100% Muslim, 100% Londoner. Deal with it.

Some people call it micro-blogging. Well, if blogging was cocaine, Twitter is crack.

Twitter has been gaining a steady following for a while and finally achieved widespread recognition as a new medium in its own right during the terrorist attacks on Mumbai. The Mumbai “hashtag” (#mumbai) was used as a virtual channel to precisely convey minute-by-minute updates on the situation by Twitter users on the scene to the rest of the world.

It’s a little harder in Gaza of course, because despite the widespread use of the Gaza hashtag (#gaza) by Israelis, their apologists, Islamophobes and those supporting the Palestinian cause in the rest of the world, much of Gaza is without electricity. For the last year and a half or so, they’ve been short on other things too. Like fuel. And food. So tweets (a single Twitter post of no more than 140 characters, allowing it to be contained in a single SMS) have been thin on the ground from Gaza. Like ambulances. And hospitals.

Getting Started:

Here’s what you do. Go to Twitter’s site. Get yourself an account. Then choose people to “follow”. (You can start with me if you like!) That works a bit like RSS. You then get a “feed” on your Twitter home page, which includes tweets that you send to the outside world, but will hopefully be populated soon by tweets from those you follow.

You’ll want to use a client though, as the standard Twitter web page is a bit basic. I use Tweetdeck. If Twitter is crack, Tweetdeck is the pipe. (I nicked that from a friend of mine who also put me onto Tweetdeck in the first place.)

Following:

Now it gets interesting. With those you follow and who follow you, private messages can be exchanged. You can also publicly reply to a tweet. (Like an open debate in the Houses of Parliament in a way, but with fewer morons.) You can’t stop the public replies to you, but you can ignore them. Some of the people who publicly reply say disgusting things, particularly Zionists, Islamophobes, colonialists and other assorted riff-raff. You can ignore it. It’s out there and the neutrals can and do see what’s going on.

Hashtags:

Unless you specify otherwise, your tweets go to a public timeline. Now that’s an awful lot of tweets. How to cut through the noise and get to the signal you want from that mess? There are two ways. The first is a straightforward search. Tweetdeck makes that easy. It opens up a new column for you and regularly updates it with new tweets that have terms matching your search query. The second way is to use a hashtag. A hashtag is as simple as it sounds. A hash symbol, then a word, which can be cryptic, or an acronym, or as is often the case in big news stories, the name of a place. Right now, I am following and regularly tweeting on #gaza. (You could just search for gaza as that would return matches to the hashtag and mentions of the territory.) The message should contain the hashtag at some point. Often, you can work it into the message.

One of my tweets looks like this for example:

Re-Tweet:

What is re-tweeting? (Sounds absurd, doesn’t it!) You will have a network. When you tweet, (unlike those of the Zionaxis, who twat…) your tweets appear on the timelines of those who follow you. So if somebody you’re following tweets something interesting and you want to share it, or somebody you don’t like twats something obnoxious, and you want to let people see what’s under the rock, you re-tweet that tweet. There’s an icon for it that appears if you mouse over the profile icon in a tweet.

Let’s support Gaza NOW!

There are some really hateful people on Twitter rejoicing at the deaths of children. Not a single person on the #gaza hashtag has supported the killing of Israeli civilians, but hundreds are supporting and even applauding the killing of innocent human beings in the world’s largest Israel-created concentration camp in the world. The Gaza Strip. Those people have been humiliated, oppressed, starved, denied medical aid, deprived of electricity and killed for decades. Now they are being bombed with nowhere to run. And the Zionists who twat about it are rejoicing, believe it!

It is a stated aim of the Zionist regime to use propaganda and especially Twitter to “win the war”. There is no war here. There is the unilateral destruction of a people. A genocide. A shoah. Their consulate is even setting up a Q&A on Twitter. There is no war to be won. There is truth to be told and a people to be saved. Remember, Israel is the racist nation that decided to start this latest holocaust over the Christmas period while the West slept. They know what they’re doing. Speak truth to evil! Do it!

So we must follow and support each other and contribute so that people can see the truth. Everytime we speak the truth on a new medium, we influence someone. We must never lose hope. We must support the suffering. We must. History is watching us. Allah (SWT) is watching us. Do your bit and spread the truth. The darkness of oppression cannot survive the light of truth.

Lately, I’ve been trying to work out why good writers find it hard to say much when really bad things are happening. I think part of it is an “injustice shock”. Surely, some authority has got to step in and stop something that is seriously “bad”. And while bad stuff goes on, and authority figures equivocate whilst the “bad guys” get to run riot with atrocity after atrocity, raping the language and deflowering truth, the “good guys” just go numb with shock.

