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KFC and the BNP

Posted on 11th May, 2009 by

Indigo Jo

Harry’s Place » KFC and the BNP

Edmund Standing at Harry’s Place on the Islamophobic reaction to the decision by KFC to offer halaal meat at eight of their outlets. The usual suspects have been whingeing, among them Robert Spencer who detects “Islamic supremacist assertions that non-Muslims must abide by Islamic norms”, when in fact this is plainly a move by a commercial organisation to please its customers, or attract more customers:

Now firstly, KFC is an American company and its restaurants are famous for serving Southern fried chicken. I’m not wanting to come over all Naomi Klein on the issue, but if there is any kind of ‘colonisation’ going on here it’s colonisation by American culture, given the fact there are now 720 KFC stores nationwide, all of which are no doubt contributing to the ‘crushing’ of our ‘indigenous’ fish and chip shops and greasy spoon cafes by ‘invading’ the British market with their foreign chicken dishes. How ironic that an insular minded political party that professes a hatred of globalisation should be so upset about what happens to American fast food chains in this country.

Secondly, what a load of nonsense anyway. Businesses, last time I checked, work on the basis of making a profit from serving their customers with a desired product. It is quite obvious why KFC is trialling halal meat and it has nothing to do with ‘colonisation’ by a Muslim conspiracy and everything to do with making more money. If you go into any urban area in Britain with a significant Muslim presence you will find that almost all independent outlets selling fried chicken are halal certified. There is a good financial reason for doing this - it means more customers. And, despite ethical issues surrounding ritual slaughter, I never saw any shortage of non-Muslim customers frequenting such fast food businesses in my time living in Cardiff, London, and Birmingham. After all, let’s face it, if you don’t care about the birds having to live their entire lives shut away in factory farms, it’s hard to see why you should suddenly be so filled with compassion for them at their moment of death.

Given the fact that numerous independent restaurants and smaller chains already sell halal chicken wings and chicken burgers, it is clearly counterproductive for KFC not to.

Posted in Islamophobia, Robert Spencer |

Scaremongering over Muslim demographics

Posted on 9th May, 2009 by

Indigo Jo

Recently, a video has been popping up on various Muslim blogs ([1], [2], [3]), attempting to raise fears among Westerners that Muslim birth rates are vastly outstripping non-Muslim ones, to the point that some western European countries will have Muslim majorities by the middle of this century. Another example of this kind of scaremongering appeared on the Telegraph’s blog site (which, regardless of the impression the site might give, is not restricted to Telegraph columnists; it appears that anyone can get a blog there) by some guy called Ed West, “a journalist and social commentator who specialises in politics, religion and low culture”. West compares those on the left who “kept silent” about the issue of declining European birth rates coupled with rising Muslim ones to those on the right who “kept silent” about man-made climate change, until Hurricane Katrina forced the issue out into the open.

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Posted in Islamophobia |

Muslims, Islam Channel and QF: who represents who?

Posted on 6th May, 2009 by

Indigo Jo

The Quilliam Foundation recently put out a so-called “alert” about Islam Channel which drew attention to the “undesirable” elements which, they claim, account for “many of its speakers”. Those they name include Azad Ali of Islamic Forum, Yasir Qadhi of al-Maghrib, Inayat Bunglawala and various members of Hizb-ut-Tahrir. Amad at Muslim Matters has already posted a refutation, extensively exploring the role of the media in foisting representatives on the Muslim community who are, in fact, representatives of them and not the community, and defending the reputation of Yasir al-Qadhi. The same organisation also recently published an “alert” against Osama Saeed, an occasional blogger whose links with the Muslim Brotherhood are no secret, who was recently selected to stand for Parliament for the Scottish National Party.

