Whether Rowan Williams is a good man or a bad man; an intellectual or an academic; a highly sensitive soul or a machinating demagogue or whether or not he deserved the tabloid-led backlash is irrelevent to the position that he took when he delivered his speech, Civil and Religious Law in England: a Religious Perspective.
What […]
In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country. In Iran we do not have this phenomenon, I don’t know who has told you that we have it.
So said Ahmadinejad at Columbia University.
Well, you could have fooled us Mahmoud. Who’s the hotty you’re sucking the face off?
Perhaps what he means is that he’s doing […]
Myanmar (Burma) has been under the kosh of a brutally repressive military junta since 1962 but the tide might finally be turning.
The last 4 days have seen protest by tens of thousands of monks marching to Yangon; and their lines are growing.
Burmese religionists leading the popular uprising against an anti-democratic, totalitarian, military dictatorship!
The irony is […]
A controversy which spontaeously combusted in Bangladesh on Wednesday, following the publication of a cartoon deemed “offensive to Muslims” has blown over into a national crisis, involving freedom of speech and a power struggle between clerical political forces harboured within the existing Caretaker Government.
It started off with an innocuous cartoon published in Alpin, a magazine […]
What do the following men have in common:
1. Narendra Modi
2. Bal Thackeray
3. Praveen Togadia
4. Slobodan Milosovic
5. Jean-Marie Le Pen
6. Christopher Hitchens
7. Martin Amis
8. Mark Steyn
The answer?
Well, we know that the first three are Indian political fascists who sprinkle their rhetoric with anti-Muslim bigotry to stigmatise communities and win votes at the drop of a Nehru […]
Reposted from Padraig Reidy’s Index on Censorship blog:
Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz has made an academic publisher withdraw a controversial book. But it is the UK libel system that allows the rich and powerful to stifle investigation, writes Padraig Reidy
Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz, a Saudi-born Irish passport holder, and one of the richest men in the […]
From the Boston Review, Nicholas Schmidle on the “Islamist challenge to secular Bangladesh”:
Islamist parties have multiplied over the past decade and public support for them has grown. Yet Bangladeshi society remains overwhelmingly secular, even militantly secular. And while the Islamists have grabbed headlines, the secularists are holding their own in an intense power struggle. Bangladesh […]
It was then that I became involved with my first Islamicist group, the Hizb-ut-Tizer (party of Tizer). They wanted to get rid of corrupt Muslim states and replace them with a superstate, based in Scotland, made from girders. They felt this would strengthen the Muslims. They successfully lobbied for a new prayer space, and we […]
In an interesting article, Adrian Hamilton tells us of Blair’s skillful use of “four rhetorical tricks”:
The problems faced by the Government are new and more terrible than anything that has gone on before. But then you have to use anything you can to justify ‘extraordinary rendition’ [Abduction & Torture ], don’t you.
Defining a choices in […]
Woke up this morning to the news, flooding the news channels, that Saddam Hussein has been hanged in Iraq. There’s even an accompanying snuff movie of the execution (linked off the BBC page above) for all you who get off on a bit of gallows pornography.
So that’s Augusto Pinochet and Saddam Hussein down in the […]