After all, if appeals to authority, and especially decency in the name of human rights aren’t working, what hope do we have of justice?

As this was taking shape in my head, I found myself getting dizzy at the idea of people shopping like the zombies in Dawn of the Dead in the post-Christmas sales as bombs rained down on the heads of Palestinian children after over 2 full-term-pregnancies-worth of mediaeval siege.

So I headed for the shops. I didn’t know which shop, I just wanted to get out of the house. I took my family to High Street Kensington and dropped them off to shop for some clothes for the kids. I took my camera to the protest outside (a long way outside) the Israeli embassy. I was early, so I got to the front and just breathed in the atmosphere.

I felt excited hearing hundreds of people shout “Israel - TERRORISTS!” again and again. Excited that we could reflect a word that has become overused and sullied. Simply, a terrorist is now any dissident of the ruling paradigm. Any Muslim is also a terrorist. Well on the streets of London and indeed, on streets all over the world, the terrorist is most certainly Israel. (I didn’t join in that particular shout, because I’d feel hypocritical knowing that the United Kingdom and the United States of America also practice state terror, the latter on a far bigger scale than the most rapacious dreams of the Zionist machine) but I did join in the few shouts of “Allahu Akbar”, because He tells us that tyranny should be opposed and that oppression is worse than killing. Well, Israel has been doing a fair amount of both.

I am dismayed, but utterly unsurprised by the framing and bias in the mainstream media. Other than a brilliant piece by Nir Rosen in the Guardian, that paper’s coverage has been a betrayal of its original readership. Ever since the Euston Manifesto thing started happening, all of these traditionally left-of-centre organs have turned into post-Fabian-Imperialist sell-outs. Gutless, craven, racist and soulless.

As for the BBC, they’re still carrying that Orwellian poll, framed probably by the same guy who penned the question “When did you stop beating your wife?”

Might as well ask “Were the Nazis justified in creating the Warsaw Ghetto?”. What’s more nauseating than the framing are some of the comments there.

I was surprised then, to find less biased coverage in the Times (for a bit) and the Telegraph, which was bold enough to print B’Tselem’s findings that (before the assault), 9 Israelis had been killed since 2005, but over 1,400 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli forces. Kind of taking an eye for an eye a bit far, aren’t we guys?

I’ll write a little about some of the Hasbara after more pics I took of today’s event.

"Israel! Terrorists!"

The guy above was originally across the road, but the second he started protesting, the police surrounded him and searched him. He handled himself well and proceeded to join us. He stood just behind me to my left.

You can click through to a larger image of the above picture.

Some of the Hasbara has been widely parroted by the bankrupt mainstream media. These lazy incompetents can’t think for themselves, so they just repeat stuff that won’t offend their masters. And their masters are Friends of Israel, are they not? Certainly no Friends of Palestine.

And actually, that’s all I care to write about the Hasbara. It’s exhausting to deal with hateful idiots. Some of the people on Twitter are frankly, bonkers. I’m even getting it from some Indian who has been incredibly hateful. Given how much I’ve helped India on a business level over the last year, I’m just glad I don’t allow myself to think he’s representative of India, but the scary thing is, he is representative of a lot of people when you think that the country has over a billion people.

Then there are the softies who know that murdering kids is wrong, but somehow get it into their heads that Hamas is to blame. You know, these people are normally intelligent. And they use the same argument that any rapist uses in defence. “She was asking for it”.

Let’s do some basic fact-checking, and my thanks to the inspirational Mark Elf at the illuminating Jews Sans Frontieres for the first one on the list:

1. Hamas didn’t break the truce. Israel did.
2. Most Israelis want negotiation with Hamas.
3. It’s not a war with Hamas, it’s an assault against a defenceless and battered nation. This one particularly offends me. Why did the world refer to the 2006 war ON Lebanon as Israel’s war against Hizbullah? The West Bank is not run by Hamas, yet people in the West Bank are routinely killed and tortured and oppressed and imprisoned and their land is stolen and the occupation expanded.
4. The people of Palestine are being punished for exercising their democratic right. Hamas has a mandate from the vast majority of the population, a position unthinkable in the UK, which is run by self-serving Zionist-lapdog crooks, or the USA, which is run by self-serving Zionist crooks that fix elections.
5. Israel is a democracy only for Jews. “Israeli” Arabs are not welcome and with all the talk of “dhimmis” by nauseating Islamophobes who throw Muslim expression around in the manner of uneducated orientalists, they should look no further than Israel to see how “second-class citizens” really live.
6. The media reports that Israel “targets Hamas buildings”. If Israel was to target the Houses of Parliament, would the media write “Israel targets Labour buildings”?
   

