Anthropax's Old Blog

Heading home yet again. The main exciting news is that I'm off to see Polly Toynbee give a talk as part of the Monmouth (my home town) womens festival - she's talking about her experiances of trying to live on the minimum wage (£5.05/hour - or about $9 for aur american friends). It'll take about two hours to drive home, so I'll knock up a few sandwhiches to take with me - a good bit of pastrami, and a local chutney, both from the small independant delicatessen in Lampeter (my only source of good olives for miles around!). I've also got to have a chat with the DDO, so I'll have an opportunity to do that tomorrow. I noticed, while browsing the newspapers, that the superb Karen Armstrong (who's books pretty much got me through my Christian Doctrine essay, not to mention Islamic Doctrine) has written a comment on the Danish Cartoon kerfuffle; On both sides, the radicals have tried to eliminate the middle ground, and this is extremely dangerous. The Muslims who vandalised embassies and brandished placards vowing to execute the cartoonists have fulfilled the stereotypical view of "Islam" in the west: a religion seen as violent, fanatical, selfdestructive and atavistically opposed to freedom. At the same time, those who aggressively support the repeated publication of the cartoons embody the view many Muslims have of "the west": as arrogant, disdainful of religion, chronically Islamophobic, and guilty of double standards - proudly boasting of its tolerance, but not applying it to anything Islamic. When the dust has settled after the crisis, these negative stereotypes will be more entrenched, to the detriment of a final reconciliation. A little bird mentioned to me that a certain person who seems to be distinctly unchristian has started a Christian Union at his school, but seems to be using it to spread and justify his dreadful right-wing views.