The Times goes for the Tablighis
Muslim group behind ‘mega-mosque’ seeks to convert all Britain -Times Online The Times continues its hit job on the Deobandis (see earlier entry) with the claim that the Tablighi Jama'at, the "group behind the...
Category: Media
What have they got on Shaikh Riyadh?
The Times yesterday had a front-page "exposé" of the supposed "hardline take-over of British mosques" by what the writer called "a hardline Islamic sect whose leading preacher loathes Western values and has called on...
Intrusion as “art” or “journalism”
Right now the London South Bank Centre is playing host to the World Press Photo exhibition, containing “approximately 200 award-winning photographs from across the globe that capture the most powerful, moving and at times...
Lady Di: get over it, please!
Am I the only one who’s really sick of the bickering over the upcoming 10th anniversary of Lady Di’s death, and in particular, of it being front-page news? Yesterday and at the weekend, there...
The difference between hate and yob violence
Last month I wrote a review of Richard Littlejohn’s documentary “The War on Britain’s Jews?”, in which he presented as evidence of an upsurge of anti-Semitism an attack on a rabbi without mentioning that...
Gandhi’s long shadow
The Guardian: A Father Betrayed This article appeared in the Guardian as part of a "special" in their G2 supplement on Tuesday. You can read other articles here under "The New India", including an...
Dispatches: condemned, but not yet cancelled
I guess I've taken my time in jumping on the bandwagon of Muslim bloggers commenting on the condemnation, last week, of the Channel 4 Dispatches documentary, Undercover Mosque, in which a number of Muslim...
“Bakery” murder: no correction from the Observer
Last week the Observer printed a report on the murder of an American newspaper editor, Chauncey Bailey, by Black militants supposedly linked to "Your Black Muslim Bakery", dominated by a psuedo-Islamic sect that Bailey...
Who’ll be my role model?
Yesterday morning, on the Vanessa Feltz show, they were discussing the issue of Black role models – a topic which came out of the launch of a new internet-based Black-oriented TV station called "Colour...
A bit of corruption and a lot of hypocrisy
Was anyone else as shocked as I was by the front pages of some of this morning’s papers? At least two of the right-wing commercial papers led with the story of the BBC having...
Hospitality? What Hospitality?
This was the front page of today's Daily Express, or Daily Spew as I call it here, about an idiotic demonstration by a few women in "burkhas" against the sentencing of a group of...
Ali Eteraz on “reformed extremists”
Ali Eteraz: Media Reliance on Former Terrorists and Radicals is a Joke – Media on The Huffington Post An interesting article on the celebrity ex-extremists the media have recently been parading in front of...
Who are the feral beasts, then?
I was rather surprised to hear that Tony Blair, in a speech last Tuesday at Reuters’ HQ in London, had accused the media of behaving like “a feral beast, just tearing people and reputations...
‘Ed’ Husain and the Muslims’ dirty linen
Last Saturday the Guardian printed a full-page interview with “Ed” Husain (full name, Muhammad Mahbub Husain, as has already been established elsewhere on the Internet), the author of a memoir entitled The Islamist, recently published (although not that widely available, since I’ve yet to see it in any bookshop other than Foyles) in the UK to praise from, among those named by Madeleine Bunting, Martin Amis, Simon Jenkins, David Aaronovitch and Melanie Phillips, who published two blog entries ([1], [2]) telling us all to read it. I wrote a letter in reply on Monday (perhaps too late), but since it is Thusday and it has not yet been printed, I will reply here, insha Allah.
Express stokes hysteria over “Shari’a Court”
Islamophobia Watch – Home – 'Now Muslims Get Their Own Laws' This is a response to the shocking lead story in today's Daily Express, a disreputable newspaper which routinely leads with scare stories of...
Manal Omar, the ‘burkini’, the rude busybody and the local media
Manal Omar on her five piece Islamic swimsuit – The Guardian I don't know why I'm surprised that a woman has run into problems wearing an all-over swimsuit; Manal Omar's run-in with some staff...
Toynbee: the press’s hypocrisy
Guardian Unlimited: Our press, the worst in the west, demoralises us all Polly Toynbee (someone with whom I agree vary rarely) on the hypocritical media condemnations of the sailors who were captured by Iran....
Gay Humanists offer Spencerian bigotry
Islamophobia Watch drew my attention to an article by Barbara Smoker, former president of the National Secular Society, in the latest edition of the Gay Humanist Quarterly. The edition is freely downloadable but is...
Westminster’s plague of lawyers
George Monbiot: A glut of barristers at Westminster has led to a crackdown on dissent This was in today’s Guardian (also find it, with references, here at George Monbiot’s own archive). The context is...
On Zia Sardar and the Power 100
Once in a blue moon I find myself agreeing with the ultra-modernist Ziauddin Sardar, who writes a column in the New Statesman (you can see what I’ve written about his other writings in the “ZiaWatch” category). In this week’s New Statesman, he has an article in reaction to the recently published “Muslim Power 100”, which was sponsored by the Islamic Bank of Britain and Carter Andersen (I’m not sure what they do, because the only website under their name is at the time of writing suspended for non-payment of hosting fees). This is supposedly a list of the hundred most powerful Muslims (or people with Muslim names) in the UK right now.