James Turley reviews Kenan Malik’s From fatwa to jihad: the Rushdie affair and its legacy Atlantic, 2009, pp266, £16.99 The year 2009 is the anniversary of many things - the 20th of the collapse of the eastern bloc countries that instigated the final death of a decrepit Stalinism; the 25th of the Miners’ Great Strike; and ...
Barack Obama invokes the traditions of the first and second American revolutions and the 1960s civil rights movement. As Ted North shows, this has created huge popular expectations One would have had to be hiding deep in the Amazon to have avoided the news that Barack Obama is now the 44th president of the United States ...
How deep is official anti-racism? James Turley examines the question There can be few constituencies in America which have received the results of the November 4 presidential election as favourably as the nation’s black voters. Always a reliably Democrat demographic, 96% of African-Americans cast their ballot for Obama, with only 3% voting for McCain. The most obvious ...
This month has seen the implementation of Home Office plans to make foreign students carry biometric ID cards and force lecturers to keep registers of their attendance. This has been framed as a response to the scandal over the 'bogus colleges', almost 300 of which were uncovered last year, through which applicants could obtain a ...
The accusations of Tarique Ghaffur against the Metropolitan Police have given the lie to the state’s ‘liberal’ PR, argues James Turley On September 9, Metropolitan Police commissioner Ian Blair formally suspended an assistant commissioner, Tarique Ghaffur, from his duties. Less than a fortnight earlier, Ghaffur had staged a highly visible and incendiary press conference, in which he ...