It’s late. Some more pictures from today (yesterday) because I’m succumbing to injustice shock again.

Tomorrow, I’ll talk about the options on the table. In the meantime, I live in hope that “Ahmadinejad’s” prayer that the Zionist regime will one day vanish from the pages of history like communism or apartheid will be answered. Insha’Allah.

A modus operandi has been established, but is it really new?

It goes like this: Strong country pulverizes weak country whilst calling weak country a “rogue” or “terrorist” state. When population of weak country is at its lowest ebb, when barely anything that you’d expect to need for the normal running of a human society works, when the people are starving, strong country carpet bombs weak country back into the dark ages in the guise of “self-defence”. Rest of the “civilised” world says that the weak country “had it coming”.

In Iraq, years of devastating sanctions weakened the country and resulted in the deaths of a million people, half of them children. Madeline Albright (no prizes for guessing which Middle Eastern country she put first) affirmed on the record that according to her, the deaths of half a million Iraqi, Arab, Muslim children was a price worth paying. She has since expressed regret for that remark. A bit like dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and then saying “whoops, sorry!”

Then the First Gulf War destroyed Iraqi infrastructure and left the country devastated and further weakened.

Finally, a weakened Iraq, but one still proud and coping, with a female literacy rate higher than the United States (no surprise there, many Americans still think Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11) was utterly pillaged, looted and raped. Over a million dead and four million displaced, this is a Holocaust. A real one. Today. We said “never again”, but really, let’s face it, that was just for the Jews. It’s “Again and Again” for the Muslims.

No crime that we have a word for hasn’t been committed by the imperialist aggressors. When we ran out of old words, we even invented new terms for old crimes. Tourists and journalists rounded up by warlords for the promise of bounty, were hooded, shackled and shipped to Guantanamo Bay where for years, they have been stripped of their humanity through torture and persecution. We call them “illegal combatants” and deny them, along with the untold thousands held in CIA or CIA-client dungeons around the world, habeas corpus.

And now in Gaza, the Jewish supremacist, racist and apartheid machinery of Israel blows up hundreds of human beings and injures many hundreds more and the world leaders urge Palestinians to stop defending themselves.

A few weeks ago, a false flag operation in Mumbai was called “India’s 9/11″. Arundhati Roy quite brilliantly ridiculed that notion. It’s a very odd pattern. A false flag attack, almost invariably with Zionist undertones, is blamed on a weak country. That weak country is further weakened and then destroyed. It won’t be so easy to destroy Pakistan of course, as nuclear armageddon would surely follow.

Palestine, sadly, has no defensive capability at all. So for years, Israel has been supported in its Nazi ambition to crush the life out of Palestine. Scarcely imaginable brutality has been meted out on a daily basis to millions of Palestinians, washed down with bitter, humiliating tears.

So while hundreds have been killed, Nazisrael and its racist, Islamophobic supporters around the world, the Hasbara-parrots and the imperialists have been rejoicing - and allowed to rejoice openly at this suffering. Meanwhile, the mainstream media, dominated by Jewish interests, whilst still staunchly pro-Israel and anti-Islam, in some quarters seems to be allowing some of the news through, even if it continues to spin this dirty massacre, Gaza’s 9/11, as some kind of justified “defensive retaliation”.

Since the truce expired (it had actually been ended early by Israel killing civilians with missiles again), none of the rockets fired on Israel had actually killed or even injured anyone. The whole world knew that Nazisrael was readying itself to strike against defenseless civilians in the largest concentration camp in the world after collectively punishing them.

Of course, we know what to expect of the Nazi regime in Israel. They are a bunch of hateful murderers spreading terror around the world and behaving like Nazis. Nothing new there. We also know what to expect of many of Israel’s citizens, with attitudes that should be punishable by a life-sentence in a concentration camp. (Yes, I mean forced relocation to Gaza.) An Israeli mother, Mechi Fendel from Sderot said of the deaths in Gaza today “What’s been happening in Gaza is fantastic.” What kind of offspring will that putrid and hateful womb have produced? And that’s not to mention the extremist, terrorist settlers who bully, beat and kill Palestinians every day with the open collusion and support of watching Israeli police and cheering IDF “heroes”.

