The "Turbulent Priest" To Leave Office

The 104th Archbishop of Canterbury and leader of the Anglican Church, Rowan Williams, has announced that he will step down from the post in December. Williams has held the post of Archbishop of Canterbury for almost a decade. Whatever else he was in office, Williams was clearly one of a deeply misguided breed - a left wing Christian. He did nothing to protect and defend the Church, let alone further its interests. In my last post about him, I wrote:

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Cantebury, [is doing] to Christianity what Labour is doing to Britain. He is the man who prior to this day had praised Islam, damned America as an imperialist nation to a crowd of Muslims, blamed America for Muslim violence against Christians in the Middle East, refused to proselytize for Christianity among Muslims, and advocated implementing at least parts of Sharia law in Britain. The Archbishop's latest assault on the Christian faith has come in an apologia to Muslims for the violent history of Christianity and what seems an apology for one of the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith - the Trinity. This from the Daily Mail:

Christian doctrine is offensive to Muslims, the Archbishop of Canterbury said yesterday.  Dr Rowan Williams also criticised Christianity's history for its violence, its use of harsh punishments and its betrayal of its peaceful principles.  His comments came in a highly conciliatory letter to Islamic leaders calling for an alliance between the two faiths for 'the common good'.

But it risked fresh controversy for the Archbishop in the wake of his pronouncement earlier this year that a place should be found for Islamic sharia law in the British legal system.

. . . The Archbishop's letter is a reply to feelers to Christians put out by Islamic leaders from 43 countries last autumn.  In it, Dr Williams said violence is incompatible with the beliefs of either faith and that, once that principle is accepted, both can work together against poverty and prejudice and to help the environment.  He also said the Christian belief in the Trinity - that God is Father, Son and Holy Ghost at the same time - 'is difficult, sometimes offensive, to Muslims'.  Trinitarian doctrine conflicts with the Islamic view that there is just one all-powerful God. . . .

Read the entire article.

Rowan Williams has been a disgrace to his position and a disaster for Christianity in Britain. In addition to his unforgivable sins above, he has been fully in step with the secular left of Labour - a group virtually dedicated to removing Christianity and Christian influence from the public square in Britain. This deeply misguided man will not be missed when he steps down from office in December, 2012.

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Obama's Cairo Address - Obama Calls For Womens Rights While Glossing Over Discrimination & Violence

A credit to Obama - he at least went as far as to call for some improvement in the rights of women in the Middle East. He called for women to be afforded education, the right to work, and the right to wear a hijab. That goes further than the complete absence of any calls by most American feminists. That said, to call Obama's statements on women's rights tepid, if not in many respects harmful by omission, would probably be an overstatement. He wholly ignored any discussion of the key factors subjecting Muslim women to discrimination and violence. And then there was his ridiculous equation of the problems facing Muslim women with the problems faced by women in the West.

The true subjugation of women in Islam begins with institutionalized discrimination in Sharia Law. Beyond that are the insidious practices of honor violence, forced marriage and female genital mutilation. Obama simply glossed over all of this, giving them a patina of acquiesence by his ommission. Instead, he played up his approval of the hijab as an applause line.

Obama failed to make any calls for Sharia law to be evolved so as to allow for equal rights for women. Sharia law is used to discriminate against women in family law and other legal proceedings and to justify violence against women. Sharia allows for a husband to beat his wife. In its most extreme forms, it can lead to results such as last year's Saudi judgment against a woman who was brutally gang raped - that she should be whipped for 200 lashes and then imprisoned for being outside of her home in while unaccompanied by a male guardian.

Besides ignoring Sharia, Obama failed to challenge other true horror for Muslim women - honor violence. As a detailed report on honor violence in Britain made plain, it is a practice both wide spread and insidious:

This study shows that honour killings, domestic violence, forced marriage and FGM are not isolated practices but are instead part of a self-sustaining social system built on ideas of honour and cultural, ethnic and religious superiority. As a result of these ideas, every day around the UK women are being threatened with physical violence, rape, death, mutilation, abduction, drugging, false imprisonment, withdrawal from education and forced marriage by their own families. This is not a one-time problem of first-generation immigrants bringing practices from ‘back home’ to the UK. Instead honour violence is now, to all intents and purposes, an indigenous and self-perpetuating phenomenon . . .

This is a scourge of Islam, both inside and outside the Middle East. If a woman is perceived to have somehow dishonored her family, then relatives may well beat her and perhaps even kill her. Indeed, the poor girl who was gang raped in Saudi Arabia and whose story I linked above was in fact beaten by her brother for the dishonor of being gang-raped. Additionally, Muslim women are prevented from marrying outside of their faith. To do so is often interpreted as an act brining dishonor on the family and any relationship with a man not Islamic is met with violence. How Obama could address women's rights and ignore these grotesque practices is simply beyond comprehension. And by failing to mention them, he gives them a degree of acquiesence where only clear condemnation and scorn are necessary.

Obama also made two comments on the hijab and other clothing women in traditional Muslim societies are required upon pain of punishment to wear. According to Obama:

it is important for Western countries to avoid impeding Muslim citizens from practicing religion as they see fit -- for instance, by dictating what clothes a Muslim woman should wear. We can't disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretense of liberalism. . . .

I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal, . . .

Great, except for two things. One, if there is freedom to wear a hijab, or even a burkah, how about the freedom not to wear one? In most Muslim societies, if such coverings are a part of the culture, then they are enforced with violence. Obama pushing this as a woman's right is dangerous, for it will now be an excuse to continue a practice that can be clearly degrading to women. And two, Obama's call for freedom to wear a burkah cannot be going over too well amongst the secularists in Turkey and Tunisia, both of whom have laws banning a woman from covering her head in public buildings or if she is a member of government. Those laws exist to try and keep religion separate from their government. Is Obama that clueless not to realize that?

