Murtadd Nazir-Ali on defending all faiths
The BBC reports that the bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, has some opinions on the Prince of Wales' plan to be "Defender of Faith" when (or if) he takes the throne: The Prince of...
Author: Matthew Smith
Beeb News: Confrontation Culture
The BBC has a "Magazine" feature on Confrontation Culture – the apparently peculiarly British phenomenon of public shouting matches: It's an everyday scene. I'm in a supermarket and without explanation or apparent provocation, there's...
Abuse of women op-ed writers
This is a piece I found linked on [Comment is Free](http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/index.html)’s “Best of the Web” section: all about the hate mail directed at women who write op-ed columns, particularly those of a liberal tendency;...
Francis Maude in Emel magazine
Francis Maude, chairman of the Conservative Party, has a column in the latest edition of emel magazine (June 2006, issue 21, not online yet but available in Borders), entitled A Party for All People. The article discusses at length the party’s recent drive to recruit more female and ethnic minority candidates, including Muslims.
Kira Cochrane on the C-word
Kira Cochrane, the recently-appointed women’s editor of the Guardian who wrote the piece on sexual harrassment from which I got my “Holla Back” link from a few weeks back, has written another article (with strong language) in the New Statesman on a similar theme: the wide spread of the C-word in popular culture.
Dual national threatened with deportation
The latest twist in the sorry tale of the UK government's media-dictated crackdown on "foreign criminals" involves a British-Pakistani dual national, who did time for what his sister describes (in Socialist Worker, so far...
Swiss spy reveals “extremists” as agents
Via Izzy Mo, this story in the LA Times is all about a Swiss man who was recruited as a spy, infiltrated Tariq Ramadan's circle in Switzerland and eventually converted to Islam. Among the...
“Armchair hooligans” to be banned from football
From the "you couldn't make it up" department (this is from yesterday, but I've just remembered that I meant to blog it …) Armchair hooligans face ban at domestic matches – Britain – Times...
Yellow star lie debunked
In case anyone came in having recently read Melanie Phillips' diary where the writer has still not bothered to delete or amend her most recent entry which repeats a false report from the Canadian...
Communists for freedom at Conway Hall
Yesterday evening there was a meeting held by the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association, at which Peter Tatchell (OutRage), Ali Hilli (OutRage’s Middle East spokesman) and Houzan Mahmoud of the so-called Organisation of Women’s Freedom of Iraq spoke.
Imam Zaid: What We Should Be Teaching Our Children
Here is an article from Zaytuna Institute by Imam Zaid Shakir, on What We Should Be Teaching Our Children (hat tip: Abu Eesa. It is a pretty comprehensive article about instilling taqwa in children,...
Bindel: I’m glad Arsenil lost
An amusing article from Julie Bindel (very rare indeed for me to agree with anything she writes) on [why she’s glad the Gunners lost](http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/julie_bindel/2006/05/i_am_glad_aresnal_lost.html) in the match with Barça last night. Particularly interesting is...
Crocodile tears for Ayaan
With Ayaan Hirsi Magan’s resignation after the exposure of her asylum grounds as largely false and her Dutch citizenship now in serious doubt, the hypocritical crocodile tears are beginning to flow in large numbers. Robert Spencer calls it “persecution”, the immigration minister Rita Verdonk “lamentable” and the politicians involved “despicable, black-hearted Dutch dhimmis” who “evidently want to take the greatest stateman they have produced in this age and send her back to Somalia and certain death”. Melanie Phillips talks of the Dutch being “in the throes of a pathological moral convulsion” and her downfall “a development that shames the Dutch people and should strike a chill throughout the rest of dhimmi Europe”.
British Museum hosts Islamic art exhibition
BBC NEWS: The word in contemporary Islamic art The British Museum is putting on an exhibition of modern “Islamic art”, that is to say, Middle Eastern art since the 1980s, which the Museum has...
Far right tries to kick off in Austria
From A Fistful of Euros, a report on how Austria's interior minister used media reports and an academic study whose author has yet to draw his conclusions as the basis for accusing Austria's Muslim...
Guardian: Mubarak’s thugs’ abuse of women
From today's Guardian, Simon Tisdall on how Hosni Mubarak's thugs sexually molest female demonstrators both in police custody and in the street: "They drove me to Sayyida Zeinab police station. I screamed and resisted...
Why I detest all this anti-rights rhetoric
Last week Umar Lee blogged a piece about “child terrorists” who rampage in the streets of New York every day of the school year. The young thugs get out of school and terrorise the...
Ayaan Hirsi jumps before she’s pushed
Belfast Telegraph: MP may be deported over claims she lied to win asylum (also here) A Dutch TV documentary has alleged that Ayaan Hirsi Ali told a number of lies in order to gain...
Salma Yaqoob: the women voted for me
From Comment is Free, Salma Yaqoob's rebuttal to Nick Cohen's assessment of why she was elected as Birmingham's only Muslim woman councillor (here, with my rebuttal here). She accuses the local Labour and Lib...
Gotcha! Radio 4 phone-in’s a spoof
MediaGuardian.co.uk: Gotcha! On how the Radio 4 team duped its audience into thinking it was going downmarket and hiring an unknown presenter who’d supposedly only been on the airwaves in Canada to do a...