Who speaks for Muslims?
muslimmatters.org » Tarek Fatah (and…) Does NOT Represent Me: Muslims 101 for Media Muslim Matters (in this case Amad) on the media’s insistence on relying on fringe figures for details of what is wrong...
Category: Media
Why Rochester is not a no-go area for Michael Nazir-Ali
Michael Nazir-Ali, bishop of Rochester (previously: [1], [2], [3]), has been given another bit of space in the Sunday Telegraph to write an Islamophobic article (also see front-page feature here). This time, he's alleging...
Anas el-Banna: New Statesman Person of 2007
New Statesman – Person of 2007 Anas el-Banna, the son of the Guantanamo detainee Jamil el-Banna, has won the New Statesman's Person of the Year Humanity Award for 2007 (the competition included anti-arms trade...
Policy Exchange report questioned
Rolled-up Trousers: Newsnight rips apart mosque extremism report A few questions were asked about the Policy Exchange report (which moaned about books saying things non-Muslims don’t like being sold in some mosque bookshops) on...
Today programme embarrassment
Technorati Tags: gillian gibbons Last Thursday morning, Ed Husain and Massoud Shadjareh (of the Islamic Human Rights Commission) appeared on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 – you can download it until next...
Ofcom supports “Undercover Mosque”
Last Monday, the British media regulator Ofcom published a ruling that the Channel 4 documentary Undercover Mosque was not in breach of its code of conduct (PDF here; it’s on page 9). The complaints,...
Woman killed for rejecting proposal on chat show
Woman killed after rejecting TV marriage proposal – Guardian Unlimited This is a story about a woman who was murdered in Spain after rejecting a marriage proposal from her violent partner, delivered on a...
A “big gun” fires blanks for Amis
Today, the Guardian printed a defence of Martin Amis, in response to Ronan Bennett’s deconstruction of Amis’s anti-Muslim remarks in his interview with Ginny Dougary. Entitled Martin Amis is no racist, the article took up the bottom half of two pages, with the top half empty apart from the headline. It seemed that a big gun had to be brought in to defend Amis – someone of Amis’s own supposed stature – but the arguments were astoundingly flabby.
What came before “PC” policing?
This morning’s potboiler issue on the Vanessa Feltz show was that the Metropolitan Police had scrapped its mascot, a 9-foot-high figure of a Police Community Support Officer (the recently introduced police-lite) called Steve, because...
Martin Amis’s “adumbrations” deconstructed
Ronan Bennett on Martin Amis's threatening remarks about Muslims | The Guardian | Guardian Unlimited Ronan Bennett takes apart the attacks made by Martin Amis on the Muslim community, including that in the Ginny...
NHS hymen repairs
The other day, Vanessa Feltz brought up the issue of the NHS offering hymen repairs to women of certain ethnic origins who need to appear to be virgins on their wedding night. Apparently, according...
Sunday Spew on Abdul Bari: see the irony?
Islamophobia Watch – Home – Muslim brands Britain 'Nazi' – according to the Express Islamophobia Watch prints an extract from today's sanctimonious carping from the Sunday Express in reaction to the comments by the...
Godson v Bunglawala on al-Jazeera
YouTube – Riz Khan – Has Islam been hijacked in the UK? – 31 Oct 07 This is a debate between Dean Godson of Policy Exchange, which published the report on “hate literature” in...
“Hate books” that aren’t
A report was published yesterday by the “Policy Exchange” alleging that so-called hate literature is widely available in British mosques (PDF), many of it subsidised by Saudi Arabia. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, this was published on the same day as a Saudi state visit. The report is written by Denis MacEoin, on whose letters to various newspapers I have commented here in the past. He is well-known for having anti-Islamic attitudes, having written letters to newspapers opposing Muslim girls’ rights to wear hijab and on one occasion alleging that “multiculturalism gets you Northern Ireland”, rather than invading someone’s country and gerrymandering a state so that your planted minority can rule over a section of the majority population in that country.
The Herbal Hill “heretics”
Melanie Phillips's Diary: "The Heretics Of Farringdon" Melanie Phillips on the recent resignation of the Observer's editor, Roger Alton, who has been in the position for ten years and under whose leadership the paper...
Dr Watson and the new race/IQ controversy
Fury at DNA pioneer's theory: Africans are less intelligent than Westerners – Independent Online Edition To be honest, I'm a bit shocked that this "news" appeared on the front of the Independent, and that...
The recent Eagleton vs Amis affair
Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | Rebuking obnoxious views is not just a personality kink This is an article by Terry Eagleton, who has been involved in a public argument with the novelist...
Medical students: getting picky with the facts
Muslim medical students get picky – Times Online This is an attempt to incite hostility to Muslims, based on the reported actions of a handful of ill-advised Muslim medical students. By the way, read...
Shiraz Maher fails to prove his point (again)
Last night, Shiraz Maher, a friend of Ed Husain's who was also a member of Hizb-ut-Tahrir in England (much more recently), fronted a BBC Panorama documentary entitled "How I Became a Muslim Extremist". He...
Nick Cohen on Saudi money power
Nick Cohen, in last Sunday’s Observer, posted an extraordinarily conspiracy-minded article about the Saudis’ financial muscle supposedly inhibits any investigation into their activities in the UK. He starts off on the subject of the...