A joint statement in the Liberal Democrat Voice by Maajid Nawaz and Mohammed Shafiq.

We wish to make a statement about the recent concern expressed over issues related to conflicting views on depictions of Prophet Muhammad.

We recognise that, when it comes to this question, some Muslims of various persuasions may take different views. However, we also recognise that there are many Muslims who have taken offence, and we assert that images of the spiritual leaders of all religions should be deemed to be respectful.

Stop right there.

No.

No.

No. Your religion is your religion, and it is not binding on me or on anyone else who does not choose to be bound by it. I don’t have … Read the rest

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Via Monte Albert -

Yes. That.… Read the rest

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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

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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.

That. Very good that references to sharia were dropped, but not good that any religion is the state religion, and bad that it forbids attacks on “the sacred,” whatever the hell that is when it’s at home.

The text also recognises equality between men and women for the first time.

Well that is … Read the rest

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All right – a bad decision withdrawn.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.

The play will now go ahead as scheduled on Wednesday and Thursday.

Reduced Shakespeare Company vindicated!

Mayor of Newtownabbey Fraser Agnew, who is an Ulster Unionist councillor, said there was a “need to defend Christian values”.

“If it was a play to do

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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

♡ kimi ♡@kimiskis Follow

phyllis can go shove tomorrow’s weather up her wideset vagina. #fuckphyllis

haily cook@hailycookk Follow

I hope you slip on ice and break a hip #fuckphyllis

goombatoomba@goombatoomba Follow

Asians and women

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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”.

When Putin said it was “as long as they don’t go after children.” Pakhomov’s formula seems potentially more restrictive. It depends what he means by “impose their habits on others.” I sort of kind of suspect he means just…”as long … Read the rest

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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 … Read the rest

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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.

EMLD also deplores the portrayal of Muslim communities – in the mainstream media and party blogs – as not valuing free speech. Many British Muslims

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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.

…

The Deputy Prime Minister defended Mr Nawaz’s right to send the personal tweet of the “Jesus and Mo” cartoon after BBC producers decided it was too offensive to be worn on T-shirts by two atheist audience members at a televised debate attended by the Lib Dem candidate.

In a letter to

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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.

CCTV captured Harrison’s attackers approaching her and the violent struggled that followed as Ditta’s siblings sought to find out where Miss Harrison and their sister were living.

Footage of the broad daylight attack, which happened on June 20 last year, showed members of Miss Ditta’s family trying to

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We’ve met the BNP, we’ve met Golden Dawn, so now let’s meet Jobbik, the Hungarian branch of the Let’s Foment Hatred of Some Despised Group or Other club.

Jobbik, who have a several MEPs in the European parliament, are known for a series of anti-semitic and anti-Roma statements. In November 2012, Marton Gyongyosi, the party’s deputy parliamentary leader, called for a security register of Hungarian Jewish legislators and ministers. Gyongyosi said: “I think such a conflict makes it timely to tally up people of Jewish ancestry who live here, especially in the Hungarian parliament and the Hungarian government, who, indeed, pose a security risk in Hungary.”

Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, said last month that the three parties had

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There’s a conference in London today, wrapping up in an hour. It’s put on by the Deen Institute, and it’s titled Can Muslims Escape Misogyny? Tariq Ramadan is at the top of the bill.

This conference will address the injustices against women which persist across communities and cultures the world over, and ask where Islam stands on countering these issues. Islam is often criticised as misogynistic, and its name is invoked by those who seek to perpetuate injustices and inequalities against women and girls. So what’s truly to blame and what solutions does our spiritual tradition offer?

Moreover, stories of forced marriages, domestic violence justified under the guise of sharia law and female genital mutilation perpetuated by purported religious figures,

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Via Monte Albert at BMSD on Facebook.

In other contexts I would consider it too crude and obvious and simplistic to bother with, but in that context – where there is a huge amount of repetition of myths and fictions treated as facts – it makes a useful point. The mere fact that something is written down in a book doesn’t make it true. No matter how many times how many people repeat that it is true, and holy, and a sin to deny – none of that makes it true. Repetition is just repetition. Advertising and political manipulation work the same way.… Read the rest

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I have to dash away but I just want to point out Nick Cohen’s piece on the Maajid Nawaz-LibDems-Jesus and Mo turmoil for your enlightenment.

Just a bit, on LibDem activist Muhammad Shafiq:

Shafiq denies that he is spreading fear and if you had not done the research you might believe him. Certainly, you could think him a man who can snuffle out offence where no one else can find it. You could think that the 20,000 or so who have signed his petition are so desperate for reasons to censor that they will manufacture them. But this is a free country and they are entitled to their hysterias.

But to put it as politely as I can, Shafiq is

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A petition to Cameron to intervene in the case of that schizophrenic Scot sentenced to death for “blasphemy” in Pakistan.

Muhammad Asghar is a 68 year old from Edinburgh, currently resident in Pakistan. He has been convicted of blasphemy following a trial where his legal team were dismissed, and the state nominated replacement presented no evidence in his defence. He is a paranoid schizophrenic with a history of mental illness, a fact very relevant to his alleged crime; declaring himself a prophet. Muhammad Asghar should be helped, not killed. We ask that David Cameron and Alex Salmond intervene in the strongest possible terms, to help save the life of a vulnerable British man.

The petition is by the Scottish Secular … Read the rest

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A new one from Mike Booth. I know that voice…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQBE3odp6Q0… Read the rest

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The councillors of Newtownabbey in Northern Ireland must have been suffering from Censorship Envy.

The decision by Newtownabbey’s Democratic Unionist council to stop two performances of The Bible: The Complete Word of God (Abridged) was met with outrage from freedom of expression campaigners.

The show, first seen in 1995, was to have been performed over two nights at the Theatre at the Mill in the town next week, with about 150 of the 800 seats available sold.

Fraser Agnew, the mayor of Newtownabbey council, said: “As the guardians of all that is right in society we have got to take a stand somewhere.”

The productions were part of a three-month UK tour by the Reduced Shakespeare Company, which has

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Hey, Patricia Churchland does the Colbert Report. Oxytocin, prairie voles and montane voles, bonding, the self is in the brain, what about the soul?

Any time people try to tell you how great Sam Harris’s take on morality is, just tell them to read Patricia Churchland instead.

 … Read the rest

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And then there’s the quaint old custom of gang-raping women to punish them.

A young woman in West Bengal was gang-raped this week on the order of a village council, to punish her for planning to marry a man from outside the village, according to the Indian police.

…

The episode began on Monday when Khaliq Sheikh, the man from outside the village, asked the young woman to marry him, and she accepted his proposal, the police said. When Balai Mardi, the chief of the village, heard about it, he quickly sought to block the marriage.

According to local news media accounts, villagers went to the young woman’s house and detained Mr. Sheikh, and the next day, he and

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