What are the shibboleths of ignorance about Islam?
I've been getting a lot of tweets lately about talk of a ban on the so-called burqa in France, the latest chapter in the long saga of the French obsession with what Muslim women...
Indigo Jo Blogs Blog
More UK police thuggery exposed
More video footage has turned up of British police using violence against political activists, this time two women protesting against the proposed Kingsnorth power station. As with some of those who were involved in...
Muhajiroun versus Murray revisited
After writing my last entry linking to Yahya Birt's response to the abortive "debate" at Conway Hall, London, between Anjum Choudhary of al-Muhajiroun and Douglas Murray of the so-called Centre for Social Cohesion, my...
Yahya Birt: How not to deal with the Muhajiroun
Yahya Birt has posted an article on the incident earlier this week at Conway Hall, London, in which the "Centre for Social Cohesion" (run by Douglas Murray; a Civitas offshoot run out of the...
Test running the new Javelin
Recently while in London, I’ve seen adverts for the new high-speed commuter trains to go from London to Kent, which run along the new Channel Tunnel link. That line runs out of St Pancras,...
Meet the Daily Mail’s new guest editor
Back in the 1990s, I was a big fan of the Liverpool-based TV soap Brookside (I got into it just as the body-under-the-patio story was hotting up and got out after the storylines got...
Fear, loathing and thuggery in Luton
Fear and Hatred on the Streets of Luton from the Sunday Times A very long and comprehensive article (you can also see it in four parts here: [1], [2], [3], [4]) on the unrest...
Muslim woman wins bar dress lawsuit
An update about a case I blogged about a few months ago: Fata Lemes, a 33-year-old Muslim woman of Bosnian origin who sued her employer, a Mayfair bar, for sexual discrimination after they made...
The moral inequivalence of 9/11 and Holocaust denial
Yesterday, there was another of Nick Cohen's rambling pieces in the Observer, drawing a moral equivalence between those who deny that the 9/11 attacks were the work of al-Qa'ida (so-called truthers) and Holocaust deniers....
WordPress 2.8 worth the upgrade
Yesterday I upgraded my install of WordPress to version 2.8, and although I was apprehensive about upgrading (being an adherent of the school which prefers patched, i.e. bug-fixed, versions to fresh ones), it turned...
Cuddly Sufis versus aggressive Salafis
Once again, the topic of promoting "Sufism" as a means of countering the aggression of "salafi"-inspired jihadist movements, as in Pakistan presently, has come up, thanks to the establishment of a seven-member "Sufi Advisory...
What’s in a Muslim name?
Did you change your name when you converted? I did what I suspect most did: adopted a Muslim name to use with my Muslim friends, and kept my old one to use with everyone...
Rose-tinted, fluffy-rimmed spectacles, anyone?
Just as one man's freedom fighter is another's terrorist, one man's cute, fluffy endangered species is another's vermin. Last week Prince Charles called for an eradication drive against the evil grey squirrel, an "invasive"...
The frustrations of switching content management systems
Recently, I have been hearing over Twitter that one of my contacts has been thinking of moving one of his websites off WordPress onto Expression Engine, a proprietary content management system. I have never...
Aisha’s Young Marriage
Won’t somebody please think of the children (from The Spittoon) This is an article from a liberal perspective on controversies about publications which find fault with the marriage of the Prophet (صل الله عليه...
Gordon Brown and legitimacy
Does anyone get sick of hearing the claim that Gordon Brown’s position as prime minister is illegitimate because he wasn’t directly elected? The story goes that because he never contested an election as prime...
They love it, honest
I’ve not long finished watching a BBC Storyville documentary (see it on iPlayer here) on the scientist D. Carleton Gajdusek (pronounced Guy-du-shek), who won a Nobel prize for work on prion diseases (such as...
Religion and cruelty
Today’s Observer carried an opinion piece by the co-author of a book called Does God Hate Women?, to be published by Continuum this week, which gives a brief list of the worst things religious...
The two faces of the BNP
The rise of British racism may be horribly close — The Spectator Fraser Nelson goes “on the stump” (meaning, out knocking on doors) with BNP activists in Hertfordshire and discovers that people are no...
Guardian on comment links and spam
Yesterday’s Guardian Technology supplement had an interesting article on comment spam and the use of the “nofollow” feature to discourage it. My own view on this is that the value of “nofollow” is limited...