Encountering swathes of the volunteer Muslim media — websites, blogs and free newspapers amongst them — generates a not dissimilar ambivalence. My irritation with the perpetual obsession with documenting every instance of alleged Islamophobia whenever it occurs anywhere in the world, even if it means trawling the online press twenty-four hours a day, has already been forcefully noted. It is tiring having to sift through reports of every misdemeanor of The Other, presented as they are to induce instant gloom. But of greater concern is the habit of some websites insisting on giving such prominence to an insignificant extremist fringe, amplifying their importance out of all proportion: Pamela Geller is the Muslim media’s equivalent of the tabloids’ hook handed mullah.

The picture foisted upon us is, they’re all out to get us — which is presumably the same picture that a regular reader of the Daily Express or Daily Mail forms of Muslims. We are suddenly living in a very polarised world, split succinctly into us and them. Given a bit of push and shove, the wrong economic conditions and the collapse of the Police force, and we will all be at each other’s throats in no time.

Absent amidst all the dreary pessimism is a record of the positive contributions of human-beings to one another, of Muslim and non-Muslim alike. Just as the press cannot find anything to say about the role of Muslim doctors in sustaining the health of our nation, we can only dwell on the light lacking in The Other. We heard there was a bitter pill and we swallowed it.

Yet here I have a flier that was thrust into my hands as I left the mosque last Friday. The (non-Muslim) Mayor of our little market town is organising a sponsored walk to raise funds to assist in the relief efforts for victims of Pakistan’s massive floods this year. It is supported by the town’s Churches Together group as well as Muslim-run businesses. A positive story at last, of communities working together with care and foresight. But of course it’s not the only case: we just need to accentuate the positive.

Surely then this is a sign for you: one of the most melancholic individuals you know is demanding a fundamental attitude shift that requires us to constantly seek out the good.  For I am told that if you seek out goodness, this is exactly what you will find.

What, pray, is the purpose of the daily trawl of the online press for tales of woe afflicting the Muslims, condensed and abbreviated into bite-sized chunks for readers to absorb in a fit of never ending misery? Will nobody stand up and say enough is enough? Why, kind sirs all inclusive, must we constantly record all that keeps us in a state of perpetual gloom? Is this, I have to ask, the way it was meant to be?

I fear a bout of seasonal melancholy is coming my way. If tales of joy do not arrive pretty swiftly, I shall blame my demise on this rampant morass of negativity. I have no time for this, but I am minded to start a blog entitled, People being awfully nice to one another Watch. I know it doesn’t have a very good ring to it, but I’m not sure bleakophobia is a word.

If anyone has any happy tales to share, please do forward them to me at the earliest opportunity. This is an urgent request, so please do not procrastinate. I look forward to being amazed by the sheer humanity of my fellow humans, for which I shall be eternally grateful. I thank you.

The 1,040 mile pipeline will run from Turkmenistan’s Dauletabad gas field to Afghanistan. From there it will be constructed alongside the highway running from Herat to Kandahar, and then via Quetta and Multan in Pakistan. The final destination of the pipeline will be the Indian town of Fazilka, near the Pakistan-India border.

I asked for directions from Google Maps. You may recognise some of the names on the southern end of the route .

In the course of the war on terror, we have slipped into the alternative fictional world of 2000AD in which Street Judges sentence and execute offenders instantly in their effort to enforce the law. We have lost all sense of moral proportion, shrugging off the actions of the squadron of MQ-9 Reaper “hunter-killer” drones as some kind of norm. Judge Dredd now sits at a computer terminal at a military base in Nevada, sending his robotic army wherever he wills. All the world is Megacity 1: Pakistan, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq. In this alternative reality—now our tragic actuality—the world is his oyster. And we dumb clones.

How can it be that the deaths of wives, children and grandchildren are all considered an acceptable side effect of a policy of assassination? We no longer even talk of collateral damage: it is only necessary to mention that the target was an Al-Qaeda militant and anyone around him is suddenly non-human, whose death is inconsequential.

Some would point out that this is nothing beside the German blitz of British cities during World War Two, or in light of the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What is the death of a few children to the massacre of 50,000 civilians and the destruction of the entire city of Hamburg during one week in July in 1943? It is the way of war, is it not?

Not last time I checked. While it goes without saying that the targeting of civilians is absolutely prohibited in Islamic Law, with clear conditions laid down to avoid accidental civilian casualties, the Geneva Convention also makes plain the status of combatants and civilians on the battlefield.  Civilians may well have borne the brunt of military action over the past century, but under humanitarian law they are supposed to be protected people.

It is claimed that a man said to be a leading militant in Al-Qaeda—that great spectre of the war on terror—was killed last week by a missile fired from a robotic drone in Pakistan’s North Waziristan, near the town of Miran Shah. Nobody advocates capturing those charged with terrorism or rebellion and bringing them to trial, for this is war; indeed to even make such a suggestion is to admit some sort of sympathy for the worst of the worst.

Dare we speak up for those killed alongside him though? For it is claimed that his wife, three of his daughters, his granddaughter, and other men, women, and children, were also killed in the missile strike. They were collateral damage? They were guilty by association? Or is this a new post-patriarchal age when we dare not speak of women and children for fear of patronising the victims of war? Must we remain silent in reverence to the new wisdom of our age?

If not now, when will we awake? Last July, the US Air Force released a report entitled, “Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009-2047,” in which it proposes a drone that could fly over a target and then make the decision whether or not to launch an attack, all without human intervention. The drones are not going away, nor the so-called war on terror.

So I see those crocodile tears for Israel’s actions this week are already dry, for if the nations truly cared then, surely they would condemn these other breaches of international humanitarian law too. Isn’t it this the death of civilisation?

I have seen many blogs and have don research on many but most of them lack of good substance but I would say that you are doing a great job and keep the good work on

…until it occured to me that it had a familiar ring. I scooped it up wholesale and plopped it into a Google search. It seems I’m not alone in receiving such wondrous praise. A marvel to behold!