What has really upset many Muslims around the world though is the craven betrayal of Arab states. Livni having tea with Mubarak in Egypt just a few days ago sticks out. Sticks out badly. I understand that Israel has one of the strongest armies in the world and nuclear weapons, but where is the Arab support for Palestine? Where is the international pressure? Where are the boycotts? Where?

As Gaza ran out of morgue space and world-weary, shell-shocked civilians picked up the remains of their incinerated children, a racist Jew, Ofer Shmerling - Israeli civil defense official said to Al-Jazeera: “I will play music and celebrate what the Israeli air force is doing.”

When I reverted to Islam just over four years ago from the cult of Ahmadiyya, I was still in the dark about my new religion. Imagine you have n older sister who you’ve lived with all of your life, someone you didn’t see eye-to-eye with. You think you know her. She becomes a doctor. You think “hey, my sister’s a doctor, cool”. She works in A&E and does 72 hour shifts. You think “she works hard, but gets paid well”. She does the odd voluntary stint in poorer countries and you think “that’s nice”.  Well, that was my relationship with Islam before my reversion.

Then I had to do the equivalent of stepping into my sister’s shoes without medical training. I had to view the human wreckage in A&E - and deal with it. I had to actually be awake for 72 hours at a time and function at a level that most humans would just shout “give me my easy 9-5 desk job back!” at. I had to actually endure the privation of working at the same level with limited facilities in poorer countries and watch children die because for some reason I couldn’t fathom, a $10 life-saving treatment could not be made available.

I have learned that the world of Islam is deeper in wisdom and compassion than I could understand before. I thought I knew Islam, but I really didn’t. (And despite years of reading, mixing, learning, visiting, I still don’t). The difference is, now I get to see a side that was invisible to me because of the veil of ignorance I was safely behind. My metaphorical sister’s humility and decency hid the unfathomable reserves of love, wisdom, understanding and knowledge from my limited vision.

I read quite a few Muslim blogs now, the equivalent I guess of reading The Lancet as a layperson. Some of it I understand, some of it I am still learning. All the time, my faith deepens, my love and understanding increase and I realise that I have much work to do on my sabr. Certainly my knowledge has increased, but as any student knows, the more one learns, the less one realises one knows.

There are some interesting side-effects to this open reversion and professed love for Islam. I now come into contact with other people who “don’t know what it’s like to be a doctor” so to speak, who were in the same position as me. And sometimes, very rarely, if I’m lucky, I can help them over that perception barrier because of the journey I took. The more I travel down this road, the harder it becomes to be the person I left behind four years ago.

Then I also encounter those who through fear, ignorance, prejudice or hatred, hate Islam and Muslims, even when some of those people don’t outwardly make that claim. Nevertheless, their actions reinforce their hatred. There are many examples on my blog. I am often bemused by this, especially when someone visits the blog for the first time, makes a judgement call and then leaves. Sometimes I’m bemused enough that I’ll visit that person’s blog and ask “why”. And to their immense credit, very often such people will revise their positions after I’ve engaged with them. That’s changing perceptions one person at a time. Perhaps of just one Muslim, but if hatred of Islam and Muslims can come from few sources, maybe acceptance of Islam and Muslims can come from fewer still, insha’Allah.

I have managed to retain most of my friends through this transition. To many, I guess it’s the equivalent of watching someone shift career path. (The person is the same, just their business card has changed.) A shift to Islam is far deeper than that. I read with a mix of amusement and horror once that men are more likely to support the same football team than to stay married to the same woman. (I must confess to being guilty as charged). Islam is a deeper attachment than that. Far deeper. (Though if asked to switch allegiance from Liverpool to Manchester United in order to uphold and defend my faith, I might falter). This depth to which Islam permeates a person is something I never understood before and never could.

When I was a Qadiani, religion was a cloak I wore. The cloak could be substituted for another and the same effect would be achieved. Islam is a different principle entirely. It reaches the parts other faiths cannot reach. It is not about racial superiority as in much of Judaism nowadays, despite what the Islamophobes say. It is a birthright of all of Creation, living and non-living. That is a very difficult concept to explain to those who have not been imbued in it for some time. Of course, the perception of most to my new depth of attachment is not very different to what it was before. What I have noticed is that the new people I have met since embracing Islam do understand and have embraced me as a brother in a way I never could embrace them before. Alhamdulillah, now, with these new eyes, I can.

For the last two weeks I have had conscious control of my diabetes for the first time since I became a Type 1 diabetic in December 1973. 35 years is a long time to have such a pernicious disease and some of my older readers will remember my battle against some of its complications.

