On Wednesday, Israeli forces demolished five homes in the Bedouin community of Abu Nuwar, in the Jordan Valley area of the West Bank. The 25 residents, 17 of whom are children, were not given time to collect their belongings before their homes were bulldozed, and are now homeless in the middle of winter.” (Medical Aid for Palestinians)

This is what happens when self-righteous, un-compromising followers of organised religion are allowed free rein. Perhaps we could debate the moral difference between chopping off the heads of non-believers (as per Daesh) and demolishing people’s houses, destroying their possessions and dumping small children out into the winter cold with nowhere to go. I suppose the Bedou still have their heads, filled with despair as they no doubt are.

In South Korea, many older people fear that if you sleep with an electric fan in the room, you may never wake up.   The South Korean news media and scientists keep trying to debunk this notion, but it won’t go away.   In 2008, Chun Rim, a professor at the Department of Nuclear and Quantum Engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, decided to test the hypothesis. He says it was hard to find anyone to take part in this so-called dangerous experiment. So he used his 11-year-old daughter.

“Every five minutes I checked her body temperature, blood pressure, and also the temperature of her hand,” he says.  She survived the night. Her vitals barely changed. And now, the whole family sleeps with fans blowing on them.   The study got some attention when it came out. But seven years later, it doesn’t seem to have done much to make this persistent belief blow away. Adapted from the NPR website in 2015).

This illustrates the comfort that human beings derive from weird beliefs of all sorts.  You can do surveys, studies, scientific analyses and so on, but a fixed belief dies hard.  I personally do not believe that walking under a ladder with a man with a pot of paint in his hand above me brings bad luck or guarantees that I get splattered with paint.  But I very deliberately walk beneath the ladder to prove to myself that I am grown up and rational.

Most of these beliefs are harmless, but some are not. The idea that if you kill yourself and others for the love of Allah you are rewarded in heaven with 72 young virgins is one of the silliest beliefs, even if it is one of the most stellar marketing claims ever for a religion (and for anything else I can think of, for that matter). The actual translation seems to be controversial Some translate it as “companions of the same age”. The number of virgins is not mentioned in the texts, and in any case many would settle for fewer than 72 anyway. But the translation doesn’t matter. The myth persists and is the probable cause of countless futile deaths. Regrettably, the gullible young men who do this often take many others with them. Justify it – if you can!

A debate on whether to ban the wannabe US president Donald Trump from entering the UK is to be held on 18 January in the British House of Commons after a petition was signed by more than 560,000 people. Trump called for Muslims to be barred from entering the US and said that parts of London are “so radicalised that police are afraid for their own lives”. (The Week)

Anyone who knows what happened in Italy during the inter-war years will feel a shiver go down the back, listening to Trump. Americans can do little about him, except not vote for him, but for the sake of happiness and peace of mind he should be made aware how difficult it would be to deal with civilised nations such as the UK were he to become President. No one would have any respect for him. Actually banning him, however, is not the right thing to do. He is a deeply ignorant man and needs to know something about the real world. A little European “education” might get him to moderate his language. (Yes, I doubt it, too!).

By the way, Trump unfortunately has the kernel of a point. In the Spitalfields area, just on the eastern edge of the City of London, the population is overwhelmingly Bangladeshi. This is where many of the immigrant groups – Huguenot, Jewish etc first came, but then dispersed. The Bangladeshis are not dispersing. On the contrary, it is a Bengali-speaking, (and children learn it in school), it’s businesses are mainly Bangladeshi, and it has what some people think is the highest density of mosques in Europe. No one is saying that the police are afraid to go there, but someone (who knows the area) told me that nonetheless they don’t (go there). It seems to be ignored. Trump’s crude exaggeration does have a point. Such laagers or ghettos have no place in a modern country. It’s bad for London and it’s bad for the immigrants, who should be dispersed and integrated. Let’s not be too politically correct.

Such concentrations of poor people and mosques could be a problem in the making. Back in September the prime minister of Bangladesh warned David Cameron that he needed to do more to combat radicalism spread by British jihadis, notably Jamaat-e-Islam, which is recruiting islamists in Bangladesh itself, where political exclusion and lack of government services are causing disaffection. This disaffection has been noticed by the Islamic Sate and by al-Qaida, and there have been a number of horrific incidents of religious terror that haven’t been reported in the West. The radicalization is coming from Britain, but nothing is being done about it. When, not if, there is an atrocity in London this could be the source.