SIR – We have serious misgivings about the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill, which seeks to legalise gay marriage.

As imams and Muslim leaders we have a responsibility to fulfil our sacred trust to God and present our view on these proposals on behalf of the Muslim communities we serve.

Marriage is a sacred contract between a man and a woman that cannot be redefined. We believe that marriage between a man and a woman is the cornerstone of family life and the only institution within which to raise children.

We are concerned that this radical change to the institution of marriage will impact on what is taught in schools. Muslim teachers will be forced into the contradictory position of holding private beliefs, while teaching a new legal definition of marriage. Muslim parents will be robbed of their right to raise their children according to their beliefs, as gay relationships are taught as something normal to their primary-aged children.

We support the numerous calls from other faith leaders and communities who have stood firmly against gay marriage and instead support marriage as it should be, between a man and a woman.

The letter should not come as any great surprise. Most religious groups tend to be very conservative in their outlook. In a democratic society, they should have every right to air their religious views. That does not mean that their views should not be scrutinised though.

The signatories say:

“Muslim teachers will be forced into the contradictory position of holding private beliefs, while teaching a new legal definition of marriage. Muslim parents will be robbed of their right to raise their children according to their beliefs, as gay relationships are taught as something normal to their primary-aged children.”

I am not convinced that this is actually true. Muslim teachers can still preach that they believe that gay sex is sinful as is gay marriage – if they wish to do so. Even though abortion and sex before marriage between adults is lawful, those whose religious beliefs instruct them otherwise can still entertain those beliefs and teach them to their children in the privacy of their own homes.

I am pretty sure that many of the very same religious figures would also like to deny the right of a woman to have an abortion, for unmarried adults to have any type of physical relationship,  for authors to publish books that they deem blasphemous or ‘deviant’, for movie makers to include scenes which they regard as being ‘lewd’ or ‘unacceptable’, the right of biology teachers to teach kids about evolution etc.

In short, they would prefer to impose on the rest of us a far more restrictive society. I am not at all convinced that it would lead to a better society. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Karl Popper famously wrote about the virtues of an ‘Open Society’ and the differences with other types of societies. His arguments are still every bit as valid today.

Cisco have posted the above new video about their partnership with Wired magazine to publish an interactive magazine, The Connective, which gives a glimpse of what the Internet of Everything will hold in store for us. You can download The Connective as an app for both Apple and Android devices from here.

Impressive.

The decision by Professor Stephen Hawking to support the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement against Israel is a hugely courageous one and he deserves support for speaking out on the issue of Israeli apartheid – an issue on which too many people are afraid to speak out.

As the award-winning journalist Nick Davies observed in his splendid book about the UK media, Flat Earth News:

“…the most potent electric fence in the world is the one erected on behalf of the Israeli government.

“Journalists who write stories which offend the politics of the Israeli lobby are subjected to a campaign of formal complaints and pressure on their editors; most of all, they are inundated with letters and emails which can be extravagant in their hostility…

“The result is that some facts become dangerous: to report Palestinian casualties; to depict the Palestinians as victims of Israeli occupation; to refer to the historic ousting of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes; to refer to the killing of Palestinian civilians by Zionist groups in the 1940s. The facts are there, but the electric fence will inflict pain on any reporter who selects them.”

Hawking has been in poor health for some time now. He is undoubtedly going to have pain inflicted on him as a result of breaking through the ‘electric fence’. The Times (where Daniel Finkelstein and the odious Oliver Kamm both hold senior editorial posts) yesterday published a disgraceful editorial belittling Hawking and describing his decision as ‘stupid’. Hawking will surely be remembered as someone who has done far more for improving our understanding of the world around us than either of those two little shits.

The best support we can give Hawking, is to join him in speaking out against Israel’s continuing racist and violent oppression of the occupied Palestinians. Just like South Africa, it’s apartheid policies will be it’s downfall.

Many of our politicians and much of our media may have been bought out by the Israel lobby. But they can’t buy all of us.

Hat-tip: Thanks to Jews Sans Frontieres for bringing my attention to the graphic which I nicked for this blog.

Cisco’s latest video about the ‘Internet of Everything’ suggests that it will help increase transparency – and therefore, one would presume, accountability too – from governments around the world.

That has to be good news.

Well, I am pleased to report back that those of you who went on to read Miller’s book, Finding Darwin’s God, have told me that you have been every bit as impressed and convinced by Miller’s arguments as I was all those years ago. This is heartening news and in a small way shows that the best way to defeat ignorance on the topic is better education about science and evolution.

Anyway, the positive reports I had coming back to me encouraged me to re-read the book again and it has only deepened my appreciation for Prof. Ken Miller and his outstanding book. Here is an extract I want to share from the final chapter of Finding Darwin’s God in which Miller points out the folly of those religious believers who seek to deny the reality of evolution and how they are unwittingly providing fodder for atheists.