I’ve had good hba1c results in the dim and distant past, but for the last few years, it has rarely dropped below 8.5% and has at times been over 10%. Simply not good enough. All of my prior good hba1cs were entirely unconscious. I don’t remember ever aggressively managing my diabetes. Sure, I made the odd attempt, but achieving regular balance was always like nailing jelly to a wall. I’d get my blood sugars under control for a day, then at night I’d get a crushing hypo, massively over-treat it and spend the rest of the following day bumping off the buffers of ketoacidosis.

Hypo after hypo weakened my resolve to manage my diabetes well, so I practically gave up trying to keep my blood sugar within a narrow range and decided to work on avoiding hypos. I got better at that over the last couple of years and consequently avoided readings of over 25mmol/l, which in the hypo-over-treating days were too frequent to reduce my chances of avoiding severe complications. Of course, I just buried my head in the sand whilst pretending that I was doing a better job than I was. Nobody seemed to be able to explain the basics of why I couldn’t get my blood sugars under any kind of control and I resigned myself to a life of brittle diabetes, continuing weight gain and hideous complications. Oh and of course, death. Then again, we all die of something, so I never really got too morbid about that.

So what changed? How did I manage to get to the point where I was waking up with blood sugars ranging from 4.2 to 6.8 on a regular basis? How did I manage to get to the point where even after a night-time hypo (last night as it happens), I could wake up with a blood sugar of just 5.3? (Never pulled that one off before)

The answer is very simple, and confirms my own suspicions about effective Type 1 Diabetes management. Richard K Bernstein.

By eliminating sugars, sweets and most fast-acting carbohydrates, which covers most starchy food, including pasta, potatoes, rice and bread, I reduce the amount of insulin required to treat the food that I eat. Insulin is of course a potent hunger-stimulator and the fat-storage hormone of choice for the human metabolism. So cutting down insulin helps reduce weight. Reducing weight lowers blood pressure (and therefore reduces the compounding effect that high blood pressure has on diabetic complications) and reduces the body’s requirement for insulin. Simply, an 11 stone man needs a lot less insulin than a 15 stone man. I have lost about a stone recently.

Diabetic complications are caused by high blood sugars. Other factors compound the damaging affect of high blood sugars, but Bernstein makes it very clear that he swears by the results of the DCCT. Bernstein also swears by frequent blood testing and keeping blood sugar aggressively managed. His thesis is that if you can keep your blood sugar in normal range for as long as you can, you stand every chance of not suffering the pernicious complications of diabetes. At 74 years of age, having been a Type 1 diabetic for 62 years, he is living testimony to his methods and ideals.

Avoiding high glycaemic index carbs (like starches and sugars) also means avoiding a blood sugar spike that cannot be covered by conventional injected insulin. Bernstein won’t allow that wooly nonsense you get taught at normal diabetic clinics - i.e. don’t test your blood sugar within two hours of a meal. He won’t have that. He proclaims that it’s possible to achieve good blood sugar around the clock. I’ve called him on this and bugger me if he isn’t right! Sticking to protein, vegetables and the odd low GI food means that the insulin I take, less than I normally need, is enough to cover me continuously. Now I can check my blood sugar at any time at all and it should be normal. I’ve hod the odd slip, but the highest I’ve read recently is around 10. Most of the time, it has been between 4.2 and 6.9. Just unbelievable. And unachievable using my old regime.

Having achieved near-normal blood sugars through aggressive monitoring, control and restraint for a few weeks, I’m delighted and plan on continuing Bernstein’s regime for a while. Insha’Allah, I should find some of my complications reversing and others not progressing.

(Update 17/12/8 - I forgot to say “alhamdulillah“)

There has been much talk of Barrack Obama’s Guantanamo problem of late. If he is to close the gulag down, what would happen to the prisoners? Some voices have expressed concern that if repatriated into their original countries, they might face torture. I have long given up being aghast at the complete lack of irony expressed by such commentators. Human beings have been unlawfully detained, denied their human rights and tortured for year after year at Guantanamo and yet we are to believe that the Dirty Empire is concerned about their well-being? If they’re so concerned, release them without delay and give them Green Cards!

Let’s bear something in mind. Despite all the concern about which prison the detainees should be “released” into, they are all innocent. Every single one of them. Yes. In case you’d forgotten, guilt has to be established and at all other times, innocence presumed. These men would be very happy to have a fair trial, but I’m not sure if they’d be mentally fit anymore for any trial.

I have an idea for that slave-to-Israel-elect, one I’m sure he’d appreciate just as much as the incumbent drunk: Why not send the detainees to your “secret rendition camps”? That’d take care of your “problem”. And it’s what you usually do.