Islam

When President de Gaulle was asked to authorise the criminal prosecution of Jean-Paul Sartre for civil disobedience during the Algerian war, he declined. ‘One does not lock up Voltaire,’ he added, unhistorically. In France, ‘public intellectuals’ have a quasi-constitutional status, so it’s not surprising that a furious bunfight has broken out over a handful of philosophers known as ‘les nouveaux réactionnaires’. The new reactionaries do not see themselves as a group, but they defend a common point of view about the causes of France’s diminishing status and influence. They look back on a golden age that started with the French revolution and continued for nearly 200 years as France —

Tunisia is preposterously touted as the one success story of the nightmarish revolutions, counter-revolutions, civil wars, jihadist invasions and Islamist terrorist atrocities in the name of an Arab Spring we are still told represents a thirst for Western-style freedom and plurality. The decision to award this year’s Nobel Peace Prize to the country’s National Dialogue Quartet, for apparently helping the country’s transition to democracy, dangerously perpetuates this myth. The Nobel Committee says that the National Dialogue Quartet was… …instrumental in enabling Tunisia, in the space of a few years, to establish a constitutional system of government guaranteeing fundamental rights for the entire population, irrespective of gender, political conviction or religious belief.

So the German Chancellor has just been caught on microphone talking with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: German Chancellor Angela Merkel was overheard confronting Zuckerberg over incendiary posts on the social network, Bloomberg reported on Sunday, amid complaints from her government about anti-immigrant posts in the midst of Europe’s refugee crisis. On the sidelines of a United Nations luncheon on Saturday, Merkel was caught on a hot mic pressing Zuckerberg about social media posts about the wave of Syrian refugees entering Germany, the publication reported. The Facebook CEO was overheard responding that “we need to do some work” on curtailing anti-immigrant posts about the refugee crisis. “Are you working on this?”

On Saturday I wrote a blog recommending readers catch the ‘Passion For Freedom’ festival’s final hours in London.  Thank you to all the readers who did and helped make it a packed-out show.  One further detail about the show came up afterwards in the Guardian and I mentioned it at the start of my talk at Denmark’s free speech conference on Saturday. That is the fact that one of the artist’s work was removed from the show on the advice of the British police.  The work in question – entitled ‘Isis Threaten Sylvania’, featuring the children’s toys Sylvanian Families – is certainly anti-Isis, but it is hard to see it as ‘potentially inflammatory’ as

Republican hopeful Ben Carson was asked on television whether a president’s religious faith matters. He said that a president’s faith should be compatible with the Constitution of the US. Asked whether that included Islam, he denied it. ‘I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that.’ He has been accused of Islamophobia and of disregarding the Constitution itself, which states that ‘no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office’. The Council on American-Islamic Relations has called for Carson to withdraw from the race. His answer was clumsy, but not essentially wrong. The US Constitution does

Over the weekend, a Muslim conference held near Paris was interrupted when two Femen activists stormed the stage during a talk given by two fundamentalist preachers. The focus of the talk was on the role of women in Islam and, according to Inna Shevchenko – Femen’s founder member –  they were discussing why husbands should not beat their wives. The topless activists were then forcibly removed from the stage and kicked aggressively by a number of the event organisers. Irony doesn’t even cover it. It’s easy to dismiss this as yet more bare-breasted attention seeking from Femen protesters, and in a way, it is. But you can’t doubt that they often get their targets right. Back in Ukraine in 2008, Femen activists fought