Muslims, show us your moderation (for the 1,236th time)
On the same day that the Times (and the ITV evening news) featured a Populus opinion poll which supposedly showed that 13% of Britain’s Muslims think that the four men who carried out the...
Category: Media
“Left to pick up the pieces”
This week’s Media Guardian on the invasion of Beeston, the home town of three out of the four people who bombed London last July, by reporters who had no idea of what sensitivity means:...
New Statesman slanders Dr Quick, boosts Hargey
This week’s New Statesman (the first I’ve had through the door on a now ended subscription offer of £4.80 for three months) has on its front page a feature marking the anniversary of the 7th July bombings last year. There are two long articles, one by Shiv Malik (yep, him again) on the background of the bomber Shazad Tanweer and one by Ziauddin Sardar (yep, him again) on young British Muslims. Laughably Shiv’s feature is entitled The Suicide Bomber in his own words, which refers to the personal statement on his UCAS (university application) form that he’s managed to get hold of. Depressingly, as I noted last year when writing about political magazine coverage of the bombings, these two were the only voices within the community the NS could find, with Shiv concentrating on Hizbut-Tahreer, which had nothing to do with the bombings.
Imperialist fairy-tales
Thanks to Pickled Politics for reminding me of this … a quite comprehensive article in today's Guardian debunking recent attempts to whitewash the British empire: Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | The story...
Zia Sardar on intelligence
Zia Sardar in the current edition of the New Statesman on the folly of “intelligence-led” police operations:
Don’t be fooled by the mantra that intelligence is an extremely difficult business, prone to absurdly wide margins of error. If that were so, Britain would have lost the Second World War. The remarkable success of British intelligence, including counter-intelligence, during that war proves that we can produce reasonable – say, 25 or even 50 per cent – rates of success.
The perils of off-the-peg American policy
Two interesting articles regarding the British government's enthusiasm for adopting US policies into British criminal law: First, from this week's New Statesman: Martin Bright explains why our ministers seem always to look to the...
Police chief: government ARE caving in to press
Finally, the head of a police force comes out and says what a lot of us have been saying for months if not years: that the Government is caving in to bullying from the...
Forest Gate: it was either this or that
STOP PRESS: the Forest Gate brothers have been released Plus: in this week's New Statesman, former editor Peter Wilby on the contradictory stories of the events last Friday: The brothers who lived there were...
Londonistan panned in the New Statesman
New Statesman – Books – Losing the plot Brendan O'Neill (of Spiked Online) reviews Melanie Phillips' "hysterical" new book Londonistan and accuses it of repeating rumours and claims which have been debunked in an...
PhobeWatch: UCL debate, Whitaker on Manji, reply to Mad Mel
A few interesting entries at Islamophobia Watch which I'll deal with in one entry, insha Allah: (1) There's a panel debate this Wednesday at University College London, including Dr Hisham Hellyer, Tariq Ramadan, Dr...
Inayat Bunglawala in death threat controversy
Little Green Footballs alleges that they received a death threat from a machine owned by Reuters last Friday. The threat came after someone posted a link to a LGF article in response to an...
More on female commentators and abuse
MediaGuardian.co.uk | Media | The anarchy and the ecstasy Further from the earlier link about female "pundits" and the abuse they get, Georgina Henry reports on the culture at Comment is Free (the Guardian's...
Ben Marshall on Runnymede and Islamophobia
In this month’s New Humanist there’s a one-page article by Ben Marshall (a freelance journalist) on Islamophobia, in which the author “embraces his phobia”, defending it as “an entirely reasonable and honourable intellectual position”. The magazine is a bi-monthly, founded in 1885 as the Literary Review, and claims that it “has distinguished itself as a world leader in supporting and promoting humanism and rational inquiry and opposing religious dogma, irrationalism and bunkum wherever it is found”. A typical issue will feature ridicule of some aspect of religion – the present issue has a short piece about Malaysians discussing where to face in prayer when in space, for example. Marshall starts off by attacking those who try to defend Muslims from Islamophobia, including the Runnymede Trust (a race relations body which published a report on Islamophobia in 1997) and the blog Islamophobia Watch. He also makes it clear that he is generally anti-religious and, like a lot of secular humanists, lumps religion in with superstition.
Abuse of women op-ed writers
This is a piece I found linked on [Comment is Free](http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/index.html)’s “Best of the Web” section: all about the hate mail directed at women who write op-ed columns, particularly those of a liberal tendency;...
Kira Cochrane on the C-word
Kira Cochrane, the recently-appointed women’s editor of the Guardian who wrote the piece on sexual harrassment from which I got my “Holla Back” link from a few weeks back, has written another article (with strong language) in the New Statesman on a similar theme: the wide spread of the C-word in popular culture.
Gotcha! Radio 4 phone-in’s a spoof
MediaGuardian.co.uk: Gotcha! On how the Radio 4 team duped its audience into thinking it was going downmarket and hiring an unknown presenter who’d supposedly only been on the airwaves in Canada to do a...
Response to biased article on fathers’ rights
Guardian Unlimited: Children should not be the victims of gender wars This is a response to an atrocious article by Decca Aitkenhead on the scandal of children being forced to see their abusive fathers...
Documentary on women in Iraq tonight
There is a documentary on Channel 4 tonight (Dispatches, 8pm) on women in Iraq and how they have fared since the "liberation" of their country (not very well, is the message). You can read...
BBC Programme on Muslim prisoners
BBC Radio 4 (92-95FM and 198LW) has a programme on at 8pm tonight (30 mins) about who has influence over Muslim prisoners, in light of recent concerns that prisoners may be exposed to “radical...
The unacknowledged controversy over Bernard Lewis
Comment is free: Bush's historian Brian Whitaker on how Bernard Lewis, whose 90th birthday celebrations were attended by none other than Dick Cheney (full guest list here), is being talked up in the media...