Halo Halo (2026)

The Halo Halo Column from the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Plans by the UK government to not go ahead with making Islamophobia an offence would appear on the surface to be a victory for common sense.

In March 2026 the government put in place a ‘non-statutory definition of anti-Muslim hostility.’ The government is adamant that this is an advisory, not legally binding measure and that free speech remains inviolate.

Internet AI says that this plan covers violence, harassment, and prejudicial stereotyping; it applies to individuals based on their actual or perceived Muslim identity; it will not hinder criticism of religion or beliefs, and a special representative on anti-Muslim hostility will be appointed to support implementation. How this will work out in practice remains to be seen. It will be greeted with relief by those expecting something more draconian but it still provides special measures for a specific religious group.

If you belong to a religion, which is the equivalent of an American Homeowners Association, filled with rules and regulations, then one of the cardinal rules is do not take the head honcho’s name in vain – or else!

Do that and you might find yourself getting stoned, and not in a good way. However, cursing those who follow and support a different honcho is positively encouraged.

‘Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me’ is a line from a 1964 Carry On film; ‘Blasphemy, blasphemy, they’ve all got it in for me’, doesn’t come within a light year of being as funny, but then blasphemy is certainly no laughing matter. And never has been. Merriam-Webster defines blasphemy as ‘the act of insulting or showing contempt or lack of reverence for God or to something sacred’.

In modern times AI says that ninety-five countries, possibly more, still have laws that regulate blasphemy. In six countries, mainly in West Asia, the penalty for blasphemy is death. It was always thus because to attack the gods a group had brought into being was to try to undermine that society.

Thomas Aikenhead, a seventeenth century Scottish student, articulated the following statement: ‘Theology is a rhapsody of ill-invented nonsense, patched up partly of the moral doctrines of philosophers, and partly of poetical fictions and extravagant chimeras’. However, uttering these sentiments, or truths, resulted in his hanging at the year’s end of 1696. Aikenhead was the last person to be executed for blasphemy in Great Britain.

In 1977 a private libel prosecution for blasphemy was brought against Gay News and its editor. It resulted in financial damages being awarded against the defendants. In 1979 an appeal to the House of Lords against its conviction was lost. One of the judges hearing the appeal opined that blasphemy laws ought to cover all religions, not just Christianity, and would no doubt have liked to implement some medieval punishment against those who ‘cause grave offence to the religious feelings of some of their fellow citizens or are such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely to read them.’

DC

Halo, Halo (2025)

The Halo Halo Column from the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Not for the first time comes a report of a 45-year-old Afghanistan man marrying a six-year-old girl. He reportedly has two wives already and paid the child’s family for the ‘marriage’. The report notes that ‘since the Taliban returned to power in 2021, child and early marriages have been on the rise’. It’s said that this rise is due to ‘worsening poverty and strict restrictions on women and girls, especially the ban on female education. UN Women reported in 2024 that this restriction has led to a 25 percent increase in child marriages’ (tinyurl.com/m54ty4jy ).

A Pakistani 72 year old Catholic male has, after 23 years on death row, been acquitted of a blasphemy conviction. He was originally charged with ‘insulting the Prophet Muhammad” – a capital offence in Pakistan’ (tinyurl.com/yu8xpysj). It has now been ascertained that he had mental health problems, so could not be held accountable. It’s expected that this defence will be used in dozens of other blasphemy cases.

****************************************

Did you know that the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum is striking at the very foundation of European civilisation? If you’re going to pee people off you might as well go the whole hog. The museum, supposedly, has also ‘insulted’ god and every catholic in the world. Respect!

Who is making this outrageous claim? TFP Student Action Europe is. This is a right-wing catholic organisation founded in 1960. It would appear to want to set the world clock back to medieval times, unlike the global political movement masquerading as a religion which sanctions child abuse and wishes to turn the clock back to the seventh century. What does TFP mean? Apparently, it stands for tradition, family and property.

This is to be found on its website: ‘The Seventh and Tenth Commandments protect property. Property… (is) the guarantee of freedom. If it is not respected, we will automatically be led by socialism. Together, these three values, tradition, family and property form a protective wall against Marxist, socialist, and communist ideology’.

So why all the kerfuffle? It’s caused by a condom. The item in question is a very old condom, one that’s two hundred years old. We would suggest that it shouldn’t be utilised for its intended use as it’s probably well past its best before date. The condom ‘features an erotic print of a nun and three naked clergymen about to engage in a sexual act’. Surely the important question should be, was it consensual? So, the TFPSA finds this condom ‘sacrilegious’ and displaying it goes ‘far beyond moral and spiritual boundaries.’ What one wonders do these would-be moral arbiters think of the temples in India where they could view the erotic carvings on the walls? How do they find the Amsterdam red light district?

