Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective
One of the legacies of the child abuse witch hunt culture of the 1990s and early 2000s, which saw at least three innocent women sent to prison for “murdering” babies who in fact died in cot deaths, is cases like that of the Websters of Norfolk, whose three children were seized from them after doctors accused them of causing fractures to one of them deliberately, and adopted.
Today, 850 workers at the BMW plant in Oxford, which manufactures the Mini car, were fired because the company was facing falling sales. The Mini was a long-standing Austin/Rover product, which was saved when...
Br. Umar posted a YouTube video based on a recent American version of the reality TV show Wife Swap, in which an originally British, but naturalised American, man swapped with a family from Missouri,...
Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician notorious for making an anti-Muslim film called Fitna which was essentially a montage of all the worst stereotypes of violent Muslims, has been banned from entering the UK to...
Islamophobia Watch and a Muslim Facebooker drew my attention to the “scandal” of the head-teacher in Sheffield who was “forced out” after Muslim pupils (and, presumably, parents) objected to her whole-school assemblies. She had...
Al-Qaida fantasist tells court: I'm a professional liar (Guardian website) The Guardian reports on the most egregious of the "ex-extremist" fraternity, who, when the story about having actually been a terrorist got too hot...
This week, Carol Thatcher, a TV "personality", economist and daughter of Margaret Thatcher, the former Prime Minister, was dropped from a BBC TV show for calling a sportsman a golliwog. The remark was made...
I recently acquired (thanks Mum & Dad) a new Dell Inspiron 530 computer, and one of the first things I do in such circumstances (which don’t come that often, admittedly) is to install Linux...
Looking at the discussion which has ensued from Umar Lee’s original “Rand Institute Muslims” post two weeks ago, something which has stuck out is the oppositional attitude of some of the major contributors. It...
Snow in Kingston, February 2009 – a set on Flickr So, we’ve had the biggest snow fall in southern England since 1991 (which I remember fairly well; I was away at school), and the...
Does anyone out there (particularly in the UK; I’m not sure if it’s available anywhere else) like Kingfisher toothpaste? It’s an organic brand of toothpaste which is available in a variety of flavours, including...
Ben White of Fulcrum, a website for evangelical Anglican Christians, has drawn my attention to a review he has written of Patrick Sookhdeo’s 2007 book Global Jihad. While I’ve not read Sookhdevil’s book, this...
I have recently seen two articles ruminating on the causes of the recent credit crunch and resulting recession, one by Nick Cohen in the Observer Review last Sunday, and the second by Jaques Monin,...
BBC NEWS: White House plans open government An interesting report on how the Obama government intends to open up the White House website to search engines. Under Bush, they "blocked" search engines from indexing...
Umar Lee has posted an exposé of what he calls "Rand Institute Muslims" or RIMs as they supposedly exist in 21st-century America. Their characteristics, according to him, are "detachment from the Islamic Revival", supporting...
Gordon Brown today gave the go-ahead for the third runway at Heathrow airport, the international airport in the western suburbs of London. I posted what Simon Jenkins wrote about this disaster yesterday, and here...
The technology supplement to the Guardian published a letter from me today, concerning the "no clue" nature of Apple's attitude to low-cost computer kit. You can read what they published here, but here's what...
Trinny and Susannah are something of a national institution here; they are best known as the faces of What Not to Wear and a series of less well-known programmes since they left BBC and...
Simon Jenkins: A runway for jobs? It's time aviation's bluff was called (The Guardian) An excellent opinion piece on the stream of lies and broken promises which have led to the proposal for the...
Last night and the night before, there were discussions about knife crime on the BBC London station, based around a BBC Panorama programme in which Raphael Rowe, a BBC reporter who had been in...