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Posted in Ed Husain, Shiraz Maher |

Yasmin Alibi-Brain on Islam, women and justice

Posted on 4th May, 2009 by

Indigo Jo

Update (6th May): The Independent printed a letter from me in response. See here - it’s the third section down, under “Don’t blame Islam for these injustices”. ما شا الله

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: Who’d be female under Islamic law? - Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in the Independent

This appeared in the Independent today (I normally read the Guardian, as you all probably know, but I generally stop to browse some of the other papers while approaching the supermarket checkout) and, while I don’t expect Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to say anything positive about Islam or Islamic law, this is so obviously full of red herrings that its printing should be a mystery (but isn’t). Her examples include the recent hanging of Delara Darabi in Iran, the imprisonment of Roxana Saberi in Iran, and the story of Rania al-Baz, the Saudi TV presenter who was battered by her husband.

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Posted in Windbags |

Contract doctor gave fatal overdose

Posted on 4th May, 2009 by

Indigo Jo

Guardian: Exhausted relief doctor gave patient fatal dose

This is about how a doctor working for an NHS contractor gave a 70-year-old patient a fatal overdose of diamorphine (heroin), apparently due to lacking concentration due to having only had three hours of sleep before starting his shift and having to make a circumnavigation of East Anglia during the night, on the “wrong” side of the road and without a navigation system. Even taking into account the fact that most of the roads he would have had to use were dual carriageways, I can well believe that NHS contractors (this company was a subcontractor of a subcontractor) are requiring people to work in unreasonable and stressful conditions to keep costs down, as I have personally done home deliveries for a contractor in London, and I’ve never had a delivery round which lasted less than twelve hours despite a quoted finishing time of much less than that. These sorts of disasters will go on until those who run the NHS realise that profit-making companies only care about the bottom line, not about quality or anything else that cannot be measured in pounds and pence.

More here and you can read the doctor’s apology letter (forwarded to the family) here.

Posted in News |

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Amad debunks Quilliam hit job

Posted on 4th May, 2009 by

Indigo Jo

Amad at Muslim Matters has posted a refutation of a “hit job” article issued by the so-called Quilliam Foundation against a number of Muslim figures and organisations including Inayat Bunglawala, Yasir al-Qadhi and the Global Peace and Unity event, and also examines the tendency of the media and politicians to impose representatives on the Muslim community who have no real authority within it. You can view it at Muslim Matters or see this PDF. (Insha Allah, I intend to post my own article on this subject when I get round to writing it.)

Posted in Ed Husain, Shiraz Maher |

Why not slaughter all the pigs?

Posted on 3rd May, 2009 by

Indigo Jo

I’m sure we’ve all heard by now about the Egyptian government’s move to slaughter all of the country’s stock of pigs, kept by the Coptic Christian minority, supposedly in response to the outbreak of “swine flu” originating in Mexico. I use the inverted commas because it ceased to be swine flu in reality some weeks ago; it’s flu, plain and simple, being passed from human to human. In this, the Israeli health minister who suggested it should be called Mexican flu is correct.

Unless someone can demonstrate that pigs are a recent import in Egypt, brought over by the British or Napoleon, it stands to reason that pigs have been farmed in Egypt since before Muslims were present, and Muslims have been in Egypt almost from the beginning of Islam. As is usual, they were allowed to keep pigs because not all of the Shari’ah applies to non-Muslims in an Islamic state. This would mean that pigs were present in Egypt for hundreds of years under the Khilaafa, including the Rightly Guided Caliphs, (رضي الله عنهم). No doubt there have been outbreaks of flu in that time which originated with them, and with the Muslims’ chickens for that matter. I don’t suppose the Caliphs slaughtered thousands of pigs or chickens in, say, Iraq or Morocco to hold back the epidemic once it had already started, by passing to human beings!

