Channel 4’s “The Qur’an” Reviewed
Last week, Channel 4 broadcast a film by Antony Thomas (of Death of a Princess fame) called The Qur'an (see it here), which attempted to explore "what the Qur'an actually says". Karima Hamdan has...
Category: Reviews
Disappointed with “Fallout” drama
Last Thursday, Channel 4 broadcast Fallout, a feature-length drama about a stabbing in London and its aftermath. Its star is Lennie James, who wrote an article for the Observer a couple of weeks ago...
Round-up: drinks on the Tube, Blair uniting religions, Mary Whitehouse, high fuel costs
As you can see, I have not blogged much this week, mainly out of being tired after getting up in the morning to do various driving jobs. However, it's Sunday and I'm well and...
The real Fitna
I've watched Geert Wilders's new film Fitna. I am sure nobody expects a good write-up of it from me, but it's a really poor piece of film. (More: HAhmed, Austrolabe, reproduced at Muslim Matters,...
Review of London lecture on French hijab politics
This evening the American feminist academic Joan Wallach Scott, a professor of social science at Princeton, NJ, gave a lecture to promote her book, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, 2007) (reviewed in the...
Michael Moore’s Sicko: Review
I’m sure Michael Moore needs no introduction to most of my audience: many of us have been painfully aware of his clumsy attacks on the Bush administration since about 2000. I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 almost as soon as it opened in London, and was disappointed to see a list of factual errors in the film, which ruined its impact for me (from a conservative source, but the list is well-referenced). Another criticism of his stance, from an Afro-American Muslim woman on a Yahoo list I used to read, was that he was concerned with “disarming minorities” and that anyone of a minority who consented to being disarmed was a fool. This film, however, is about a rather less controversial topic – American medicine, and the stranglehold he claims the insurance industry have on it.
Britz: another exposition
Having watched the second episode of Britz, sister Safiya posted a second article outlining its inconsistencies. She concludes that the programme is "prejudiced garbage" and that the Muslims involved in it should be ashamed....
Britz: a negative opinion
Outlines: And I thought Sleeper Cell was bad… I have to say that I agree with much of what sister Safiya says in this review. I was sceptical about this programme from the outset,...
The injustice of “A Mighty Heart”
New Statesman – Through western eyes This is a review written by Ananya Vajpeyi, an Indian Hindu woman who was a friend of Daniel Pearl, of the film about Pearl’s murder in 2002. She...
“Israel lobby” book is out
The book version of Mearsheimer & Walt's The Israel Lobby is now out in the UK (I got it for £22 in Blackwell's in Charing Cross Road; Borders didn't have it at all, several...
Review of Littlejohn’s “War on Jews”
Technorati Tags: richard littlejohn Yesterday evening, the well-known talk-show host and newspaper columnist Richard Littlejohn presented an hour-long documentary, as part of Channel 4's Dispatches feature, entitled "The War On British Jews?", purporting to...
Keith Allen’s grudge match in Kansas
I’ve just finished watching a programme on Channel 4 called Keith Allen Will Burn In Hell, in which someone nowadays best known for being the father of a mediocre pop star goes out to Topeka, Kansas, to get inside the cult known as the Westboro Baptist Church. The church have been well-known for years for picketing funerals, first of homosexuals and more recently of soldiers killed in Iraq. They hold up brightly-coloured placards proclaiming “God hates fags”, “Thank God for AIDS”, “Fag Flag” and the like. More recently they have taken to posting their offensive messages in videos on YouTube.
Review of “This is England”
This is England is a film about skinheads in the English Midlands in the early 1980s, written and directed by the British director Shane Meadows (interviewed here) and set mostly on a council estate which turns out to be in Nottingham, although no reference to Nottingham is actually made anywhere in the film; some scenes are shot in Grimsby, an east coast port and seaside resort. It mainly revolves around the character of Shaun, a 12-year-old boy who has recently lost his father in the Falklands war, and who is partly based on Meadows (and some of the other characters are also partly based on people Meadows knew).
Review of “Londonistan”
I waited for some time to pick up my copy of Melanie Phillips's book Londonistan, largely because I have a conscience about paying for books which are as full of damaging gibberish as this...
Nick Cohen: crude parodies and a thinly veiled agenda
There are two extracts from Nick Cohen’s forthcoming book What’s Left? published in last Sunday’s Observer, in which he has a weekly column. For anyone who is not familiar with his writing, he is part of the same tendency as Paul Berman (of Dissent magazine and the author of Terror and Liberalism) and Christopher Hitchens; that is to say, he is from a left-liberal background but supports recent western military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and accuses the left generally of betraying its principles in its opposition to them. Until the early 2000s his columns had a strong pro-civil liberties stance and concern for asylum seekers; after the demonstrations against the war in Iraq in 2003, he denounced the Stop the War coalition of being an alliance of the “enemies of economic freedom” (the Socialist Workers) and the “enemies of sexual freedom” (the Muslim Association).
Review: Shoot the Messenger
Shoot the Messenger was on BBC2 last night; it featured David Oyewolo (from the drama Spooks, British slang for spies) as Joe, a young black teacher who entered the profession after attending a meeting to discuss the chronic underachievement of black boys in British schools, at which one lady announced that what was needed was more black male teachers to provide positive role models.
Review of Gita Saghal’s Hecklers appearance
Last Saturday Gita Saghal of Awaaz South Asia Watch and “Women Against Fundamentalisms”, an organisation which monitors and opposes religious fundamentalism in south Asia, appeared on BBC Radio 4’s programme Hecklers, so-called because one...
Movable Type 3.3 is out
Six Apart have now released version 3.3 of Movable Type, complete with an enterprise version for organisations with thousands of users which, among other things, supports the Oracle database as well as the usual...
Martin Bright on 30 Minutes
Martin Bright’s documentary on British Foreign Office dealings with “radical Islam” finally aired on Channel 4’s 30 Minutes slot last night, and did not really contain any surprises for me. Martin Bright’s position is that the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO), in its dealings with the Muslim community, has largely restricted itself to dealing with groups led by the Muslim Brotherhood and Jama’at-e-Islami, to the exclusion of ordinary, moderate “Sufi” Muslims.
Simon Heffer on “Londonistan” (with replies)
Simon Heffer has written what amounts to a puff piece for Melanie Phillips' book Londonistan in the Daily Telegraph, alleging among other things that Phillips had difficulty "exercising her freedom of speech" on account...