Watch out for Fridays. Maybe stay home on Fridays, with the doors locked and barred and sheets of iron over the windows. At least, if you live somewhere like Pakistan or Afghanistan, do that.

Thousands of demonstrators angered over the burning of a Koran in Florida mobbed offices of the United Nations in northern Afghanistan on Friday, overrunning the compound and killing at least seven foreign staff workers, according to Afghan officials…The incident began when thousands of protesters poured out of the Blue Mosque in Mazar-i-Sharif after Friday prayers and attacked the nearby headquarters of the United Nations.

Correlation is not causation, but when thousands of angry men rush out of a mosque after Friday prayers and attack a … Read the rest

What a relief: it turns out that religious schools don’t exclude after all. Whew!

The Catholic school accommodates plenty of non-Catholic children whose parents are often African Christians who choose to send their kids to a school with a specifically religious ethos.

In other words, they find a denominational school, even if it is not of their own denomination, more congenial than a non-denominational or a multi-denominational school.

This is an absolutely key point. It blows out of the water the assumption that denominational schools somehow ‘exclude’ anyone not of their own denomination.

Ohhhhhh, I see. I was confused all this time. I thought “exclusion” could apply to students of other religions as well as other denominations, and to … Read the rest

Howard Jacobson is cautious about revolutionary elation.

Let’s not get too carried away by the secular nature of the revolutionary zeal engulfing the Middle East right now: the Godly are always there in the wings, waiting for the hour in which they can claim the victory as theirs and restore tyranny, only in their image. Maybe it won’t happen this time – I doubt it, listening to protesters saying they don’t mind what comes next, so long as the process is democratic, as though a democratically elected theocracy is somehow better than any other kind.

Really. I do wish people would get that straight.

Much has been made over the last weeks of the youthful passion of the demonstrators,

As Lauryn Oates points out, it’s good that Afghanistan is so happy and prosperous that its President can afford to pay attention to the elegant details of life.

The deputy governor of Helmand province has been sacked for organising a concert that featured female performers without headscarves.

Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai took the action against Abdul Satar Mirzakwal after tribal elders complained that it was inappropriate.

Karzai himself was sufficiently at leisure to fire a deputy governor for allowing two women to sing at a concert without bags over their heads.

And while we’re on the subject, notice the typical craven way the BBC puts it – “without headscarves.” Notice what an official says a few paragraphs down … Read the rest