This is grandstanding, very obviously — Mubarak, a notoriously corrupt quasi-dictator, trying to look pious by doing something which generations of rulers who, righteous or not, ruled by the Shari’ah, did not do, rather like the Taliban who destroyed the Buddhas just as a show to the West and to their partisans, something that generations of better rulers than themselves never did. Muslims should not applaud him in this; it is a publicity stunt with no conceivable benefits to public health as any outbreak of the Mexican flu will be blown on the wind or brought by travellers from Europe or the USA, not from Egyptian pigs. In fact, if Egypt’s pigs are less intensively farmed than those in Mexico — kept in huge factory “farms” in which thousands of pigs are kept in the dark and walking in their own shit — then those pigs are far less likely to cause an outbreak of flu than those in Europe or North America.

Posted in Muslim world |

The politics of Gurkha resettlement

Posted on 3rd May, 2009 by

Indigo Jo

The astonishing history of a 200-year-old British-Gurkha friendship | UK news | The Guardian

This is an article from yesterday’s Guardian about the issue of whether all of the older ex-Gurkhas should be allowed to settle in the UK; the author, who served in a Gurkha unit as a conscript in the 1950s during the Malaya “emergency”, supports it, with some reservation:

On the government side, the Home Office fears a massive influx of ex-Gurkhas and their extended families, while the Ministry of Defence worries about the effects on future recruiting of Gurkhas should there be a large exodus of ex-Gurkhas from Nepal and the Nepalese government cease to benefit from pensions now being paid in Nepal - effects that may become critical with a Maoist-dominated government already hostile to the idea of Nepali nationals serving in an overseas army.

On the other side, there is the question of just how representative of Gurkha opinion the activist Gurkha Army Ex-Servicemen’s Organisation (GAESO) is. Field Marshal Lord Bramall, in a recent letter to the press, refers to GAESO without naming it, when he writes that he is confident “a great many serving Gurkhas regard this recent activism as ‘trade unionism’ that discredits their soldiers and is in any event counterproductive”. Perhaps so, but then serving Gurkhas already have the privileges that those who retired before the 1997 watershed - when the Brigade of Gurkhas left their Hong Kong base and were relocated in the UK en masse (thus acquiring the right of UK residence along with parity of pensions with British troops) - are still fighting for, and may not wish to see the applecart overturned.

There is also the matter of costs. Should there be a large influx of pre-1997 ex-Gurkhas and their families, their pensions, which were designed to provide a comfortable enough retirement in Nepal, would be quite inadequate to live on in this country. This would mean either that these pensions would have to be increased or that the government would be having to deal with large numbers of welfare claims - both expensive options.

(The Gurkhas, by the way, are a unit of the British army recruited from Nepal, a relic of the days of British colonial rule in India; the officers are British. They were based in Hong Kong until 1997.)

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Posted in Politics |

The need for constructive discussion on tariqa problems

Posted on 30th April, 2009 by

Indigo Jo

The last few weeks have seen an upsurge in attacks on shaikhs on various blogs, particularly on Umar Lee’s site and Salafi Burnout. It all started with Umar’s post about so-called Rand Institute Muslims and particularly Shaikh Hamza Yusuf, but the “discussion” quickly moved on to the subject of Shaikh Muhammad al-Ya’qoobi and Shaikh Nuh Keller, with a number of angry messages left on those two blogs, and a few on mine back in January and early February, mainly criticising the way Shaikh Nuh and some of those around him handle the personal affairs of students in Kharabsheh, the district of Amman where the shaikh’s zawiya and the Qasid Arabic school are located, and which is home to a number of western students.

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Posted in Community |

Rachel North: no truth or justice yet

Posted on 28th April, 2009 by

Indigo Jo

Rachel from North London has posted her reaction to the verdicts in the terrorism trial at Kingston Crown Court today:

So there will never be justice, but there can be the other thing so badly wanted and needed by the victims; the truth to be told, and the best way for that to happen - for the complex picture of what was known, by whom and when, what decisions were made, such as deciding not to prioritise the men who became the 7/7 bombers as investigative targets and so on - is to have an independent inquiry.