Lastly, there was Obama's utterly vacuous suggeston of moral and actual equivalence between the mistreatment of women under Islam and the "the struggle for women's equality . . . in many aspects of American life." This is not merely ridiculous, it also has to be disheartening for Muslim women who have never been to the West but who now are being led to believe that their own mistreatment is the norm in America also. Instead of holding up the U.S. as a model for the Islamic world to strive to emulate, Obama lied in a way that will decieve a substantial portion of women in the Middle East and harm their fight for equal rights and freedom from violence.

Summary - Obama's Cairo Address: What We Needed, What We Got
Part 1 - Obama's Cairo Address: Hiding From The Existential Problems Of The Muslim World
Part 2 - Obama's Cairo Address: A Walk Back From Democracy & Iraq
Part 3 - Obama's Cairo Address: Obama Calls For Women's Rights While Glossing Over Discrimination & Violence
Part 4 - Obama's Cairo Address: Nukes, Iran & Weakness Writ Large
Part 5 - Obama's Cairo Address: Israel & Palestine – A Little Good, A Lot Of Outrageousness
Part 6 - Obama's Cairo Address: Islam's Tradition Of Religious Tolerance?
Part 7 - Obama's Cairo Address: The Dangerous Whitewashing Of History

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Links From The Anglosphere

Today is links from our allies in the Anglosphere, all below the fold:
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Art: Conversation in a Park, Thomas Gainsborough, 1740

From North of the Border

Kateland at The Last Amazon blogs on the "second Inquisition." Palestinians are making use of Spanish courts to charge Israelis with war crimes. International law, just like the UN Human Rights commission, is subject to gross distortion.

The Covenant Zone sees China and Canada as going in opposite trajectories, the former towards greater freedom, the latter towards greater repression.

Halls of Macademia posts inarticulate commentary placed on his site from the left. Until recently, I was predisposed to ignore such folks, but I think we do so at our peril at this point.

The recent spate of Human Rights Commission cases in fact seems to be causing a lot of introspection on freedom of speech north of the border. Blazing Cat Fur has several good posts on this topic, including this one on articles addressing the topic by Nigel Hannaford and Ezra Levant in the Calgary Herald. But, as Five Feet of Fury notes, the Muslims who wish to silence speech in Canada and, for that matter, the HRC are determined to prevail. This really is grotesque.

Ezra Levant posts on his confrontation with his HRC accuser, radical Pakistani Imam Syed Soharwardy, on a radio show this week. He asked of Soharwardy when he was going to repay the half million taxpayers dollars wasted on the HRC inquisition of Mr. Levant.

From Down Under

Dr. John Ray posts at a Western Heart on how Kevin Rudd is using politicized science – evidence that is sounding ever more shrill as hard evidence of the falacy of anthropogenic global warming – to justify his massive assault on Australia’s economy.

Col. Robert Neville recounts the conversation of Derek & Clive as they contemplate Islam and anonymous commentor on the good Colonel’s blog. Interesting, the comment sounds very a lot like those from the loony left memorialized in the link to Halls of Macademia above.

KG is doing a bit of howling at Crusader Rabbit over a publicly funded meeting of NZ "bovines" and Islamics, apparently so the NZ ladies can brush up on their dhimmitude.

MK notes that, if you are travelling on the high seas, you had better go armed. Muslim piracy did not end with the Barbary pirates.

Aurora ponders the naked aggression of Russia and sees dangers for America’s allies if Obama is elected President and the world is left without any policeman.

From Across The Pond

Standards matter more than money. From an Englishman’s Castle: "The literacy and numeracy of new employees have tumbled over the past decade despite Labour’s £28 billion increase in education spending, according to research by a leading employers’ organisation."

Heh. At Biased BBC, the foxes are calling for a poultry protection act.

From Bishop Hill, the BBC – a snake pit of socialism, multiculturalism and post modernism – has now made its global warming bias official: "The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus [on anthropogenic climate change]."

Brits At Their Best notes that Brits retain their affinity for measuring distance in miles, not metric.

Burning Our Money spells out, . . . well, how Labour is burning through Britain’s money.

From the Centre for Social Cohesion, this is an interesting artifice. Radical Muslims in the UK want Sharia law recognized for Muslims and, in fact, are running Sharia law courts, though not recognized by the UK. So what the radicals have done now, to give their Islamic marriage a patina of fairness between the sexes, is to launch a new Muslim marriage contract that is, on its face, more fair to women. If that is their goal, why not simply rely on the law of marriage in the UK? Clearly they intend to use this to try and blunt the criticism of those reactionary, non-BBC watching BNP types who do not want to see a parallel legal system recognized in the UK.

The Winds of Jihad has the story of the British welfare system at work. Counting Cats has his fur up and is hissing loudly.

David Thompson bravely goes where few will willingly tread – into the indecipherable prose of the academic bull-shit artist. He appears to have found a few literary Picassos.

The Heresy Corner weighs whether Obama is the anti-Christ.

Hibernia Girl casts a jaundiced eye at some more of the many benefits of EU law – such as preventing enactment of common sense laws to tackle welfare fraud. The EU really is the penultimate socialist nightmare.

Heh. The House of Dumb notes that the left has ferreted out an insidious plot by right wingers.

Mediocracy diagnoses the root causes of the difference in popularity between Gordon the Leper and Tony the Annointed.

