Category Archives: Your View

This is a cross-post by Shiraz Maher from Standpoint Magazine

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The problem with Inayat Bunlawala is that, well, he’s just not that smart. It probably explains why he remains an Islamist well into his thirties.

To be honest, I haven’t written about him for a while because it’s just too easy. It started getting embarrassing. Here’s the thing with Bungles, like every good Islamist he loves to whine and moan about pretty much everything while maintaining a blissful ignorance about his own hypocrisy.

In the past Bungles has ferociously tried to protect his own little Islamist match by deriding and dismissing almost every other Muslim group in the most vicious terms. Here he is dismissing my friend Haras Rafiq:

Who is he? Who does he represent? Let’s wait and see just how many groups affiliate to his group, but at the moment it’s obscure and unknown.

This is a cross-post by Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens

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For the past week I have been in New York, and on Tuesday took the afternoon to visit Ground Zero and Park51, the site of the Cordoba Initiative’s proposed Islamic centre.

As I pressed the timer on my watch so as to check how long it took to walk from the former World Trade Centre to the Cordoba site, it dawned on me how absurd this whole issue really is; what distance would be appropriate? Should there be some sort of strictly enforced ‘don’t offend me’ radius around Ground Zero? The next day, the New York Times reported that Mayor Bloomberg made exactly this point:

Mr. Bloomberg…said he understood the impulse to find a different location, in the hope of ending the controversy.

“But it won’t,” the mayor said, “The question will then become, ‘how big should the ‘no-mosque zone’ around the World Trade Center be?’”

This is cross-post by Shiraz Maher from Focus on Islamism

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I have long maintained that I don’t ‘do’ theology. It really is not my game and, given the mess modern Islam finds itself in, there is very little to be gained from my entering the fray. Those who know me or follow my writing will know that from 2001-2005, I was a member of the radical Islamist party, Hizb ut Tahrir. I can’t profess to having known much about Islamic theology then either – joining was a political move, the Militant Tendency of my day – and I don’t claim to be an expert on Islamic theology today either.

I have been content to have left the party on my own terms and in my own way after researching Islamic political thought for myself. Until now, I have never sought to comment on that further but the ongoing mosque controversy in New York – fuelled by some of the very worst elements of the American Right – and, this silly post by Edmund Standing on Harry’s Place (from which he nominally retired as a blogger at one point) has forced me to review that.

This is a guest-post by Chris Blackburn

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The recent deluge of sensitive information by Wikileaks on the US in AfPak has made me really mad. I don’t care about the breach of security, although, the naming of Afghan informants was highly cavalier and Julian Assange should have blanked out assets names. Intelligence and the suppression of strategic information should become more open in some respects, but what Wikileaks have done is just simply reckless. The Afghan people have been risking their lives to give us information and intelligence which they hoped would help defeat the Taliban and its allies. But, what really annoys me the most is the fact that Pakistan has been complicit in sponsoring militants and playing us for fools, or have they? That position is certainly conventional wisdom at the moment, but is it strictly accurate?