Rolled-up Trousers

Muslim GPs: Chapter and Verse

What Patricia Hewitt said:

I have had Muslim women give me chapter and verse on very distressing breaches of confidentiality by Muslim GPs.

A Department of Health press release later rolled back with this clarification:

Muslims and Canada

Thought provoking observations from Ehsan Masood on a visit to Canada, the country that has consistently shown in various polls has the best relations with their Muslims:

One of the first things that grabs a visitor from Europe is the absence in Canada of an aggressive popular media. There is a tabloid press, but it concerns itself with the celebrity world, and the domain of the weird and the wacky. Canada's newsagents and supermarkets lack the familiar (to a visitor from Britain) sight of a long row of newspapers screaming alarmist headlines in capital letters that frequently exude scepticism (at least) and outright hostility (at most) towards people of non-western religions or new arrivals from other countries.

Furthermore, Canada's media (both popular and broadsheet) will not do anything to disturb the national consensus on diversity. So, for example, members of the Canadian far right, or Muslims who support violent extremists, will not automatically make the front pages, nor will they be invited to the top news shows as routinely happens in Britain. 'We just don't do that kind of thing in Canada', says Nazim Baksh, an award-winning producer and filmmaker for the CBC, Canada's public-service broadcaster.

£10,000

MPs have voted themselves an allowance of £10,000 a year for running websites. Why don't they just head down to Wordpress and get one for free?

Seems like some friendly web design company is going to be creaming £6.5m or so from this, when a basic blog would do the trick. MPs could keep us updated on their activities, give reasons for why they voted as they did, while people could leave comments and feedback.

The terrorism monkey is off the MCB's back

Ruth Kelly, the Communities Minister, recently announced that £5m of funding would be allocated to fighting extremism. It would be directed at local projects, which was interpreted as another slap for the MCB. In an Observer article last week, other groups were mentioned positively such as the "Muslim British Forum", which is presumably meant to be the British Muslim Forum.

The mistake hasn't been seized upon, but betrays the desperate groping at the centre of government for something resembling a strategy. I don't think the MCB should be overly concerned at being looked over. Rather, many have argued for ages that there is nothing more that the organisation can do with respect to the terror threat. Plausibly, all that can be asked for is to renounce the killing of innocents and say it has no place in Islam (which they have done), and to call for people to cooperate with the police and security services (which they have done).

You can watch highlights of the Sky News debate on the Iraq war here. 82% of people said the invasion was wrong.

Worth watching just for Times Comment Editor Daniel Finkelstein's attempt to portray George Galloway's labelling of him as an Israel supporter, as actually calling him a Jew.

Meanwhile, Craig Murray caught a report on BBC World Service saying that the government had concluded that the Lancet's calculation of 655,000 dead in Iraq was "if anything, an underestimate". The news, along with the Department for International Development's report, now seems to have been buried.

In most European countries there is a party of the right whose basic definition is its attachment to the national interest of that country. Only here is there a Conservative party, and Tory press, largely in the hands of people whose basic commitment is to the national interest of another country, or countries.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft on the Conservative MPs whose allegiances lie with the US and Israel.

Terry Sanderson confirms what I wrote in a recent post about the National Secular Society not being about pushing religion from just the public sphere, but about railing against religion wherever they can.

Commentators at the time pointed out that many religious people were also secularists. If they are members of the NSS I would advise them to get out, as they are nothing but "human shields" for Sanderson & Co's illiberal agenda.

See also Ekklesia

Comic Relief

Friday's Comic Relief festivities struck me as a bit anachronistic.

Just two years ago 250,000 marched in Edinburgh to Make Poverty History. Many thousands of others across the world made the sacrifice of attending concerts performed at by the globe's leading music acts. The rallying cry was:

1. Drop the Debt
2. Trade Justice
3. More and better aid

Gone was the "Give us you money" attitude. Not a penny was raised. It had taken two decades, but Sir Bob and Sir Bono had realised that political change was necessary to move people out of poverty in this world. The MPH campaign appeared to mark a shift in people's attitudes. It was no longer about charity. Political change was needed on crippling debts and ridiculous trade rules. Even on aid, governments had to start meeting the decades old UN target of 0.7% of GDP - it wasn't not up to ordinary people to do it through Live Aid events any more.

Self-indulgence

Something of a breakthrough has happened, with Tony Blair labelling support for independence as being "self-indulgent". He was speaking about Sir George Mathewson's support for the SNP in the coming elections and his backing for Alex Salmond as the "outstanding" candidate for First Minister.

Sir George is regarded as the driving force behind the Royal Bank of Scotland's rise to being one of the biggest financial institutions in the world today. Bizarrely, Blair sought to deflect his position by saying that Sir George's view was not that of "real businesses". Not a good day for the speech writer.

