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I feel like Charlton Heston’s character “Taylor” did in the Planet of the Apes. You remember, that upside-down world where apes ruled over men? Our world seems like that nowadays.

On occasion I read the excellent forum of the J7 Truth team and find some of the contributors distasteful, because they epitomise some of the characters in the world Taylor found himself in. If you remember the scene when Taylor tries to defend himself in front of the ape court and gets the now legendary “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” response from the judges, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

I read the hostility and name-calling, realising dejectedly that these people are “mainstream” influencers. It gets me a little down.

I’ve been trying to work out why, but until today, no single sentence encapsulated the dysphoria that engulfed me every time I read some intellectual lightweight or faux-left gatekeeper spew forth a hasbara parrot-like response to anyone who dared question the risible short-story that is the “official narrative of 7/7″.

Let’s take a ludicrous diversion for the sake of analysis with an extract of Popular Mechanics’ Editorial response to the “demolition theory”, taken from the Editorial Notes section of the print version, and absent from the on-line version:

[T]hose who peddle fantasies that this country encouraged, permitted or actually carried out the attacks are libeling the truth — and disgracing the memories of the thousands who died that day.

The 9/11 Truth movement does have its problems and the biggest is that it puts its stake in the ground - several stakes and several pieces of ground come to think of it.

The J7 Truth team, despite enormous pressure and to its immense credit, has never backed an alternative theory of what happened and so cannot be smeared with the label “conspiracy theorists” (or more derisively by certain self-obsessed, self-aggrandising and shrill commentators, “conspiraloon“, a tag which has been playfully adopted by a small, but growing band of wonderful people, including me of course…)

Regardless of the various positions of the various 9/11 Truth movements and notwithstanding the possibility that some of these are gatekeepers, plants and other shady so-and-sos, the Popular Mechanics sentiment comes across as shrill, divisive and pejorative. Why would anyone seeking the truth be “disgracing the memories of the thousands who died that day”?

Since when did it become offensive to memory to ask what really happened? I mean, is it offensive to Jill Dando’s memory that Barry George has after many years of asking questions about what really happened been released from prison?

Was it offensive that the Guildford Four or the Birmingham Six or the Tipton Three were released? Is it justice these gatekeepers want or blood? I suspect the latter.

Take this series of quotes from someone in TV, taken from the forum:

Don’t have nightmares about the boogie man coming to get you. Except you Bridget, difficult to get out of your head I guess, once someone’s mentioned it …

The above is a quite shocking, personal and frankly, sinister thing to say to someone, especially to a lady. Imagine the outcry if someone had said something along those lines to the daughter of Norfolk, the darling of the gatekeepers; a lady whose name I cannot mention for fear of getting sued or stalked or worse?

Then this character goes on to edit a post and attributes the following “edit” to “The Antagonist“, doing the gatekeeper/Zionist thing of calling anyone who asks questions an anti-Semite.

Disgusting language I’m sure you agree. We do not allow people to be nasty about the July 7th bombers here, heck they were only doing what they thought was right. And we do not allow racism either. Except against the Jews of course. We don’t like them at all.

Funny that he should make this accusation when he himself is guilty of racist hatred with the following gems in the same thread:

And also that the filth who gave them succour and help are safely behind bars weeping into their pillows every night and praying to Allah that they don’t drop the soap in the shower.

Since 2005, thousands of Afghans and tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslims have died as a result of the Crusade. On an atrocity scale, I would reserve the tag “filth” for some of those mass-murderers and if the above is true, and let’s face it, being done for having a CD that you didn’t even load and the contents of which are available on American servers is hardly a crime worthy of comparison to dropping a thermobaric bomb onto a wedding, then the tag “misguided” might be more appropriate.

Why the reference to “Allah”? This guy is not a Muslim, the reference is made as a barb against Islam in general. It’s a technique used by a lot of these gatekeepers using hasbara techniques. As for racism, well surely, “Muslims are not a race” means it’s OK to condemn the lot of them, right?

I’ll let the incendiary and insightful Dr. M answer this one:

Lie#612 : Islam isn’t a race hence abuse of Muslims is in no way or form racist.

