Democracy does not guarantee rights
Jack Straw: Our record isn't perfect. But talk of a police state is daft | Comment is free | The Guardian Jack Straw (currently the Justice secretary in the British government) wrote in yesterday's...
Indigo Jo Blogs Blog
Who’s endangering who?
Nearly a month ago, I flagged up a review by Ben White on an evangelical website of a new book by Patrick Sookhdeo, who I have taken to calling Sookhdevil for reasons anybody who...
Denis MacEoin’s rake job
Denis MacEoin, a serial Islamophobic letter-writer and think-tank hack, has published another report attacking Muslim schools. The sneering tone of the report might be gauged from the title: Music, Chess and Other Sins (PDF...
Review of “Muslim First, British Second”
A brother has asked me to review the Panorama programme entitled Muslim First, British Second which was on BBC1 on Monday night. You can watch it (as I did) on the BBC's iPlayer here...
The adoption abuse scandal
One of the legacies of the child abuse witch hunt culture of the 1990s and early 2000s, which saw at least three innocent women sent to prison for “murdering” babies who in fact died in cot deaths, is cases like that of the Websters of Norfolk, whose three children were seized from them after doctors accused them of causing fractures to one of them deliberately, and adopted.
Sacked Mini workers had an hour’s notice
Today, 850 workers at the BMW plant in Oxford, which manufactures the Mini car, were fired because the company was facing falling sales. The Mini was a long-standing Austin/Rover product, which was saved when...
Wife Swap embarrassment
Br. Umar posted a YouTube video based on a recent American version of the reality TV show Wife Swap, in which an originally British, but naturalised American, man swapped with a family from Missouri,...
Wilders should be kept out
Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician notorious for making an anti-Muslim film called Fitna which was essentially a montage of all the worst stereotypes of violent Muslims, has been banned from entering the UK to...
Notes on the Sheffield hymn scandal
Islamophobia Watch and a Muslim Facebooker drew my attention to the “scandal” of the head-teacher in Sheffield who was “forced out” after Muslim pupils (and, presumably, parents) objected to her whole-school assemblies. She had...
Hassan Butt: I’m a professional liar
Al-Qaida fantasist tells court: I'm a professional liar (Guardian website) The Guardian reports on the most egregious of the "ex-extremist" fraternity, who, when the story about having actually been a terrorist got too hot...
The importance of sensitivity
This week, Carol Thatcher, a TV "personality", economist and daughter of Margaret Thatcher, the former Prime Minister, was dropped from a BBC TV show for calling a sportsman a golliwog. The remark was made...
Finding a decent Linux distro
I recently acquired (thanks Mum & Dad) a new Dell Inspiron 530 computer, and one of the first things I do in such circumstances (which don’t come that often, admittedly) is to install Linux...
Muslims, shaikhs and the oppositional mentality
Looking at the discussion which has ensued from Umar Lee’s original “Rand Institute Muslims” post two weeks ago, something which has stuck out is the oppositional attitude of some of the major contributors. It...
Don’t be a drudge – go for a trudge
Snow in Kingston, February 2009 – a set on Flickr So, we’ve had the biggest snow fall in southern England since 1991 (which I remember fairly well; I was away at school), and the...
The organic corporate nanny
Does anyone out there (particularly in the UK; I’m not sure if it’s available anywhere else) like Kingfisher toothpaste? It’s an organic brand of toothpaste which is available in a variety of flavours, including...
Review of rotten book by the Sookhdevil
Ben White of Fulcrum, a website for evangelical Anglican Christians, has drawn my attention to a review he has written of Patrick Sookhdeo’s 2007 book Global Jihad. While I’ve not read Sookhdevil’s book, this...
Why Britain is up the spout, by Nick Cohen and a Frenchman
I have recently seen two articles ruminating on the causes of the recent credit crunch and resulting recession, one by Nick Cohen in the Observer Review last Sunday, and the second by Jaques Monin,...
Bush, Google and censorship
BBC NEWS: White House plans open government An interesting report on how the Obama government intends to open up the White House website to search engines. Under Bush, they "blocked" search engines from indexing...
Response to Umar Lee on Shaikh Hamza Yusuf
Umar Lee has posted an exposé of what he calls "Rand Institute Muslims" or RIMs as they supposedly exist in 21st-century America. Their characteristics, according to him, are "detachment from the Islamic Revival", supporting...
Heathrow: the sweetener which isn’t
Gordon Brown today gave the go-ahead for the third runway at Heathrow airport, the international airport in the western suburbs of London. I posted what Simon Jenkins wrote about this disaster yesterday, and here...