Airport insecurity

Anyone who travels a lot by air will know that there's no glamour involved anymore, in fact, airports appear to be less civilised places these days than coach stations. They make the bulk of their money from charging motorists for parking and dropping off and have little regard for passengers. Amongst the least pleasant experiences before boarding a plane is the so-called security screening procedure. It has very little to do with security and a lot with harassment. It seems authorities want Joe Public to feel uneasy and on edge, for keeping the so-called terror threat alive is good for politics. So far, the only explosives ever detected by airport screening were those previously planted by security staff themselves. A couple of years ago a business man boarded a plane in Houston, Texas, with a loaded pistol in his hand luggage. He reported the security lapse on arrival. Lucky for him, they didn't spot it prior to boarding, seeing he goes by the Arabic name of Farid Seif. Had they found it, they would probably have turned him into a would-be terrorist, instead it was all embarrassment for them. He didn't intend to carry the gun, he just forgot it was there. I can sympathise. Twice I have travelled from a UK airport with a Swiss army knife in my pocket, having simply forgotten to remove it prior to setting out to the airport. On one of those occasions, they put me through a pad-down body search whilst the pocket knife happily passed through the x-ray machine unmolested with my jacket. On the other occasion, they took great care to swab my ipad for explosives. Ipads are much more interesting than Swiss army knives, I suppose. I've known other people who have travelled with box cutters left in their bag from some DIY project. Wasn't it box cutters after all which ushered in the ongoing security hype, not explosives?

The other day I boarded from a UK airport and they spent half an hour taking out everything from my hand luggage, the same bag which has travelled with me unaltered in any way for dozens of occasions before without being scrutinised, containing an assortment of electrical chargers and cables for laptops, phones etcetera. Since the electronic devices have to be removed and put through separately, they usually get all the attention, but this time it was my bag at last. The initial polite question "Is this your bag" and "Do you mind if I check it" quickly turns into "Stand back, don't touch anything", setting off alarm bells with passengers nearby that the whole thing might go up in smoke any time. Yet the procedure itself is ludicrous. An officer who wears the same gloves he has worn for hours during previous checks takes out each an every item and lays it out on a table top area in no way separated from other luggage, then swabs the items, each and everyone of them, with his explosive residue swab kit, which he puts through his mobile analysis device right at the end before giving you the "all clear" and offering to help pack so your clear out quickly, an offer best refused as you most probably end up with losing half your stuff. Officially, he would have to wear new gloves and swab and test each item separately with a new kit for the test to be in any way meaningful, but since the whole thing is just for show it doesn't really matter. It is my suspicion that security staff would rather not carry out a proper test, because substances like glycerine (nitroglycerine) used in medication for heart conditions can give false positives, and an explosive alert would cause unwelcome disruption to the whole process.
As for people losing things, besides their nerves and their heads, I have seen them forget their mobile phones, drop their identity cards, leave their boarding passes behind, and the ensuing confusion and chaos must surely add a great deal to security, apart from being a great opportunity for the occasional thief.
There is no consistency either. At some UK airports they give you tiny trays where hardly anything fits in, at others huge ones, at some airports they let you sort your stuff into trays beforehand, at others they hand you the tray last minute, so you end up like a juggler trying to balance whilst holding your jacket, belt, laptop, ipad, hand luggage ready to be submitted in a hurry. At some airports they ask you to take your shoes off randomly, at others they have a separate shoe scanning machine. If you're quick enough you could place a hidden item from your shoe into the already scanned luggage before placing your shoes on the second belt, a great way of concealing contraband and exploiting a security loophole! At European airports they take away your drinking water, but on your return flight into Europe with the same carrier you can take your water with you - naturally, North African water, for example, is known to have a much higher safety record than, let's say, British water - I kid you not!
I remember that in the days before the terrorist threat they executed similar harassment for health and hygiene reasons. If you were to fly into Heathrow or some other UK airport from Africa, they would spray the plane with insecticide before opening the doors after landing. However, if your plane made an intermediate stop in Frankfurt, where they didn't disinfect the plane, then they wouldn't do it at Heathrow either, because you came in from Europe. A simple stop-over somewhere in Europe turned those deadly African bugs into benign European creatures not worthy of further consideration - amazing!
The so-called airport security measures, including the police patrols with machine guns, serve the same purpose. They are there to intimidate and cause anxiety; they allow the US and Europe to act like the tough world policeman they made themselves out to be and keep their populations scared of those lesser human beings living outside their borders. Last not least, even bogus security is expensive, so it's definitely good for business.

