I've watched Geert Wilders's new film Fitna. I am sure nobody expects a good write-up of it from me, but it's a really poor piece of film. (More: HAhmed, Austrolabe, reproduced at Muslim Matters, CLOSER which examines the Dutch newspaper headlines reproduced in Fitna.)
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 held at the London School of Economics (LSE), presently part of the University of London, and was well-attended, with both men and women, including quite a few Muslims (although fewer than I expected), in the packed 240-seat lecture theatre. The lecture, and the book, offers an intriguing insight into the "debate" which led to the imposition of the ban.
Continue reading "Review of London lecture on French hijab politics" »
Technorati Tags: michael moore, sicko
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.
Having watched the second episode of Britz, sister Safiya posted a second article outlining its inconsistencies. She concludes that the programme is "prejudiced garbage" and that the Muslims involved in it should be ashamed. I agree. She points out a few issues I'd not noticed, such as the fact that the "covenant" the bomber took made no mention of Allah and the fact that all the Muslim characters were either nominal Muslims or extremists, with nothing in between.
I have a couple other qualms regarding the "realism" of this programme:
The issue of a woman being subject to a control order because a bulk quantity of curry powder was found in her family's house seems like an attempt to emotionally manipulate us. While it is true that people were convicted of IRA terrorist activity in the 1970s on the basis of explosive being found on their fingers, which was actually derived from common household cleaning products, no such event as shown in Britz has happened as yet and, surely, the fact that curry powder is widely used in Asian cooking would surely occur to the authorities when issuing a control order.
I also find Sabia's suicide unlikely given that the length of time she had spent under the control order was not that long and that it wasn't stringently enforced; she was able to go to college and Nasima, who she was banned from meeting, nevertheless managed to sneak in at night.
Then there is the issue of how the "Nasima lookalike" ended up dead, and not only dead but "interfered with". This is not at all explained, but I find it difficult to believe that even Muslims who would kill for political reasons would simply kidnap an innocent woman, sexually assault her and then murder her, for no other reason than to make it look like one of their bombers was dead, if that is what we are expected to believe. I have never heard of it happening or (unlike terrorism itself) anyone trying to justify it.
Parts of Britz could have rung true if it had been presented at some time in the near future as some sort of cautionary tale about where the Blair control order laws could lead, but it was not; it was set now, and the terrorist plots arose directly out of the July 2005 bombings. As it was, it gave a distorted picture of what Muslims are like while apparently trying to manipulate us with exaggerated details about control orders. Whatever the political standpoint of its authors, this drama was not very good.
Outlines: And I thought Sleeper Cell was bad...
I have to say that I agree with much of what sister Safiya says in this review. I was sceptical about this programme from the outset, having heard that it revolves around a female suicide bomber who came from the background of a Muslim civil rights activist, despite the fact that all the suicide bombers which have struck in the name of Islam outside of Palestine have been male and had not been known for any such work. The objection that nobody has yet committed suicide as a result of a control order has already been raised elsewhere, but the impression was given that the woman who did so in this stupid programme had not been under the order for anything like the length of time which might normally push someone to do such a thing. Ever heard of realism?
I must say though that the issue of Muslims joining MI5 is a real one, and that I've contemplated doing this on more than a few occasions, but the idea of a job which required me to lie to most of my friends and family about what job I did and where I worked (and everyone knows, for example, who actually occupies that building on the south bank of the Thames at Vauxhall, for example), much less with befriending other Muslims in order to feed innuendo about them to the authorities. No thanks.
New Statesman - Through western eyes
This is a review written by Ananya Vajpeyi, an Indian Hindu woman who was a friend of Daniel Pearl, of the film about Pearl's murder in 2002. She says that the Karachi portrayed in the film, of "a frightening and incomprehensible palimpsest of urban chaos, poverty and Islamic terrorism, teeming with Muslim men who are scarily numerous, devoutly religious and horrendously violent", complete with a police officer who tortures someone almost to death and then heads off to the mosque to pray, does not match her experience of it, in which people were very welcoming to her and more so when they realised she was Indian and not Pakistani, and "the traffic was not insane, the slums were not menacing, the alleyways were not dark, the markets were not dirty, and the people were not out to kill each other or to kill me". The film hasn't been released here yet, and I probably won't bother to go and see it, but I hope anyone who does reads this as well.
The book version of Mearsheimer & Walt's The Israel Lobby is now out in the UK (I got it for £22 in Blackwell's in Charing Cross Road; Borders didn't have it at all, several days after I found it (full price, £25) in Foyles. Amazon are doing an even bigger discount, so if you're in the UK you can buy it from the link on the right and make me some money, insha Allah.
There have been a few articles about it in the British press as you might expect - it was on the front page of the New Statesman, with this article by Andrew Stephen, their usual US correspondent, which backs up most of what the book says and offers a couple of examples of his own, such as that of his friend who was branded an anti-Semite for suggesting that the US offer Israel American fighter planes rather than fund the development of Israeli ones. He makes a passing reference to "the deranged letter-writers and threat-merchants", which exist in this country as well, but those are the people who cause the most difficulty for ordinary supporters of the Palestinian Arabs' rights to their own country. I looked in the book's index and, for example, there was no listing for Front Page Magazine or the likes of David Horowitz or Joe Kaufman, for example.
Also see this article by Ed Pilkington in today's Guardian.
Technorati Tags: richard littlejohn
Yesterday evening, the well-known talk-show host and newspaper columnist Richard Littlejohn presented an hour-long documentary, as part of Channel 4's Dispatches feature, entitled "The War On British Jews?", purporting to demonstrate that "in Britain 2007, it's open season on the Jews". You can see it in a series of YouTube videos here. The programme made a number of familiar points, among them that the Left, despite its anti-racist reputation, was "pouring petrol on the flames", and demonstrated a rather lackadaisical investigation.
