Crazies march today; real demo this Sunday
The family of the two men arrested in the raid a week ago are urging Muslims not to take part in a march organised by "al-Ghurabaa", an off-shoot of al-Muhajiroun, according to this report...
Indigo Jo Blogs Blog
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...
Incident of harrassment by Central Trains driver
The following is a report which was posted to Deenport earlier today, regarding a distressing incident affecting a young Muslim woman on a train in the English East Midlands. Central Trains is the main...
Faisal Bodi: forcing desegregation doesn’t work
Comment is free: Birds of a feather… Faisal Bodi on a recent review of the Cantle report (PDF) of the 2001 disturbances in northern English towns by the report's author shows its author is...
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...
PhobeWatch: UCL debate, Whitaker on Manji, reply to Mad Mel
A few interesting entries at Islamophobia Watch which I'll deal with in one entry, insha Allah: (1) There's a panel debate this Wednesday at University College London, including Dr Hisham Hellyer, Tariq Ramadan, Dr...
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...
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...
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...