Maryam tells us more about what happened to Reza Moradi at the free speech demonstration. The Washington Post, as I mentioned, reported that he was questioned by the police.

“It’s my freedom, everyone’s freedom, to expose these pictures and encourage everyone to do the same,” said Reza Moradi, 29, a protester who identified himself as an Iranian who has lived in Britain for eight years. Moradi was later questioned by police after someone lodged a complaint regarding the “nature of his placard,” which featured a copy of the Danish cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban, a London police spokeswoman said. After a brief, heated exchange with officers, Moradi left the protest on his own

There’s a lot of ‘How’s That Again?’ at the moment. There is the half-laughable half-weepable mess of the ‘March for Free Expression’ ha ha for instance. The ‘March for Free Expression’ which had to be renamed at the last minute the ‘March for Free Expression Only as Long as the Free Expression in Question Doesn’t Irritate Anyone Too Much’ – which, you have to admit, is a pretty lame halting stumbling weak-kneed shambling unimpressive unstirring sort of march. More like a ‘Keep on Lying Down for Thoroughly Hedged “Free” Expression’ than a march for anything. You might as well march against a war and have on all the banners ‘Unless You Really Really Want to Of Course’. You might as … Read the rest

Time for yet another installment of that long-running series, ‘How’s That Again?’ or What the Oxymoron Said. Sit down, stop whispering, fold your hands, don’t kick the seat.

The scene this time is Afghanistan, where a judge is explaining things to BBC reporter Sanjoy Majumder.

Under the interpretation of Islamic Sharia law on which Afghanistan’s constitution is based, Mr Rahman faces the death penalty unless he reconverts to Islam. “The Prophet Muhammad has said several times that those who convert from Islam should be killed if they refuse to come back,” says Ansarullah Mawlafizada, the trial judge. “Islam is a religion of peace, tolerance, kindness and integrity. That is why we have told him if he regrets what he did,

Russell Jacoby is in fine form.

If you missed the 1995 CUNY “Question of Identity” conference, the issue of October magazine devoted to it, the “remarkable” essay on the same subject in Diacritics or – even worse – you are unaware you have missed these, don’t despair. Help is on the way. Eric Lott, who teaches English and American studies at the University of Virginia, will bring you up to speed. His book The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual is to stay-at-home tenured radicals what the television remote is to couch potatoes. Without parking hassles or library bottlenecks, you get the latest on unforgettable conferences and pathbreaking journal articles. Did you know, for instance, that Gene Wise’s “famous” essay “Paradigm Dramas

I’ve been thinking about preferences, and what matters to us, and what we put first – how we rank what matters to us; and about freedom. I’ve been thinking about the fact that freedom of certain kinds seems to matter to me very profoundly indeed, and about why that is, and what flows from it.

I won’t bore you with the why that is part (and I have only guesses anyway), but I will talk about one thing that I think flows from it. It offers one reason I dislike religion so much. Why I’m not just indifferent or uninterested but actively hostile, especially when religion comes out of its churches and mosques and isolated farmhouses to engage in public … Read the rest