Apparently ‘Dutch conservative Christian group Civitas Christiana has been demonstrating outside the museum calling for the condom to be removed.’ Is the removal of a condom really wise? One thought that Catholics were mandated to practice safe sex at all times? (tinyurl.com/2jsk59bw).

DC

Halo, Halo! (2025)

The Halo Halo Column from the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

What is amongst the top ten American capitalist ‘opportunities’ (read scams) for becoming rich in the USA? One in particular is also popular in other parts of the world. Become a preacher. Grow a congregation. Rook them for as much money as you can.

At a Pentecostal Assemblies of the World Convention a preacher said it had cost him $2,000 to renew his ordination and license. Can y’all contribute toward that? Yahoo reported that he ordered the doors locked on the one thousand people there and demanded that they each give twenty dollars. And the same from the online audience. Nice work if you can get it, Rev. He’s quoted in the piece as justifying the action on the following grounds: ‘The truth is, when finances are being received in any worship gathering, it is one of the most vulnerable and exposed times for both the finance and security teams. Movement during this sacred exchange can be distracting and, at times, even risky. My directive was not about control it was about creating a safe, focused, and reverent environment for those choosing to give, and for those handling the resources’.

Chutzpah on a grand scale. Wonder if he had the American equivalent of Securicor waiting outside to safely carry off all the loot? Credit where it’s due, he’s merely following all those who recognised early on that religion offered power over the masses and oodles of boodle.

* * *

The Socialist Party is wholly in favour of free speech, even when religious nonsense is being propagated. That’s because we have a long history of refuting such hokum with empirical evidence. In the USA the First Amendment guarantees freedom of expression, and free exercise of religion except where it doesn’t.

In Kansas, according to AlterNet, the ‘Satanic Grotto, a group of Kansas religious anarchists’ wanted to hold a ‘black mass’ inside the Statehouse.

In a fine display of sensitivity, the SG noted that ‘The event would not be the full “black mass” the group normally observes because that would involve nudity, drinking and other activities discouraged at the Statehouse. There also wouldn’t be fire or anything used in the ceremony that might pose a physical risk to the public’.

The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property organised an online petition. It’s described in the piece as a ‘traditionalist Catholic advocacy group’. Private property, eh?

Surprisingly not, the Kansas Governor responded with ‘computer says no’.

The article author points out that encouraging deference to religion can lead to ‘true believers’ resorting to violence to end perceived blasphemy. His example is the attack on Salman Rushdie in 2022, who was left blind in one eye.

Jonathon Turley, a US First Amendment lawyer, said: ‘Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner has announced that the government will be further cracking down on hate speech with a new working group tasked with defining “Islamophobia”’. The effort to crack down on “Islamophobia” could create a type of blasphemy standard if it encompasses criticism of the faith or its practices’.

DC

Halo Halo! (2024)

The Halo Halo! column from the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

American Wobbly activist Joe Hill’s song, The Preacher and the Slave, describes how ‘Long-haired preachers come out every night, Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right’. But when asked for a bite to eat will decline and say you’ll have to wait till you get to heaven to experience the good life:

‘You will eat, by and by, In that glorious land above the sky; Work and pray, live on hay, You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.’

One wonders what Joe Hill would have made of the contemporary preachers who decided that rewards in heaven were for the poor, the downtrodden and the working class, but they, the preachers, wanted theirs here, now and plenty of it thank you very much.

The South China Morning Post (27 April) featured ‘8 of the richest televangelists of 2024.’ Type ‘rich pastors’ into a search engine and many more than eight are listed. Sitting at Numero Uno was Kenneth Copeland with an estimated worth of 300 million dollars. A Kenyan website, Tuko.co.ke has his worth listed as 760 million dollars.

The South China Morning Post’s eight nominees are all American whereas the Kenyan site is far more international, listing Nigerians, Malawians, Zimbabweans, South Africans as well as Americans. The gullible are found all over the world.

A common feature these snake-oil salespersons seem to share is a predilection for private jets and vast property empires. Also in on the racket are women but they don’t appear to come anywhere near the amounts amassed by the males. Joe Hill’s song: ‘Give your money to Jesus they say.’ What they’ve always meant was ‘give it to me’.

