Author Archives: Faisal

The Illiberal French Burkha Ban

By Faisal | Published: May 18, 2010

Norman Geras refutes/dismantles Christopher Hitchens’ poorly argued support of the French burkha ban in seven bullet points. Here’s the first of them:

This, I’m sorry to say, is how it strikes me as being with Christopher Hitchens’s piece in Slate supporting the French move to outlaw the burqa. He has plenty of arguments, but not one of them is compelling. Christopher tries, first, to present the agents of the prospective legislation as not seeking to impose a ban.

To the contrary, they are attempting to lift a ban: a ban on the right of women to choose their own dress, a ban on the right of women to disagree with male and clerical authority…

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Posted in Civil Rights, Moral relativism | 45 Comments

A New Bill for Civil Liberties

By Faisal | Published: May 16, 2010

Watch out for a new bill to sweep away in a single repeal act all the pernicious laws against civil liberties introduced by New Labour in the last 13 years. The Con-Dem coalition could be a rare fluke which would enable such a bill, something a Lib-Lab coalition or a Conservative minority government would not have even considered, let alone passed.

Henry Porter writes in the Observer:

The Queen’s speech, now being drafted, will establish a Freedom or Great Repeal bill – the title has not yet been chosen – as a major part of the coalition’s legislative programme. All the areas detailed in the agreement between the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives, such as the abolition of ID cards and the children’s database (ContactPoint database??), the further regulation of CCTV and the restoration of right to protest will be in it. Measures that weren’t in the published agreement will reassert the right to silence and protect people against the huge number of new powers of entry into the home allowed by Labour.

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Posted in Civil Rights | 1 Comment

She Said

By Faisal | Published: May 10, 2010

Two standout passages from a superb interview of Ayaan Hirsi-Ali in the Observer, by Emma Brockes. Brockes calls her “narcissistically provocative” before going on to write, “To Hirsi Ali, the act of speaking out, of saying what no one else will say, seems at this stage to be almost a pathology; to override all other considerations”.

The first of those passages, on the moral bankruptcy of post-modern Western feminism and feminist intellectuals in particular. Hirsi-Ali is rightly critical of the of their stupendously narrow and blinkered response to the denial of basic rights of women in Muslim-majority societies:

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Posted in Human Rights, Islamism | 1 Comment

America’s Non-Controversial Christian Censorship

By Faisal | Published: April 26, 2010

Glen Greenwald debunks the notion that censorship and religious offence-taking is now the mainstay of Islam alone. In particular, Greenwald dismantles Ross Douthat’s (of the New York Times) accusations that only Islamic sensibilities are granted special privileges, as the tribalistic and selective tropes of a right-wing Christian fundamentalist hack.

Douthat writes in the New York Times:

In a way, the muzzling of “South Park” is no more disquieting than any other example of Western institutions’ cowering before the threat of Islamist violence. . . . But there’s still a sense in which the “South Park” case is particularly illuminating. . . . [I]t’s a reminder that Islam is just about the only place where we draw any lines at all. . . .Our culture has few taboos that can’t be violated, and our establishment has largely given up on setting standards in the first place.  Except where Islam is concerned.

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Posted in Anti Muslim bigotry, Freedom of Expression | 34 Comments

March For Secularism

By Faisal | Published: April 26, 2010

Thousands of people marched in Beirut in a bid to promote secularism in Lebanon’s sectarian political system.

Said one protester: “All the time you are asked which religion you belong to, but we want to be considered as only Lebanese,” she said. “Secularism is about every religion. It unites everyone but we need to forget whatever religion we are.”

The march was organized over the Internet by five Lebanese who together formed the grassroots group Laique Pride. They had hoped for 2,000 participants in the march, a figure easily surpassed as hundreds turned out in the sun.

Slogans such as “Civil marriage, not civil war” and “What about freedom of opinion?” could be read from huge placards in between Lebanese flags. Dozens of protesters wore white T-shirts with “What’s my religion?” on the front and “None of your business” on the back.

