BBC Programme on Muslim prisoners
BBC Radio 4 (92-95FM and 198LW) has a programme on at 8pm tonight (30 mins) about who has influence over Muslim prisoners, in light of recent concerns that prisoners may be exposed to “radical...
Indigo Jo Blogs Blog
Russian racism “out of control”
The BBC reports on a spate of attacks by racist thugs on non-whites of all types in Russia, including local Roma and foreign students and other visitors, which included the stabbing to death of...
Not a good career for a Muslima
The BBC is reporting on a Muslim woman who wears hijab and whose aunt is an actress in Iran and wants to make it on the stage or screen here. I don’t see how...
How the BNP tried to butter up Evangelicals
Guardian Unlimited: God is the God of all Dr Giles Fraser (vicar of Putney and Oxford philosophy lecturer) on how the BNP tried to build up an alliance with evangelical Christians, but balked at...
Yvonne Ridley on Sami Yusuf
Pop Culture in the Name of Islam – MuslimsWeekly Yvonne Ridley has a go at Sami Yusuf and his over-enthusiastic female fans who acted like teenage boy-band fans even though some of them were...
The unacknowledged controversy over Bernard Lewis
Comment is free: Bush's historian Brian Whitaker on how Bernard Lewis, whose 90th birthday celebrations were attended by none other than Dick Cheney (full guest list here), is being talked up in the media...
Monbiot on junk food and crime
Guardian Unlimited: Tough on crime, to hell with the causes of crime if they make money George Monbiot on the evidence of the links between a “junk food and TV” diet and crime, and...
First Qibla Cola, now al-Quds jeans (updated)
Last September the British Muslim run company which produced Qibla Cola, a Coke substitute which donated 10% of its profits to various good causes and was intended to relieve Muslims’ apparent dependence on the...
The vast left-wing conspiracy
Something I'd been meaning to blog on as part of my "Melanie Phillips soundbite of the week" series, now that she's started blogging again, but Stuart Jeffries in today's Guardian has pretty much beaten...
Too many protest singers, not enough protest songs (or: Don’t Give That Girl a Pen)
OK, who hasn't heard the single by Pink (or P!nk as it appears on the album covers, but for the benefit of anyone listening to this with Jaws or similar software rather than reading...
Why the foreign prisoner scandal is worrying
This week the Government – and particularly the Home Secretary, Charles Clarke – became involved in a scandal involving the release of more than 1,000 “foreign criminals” without it being considered that they might...
American idiots
The BBC is reporting that an Egyptian student, applying at the US embassy in London for a visa to work at Camp America, was told that he would have to undergo additional security tests...
Met Police thuggery alive and well
Anyone thought that malicious police harrassment of ethnic minority men died a death after the Brixton riots of the early 1980s? This report might make you think again: in the last three years, but...
Same old Nazis …
The Guardian today has a feature on the British National Party and its threat to appeal to working-class white voters disillusioned by Labour (and with their heads filled with exaggerated stories about asylum seekers)....
I could have told them this
Anyone who looks at The Spectator's front page (if they are a site member) will notice a link to an apology to Lady Colin Campbell regarding an article by its columnist Taki Theodoracopoulos: In...
Eat up or pay up
The Guardian reports on a restaurant in London (not a halal one) which has a novel way of sorting out customers who order large amounts of food and then leave it on the plate...
Really a civil war?
The BBC is reporting that Michael Ancram, a senior Tory MP, has called for troops to be pulled from Iraq, on the grounds that there is a civil war: "It is time now for...
BNP shamelessly lying in anti-immigration campaign
The Independent today had a major feature on the practice of the British National Party of lying about immigration in order to scare working-class white voters in east London into voting for them. Most...
Shiv Malik on HT and the Tel Aviv bombings
Our old friend Shiv Malik writes in the *New Statesman* with a profile of Omar Sharif, one of the two British Muslim men who were involved in the Tel Aviv pizza parlour bombing in April 2003. Sharif appears to have been a devotee of Omar Bakri Muhammad, although this of course does not demonstrate in any way that OBM was responsible. Malik can’t let go of his dog-and-bone obsession with Hizbut-Tahrir, however.
Guardian’s future history on Iran bombing
Timothy Garton Ash has what is in many ways a rather tendentious future history on "what happened" after President Hillary Clinton bombed Iran's nuclear facilities in 2009, having won an election by demonstrating that...