Here it is again. Yet again. The BBC declaring the head of the MCB a ‘leading Muslim’. But what makes him a leading Muslim, who says he’s a leading Muslim? The MCB is a self-appointed, very reactionary ‘council’ that gets treated and deferred to as if it represented all UK Muslims in some way, but it doesn’t. It’s very annoying and unhelpful and lazy and obscurantist that the BBC keeps pretending it does, keeps handing it a giant megaphone by rushing to ask its opinion every ten minutes and by refraining from asking non-MCB Muslims and people of Muslim background for their opinion at the same rate. Why does the BBC do that? Why doesn’t it stop doing that? … Read the rest

The Ward Churchill matter, as I’ve mentioned before, raises some interesting issues. One issue is that of free speech, which Norm and I along with Eve and, later, Jonathan, kept disagreeing about a few months ago. I still disagree with all of them – but I think the disagreements may have rested on various confusions among terms. The terms kept shifting, I think, back and forth between legal and moral, law and principle, without being nailed down often enough. Still…I think my point stands: there is no free speech right to falsify evidence. There is no free speech principle that protects Churchill’s right to falsify evidence. Falsification of evidence is not always a criminal offence (although it certainly … Read the rest

Community again. Sometimes the helpless dependence on the word ends up in confusion.

“We are sure that the overwhelming majority of all communities are united in condemning any attempt to justify last year’s terrorist attacks in London,” he went on.

The overwhelming majority of all communities…I’m confused already. Does that mean that some entire ‘communities’ are not united in condemning any attempt to justify last year’s bombs? If so, which ones are they? What are we talking about? Or does it mean that the overwhelming majority of all people are united that way? But then why say ‘communities’? If it is the first, if what is meant is that some ‘communities’ are not united that way, does that mean … Read the rest