My, my, my, aren’t they so very clever? Insistence that Islam isn’t a race and therefore representations of Islam cannot be racist is disingenuous rubbish. Religion is not only about faith but also about identity, background and culture, and Muslims are overwhelmingly non-white. In the mind of the hate mongers, Islam is a religion of non-whites and white race traitors. They see black skin and head scarves the same way. Being Jewish used to be simply a religious identity. With the rise of capitalism, it was transmuted into a racial one. What we are seeing today is the opposite process with Islam. If we must be so asinine as to insist upon using skin color as a determinant of race, I would ask why the Muslims represented in Islamophobic filth never EVER look like Indonesian Muslims, even though it is the most populous Muslim country on the planet. The reason is simple: Muslims are seen and stereotyped as a “race,” especially as dark skinned, unkempt Arabs and Pakistanis.

I’ve said this myself in the past of course, but Dr. M says it better.

There is more disgusting and personal stuff from a man who claims to be intelligent and rational:

You’re right of course Bridget, they are all out to get you. Mooslims, the police, Baader Meinhoff, the Russians. I don’t know how you sleep at night for worrying, I should be careful a bear doesn’t leap on you while you’re wiping your arse.

(Emphasis mine). Again, is this how you talk to a lady? And the reference to “Mooslims”, well that makes me cringe in the way that a white guy who doesn’t know me very well saying “nigger” or “paki” does. (Not that I’m suggesting APed is white, I haven’t a clue and don’t care either way)

Then this kind of sinister and distasteful veiled threat:

Blimey, you lot are paranoid enough as it is, don’t want to tip you over the edge and cause some kind of nasty shotgun in the mouth incident!

And the personal tirade against Bridget continued:

Good grief woman, your level of paranoia is around about certifiable levels. It’s a wonder you feel able to walk around in public. I hope they don’t put you in chanrge of any heavy machinery at that factory of yours.

Bridget, to her immense credit, did not rise to the bait, despite filth like this:

That Bridget girl, do you think she’s…y’know…quite right in the head? No really, I’m not being mean, I’m trying to be understanding. I mean something must have made her all stressy. Do you think she might be in serious need of a man?

More proportion from the Islamophobe:

They’re dead thank God and the vermin that helped them out, like this shit for brains Khalid Khaliq and Babar Ahmad (look them up in Wikipedia - what nice people they are!) got banged up and - with luck - got severely sliced for their efforts by some East End gangster or two.

This kind of baiting and hating isn’t new. What is perplexing is that these people think anyone who questions the official version of events deserves this kind of vitriol and to coin a phrase (not my language) “shits on the graves of the dead”.

“Once a government resorts to terror against its own population to get what it wants, it must keep using terror against its own population to get what it wants. A government that terrorizes its own people can never stop. If such a government ever lets the fear subside and rational thought return to the populace, that government is finished.”

Michael Rivero

I don’t know what happened on 7/7. It might well be that the men who are accused of suicide bombing themselves and 52 innocent people were really guilty. It might be that they were not. I don’t believe that a government who lied to take us to war and is therefore guilty of the most heinous crime is beyond withholding the truth about any other important matter.

What I refuse to take part in is some bizarre conflation of Islam with 7/7 or any other terrorist incident, which is what the gatekeepers like APed want (otherwise why keep referring to religion and Islam and terrorism?)

In every discussion I’ve seen, the hatred and the propaganda and the smears and the threats come only from gatekeepers and mainstream media figures.

So the sentence? What was the thought that helped me to reverse the upside-down world? It is simply this:

Those people who do not question power, when that very power has lied to us and stripped us of our liberties and stolen our wealth, it is they who disgrace the memories of those who died.

Like the innocent Jean Charles de Menezes, the inquest of whose execution starts tomorrow, they deserve the truth.

The buck stops here.

Cogent and shattering analysis in a number of places by Richard C. Cook of the financial Armageddon. I’ve commented on various sections, interspersed throughout Cook’s article.

“Train-wreck” doesn’t even begin to describe what is starting to happen to the U.S. today with the financial crisis, an onrushing depression, and the failure of George W. Bush’s war policy as he is faced down by Iran and the Russian bear.

But in an even broader sense, the West, as a civilization, after a century of world war and the utter failure of global finance capitalism, may have reached its limits.

