This is a cross-post by Potkin Azarmehr
For those British students who were getting too enthusiastic to appear before Press TV and describe UK police brutality, this is police brutality in the state which funds Press TV:
This is a cross-post by Potkin Azarmehr
For those British students who were getting too enthusiastic to appear before Press TV and describe UK police brutality, this is police brutality in the state which funds Press TV:
This is a cross-post by Asma Q. Nomani from the Beast
Gen. David Petraeus has weighed in, saying that the planned burnings by the Rev. Terry Jones‘ congregation in Florida will endanger U.S. soldiers fighting in Afghanistan. But I believe that there is something that endangers Americans and American soldiers even more: certain passages that—when read literally—pit Muslims against Americans and the West.
We, as Muslims, need to tear a few pages out of the Quran.
This is a cross-post by Kenan Malik
The fashion police, at least, have already arrived, a decade early and without any help from Islamists. But rather than forcing women to wear the burqa or niqab, their job is to force them not to. Earlier this month Italian police in the northern city of Novara fined a Tunisian immigrant, Amel Marmouri, €500 for being veiled in a post office. Belgian police are likely to be doing the same after the Brussels parliament outlawed the burqa. France expects to pass a similar law by the autumn. Holland could follow suit. The Spanish city of Lleida has forbidden the burqa in public buildings; the Minister of Labour and Immigration Celestino Corbacho has hinted at a national ban. In Canada, the Quebec government has drafted an anti-burqa law. Australian politicians are demanding one too.
i’ve not posted for a while, mostly because of pressure of work, but there are a number of things which are currently causing me to more or less lose sleep.
recently, i gave up posting on pickled politics, partly because of the level of personal animosity i was facing, but mostly just in frustration at my apparent inability to get my point across. now, i suppose i have nobody very much to blame for that apart from myself, but i’ve never felt that was a problem before now. now, i think i’m starting to work out what it is that is bothering me; certainly, it’s not about the denizens of one blog, or even the blogosphere, or even the media. it’s not any one set of views, not any one person, but a set of trends, a collective movement i sense in wider society.
This is a cross-post by Edmund Standing
The white liberal is an unhealthy type of creature that you will undoubtedly have encountered, if not in real life, certainly via the media. By ‘liberal’, I do not mean simply someone who has a generally liberal outlook, in the sense of a ‘live and let live’ philosophy, nor do I mean liberals in the sense of the classical liberals of the conservative tradition. By ‘white liberal’, I mean a white Western individual who is likely to come from a middle class background and have a university education, considers him or herself to be both ‘left-wing’ and socially ‘liberal’, and almost certainly reads The Guardian or The Independent. White liberals espouse an artificial and pretentious form of ‘egalitarianism’, a patronising and hypocritical approach to ethnic minorities and non-Western cultures, and – in a re-hash of the notion of the ‘white man’s burden’ – devote themselves to a delusional Messianism in which they seek to ‘save the world’ through protesting against war (in real terms, protesting against non-white people having a chance at freedom and democracy), Israel (the one truly liberal society in the Middle East), globalisation (thereby opposing the one great vehicle by which poorer nations can develop), and so on, while making themselves feel and look ‘good’ by flaunting their pious support for campaigns to end poverty in the Third World (which will do no such thing, as Dambisa Moyo, Stephen Pollard, Marian L. Tupy, and others rightly point out ), and boasting about how ‘progressive’ they are by showing ‘solidarity’ with genocidal Islamists in Gaza.
Gauri Viswanathan interviews Salman Rushdie for The Hindu. An excerpt:
SR: I don’t know how unfashionable this is, but I think there are universals. I think there are things that are universally true and I think there are such things as universal rights. They are not culturally specific, in my view. The argument made by relativists is that it is culturally specific to argue that there are universals. I think there are other ways of approaching it.
Consider two stories carried by Bob Pitt on Islamophobia-Watch.
Exhibit A, published by I-W on June 25th, is the story of Sureyya Ozkaya:
These are the shocking injuries inflicted upon schoolgirl Sureyya Ozkaya during a brutal daylight assault near her Thornton Heath home.
The 14-year-old’s hair was set on fire and her hands and feet were cut with glass during the attack in Grangewood Park, before her attackers smashed her head against a tree and left her bleeding in a bush.
She was stumbled upon by a woman walking her dog and carried home to nearby Kitchener Road following the attack, at about 7.30pm on June 9.
Sureyya’s mother Pemdegul Kale, 39, said three girls taunted her daughter about her Muslim faith as they carried out the assault, before burning her hair with a lighter and stealing her trainers.
Eight years ago, Kenan Malik wrote an important and remarkably prescient essay on multiculturalism called Against Multiculturalism:
Proponents of multiculturalism usually put forward two kinds of arguments in its favour. First, they claim that multiculturalism is the only means of ensuring a tolerant and democratic polity in a world in which there are deep-seated conflicts between cultures embodying different values. This argument is often linked to the claim that the attempt to establish universal norms inevitably leads to racism and tyranny. Second, they suggest that human beings have a basic, almost biological, need for cultural attachments. This need can only be satisfied, they argue, by publicly validating and protecting different cultures. Both arguments are, I believe, deeply flawed.
By that definition, Sunny Hundal is a textbook proponent of multiculturalism. A few months ago he wrote a piece on his blog, Pickled Politics, and called it Minorities and power, in liberal democracies. Not only was it is a clear-cut example of Kenan’s definition of multiculturalism, Hundal provides a complete proof-positive validation of Kenan’s thesis with this astonishing disclosure:
The UNDP has published its yearly Human Development Report (HDR) and the results are surprising to say the least. It will put paid to a few received notions held dearly by the moralists of the Left, the Islamists of the religious right and pretty much everything else in between. I say that with irony at full blast and very little confidence, of course.
According to the report, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, which comprises the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, are classified in this broad-based UN Index as having “Medium Human Development”. It places its position at 110 of 182 countries, putting the Palestinian Territories in neither the top nor bottom groups.
And most surprising of all, the country’s HDR index places it ahead of the muslim-majority countries Egypt (123), Indonesia (111), Pakistan (141) and Bangladesh (146).
Sunny Hundal is overjoyed. Evidently Amnesty International have published a report detailing their human rights activism in Afghanistan. Hundal seems to be suggesting that publication of this report legitimises Amnesty UK’s partnership with the jihadi pressure group Cageprisoners:
Wait! I thought they were in league?? I’m getting all confused here, because according to certain defenders of human rights Amnesty was acting LIKE the Taliban. All very confusing isn’t it…. or not.
But surely countering human rights abuses is the the kind of thing Amnesty was set up to do? Wasn’t highlighting human rights abuses rather than contextualising “defensive jihad” precisely their remit? Shouldn’t Amnesty be unapologetic advocates of universal human rights instead of forging partnerships with Cageprisoners whose business is to promote jihadist Islam and its exponents such as Anwar al-Awlaki and Ali al-Timimi?