Halal Pork - Muslims have themselves to blame

Investigations following the detection of horse meat DNA in burgers sold in British supermarkets eventually also led to the discovery of pork DNA in processed food supplied as halal produce to prisons throughout the UK. The response is probably as scandalous as the discovery. On the non-Muslim side the emphasis was on this having been an unfortunate isolated accident. On the Muslim side it was a lot more muted than that concerning cartoons nobody ever saw. Somehow one got the impression that as long as only prisoners were affected it didn't matter all that much and, in any case, they had consumed the food unknowingly and thus were forgiven. The only key concern was that other services and outlets would not also have been supplied by the same firm, McColgan Quality Foods of Northern Ireland. The firm's website has been taken offline, making it impossible to check who certified them as halal in the first place.

No lessons will be learned as long as nobody addresses the systemic failures. The discovery of pork in halal labelled products is both an insult and a wake-up call to all Muslims, not just those who ate the food. Unless the system of halal certification and the use of halal labelling on food products changes, this will not be the last incident, just as it has not been the first. South African Muslims had a similar experience earlier this year of an unscrupulous butcher selling pork as halal meat. Years ago, the certification of halal food containing pork was questioned in Singapore. The key question, therefore, is: who has the right to declare a product as halal?

In the UK there are one major organisation, the Halal Food Authority (HFA), and a minor one, the Halal Monitoring Committee (HMC). Whilst the former gives the impression that it is an official body with the use of the word authority, this is only a name it chose for itself. There is no regulation covering the approval and auditing of halal food products. The latter, HMC, was dissolved as a company after the UK tax office decided that the firm did not benefit from a VAT exemption and demanded some seven hundred thousands of pounds in back payments. As the company could not re-bill its customers, it had to close down, but its work continues as an unincorporated association of individuals. Halal Monitoring Committee is the only UK Muslim body insisting that halal meat should only be certified as such if it has not been previously stunned.

Halal has become big business, and the majority of companies profiting from it are not small and medium-scale Muslim family butchers and slaughter houses but large non-Muslim corporations. The list of certified suppliers on the HFA website has hardly a Muslim sounding name on it. All of them use stunning and mechanical slaughter processes. The halal element of their operations is reduced to a tape running with Qur'anic blessings and a Muslim slaughter man watching the conveyor belts. Once stunning had been declared as acceptable by scholars, Muslim conscience could be bought off with the supply of cheap halal meat on a mass scale. The same happened in the banking sector with so-called halal mortgages where interest was re-labelled and declared halal by hand-picked Muslim scholars and the market opened up and was exploited by non-Muslim banks such as HSBC.

Muslims have become consumers, and most are not worried where their food originates from as long as somebody tells them it's ok to eat and, of course, as long as it's not pork. Many take refuge in the Qur'anic permission to eat the food of the Jews and Christians, forgetting that their food is only permitted if it is in all other respects complying with Islamic dietary rules, in other words: their stunned meat is no less forbidden than their pork. Neither becomes halal just because it is produced by Jews or Christians. The permission only indicates that since they worship the same God, Muslims need not worry about their food having been dedicated to some other deity or idol.

I have come to a point where I probably trust Jewish food products more than Muslim ones. Jews don't permit non-Jews to process their food. They don't allow anybody outside their faith to take control of any of the processes of food production in order to label an item as kosher. What Muslims need to realise is that if you entrust the safeguarding of your religious requirements to people who do not share your faith, you cannot expect them to be all too zealous about it and things will inevitably go wrong. When our halal food is produced by non-Muslims with a remote nod of approval by some self-appointed and non-regulated body happy to cash in on selling the halal label, the selling of pork in halal produce was only an accident waiting to happen.