But for me, the strangest part of the prime minister's response was to characterise it as being "self-indulgent". Unionist politicians have never seen any benefit to independence, but the prime minister's comments betray that there must be something to it now. Even if he was claiming selfishness of the part of Sir George, it would be safe to assume that others would also be similarly placed to benefit.

I suspect though that we are talking about self-indulgence in the broad sense. The kind of self-indulgence we're told that Scots would be engaging in if they kept all the oil wealth to themselves, as if it is normal for nations to go sharing their natural resources with others, much less have someone else "look after" it for them.

The wisdom of Taj Hargey

“How can you swim properly if you wear a hijab?” - in the Sun

Trident

Can someone explain to me why the prime minister is telling us that Trident will be out-of-date by 2024, that we need to take a decision to renew it this year because it will take 17 years to build a new one, but we're also being told that Iran could potentially magic up a nuclear bomb that could imperil us more or less immediately?

David Cameron scripted by "pro-Arabs"

According to the New Statesman's Martin Bright. He reels off a list of supposed gaffes emanating from the Tories in late February 2006 (he means 2007). First among them is:

The week ended with a distinctly shaky performance from David Cameron in Israel where he had felt it necessary to assure Foreign Office officials that he would try not to “screw up”. Yet by sticking to the script provided by the pro-Arab mandarins he provoked the disdain of the Israeli government by suggesting that it is standing in the way of peace by continuing to build settlements in the West Bank.

How Barack Obama learned to love Israel

His decisive trajectory reinforces a lesson that politically weak constituencies have learned many times: access to people with power alone does not translate into influence over policy. Money and votes, but especially money, channelled through sophisticated and coordinated networks that can "bundle" small donations into million dollar chunks are what buy influence on policy. Currently, advocates of Palestinian rights are very far from having such networks at their disposal. Unless they go out and do the hard work to build them, or to support meaningful campaign finance reform, whispering in the ears of politicians will have little impact.

Ali Abunimah from Electronic Intifada

FIFA bans hijab

Readers may have been following this story from Canada. A 12-year-old girl was not allowed to participate in a  football match last Sunday because she was wearing a headscarf. Asmahan Mansour's team mates walked off with her in solidarity.

The issue was discussed at FIFA's meeting in Manchester this week where the world's governing body upheld the decision. English FA chairman Brian Barwick said:

“If you play football, there's a set of laws and rules, and law 4 outlines the basic equipment ... It's absolutely right to be sensitive to people's thoughts and philosophies, but equally there has to be a set of laws that are adhered to, and we favour law 4 being adhered to.”

Here's the key passage in law 4:

A player must not use equipment or wear anything that is dangerous to himself or another player (including any kind of jewellery).

It hasn't been demonstrated that the hijab is a threat to the player or to others. I think that would take quite a bit of imagination. And a reading of law 4 says it outlines the "basic compulsory equipment of a player". It isn't clear from reading it that it is to the exclusion of anything else. Indeed players are regularly seen wearing caps and gloves which are not in law 4, so it's clear Barwick is talking nonsense on that point.

My feeling is that the decision has been rushed. Asmahan was only sent from the field last Sunday (after playing on Saturday in the tournament without sanction) and already FIFA have apparently sat and deliberated the issue on the back of that. It's hardly enough time for research to be done, papers to be submitted and the ramifications to be considered.

Before the usual suspects start to drone on about "integration of religious minorities" - football is a global game. FIFA's decision sends out a signal to Muslim women everywhere that wear the headscarf that their participation in the sport is not welcome.

National Secular Society has descended into farce

The point that secularism is itself an ideology comparable in scope to any of the creeds it aims to keep out of the public sphere - but arguably the only one that is genuinely tyrannical - is reinforced by the existence of organisations like the National Secular Society.

It claims that it "wants to have a society in which all are free to practice their faith" but then calls Judaism a "nonsensical religious life" (see image on right and the actual BBC headline it is a link to).

It's pretty clear that the NSS have lost their way, and now come across as an extremely bitter bunch of people railing against the religious in manner in which they would heap opprobrium if it was the other way round.

Osama bin Laden has always been very clear that his jihad depends upon the US and its allies for its globalization. His statements are filled with heavily ironic passages about the “partnership” that Al-Qaeda has with the Bush administration to carry on a war from which both sides benefit while trying to destroy each other. However rhetorical its language, this bizarre partnership is confirmed by the intimacy that so many Muslim militants enjoy with their Western enemies.

Like the 9/11 bombers, as well as those in Madrid and London after them, these men tend to be thoroughly integrated into Western societies, have non-Muslim friends and even girlfriends, and indulge in the whole array of Western pleasures, bars and nightclubs included. They are in this sense internal to the West they fight in every way.

Professor Faisal Devji - read the rest