Musings on the Britannic Crescent
Muslim communities around the country have shunned al-Muhajiroun and its various entities for years and refused to give them a platform. Instead, they have to work through front organisations, hire private halls, set up high-street stalls or leaflet people with their poisonous little tracts. They are utterly marginal but are still able to generate huge [...]
Today we live in an age when the boundary between two allegedly monolithic entities, “Islam” and the “West” appears to be rigid, politicized, ring-fenced. So the question arises as to the motives of converts to Islam. Are they converting to faith or to an anti-West political cause? Such questions get asked after terrorist incident involving [...]
The campaign against the British government’s bill to extend detention without charge from 28 to 56 days is gainng momentum. One campaign, Not a Day Longer, which brings together Liberal Conspiracy, Amnesty International, City Circle and Our Kingdom, is being run from Facebook, so please sign up here. One thing you can do is to [...]
In October the Racial and Religious Hatred Act came into force in Britain that outlaws anyone from stirring up religious hatred against people on religious grounds. From the late Eighties onwards, it was argued that while certain religious groups such as Sikhs and Jews were seen as ethnic groups under incitement to racial hatred legislation, [...]
Boyd Tonkin says it much better than I could, but the case of the Lyrical Terrorist shows that people can now be locked up for what they think, what they write and what they read, download and print out from the Internet. How can we have come to the position whereby the first response of [...]
Peter Kosminsky, well-known for his topical political dramas, has taken on post-7/7 Britain in his latest offering, the two-parter, Britz. This is the story of a brother, Sohail (Riz Ahmed, the single “Post-9/11 Blues”, Michael Winterbottom’s The Road to Guantanamo), and his sister, Nasima (Manjinder Virk, Neil Biswas’s Bradford Riots), both born and bred in [...]
on American campuses this week (22-26th October). According to Think Progress, one of America’s top political blogs, the claim that 200 campuses are taking part is hype. The American-Arab Anti Discrimination Committee did a survey of (the allegedly) participating campuses and found that
after we contacted those institutions, most of those institutions indicated that no such [...]
After the foiled attacks in London and Glasgow, stops and searches under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 have increased in London to five times the monthly average of 2,114 to 10, 948 last month (July 2007). Twenty four per cent were Asian, 14% were black and 54% were white. Under the Act, people [...]
We have sadly been here before. The question on everyone’s lips after the failed attacks in London and Glasgow is: shouldn’t British Muslims be doing more? After all, if one considers some of the key figures, the battle for the “hearts and minds” (a horrid cliché admittedly) of an extremist subculture doesn’t seem to be [...]
