adapted from London Evening Standard, January 26, 2012

While the capital is home to an estimated 40 per cent of the UK's Muslim population, there are still many mysteries surrounding the faith that I follow. For I was born and raised a London Muslim.

I attended mosques and madrassas in Tooting and Balham, adding to the knowledge of Islam taught me by my family. From a young age we learned the importance of the five pillars of Islam; faith, prayer, charity, fasting - and Hajj, a pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, a journey every Muslim must try to make in their lifetime. So I was delighted to visit the British Museum's Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam.

by Ahmed Qerni

I have been meaning to write about this spat between two historians for a while but the holiday season took priority.  First of all, let me make my position clear: scholars like Niall Ferguson are distinctly responsible for giving intellectual cover to all kinds of unsavoury ideologies that are creating problems for the rest of the world today.  While their words may be walking a fine line, the images they conjure up in the minds of others lead to a two-tier world that is simply not acceptable to civilization as we know it.

In his book, 'Civilization: The Six Ways the West Beat the Rest' (I won't link to it), Ferguson describes the six 'killer apps' of the West that not only provided it deserved dominance, but seeks to justify an approach that may serve little more than a continued dominance at all costs.

Diplomats don't make many mistakes.  Certainly not mistakes like attending a reception for 20 minutes and posing for pictures and also giving positive comments.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz is keeping them honest.  But what is afoot here?  Let us take a look.

Marine Le Pen had invited about 100 diplomats to a luncheon earlier this month during a visit to UN Headquarters in New York. But only four accepted: the envoys from Trinidad-Tobago, Armenia and Uruguay — who obviously are of no concern to her at all — and the fourth guest, Israeli UN Ambassador Ron Prosor.

This is the United States of America -- where Christians are being asked by Rick Perry supporters to not vote for Romney and Huntsman:

"The view that Mormons are not Christians is the widely and strongly held view among Protestant pastors. That does not mean they do not respect Mormons as persons, share their values on family and have much in common. Yet, they simply view Mormonism as a distinct religion outside of basic teachings of Christianity. Many of these pastors may know Mormons who consider themselves Christians, but Protestant pastors overwhelmingly do not consider them such," said Stetzer. "I know this is an unpleasant question to many, and one that some will use as a hammer on evangelicals."

Mormons differ from most Protestants in how they view the Trinity. They also have scripture in addition to the Bible, such as the Book of Mormon, and believe in prophets such as Joseph Smith, Jr., who founded the Latter Day Saint movement.  (Stetzer, Lifeway Research Study 2010)

Guardian Editorial - The short war has become a long war which even now, on the 10th anniversary, we do not know how to end.

America and Britain invaded Afghanistan 10 years ago, for reasons which were understandable, to wage a short war that was unavoidable. We stayed, through all the twists and turns imposed by events and by the incoherence of our own changing policies, for reasons which have become less and less understandable. The short war has become a long war which even now we do not know how to end. The ambition to remake Afghanistan on the western model has been silently discarded.

Thanks to the good work by our team, the All-Parliamentary Ahmadiyya Group in the United Kingdom has lost the support of most members of the House of Commons who participated in the first meeting, the mainstream media, all the Muslim intellectuals that attended the previous meeting, and have been forced to switch gears to 'international' extremism.

The first meeting, which we reported on: 

was called by the Honourable Siobhain McDonagh, the precursor to this PG (in 2010) was meant to discuss the Lahore attacks, but was used to bounce half-baked local media stories off the walls of Parliament and then into full-fledged stories in the mainstream media.

The application to the United Nations for admitting the state of Palestine has been submitted.

In a speech eerily reminiscent of Colin Powell's shameless assertion of Iraqi WMDs at the UN, President Obama produced another US presentation at the UN that reeked of hypocrisy and falsehood.  Any credibility that the United States had has been lost.

The issue of Israel goes back to a curious nexus between the cause of the Crusades and to the Protestant guilt at the Holocaust.  Germans are mostly Lutherans, and the intellectuals among the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust vowed to bring down Protestant Christianity as an immoral and racist herd psychology that was capable of any atrocity.  In our opinion, it is not Protestantism or Martin Luther -- there is a certain Nordic tendency to racial and social purity that may be confused with Protestantism.  It remains in check for decades, but when confronted with uncertainty,  the Nordics band together and go overboard with their misguided cohesive dehumanisation of 'the other'.  The Vikings did it, the English did it, Hitler did it, and now the Anglo-Saxon world did it again after 9/11.

So, the Chicago Tribune censors the political cartoon strip Doonesbury.

Here is what the editor had to say:

To be sure, “Doonesbury” is a satirical cartoon, but the remarks are serious enough that we cannot publish the strip without more information, context and a response from Palin.

Anyone remember the Danish cartoon story?  And how free speech was supreme at that time.  Doonesbury is political satire.  Sarah Palin is a politician.  The writer of the strip is a guy named Trudeau, who has been doing this for ages - and he received an advance copy of the book.  He is not lying.

Gerald Caplan of The Globe and Mail, Canada, has written a questioning piece on why mainstream media spends so much valuable time and resources in promoting Islamophobia.

He begins: