Indigo Jo Blogs

As an example of the sort of silly conspiracy-mongering George Monbiot was talking about in his article in the Guardian on Tuesday (which I linked), here is a reply to it (third letter down), which was published in the newspaper yesterday:

What if the "official" account of what happened on 9/11 is false? What if, in fact, it's a lie, and a big one at that, complete with corporate/media/propaganda cover-up? Without backing from the media the story wouldn't fly. What would that make this "war on terror"? A fraud? Since when do steel buildings freefall to the ground, like the World Trade Centre? Ever watched the video of it coming down? They didn't play it much on CNN or NBC. Ever wonder why? Because it's the smoking gun of the whole thing. It's proof because it's an obvious controlled demolition, which we all know takes weeks of planning, hence, foreknowledge of the attack, which means, an inside job.

The collapse of the towers was played, over and over again, on British TV, and it seemed obvious that a building would come down if a part was blown away far enough from the top, causing the top few storeys to crash down because what was holding them up had weakened from the heat and been taken away altogether by the impact. However, precisely because controlled demolitions take time and are invariably done after all the fixtures and fittings have been removed, and because there are not so many people in the controlled demolition industry that the government could find enough of them willing to take out two large buildings and neither tip off the WTC management, someone close to the workers or the local media in advance nor to talk to anyone about it afterwards, it is simply not possible for it to have been a controlled demolition.

Posted by Indigo Jo at 7:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

It's still open season on niqabis, as the Independent prints four letters in response to Deborah Borr's attack on them in Saturday's edition. The letters can be read here in the left-hand column (not paywalled). The first letter conveys feminist outrage, the second concerns about "trust" and "security", while the third and fourth are basically defensive.

Continue reading "Busybodies on niqab (2)" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 9:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

A woman called Deborah Orr (or should that be Deborah Borr) wrote an article for today's (Saturday's) Independent attacking Muslim women who cover their faces ([1], [2]), alleging that face coverings are "are physical manifestations of outdated, cruel and degrading traditions". The article is paywalled except for the first two paragraphs: the paper is the weakest of all the former broadsheets and the only one which paywalls its comments, laughably claiming that its "Portfolio" gives us access to "a collection of some of the best content on the web" (their star columnist is Robert Fisk, and you have to pay £10 a month just for his articles, and an extra tenner for the rest of their comments). So I'm going to answer this partly from memory of what I read on the news-stand in Borders, and partly in a more general sense. (More: here.)

Continue reading "Another busybody article about hijab" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 5:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (0)

A short letter in today's Sunday Telegraph wonders why Kilroy gave his party (of which we haven't heard much since it was founded; wonder why?) a Latin name, Veritas (meaning Truth in English or Pravda in Russian):

It is odd that he has called his party Veritas, which means "truth" in Latin, the language of intellectuals in Europe during the Middle Ages. Odder still that his party intends to take the United Kingdom out of the European Union. Is the English language not enough to provide his party with a name? Or does he intend us all to communicate in one of the languages used on the Continent of Europe?

Perhaps his intention is to destroy the EU rather than merely take the UK out of it.

Meanwhile, the prospective UK Independence Party candidate for Colne reveals an innovative policy for tracking asylum seekers. Because of EU rules, cattle can be tracked from birth to the dining table; the Government can't, on the other hand, track asylum seekers and illegal immigrants. So what do the UKIP plan to do? Assign each asylum seeker a cow.

Only trouble is, once they pull us out of the EU, the regulations on the tracking of cows (which are for human health reasons, to make sure we aren't fed beef products full of prion-rich offal) will no longer be part of UK law. How will they do their tracking then? Actually, when I read this I thought it was a joke, and I wonder if the Telegraph's editors did too. With policies like this, perhaps the Monster Raving Loony Party will agree to a merger.

Posted by Indigo Jo at 5:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Randhir Singh Bains of Gants Hill has got yet another letter in the Sunday Telegraph today (registration may be needed - it's free). (Bains, as I've pointed out before, is a frequent writer of letters to newspapers whose letters seem to get printed time after time; the content is usually against religious schools or even religious allowances in schools. What authority he has to merit letter after letter from him being printed has never been mentioned; I presume he has none.)

One way might be to abandon the policy of multiculturalism, in which the unit is no longer the rights-bearing citizen, but the religious group. People now see themselves not as British, but as Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus and Christians. Unless Mr Howard places integration at the centre of his immigration policy, fragmentation of Britain's national identity is likely to continue, and transform this country into a larger version of Lebanon or Northern Ireland.

This is a common lie, which has also been trotted out in the past by Denis MacEoin of Newcastle, known for his writings on the Baha'i sect which might explain his hostility to Islam. The Northern Ireland situation has nothing to do with multiculturalism: it's got to do with the planting of Scottish Protestants in Northern Ireland, who opposed (with arms) the formation of an Irish state because they feared that "Home Rule" meant "Rome rule". When the Irish Free State was formed, Northern Ireland was given its own parliament (at Stormont), which proceeded to deny the Catholic population their civil rights, which is what led to the Troubles of the 1970s onwards. All of this is very well-known and anyone who suggests otherwise is either ignorant or lying. The civil war in the Lebanon was similarly nothing to do with multiculturalism. The state of "Lebanon" had not existed before the French established it.

Nobody even suggests that "the unit is no longer the rights-bearing citizen ..." anyway. And in this country you can already get council support for projects aimed at ethnic groups, like Asians or Afro-Carribeans, but not for multi-ethnic religious groups. I once knew an Afro-Carribean Muslim from St. Lucia who ran a youth project for "Asian" youth in Hounslow, because the council wouldn't fund a project aimed at Muslim youth. I don't know how a person can be said to have rights when he (or she) can be forced to go against his or her religion in order to get an education.

Posted by Indigo Jo at 10:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)