***

Meanwhile, in Karachaevo-Cherkessia, a Muslim-majority region in southern Russia, the Islamic authorities have banned the wearing of the niqab, citing risks posed by the practice to security and sectarian tolerance, and follows a similar move in Dagestan. The niqab is a type of garment worn by women in some parts of the world which covers the body and face, except for the eyes. The Muftiate denounced people who claim that the niqab is mandatory in Islam, stating that the false claim is ‘introducing strife and division into society’. Under current circumstances there, the garment and similar items that fully cover the face ‘inflict practical harm to Muslims and threaten discontent in relations between religions and ethnicities’.

***

The UK National Secular Society notes a report from the Commission for Countering Extremism which highlights the link between UK religious (Islamic) charities and anti-blasphemy extremism. It says that there is a ‘new generation’ of activists working to ‘make blasphemy a key issue of concern for British Muslims’. Incidents highlighted include ‘a teacher in Batley forced into hiding after allegedly showing pupils a drawing of Muhammad in 2021; screenings of the film The Lady of Heaven cancelled following protests in 2022; and a pupil receiving death threats in 2023 after a Quran was lightly damaged at a Wakefield school’.

DC

Halo, Halo! (2024)

The Halo Halo Column from the June 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who knows what goes on behind the closed doors of convents? Bitter Winter (19 April) reported that the French Dominican Sisters of the Holy Spirit were so aggrieved at the behaviour of one of their nuns that they asked the Vatican to send in one of its Gumshoes to investigate her. The Sister was then effectively fired. Displaying secular umbrage she then took herself off to a tribunal and got herself awarded two hundred thousand euros for false dismissal. The tribunal apparently found the investigation biased because the Cardinal in charge of it was ‘friendly’ with another nun known to be an opponent of the one in question’.

#    #    #    #

‘An influential traditional priest aged 63 has sparked outrage in Ghana by marrying a 12-year-old girl… During the ceremony, women speaking in the local language Ga told the girl to dress teasingly for her husband. They can also be heard advising her to be prepared for wifely duties and to use the perfumes they gifted her to boost her sexual appeal to her husband.’ Apparently, the girl (shouldn’t that be child?) ‘started the rites to become the priest’s wife six years ago, but the process did not interfere with her education.’ She will also be ‘educated’ in her ‘marital responsibilities such as childbearing’. An NGO reports that 19 percent of girls in Ghana are married before they reach eighteen and 5 percent get married before their fifteenth birthday (BBC 1 April).

#    #    #    #

Charlie Hebdo is a French Private Eye-type magazine. In 2006 the magazine reprinted twelve cartoons depicting the founder of Islam which the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten had published in 2005. This did not go down well in certain sections of society. In 2015 two Algerian brothers entered the offices of Charlie Hebdo and killed twelve of the staff and wounded eleven more.

In 2022 Salmon Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses was attacked in New York. He was stabbed several times and as a result lost sight in one eye and the use of one hand.

In 2021, an educator in West Yorkshire was teaching religious studies. ‘The lesson that sparked the controversy was designed, ironically, to explore issues of blasphemy and free speech, and of appropriate ways of responding to religious disagreements’ (Guardian 31 March). What triggered the subsequent furore? He showed a cartoon which may have been one of those originally published by Jyllands-Posten. ‘The school immediately suspended the teacher, and ‘unequivocally apologised’ for using a totally inappropriate resource, promising to review the curriculum with “all the communities represented in our school”’.

The teacher was forced to leave his post and is apparently still in hiding.

Ain’t religion wonderful.

DC

Tiny (URL) Tips (2010)

The Tiny Tips column from the December 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard 

The corporate clout of the mining industry trumped political ideology in Canada when members of all political parties helped to narrowly defeat a bill late last month that would have imposed standards on Canadian mining companies operating in developing countries:

[Dead Link.]

Up to 200,000 Haitians could contract cholera as the outbreak which has already killed 800 is set to spread across the battered Caribbean nation of nearly 10 million, the United Nations said:

[Yahoo News, Dead Link.]

A Christian woman has been sentenced to hang in Pakistan after being convicted of defaming the Prophet Mohammed:

[Daily Telegraph, Dead Link.]

Unemployed workers will be barred from claiming benefits for up to three years if they repeatedly refuse job offers under radical plans to reform the welfare system:

[Daily Telegraph, Dead Link.]

Israel will begin constructing a barrier on its border with Egypt within the next two weeks. The government has said that the central purpose of this fence is to keep the growing number of illegal migrants from infiltrating the country:

[Link.]

