Ah now this is pure fun – a guy on French tv, on what looks like a talk show, takes on Fox News’s pontifications about “zones interdites” in Paris. C’est drolatique.
Especially the part where a correspondent goes into the field, in pleasant areas of inner Paris, and asks locals if their neighborhood reminds them of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Watch French TV make fun of Fox News claims of… by ewillies
H/t Maureen
News from India, via the Independent:
An Indian man has been arrested after he allegedly attempted to bury his 9-year-old daughter alive.
Adul Hussein allegedly dug a pit in the back garden of his home in Putia, a small village near the India-Bangladesh border, while his wife was away from the house on Friday afternoon.
Police sources told Indian news channel NDTV that the man’s “dislike” of his daughter Rukshena prompted his actions. [Read more…]
50ShadesOfBeige @Iram_Ramzan
I think the world should sue Saudi Arabia for bringing the human race into disrepute
That puts it neatly. I think something along those lines every time I post about one of their atrocities.
Yesssss – finally the progressive liberal Muslims are starting to get a voice in the UK media. The Independent quotes four who were on Panorama last week.
Last week four British Muslims told the BBC’s Panorama why they believe the government is right to identify “non-violent extremism” as the ideology that helps lays the ground for violent extremism. They explained that this non-violent ideology is the politicised version of puritanical Sunni Islam that dominates Saudi Arabia and which has been exported to Britain and around the world over decades.
The programme showed how Salafi Wahhabism is wreathed in anti-westernism, contempt for parliamentary democracy, reactionary attitudes to gender equality and gay rights, and disdain for other faiths. Through its UK-based adherents, this puritanical strain of Islam has taken on a life of its own here with a proliferation of Islamic teaching institutions, activist groups and Islamic satellite channels. It “takes young Muslims to the front door of violent extremists” said Sara Khan.
Here is a segment of Gerard Biard on Meet the Press.
The chief editor of Charlie Hebdo is defending the magazine’s controversial depictions of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad, saying it skewers religious figures only when faith gets “entangled” in the political world.
“We do not attack religion, but we do when it gets involved in politics,” Gerard Biard said in an interview with Chuck Todd broadcast on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. [Read more…]
Now Boko Haram is turning its murderous violence on Cameroon. The BBC reports it has kidnapped dozens of people there.
They said many of those kidnapped in the cross border attack against villages were children.
Four villagers who tried to fend off the attackers were killed, a security source has told the BBC. [Read more…]
The new ed-in-chief of Charlie Hebdo was on Meet the Press this morning. Mediaite transcribed a bit:
Meet the Press host Chuck Todd asked Charlie Hebdo’s new editor-in-chief Gerard Briard Sunday morning what he made of the decision of many American news outlets, including NBC News, to blur the cover of this week’s issue, which featured a caricature of the Islamic prophet Muhammed…
“Écoutez, we cannot blame newspapers that already suffer much difficulty in getting published and distributed in totalitarian regimes for not publishing a cartoon that could get them at best jail, at worst death,” he said. [Read more…]
Jane Harley explains at Comment is Free that Oxford University Press hasn’t banned pigs, it just…doesn’t want its education authors to mention them. (Scholars are entirely free to mention them, she says. Oh, whew.)
Given that our editorial guidelines that reference pigs and pork have been in place for as long as I can remember, little did I imagine that they would attract international headlines claiming that the Oxford University Press had banned sausages. To clarify, OUP does not have a blanket ban on pork products in its titles, and we do still publish books about pigs. Although there have been no recent changes to our guidance on this topic, these articles highlighted the fine balance needed when considering students’ cultural and learning needs.
Nick linked to a piece by Mehdi Hasan so I just had to go read the whole thing. I do not like it. I never do like what Mehdi Hasan writes or says.
He frames this as an open letter to “Dear liberal pundit” – which is annoying. Should we reply “Dear conservative Muslim pundit”? Or should we play at being grown-ups.
The massacre in Paris on 7 January was, you keep telling us, an attack on free speech. The conservative former French president Nicolas Sarkozy agrees, calling it “a war declared on civilisation”. So, too, does the liberal-left pin-up Jon Snow, who crassly tweeted about a “clash of civilisations” and referred to “Europe’s belief in freedom of expression”. [Read more…]
Nick Cohen too is unimpressed by the pope’s assertion that we can’t insult religion. He’s also unimpressed by the “Charlie Hebdo had it coming” crowd.
After the Paris attacks, the novelist Will Self claimed moral equivalence. Those who say “freedom of speech is an absolute right” – no one does, incidentally – have “a religious point of view”. Mehdi Hasan, political director of the Huffington Post, agreed that freedom was fanaticism. He condemned “the hypocrisy of free-speech fundamentalists” and cited a thought experiment of an Oxford philosopher called Brian Klug. If an Islamist had joined the free speech rallies in Paris and applauded the murderers, Klug mused on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, he “would have been lucky to get away with his life”.
And yet, and yet – when’s the last time journalists shot up the office of some Islamists? Hmm? That would be never, wouldn’t it. Imagining such a scenario is not quite the same thing as actually being able to point to one, or fifty.
Think before you go along with the pope’s argument that violence is the “normal” response to insults to family honour. Once the law accepted it was. A husband could beat a wife, who failed to stroke his ego and confirm his superiority and the police would dismiss the case as a “domestic”. A man could kill a woman who had betrayed his honour and the courts would dismiss it as a crime of passion.
We don’t live there any more. And you know what? We don’t want to.