“There is, however, a deeper problem caused by the opponents of evolution, but it is not a problem for science. It is a problem for religion. Like our priest, they have based their search for God on the premise that nature is not self-sufficient. By such logic, just as Father Murphy claimed only God could have made a flower, they claim that only God could have made a species. Both assertions support the existence of God only so long as they are shown to be true, but serious problems for religion emerge when the assertions are shown to be false.

“If a lack of scientific explanation is proof of God’s existence, the counterlogic is unimpeachable: a successful scientific explanation is an argument against God. That’s why this reasoning, ultimately, is much more dangerous to religion than it is to science. Eliot Meyerowitz’s fine work on floral induction suddenly becomes a threat to the divine, even though common sense tells us it should be nothing of the sort.

“The reason it doesn’t, of course, is because the original premise is flawed. The Western God created a material world that is home to both humans and daffodils. God’s ability to act in that world need not be predicated on its material defects. There is, therefore, no theological reason for any believer to assume that the macromolecules of the plant cell cannot fully account for the formation of the flower. Life, in all its glory, is based on the physical reality of the natural world. We are dust, and from that dust come the molecules of life to make both flowers and the dreamers who contemplate them.

“The critics of evolution have made exactly the same mistake, but on a higher and more dangerous plane. They represent no serious problem for science, which meets the challenge easily. Their claims about missing intermediates and suspect mechanisms can be answered directly by providing the intermediates and demonstrating the mechanisms. Religion, however, is drawn into dangerous territory by the creationist logic. By arguing, as they have repeatedly, that nature cannot be self-sufficient in the formation of new species, the creationists forge a logical link between the limits of natural processes to accomplish biological change and the existence of a designer (God). In other words, they show the proponents of atheism exactly how to disprove the existence of God – show that evolution works, and it’s time to tear down the temple. As we have seen, this is an offer that the enemies of religion are all too happy to accept.

“Once again, the premise of the argument is flawed. If their God exists, He acts in the world today in concert with natural laws and works His will in the present through the contingent events of human and natural history. All that evolution does is to point out that the workings of natural processes are also sufficient to explain the contingent events of natural history in the past, including the origin and extinction of species. There is neither logical nor theological basis for excluding God’s use of natural processes to originate species, ourselves included. There is therefore no reason for believers to draw a line in the sand between God and Darwin. The opponents of evolution have put their money on the wrong horse, and they fail to see that betting so consistently against science is a losing proposition – not for science, but certainly for religion.

“As a Christian, I find the flow of their logic particularly depressing. Not only does it teach us to fear the acquisition of knowledge, which might at any time disprove belief, but it suggests that God dwells only in the shadows of our understanding. I suggest that if God is real, we should be able to find Him somewhere else – in the bright light of human knowledge, spiritual and scientific.”

Impressively argued, right? You can buy Prof Miller’s book from this link and make your own minds up about evolution.

The exhibition cost is £15 for adults. If you buy the annual member’s pass for the British Museum (£50), then you can visit the exhibition – and all other British Museum exhibitions as many times as you want and you do not need to queue.

Both Pompeii and Herculaneum were famously destroyed when Mount Vesuvius  erupted in AD 79 and they lay covered in ash which over time became rock until the towns were rediscovered in the 1700s.

The above image shows the Roman God of Wine, Bacchus, draped with grapes, standing next to Mount Vesuvius which was home to a number of vineyards.

The excavations since the 1700s have fascinated the world and the British Museum has with the help of their counterparts in Italy helped bring together around 300 artefacts in what is described as the biggest exhibition on the subject in the UK for twenty years, so it really is a once in a generation opportunity to see this material in London.

At the beginning of the exhibition there is a video explaining what happened when Mount Vesuvius erupted. It was the first time that I had heard of the term ‘pyroclastic surge’ – a mass of gas and rock released by a volcanic eruption. According to a National Geographic article “when the pyroclastic surge hit Pompeii, there was no time to suffocate…The contorted postures are not the effects of a long agony, but of the cadaveric spasm, a consequence of heat shock on corpses.”

We are then introduced to examples of what has been excavated in Pompeii and the neighboring town of Herculaneum including atriums, mosaics, frescoes, jewellery etc and we begin to build up a picture of what life was like for the dwellers of those towns.

The above is a rather lovely mosaic of a guard dog found in a home in Pompeii.

All the while though, a sense of foreboding grows. We know that soon we are going to see examples of terrible destruction. And when it does come, it is chilling. Chilling to the bone.

The above is a plaster cast of a guard dog found in the House of Orpheus – the same house that the dog mosaic shown earlier was found. The dog’s posture is contorted in agony.

And then, in a heartbreaking scene, we are shown a human family, with the mother and father having fallen down in pain and their two children, the younger of whom is still on the mother’s lap and appears to be clawing at a wall.

The Latin poet Statius (45 – 96 AD) wrote the following lines about the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum:

“Will future centuries,

when new seed will have covered over the waste,

believe that entire cities and their inhabitants lie under their feet,

and that the fields of their ancestors were drowned in a sea of flames?”

