Harry's Place

Blogger Sid has a spot-on take on Islam Channel, a UK-based broadcaster:
The Islam Channel says it is committed to giving a platform to a range of views from across Britain’s Muslim and non-Muslim communities. This is a complete fiction.
What it is has done is to give an un-due prominence to Islamist voices that represent only [...]

Five members of Congress were arrested Monday while protesting outside the Sudanese embassy in Washington.
The congress members crossed a yellow police tape line and refused to leave the largely peaceful demonstration after calling on Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir to reinstate 16 nongovernmental aid organizations [in Darfur] that he expelled or shut down last [...]

Over at a blog called Marginal Revolution, they’re highlighting a very interesting solution the impasse in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process by a chap called Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, a political science professor at NYU:
“In my view, it is a mistake to look for strategies that build mutual trust because it ain’t going to happen. Neither [...]

According to a company called Cision, we’re the no. 3 blog in the United Kingdom.
We fall behind Iain Dale and a technology blog called “Mashable”. 
Iain Dale is sceptical:
While I am delighted to come in at number 2, I have to say the validity of this table is rather undermined by some very strange placings. I’ll [...]

Tory blogger Iain Dale appears to have fallen for a hoax so obvious one can only assume he’s been exhausted by his hectic radio pundit schedule following Draper-gate.
Iain was sent an “advanced copy” of a speech to be given by Hazel Blears, and here’s part of Blears’s supposed speech that Iain shared with us:
Family Intervention Projects [...]

The Egyptian government has over-reacted to the developing flu pandemic by destroying the livelihoods of Egyptian Christians.
Egyptian leaders ordered the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of pigs today to help protect against swine flu, prompting angry protests from the poor Christan farmers who feed their animals with a country’s food scraps. The decision was also [...]

Craig Murray reports on the Stop the War Coalition’s shambolic slide into obscurity:
On Saturday I was invited to address Stop The War’s annual conference. This has shrunk down to what I might call a hard left core, with the other groups that used to be a prominent part of the coalition almost completely evaporated. The [...]

It should come as no surprise to those who have followed the views of leading paleoconservative Pat Buchanan over the decades that Buchanan has written a piece comparing Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk, facing deportation from the US to Germany, to Alfred Dreyfus and, um, Jesus Christ.
But it’s a reminder that old-fashioned nativist, rightwing [...]

The latest swine flu nuttiness:
Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota finds it “an interesting coincidence” that swine flu outbreaks seem to happen under “Democrat” presidents. She cites a previous outbreak in the 1970s under “another Democrat president, Jimmy Carter.”
Unfortunately for her coincidence, that outbreak happened in 1976– under Republican Gerald Ford.
Update: Not only that; [...]

I have to express disagreement with Karl Pfeifer. Gerd Honsik shouldn’t spend a day in prison. As Honsik’s lawyer put it, ‘To impose five years in prison for exercising one’s freedom of opinion is just intolerable’.
He’s now become another ‘martyr‘ and celebrity for neo-Nazis and other anti-Semites. Cranks shouldn’t be – and in fact are [...]