One of the most hypocritical aspects of modern feminism is the utter failure to support Muslim women. Mick Hartley notes at least one feminist who justifies that by projecting onto veiled Muslim women the belief that they are making a conscious choice to go veiled so as "a way to register protest against the sexual objectification of women and express solidarity against Western colonialism." There is some post modern thought at its finest.

When I read this story at Pub Philosopher, all I could think was that I did not realize a Clockwork Orange was a documentary.

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Melanie Phillips: UK Is Sleepwalking Into Islamisation

Melanie Phillips, author of Londonistan, is perhaps the most articulate voice in the UK to warn of the destruction to British society being brought about by the multiculturalists who hold all the power in Britain today. Their's is a steady diet of appeasement of the radical Islamists who claim to speak for the entire British Muslim population. To call the socialist Labour government's approach to this issue counterproductive is the height of understatement.
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This from Ms. Phillips:

Three years after the London Tube and bus bombings, it is alarming beyond measure to record that Britain is even now sleepwalking into Islamisation. Some people will think this is mere hyperbole. However, that’s the problem. Britain still doesn’t grasp that it is facing a pincer attack from both terrorism and cultural infiltration and usurpation.

The former is understood; the latter is generally not acknowledged or is even denied, and those who call attention to it are pilloried as either ‘ Islamophobes’ or alarmists who have taken up residence on Planet Paranoia.

Certainly, the police and security service have been foiling plot after plot and are bringing to court a steady stream of Islamist radicals –an improvement without doubt from three years ago. And so, particularly within the British elite, people think that things are broadly under control.

They fail to realise that the attempt to take over our culture is even more deadly to this society than terrorism. They are simply blind to the ruthless way in which the Islamists are exploiting our chronic muddle of well-meaning tolerance and political correctness (backed up by the threat of more violence) to put Islam on a special — indeed, unique — footing within Britain.

As a result, the steady Islamisation of British public life is either being ignored or even tacitly encouraged by a political, security and judicial establishment that is failing to identify the stealthy and mind-bending game that is being played.

The official counter-radicalisation programme illustrates the problem. The Government wants to tackle radicalisation within Britain’s Muslim community by winning hearts and minds within that community. Its strategy is based on isolating the extremists and encouraging the moderates.

The problem, however, is that it doesn’t understand what Muslim extremism is. Believing that Islamic terrorism is motivated by an ideology which has ‘hijacked’ and distorted Islam, it will not acknowledge the extremism within mainstream Islam itself.

The reason so many older British Muslims are traditionally moderate is that they were brought up in the Asian subcontinent under a tamed form of Islam, deriving from centuries of colonial rule, which glossed over much of the teaching of the religion.

The Government believes that Islamic radicalism can be countered by teaching authentic Islam to Muslims. But since Islamic radicalism is based upon those very authentic religious precepts, this will undoubtedly have the effect of radicalising people who otherwise would never have thought in this way.

The Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board (MINAB) was set up to put into effect the Government’s aim of ensuring moderation in the mosques. This was always unlikely, given that members of Islamist groupings were on the steering committee. Although MINAB’s chairman, Manazir Ahsan, presents himself as a reformer, he is the director of the Islamic Foundation, which follows the writings of Maulana Maududi — who preached an end to the sovereignty and supremacy of unbelievers who should be made to live in a state of subordination to Islam.

Similarly, Dr Ataullah Siddiqui, the Government’s chief adviser on Islamic Studies, is a senior member of the Islamic Foundation. A report he wrote for the Government last year, Islam at Universities in England, which was publicly welcomed by the Prime Minister, urged that among other special privileges for Muslims, they should be allowed to teach Islamic subjects in British universities and that non-Muslims should be banned from doing so.

In any event, the universities are steadily being Islamised, with academic objectivity in the teaching of Islam and Middle East studies being set aside in favour of indoctrination and propaganda.

A report by Professor Anthony Glees due to be published in the autumn will argue that extremist ideas are being spread by Islamic study centres linked to British universities and backed by multimillion-pound donations from Saudi Arabia and Muslim organisations.

He says: ‘Britain’s universities will have to generate two national cultures: one non-Muslim and largely secular, the other Muslim. We will have two identities, two sets of allegiance and two legal and political systems. This must, by the Government’s own logic, hugely increase the risk of terrorism.’

Even more terrifying is the increasing Islamisation of the police. It has been reported that up to eight police officers and civilian staff working in the Metropolitan Police and other forces are suspected of links to extremist groups, including Al Qaeda, with some even believed to have attended terror training camps in Pakistan or Afghanistan. One suspected jihadist officer working in the South East has been allowed to keep his job despite being caught circulating internet images of beheadings and roadside bombings in Iraq.

No less disturbing is the fact that the police are intentionally bringing Islamists into the force in the utterly misguided belief (shared by many in the security service) that they can help counter Islamic radicalism.

Commander Robert Lambert, who until this year ran the Metropolitan Police Muslim Contact Unit, observed that terrorism could not be fought by contact with moderate Muslims but through partnerships with Salafists (Sunni extremists who believe in Islamic supremacy over the secular state) — one of whom was actually an officer in his own police department.

Commander Lambert believed that this would enable the police to understand the way extremists thought before they committed any acts of terror.

But it surely goes without saying that an officer who is committed to the overthrow of the West, and its replacement by an Islamic society poses a security risk of the first order. For a police counter-terrorism specialist to be promoting this situation beggars belief.

Deeply alarmed sources have furthermore told me that, in the overriding concern by police forces to hire more ethnic minority officers, they have junked vetting criteria — particularly when it comes to hiring Police Community Support Officers, who after two years can become fully fledged police officers with no further vetting required. The result, say these sources, is that the security of police operations is potentially compromised.

