When your cosmetics make others ill
Student kicked out of class because of her hair product? This article got flagged up on Facebook: an African-American schoolgirl was kicked out of class by a white teacher in Seattle because her hair...
Author: Matthew Smith
Some facts about the Flotilla massacre
In response to the massacre yesterday morning on the Turkish ship that was delivering aid to Gaza, Amad at Muslim Matters has posted an article refuting some of the specious claims by the Israeli...
What part of this is a privilege?
Black Women are Perceived as a Threat (from Womanist Musings) I wrote about the relationship of Muslims to "white privilege" here last May as part of a carnival organised by Brooke of Rolling Ruminations,...
Miss USA, Muslim role models and the state of our blogging community
The last week or so has seen yet another falling-out in the Muslim blogging community after Muslim Matters carried a guest column by a sister who said she couldn't cheer for Rima Fakih, the...
Wakefield, vaccines and ME
Earlier today, Dr Andrew Wakefield, who published a study in the Lancet, a major British medical journal suggesting that the triple vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) might be a cause of autism,...
Israel and old South Africa made ready allies
Today's Guardian had an exclusive story on how South Africa negotiated the purchase of nuclear weapons from Israel in the 1970s, and that there are documents that prove that Israel in fact had the...
Norman Geras demolishes Hitchens on niqab ban (partly)
I was directed by Islamophobia Watch to an article on Normblog taking apart Christopher Hitchen's arguments on the Slate website in favour of banning the niqaab in France and elsewhere. The Belgian parliament has...
White guy threatens to bomb airport, gets slap on wrist, much whingeing ensues
Last week a guy called Paul Chambers was fined a total of £1,000 (all but £385 of which was either costs or a "victim surcharge") for posting a tweet threatening to blow up an...
Guardian on ME and retroviruses, and other press coverage
First of all, this past week has been ME Awareness Week as I mentioned several times in my last article. This fact has got lost in all the election talk as might have been...
Jeremy Vine meets Kay Gilderdale again
This week is ME Awareness Week ([1], [2]), and a number of media appearances and articles have been scheduled, including two appearances from Kay Gilderdale (on Radio 2 today and, allegedly, on GMTV tomorrow...
Why Muslims shouldn’t fear proportional representation
Recently I’ve seen a discussion on Facebook in which one Muslim brother said we should not be so keen on proportional representation because it’s likely to lead to the BNP getting seats, which they...
Obligatory post-election post
So, the votes have been cast and most of them have been counted, and we definitely have a hung Parliament, although disappointingly the Tories are the biggest single party and the Lib Dems have...
Obligatory election post
I haven't written anything about this coming election so far. There are a variety of reasons for this: for one thing, I haven't had the inclination, despite having plenty of time on my hands,...
JPost editorial tells Europe how to deal with Muslim women
Jerusalem Post: Rejecting the burka As Muslims it's been our recent experience that many of the voices raised loudest against Muslims in the west have connections to Israel, particularly in the United States but...
To extradite a bed-ridden woman
Earlier today I read that a woman from mid-Wales who is bed-ridden with fibromyalgia and also suffers from Crohn’s disease, epilepsy and depression has been refused an appeal in the High Court against extradition...
Polygamy, “evolution” and mistreatment of women
The last week or so I’ve seen two articles about Muslim men who don’t respect women, one of them on Achelois’ blog, the other by Mariella Frostrup in last Sunday’s Observer, which Fareena Alam...
The two sick ladies and me
Recently I read two blog posts ([1], [2]) about dealing with old “friends” that pop up on Facebook, and it wasn’t the first time I’d heard of it being a problem. There seems to...
Me on the Late Show: transcript
Yesterday (Saturday) morning, I got to speak on the Late Show with Joanne Good on BBC London (94.9FM). She was doing a feature on bad comedy, specifically an incident in which Frankie Boyle, a...
Where conspiracy theories meet prejudice
Yesterday I got an old post at Muslim Matters, Muslims Need To Calm Down About Boycotts, tweeted to me while I was out in town, and I resolved to write a blog post about...
Why don’t people abandon support groups with bad policies?
Recently I read an article by Jodi Bassett, a campaigner on ME issues who suffers from the severe form of that illness, on the Planet Thrive website (it’s also posted on her own site)...