Muslims in the West, and those in the East sucking up to the West, have bent over backwards to please in order to be tolerated and share the affluence of materialism. We have allowed ourselves to be disarmed. Whilst Sikhs, for example, are at least permitted to wear a turban and a token plastic dagger, we haven't even held onto such symbolic relics of our identity. We've willingly taken off our garments and thrown away our arms; we were not conquered, we surrendered readily. How then, do we have a right to demand sensitivity and respect?

Windows Wants the Desktop to Die

Windows upgrades are never a simple or straight forward affair, so I put aside the relatively more quiet period near the turn of the year to test upgrading to Windows 8 from a Windows 7 Ultimate installation, given that new computers are soon only going to be sold with the new operating system. I had read mixed reviews but naively hoped that the Vista Disaster would not be repeated. Unfortunately, it seems true that every second Windows release is a complete flop.

With Windows 8 Microsoft corporation is trying to make inroads into the mobile application market they have as good as lost to Apple and Google Android. For people using those perfectly usable and mature operating systems as platforms for mobile communication devices there is little incentive to move over to Windows. To force desktop users to put up with a poorly designed touchscreen button interface means Windows is going to vacate that market too if they don't come up with a new version aimed at business and professional users soon. When Vista came out, serious desktop users stuck with Windows XP, and those who have upgraded to Windows 7 will stick with it until support is no longer available. To date, Windows still dominates the desktop (and laptop) market. The perfect time for business program developers to think about writing for different platforms, such as Linux, and providing an upgrade path.

Ipads and mobile phones have come of age and as multimedia communication devices contribute immensely to networking on the move. Today anybody can skype, email or twitter from their mobile phone handset, and business people, previously dependent on Blackberry devices, have taken full advantage of the availability of alternatives. But social networking does not contribute directly to the balance sheet and real work still takes place at the office with a laptop about the smallest feasible platform for design work using CAD tools, writing reports or specifications, using spreadsheets etc. In most cases a large external screen is a must to be meaningfully productive. To fill such a screen with a few childish application buttons and hide the controls in the corners, as Windows 8 does, whilst removing the start screen to access programs altogether, is both wasteful and a serious misjudgment of the needs of professional users.

There are, of course, already programs on offer to revert to a more usable user interface, in practice to bring the Windows XP or Windows 7 layout back to Windows 8 as an overlay. This in itself makes a statement, namely that Microsoft completely misjudged the needs of desktop users. But why waste hours on upgrading an operating system without gaining anything at all? Or, in fact, losing the functionality of some (not even very old) legacy programs the new operating system cannot handle? What is the point in spending hundreds of pounds in finding new program solutions for no other reason than that Windows want your desktop to look different? Professional computing is still about functionality, not looks, and functionality is sadly missing from the Windows upgrade.

Predictably, the installation routine was not smooth. After installing, several forced restarts were required before Windows managed to present a usable interface at all. The first desktop was bare barring a few non-essential applications and could only be vacated using the Ctrl+Alt+Del key combination. Bravo Windows! What use are touchscreen buttons (on a non-touchscreen monitor) in fancy colour schemes when old-fashioned key shortcuts are the only way to even get started?

Once Windows 8 settled down, there were dozens of Windows updates to install, another indicator of poor user-testing before going to market. This meant another series of computer restarts. Worse, however, repeatedly, Windows failed installing its own updates leaving the user with a system which even according to Microsoft is missing "important" fixes and improvements. After wasting a full day on installing the new Windows operating system and half a day on trying to make it work satisfactorily with the rest of my software it was time to mirror the old Windows 7 back onto the computer which is one of the more stable Windows platforms and a lot faster too than Windows 8.

Well, at least the failed upgrade was cheap (not counting the time) - £25 is an unusually modest price for a Microsoft product. But let's not be fooled. Bill Gates' charitable endeavours have not suddenly been reflected in the pricing structure. It's still "What you pay is what you get", and the upgrade price is a true reflection of the product value, this being Microsoft's cheapest operating system version ever!

Gaza activists stage protest on Scottish parliament roof

Fifteen students belonging to a  group of activists calling themselves "We are all Hana Shalabi" managed to climb on top of the roof of the Scottish Parliament building in Holyrood, Edinburgh, to stage a protest against Israel's ongoing occupation of Palestinians, urging onlookers to stand with the oppressed, not the oppressors.

