Mufti Abdullah Patel on the Tory Leadership Debate

The Conservative candidates debate last night was a predictably dreary affair: reminiscent of a Freshers’ Week event at the Oxford Union Society. At the end of the hour’s viewing pretty much every prejudice that the population of this country might hold about politicians in general would have been amply reinforced. There has been some comment
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Sudan, journalism, democratic values

A number of people on social media started complaining this week that there was no reporting on the current conflict in Sudan. The accusation is untrue, and yet it is widely perpetuated across social media platforms. To disprove the claim, one has but to type “Sudan” into the search bar in Google. Almost every mainstream
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We Need to Be Honest About the Problems in the Muslim Community

In the west, we mostly live in representative democracies. Our vote ultimately decides the direction which our country takes. The electorate must be sufficiently informed to make a decision as to whom they might want to represent them. This is why openness and honesty in public discussion and debate are imperative. Nothing should be taboo
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The Prison States

The twentieth century has passed and the world has changed. The great evil of the period can perhaps be assumed to have mutated and changed, too. That era’s gravest sin and greatest threat, totalitarianism, seems less evident today, and its equivalents are assumed to have updated their methods. When fearing for the future, journalists and
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ISIS seek a rebirth in Iraq and attempt to capitalise on political and ethnic disputes in Kirkuk

A series of explosions in Iraq’s disputed city of Kirkuk led to a reported five people dead and eighteen people wounded on Thursday night as the head of the city’s security operations blamed the attack on ISIS. The instability in Kirkuk, which stems from constitutional and political disputes between the Federal Government in Baghdad and
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The ChristChurch Call will do more harm than good

Last week, governments and leading tech companies got together to produce a collective response to the horrific ChristChurch terrorist attack. The agreement they came up with, dubbed the “ChristChurch Call”, lays out the steps they will take to better prevent the spread of violent extremist and terrorist content online of the kind that motivated the
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As mainstream political parties continue to fail centrists must fill the power vacuum

The UK continues to be polarised by the many issues that it faces. Brexit, anti-Muslim bigotry and antisemitism dominate political discourse in this country, particularly within the Conservative Party and the Labour Party. The country’s two traditional parties have moved away from big tent politics and have retreated to their respective corners, flying the flag
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Burning of Haskallic literature in Brooklyn, NY

The author of the text that is to be burnt was written by Naphtali Hirz Wessely: an 18th century Maskil. He was fully committed to traditional observance and belief, but advocated for widening the Jewish curriculum to include secular studies. His views were essentially no different to those expressed by Rav Hirsch, who is accepted
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Why not to boycott Israel over Eurovision

The beginning of May is always a busy and emotional time in Israel. First comes Holocaust Memorial Day between the 1st and 2nd, and then on the 8th, Remembrance Day, when Jews commemorate the fallen soldiers in Israel’s history. The week long mourning ends with a huge celebration: Independence Day on the 9th. This year,
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We are not “in the gutter” with the far right – but those who spread fear and hatred cannot be allowed to go unchallenged

On Saturday, Glyn Secker – one of the luminaries of the astroturfing organisation “Jewish Voice for Labour” – accused the UK Jewish community of allying with the far Right. Claims of this sort provide good examples of the “two-campism” of the type that has become synonymous with Corbynism. That perspective pits the “community of the
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