Via Monte Albert –

Yes. That.

Hmm. Meral Hussein Ece – she’s a LibDem peer. She’s not very liberal. She had this to say last week on Stephen Tall’s post about Maajid at LibDem Voice:

I condemn anyone issuing death threats, and of course this should be reported to the Police. Im all for a mature ‘debate’ on any religion, but using a cartoon is unhelpful and trivial. This cartoon is part of a cartoon strip which depicts the Prophet Mohammed in bed with Jesus drinking beer. Clearly offensive to even the most moderate Muslims, and even many Christians who will be aware of this. I believe in living and let living, and would not want to offend Jews, Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, or any other of the major faiths in the UK. [Read more…]

Tunisia’s assembly passed a new constitution yesterday. It’s better than it might have been but it’s still flawed.

Parliament agreed the text on Friday after the governing Ennahda party granted a number of concessions, including dropping references to Islamic law.

It guarantees freedom of worship but says Islam is the state religion. It also forbids “attacks on the sacred”, which analysts say is open to interpretation. [Read more…]

All right – a bad decision withdrawn. The councillors of Newtownabbey have thought better of it.

Newtownabbey Borough Council’s artistic board last week cancelled the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s The Bible: The Complete Word of God (Abridged).

The comic play was due to run at the council’s Theatre at the Mill from Wednesday, 29 January, for two nights.

But on Monday the artistic board decided to put the play back on and the full council ratified that decision. [Read more…]

So it’s cold in Champaign-Urbana today. It was forecast to be cold yesterday. Nevertheless classes and operations were scheduled to go ahead. The chancellor, Phyllis Wise, emailed the students yesterday to tell them so. They responded with sexist racist attacks on Twitter.

Well of course they did. What else does one do when a woman does something one dislikes?

Andrei Andreev@AndreiAndreev33 Follow

It’s going to be -27 without wind chill tomorrow morning and I have class at 8 #FuckPhyllis #Cunt #Bitch #Whore [Read more…]

Great, we don’t have to worry about purely local problems in Sochi between gay people and everyone else, because the mayor of Sochi says there are no gay people in Sochi. Whew! That’s one bullet dodged.

The mayor of Sochi, host of the Winter Olympics, has said there are no gay people in the city.

Anatoly Pakhomov said homosexuals were welcome at the Games – as long as they “respect Russian law” and “don’t impose their habits on others”. [Read more…]

Maajid Nawaz has a rather beautiful mini-statement (all right all right it’s a tweet) from yesterday:

I am a free Muslim. My prophet left no heir. My faith was never ruled by pope nor clergy. For my sins I answer to God alone. You are not God

Wouldn’t it be fantastic if there were more free Muslims (and free Christians, free Hindus, free Mormons…)?

That version of faith/religion still has the problem that the nature of the sins depends on the concept of “God” – but that’s true of any concept of morality. Taking heirs and popes and clergy out of the equation makes it much easier to avoid identifying your god with bits of dogma left over from the days before the invention of birth control.

 

This is depressing – a statement by a group called Ethnic Minority Liberal Democrats, doing the same irritating “we deplore violence, we approve of free speech, but” shuffle that we’ve already seen.

Ethnic Minority Liberal Democrats (EMLD) deplores the reported death threats against Maajid Nawaz, a Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Hampstead and Kilburn. Death threats can never be justified and we wholeheartedly condemn them.

Impressive? They condemn death threats. Now that that’s out of the way – on to their real passion – demanding respect for all the cultures and faiths, no matter what.
[Read more…]

All right. Nick Clegg has given a statement to the Independent, and he did it without the giving with one hand while taking back with the other approach.

Nick Clegg has intervened in a growing row over freedom of expression, describing as “unacceptable” death threats made against a prospective Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate who tweeted a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed and Jesus greeting each other. [Read more…]

An unpleasant moment in Blackburn, Lancs.

Six siblings – all members of a Muslim family – have been jailed for what the judge described as the “sustained and brutal” attempted kidnap of a white woman who was having a relationship with their sister.

The victim, Sarah Harrison, 35, was in a relationship with Nazma Ditta, 28, and was targeted by members of her partner’s family as she left work in Blackburn Lancashire. [Read more…]