Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective
Last Thursday, Patrick Mercer, the Conservative party’s spokesman for “homeland security”, was sacked from David Cameron’s shadow cabinet for giving an interview to the Times. He was reacting to the establishment of a “new...
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...
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...
Some people just don't get it about the "road charging" situation. I signed the petition, along with well over a million others. No doubt, the government will simply brush it off, as they brushed...
The Conservative Party leader David Cameron wrote in today's Observer about the "British values" issues which were under much discussion this past week. Of merit is his debunking of stupid suggestions like having a...
Tobias Jones (of The Dark Heart of Italy fame) on militant atheists who behave like totalitarians, hiding among anti-sexists, anti-homophobes and anti-racists, but in reality seeking to erase religion totally from the Earth, starting...
In a couple of weeks' time there will be a conference in London, "A World Civilisation or a Clash of Civilisations", featuring a long list of speakers including Ken Livingstone (the mayor of London),...
Telegraph Comment: Sinister security Surprisingly hostile response from the London Telegraph's "Digital Democrats" to the news of a deal between the US Homeland Security department and un-named Brussels Bureaucrats. Admittedly this comes from Europe,...
YouTube – Channel 4's alternative Christmas message This is the Alternative Christmas Message that Channel 4 broadcast after the earlier candidate, Khadija Ravat, pulled out after discovering that the community was opposed and that...
From today's Guardian: Scots and English would pay dearly for ending the union This article expresses a number of my own concerns about the prospect of Scotland becoming independent from the UK, or rather,...
Sunday Telegraph: Ban veils in public, says Asian bishop The Anglican Bishop of Rochester Michael Nazir-Ali (son of a convert to Catholicism from Islam) jumps in on the latest bogus veil controversy by calling...
Comment is free: Lifting the veil Rajnaara Akhtar (chair of Protect Hijab) on the recent fake scandal involving the Somali who was involved in murdering the policewomen Sharon Beshenivsky and supposedly might have escaped...
The contrived controversy over the Channel 4 “Alternative Christmas Message” dragged on today, with the Daily Mirror featuring an interview with the lady in which she told the interviewer that she, being a patriotic British citizen, will be watching the Queen rather than her own message. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, however, comes out with the usual attack on the niqab, alleging that Channel 4 “has decided to glamorise and validate the veil, showing cool indifference to the meanings of one of the most violently contested symbols in the world today”. The article appeared in the Evening Standard, which does not generally publish its opinion pieces online.
Via Deenport and Pickled Politics, we hear that Channel 4 is planning to have a woman in niqab to read their “alternative Christmas message” this year: A veiled Muslim woman will deliver this year’s...
This week the old chestnut of “road pricing” – that is, charging motorists by the mile depending on where they drive and when – appeared again in a report comissioned by the Government and produced by the former British Airways chief Rod Eddington, which appeared on Friday. The report “concludes that the potential benefits of charging motorists for using roads will outweigh the costs of the scheme” and that charging “will put some people off driving entirely, cut congestion and carbon emissions and could raise up to £16bn a year in payments”.
This is a shocking story from today’s (Tuesday’s) Guardian about a new wave of persecution of central Europe’s Roma (Gypsy) minority, which has started to take the form of destruction of Roma neighbourhoods and...
There is a letter in the current edition of the Jewish Chronicle, the "establishment" paper of the British Jewish community, from Alan Goodacre defending the British National Party from this article by Melanie Phillips...
Naima Bouteldja, in today's Guardian, discusses the impending Dutch niqab ban and the pattern of governments stoking anti-Muslim hostility for political ends: Naima Azough, a Dutch Green MP, points out that the ban would...
Cracked it! Guardian Unlimited Steve Boggan explains how he and "a friendly computer expert" managed to crack the security codes on the new British biometric passport (the one which provided an excuse to hike...
That's Me on Screen! (free registration required) Craig Murray (former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, who resigned after exposing the human rights abuses carried out by "Islam Karimov" and then stood against Jack Straw) on...