If you watched the video in yesterday’s post, you would have seen that debt growth is reaching the asymptote. It’s unsustainable and we are running out of resources to loot. When the sums being discussed are in the trillions, you know that we left Kansas a very long time ago.

Those with a vested interest in the status quo dismiss any suggestion that something is wrong. This includes Donald Luskin, author of an article in the Washington Post on Sunday, September 14, titled: “A Nation of Exaggerators: Quit Doling Out That Bad Economy Line.”

Luskin writes, “The relentless drumbeat of pessimism in the media and on the campaign trail” is “a virus.”

He continues: “Sure, there are trouble spots in the economy, as the government takeover of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and jitters about Wall Street firm Lehman Brothers, amply demonstrate. And unemployment figures are up a bit, too. None of this, however, is cause for depression — or exaggerated Depression comparisons.”

Continue reading, and you find out who Luskin is: a campaign adviser to John McCain.

Why aren’t there heads on spikes yet?

Are these people inhabiting any kind of reality? I woke this morning to find that my bank, the Halifax, had been bought by Lloyds TSB for over £12BN. Can anyone imagine for even a moment that such a monumental event would have been allowed by any government a year ago? A monster has been created in the aftermath of a Jacobean tragedy and these amoral monsters are telling me that everything is OK.

Each and every one of my friends knows that things are bad. Some of my friends cannot sleep at night. (I have no such trouble, fortunately. Insha’Allah is one of the greatest blessings ever afforded to a Muslim. Now I know why I experienced poverty in the past. I thank my Creator for that lesson!)

We know that “where you stand depends on where you sit”—and who pays you for advice. So is a catastrophic meltdown coming?

If so, probably a majority of the people in the world are thinking: “Serves them right.” For the last 500 years, the West has been striding across the globe, armed to the teeth with firearms, warships, bombers, and—more recently—depleted uranium, enforcing the “white man’s burden” by enslaving nations and peoples and confiscating everything of value—ranging from art objects to gold to oil—that can be carried away.

It’s not a “chippy paki” that said that - Richard C. Cook is a former U.S. federal government analyst, whose career included service with the U.S. Civil Service Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury Department. His articles on economics, politics, and space policy have appeared on numerous websites. His book on monetary reform entitled We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform will be published soon by Tendril Press. He is also the author of Challenger Revealed: An Insider’s Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age , called by one reviewer, “the most important spaceflight book of the last twenty years .”

Truth comes out when the chips are down and when there’s nothing to lose, or gain.

The financiers behind it all have also used the diabolically clever practice of creating money “out of thin air” to put the natives everywhere into debt, and, when that has proven insufficient, of doing the same to their own populations.

All this is rationalized by various brands of racism, cultural superiority, social Darwinism, historical determinism, “dominion of the Elect,” “God’s chosen people,” etc. Or, simply, “might makes right.”

Some call it “The New World Order.”

Blimey, anyone would think this guy was a conspiraloon. Are you reading Ms. Norfolk? (because you’re not from London, not like me and my friends, who so are). Don’t like it? Sue me!

You brand a few decent people who had the temerity to question whether the government was telling the truth with the tag “conspiraloon” and now you must be so confused to observe that the whole world is a conspiraloon, leaving only you, a fawning band of Islamophobes and mendacious racists and the murderers in power that you so blindly and loyally support. Now who’s out on a limb?

I’m proud to be a conspiraloon if it means agreeing with Woodrow Wilson, or Richard Cook, or even Jesus Christ or Muhammad (peace be on them, yes even Wilson and Cook!) And I am so proud to be a Londoner, to be tolerant to be patient and so in every respect, nothing like you at all.

So today, we Americans, denizens of the “land of the free and the home of the brave,” victors in two world wars, bearers of “democracy” to Afghanistan and Iraq, allies of the brave Israelis who hold high the banner of Judeo-Christian values among the ungrateful Palestinians—well, we Americans owe our own bankers almost $70 trillion at most recent count. With the government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, we owe holders of bad housing loans, including the governments of China, Korea, and Japan, another few trillion.

$70 TRILLION OF DEBT OWED TO BANKERS!