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Posted in Secularism | Leave a comment

Sikh Extremism “On The Rise” in Canada

By Faisal | Published: April 25, 2010

Ujjal Dosanjh, Liberal MP

We have here a report on Sikh extremism in Canada which has startling similarities with the situation of Islamist extremism in the UK. Ujjal Dosanjh, a former Canadian Liberal Party cabinet minister says Sikh extremism is on the rise in British Columbia, Canada. He goes on to say that a distorted multiculturalism has allowed Sikh extremism to take root “in the name of diversity”. Furthermore, he says that the militancy is worse now than a generation ago when Sikh extremists blew up an Air India flight, killing 329 mostly Canadian people.

Mr Dosanjh says separatist extremism is more entrenced in some Canadian Sikh communities than in Punjab, where the Khalistan movement – named after creation of a separate Sikh state – originated.

Of course, we are living through the same phenomena here in the UK, except that here the counterpart radical extremist groups, feted and supported by liberal forces in exactly the same way that Dosanjh describes happening in Canada, are Islamist .

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Posted in Sikh Extremism, Terrorism | 5 Comments

Amnesty in the dock

By Faisal | Published: April 25, 2010

The liberal consensus at the Guardian has finally caved in on the matter of Gita Sahgal and Amnesty International and has decided to report the story without resorting to malignant reportage on Sahgal (like some other “progressives” I could mention):

It has been a strange, disorientating and upsetting few months for Gita Sahgal. The former head of Amnesty International’s gender unit was suspended in February after a very public and acrimonious dispute with her bosses. Two weeks ago she left it altogether. Her departure was provoked, according to a statement by Amnesty, by “irreconcilable differences”.

The row – over Amnesty’s links with Islamist pressure groups – has led to a succession of negative headlines for a body unused to such bad publicity. According to Sahgal, the affair was symptomatic of an organisation that has lost its moral bearings and risks alienating whole swathes of liberal sympathisers.

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Posted in Human Rights | Leave a comment

Simon Singh delighted as BCA drop case

By Faisal | Published: April 15, 2010

The BCA have dropped their case against Simon Singh! A delighted Simon says:

It still staggers me that the British Chiropractic Association and half the chiropractors in the UK were making unsubstantiated claims. It still baffles me that the BCA then dared to sue me for libel and put me through two years of hell before I was vindicated.  And it still makes me angry that our libel laws not only tolerate but also encourage such ludicrous libel suits. My victory does not mean that our libel laws are okay, because I won despite the libel laws. We still have the most notoriously anti-free speech libel laws in the free world.

Read more here.

And here is Simon’s original article about the British Chiropractic Association which kicked off their libel action, now legally republished on the Guardian.

Posted in Freedom of Expression, Lawfare | Leave a comment

Child Sex Abuse and the Catholic Church

By Faisal | Published: April 15, 2010

The next time the Catholic Church customarily attacks secularism, it should remember what it owes to democratic secular institutions which have protected the child victims by upholding the rule of law.

Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker:

It is not “anti-Catholic” to hypothesize that these things may have something to do with the Church’s extraordinary difficulty in coming to terms with clerical sexual abuse. The iniquities now roiling the Catholic Church are more shocking than the ones that so outraged Martin Luther. But the broader society in which the Church is embedded has grown incomparably freer. To the extent that the Church manages to purge itself of its shame—its sins, its crimes—it will owe a debt of gratitude to the lawyers, the journalists, and, above all, the victims and families who have had the courage to persevere, against formidable resistance, in holding it to account. Without their efforts, the suffering of tens of thousands of children would still be a secret. Our largely democratic, secularist, liberal, pluralist modern world, against which the Church has so often set its face, turns out to be its best teacher—and the savior, you might say, of its most vulnerable, most trusting communicants.

Posted in Crime | Leave a comment

Reply to Sunny Hundal: Tell us the difference between Al-Awlaki and Mehsud

By Faisal | Published: April 14, 2010

Given the kind of wild approximations and sweeping generalisations Sunny Hundal makes here, it might not hurt him to trouble himself with some data on terrorist attacks in Pakistan.

The number of fatalities due to terrorist violence in Pakistan between 2003 and 2009 came to 25,070. The largest number of deaths occurred in 2009, which came to 11,585 in one year alone.

The SATP report where I get this information from also says

“Since media access is heavily restricted in the troubled areas of Pakistan, and there is only fitful release of information by Government agencies and media reportage, the actual figures could be much higher”.

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Posted in Human Rights, Moral relativism | 57 Comments

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