In The Guardian, Sunny Hundal is on his way to the Gaza rally in London:
I had an uncomfortable feeling I couldn’t articulate until I was leaving via Charing Cross tube. It was crowded inside as we made our way to the trains. Two girls started to chant “We are Hamas” (I’m not, thank you very much) but were almost immediately drowned out by “Free free Palestine” before I had the chance to get annoyed. And then it came: Allah hu Akbar, Allah hu Akbar on repeat. Our fellow white travellers said little.
And therein lies my problem. I came to the march to express solidarity with Palestinians and express my anger at Israel’s bombings. I didn’t come to express solidarity with Hamas, nor want to come to a religious march. If I wanted to hear “God is Great” I could have gone to a mosque or a gurudwara. But I didn’t. People can say what they want – freedom of speech etc – but I think this encapsulates a broader problem.
[...]
Most non-Muslims who go to such marches don’t really have an interest in exploring Islam: they care about human rights. Religious chants merely end up alienating the very people Palestinians need the support of – a wide swathe of the population.
But many Britons, despite their sympathies, won’t I suspect because they feel such events are dominated by religious types who like to shout Allah hu Akbar, and rudeboys with kaffiyeh bandanas who like to prance around in front of the television. Let me tell it to you straight: it doesn’t help the cause.
They’re not anti-war Sunny - they’re just on the other side…
FAT cars for fat Americans…
Dutch MP Harry van Bommel and friends in Amsterdam…
Alex Massie on magic darts - live blogging.
Alex, you require stamina…
Wikipedia bills itself as the free online encyclopedia anyone can edit. And while indeed that is true, do you ever wonder who does the bulk of the work? … Wales decided to run a simple study to find out: he counted who made the most edits to the site. “I expected to find something like an 80-20 rule: 80% of the work being done by 20% of the users, just because that seems to come up a lot. But it’s actually much, much tighter than that: it turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users … 524 people. … And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits.”
Do Wikiepdia writers have an entry?
Just love the thinking that came up with this - a new font type thats riddled with holes and so uses 20% less ink while remaining entirely readable.
Money saving, better for the environment and downloadable here: http://www.ecofont.eu/ecofont_en.html
Ah, so that’s what twittering is for…
Currently, the most read article on the Telegraph’s website looks at Britney, John Cleese and Will Carling’s twitter entries – it turns out celebrities lead unbelievably mundane lives (Carling saw in the new year with a cup of Earl Grey). That said, the article goes on to point out some of the more serious uses for twitter – such as the Israel government using it as a tool to receive questions from the public on the conflict in Gaza.
