Nice to know that the first Muslim in the UK's House of Lords has his head screwed on right:

Lord Ahmed of Rotherham called for a sensible and sensitive debate among Muslims on whether veils were needed in today's society…

"But there's nothing in the Koran to say that the wearing of a niqab is desirable, let alone compulsory. It's purely cultural. It's an identity thing which has been misinterpreted.

"They were supposed to be worn so that women wouldn't be harassed.

Nothing is more fun than listening to the US government try to deflect our attention away from the Saudis towards Iran as if Iran were the source of all that is scary.  Not that the Saudis are the source of all that is scary, but dagnabit if they don't give it all they got!  Those wacky Saudis.  Watch this exquistely painful interview with the head of a British Muslim school that uses books saying that all other religions are worthless, etc….  

The Guardian has an interesting report about how quite a few well-known British Jews are speaking out against their community spokespeople for being unrepresentative of the community's diverse views on Israeli policy:

"We come together in the belief that the broad spectrum of opinion among the Jewish population of this country is not reflected by those institutions which claim authority to represent the Jewish community as a whole," the letter says. Jewish leaders in Britain, it argues "put support for the policies of an occupying power above the human rights of an occupied people" in conflict with Jewish principles of justice and compassion.

The Guardian has the story. A refreshing change from newspaper reports criticising mosques for being 'hotbeds of radicals'.

Although his mosque is tiny, Satardien has attracted a loyal following from 20 nationalities of Muslims now living in Ireland. Haris Puskar, 19, fled from Bosnia to Ireland with his family while he was still at primary school. A victim of Serb ethnic cleansing in Banja Luka in the early 1990s, Puskar now speaks English with a Dublin accent and is an ardent Gaelic football fan.

Just in case people are still in a state of euphoria over Rumsfeld being booted out and possibly prosecuted, here's some very worrying news. MI5, the UK's equivalent to the FBI, is apparently monitoring around 1600 British Muslims who are suspected of plotting around 30 terrorist attacks. Using wikipedia's figure of 1.5 million for Britain's Muslim population, that means roughly 1 in 1000 Muslims is being monitored as a suspected terrorist. That seems like such a high number that I've been thinking about it.

The UK Guardian has an interesting story today about how a Muslim police officer was excused "on moral grounds" from guarding the Israeli embassy in London during the Lebanon war. Since I'm in favour of all kinds of non-violent protests against Israeli government policy, I found it quite amusing.

The fact is that the Israeli embassy in London was probably never under any threat of anything more serious than having a few eggs thrown at it. Had there been any real threat of violence, of course the police are obligated to do whatever they can to prevent it. It's actually reassuring to know that police officers are given this kind of flexibility, even though the Home Office probably won't see it that way.

The Guardian has a huge story today about the planned bombing of 12 passenger aircraft. So far 24 suspects have been apprehended;

the majority British Muslims of Pakistani descent, were going to disguise liquid explosive as bottles of soft drink and carry them in their hand luggage on to US-bound planes leaving British airports.

This is the second time British Pakistanis have been implicated in terrorism; the first was the 7/7 London subway bombings. Of course, people are now going to be asking why British Pakistanis are resorting to terrorism; while this is often expressed in the context of a xenophobic and anti-immigrant argument, it is a legitimate question which deserves an answer. Unfortunately the answer is not a short or quick one. It has to do with the alienation felt by the UK's Muslim community as the most economically deprived ethnic group, as well as with the frustration at Tony Blair's transformation into George W. Bush's poodle in the realm of foreign policy. However, it would be denying reality to say it had nothing to do with the UK's Muslim population, in particular with British Pakistanis.

The UK public was made very uncomfortable this week by the Times' widely-reported poll of British Muslims' views on terrorism. Certainly I was concerned about the revelations that 16% of respondents thought of the 7/7 bombers as martyrs, that 7% believed suicide bombing against UK civilians to be acceptable, and that a further 2% would be proud if a member of their family joined Al-Qaida. However, it's important to keep the above results in perspective. It's easy for an angry young man to talk big in a poll; but certainly only a small proportion of the most dangerous 2% mentioned above are actually psychopathic and suicidal enough to act on their views. Polls are inherently biased towards the views of the angry and alienated, who wish to make their dissatisfaction heard. Giving a radical answer in a poll is the safest kind of protest vote, since it doesn't change anything other than the contents of a database somewhere. This is why this sort of poll should be reported with restraint and a grain of salt, which unfortunately is not how this one has been treated by some of the tabloids.

Thabet, of Towards God Is Our Journey, an engineer who (somehow) is not living in a state of Manichean Duality, offers an incredibly rich essay on the state of British Muslims and Western Muslims. Just one excerpt:

In instances where unfair anti-Western attitudes are expressed, whether by my friends or people I meet who wish to express their opinions to me, I feel it is important for me to challenge attitudes which reduce all Western political, philosophical and humanist traditions to a few crude, negative, adjectives and dismiss all the output from Europe and its historical outposts as 'frivolous'. I think any Western Muslim should do this. They should also challenge certain myths which still circulate amongst Muslims here. One, in particular, is of a more moral and spiritual Islamic East, compared to an immoral or decedant secular West. Yet, I know literally dozens of Muslims (one a very good friend of mine) who left to live in Muslim countries in the hope of living their 'Islamic dream'. My friend, along with some acquaintances, have all return to Britain, disappointed with what they experienced (bigotry, racial and even religious discrimination, incompetence). This veil has surely been lifted from our eyes by now. None of my comments, of course, suggest that anything deemed 'Western' is sacroscent or off limits to valid, powerful and stinging criticism. Instead what I'm saying is that just as Muslims complain that Islamic traditions is reduced to a set of negative stereotypes, then similarly Western traditions suffer the same fate, even amongst Western Muslims. This is disappointing and borne out to some degree by the results from the recent Pew Global Attitude Project. We should be Western Muslims in the fullest sense: intellectually, morally, politically, physically and so on. That, or we hide and remain fearful that the horrors of the Holocaust are visited upon us.