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Let’s not create a hypothetical problem…it can be the work of Muslims, Christians, Jews or Buddhists.”

Daud Abdullah, Deputy Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain UK Muslims Back Police in Bomb Prob

Buddhists? Buddhists?

A Manchester magistrate who refused to deal with a defendant because she was wearing a full Muslim face veil could face disciplinary action

BBC, Magistrate walks out in veil row

Maybe the magistrate was remembering this:

Mustaf Jama, a prime suspect in the fatal shooting of PC Sharon Beshenivsky, assumed his sister’s identity — wearing the niqab and using her passport — to evade supposedly stringent checks at Heathrow, according to police sources

TimesOnline, police killer suspect escape

and this:

The jury at Woolwich Crown Court saw footage of Yassin Omar, 26, wearing a black full-length dress and burka with a handbag over his arm.

BBC, Jury sees 21 July ‘burka escape’

The wonderful Gnarls Barkley Crazy Theremin Jam

Patricia Hewitt will not be health secretary in new Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s first Cabinet.

Harriet Harman won the deputy leadership because in all of the five rounds, she came top with Labour party members. That’s quite a triumph. She makes the dream ticket

Polly Toynbee, Will Gordon let her speak?

The niece of Elizabeth, Countess of Longford is puffed by the Great Grand-Daughter of Lady Mary Howard.

It’s the great central mystery of our time, as far as I’m concerned, this inexplicable torch carried for Islam. Stalin, Islam – gee, parts of the left just don’t seem to have very good taste, do they.

Butterflies and Wheels, Rod Liddle on Rushdiephobia

Defence chiefs have abandoned plans to raise a regiment of British Sikhs…race commissioners at the CRE that creating a Sikh regiment would be divisive and amounted to “segregation”

The decision to shelve the plans was last night criticised by politicians, members of the Sikh community and soldiers

Sunday Telegraph, Sikh regiment dumped over ‘racism’ fears

So what now for the Brigade of Gurkhas and the Welsh Guards

Certainly, the Gurkhas will have to be disbanded.

Actress Cameron Diaz has upset Peruvians by sporting a bag emblazoned with a red star and Chairman Mao’s most famous political slogan. The incident highlights the interesting contrast between communist iconography – hip and acceptable – and Nazi-inspired fashion accessories.

When the singer Brian Ferry praised the look of the Nazis, including Leni Riefenstahl’s films, Albert Speer’s buildings and the pageantry of the mass parades, he was obliged to apologise almost immediately. As the weblog Agoraphilia says, in Icons and Irony:

when I see someone sporting a swastika, it’s hard for me to believe it’s just a goof (“No, I wear this as a commentary on the idiocy of racism” – yeah, right) …

But in 2007, anyone who doesn’t understand that communism is murderous and brutal is either willfully blind or woefully ignorant

Frédéric Bastiat 1801-185

Political economist, libertarian, author of the highly amusing and instructive Candlemakers’ Petition.

Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else

The Marquis de Condorcet 1743-1794

Originator of Condorcet’s paradox of voting, demonstrating the non-transitivity of voting preferences. Related to Arrow’s impossibility theorem demonstrating the impossibility of a fair voting system

A leading group of Pakistani Islamic scholars today awarded its highest honour to al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, saying it was in reaction to Britain’s knighthood for Salman Rushdie.

The Australian Daily Telegraph Pakistan scholars honour Bin Laden

Salman Rushdie

Novelist, author of a novel some but not all Muslims think offends their religion

Osama bin Laden

Head of terror network responsible for the:

• World Trade Center attack in 1993 (6 deaths, 1,042 injured
• 300 deaths in the Embassy Bombings in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi in 1998
• USS Cole bombing (17 deaths) in 2000
• second World Trade Centre attack in 2001 (2,972 deaths)
• the 2002 Mombasa hotel bombing (13 dead, 80 injured)

And these people honouring Bin Laden are supposed to be Islamic scholars