Predictably, none of the mainstream media picked up on the protest or the related apparent security flaw exposed. With the exception of stv online and the Scotsman and, notably The Jewish Chronicle, the latter, however, claiming incorrectly that they were only attempting to climb the roof, the BBC and other establishment media completely ignored the event, displaying where their biased loyalties lie in spite of endless claims of impartiality. Had this been a campaign for, let's say, gay rights, they would no doubt had covered the event.

All protesters have been arrested and are likely going to be charged with public order offences, therefore please try to make contact with the office of Alex Salmond, Scotland's first minister who was answering questions in parliament at the time, to register you objection to this criminalising of essential freedom of speech and expression of humanity.

The Scottish parliament phone number is (+44) (0) 131 348 5712 or freephone 0800 092 7500. Ask for the first minister's office.

Post script: Callers to the number above have been told that submission should be made in writing, please email
Firstminister@scotland.gsi.gov.uk

The protesters have since been released and charged with "breach of the peace" - ironic isn't it, when this is the very Israeli crime they were protesting against.

Freedom of speech divided

They say a week is a long time in politics, and it seems this week has been one of those. Two very different strands of the freedom of speech versus censorship paradigm emerged. On the one hand there is the video produced by Egyptian Coptic and convicted fraudster Nakoula Basseley Nakoula and directed by Hollywood porn film maker Alan Roberts at a cost of a quarter million dollar as yet another attempt to insult Muslims through denigrating the prophet Muhammad. Leaving aside the fact that the Muslim response has hardly been any more mature than when I published David Pidcock's Satanic Voices Ancient and Modern - A Surfeit of Blashphemy Including the Rushdie Report in 1992 as well as the likelihood that much of the violence has been engineered for ulterior motives which have nothing at all to do with Islam as elaborated in the more recent book Surrendering Islam - The Subversion of Muslim Politics Throughout History Until the Present Day  I co-authored with Muslim historian David Livingstone, the general response in the media has been that whilst the film is despicable, Muslims should moderate their response in the interest of freedom of speech. Google, for example, refused to take the trailer for the video off YouTube, describing it as merely an expression of a different opinion.

On the other hand there is the publication of semi-nude photos of Kate Middleton following the earlier publication of nude photos of prince Harry, both in countries who do not regard the British Royal Family as anything more than celebrities. Here the media response took a totally different tune calling for censorship and self-censorship. Of course, the British media also milked the interest in those celebrities being denigrated as much as possible, endlessly discussing the story whilst not, however, publishing the pictures themselves. The Belfast Telegraph, for example, published the front page of Closer, the French magazine originally running the photos, with the offensive pictures blacked out; most other papers did something similar. With the exception of the Sun, which published the incriminating photos of Harry, the other British tabloid papers also published the photos with key areas blurred or covered up. Had the pictures been of some lesser celebrity or a foreign, non-American, non-European dignitary, they would not have shown the same level of constraint even if the photos were taken under similar circumstances.

When contrasting the two, the uneasiness of the demand for freedom of speech as a universal human right becomes apparent. Just like democracy, which is deemed essential as long as the people make the right choices, but overthrown when they want to assert their rights against Anglo-American interests, freedom of speech is a two-edged sword: Western demagogues demand the right to insult, yet want to prevent being insulted. Now why, one ought to ask, should the yet uncrowned children of the monarch of a small island in the North Atlantic Ocean still living off its long gone history be afforded more respect than the prophet revered by a billion contemporaries on our planet? Why can you ridicule and smear Muslims unashamedly yet not voice even the mildest form of criticism of Israeli Jews? Why is the questioning of historic facts relating to the Holocaust narrative outlawed in many European countries, whilst the 20 million victims of Stalin are hardly ever mentioned and the genocide of indigenous Muslim populations continues barely noticed in one part of the world after another, Burma being the latest scene of unspeakable massacres?

