblog, have commented on things posted there. The other categories were full of blogs of which I'd never even heard.

Continue reading "Weblog awards 2005: who cares?" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

As a lot of you noticed, I recently switched my blog tool back to Movable Type. With a vengeance - I actually bought an unlimited personal licence while it was reduced for a few months in the wake of the 3.2 release. A lot of people didn't like this. "MT sucks!", they said. In the last few years, bloggers have switched from earlier versions of MT to Wordpress (and probably other tools) to flee the advancing tide of comment and trackback spam. Wordpress offered at the time what no other blogging tool did: the two-level word-blocking system. It kept out most of the spam I got. MT had a Blacklist plug-in tool which I used, but suspected was slowing my system down and causing server errors. When Wordpress 1.5 came out, I went for it like a shot.

Continue reading "Which blogware to use?" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 11:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Via Guardian Newsblog, a guy called Jakob Nielsen has laid out a list of the Top Ten Design Mistakes commonly found on blogs. I guess mine falls foul of quite a few of them: no author bio (the one that was there has gone, as I deleted the Wordpress blog because it was getting heavily spammed), no picture (again, was there, now gone), headlines are not always the most descriptive, "classic" articles buried in the archives (again, I did have an "important posts" list at one stage, and got rid of it), and mixed topics (tech and religion ... although they do overlap sometimes).

Continue reading "Top 10 blog design mistakes" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 2:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

In today's Times, it's reported that Rita Verdonk (what a name!), the "hardline" integration minister of the Netherlands, has told the country's Parliament that "she was going to investigate where and when the burka should be banned". The author, Anthony Browne, calls the burka "traditional clothing in some Islamic societies [which] covers a woman’s face and body, leaving only a strip of gauze for the eyes". Marcus, a regular blogger at Harry's Place, calls it "further evidence of how deeply the murder of Theo Van Gogh has affected Dutch society".

Continue reading "Dutch tolerance" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 11:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (71) | TrackBacks (0)