Moreover, there have been disturbing examples of the police protecting Islamic extremism. In 2007, the Channel Four Dispatches programme uncovered evidence of incitement to murder of homosexuals, the killing of British soldiers and hatred of ‘unbelievers’ going on below the official radar in ostensibly respectable British mosques.

But instead of prosecuting such fanatics, the West Midlands Police first tried to prosecute the programme makers and then accused them of selective editing and distortion and undermining community cohesion — a libel for which the police and the Crown Prosecution Service were subsequently forced to apologise.

A report by the Centre for Social Cohesion on honour killings and similar violence revealed that several women’s groups, particularly in the Midlands and northern England, say they are often reluctant to go to the police with women who have run away from home to escape violence, because they cannot trust Asian police officers not to betray the girls to their abusing families.

In February, Christian evangelists Arthur Cunningham and Joseph Abraham were handing out Bible extracts in Alum Rock, Birmingham. They were stopped by a Muslim Police Community Support Officer, threatened with arrest if they carried on preaching in ‘a Muslim area’, and warned that they might get beaten up if they came back.

What on earth is happening when, in the heart of England, a British police support officer, employed by the British state to enforce the law of England, aggressively prevents Christians from preaching the established faith of England on the grounds that this is now a ‘hate crime’?

. . . When the Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, warned that Britain was developing Muslim nogo areas, he was denounced as Islamophobic.

The Establishment queued up to say they didn’t recognise the Britain he was describing. But British public life is progressively being Islamised, with Muslim radicals in areas with large concentrations of Muslims increasingly intimidating non-Muslims.

After a vicar in East London, Canon Michael Ainsworth, was beaten up by three Muslims in his own churchyard in March, it was revealed that there had been many attacks on churches in the area by such youths, who on one occasion shouted: ‘This should not be a church, this should be a mosque.’

Yet last month, one of the youths in the Ainsworth attack walked free after a judge accepted his claim that the attack was not religiously motivated.

Sharia law is steadily encroaching into British institutions. Last week, Lord Phillips, the most senior judge in England and Wales, said it could play a role in some parts of the legal system. This followed comments by the Archbishop of Canterbury who declared that Muslim families should be able to choose between English and Islamic law in marital and family issues.

But the fact is that Britain is already developing a parallel sharia jurisdiction in such matters, with a blind eye being turned to such practices as forced marriage, cousin marriage, female genital mutilation and polygamy; indeed, welfare benefits are now given to the multiple wives of Muslim men.

Meanwhile, the courts still appear to be bending over backwards to appease Muslim radicalism. Last month, a judge freed from prison Abu Qatada, the most important Al Qaeda operative in Europe and the lynchpin of numerous European terror attacks, who was being held pending deportation to Jordan to stand trial.

His release on bail — into a kind of house arrest — followed an Appeal Court ruling that he could not be deported to Jordan because any prosecution there might have been obtained as a result of a witness being tortured — a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Why do the British authorities appear to go out of their way to thwart efforts to fight and defeat jihadi terror? While Islamists are being appeased, the Christian church is being discriminated against. The Bishop of Rochester said that the decline of Christian values was destroying Britishness and had created a ‘moral vacuum’ which radical Islam was filling

In reply to this cri de coeur from a civilisation under siege, Hazel Blears, the Communities Secretary, maintained it was right that more money and effort was spent on Islam than Christianity because of the threat from extremism and homegrown terrorism.

But Islamism will be repulsed only if Britain once again regains the confidence of its own culture, heritage and traditions. And these are based on Christianity.

Ms Blears’s lamentable comment graphically illustrates the problem. While the ordinary people of Britain are increasingly aghast at the way their country is being transformed by Islamism, the political, judicial, security and intellectual elites are busy denying the nature of the danger and making it far, far worse through a combination of extreme ignorance, arrogance and sheer funk.

The Islamists launched their jihad against the West because they perceived it was so weak and confused it would not possess the wherewithal to defend itself. When it comes to Britain, they never spoke a truer word.

Read the entire post. I would add that most of the points Ms. Phillips makes, I have covered in excruciating detail here and here - and about the insanity of MINAB here. Britain has a huge problem that is only growing by leaps and bounds. But an even bigger one is that the socialists in power either do not recognize reality or are being deliberately ignorant because of some combination of their utopian multicultural ethos and the cynical practicality. The rapidly expanding Muslim population makes up a solid Labour constituency. Because what is happening is destructive to traditional society and because the policies being followed seem based on pure fantasy, a day of reckoning seems inevitable.

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The UK's Lord Chief Justice In A Muslim Fantasy World

As Winston Churchill once commented about Stanley Baldwin, Britain's ineffectual and incompetent Prime Minister in the mid-1930's, "he will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on." Were Churchill alive today, he could well make the same remark in regards to Britain's Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips, who has called for allowing a parallel legal system with Sharia law to be recognized in Britain. And indeed, Churchill's commentary on Baldwin applies essentially across the board to the U.K.'s socialist elite, all of whom seem to live in a cloistered world of pure fantasy. Unfortunately, in Britain, it is this 'chattering class' of socialist elitists who hold all the reigns of power in government, the judiciary, academia, and even the Anglican Church.

A few weeks ago, Britain's Archbishop of Canterbury, the highest priest of the Anglican Church - a man who has praised Islam, damned America as an imperialist nation to a crowd of Muslims, blamed America for Muslim violence against Christians in the Middle East, and who refuses to proselytize for Christianity among Muslims - himself advocated implementing at least parts of Sharia law in Britain. Today, Britain's Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips - the man who has overseen the gutting of Britain's anti-terrorism law, the man whose judiciary has made it impossible to deport the terrorists and radical Islamists from Britain, and the man who has helped make of the British justice system a joke as a deterrent to crime - has himself now joined this supremely misguided Archbishop in calling for at least the partial enforcement of Sharia law in Britain.

