Indigo Jo Blogs Blog

Nick Cohen on last Sunday’s demo

Here is what Nick Cohen has to say about a demonstration I attended outside Scotland Yard (London police HQ) last Sunday in response to the bungled Forest Gate raid. He is suggesting that everyone...

Mad Mel in the Guardian

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Jackie Ashley meets Melanie Phillips I'm sure some of you are getting sick to death with this and wondering if I have an infatuation with Melanie Phillips, but...

Most Turks oppose hijab ban

IslamOnline reports that a recent poll in Turkey reveals that most people oppose the country's ban on hijab in the civil service and universities (see also this report from the Washington Post, thanks UZ)....

Ahmedinejad misquoted

Comment is free: Lost in translation Jonathan Steele on how the president of Iran's notorious "wipe off the map" speech did not in fact contain the offending words at all: The New York Times's...

Mad Mel’s audience

Just checking for reviews of Melanie Phillips' new book, and came across this, on Amazon … the details of what people who bought Londonistan also bought. Bawer, Fallaci, Robert Spencer, Andrew Bostom, Bat Eeyore...

What have you been eating?

I caught sight of this entry on the blog Jowhara’s Chamber about the state of Muslim-run restaurants. The author explains how she passed a restaurant at which she had become quite a regular, stopped...

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...

Deportations scandal: British citizen freed

The Guardian reported today that a British man of Bangladeshi origin who had been detained last month, pending deportation, has been released. This wasn't Saqib Almas, who is a British-Pakistani dual national, but an...

Forest Gate raid: another disaster

It now appears that the raid on a house in Forest Gate, east London, last Friday resulted in nothing suspicious being found and was based on false intelligence, as today’s papers are reporting. To...

City Circle: Islam and liberalism

Last night, as previously mentioned, City Circle held a debate between Alice Kneen of Magdalen College, Cambridge, proposing the motion that Islam was incompatible with liberalism, and Dr Richard Stone of the Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia, opposing. I got there about 15 minutes late, which was probably more than halfway through Ms Kneen’s speech. She was predictably naming all the things about Islam which in her view made Islam incompatible with liberalism (the execution of apostates, etc.).

Mad Mel soundbite (and book hold-up)

Melanie Phillips has latched onto the Inayat Bunglawala / Little Green Footballs controversy in her usual way, with a reference to "the truly demented ‘Zionist conspiracy’ theory emanating from Londonistan (Charles isn’t even a...