Racism in the UK: Arabs

Following my recent entry on golliwog dolls the news brought the results of a poll, UK attitudes toward the Arab world, with most of those expressing an opinion believing that Arabs have failed to integrate once here and that for security it is fine to employ racial profiling against them.

I was thinking about integration and the degree to which religious observance hinders it. It is only through work that I have got to know Jews and Arabs, though back in the US; there is no obvious religious diversity among my present colleagues in Dundee. Even for hosting observant Muslims, socially it is not all that difficult even to share food given suitably washable crockery and silverware and a liking for vegetable curries or whatever. Muslims may even be easier than Jews in that respect: many Sunnis even eat shrimp which surprised me as I had thought that Islam largely accepts the Torah. I suppose that it might be uncomfortable to mix with women with uncovered heads; I have not asked.

I should mention that the large mosque near my workplace typically does open its doors when Dundee has an Doors Open Day, probably including a couple of weeks ago when I wholly missed that there was another such day occurring. Were I to take advantage of one of these days then the mosque would be near the top of my list as I have perhaps never been in a non-Christian house of worship.

Maybe I am mistaken for thinking along religious lines here: perhaps many British Muslims are actually African and the feelings against Arabs are more about some other cultural difference or some unavoidable consequence of awkwardness arising from British foreign policy over the past century or somesuch. However, in practice I suspect that many respondents regard Arab and Muslim as being loose synonyms, especially given that question about racial profiling. They may even be wrong about Arabs failing to integrate.

E-mail spam

This month I have been receiving more spam so I concluded that it is time to risk increasing anti-spam measures. I no longer graylist, partly because it was a hassle to maintain with some large services retrying delivery from a new host each time. Instead, I periodically download lists of miscreants' IP addresses and have the firewall redirect their incoming deliveries to a tarpit. I have now added FireHOL's level 2 list to those I redirect away from my MTA: at least based on a small sample, it includes the IP addresses of many hosts that recently spammed me. I wonder which lists others favor.