For the past millenium, it has been a foundational element of Anglo-Saxon law that no person was above the law and that one law applies to all in the kingdom. Yet now Britain's highest judge, who seemingly should be prepared to defend the ancient Anglo-Saxon legal system with his very life against any hint of encroachment, is prepared to jettison it as no longer relevant. He is calling for the impostion of two different legal systems in Britain - systems with wholly incompatible values.

One wonders if these socialist elites have a clue as to the nature of Sharia law? Do they understand the harm they are doing to all of British society - not just the majority of Muslims in the UK who wish to live in freedom - by calling for this? Do they understand that there is a war going on at this very moment for the heart and soul of Islam? Do they understand that it is a war between those who wish to live and pursue their faith under Western freedoms versus those who wish to do away with the West and impose Sharia law? All one needs to do to understand what is at stake is listen to Parts II and III of the debate on this issue between the Muslim reformer, Dr. Zhudi Jasser, and a Salafi Imam (see here).

One wonders if these socialist elites understand so little about Islam that they do not know its basic precepts. One of those precepts is that calling for Sharia to be imposed in a non-Muslim country is "actually a violation of traditional sharia, which commands that Muslims living in non-Muslim lands obey the law and respect the customs of the host countries." The call to Sharia in the UK is not made in respect of traditional Islam, but in the name of radicalization and triumphalism.

One wonders if these socialist elites understand the relationship between Sharia law, the subjugation of women and honor violence? Perhaps they would do well to read the report on it from the UK Center for Social Cohesion that played so prominently in the U.K. papers a few weeks ago.

One wonders if these socialist elites understand that the call to Sharia comes from the fanatics who reject British law and who do not want Muslims to integrate into British society. Do they understand that these same fanatics wish to impose their belief system on all of Britain and precisely what that means? When the head of the Muslim Council of Britain calls for the stoning of adulterers in Britain as part of the country-wide imposition of Sharia law, perhaps that should be a clue to these socialists that they are living in a fantasy world. Or when converts from Islam face death threats and are hunted down in Christian Britain, mayhap there is a need to fully establish the primacy and exculsivity of British laws in Britain.

With no written Constitution, with no system of checks and balances between co-equal branches of government, and with Parliament over a century ago having claimed for itself unlimited sovereignty, Britain lives in a tyranny of parliament today. Ancient rights of the British have been taken away at Parliamentary whim over the past century. Labour and Tory offer essentially the same brand of socialism. Democracy is near death in Britain and, with the transfer of sovereignty to the EU, it will be in fact be dead in all but name. The socialists are in total control and are imposing their suicidal and destructive values by fiat. They are deconstructing society at an ever increasing rate even as they hold open the floodgates to massive immigration (with corresponding massive emigration). The virulent strain of Islam now dominant in Britain and being homegrown on British soil in Deobandi seminaries is, according to the Times, even more radical than the strain animating the brutal Taliban. This is suicidal insanity. It truly is a race to see whether Britain's socialists will completely destroy what remains of Anglo-Saxon society before the rank and file of Britain revolt and either retake their country or are defeated, ending once and forever the Anglo-Saxon kingdom that has been such a positive force in the world.

The Telegraph provides the sordid details of Lord Phillips perfidy:
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This from the Telegraph:

Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, the Lord Chief Justice, strongly backed Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, over his suggestion earlier this year that aspects of Sharia law should be adopted in Britain.

The archbishop's remarks sparked a national debate and led to calls for his resignation.

Risking inflaming that controversy again, Lord Phillips has said that Muslims in Britain should be able to use Sharia to decide financial and marital disputes.

The judge did add that only the criminal courts should have the power to decide when a crime has been committed and when to impose punishment.

But his suggestion that different religious groups should run their affairs according to different rules sparked warnings that community cohesion could be undermined.

In a speech at the East London Muslim Centre in east London, Lord Phillips said it was "not very radical" for Dr Williams to argue that Sharia law can be used to help govern issues like family disputes and the sale of financial products.

Lord Phillips said: "It is possible in this country for those who are entering into a contractual agreement to agree that the agreement shall be governed by law other than English law."

Therefore, he said, he could see no reason why Sharia law should not be used to settle disputes in this country.

I have to intercede here. What the Lord Justice has said is incredibly disingenuous. Yes, it is possible for parties to a contract in the UK, just as in the U.S., to enter into a choice of law agreement specifying that another country's law should govern the terms of that particular agreement. However, it is a long established doctrine at common law that no court will enforce an agreement - or any law requiring a specific interpretation of an agreement - that contravenes the public policy of the state. There is no question that Sharia law, particularly as to marriage and family, is at odds with the values - and thus the public policy - of the West in many respects. See the links discussing this below. To continue with the Telegraph article:

He said: "There is no reason why principles of Sharia law, or any other religious code, should not be the basis for mediation or other forms of alternative dispute resolution."

He added: "It must be recognized however that any sanctions for a failure to comply with the agreed terms of the mediation would be drawn from the laws of England and Wales."

Sharia law suffered from "widespread misunderstanding" in Britain, Lord Phillips said.

"Part of the misconception about Sharia law is the belief that Sharia is only about mandating sanctions such as flogging, stoning, the cutting off of hands or death for those fail to comply with the law," he said.

"In some countries the courts interpret Sharia law as calling for severe physical punishment. There can be no question of such courts sitting in this country, or such sanctions being applied here."

The judge said Dr Williams had been misunderstood when it was reported in February that he said British Muslims could be governed by Sharia law.

