Chris Moos set up a petition, a counter-petition to the one asking Nick Clegg to ditch Maajid Nawaz. Chris’s petition asks Nick Clegg to do no such thing and to support Maajid Nawaz instead.

On January 12th, Maajid Nawaz, Liberal Democrat PPC for Hampstead and Killburn, posted an innocuous ‘Jesus and Mo’ cartoon on his Twitter timeline and stated that he, as a Muslim, was not offended by the content. This followed a BBC Big Questions programme in which the cartoons were discussed and Maajid Nawaz was included as a studio guest. The cartoon depicts Jesus and Mo saying ‘Hey’ and ‘How ya doin” to each other.

Islamists and political opponents have now mounted a campaign against Maajid Nawaz,

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Mohammad Shabbir, Councillor for Heaton Ward Bradford, tweeted Nick Clegg 5 hours ago to suggest (in a slightly passive-aggressive way) that he should ditch Maajid Nawaz.

Mohammad Shabbir @

@nick_clegg guess you are between a rock and a hard place. Ditching Majid isn’t the liberal way but his behaviour is deliberate provocation

so you could demonstrate that liberalism isn’t about deliberate insults but ‘consideration is civilisation’ as muslims say

 Later a conversation ensued. Nawaz asked Shabbir if he could agree “to allow me my right to my own opinion on my own timeline?” Shabbir replied:

I don’t deny the right to any human being. But the question is why would anyone go out of their way to create potential

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More on the fury at Maajid Nawaz.

There’s an exceedingly vivid and nasty threat, for one thing.

IMRAN @Abdul_al_Jame

@MaajidNawas

I would be glad to cut your neck off, so your kufr friends won’t be amused by your humour.In sha Allah may my dua get accepted

That account is now gone, so that’s something, but still – what a revolting sentiment.

Via Homo economicus’s blog, Nawaz’s response to all the shouting:

Shiraz Socialist has a post In defense of Maajid Nawaz.

5Pillarz, a blog written largely by and for British Muslims, has decided that Nawaz should be their top candidate for ‘Islamophobe of the Year’. The EDL is mentioned at the bottom of their list

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And another thing.

What is it with using the honorific “scholar” for people who parse the fine points of a religion? How is that scholarship? As in the Independent article for instance:

Some scholars point out that it is against the teachings of Islam to force anyone to stay within the faith. “The position of many a scholar I have discussed the issue with is if people want to leave, they can leave,” said Shaykh Ibrahim Mogra, the assistant secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain.

Does thorough knowledge of dogma really qualify as scholarship?

I don’t think newspapers and other media tend to refer to astrologers as scholars, however vast their knowledge of astrology is. They refer to … Read the rest

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The Independent has a story on being an ex-Muslim.

Amal Farah for instance, a banking executive.

Born in Somalia to Muslim parents, she grew up in Yemen and came to the UK in her late teens. After questioning her faith, she became an atheist and married a Jewish lawyer. But this has come at a cost. When she turned her back on her religion, she was disowned by her family and received death threats. She has not seen her mother or her siblings for eight years. None of them have met her husband or daughter.

“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done – telling my observant family that I was having doubts. My mum was shocked; she began

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George Galloway is getting in on the act.

George Galloway @georgegalloway

No Muslim will ever vote for the Liberal Democrats anywhere ever unless they ditch the provocateur Majid Nawaz, cuckold of the EDL

Cuckold!! Prurient, sexist, misogynist and illiberal all in one word. What a vile, disgusting man he is.

 … Read the rest

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The threats directed at Maajid Nawaz on Twitter continue. It’s very dispiriting, seeing people devote so much energy and outrage at something so thoroughly

• not a problem
• not a source of real harm or suffering
• not a big deal
• not their business
• not “forbidden” except in the minds of people who insist on sorting the world into Forbidden and Permitted
• not even what they think it is, to wit, “a drawing of the prophet”

when the world is so packed to the rafters with real problems, real harm, real suffering.

In general I don’t like that argument – that “don’t talk about what you’re talking about, talk about something more important” – because it’s so often deployed to tell feminists … Read the rest

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The British Muslims for Secular Democracy Facebook page is, sadly, infested with Muslims who are very much against secular democracy, who are constantly trolling the page.

One of them posted the link to a nasty article about “prominent members of the Muslim community” writing to Nick Clegg to tell him to dump Maajid Nawaz as a candidate because he tweeted that innocuous Jesus and Mo cartoon.

It’s a disgusting piece of work.

The campaign comes after Nawaz posted a cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad (saw) and Prophet Isa (as) on his Twitter feed. Any depiction of the prophets is considered offensive to most Muslims and has traditionally been prohibited by the majority of scholars.

Nawaz, who’s the chairman of the

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Sometimes they just twitch the curtain aside so that no one can fail to see that the whole point is to put men totally in charge of women so that no woman is allowed to say no to sex with her owner.

Like the president of the Maldives for instance.

Maldivian President Abdulla Yameen has refused to ratify a bill that seeks to partially criminalize marital rape, calling it “un-Islamic.”

The parliament voted 67-2 last month to limit a husband’s right to have non-consensual sex with his wife. The bill says a husband cannot force his wife to have sex if the couple have filed for divorce, dissolution or mutual separation, and if the intent is to transmit a sexual

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Today’s bit of crap news, or first bit of crap news.

A good guy has been killed in a suicide bomb attack at a restaurant in Kabul. The BBC reports:

Labour’s MEP candidate for the South East has been confirmed as among 21 people killed in a suicide bomb and gun attack in the Afghan capital Kabul.

