You’ve probably guessed or seen, we were hacked by someone or people who probably deliberately targeted the site due to its Muslim/Islamic content. As they deleted eveything (and replaced it with offensive and obscene material), we’ve had some difficulty trying to restore the full site – until now.

We’re pleased to report we have now been able to restore almost all the previous material, except maybe the last couple of posts and the most recent comments. We’ve still got some work to do, and for that we ask for your patience as we’re all volunteers here.

Andrew Gilligan’s latest diatribe is fast deteriorating into an anti-Muslim hate campaign built on deceptive language and a distortion of clear facts. Here are some of his quotes from his latest hate instalment in the Spectator, alongside our comments.

“The Islamic Forum of Europe is decried by most Muslims as vicious and unrepresentative, says Andrew Gilligan.”

So here “most Muslims” would equate to at least over 1million Muslims if we take a rough figure of  2 million Muslims in the UK – when did AG interview all these people or is he spewing lies again? Continue reading Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics – Gilligan’s latest hate installment

We hope you will appreciate our continuing efforts to improve the blog, and most importantly your reading and participation experience.

We would like to thank all the blog readers for their participation. We welcome and encourage comments on the blog posts, however many readers do not like to see comments reaching into many hundreds or even thousands of words!

Some readers are discouraged from commenting themselves (or reading comments at all) when they see very long comments left by others. Very long comments also dilute the impact of the author’s original post by relegating it to a small proportion of the overall content on the page. Hence, we have set a new limit of 1,000 1,500 (one thousand and five hundred) characters for each comment – effective immediately. Continue reading Blog Update

Breaking News: The Sunday Times has discovered that Azad Ali is back at work and naturally decided to re-run an old story.

This time the new revelation is that Azad Ali sat or sits on an obscure ‘community involvement’ panel which advises the Director of Public Prosecutions.

Someone with ‘radical views’  should not be sitting on such panels according to it and the people they quote. The views are indeed all extracted from his blogs on BtL, however this time they were very careful and did not misquote him (as far I can tell anyway). Continue reading BtL and Azad Ali in the news (again)

Daily Telegraph: Although the language is much more sophisticated, regrettably the Telegraph reply is more or less the same as the Mail on Sunday.

I’ll spare you the full letter, the following excerpts sum up the reply: Mr Rhidian Wynn Davies, Consulting Editor, wrote: “Taken in context it is clear Mr Ali’s endorsement of the beliefs of Abdullah Azzam also extends also to the doctrine of jihad…”

He continues later, “Nothing that Mr Ali wrote differs from, qualifies or otherwise questions this doctrine. The inference that he agrees with, endorses and adopts it unconditionally is inescapable”. And concludes, “We are satisfied that our quotes from the blog were reproduced accurately and in proper context.”

From his letter it is clear Mr Wynn Davies is a master of the English language, and I can certainly learn a lot from him. However, through his articulacy he also manages not to answer my central complaint. Continue reading Latest on the case of Azad Ali – Telegraph & Mail

The Mail on Sunday has not only replied to my letter of complaint, but also (quietly) removed the articles from its website. However, John Wellington’s (Managing Editor) reply does not address the central issue of the complaint – the misquote and resulting false allegation.

I have written to him once again urging him to issue a full apology in print. The text of his reply and my new letter are included below Continue reading Mail on Sunday replies on Azad Ali