Lord Phillips said that the archbishop was saying only that "it was possible for individuals voluntarily to conduct their lives in accordance with Sharia principles without this being in conflict with the rights guaranteed by our law".

There is already scope in English law for some communities to use their own religious codes to resolve disputes. Orthodox Jews can use the Beth Din rabbinical courts to decide on matters including divorce.

However some critics say that women marrying under Sharia law do not have the same rights as in English law, and could lead to them being treated as second class citizens as far as divorce settlements, custody of children and inheritance go.

Muslim and Christian politicians expressed fears that at a time of heightened tensions, encouraging Muslims to live by their own distinct rules could make it harder for different communities to integrate.

Khalid Mahmood, Labour MP for Birmingham Perry Bar and a practising Muslim, said that allowing Sharia law in parts of the UK would be divisive.

He said: "This would create a two-tier society. It is highly retrograde. It will segregate and alienate the Muslim community from the rest of British society.

"The majority of British Muslims want to live only under British law and they would reject anything that means they are treated differently.

"What Lord Phillips and the archbishop are discussing is something that is completely outside their area of understanding."

Philip Davies, the Conservative MP for Shipley, said Lord Phillips' suggestion was "totally unacceptable."

He said: "It is very unhelpful for community cohesion. This is the sort of thing that builds up tensions in areas like mine, in places like Bradford. Sharia law has got no place in any shape or form in British law."

Andrew Selous, a Tory MP and chairman of the all-party Christians in Parliament group, said calls like those made by Lord Phillips and the archbishop were "worrying."

. . . A spokesman for Dr Williams said: "We welcome the speech given by the Lord Chief Justice as a positive and constructive contribution to this important and ongoing debate." . . .

Read the entire article.

You can find the links responding to why the Archbishop of Canterbury's calls for Sharia law were so misguided here, here and here. They apply with equal force to the foolish Lord Chief Justice. But perhaps the most articulate statement of just how suicidally misguided acquiescing to calls for recognizing Sharia law in the UK is comes from the Sufi Muslim author and Executive Director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism (CIP), Stephen Suleyman Schwartz, who writes:

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, head of the Anglican Communion, doubtless thought he was making a positive contribution to interfaith relations when he gave a speech on February 7 suggesting that some form of official recognition in Britain for elements of sharia--Islamic religious law--is "unavoidable." . . .

Britons--some 3 percent of whom are Muslims--were disturbed by more than Williams's naiveté. Many Muslim immigrants came to the West to escape the excesses of Islamic ideology in countries like Pakistan, where extremism is advancing. Imposition of sharia could deny these immigrants' children opportunities to become successful in British society or elsewhere in the West.

What the archbishop ignored is that British Muslim radicals raise the demand for sharia as an ideological banner. They hope to separate Muslims from their non-Muslim neighbors, the easier to recruit and indoctrinate believers for jihadism. George Carey, Rowan Williams's predecessor as archbishop of Canterbury, warned in the Sunday Telegraph of February 10 that sharia might perpetuate Muslim ghettoes in Britain.

But sharia is not a sound-bite topic. Paradoxically, ignorance of sharia among non-Muslims is matched by a similar void among the radical agitators, who chiefly seek publicity with their demands and threats. Unschooled in Islamic law, they equate sharia with their own improvised notions of religious justice. In reality, sharia is a complex system of jurisprudence, differently applied by four different Sunni and two Shia schools of interpretation.

One aspect of sharia governs religious customs that are not normally the subject of public law in the West--things like diet, prayer, burial, and zakat, the obligatory contribution for relief of the poor. Non-Muslims need not be concerned about, say, clerical supervision of the slaughtering of meat. In this limited sense, sharia already functions on a voluntary basis in Britain and wherever Muslims live, and poses no threat to Western legal systems.

. . . Further, a "shadow sharia" already exists in Britain: informal courts, usually handling family matters or alleged apostasy, that impose forcible marriage and divorce. But sharia fanatics call for something more: They want the public enforcement of religious decrees. Obligatory sharia for Muslims, enforced by the British state, is the ultimate threat implicit in Archbishop Williams's call for accommodation.

Counterintuitive as it may seem, the Islamists' call for introduction of Islamic religious law in the West is an innovation, not heard in Europe or the United States before the radicalization of Muslims at the end of the 1970s. This is because it is actually a violation of traditional sharia, which commands that Muslims living in non-Muslim lands obey the law and respect the customs of the host countries. This requirement is spelled out, for instance, in the sharia volume A Code of Practice for Muslims in the West (1999), which quotes the moderate Iraqi Shia ayatollah Ali Sistani pronouncing that Muslims living in non-Muslim nations must commit themselves "to abide by the laws of that country," as they implicitly promise to do when they sign an immigration form. If they cannot do this, they should return to Muslim territory.

Traditional sharia also forbids antagonizing the local majority in non-Muslim societies. Through most of Islamic history, jihad against non-Muslims referred to warfare between states and armies, not infiltration and conspiracy. For normal Muslims, there is a duty to protect one's family and community by showing a good civic example to non-Muslims.

Many great Islamic polities--including the Ottoman empire, the most powerful Muslim state in history--refused to grant primacy of sharia over common law. The Turks maintained a legal standard, kanun, for administration of government, taxation, and related affairs and left sharia to family and religious matters. Exclusive authority for sharia is an Arab and Pakistani fixation, occasionally sprouting in the margins of the Islamic global community--in parts of Nigeria, northern Malaysia, and the Muslim diaspora in the West.