Cancel all of the debt. (It’s only numbers) and let’s see some heads on spikes, like the good old days. What’s it going to take for there to be a revolution? How long will we let these usurist, murdering thieves loot us and kill us and worst of all, divide us against each other while we try to spend our way out of indentured, indebted servitude?

The bluster of Kissinger, Brzezinski, the Kristols, the Christian fundamentalists, and their paid-off politicians and media millionaires notwithstanding, America—indeed, the entire West—has been found out, perhaps even checkmated on the world stage.

Maybe now would be a good time for me to learn Russian. Or Chinese. Or Persian?

The Bush/Cheney wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have blackened America’s name forever.

People of the world are not stupid. As I’ve repeatedly said, America is just another empire. America is an idea. There are people who have hijacked the idea, but America was actually loved by many for a long time. That love will come back if the Americans just turn up and get rid of the impostors who are destroying the world. Usurist, thieving Rothschilds, Rockefellers, Warburgs and the rest.

Iran has called our bluff. In Israel the gap between rich and poor is increasing as much as in the U.S. According to an article by Ian S. Lustick, the Palestinians have stood up to the Israelis to the point where more Jews are emigrating from that country than are moving in, and where those who remain are increasingly huddling around Tel Aviv as a safe haven. (Ian S. Lustick, “Abandoning the Iron Wall: ‘Israel and the Middle Eastern Muck’,” Middle East Policy , Vo. XV, No. 3, Fall 2008.)

If Israel tries any funny stuff with its neighbours, its neighbours, including Iran, have the ability to level Tel Aviv in the same way that the murdering Zionaxis levelled the whole of Iraq. And in the wasteland that will remain, nobody will come to build a ferris wheel. They’ll be coming to build homes for the Palestinians. Let the Europeans make amends for what they did to the Jews in the 30s and 40s.

In the 1990s, the European bankers used U.S. and NATO forces to dismember Yugoslavia so George Soros and the Rothschilds could gobble up Balkan resources. But that strategy is failing in the Caucasus, where the Russians fought back against the genocidal attack by Dick Cheney’s poodle, Mikheil Saakashvili, the New York-trained attorney the CIA got elected as the president of Georgia.

I’m afraid I know very little about the Caucusus, I forgot much of my ‘O’ level History and even that didn’t cover the region very well. I had no idea that Saakashvili was a New-York trained attorney though, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was the CIA that got him elected. The CIA is great at getting all kinds of oppressive scumbags into power so that they can steal the resources of an entire nation. Somalia, Iran (Mossadegh), Indonesia (Suharto), Nicaragua and the list goes on and on and on.

And now the people of Ukraine, the “Little Russians,” realizing what the West has in store for them, are rushing back into the Slavic fold and may be only a year or so away from reuniting with their “Great Russian” cousins across the border.

A friend of mine who knows the region well assures me that this is indeed the case. I’m not learned enough to know what the truth is here.

I’m going to back off now for a few paragraphs; I don’t want to interrupt the best bit of writing here.

What is telling is to watch the Western financier press, chiefly the Washington Post and the New York Times , fume about Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin and his “authoritarian” manner. An example is the article by Times correspondent Ellen Barry on Putin’s September 11 press conference in Moscow. She wrote, “In three-and-a-half hours, in tones that were alternatively pugilistic and needy, Vladimir V. Putin tried to explain himself.”

I’m sorry, Ms. Barry. You and your editors may think your writing is cute, but Vladimir Putin is the foremost figure on the world stage today. He will remain so after George W. Bush leaves the White House disgraced.

Putin is heir to an epochal movement of patriots who began in the 1970s to take back Russia from within. It started with a base of operations within the KGB and the Orthodox Church, led to Gorbachev’s glasnost in the 1980s, and culminated in the Second Russian Revolution of 1991. At that point, the Western financiers gleefully rushed in to support an assault from the Russian “oligarchs” who were looting Russia of everything it owned.

The oligarchs were the shock troops of a financier assault that had already begun to overlap in the West with the Russian Mafia. Cheered on by the Washington Post and aided by academic advisors from places like Harvard, this international syndicate nearly destroyed Russia during the 1990s. But when Putin was appointed interim president by Boris Yelstin in 1999, and after winning the presidential election of 2000 in his own right, he began to fight back.