An inquiry independent of the government and the security services and the police, with the power to compel and cross examine witnesses, go through evidence in detail, and write a report and recommendations which will be acted upon and so, we hope, save lives and spare suffering in future. This is what we have asked for, for over three years now. We have been prevented from having one because of the legal processes - the trials that have followed 7/7, as a result of which some men have been jailed for planning terror offences and others have been acquitted. Now those trials are completed, we are still waiting.

The families still wait for inquests - unsure still when they will happen and whether they will be held in secret or not - under the terms of the Coroners and Justice Bill legislation.

The survivors and families wait - along with the British public - for the ISC report, to see if this time it answers our questions about what was known about the bombers before they struck. And all of us wait, not for justice, nor for ‘closure’ - this is not therapy, this is thankless hard and sad work, especially today, when it is my wedding anniversary and I have cancelled the celebrations to go and talk about this yet again on the news and Newsnight - but I wait, we wait for the truth to finally be told, in the hope that, one day soon, it will.

A significant point she makes is that the 2005 bombers were not, as politicians claimed at the time, “clean skins” — Siddique Khan in particular was well-known to the security services, was close to people who were plotting to let off a fertiliser bomb, had been taped talking about jihad (presumably, not just in theory — otherwise he would have been by no means alone in this) and had perpetrated a £20,000 fraud against the Jewsons building supplies company. Of course, it’s next to impossible to be a “clean skin” by the time you get to let off a bomb, as you will no doubt have been mixing with people known to the authorities if they are doing their job properly, but the idea that terrorists could come out of nowhere — that any Muslim could be a terrorist — obviously contributes to the air of suspicion against Muslims in general.

Posted in London bombings |

Kids are kids

Posted on 27th April, 2009 by

Indigo Jo

Editor-At-Large: Our bitching and bullying is a form of class warfare - Janet Street-Porter, Commentators - The Independent

Yesterday, this article by Janet Street-Porter on the depressing saga of the boy who represented the UK at the Beijing Olympics last year but faced only teasing and bullying from the inadequates at his school appeared in the Indepdent on Sunday. The boy has now been removed from the school after the riff-raff, who had been inciting younger boys to join in their campaign, threatened to break his legs.

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Posted in Education, Media, Racism |

BBC: Twin sisters, two faiths

Posted on 25th April, 2009 by

Indigo Jo

BBC - BBC Radio 4 Programmes - Twin Sisters, Two Faiths

Anna Scott-Brown about their choices to follow two very different faiths - Islam and Christianity. They discuss their strongly-held but separate beliefs, and how this affects their relationship within the family. As their own lives unfold, they also have to confront their mother’s terminal illness and come to terms with what her death will mean to them.

This was on last Tuesday, so will be available for another two days to listen online (you will need Flash, I think), or you can hear it on Radio 4 tomorrow at 8pm. I very much recommend listening to it.

Posted in Uncategorized |

“Civil war” in US anti-Muslim blogosphere

Posted on 22nd April, 2009 by

Indigo Jo

The Washington Independent » Civil War Raging in Right-Wing Blogosphere

Or how the alliance between Little Green Footballs and its numerous offspring of mostly Christian (and sometimes Jewish), right-wing, anti-Muslim blogs have fallen out since the Bush administration ended. I haven’t read many of them very often recently because they are very difficult to debate with as they are so closed-minded (much the same can be said of the commenters at Harry’s Place, although the actual regular posters are more reasonable), but there is some schadenfreude in watching these bigots fall out with each other, with Charles Johnson of LGF accusing the Christian sites’ owners of rubbing shoulders with European fascists, while the latter accuse Johnson, who designed at least one of their websites, of having gone mad in the last year, of being a control freak and banning anyone who disagrees with him.

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Posted in Blogs, Far right, Islamophobia |

Erith scandal: a sign of Labour’s degradation

Posted on 20th April, 2009 by

Indigo Jo

I have not had anything to say about the Draper/McBride smear story, mainly because the government actually had nothing to do with it, and it was all about suggestions being passed around by staff which had yet to be acted upon. The issue of the Erith by-election, in which the “party machine” is effectively sponsoring the 22-year-old daughter of Lord Gould, a close aide to Tony Blair, in preference to candidates with genuine local connections, is more disturbing in terms of what it says about the party and how it operates internally.