Technorati Tags: keith allen, westboro, fred phelps
Last night I watched a programme on Channel 4 called Keith Allen Will Burn In Hell, in which someone nowadays best known for being the father of a mediocre pop star goes out to Topeka, Kansas, to get inside the cult known as the Westboro Baptist Church. The church have been well-known for years for picketing funerals, first of homosexuals and more recently of soldiers killed in Iraq. They hold up brightly-coloured placards proclaiming "God hates fags", "Thank God for AIDS", "Fag Flag" and the like. More recently they have taken to posting their offensive messages in videos on YouTube.
Technorati Tags: this is england, shane meadows, national front, skinheads
This is England is a film about skinheads in the English Midlands in the early 1980s, written and directed by the British director Shane Meadows (interviewed here) and set mostly on a council estate which turns out to be in Nottingham, although no reference to Nottingham is actually made anywhere in the film; some scenes are shot in Grimsby, an east coast port and seaside resort. It mainly revolves around the character of Shaun, a 12-year-old boy who has recently lost his father in the Falklands war, and who is partly based on Meadows (and some of the other characters are also partly based on people Meadows knew). (More: Crooked Timber, BBC Movies, Future Movies, Pickled Politics.)
Technorati Tags: melanie+phillips, londonistan
I waited for some time to pick up my copy of Melanie Phillips's book Londonistan, largely because I have a conscience about paying for books which are as full of damaging gibberish as this one is. I ended up waiting until the first paperback edition, which was reduced as new paperbacks often are, and I'm glad I did because this one has an extra chapter which was not in the original. The original cover, featuring that kid with the "I love al-Qa'ida" hat from the tiny anti-Danish demo by a bunch of idiots last year, has been replaced with an image of three women in niqab, one of them giving a V sign to a bunch of journalists. A recent interview with Phillips, by a writer for the Guardian for which she used to write herself, describes her hysterical and hectoring tone and notes:
She is not cynical, or saying it for effect. She means every word and the key to her analysis is her belief in a general collapse of values or, in her words, "the creation of a debauched and disorderly culture of instant gratification, with disintegrating families, feral children and violence, squalor and vulgarity on the streets". This is combined, she believes, with a profound anti-semitism among people who do not realise that "the fight against Israel is not fundamentally about land. It is about hatred of the Jews". She hears echoes from the past today, talking of "a climate in Britain that has alarming echoes of Weimar in the 1930s".
(More: Austrolabe.)
Technorati Tags: nick cohen, whats left
(A week late, but this is the first time I have had the time and energy to complete this article. Nick Cohen's book "What's Left?" is now out.)
Don't you know your left from your right? (Part 2 here)
There are two extracts from Nick Cohen's forthcoming book What's Left? published in last Sunday's Observer, in which he has a weekly column. For anyone who is not familiar with his writing, he is part of the same tendency as Paul Berman (of Dissent magazine and the author of Terror and Liberalism) and Christopher Hitchens; that is to say, he is from a left-liberal background but supports recent western military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and accuses the left generally of betraying its principles in its opposition to them. Until the early 2000s his columns had a strong pro-civil liberties stance and concern for asylum seekers; after the demonstrations against the war in Iraq in 2003, he denounced the Stop the War coalition of being an alliance of the "enemies of economic freedom" (the Socialist Workers) and the "enemies of sexual freedom" (the Muslim Association).
Continue reading "Nick Cohen: crude parodies and a thinly veiled agenda" »
Technorati Tags: sharon foster, shoot the messenger, racism, bbc, ligali
Shoot the Messenger was on BBC2 last night; it featured David Oyewolo (from the drama Spooks, British slang for spies) as Joe, a young black teacher who entered the profession after attending a meeting to discuss the chronic underachievement of black boys in British schools, at which one lady announced that what was needed was more black male teachers to provide positive role models. The film was no Stand By Me, however; his plans are shredded pretty quickly when he is suspended from his job over a false accusation of assault and ends up in a mental hospital and before long is living rough on the streets. The film was written by Sharon Foster (of Babyfather fame) and was shown at the Tribeca film festival in New York and at the recent Edinburgh festival. At a London venue, however, when the BBC previewed it to a select audience, a black man got up and called it the most racist film the BBC had ever made and that it reminded him of Birth of a Nation (you can read what Foster wrote about that here).
Last Saturday Gita Saghal of Awaaz South Asia Watch and "Women Against Fundamentalisms", an organisation which monitors and opposes religious fundamentalism in south Asia, appeared on BBC Radio 4's programme Hecklers, so-called because one person is allowed to give a speech, occasionally interrupted by five opponents. In this case, the opponents were Moazzam Begg (former Guantanamo detainee), Daud Abdullah of the Muslim Council of Britain, Tariq Ramadan, Tahmina Saleem of the Islamic Society of Britain and Nazir Ahmad of the House of Lords (in the British Parliament). Saghal, an atheist of Hindu background, who stressed that she was "secular", advanced the now common stance that a number of the British government's "key allies in the fight against terrorism".
Continue reading "Review of Gita Saghal's Hecklers appearance" »
Six Apart have now released version 3.3 of Movable Type, complete with an enterprise version for organisations with thousands of users which, among other things, supports the Oracle database as well as the usual open-source databases like MySQL (which I suspect the overwhelming majority of MT users use). Oh, and among the other innovations is that the software is (once again) completely free for personal users, unless your definition of "free" is the Free Software Foundation's.