Much has recently been made of the alleged connections of terror suspects with Pakistan, and in particular the alleged role of the Pakistani Madrassa (Islamic school) in fostering extremism amongst young people.
What can we say about the Madrassa? It is a wholly male boarding institution with its own food customs, fostering a strict and a particular world view handed down over generations. Attendees regard themselves as set apart from the general populous, often with a special mission. Close bonds are formed between students which generally continue into later life. Not unlike Eton.
Not all students of the madrassa go on to become terrorists, just as not all former students of Eton go on to become members of the shadow cabinet. However a connection appears to occur with such regularity as should give us cause for concern.
David Cameron has announced he is keen to promote diversity within the Conservative Party and is urging constituencies to list at least 50% women as candidates for parliamentary positions, thus giving the appearance of equality whilst still allowing constituencies to vote for the person they really want i.e. a white man and preferably one who went to public school.
“The Conservative Party needs to reflect the diversity of society, otherwise we are losing out on a pool of talent, ” said five Old Etonians. “We want to encourage more women to become models … er … MP’s.”
Hi.
You purged my trackback, but I have to tell you that the trackback you deleted isn’t spam. If you look at my blog, you’ll find a link, to a comment of judge Floro.
You may have to know that, if I link your posts, Wordpress sends you a ping automatically. Think first then act: if american bloggers send you a trackback spam, italians blogger don’t do it. Ok that I’m Italian, and (of course) I write and speak in Italian, but I think that you first can controll trackback, then (eventually) delete it. If you don’t understand Italian, it’s your problem, not my own.
Have a nice day, and sorry for my terrible English.
(Ps: also sorry for off topic comment.)
“If you don’t understand Italian, its your problem not my own.” Well yeah, but this is an English language site and whilst some readers may well understand Italian, most will not and will therefore not be able to respond to your comments. More to the point, since neither Geeklawyer or I speak Italian we can’t monitor your comments for moderation purposes.
The English are lazy when it comes to foreign languages, working on the basis that everyone else speaks English so why bother. Its also quite an unpleasantly colonialist attitude. You’ll see from my latest post above that speaking a foreign language got two men thrown off a plane. Other passenger have described it as sounding like Arabic. I would be surprised if the men were speaking Arabic, far more likely to be Punjabi, but I very much doubt that the passenger overhearing them would be able to tell the difference.
I do speak a foreign language but I wouldn’t converse in it on the blog on the basis it would exclude so many people.
Presumably your English is good enough for you to have understood my post, and despite what you say, doesn’t seem so bad. So I welcome your comments, but please SPEAK ENGLISH!
Ooh Ruthie, that’s a little unfair.
You’ll notice these excerpts appear in the comments section when you link to earlier posts on your own blog. They are just a way to note that another blog references the piece and provides a short excerpt in order to give it some context.
The ‘comment’ was just such a heads up. This means that they weren’t writing in Italian to irritate your readers, but because that’s the language _they_ write _their_ blog in.
Whether you want the trackback or not is another matter (and is of course up to you Geeklawyer), but it seems unfair that they should have to write in English on their blog just because they link to yours.
I’m not sure that to castigage somebody who is only promoting you to a new, Italian, readership is the best way to promote your blog. Surely you could find somebody with enough Italian knowledge to know if it was spam or not? (And if not then shame on you - presumption of innocence?)
Of course that should have said: “and is of course up to you AND Geeklawyer”, although I guess as he has the moderator gun then maybe it is less democratic…
Thanks Kirit. It appears I am once again demonstrating my technological ignorance as I hadn’t appreciated that this was a trackback from an Italian blog. So I owe Fulvia and apology for that.
Having said that we still need to be able to moderate comments on the site even if they are trackbacks. And moderation always needs to be done quickly. I don’t want anything racist or defamatory on the site any longer than absolutely necessary even if it is in a foreign language.
I don’t personally know a Italian speaker who I can contact at short notice to look at the blog, unless you can recommend someone. But I certainly have no desire to alienate our blogging brethern in Italy.
I’ll be interested to see what Geeklawyers take is on all of this, once he’s managed to drag himself out of a bar in Vilnius..:-)
In fact the blame is primarily mine. Had I not been steaming drunk in a Vilnius bar I would have paid more attention & twigged that it was a trackback. As kirit says; I have the moderator gun.
Ruthie has a good excuse: she’s just a chick - but I haven’t. In my defence I was probably executing a policy of do what Ruthie says since I pissed her off recently and didn’t want more nagging
anche, io parlo d’Italiano (ma, soltanto un po’) - but even so that is a double non-excuse.
apologies FulviaLeopardi
“I was executing a policy of do what Ruthie says…”
Yeah, like that policy.
But this still leaves us a dilemna of what to do about moderating posts in foreign languages. Still, worry about it when it happens.
[Site will of course now be deluged with comments in Russian, Urdu, Japanese etc etc]
Jeg tror det er lite sjans på det
(I’ll have to wait for the wife to come home before commenting in Thai. I can’t spell that yet.)
There’s always one…