The issue goes deeper than mere hypocrisy, however: it demonstrates the bankruptcy of the so-called universal declaration of human rights, which has become just another politically loaded term in the arsenal of cultural domination pursued by former imperial Western powers. Firstly note, that those rights are not universal, but the declaration is, everybody is meant to sign up to the declaration, but not everybody may be entitled to claim those rights. Those human rights postulate to protect the "life, liberty and security of person" of everyone (article 3) as well as against "attacks upon his honour and reputation" (article 12; the "his" in this article would nowadays be considered as sexist by the very same people waving the declaration in everybody's face), but in practice, some rights are "more equal than others". Man-made laws are subject to the realities of power constellations where "might is right".

In Islamic jurisprudence, there has always been the concept of the "rights of God", long before Magna Charta, bestowing upon all humans, whom God has honoured or dignified (Qur'an 17:70), an inviolable right to life, property and dignity. When Muslims demonstrate, therefore, against their prophet and religion being vilified, they are essentially defending and exercising their God-given human rights. They would also defend the right to privacy for a married couple like William and Kate, whereas in the case of Harry they would use the photos as evidence in a prosecution for fornication rather than publish them for the base gratification of tabloid readers. But since in Western media phraseology all Muslims have become subhuman and latent terrorists, we mustn't really let them speak. Let's ridicule their religion and be outraged at their response and let their protests be another proof of their inability to govern themselves, which is why we must continue to interfere and take their land and resources off them. Sure, we don't really want to profit from invading other people's countries, but somebody has to foot the bill for "keeping the peace".

Moonsighting revisited

It is no secret that Muslims are deeply divided and one of the times when this is most apparent in the West, where tribal differences or foreign alliances have not spilled over into civil war as in Libya, Yemen or Syria, is the time of starting and ending Ramadan. Since we have communities from around the world residing here, each retaining allegiances with their home countries, we often end up with two or even three different days for Eid to mark the end of the month of fasting. All attempts during the past two decades to unite those communities onto a common approach have failed so far. The prophet of Islam, peace be with him, stated that his Ummah would never unite upon error, so when we observe that unity continues to elude us we need to start asking whether maybe we have got the formula wrong by which we try to unite.

Irrespective of their country of origin, many Muslim organisations and mosques in the UK and other parts of Europe have in the past become dependent on funding from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States. There were strings attached, and the Saudi state mufti became equivalent to the pope: whatever was declared in Saudi Arabia became gospel in Europe. The funding may have dried up in places, but with the advent of satellite television and the broadcasting of live prayers from Makkah the idea that Muslims worldwide had to follow Saudi Arabia's lead because this is where the Kaaba, the house of God, is situated, became increasingly prominent. This argument does not have much merit Islamically. When the prophet Muhammad, peace be with him, migrated to Medinah, the Kaaba was still in Makkah, but decisions were taken in Madinah since the rulers of Makkah were misguided. For Muslims, what is right or wrong does not get decided by location but by principle; leaders are followed on account of their adherence to the Qu'ran and the example of the prophet not because they happen to be in charge of a particular place of worship.

Since both traditional taqlid, the following of a righteous teacher, and independent study are in decline, Islam in the West is increasingly dominated by the likes of Islam Channel, a purely commercial enterprise, and Sheikh Google. Many mosques in the UK advised their followers to break their fast several minutes too early this year by obtaining prayer times online from sites like IslamiCity  or IslamicFinder, for example. Their algorithms allow for the input of longitude and latitude but not altitude above sea level. The result are sea level prayer times for every place on earth. For Muslims relying on those times, the earth is flat, very flat. The prayer times provided by such online services are useful as a rough guide for people travelling to places unfamiliar, but not for more accurate religious observances. Sadly, they do not point this out in a disclaimer but instead call their prayer times "accurate". Details on the calculation of prayer times can be found at Praytimes.org  and there is a Windows program to perform the calculations, written by Dr. Manzur Ahmed.  Longitudes and latitudes as well as altitudes can be obtained from Google Earth, so Sheikh Google still has his uses.

