Well how nice for Toronto – unlike poor sad deprived Britain, it gets to have Zakir Naik telling it what’s what.

Zakir Naik, founder of online Peace TV in Mumbai, India, tops the bill at the Journey of Faith Conference, July 2-4, at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. It is being described as the largest Islamic conference ever in North America. In videos on YouTube, Naik advocates death to homosexuals and to Muslims who leave the faith…“This guy has absolute hatred for the West,” Tarek Fatah of the Muslim Canadian Congress said Friday.

And homosexuals and apostates, apparently. I bet he’s not much of a feminist, either.

“What we want him to preach here is peace. We want him

Remember Kees? I mean “Kees”? The troll who appeared in February-March 2009 pretending to be a naive observer who had just discovered moral relativism by watching a tv documentary about a South Pacific island where the men (prepare for a shock) ran everything?

Who then revealed himself (by emailing a lot of commenters here to urge them to escape my dictatorship, and using a revealing email address) to be the same as one “Bernie Ranson” who had staged a similar extended charade at Talking Philosophy more than a year earlier, in January 2008?

Remember him? (He claimed to be male, and I think that particular claim is true.)

I’ve been reading some of his comments from those two encounters. They’re … Read the rest

The poor Irish bishops aren’t getting the deference they’re used to.

But Mark Kelly, director of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL), dismissed the bishops’ call. “The ICCL seriously doubts that the Irish Catholic bishops retain sufficient moral authority to pontificate on the Civil Partnership Bill,” he said.

And the ICCL isn’t the only one.

The Union of Students in Ireland said it was extremely disappointed the bishops were resisting equality for same sex couples. President Peter Mannion said: “While USI respects the viewpoint of the Catholic Church we do not agree with it. Objecting to the implementation of equal rights for Irish citizens may be seen as an absence of moral conscience.”

Omigod he said the bishops … Read the rest

If you’re in London, or say maybe Dorking, or St Albans, or High Wycombe, or what the hell, Manchester, or Bristol, or Norwich, on Sunday, get yourself to Hyde Park for the rally against sharia and religious laws in the UK.

Swell the crowd. Bring a friend; bring your dog; bring an inflatable doll. Show the New Statesman that sharia is not wanted.

Make up the numbers. Tell your friends. Turn up. … Read the rest