Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective
Yesterday, at a protest organised by Defend Our Juries in Parliament Square, London, more than 500 protesters, many of them elderly, were arrested for holding banners supporting the organisation Palestine Action, proscribed last month...
There is an article in this week’s New Statesman from Danny Kruger, newly-elected MP for Devizes (right) in Wiltshire, replying to two pieces from last week’s edition which called Boris Johnson’s government aimless in...
[How the Human Rights movement failed (from the New York Times)](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/23/opinion/human-rights-movement-failed.html) In this article, Yale law and history professor Samuel Moyn argues that the backsliding of various countries such as the Philippines and Hungary,...
Democracy is dying – and it’s startling how few people are worried | Paul Mason | Opinion | The Guardian This was in today’s *Guardian*, and uses a few examples of democracies turning back...
Somebody has already been imprisoned for offences relating to the Grenfell Tower fire in west London, and it’s not someone who signed off on the dodgy cladding; no, it’s a local who had been...
This will be the last blog post I make before the election starts tomorrow (Thursday) morning. The front pages of the two biggest-selling newspapers are full of propaganda against the Labour leadership, branding them...
Last week, Amnesty International adopted a policy supporting the decriminalisation of the sex trade after a debate in which it was subjected to intense lobbying from two groups of feminists (amid renewed mud-slinging between...
Last Sunday there was a letter in the *Observer*, the Sunday sister paper to the *Guardian*, from a long list of people (the principal signatories being Beatrix Campbell and Deborah Cameron; the others appeared...
France ‘to protect all religions’ (BBC News) The French president, François Hollande, has announced that France “will protect all religions” and that Muslims are the “main victims of fanaticism” in a speech at the...
Last week three gunmen raided the offices of the French ‘satirical’ magazine Charlie Hebdo (Weekly) and killed its editor, three other contributors, two policemen and various other staff (including bodyguards but some not named)...
Why must we tolerate police spies in our midst? | Nick Cohen | Comment is free | The Observer Nick Cohen, as long-time readers will know, has a long-standing hostility to the Muslim Brotherhood,...
Yesterday a report from the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) came out that concluded that the murder of Lee Rigby, a British soldier, in London in 2013 could not have been prevented despite the...
This week Julie Bindel (right) is due to speak in a debate at Essex University about pornography. Bindel is a radical feminist best known for her work with Justice for Women, a group that...
The last couple of weeks a few things have made me seriously consider the state of free speech in the UK. One was that a man (Michael Abberton, right) who had posted some innocuous...
I regularly read a blog, Blogging Astrid, by an autistic woman in the Netherlands who has been blogging about her life since her teens, but since 2007 it has been about her life in...
Yesterday a 21-year-old Somali woman from London was given a community service order for posting an offensive tweet about the soldier Lee Rigby after his stabbing last month (but before the full facts about...
In the wake of the conviction of Mark Bridger yesterday for killing April Jones, a 5-year-old girl he kidnapped from a green on a housing estate in Machynlleth, mid Wales, last year, the focus...
In the wake of last week’s Woolwich stabbing, there have been renewed calls to ban “hate preachers” from appearing on TV, most notably Anjem Choudary, the leader of al-Muhajiroun. Muslims, including myself, have for...
Margaret Jean “Jenny” Hatch is an American woman, aged 29, with Down’s syndrome. Until early last year, she lived independently in Newport News, Virginia, and had been working in her friends’ store. She had...
Last week it was reported that the Lib Dem party conference had condemned the government’s plan for “secret courts” (as the BBC describes it, “some civil proceedings held in private for fear of damaging...