But back to the moon. There is the debate whether the month should start based on actual sightings or calculations. In spite of being often dismissed as problematic due to causing uncertainty until the day before the start of a new month, sightings are straightforward: either you see the moon or you don't. There is no room for ambiguity. Calculations, on the other hand, whilst permitting the publication of definitive advance calendars and more reliable forward planning, introduce ambiguity dependent on the calculation method used. Just as with prayer times, one can get it terribly wrong if one assumes that the earth is flat or, in this case, that the day can start at the same time everywhere upon the globe, ignoring the time zones which are responsible for a difference of up to twelve hours between locations.

Due to a lack of transparency, most Muslims believe that Saudi Arabia actually follows physical moon sightings. This is not the case. Saudi Arabia follows the Umm al-Qura calendar of Makkah, based entirely on calculations of the probability of sightings. Such probability predictions are nothing new and are available from various institutions dealing with astronomical data, e.g. the British Nautical Almanac Office. They present a graphical representation of where in the world the moon can be seen by naked eye or by telescope at a given date. So why does Saudi Arabia persistently pretend to see the moon well before it is physically possible to see it? An academic paper from the Netherlands describes the method used by which the Umm al-Qura calendar arrives at its lunar dates and why they do not match the actual moon, leading, for example in 2007 to a month of Dhu-l-Hijja lasting 31 days, whereas Islamic lunar months can only have either 29 or 30 days. The Saudis compensated for this by making the 19th of Dhu-l-Hijja 1428 last two full days, Friday 28 and Saturday 29 December. Initially the only condition stipulated by the Makkan calendar for a new month to start was that the moon would set after sunset. Since this lead to the anomaly that sometimes the month would start before the moon was even born (conjunction), the calendar was corrected in 2002 with the added condition that conjuntion must occur before sunset. Even then, when compared with the graphical data for probable visibility, the moon will in most cases be declared before the moon can physically be seen, because not much account is taken of the time lapse between conjunction and actual visibility.

This year sees an attempt at promoting the Umm al-Qura calendar of Makkah as a means of unifying Muslims. Even though in their explanation the promoters cite a Hadith by Kurayb indicating that different days of Eid at different locations were perfectly acceptable in early Islam [Kurayb said: "Umm Al-Fadhl, daughter of Harith, sent me on a mission to Mu’awiya in Damascus. I accomplished the mission and was still in Al Sham when Ramadan began. I saw the new moon there on a Friday evening. I returned to Medina and reached there towards the end of the month. I met Ibn Abbas who asked me: 'When did you observe the new moon (of Ramadan)?' I replied: 'We saw it during the night of Friday?' Ibn Abbas inquired: 'Did you see it yourself?' I replied: 'Yes, I saw it and other people as well. Thus they started fasting and Mu’awiya fasted too.' At this juncture Ibn Abbas said: 'But we saw it during the night of Saturday, and either we see it (again), or otherwise we will pursue the fast on the thirtieth day.' I asked: 'Do you not accept the observation by Mu’awiya and his fast?' Ibn Abbas replied: 'No! It is thus that the Messenger of God has ordered us." (Reported by Muslim, vol. 7, p.178)], they then move on to declare that to have the same Eid throughout the world would be desirable for Muslim unity. To achieve this, they are now basically satisfied for the moon to potentially be seen anywhere in the world, in other words, if it could have been seen in the far West of America, then this potential sighting is valid even in the far East of Asia, even though a physical sighting would be impossible. To avoid being caught out by time zones they extend the time window for moon visibility from maghrib all the way to fajr of the following day. Since they are not really bothered with looking for the moon but only with the calculated possibility of being able to see it, it will not matter to them whether the moon arrives after the announcement that it might have been seen. Islamically, however, this methodology is as flawed as that of the Umm al-Qura calendar itself: Since Tarawih prayers are prayed on the night before the 1st of Ramadan, a decision needs to be taken no later than Isha prayer, hence the actual time window for seeing the moon is two hours at most after sunset.

I sent an email enquiry about these problems to the sponsors of this new project of advocating the use of the Makkan calendar as global standard, but am not overtly optimistic as to this issue being resolved any time soon. Most Muslims still go with where the money is or ask Sheikh Google. And living in urban conglomerates with artificial lighting, sitting in front of satellite televisions or computer screens with ready-made fatwahs at the click of a button, it seems we can do away with the moon altogether. Next we might be given a uniform prayer time table because in some places on earth the days are too long and in others too short, hence why don't we all start and break fast with Makkah irrespective of the sun - saving us the headache of calculating accurate prayer times. And with the moon and the sun out of the way, we can follow the imam in the Kaabah on television for tarawih prayers without having to go to the mosque. This will cut down on the friction arising from the decision of which of competing mosques we should go to and thus further serve the cause of unity. Utopian Islam has finally arrived!

