Whitaker: MCB elections this Sunday
Comment is free: A very British balancing act Hey, I never knew that Iqbal Sacranie was stepping down myself until I read this. The Muslim Council of Britain is holding its leadership election this...
Indigo Jo Blogs Blog
Darwinism at Hay on Wye
At the time of writing, Comment is Free and all its articles are down. Sarah Crown on Comment is Free posted yesterday a write-up of a speech at the Hay Festival by Steve Jones,...
Inayat Bunglawala in death threat controversy
Little Green Footballs alleges that they received a death threat from a machine owned by Reuters last Friday. The threat came after someone posted a link to a LGF article in response to an...
Asim Siddiqui on Muna Fuzai
Comment is free: Crescent Muna Asim Siddiqui (chairman of the City Circle) presents the ideas of Muna al-Fuzai, a Kuwaiti businesswoman and journalist "who is on a mission to not only project a better...
2001 riots “fuelled by racist propaganda”
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Report says riots product of racist propaganda The Burnley race riots of 2001 were fuelled by racists exploiting the perceived imbalances in council spending on different communities, according...
Always helping police with their enquiries
Pickled Politics: Deport BNP council tax cheats! Pickled Politics reproduces a report from last week by Andrew Gilligan from the Evening Standard on the latest scandal involving the British National Party's notoriously incompetent, criminal...
More on female commentators and abuse
MediaGuardian.co.uk | Media | The anarchy and the ecstasy Further from the earlier link about female "pundits" and the abuse they get, Georgina Henry reports on the culture at Comment is Free (the Guardian's...
Ben Marshall on Runnymede and Islamophobia
In this month’s New Humanist there’s a one-page article by Ben Marshall (a freelance journalist) on Islamophobia, in which the author “embraces his phobia”, defending it as “an entirely reasonable and honourable intellectual position”. The magazine is a bi-monthly, founded in 1885 as the Literary Review, and claims that it “has distinguished itself as a world leader in supporting and promoting humanism and rational inquiry and opposing religious dogma, irrationalism and bunkum wherever it is found”. A typical issue will feature ridicule of some aspect of religion – the present issue has a short piece about Malaysians discussing where to face in prayer when in space, for example. Marshall starts off by attacking those who try to defend Muslims from Islamophobia, including the Runnymede Trust (a race relations body which published a report on Islamophobia in 1997) and the blog Islamophobia Watch. He also makes it clear that he is generally anti-religious and, like a lot of secular humanists, lumps religion in with superstition.
What Muslims have done for Holland
Feargus O'Sullivan, in yesterday's Guardian, wrote about the various "anti-delicacies" he tasted on his travels in Europe. This is what he found in the Netherlands: The quintessential Dutch food experience is the FEBO snack...
Murtadd Nazir-Ali on defending all faiths
The BBC reports that the bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, has some opinions on the Prince of Wales' plan to be "Defender of Faith" when (or if) he takes the throne: The Prince of...
Beeb News: Confrontation Culture
The BBC has a "Magazine" feature on Confrontation Culture – the apparently peculiarly British phenomenon of public shouting matches: It's an everyday scene. I'm in a supermarket and without explanation or apparent provocation, there's...
Abuse of women op-ed writers
This is a piece I found linked on [Comment is Free](http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/index.html)’s “Best of the Web” section: all about the hate mail directed at women who write op-ed columns, particularly those of a liberal tendency;...
Francis Maude in Emel magazine
Francis Maude, chairman of the Conservative Party, has a column in the latest edition of emel magazine (June 2006, issue 21, not online yet but available in Borders), entitled A Party for All People. The article discusses at length the party’s recent drive to recruit more female and ethnic minority candidates, including Muslims.
Kira Cochrane on the C-word
Kira Cochrane, the recently-appointed women’s editor of the Guardian who wrote the piece on sexual harrassment from which I got my “Holla Back” link from a few weeks back, has written another article (with strong language) in the New Statesman on a similar theme: the wide spread of the C-word in popular culture.
Dual national threatened with deportation
The latest twist in the sorry tale of the UK government's media-dictated crackdown on "foreign criminals" involves a British-Pakistani dual national, who did time for what his sister describes (in Socialist Worker, so far...
Swiss spy reveals “extremists” as agents
Via Izzy Mo, this story in the LA Times is all about a Swiss man who was recruited as a spy, infiltrated Tariq Ramadan's circle in Switzerland and eventually converted to Islam. Among the...
“Armchair hooligans” to be banned from football
From the "you couldn't make it up" department (this is from yesterday, but I've just remembered that I meant to blog it …) Armchair hooligans face ban at domestic matches – Britain – Times...
Yellow star lie debunked
In case anyone came in having recently read Melanie Phillips' diary where the writer has still not bothered to delete or amend her most recent entry which repeats a false report from the Canadian...
Communists for freedom at Conway Hall
Yesterday evening there was a meeting held by the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association, at which Peter Tatchell (OutRage), Ali Hilli (OutRage’s Middle East spokesman) and Houzan Mahmoud of the so-called Organisation of Women’s Freedom of Iraq spoke.
Imam Zaid: What We Should Be Teaching Our Children
Here is an article from Zaytuna Institute by Imam Zaid Shakir, on What We Should Be Teaching Our Children (hat tip: Abu Eesa. It is a pretty comprehensive article about instilling taqwa in children,...