From the mid-1970s to today, thousands of Russian gangsters, along with many hard-line Bolsheviks/Stalinists, were allowed to emigrate. Many settled in the U.S. and are here today, and many more settled in Israel. In fact, one reason the price of condos in New York, Miami, Tel Aviv, and elsewhere has inflated so much reportedly is the flood of cash from racketeering.

The crooks have allied themselves with the Colombian drug cartels and have heavily infiltrated the world’s financial systems, even setting up their own banks for laundering money and speculating in the commodities markets.

Today, Putin is cleaning out the remaining gangster class. His efforts reached a milestone in January with the arrest in Moscow of Semion Mogilevich, called “the world’s most dangerous man.”

Putin has declared that the world will not be governed in a “unipolar” manner; i.e. by the U.S. military as the police force for the global financiers. This does not mean Russia has to be our enemy. In fact the world would be much better off, and much safer, if we joined with Russia as allies in keeping the peace.

For more on how the oligarchs were allowed to destroy Russia and just what a thug Yeltsin was, I recommend Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine”. More learned readers should see fit to point me towards better resources.

What I learned was that Russia’s so-called “reforms” led to the impoverishment of 72 million people in only 8 years! And by 1996, 25% of Russians, that’s over 37 million people, lived in poverty described as “desperate” and by which time also there were 715,000 homeless children in Russia, though UNICEF put this figure as high as 3.5 million children.

The country was basically looted and pillaged by these oligarchs, but how was this possible given just how wealthy Russia was? Well guess what. It needed terror. From the torching of parliament (turning the Whitehouse into the Blackhouse - Reichstag anyone?) to the invasion and brutal repression of Chechnya to the total suspension by Yeltsin of any form of democracy. Indeed, Yeltsin’s “privatisation” minister, Anatoly Chubais stated quite brazenly that “In order to have a democracy in society there must be a dictatorship in power.”

I haven’t even scratched the surface of what happened in Russia and it would take me years of research to become knowledgeable.

It boils down to this. Rich, greedy, corporatist, usurist thieves suspend democracy by creating a terror diversion and then proceed to rob a nation of its liberty, its resources and its common wealth. As a friend says so eloquently and figuratively (of course!) - “HEADS ON SPIKES!”

But to do that our system would have to change, because finance capitalism is far too unstable to coexist with other nations as equals. It must either grow or die, because it always needs new victims to pay the interest on its usury practices and to finance its speculative balloons. As a last resort, it needs the kind of financial institution bailouts being engineered by Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, where the only remaining stopgap is borrowing from public funds and adding to the national debt.

Once economic growth stops, as has now happened, and all the bubbles to restart it have blown up, as has also happened, the end really is nigh. Especially if the host—the U.S.—is bankrupt.

What is coming at us today isn’t just another downturn. If people like McCain adviser Donald Luskin doubt it, maybe, instead of writing campaign propaganda, they should ask the fired CEOs of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the stockholders of Lehman Brothers, whose shares have dropped ninety percent in less than a year, and the millions who are losing their homes.

Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain are calling for “change.” Well, if I were standing on a beach with a 100-foot tsunami roaring in my direction, I would call for change too. Except I would not be standing around arguing about the meaning of the words “lipstick on a pig.”

By Richard C. Cook
http:// www.richardccook.com

HEADS ON SPIKES.

“Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”

Kenneth Boulding. (Economist)

Like many, I have started a crash course on money. For starters, what is money, anyway? Most people think money means bank notes, or minted coins or even numbers in a computer. Fair enough. Where does it come from? Who decides how much of it there is? Isn’t there a finite supply? What are the consequences of infinite supply?

Four years ago I learned of the twin evils of fractional reserve banking and interest. Now I want to know the rest. This film recommended by someone at Stef’s blog, is as good a start as any. (Nothing happens for the first 12 seconds or so.)

Good, wasn’t it?

Nwo, sorry, I mean now for some more delicious quotes…

“None are more enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Erm, that’d be us then.

How about this then?

“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men.

We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world. No longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.”

Woodrow Wilson (after signing the Federal Reserve into existence)

Sounds like a conspiraloon, right? That’s a President of the USA talking.