Eid Mubarak to all, whenever it might be.

German state extremism

In dealing with a case where a circumcision performed on a boy of four resulted in medical complications, a county court in Cologne has thrown the baby out with the bath water and ruled that circumcision itself amounts to bodily harm because "the body of the child is permanently and irreparably altered". This alteration, so the court, interferes with the interest of the child to later take his/her own decision about religious belonging. Not that the parents of the Muslim boy actually complained to bring a case. Due to some subsequent bleeding two days after the operation the mother attended the hospital's accident and emergency services. This, the German practice of nosing about and reporting on each other apparently still being alive and kicking, came to the ears of the public prosecutor who jumped to the occasion. The municipal court decided in favour of the parents and the prosecutor appealed. The regional court exonerated the doctor during its appeals hearing but took it upon itself to dictate that in future religiously motivated circumcision could legally only be practiced on adults who had given their consent.

Jumping on the bandwagon, the German Medical Association immediately expanded the regional judgment, which is most likely going to be appealed further, and told physicians nationwide to no longer perform circumcisions on children for religious reasons. Of course, the body supervising the practice of German doctors has no qualms about cosmetic surgery, but it appears that religious practices are a niggling thorn in its side. And obviously, circumcision is hardly as lucrative as cosmetic mutilation of the body. To be fair, the latter is not performed on children.

Yet, circumcision is not just a religious practice. Only a couple of weeks ago more than seventy members of parliament in Zimbabwe got themselves circumcised to kick-start a campaign amongst males in Africa due to the ongoing problems with the AIDS epidemic there and research which shows that circumcision reduces the risk of an AIDS infection by sixty percent. In the Mbala district of Uganda circumcision has been made compulsory. In the United States of America, too, circumcision is the prevalent practice chosen by parents regardless of religion. It is also proven to reduce the likelihood of cervical cancer in women.

Such medical considerations obviously played no part in the Cologne court's rush to judgment and the Medical Association's hurry to comply. The court agreed with an expert opinion stating that notwithstanding those medical benefits, there was "no necessity in Central Europe for preventative circumcision for health reasons". Whilst carefully coached in the legal justification of a child's right to self-determination, the judgment is a thinly veiled expression of religious, especially anti-Muslim, prejudice. Cologne is one of the cities with the highest concentration of Muslims in Germany. The issue is, however, complicated by the fact that circumcision is also a Jewish rite, thus immediately bringing up Germany's history in the debate, and the German National Jewish Council protested the attack on the "self-determination of religious communities" and on the "freedom of religion".

The clever ruse to enforce a monoculture by legally outlawing individual items of religious practice is not new. The German law on the prohibition of religious slaughter, for example, dates from 1933 as one of the earliest laws targetting Jews. Like the Nazis then, today's German authorities know only too well that to fight an "alien" religion, you don't have to attack their beliefs, you just curb their practices. About half of German's Federal states prohibit female teachers from wearing a headscarf, not quite as aggressive a prohibition as in France, but significant, and German courts have supported that decision. In Switzerland a referendum outlawed the building of minarets attached to mosques, so here they are clearly ahead of their German neighbours. Never mind that successive German presidents declared that "Islam is part of Germany" or "Muslims living in Germany belong there" - what they apparently meant was: You may call yourself a Muslim when you live in Germany, provided you practice Christianity or secularism.

Maybe they should take it a step further. With body scanner technology at airports it should be easy to detect whether a boarding passenger is circumcised or not. Those who are should be asked to step aside and be questioned under terrorism legislation; after all, they have taken their religious convictions too far. If such a pilot scheme is successful, it could be rolled out to other locations, too. The security industry would be grateful for the extra cash. And if the number of suspects ends up to be too great to process, they could be detained in special holding centres. Just don't call them concentration camps!