More politics

Lebanese soldiers on the beachfront, originally uploaded by CharlesFred.

This phot has been used to head up and illustrate an article on one of my favourite websites, namely, openDemocracy, which is is also referenced in the links in the right hand column on this blog.

The article can be read here, and a very interesting article it is too.

The good people of openDemocracy have actually broken the Creative Commons licence under which I put my photographs on flickr, namely a Attribution-NonCommercial License and also broken teh rules of flickr, by not attributing this photo to me. I am not too bothered, but it is quite ironic that openDemocracy itself published a very interesting in-depth article about Creative Commons and attribution.

Anyway, it is time for bed now. I am an eager viewer of Question Time on the BBC on a Thursday evening, followed by This Week, with Michael Portillo, Diane Abbott and some very interesting guests. I was very disappointed with QT, again we had a very silly and inarticulate Blair Babe and an inordinate 35-40 minute (out of a maximum of 60) discusison about the veil, in response to the question of whether or not a woman in a veil can make a full cntribution to society. (This in the light of today's ruling that a teacher can not expect to be able to wear a veil when teaching young children in class). Everything was wrong in this debate, people not answering teh question, too many silly comments from the audience including about 5 minutes given to some woman who had become a Muslim and decided to wear a veil as she 'deepened'her belief in Islam, and David Dimbleby realy did not control the discussion at all well, leaving virtually no time to talk about the other major issue of the day, namely whether Madonna was right to adopt the Malawian orphan. I must say that, yet again, it was stated that we were a Christian country.. this is being said so often that I feel that it will become the truth de facto.

This Week was much better and I was very impressed with Aleesha (a half black, half white, very beautiful and very articulate pop singer) and her piece on multi-culturalism. I liked especially the way she said twice how good she thought faith schools are - but then only after normal school hours or on a Sunday and that children should be allowed to mix with children from other religions and, by implication, other cultures. Excellent!