Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective
This week Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), the erstwhile leader of the English Defence League, announced that he was leaving the organisation he helped found to start some kind of new anti-extremism organisation...
Roman Polanski and the sin of simplification (in today's Observer) Victoria Coren Mitchell tries to make a case that the situation of Roman Polanski, the subject of a book published by the woman he...
I wrote this letter last Thursday after seeing a series of very hostile letters in the Guardian following Kira Cochrane's article in which she interviewed women who wear the niqaab (who had been conspicuously...
Coalition Governing Could Be Britain’s New Normal Despite Liberal Democrats’ Troubles (from the New York Times) This article claims that the "successful" Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition that was formed after the 2010 election has changed...
The recent wave of media interest in niqaab that resulted from the Birmingham College and niqaab-in-court affairs has, as previously noted, featured a lot of opinionising from almost everyone except for wearers — plenty...
My veil epiphany | Victoria Coren Mitchell | Comment is free | The Observer Last Thursday a major further education college in Birmingham, the Birmingham Metropolitan College, backed down on a decision to ban...
Last Tuesday a British soap actor, Michael “Le Vell” Turner, was found not guilty of multiple counts of rape and sexual assault on a child (now 17). There has been some suggestions that his...
Ohio captor 'needed suicide watch': http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-23967581 Ariel Castro, the man who kept three young women captive in his house in Ohio for several years, was found hanged in his cell on Tuesday. According to...
Europe's Dirty Drug Secret: Stacey Dooley Investigates (viewable in the UK until next Sunday) Last Monday I saw a programme featuring Stacey Dooley, the British “investigative journalist” whose efforts at understanding the divisions in...
Carers and care workers are the best kind of people. So why are they treated so disgracefully? Yesterday the Guardian published the above article by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, best known for co-founding Vagenda magazine...
Currently Channel 4 is running a series called Benefits Britain 1949, in which people are invited to live on benefits at 1949 levels (supposedly adjusted to inflation) for a week. The Daily Mail has...
Recently there has been some well-deserved condemnation on blogs and Twitter feeds that I read about the British government’s attacks on immigration, which took the form of vans telling people who are in the...
BBC Three: Failed by the NHS Last night there was a documentary on BBC Three about young people whose mental health conditions went untreated for months or years by the NHS mental health services,...
Owen Jones: Cruel? Certainly. Unforgivable? Beyond doubt. But the Tories aren't actually evil – Comment – Voices – The Independent Last week Sunny Hundal posted an article on Liberal Conspiracy in which he made...
Ban packed lunches, head teachers urged (from BBC News) The government has commissioned a report by two founders of the Leon restaurant chain (!) that says that take-up of school meals is low (43%)...
Recently a series called Don’t Call Me Crazy, set inside an adolescent mental health unit in Manchester, the now-closed McGuinness Unit, was screened on BBC Three, apparently the first time cameras had been allowed...
Last week I read about two separate distressing incidents that underline the need for support for people with disabilities to remain living with their families if that is at all possible. The first happened...
The week before last (I have only just had the opportunity to write about it due to work), a teacher from Kent called Jeremy Forrest was jailed for five and a half years for...
Today the Daily Mail published a quite astonishing and appalling article by Mark Littlewood of the Institute of Economic Affairs (and former spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, the Pro-Euro Conservative Party and NO2ID) calling...
Yesterday the People's Assembly Against Austerity, which has been holding "rallies" (I'd call them meetings, rather than rallies which I always thought were held in the street or at least in the open) around...