In the video I mentioned earlier, when discussing the terrible events visited upon Pompeii and Herculaneum, we were told that what Mount Vesuvius robbed from those towns, it has bequeathed to us.

Update: To coincide with the British Museum’s exhibition, the BBC have broadcast this superb one-hour documentary about Pompeii and Herculaneum. It is available to watch on the i-Player till Wednesday 10th April 2013.

The Secret In Their Eyes is an Argentinian movie that won the 2010 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. You can still watch it on BBC i-Player (available until this Sunday).

I was going to post some notes about it but I am late for work. So it will have to suffice to say that it deals with the themes of  love, justice and revenge. It features some very moving dialogue with plenty of quotable lines too. I have been trying to think of another movie from this decade that I found more compelling and beautifully acted…and I can’t.

In a damning judgement, the Employment Tribunal rejected Fraser’s complaint and made the following crucial observation:

“It seems to us that a belief in the Zionist project or an attachment to Israel or any similar sentiment cannot amount to a protected characteristic. It is not intrinsically a part of Jewishness…”

There have been strenuous attempts made by leading Zionist bodies in recent years to get anti-Zionism equated with anti-Semitism with a view to curtailing public criticism of the illegal actions of the apartheid state of Israel. The Employment Tribunal ruling is therefore worth studying in detail and I may post more about this in the coming days…

Update: You can read the press release from the UCU on its victory in this case here.

Here are two clips featuring the man himself. This one is from The Italian Job (1969):

And these are clips from perhaps Michael Caine’s finest movie, Get Carter (1971):

Theresa May – like many Home Secretary’s – has long concluded that there are votes to be gained by appealing to baser prejudices and being seen to be really tough on darkies especially ones with long beards and to hell with the law. In recent weeks, May has taken to publicly lambasting the judges for repeatedly frustrating her attempts to deport the bearded ones and warning that she intends to repeal the Human Rights Act (because bearded Muslims are not really human, don’t you know).

Abu Qatada’s treatment at the hands of both Labour and the Tory-Lib Dem coalition is instructive. He has been living in the UK since 1994. I wrote this about him over four years ago:

“…[Abu Qatada] went on the run just as the UK government was about to announce new anti-terror laws allowing foreign nationals to be detained without trial or charge [following the events of 9/11]. He was finally captured in October 2002.

“He then spent around six years behind bars without being charged with any actual crime by our government. After the July 7 bombings and Blair’s menacing declaration that “the rules of the game” had changed, the government agreed a “Memorandum of Understanding” with Jordan as it sought to deport Abu Qatada to that country where he had been convicted in absentia of terror-related charges.

“The Home Office has claimed that Abu Qatada is a “truly dangerous individual” and “heavily involved, indeed at the centre of terrorist activities associated with al-Qaida”.

“That may or may not be true, but surely the place to establish that is in our courts of law. The man has been living in this country with his family for the past 15 years. Surely that is a long enough period to collate any evidence and bring it before a judge and jury. Instead, our government has been busy trying to deport him back to Jordan.

“Unfortunately, in the fevered atmosphere of today, seeing someone simply being accused of terrorist-related activity is enough to make otherwise sane people lose their senses, automatically assume the worst and forget about due process and the rule of law.”

So, Abu Qatada has now spent around ten years in prison without having been charged with any crime in the UK, let alone having been convicted of one. Can you imagine a middle class white person being treated the same way in the UK? And is it really possible to imagine the terrible toll on his family and children due to the UK government’s vindictive and Islamophobic behaviour?

And then think about what the families of Babar Ahmad and Syed Talha Ahsan must be going through as a result of the Home Office’s decision to sign the woefully one-sided extradition treaty with the USA back in 2002.

The Home Office – whose remit covers law and order – has the most authoritarian reputation of any government department.

To recount a tale I promised in my previous blog post, a few years ago I was visited at work in Docklands by two pretty young ladies from the Home Office. They had been dispatched by a senior civil servant in Whitehall to ask for my assistance to close down some Muslim websites which they believed were serving to radicalise Muslim youth. Their proposal boiled down to me leading a campaign to put pressure – in the name of British Muslims – on Internet Service Providers to remove content which the Home Office believed was harmful. As an incentive, they said the Home Office was planning to convene a one-day conference later that year about ‘hate material on the internet’ and if I agreed to help, I would be invited to chair the conference. I asked the two pretty young things if the internet material was actually unlawful? After all, the government already has laws at its disposal to prosecute those hosting unlawful material. No, they said, the material was not unlawful. So, the material was lawful. I looked at the pretty young things. They looked at me. I fluttered my eyelashes at them. That last bit was a joke, by the way.

Anyway, I politely declined the offer from the pretty young things and saw them out of my work premises. As they left they waved. I fluttered my eyelashes at them again.