Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.).
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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;...