Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective
In today’s Observer, there is an investigation into children in care in England being sent sometimes hundreds of miles from home for lack of care placements in their home areas; they note that children...
Earlier this week the blind YouTuber Anthony Daniels (right), whose channel is called Third Eye Visions, did a video on ‘snitching’ and on whether it is OK to inform on bullies or on people...
Last week there was a piece on the BBC News website by Terri White (a “journalist, author and broadcaster” though this was the first time I’d heard of her) on the importance of school...
Yesterday the Observer carried a story about pupil protests in some schools in England against school rules around shorts, short skirts and locking toilet doors during lessons so that pupils are only able to...
A clip has been circulating on Twitter of the Labour MP Khalid Mahmood addressing a webinar on the recent Prevent programme review by the Tory-aligned think tank Policy Exchange, a notorious source of anti-Muslim...
Anyone who uses Facebook will have noticed a pattern recently: that their news feed has less of their friends’ posts and more adverts and clickbait from various ‘news’ sites. The clickbait is often poorly...
By now it’s becoming obvious to most people that 13 years of Tory rule, with or without Lib Dem or DUP help, has been a disaster for almost everyone except the super-rich, and at...
This morning I was alerted to a video on Twitter by an Internet personality who calls himself “The Sunnah Guy”, a young man with no apparent qualifications dishing out advice to whomever might be...
Today it was finally made official that third-party Twitter clients are to be locked out of the system, rendering them useless unless they are rewritten to use other social media platforms, such as Mastodon...
A couple of weeks ago the Canadian philosophy professor Jordan Peterson claimed on Twitter that a traffic reduction scheme in Oxford amounts to a scheme by which “idiot tyrannical bureaucrats can decide by fiat...
In the past week the Taliban, who seized back control of Afghanistan from the corrupt and ineffectual US-backed government last year, issued a decree banning women from the country’s universities, after already having shut...
Last week, the government announced that a proposed upgrade to the M3 motorway’s junction with the A34 outside Winchester, a cause of major delays going back years, had been accepted for consideration by the...
Last Friday the BBC published a report by Hazel Shearing, its education correspondent (inexplicably filed under “Young Reporter” (a term normally used of student reporters, which she isn’t), about antisemitism in and around universities...
Farha is a 90-minute film set somewhere in Palestine in 1948, just as the state of Israel is being set up and the British mandate forces are withdrawing (we see them briefly, as children...
I saw this post on Facebook this morning from someone who calls himself “Shaikh JJ”, a Canadian living in Istanbul. I should add at this point that although we know what he looks like,...
Last week, the 90s comedian David Baddiel recently presented a documentary on the place of Jews among Britain’s minorities and the question of why, as he sees it, Jews are left out by identity...
This weekend, Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, shuttered the company’s headquarters and told staff they would have no access until Monday. This has prompted widespread fears that the site is about to...
The term Islamophobia was popularised, as I recall, in the 1990s to refer to hostility to Muslims in the European context. The logic behind it seems to be that people were hostile to Muslims...
On Tuesday it was announced on Twitter and via the Jewish Chronicle, before it was announced on the organisation’s own website, that the National Union of Students’ President, Shaima Dallali, who had been accused...
So, this past week the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk, the CEO of the Tesla car company, finally went through. Musk has announced that he plans to reform the rules of Twitter to...