Islam

A huge number of nonsense goes around after atrocities like those in Paris. The media and social media are full of them. I thought it might be helpful to list the worst. ‘This attack has nothing to do with Islam’: obviously not true. See here. ‘Islam means peace’: Very obviously not true. Incidentally the word actually means ‘submission’. Again see here. ‘This attack was an attack on Islam’: No. It was an attack on the people of Paris who were going to watch a football match or a concert or eating in a restaurant. ‘MuslimsAreNotTerrorists’: Today’s leading hashtag on Twitter. Again, clearly wrong. While nobody thinks all Muslims are terrorists all

It is not so surprising if the jihadists in Paris were targeting an international football match. There has for years been a strange relationship between football, Islam and violence in France. The French football team, les bleus, have long been held up as an emblem of harmony and hope in an otherwise bleak multicultural landscape. The world cup winning team of 1998 consisted largely of the children of African immigrants and was celebrated as a great symbol of how the modern multicultural fifth republic could work. Zinedine Zidane, a Muslim boy from Marseilles, was the star of that tournament. Eight years later, when he was sent off for headbutting Marco

‘I want a woman to be President,’ declared one of the ambulance drivers interviewed by Sherief Elkatsha for his film Cairo Drive. I don’t think he was joking. He was fed up with the struggle to do his job in the chaos of the Egyptian capital’s streets clogged by 14 million vehicles. Elkatsha’s feature documentary took five years to make and takes us from 2009 through the Tahrir Square uprising up to the most recent elections purely through looking at the traffic, the lifeblood of the city. He set out to give us voices, not tell a political story, and this lies behind many of the films shown in last

Tunisia is preposterously touted as the one success story of the nightmarish revolutions, counter-revolutions, civil wars, jihadist invasions and Islamist terrorist atrocities in the name of an Arab Spring we are still told represents a thirst for Western-style freedom and plurality. The decision to award this year’s Nobel Peace Prize to the country’s National Dialogue Quartet, for apparently helping the country’s transition to democracy, dangerously perpetuates this myth. The Nobel Committee says that the National Dialogue Quartet was… …instrumental in enabling Tunisia, in the space of a few years, to establish a constitutional system of government guaranteeing fundamental rights for the entire population, irrespective of gender, political conviction or religious belief.

So the German Chancellor has just been caught on microphone talking with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: German Chancellor Angela Merkel was overheard confronting Zuckerberg over incendiary posts on the social network, Bloomberg reported on Sunday, amid complaints from her government about anti-immigrant posts in the midst of Europe’s refugee crisis. On the sidelines of a United Nations luncheon on Saturday, Merkel was caught on a hot mic pressing Zuckerberg about social media posts about the wave of Syrian refugees entering Germany, the publication reported. The Facebook CEO was overheard responding that “we need to do some work” on curtailing anti-immigrant posts about the refugee crisis. “Are you working on this?”

On Saturday I wrote a blog recommending readers catch the ‘Passion For Freedom’ festival’s final hours in London.  Thank you to all the readers who did and helped make it a packed-out show.  One further detail about the show came up afterwards in the Guardian and I mentioned it at the start of my talk at Denmark’s free speech conference on Saturday. That is the fact that one of the artist’s work was removed from the show on the advice of the British police.  The work in question – entitled ‘Isis Threaten Sylvania’, featuring the children’s toys Sylvanian Families – is certainly anti-Isis, but it is hard to see it as ‘potentially inflammatory’ as