This story is really, seriously worrying: (CNN) — French authorities said Wednesday that they will not authorize weekend demonstrations in Paris as protests over an anti-Muslim video [The Innocence of Muslims, the youtube clip which sparked the anti-American protests in Cairo and Benghazi last week] started to fade worldwide. Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault told radio [...]
On Telegraph Blogs this week, Dan Hannan mounts up one of his favourite hobby horses – his contention that while “man is fallen and we find it everywhere”, people with leftwing sympathies tend to be far more hate-filled and abusive than those at the bluer end of the political spectrum. He and most others on [...]
On Saturday one of my fellow Third Estaters (I’m assuming Reuben) tweeted: Definitely don’t think the left should be calling for a state van [sic] on the EDL march While compelling, I think this view is seriously mistaken. Granted, it’s always a good idea to be wary of calling on the State to do anything [...]
The Guardian believes uncompromisingly in freedom of expression, but not in any duty to gratuitously offend…Freedom of expression as it has developed in the democratic west is a value to be cherished, but not abused. Guardian Leader Comment, 4 February 2006, on the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy. In September 2005, a Danish newspaper published 12 [...]
In the 1960s and 70s, two ultra leftist groups, the Weathermen in the USA, and the Red Army Faction in West Germany, used the same slogan to clarify the motivation for their violent response to the US invasion of Vietnam: ‘bringing the war home.’ There are two movements we can describe as ‘bringing the war [...]
With all the furore about a French parliamentary committee recommending a ban on Muslim women wearing Islamic face veils in public, I thought it was a good time to bring up France’s long-standing history of banning items of clothing… Historically religion isn’t the only area to fall victim to the fashion police in France, sartorial [...]
Guest post by Carl Packman While Sarkozy in France has realised that the burqa ban will be harder to enforce than originally believed – and so, therefore, will be shelved – another group of angry right wing men (and women), this time in Britain, have decided the issue is for them, namely UKIP, and for [...]
Guest post by Carl Packman Islam is enemy No. 1 of much contemporary criticism, either by the angry EDL men on the street, to new atheists asserting that Islam is incompatible with Enlightenment societies, to critics such as Nick Cohen and David Aaranovitch’s’ with their claims to present Islamic bad boys (and girls) as the [...]
Walking through security at Portcullis House, the fabulously expensive building standing adjacent to the Houses of Parliament, is a bit like going through any airport anywhere in the world. But making your way through the spacious courtyard, past green trees and sun-dappled water features under the enormous sparkling glass dome towering overhead, you could be [...]
“He thinks we’re all bloody bourgeois” scoffed Austen Ivereigh, as he puffed on his Montecristo in a trendy bar in King’s Cross, whilst reading aloud David Broder’s response to yesterday’s Strangers Into Citizens demonstration. “This looks like it was written thirty years ago,” he chortled to himself. Ivereigh is a founder of the Strangers into [...]
