Blogs and flame wars

Anyone who reads the blogs linked here will have witnessed the flame war currently going on between “Dr Maxtor” and the Canadian Islamophobe who posts under various names on Izzy Mo’s blog. I am not entirely sure why Izzy Mo allows this to go on; the current “debate” has run into 18 posts, almost all entirely unrelated to the actual post.

One of the main reasons I moved to Movable Type in the first place was to get some control over who commented and who didn’t. The spam is incredibly frustrating, but not half as frustrating as deleting one post after another because Haloscan’s free comment service doesn’t allow multiple deletions. The person responsible for this knows he can’t post here, and so far hasn’t bothered trying.

I’m actually not averse to people disagreeing with me or criticising anything I say here; what I dislike, and won’t tolerate, is plain insults to Islam or generalised accusations of us being a fifth column or the like (besides which, people already have entire blogs devoted to this thesis and articulate it far more effectively than this moron does). As a Muslim I cannot tolerate this, and no free speech law anywhere obliges me to on my territory.

I would like to suggest to any blogger facing such a problem: delete the flames, and delete everything posted in reply. This way, if people have serious criticisms they may state them, while your blog does not rapidly turn into a cesspit of anti-Islamic slanging and counter-slanging.