HT defence & McGill prayer room controversy (updated)
First, Natasha Walter in the Guardian states what we all knew: that Hizbut-Tahrir are not a violent organisation and that there is no reason to ban them. I have to say that her quotes...
Indigo Jo Blogs Blog
It’s a bit flat
An interesting follow-up to the story of Qibla Cola’s failure can be found here in today’s Guardian “g2” supplement (third story down), which gives another angle on why the product failed, rather than the...
Ich bin kein Berliner (2)
Looking at today’s Saturday-edition Guardian, it’s becoming clear that the Independent isn’t the sinking ship some bloggers might have thought. Can anyone who’s read today’s edition confirm or deny my impression that the articles...
Qibla Cola goes down
Some sad news I got off DeenPort this morning is that Qibla Cola, a Muslim competitor to the major cola brands, has gone into receivership. According to this BBC report, the two-year-old company blamed...
Ich bin kein Berliner!
Sorry if I’ve mangled my German, but yesterday the Guardian, a generally left-leaning British former broadsheet, relaunched itself with a “Berliner” format – the size used by Le Monde, slightly wider and quite a...
Petrol panic
Today I was back driving vans, delivering fixtures and fittings for an Asian food company from south London up to town for an exhibition. There’s a shortage of petrol stations on the main road,...
Spencer applauds Ontario arbitration axe
Latest in Spencer’s “Canadian Shari’ah Watch” (and here‘s a local Muslimah’s opinion): A hard-won victory for human rights. It is only unfortunate that the other religious arbitration arrangements have to be sacrificed, which feeds...
BNP turns to Slovaks for printing
A few months ago I blogged here about how a publishing company owned by a Saudi prince was printing the BNP’s monthly paper, Voice of Freedom. It now appears that the organisation has turned...
Pictures at Guidance Media
Via Deenport, there are some new pictures at Guidance Media taken during the visit of Habib Ali al-Jifri and some of his students to Malaysia recently. They include some scholars who are students of...
Spams for other people’s blogs
A bizarre new spam trend has emerged over the last few days – spamming people’s blogs with links to other people’s blogs. I’ve had a large number of trackback pings over the past few...
Dumb trojan assumes you’re a pervert
Both the press and the blogosphere lately have been buzzing with news of a new “trojan” program known as “Yusufali-A“. This program, when the user types a number of words commonly used in porn,...
Reasons to hate Yahoo
No, not just that they rat on their users to the Chinese government. Their site is one of the most frustratingly badly organised out there. I use Yahoo mail and groups. I use secure...
Crying wolf
If any proof were needed that some Jews will cry “anti-semitism” at the slightest nuance of hostility to their organisations or to Israel, however well-grounded, it comes in Melanie Phillips’ latest “diary” (posh word...
Victims and relatives
I was preparing a post on the recent proposal to introduce American-style “victim impact” statements in British murder and manslaughter trials, which I think is a really foolish idea. You can guess that it’s...
I see Biloxi, you say Biluxi …
Joni Mitchell famously sung that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone, and this is surely the case with quite a few places along the US Gulf Coast which are suddenly world...
Looting: it’s not a race issue
While in no position of great authority on US race relations, I find it sad, but by no means surprising, to hear people already rushing to make a race issue out of the looting...
London public transport blues
New Malden isn’t the best-connected of places when it comes to the London public transport system, although I speak as someone who was formerly spoiled, living within walking distance of East Croydon station with...
MT 3.2 is out
Movable Type, the blogging engine whose hopelessness in dealing with spam drove me to use WordPress … has just had a major update. According to the features page (emphasis is mine): Movable Type helps...
Linux Format tackle user interface problems
A few months ago I blogged here in response to an article in Linux Format magazine in which the author, Paul Hudson, said that Mac OS X “sucks”. Most of the time I use...