Indigo Jo Blogs Blog

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...

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...

Turabi pushes tired liberalism

Inayat Bunglawala (one of the leaders of the Muslim Council of Britain) writes at Comment is Free that Sudanese politician Hasan al-Turabi has made a speech supporting some rather old "Islamic" liberal positions: Turabi...

Geeks and sexism

Guardian CIF has a blog piece by AlterNet contributor Deanna Zandt about how geek culture is still very male-centred – notably how a woman who made it onto the tech discussion website Slashdot found...

“Every word in it is a lie”

DD Guttenplan, on the Guardian's Comments blog, takes apart the recently-published Euston Manifesto, exposing the alliance behind it – liberal advocates for Israel including the Engage mob and what he calls the "laptop bombardiers"...

Hattersley: defence of PC

British Labour politician Roy Hattersley on why "political correctness" is actually essential to a civilised society, however much the media hate it: Justified though the rebuke was, political correctness is more than the need...

Where I’ve been

Basically I’ve been in bed most of this week, with a nasty case of diarrhoea which suddenly appeared on Saturday evening as I was about to go to bed. I’m almost finished a post...

Ethnic candidate causes BNP outrage

[The Guardian reports](http://politics.guardian.co.uk/farright/story/0,,1749555,00.html) on today’s front page that the decision to choose an “ethnic” – a supposed descendent of an Armenian refugee with the unlikely name of Sharif Abdul-Gawad – has caused outrage among...

On Phyllis Chesler and Jack ‘n’ Condi

This Tuesday I found [an interview](http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1746131,00.html) in the Guardian with the American “feminist” Phyllis Chesler, whose recent output – much of it on [Front Page Magazine](http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/authors.asp?ID=1947) – seems to consist of attacks on Muslims...

My travels: Cheshire and west Wales

The last few days have seen me travel what must be the best part of a thousand miles: from Surrey up to Cheshire and back in a day, and out to west Wales, around...

Sheikh Mazhar tries it on Galloway

Guardian Unlimited – Gold teeth: a sure sign of a media sting I've not normally got much time for George Galloway and his party nowadays, but my attention was drawn to this story about...