Interestingly (ha!), Islam was unequivocal about usury over 1400 years ago. (That’s a long time!)

2:276 Allah will deprive usury of all blessing, but will give increase for deeds of charity: For He loveth not creatures ungrateful and wicked.

2:278 O ye who believe! Fear Allah, and give up what remains of your demand for usury, if ye are indeed believers.

2:279 If ye do it not, Take notice of war from Allah and His Messenger: But if ye turn back, ye shall have your capital sums: Deal not unjustly, and ye shall not be dealt with unjustly.

2:280 If the debtor is in a difficulty, grant him time Till it is easy for him to repay. But if ye remit it by way of charity, that is best for you if ye only knew.

Astonishingly, 2:279 is the only place in the Qur’an that war is declared by Allah and His Messenger.

We need to smash the immoral and poverty-creating banking system and replace it with something equitable and liberating. Who’s up for it? And where do we start?

So when we grieved today over the approximately 3,000 people who lost their lives 7 years ago today, did we remember to grieve for the million who have lost their lives in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine because of Anglo-American/Israeli blood lust and revenge?

Or is Muslim blood not worth the same as Western blood?

Do you shed a tear when a lying bully sells and tells their fake tale in the Western media?

Whilst turning a blind eye to children your tax money has killed?

Probably the best film on 9/11 I have seen to date.

(Sorry I couldn’t embed it, it moved to Blip.TV and it’s too wide to fit here. I thoroughly recommend that you view this important film at Blip in full-screen mode, don’t bother with the low-res google and youtube versions)

Why is it that the most rabid fascists are the ones who fight for the media, the government and corporations? Listen out for the absolutely filthy work of Fox News, for the radio presenter interviewing McKinney and a couple of people defending the government line as if their children were being violated. It’s quite scary.

Look out also for McKinney’s definition of citizenship and finally, the touching stories of the first responders, especially the shattering line that ends the film.

Ramadan Mubarak to all of my readers.

Here’s a link to last year’s post on the subject, nearly all of which still applies.

In previous years, the fasting period (from dawn to dusk), was short enough for me to keep some fasts. This year, Ramadan has shifted towards the back end of summer and therefore the fasting period is a challenging 16 hours. Given my diabetes, it would be crazy for me to try and keep the fast and then wrestle control of my condition in the 8 hours that remain of the day (or rather, night). So I’m disappointed, but I won’t be fasting.

Ramadan didn’t used to mean much to me as a Qadiani, but since I have been a Muslim, it has been an uplifting experience. I feel connected to every Muslim on the planet, of every race and background. (Qadianis are connected only to a Punjabi subgroup, because despite their best efforts and the support of Western media and governments, Islam and even other groups are highly resistant to this heretic creed). Of course, Qadianis do fast, and I do pray that those who love the part of Qadianism that takes its core from Islam, will be guided to truth and revert to Islam when they realise just how divergent Islam and Qadianism are.

Islam is vibrant today, because despite rampant Islamophobia, more and more people are drawn to Islam and indeed, are becoming Muslims by the day. The dark(!) picture painted of Muslims in the Western media doesn’t very often tally with the reality. For starters, Islam is way too diverse and confusing for most people to grasp. Sure, modern-day Orientalists, some of whom are faux-left-wing bloggers thrown up to media-stardom level by a system that clearly hasn’t a clue, have tried to pin this label and that on us, completely missing the point - that despite many differences, Muslim people have more in common with each other than their rulers and dividers would like to portray.

In this holy month, Muslims will be fasting and doing their best to be as “good” as they can. We will be reciting Al Qur’an, we will be praying taraweeh, we will make dhikr, we will attempt to minimise our bad habits and increase our good ones. We will be kinder to neighbours, we will be more loving to our parents and our children. We will call for peace and denounce oppression and tyranny.

What is it about my Islam that you still find threatening?

Katharine Whitehorn in '50s London

Beautiful article by Katharine Whitehorn in the BBC today.

And what about women? Nowadays the Daily Mail can enjoy its regular explosions about whether women having jobs and children is a Bad Thing - often written by women who have at least got away from their children long enough to write the article.