Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective
This morning the Today programme on Radio 4 covered the story of Gerard Batten, the new leader of UKIP, hiring Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the former leader of the English Defence League, anti-Muslim agitator and self-styled...
Earlier today I came across an article announcing some research that had been done about British workers and their access to toilet breaks, or lack thereof, published by the trade union Unite. Thousands of...
Last week, a draft agreement for Britain's withdrawal from the European Union (EU) was published; it was some 500 pages long and, as could have been predicted, really pleased nobody. It prompted two Cabinet...
I've been a fan of the BBC dramas Casualty and Holby City since the 1980s, although I only started watching them on a regular basis again more recently (Casualty was a fixture when I...
This morning on a truck drivers' group on Facebook, I saw a link to a report on the Hull Daily Mail website (not linked to the national Daily Mail) which claimed that the proposal...
Recently social media has been abuzz with comment on the new government housing 'tsar', Roger Scruton, previously best known as a philosopher and commentator for various magazines including the Spectator and New Statesman. His...
Last week it was announced that Donald Trump favoured ending the automatic American citizenship of anyone born in the USA, which a number of conservative politicians claimed was constitutional although it clearly violates the...
Last Saturday, a racist gunman attacked a synagogue near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and killed 11 worshippers, including four Holocaust survivors, a married couple and two disabled brothers in their fifties; also killed was a doctor...
Today the Mail on Sunday published two long articles ([1], [2]) by Ian Birrell, a former speechwriter to David Cameron who has a disabled daughter, on the scandal of autistic people and people with...
'Normalisation' is the idea that if the media gives too much exposure to extreme views or those without any basis in fact or science, they become the political mainstream and will come to be...
This morning I saw a longish interview on the BBC Breakfast show with some guy called Richard Tice, who was identified only as a spokesman for "Leave Means Leave". I didn't hear most of...
During the post Iraq War days (when Iraq was effectively if not in name under occupation), the pro-war blogger Norman Geras ran an article on what it called the Single Transferable Article About Iraq...
I haven't watched any Stacey Dooley for about five years, since I watched her programme on drug smuggling through Ukraine in 2013 and gave it this scathing review. In tonight's BBC Three documentary (shown...
Last Thursday, on the BBC's Question Time programme (a weekly late-night political panel show in which a panel of politicians and an academic, writer or other lay 'expert'), there was a contribution from an...
Last Tuesday evening there was a 45-minute programme on Radio 4 (part of its File on 4 slot) exposing the abusive treatment of an autistic teenage girl at the St Andrew's hospital in Northampton,...
Last night BBC's File on 4 programme was dedicated to how well the government's declared intention to get people with learning disabilities out of short-term mental health care and into the community where they...
Last night BBC's File on 4 programme was dedicated to how well the government's declared intention to get people with learning disabilities out of short-term mental health care and into the community where they...
Yesterday it was reported that the police in some parts of the UK, notably London and Merseyside, demand that women reporting rape submit both medical records and an extraordinary array of electronic data to...
Yesterday I came across a tweet on Twitter which made some unpleasant generalisations about Muslim women and Islamic knowledge. It claimed that when men study the Shari'ah, it leads to "More ibadah > more...
Last week an inquest opened on the case of a 13-year-old boy with a severe allergy to dairy products who died in a London school playground after allegedly having cheese put down his shirt....