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Posted in Politics |

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Rising anger at police thuggery

Posted on 17th April, 2009 by

Indigo Jo

Since the G20 protests three weeks ago, there has been a rising tide of protest against the thuggish behaviour of the police which was witnessed, and recorded, by demonstrators and some bystanders, particularly at the protest in the City. While the practice of penning demonstrators into the site of the protest for several hours after the event should have passed off has had its defenders, the videoed evidence that a man who died, allegedly of a heart attack, had been attacked by police officers without any provocation has caused outrage, and rightly so.

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Posted in Civil liberties |

Refuting Taj Hargey: hadith and McCarthyism

Posted on 14th April, 2009 by

Indigo Jo

Taj Hargey had a lengthy whinge printed in The Times last Friday, in which he complained of having been “victimised, like other forward-looking Muslims, by a campaign of classic McCarthyism”:

Just as Senator Joseph McCarthy ruined the lives of countless Americans during the 1950s when he and his committee smeared innocent people as communists, the Muslim hierarchy in Britain have used witchhunts to maintain their unquestioned theological power. Any Muslim freethinker is automatically branded as heretical or un-Islamic and excommunicated from the community - and debate is shut down.

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Posted in Taj Hargey |

Should women de-feminise for the office?

Posted on 12th April, 2009 by

Indigo Jo

There is an article published on the London Times website yesterday, by a woman commenting on the opinion of the dressmaker to Gordon Brown’s wife, a woman whose day job is at a hedge fund, that women should not be “afraid to be women” and wear a dress (like one of hers) to the office. The author, Helen Rumbelow, says that in fact, the workplace is a masculine environment and that in such environments, women are better off behaving, and dressing, like men.

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Posted in Work |

Waterloo Road stretches the bounds of credibility

Posted on 10th April, 2009 by

Indigo Jo

OK, so hands up who’s watched Waterloo Road? It’s a BBC drama series set in a northern English urban school. It’s run for a number of series, but this one has gone all out for drama, and in doing so has bordered on the ridiculous, in plot terms.

All the issues raised in the programme are real: teenage shootings, a crooked coach trying to make a Dwaine Chambers out of an aspiring boxer (and nearly making a Michael Watson of his opponent), child trafficking … but the idea of all these things — all these things — happening in one school, in one term, is stupid. To be honest, I found the programme stretched things a bit with the shooting plot, in which both a pupil and a teacher who had been threatened with a gun by a new boy, pretty much kept quiet, letting his 11-year-old brother rot in jail for several weeks, until the real gunman murdered his girlfriend (after she discovered that he had fathered a child with another woman, who was living in a shack, and the pair of them were planning to sell the child).

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Posted in Reviews |

Smug charlatan Hargey screws thousands out of Muslim Weekly

Posted on 9th April, 2009 by

Indigo Jo

Taj Hargey has won a five-figure sum (also reported here and here) from the Muslim Weekly, a slim tabloid published in London, for their claim that he was a Qadiani. This claim was inaccurate, but the “damage to his reputation” was nothing in the order of five figures since he belongs to the anti-hadith movement which, like Qadianism, is a disbelieving sect which claims Islam while actually being at enmity with the Muslims.

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Posted in Taj Hargey |

Riding a tiger through stupid protest laws

Posted on 7th April, 2009 by

Indigo Jo

Today there was a substantial impromptu demonstration in London by Sri Lankan Tamils, who first occupied Westminster Bridge before being forced by riot police into the centre of Parliament Square, where they still were in the mid-afternoon, and might still be now for all I know. I went along with my camera to witness this extraordinary event, and you can see the pictures here.

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Posted in London life |