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...
Indigo Jo Blogs Blog
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...
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...
Response to a Misleading Article on Islam and Sufism
This article was written by Fariduddien Rice, an Australian brother who was for a long time present on the Usenet group soc.religion.islam and had an interest in the Turkish Naqshbandi shaikh Mahmud Es'ad Cosan...
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...