Ahmed Faraz case: when selling books equals ‘priming people for terrorism’
VINCENT Tabak often looked at online strangulation pornography prior to his murder of Joanna Yeates. Despite that, the operators of the websites that cater for this particularly repulsive fetish are not on trial as accomplices to murder. Nor is anyone suggesting that Christian retailers should be jailed for selling the Bible, even though twisted organisations [...]
Assange, Strauss-Kahn: don’t rush to judgement
NOBODY in their right mind should come to strident conclusions about rape allegations on the basis of preliminary newspaper reports. That does not stop some people doing just that. When Sweden began extradition proceedings against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for alleged sexual offences last year, the default assumption of many of his political backers was that [...]
Desecrating war memorials: but is it art?
PERFORMANCE artist Anna Sin’kova is facing five years in a Ukrainian slammer, after frying eggs and hot dogs over a high period Stalinist kitsch eternal flame-style monument in Kiev that commemorates the Soviet Union’s world war two dead. The charge is desecrating a grave. But Ms Sin’kova insists that if she was desecrating anything, she [...]
Wearing a niqab is not like being a Goth
WHAT’S the difference between donning a burqa and doing your best to look like the bass player in the Sisters of Mercy, Brendan O’Neill asks on his Daily Telegraph blog. Why should those who adhere to religiously-inspired Islamic dress codes be regarded any differently from hoodie wearers or Essex girls in oversized sunglasses? After all, [...]
Swastikas and Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte
THE words to ‘pat a cake, pat a cake, baker’s man’ do not include ‘pat it and prick it and mark it with a swastika’. But the Tortendesign bakery, in the village of Maria Enzersdorf near Vienna, is offering customers that very option. Mind you, pastry chef Manfred Klaschka can turn his hand to just [...]
Saturday night inside the kettle
OK, I wasn’t there for all of it, and I am in no position to offer a definitive judgement on what happened in Trafalgar Square on Saturday night. But thanks to my possession of a press pass, the cops let me inside the kettle and I got a pretty good voyeur’s view of the proceedings. [...]
TUC march: I don’t predict a riot
NOT only are my days as a street fighting man well behind me, but daddy is taking girls aged 10 and 8 on the TUC anti-cuts march tomorrow. The last thing I want is for the headbangers to kick anything off. Yet today’s papers are full of dire predictions that a ‘violent minority’ are hell-bent on ‘hijacking [...]
Thilo Sarrazin: what limit to ‘no platform’?
FEW current figures in public life are so widely execrated that Jewish groups and opponents of Islamophobia alike would seek to deny him the chance to address a public meeting at a London campus. But former Bundesbank executive Thilo Sarrazin manages to make the cut. The central contention of Sarrazin’s best-selling book, ‘Deutschland schafft sich ab’ – [...]
Dammit, those gays are getting the upper hand
PICTURE the Britain of the not-too-distant future, in which an omnipotent Pink Stasi mounts a 24/7 undercover surveillance operation on all straight pick-up joints, listening out for anybody who invites a member of the opposite gender to go back to their place for a coffee. The man and the woman are trailed home by a [...]
Votes for prisoners? Absolutely
GOING out and voting is a sign of at least minimal engagement with political debate. That more than one in three adults entitled to do so did not bother pitching up at the polling booths at the 2010 general election is one obvious indicator of the detachment so many now plainly feel. And most [...]