Six years after it first debuted, the $1,000 frittata at Norma’s in New York’s Le Parker Meridien hotel continues to draw attention. Called the “Zillion Dollar Lobster Frittata”, the dish is made with six eggs, lobster claws and 10 oz. of Sevruga caviar:

[Fox Business News, Dead Link.]

Poor ‘Will be pushed out of southern England'. Bath, Chelmsford, Newbury and Maidstone are among towns that will become “no-go” areas for the poor within 15 years because of the coalition government’s plans to cut housing benefits. The claim, made by the Chartered Institute of Housing, followed the Archbishop of Canterbury’s intervention. He said he was worried by the proposal of Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith to threaten the long-term unemployed with benefit cuts:

[The Week, Dead Link.]

Some 42,389,619 Americans received food stamps in August, a 17% rise from the same time a year ago, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which tracks the data. That number is up 58.5% from August 2007, before the recession began. By population, Washington, D.C. had the largest share of residents receiving food stamps: More than a fifth, 21.1%, of its residents collected assistance in August. Washington was followed by Mississippi, where 20.1% of residents received food stamps, and Tennessee, where 20% tapped into the government nutrition program:

[Link.]

Bird’s Eye View: Religion – Thy Name Is Superstition (2022)

The Bird’s Eye View Column from the March 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Religion – Thy Name Is Superstition

‘A Pakistani court has sentenced a Muslim woman to death for committing “blasphemy” by sharing images deemed to be insulting to Islam’s Prophet Muhammad and one of his wives, also considered a holy personage by many Muslims. The trial court in the northern Pakistani city of Rawalpindi on Wednesday sentenced Aneeqa Ateeq under the country’s strict blasphemy laws, which impose a mandatory death penalty for insulting the Prophet Muhammad’ (aljazeera.com, 20 December).

Pakistan is one of thirteen countries, all of a Muslim majority, where blasphemy is punishable by death. The past lies like a nightmare upon the present: ‘Two years after Michelle, 15, was kidnapped, sold, forced to convert to Islam and married to a stranger, relatives still ostracise her. “My aunts and uncles have left us, and my two older brothers, till a few months ago, were not even talking to me,” said Michelle, talking to IPS over the phone from Faisalabad, in the Punjab province of Pakistan. They believe she has brought dishonour to them. Her captors and even the cleric who officiated the marriage are free despite committing multiple offences, including abduction, trafficking and rape. “There are several laws that can be invoked for tackling offences, such as kidnapping and abductions,” lamented Peter Jacob, executive director of the Center for Social Justice (CSJ), a research and advocacy organisation. “But the prosecution has failed to do so”’ (ipsnews.net, 19 January). According to one Dr. S. Faizi: ‘It is important that Muslims reclaim the Quran, discarding the distorting interpretations by patriarchal men’ (countercurrents.org, 18 January). The humanist and feminist author, 59-year-old Taslima Nasrin, who was born in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh, from where she is banished, her books banned and bounty placed on her head) would likely disagree, having stated: ‘The Quran can no longer serve as the basis of our law. A thousand years ago it may have been useful for fending off barbarism. But we live in modern times, the era of science and technology. The Quran has become superfluous. It stands in the way of progress and the way of women’s emancipation’ (Index, September/October 1994).

Bad science

Believe it or not, religion was humans’ first attempt at science. We could not explain the forces of nature, the rising and setting of the Sun, phases of the moon, etc., and ascribed them to the supernatural. Viewed through the lens of the materialist conception of history, it can be seen as a necessary adjunct to our development. Yet religion has long served the interests of the minority master class. Science too. Science itself has become bourgeois and is dependent upon capitalism for its operation and expansion. In 1850s America a Dr Cartwright identified a condition, drapetomania, that caused black slaves to flee plantations. Russian psychiatrists famously aided Stalin by diagnosing dissidents as insane. Contemporary examples include the sociobiology of E.O. Wilson and Steven Pinker’s evolutionary psychology. An article titled ‘Capitalists Only “Trust the Science” When It Suits Their Agenda’ (leftvoice, 21 January) explores this theme further.

’Even when ‘good’ research is done, the products of that research still exist in a social milieu: not all research or results see the light of day in publication and distribution. That information must still navigate a web of entities with vested interests in the ‘outcomes’ of science. Often, when a study uncovers information that certain entities (the funding agency, the university, the government, corporations in a particular industry) don’t like, they bury or discredit the study. For example, Katherine M. Flegal has been the victim of a 15-year-long campaign to discredit her research demonstrating that being “overweight” is not actually a risk factor for health. Some resistance to her work comes from the weight loss and health insurance industries, but some of it also comes from another classic abuser of “science”: Big Tobacco. When analyzing the data from another study, Flegal found that some of the perceived risks of obesity were actually due to smoking, which had not been accounted for in the original study’.

