No “vive la France” from me, sorry
Yesterday, France won the World Cup and the day before, England lost the third-place play-off match to Belgium after losing a semi-final to Croatia last Wednesday. I had not been following the matches all...
Category: Islamophobia
Why is Quilliam pamphleteering about FGM?
Last week Quilliam, the self-styled counter-extremism think-tank set up by former member of Hizb-ut-Tahreer Maajid Nawaz, released a pamphlet on FGM written by one Muna Adil, complete with a foreword by Ayaan Hirsi Ali,...
Times forced to admit: we printed garbage
Last year, the Times carried a story that a young girl of Christian background had not been allowed to eat pork under her Muslim foster carers' roof, on their front page. They also claimed...
Does it matter where the term ‘Islamophobia’ comes from?
Why are so many left-wing progressives silent about Islam’s totalitarian tendencies? by Julie Bindel (free registration required) This article is on Unherd, a right-leaning opinion site edited by Tim Montgomerie (founder of ConservativeHome), and...
When racists rage against racism
The controversy that started last week when someone dug up a five-year-old Facebook comment by Jeremy Corbyn on a picture of an anti-Semitic mural by an obscure London artist has not gone away. What...
Thinking of becoming a Tory?
This week someone dug up a Facebook post from October 2012 by a muralist called "Mear One" which shows a mural of a bunch of bearded figures (which he explains as representing Jewish bankers)...
Silent liberals?
Last week a half-hour feature by Nick Cohen of the Observer on the supposed "silence of the liberals" on the 'plight' of liberal Muslims in the UK who are, he alleges, facing death threats...
It’s not just the Far Right
Yesterday (Friday), Darren Osborne, who drove a van into a crowd of Muslims after a night-time prayer (taraweeh) last Ramadan and killed a 51-year-old worshipper, Makram Ali (right), who had collapsed prior to the...
Review: Panorama, “White Fright”
Last night a 30-minute Panorama programme was shown on BBC1 that looked at Blackburn, a town of about 140,000 in Lancashire (north-western England) where the white British majority live largely separate lives from the...
It was the Muslims
So, last Friday the school in Newham, a borough in east London with a large Asian and Somali Muslim presence, which had introduced a ban on girls under age 8 wearing the hijab or...
What’s “not Canada”?
This is a front page from today's Toronto Sun about the 11-year-old girl who was attacked in the street by a man who cut her hijab with a pair of scissors as she walked...
Review: House of Saud, episode 1
So, last night the first episode of a three-part series on BBC2, House of Saud: A Family at War was broadcast. I commented on the trailer last night as the language had been troubling...
Whose side is Tell MAMA on?
I've long been suspicious of the motives and loyalty of "Tell MAMA", the project set up to monitor and report on hate crimes against Muslims. It's not that it's a bad thing for there...
Why ‘Islamophobia’ is relevant
I've had an 'Islamophobia' category on this blog for as long as I can remember (my first post in it was about Oriana Fallaci in September 2006). Much of my work in writing it...
Hijab and primary school girls: not compulsory, but …
In the past week the 'issue' of primary school age Muslim girls wearing hijab to school has been on the front pages of some newspapers as the chief inspector of schools announced that her...
Home-schooling: the Muslim and autistic perspectives
The Sunday Times reported today (gleefully as you might expect) that Alexandra Spelman, the head of Ofsted, the British schools inspectorate, had announced a plan for her inspectors to ask primary school-age girls who...
Hijabi versus liberal Muslima
The other day Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, a popular Muslimah poet and blogger, drew my attention to an advertisement she'd seen in a mosque in Birmingham. It was from a BBC radio producer looking for "an...
Home schooling is vital
Hot on the heels of the Tower Hamlets Muslim foster care hoax, the Times today printed a story (behind firewall) claiming that home schooling was part of "a breeding ground for extremists and future...
Snooping round our door
Earlier today I heard an interview with Sir Martin Narey, a former director-general of the prisons service and later chief executive of the Natoinal Offender Management Service, then CEO of Barnardo's and more recently...
Why did they lie?
Earlier today I saw an article on Medium titled "Why did Andrew Norfolk lie?". Andrew Norfolk is the investigative reporter who wrote the story about the "Christian" girl being fostered with the Muslim foster...