Family law is the most controversial aspect of sharia, because radical Muslim concepts of modesty, and traditional regulation of marriage and divorce, violate Western canons on women's equality. Many Muslim clerics in Western Europe acquiesce in, and offer mendacious legal interpretations to support, such offenses as wife-beating, polygamy, female genital mutilation, honor killings, forced marriage, forced divorce, and the Saudi practice of "tourist marriage." (Late last year, the Saudi daily al-Watan claimed that Saudis have spent $25 million over the past three years on this scam, in which Saudi men on vacation deceptively marry local women for a summer, then divorce them before returning to the kingdom. Some of this behavior is derived from local cultures, but it has been assimilated by Islamist ideology.)

In practice, government recognition of the jurisdiction of sharia courts over matters of common law in the West would mean either sharia on the cheap dominated by ignorant radicals depriving British Muslims of their due rights--or an extremely elaborate system making room for the six main schools of Islamic jurisprudence, providing for an administrative apparatus, certification of judges, appeals, and so on, creating a major burden on the public budget. Sharia as a basis for strictly voluntary mediation of family or business disputes might sound well and good, except for the likely appointment of radicals as arbiters.

Archbishop Williams failed to see that demands for sharia in the West have little to do with increased respect for Islam and everything to do with the continuing radicalization of Muslims. His lightminded remarks aggravate, rather than diminish, the growing tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims in Britain, the West's main center for expansion of radical Islam.

Read the entire article.

Update: For a good view of how many in the chattering class seem to approach this issue, see UK columnist Peter Osborne in the Independent today. His take is that the problems associated with Islam are all a "Islamaphobia" - mere figments of the imagination of the BNP types. For some reason, he chose to ignore in his article all of the attacks and attempted attacks by Muslims occurring after 7/7, the most recent being an attempted massacre just a little over a month ago. In that incident, Muslim fanatics had armed and sent off a mentally retarded young man who attempted to massacre a lunch-time crowd at a busy UK restaurant. A phobia is an irrational fear. I would say the average Brit's concern with radical Islam in their borders is quite rational.

This is such misguided leftist fantasy as to defy belief. But the UK's left is no different from the elitist, fantasy based intelligentsia in the U.S. There is no more shining example of that than Obama. He believes he can meet and reason with the fanatical and deadly theocrats in Iran because, he believes, they will respond to economic incentives. That shows a complete misunderstanding of the motivations of Iran's theocracy. Perhaps if it was just Iran, it could be forgiven as merely a lack of knowledge on this existentially important topic. But it is more fundamental than that. Recall Obama's 'bitter people cling to guns and religion' remark. He likewise sees all people even here in the U.S. as having no principles more important than their immediate economics. He lives in a fantasy world where all share his values or can be rendered benign and brought to share his values with economic incentives. He is no less dangerous than the socialist elites who today control Britain.

Western civilization is in for one hell of a rocky ride. I wonder if we will recognize that which is left at the end of it.

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Dear Pakistan

Dear Pakistan:

We understand that a high level delegation from your country is coming to the West to request that we "amend laws regarding freedom of expression in order to prevent offensive incidents such as the printing of blasphemous caricatures of Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) and the production of an anti-Islam film by a Dutch legislator." We understand that you are making this plea in order to forestall Muslims reacting with justifiable homicidal mania to any perceived slight by word or picture - or in the case of Teddy Bears, naming. Indeed, you have stated that the recent suicide bombing outside the gates of the Danish Embassy was preventable if we in the West would just silence all criticism of Islam. Since you have been so kind as to take the first step and open up a dialogue on the topic, there are just a few minor things that we too find offensive and were wondering if you perhaps could do something about them.



- Do you think you could discuss your Koranic interpretations that are used to legitimize terrorism and indiscriminate murder to advance Islam. We realize that the Wahhabi, Salafi, and Deobandi sects in particular interpret the Koran to mean that they can freely murder non-Muslims or enslave them and rape them. [Update: For specific references to these doctrines being taught in a Saudi school in Virginia, read the USCIFR report here.] Perhaps you can understand why we might find that offensive. This is made all the more problematic when one realizes that those sects hold that challenging their existing Salafi Koranic interpretations are "redda (apostasy) punishable by death . . ." Thus some of us could misinterpret your reasonable request to alter our laws of free speech to criminalize the criticism of Islam as a backdoor attempt to impose your will and your religion on the West. Perhaps you can clarify that for us.



While we are on the topic of terrorism, you have allowed your country to become ever more radicalized over the past four decades by throwing open your doors to Saudi madrassas that promote incredible racism, xenephobia and violence. You knowingly allowed the A.Q. Khan network to operate as a nuclear Walmart for the most dangerous regimes around the world. You created the Taliban movement and are, today, at most doing less than nothing to combat it, and at worst, actively supporting it in its efforts to retake Afghanistan. Hopefully you will understand why we find that a trifle problematic and, in the long run, untenable. While we ponder offending you, perhaps you might ponder your role in killing us and spreading terrorism.


- Some have expressed dismay at your treatment of Muslims who decide they do not believe in Islam or that convert to another faith, such as Christianity. We take some offense at executing people for their religious beliefs. I realize that despite the threat of death, conversions to Christianity from Islam are occuring with ever greater rapidity. Are you so unsure of your religion that you can only maintain outward belief and retention by threatening death? And on a related topic, do you think you can get the Saudis to stop cutting off peoples heads for witchcraft? Not to be too judgmental, but the emphasis of your religious police on ferreting out witches and breaking spells (which accroding to the grand inquistor are to be found in the sea) seems all a trifle medieval. Perhaps it becomes understandable when one realizes that Saudi Arabia only put the flat earth theory behind them with the recent turn of the millenium. A fatwa issued by the Grand Mufti in 1993 instructed "the earth is flat. Whoever claims it is round is an atheist deserving of punishment."