Reflecting last year on how her 2005 and 2013 papers were received, Dr. Flegal concluded: ‘Scientific findings should be evaluated on their merits, not on the basis of whether they fit a desired narrative’. Indeed.

Good science

‘In an admirable, longstanding tradition, heedful Americans are taking multiple, pragmatic, science-based precautions against a virus that […] has killed 900,000 people, […] and is still infecting almost 700,000 people a day. LOL. Just kidding. In moronic fact, […] crackpots still roam the land, spewing their crazy. […] Add to their ranks […] Christopher Key, who as bonkers head of the Vaccine Police […] now advocates […] drinking urine to ward off COVID. He cites […] “antidotal” evidence, to support urine therapy; he himself has been drinking his own urine for 23 years, evidently proving, “God’s given us everything we need,” except perhaps a working brain’ (commondreams.org, 12 January).

When you doubt ‘our’ leaders or science alone can save us, and begin to question the ‘alternative facts,’ distortions, lies and misinformation of mainstream media, conspiracy cranks and fundamentalist fakirs, consider instead scientific socialism which provides an analysis of the capitalist system that explains how wealth comes to be produced and distributed and who gets what from the pool of social production. It is able to place this in an historical context showing the development of its productive relationships from past systems. It is also able to define the economic limitations of political action within the system and reliably predict the results of various political policies. Another world is possible, one where scientific progress comes hand in hand with societal progress, which is in turn driven by personal betterment of every member of that society. Let’s make it so.

The Fear of God (2012)

The Halo Halo! column from the October 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Communicating with, and tending to the whims of the gods has always been a specialised business. From the earliest religious beliefs any human behaviour that might offend the deities and bring down their wrath on the whole community had to be guarded against. The task of interpreting the god’s words and satisfying their needs has always been entrusted to an elite caste of priests, oracles or holy men who jealously guarded their power and mysterious rites. And as gods have come and gone over the last few thousand years nothing much has changed in this respect.

The hierarchy of the Catholic Church still try to maintain an air of mystery with their absurd rituals, robes, mitres and use of incense etc. Until recently the widespread use of Latin, too, helped to bamboozle their followers. Until the 1960’s it was used for all documents published by the Vatican.

“The language of the Roman Church is Latin. It is therefore forbidden to sing anything whatever in the vernacular in solemn liturgical functions” said Pope Pius X in 1903. And Pius XII declared “The use of the Latin language affords at once an imposing sign of unity and an effective safeguard against the corruption of true doctrine”. Now the current Pope, worried about the decline of religious humbug and mumbo-jumbo amongst the clergy wants to bring it back.

This is just a harmless pantomime though compared to the bizarre and rigorously enforced blasphemy laws that are used to preserve religious authority in Islam, particularly in Pakistan. Can you imagine what would happen if a TV series like ‘Father Ted’ were to be made about a group of bumbling mullahs? Unfortunately the Islamic equivalents of Fathers Ted, Dougal and Jack have never been very funny, and can be terrifyingly dangerous.

As this article is being prepared Rimsha Masih, the 14-year old girl who suffers from Down’s syndrome and was beaten up and imprisoned after being falsely accused by a local mullah of burning pages from the Koran, has finally been released after bail of one million rupees (about £6,200) was raised.

A Christian couple were sentenced to 25 years imprisonment after being accused of touching a Koran with unwashed hands. And a doctor in Hyderabad who threw away the visiting card of a pharmaceutical salesman found himself in serious trouble. The word Muhammad, part of the salesman’s name, was printed on the card. (Guardian online 19 August and 6 September).

But it’s not just the courts and mullahs who are terrified of blasphemers. In two separate incidents in Pakistan in 2011 Salman Taseer and Shahbaz Bhatti were gunned down in the streets because they spoke out in favour of reforming the blasphemy laws. And between 1990 and 2010 in Pakistan, in addition to formal convictions, there were at least 34 extrajudicial killings of people accused of blasphemy. (Guardian 5 September).

And it’s not only in Pakistan where Allah strikes fear in the hearts of his followers. Here, Channel 4 has cited security concerns as the reason for having to cancel a rescreening of its documentary ‘Islam: The Untold Story’ which claimed there was little written contemporary evidence about the origin of the religion, and attracted over 1,000 complaints from outraged believers.

Why do the followers of such powerful gods feel so insecure?

NW