The Sun has splashed with the headline: “One in five Brit Muslims’ sympathy for jihadis”, but does the claim stack up? A look at the polling data behind Monday’s headline calls into question how the newspaper has interpreted the figures. The splash and story inside the paper are based on a telephone poll carried out…
A moving trust experiment where Muslims blindfold themselves and ask for hugs has found its way to the UK. Yusef Pirot, a 16-year-old British Musim, stood in the middle of Nottingham city centre for two hours with a sign saying: ‘I trust you. Do you trust me? Give me a hug.’ Strangers approached Yusef in…
François Hollande’s declaration of war against Isis (also known as Islamic State) was, perhaps, a natural reaction to the carnage in Paris but the situation is now so grave that we cannot merely react; we also need sustained, informed and objective reflection. The French president has unwittingly played into the hands of Isis leaders, who…
The UK Government recently announced its Counter Extremism Strategy, a document which refers to ‘British values’ 54 times. Within this report, extremism is defined as ‘the vocal or active opposition to our fundamental values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and the mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs.’ These are…
When three Bethnal Green schoolgirls left the UK to join ISIS earlier this year, I was appalled. They had lived and gone to school just over a mile away from where I was brought up and, like so many others, I found it incomprehensible that modern British girls would be attracted to a belief system…