Dhamender Singh Phangurha, 39, known as Del Singh, was killed in the attack at a restaurant in the city.

Born and raised in Southampton, he was a volunteer at two charities for the homeless and mentored job seekers.

…

Southampton Itchen Labour MP John Denham said: “Del was an inspirational man and simply one of the nicest people you could meet.

“Everything

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Maajid Nawaz, LibDem parliamentary candidate for Hampstead and Kilburn and chairman of the Quilliam Foundation, whom you may have seen rocking the discussion on the Big Questions, is trying to persuade his fellow Muslims to learn to calm down about inoffensive cartoons like for example the one in which Jesus and Mo (of Jesus and Mo) say hi how ya doin.

He posted that one on his Facebook the other day, and got some indignant responses. He tweeted it earlier today, and got a flood of death threats.

happymurtad tweeted a drawing too.

happymurtad@happymurtad

Desis rightfully hurt by me drawing Gandhi in my notepad are now swearing vengeance and complaining to the UN. pic.twitter.com/w6A18JqNwM

Then he followed it up … Read the rest

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Another way this Safecare Asthmacare product is likely to fool people who don’t realize it’s “homeopathic” or what “homeopathic” means. It’s the Details, which are helpfully provided on the Google page that appears if you Google the two words. (It’s sponsored. I’m helping Safecare market its “Asthmacare”…)

You’d never know it was just a little bottle of water, would you.

But this is the really sneaky part.

Directions: Initially, depress pump until primed. Hold close to mouth and spray one dose directly into mouth. Adult Dose: 3 pump sprays 3 times per day (use additionally as needed, up to 6 times per day); Children 6-12 Years: 2 pump sprays 3 times per day (use additionally as needed, up to 6

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Sure enough, it’s not just Target. I just checked my local Bartell’s, which is a big drugstore chain around here. I found the asthma section, which had only three items, two apparently medical and one also apparently medical unless you were actually looking for the homeopathic version. This is what it looks like:

If you’re not specifically looking for homeopathic bullshit, you’re likely to think that’s actual medicine for asthma. I wasn’t sure which it was at first. The banner saying “natural-safe-smart” and the bit about “no known negative side effects” seemed likely, but I had to turn it over to confirm that it’s “homeopathic.” People who don’t know better WILL THINK IT’S MEDICINE.

It’s horrifying.

It does include … Read the rest

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Remember the Greek guy who mocked a Greek Orthodox monk by pretending to call him a pasta dish? And was charged with blasphemy? Well he’s been convicted of that stupid non-crime, and sentenced to ten months in prison.

A man who created a Facebook page poking fun at a revered Greek Orthodox monk has been sentenced to 10 months in prison in Greece after being found guilty of blasphemy.

Thousands of Greeks took to social networking sites to protest against the arrest in 2012 of Filippos Loizos, 28, who used a play on words to portray Father Paisios as a traditional pasta-based dish.

“He was merely satirising in a country that gave birth to satire,” his lawyer, Yorgos Kleftodimos, said

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It’s not good news.

A UN humanitarian official has warned against the risk of genocide in Central African Republic, where an ethnic conflict has caused over 1,000 deaths and left thousands uprooted.

“It has all the elements that we have seen elsewhere, in places like Rwanda and Bosnia. The elements are there, the seeds are there, for a genocide. There’s no question about that,” John Ging, director of operations for the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told a news conference in Geneva.

Ging described the situation in CAR as a “mega-crisis” where humanitarian needs are urged for thousands of displaced people.

The two groups that hate each other are Muslims and Christians.

Whatever. Serbs and Bosnians; Hutus and … Read the rest

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From September 2008, a New York Times editorial on libel tourism and Khalid bin Mahfouz’s lawsuit against Rachel Ehrenfeld.

When Rachel Ehrenfeld wrote “Funding Evil: How Terrorism Is Financed and How to Stop It,” she assumed she would be protected by the First Amendment. She was, in the United States. But a wealthy Saudi businessman she accused in the book of being a funder of terrorism, Khalid bin Mahfouz, sued in Britain, where the libel laws are heavily weighted against journalists, and won a sizable amount of money.

The lawsuit is a case of what legal experts are calling “libel tourism.” Ms. Ehrenfeld is an American, and “Funding Evil” was never published in Britain. But at least 23 copies of

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Because it came up, I thought I might as well take a look back at those grotesque libel cases from the recent past.

One is the suit against Alms for Jihad: Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic World (Cambridge University Press, 2006), by J. Millard Burr and Robert O. Collins. Collins wrote it up at History News Network.

On April 3, 2007 Kevin Taylor, Intellectual Property Manager for the Cambridge University Press (CUP), contacted Millard Burr and myself that the solicitors for Shaykh Khalid bin Mahfouz, Kendall Freeman, had informed CUP of eleven “allegations of defamation” in our book Alms for Jihad: Charities and Terrorism in the Islamic World and requested a response. 

They sent a response, seventeen pages … Read the rest

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Ashley Miller is getting legal threats, from someone who says “From this point forward our attorney will be the only contact” and then promptly sends another email. The threats look very empty, but to be polite I will be careful not to cast aspersions on the enterprise in question. I won’t make any effort not to laugh, though.

The enterprise in question is called Cinematic Appraisals. I’d never heard of it before and now I have, so I hope they’re thanking Ashley for the free advertising.

Cinematic Appraisals has Science. It has a page about the Science, complete with a photo of Science In Action.

Cinematic Appraisals’ patent-pending Mind Science Method is based on neuroscientific research conducted

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