- Your ideas of religious freedom seem a tad lacking to us. In your country, Pakistan, the charge of blasphemy against the Prophet is being used to steal vast tracts of land from Christians In Algeria, Christians are being jailed by kangaroo courts for practicing their religion. In Saudi Arabia, there is no freedom to practice any religion but Islam, even in the privacy of one's home. No churches can be built in Turkey. Christians are being systematically persecuted and driven from Palestinian controlled portions of the Holy Land. Christains and Jews are second class citizens in virtually all Muslim dominated countries. As long as we are discussing things that bring offense, pehaps you might consider those things.



- About this honor violence and the treatment of women thing, do you think you can work on that? It really does offend some of us in the West - though admittedly not the major feminist groups. I realize women can seem a bit threatening, but do you have to stone them to save your idea of honor? Or gang rape them? Or beat them to death? Or set them on fire? And do you really have to perform female genital mutilation?



- Most of us in the West are a might offended by pedeophilia. I realize the Prophet deflowered a nine year old girl when he was fifty-four, but times have changed over the last millenium and a half. What do you say, can you do away with arranged marriages to and sex with pre-pubescent girls in order to stop offending us?



- Some have noted that court systems applying Sharia law discriminate based on gender and religion. Is there any reason you can think of that a Muslim male's testimony should count twice that of a non-Muslim's or a woman's? We do find such systemic discrimination a bit troubling.



- Is there a reason you keep hanging gays? A substantial number of us are offended by killing or beating a person for their sexual orientation.








Lastly, there are many of us who take offense at the fact that you feel that your interpretation of your religion is above criticism - and indeed, that you act as psychopathic children at any real or imagined slight in an effort to bully the West into silence and dhimmitude. It is difficult to think of anything that would be more dangerous or counterproductive to the West than silencing criticism of Islam or freedom of speech in whatever form. Several of the major sects of your religion - Wahhabi, Salafi, Deobandi, Khomeinist - preach an interpretation of the Koran and Hadiths that are quite literally mired in the Dark Ages and aimed at imposing Muslim domination on the world by any method. They are in desperate need of their period of Enlightenment and maturation that can and will only come through critical thought and debate - or to put it in Islamic terms, ijtihad. Your request to silence free speech in the West would effectively stop that process in its tracks.

I'll tell you what, why don't you get cracking on the things that offend us, and then we'll talk some more about silencing our freedom of speech to keep you happy. Or are our concerns just more Islamophobia on our part? Well, what say you my Paki friends?

Sincerely,

GW


P.S. In countries that already have laws limiting criticism of Islam, we have seen the UK issue a warrant for the arrest of a British blogger for critizing Islam, and in Canada, Mark Steyn was charged with a human rights violation for merely quoting a Wahhabi cleric. Another blogger from Finland was recently jailed for two years for insulting Islam. What more could you ask for, really? Just remember, pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered in the West.

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Fjordman On The Descent Of Britain & Europe Towards Muslim Domnation

The brilliant essayist Fjordman writes on the decline of Britain as the Labour government encourages ever more Muslim immigration and ruthlessly imposes its brand of multiculturalism on the indigenous population, elevating the values of radical Islam over British values. It is suicide, socialist style.
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You'll note in the post here I quote Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum For Democracy (AIFD). During a recent debate with a Salafi cleric, Dr. Jasser spoke on the necessity of engaging Salafi / Wahhabi / Deobandi and Khomeinist in an ideological struggle. The Koranic interpretations and dogma of these specific sects need to be challenged if they are ever to become compatible with Western values and freedoms. Indeed, it is, quite literally, an existential struggle for the soul of Islam. There is some movement towards joining such a battle in America. Europe is pretending that no problem exists. When events erupt that force EU nations to act, they often do so ineffectively or, worse, with acts that are counterproductive - such as recent acts by UK's Home Office.

The EU has thrown its doors wide to Muslims for any number of reasons - some political, some economic, some incomprehensible - without any consideration for the fact that a high percentage of such Muslims not only have a belief system wholly incompatible with Western values, but that a significant minority wish to replace Western values with their own belief system. This is particularly true for the Wahhabi / Salafi Islamists and a significant number of Deobandi Islamists. Add to this the Marxist mindset of an intelligentsia throughout the EU that views their own value system as fundamentally flawed and you have the utterly insane problems that are playing out throughout Europe today. EU nations are not promoting their values or integration. To the contrary, they are encouraging Muslims to retain their own values under the banner of multiculturalism and then ruthlessly enforcing this system against any of the indigenous population that complains. Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant in Canada and Lionheart in Britain are some of the most notable recent examples of people crushed by a socialist system unwilling to allow any dissent from their suicidal path.

This from Fjordman on the above issues:

I will defend all Western and indeed infidel countries against Islamic Jihad, but I admit I feel especially close to Britain, not just because of the long cultural and historic ties between Scandinavia and the British Isles, but also because I appreciate the good that has come out of British culture. It makes me all the more sad to see how humiliated this great nation is today, and how many natives feel forced to leave what once was their country.

In May 2008, 18 year-old Ben Smith was stopped in a routine check. The police officer noticed an English flag on the parcel shelf and ordered him to remove it because it was "racist towards immigrants." One of the first things foreign powers usually do when they invade a country is to ban its national symbols. The fact that you can no longer run your flag in parts of Britain – and the Netherlands, Sweden, France, etc. – shows that the country is de facto under occupation, not just by Muslims, but by Multiculturalists and Globalists of all kinds.

In an essay entitled Put away the flags, Howard Zinn, the Leftist author of the best-selling book A People's History of the United States, writes that "On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed. Is not nationalism – that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder – one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?" He concludes that "We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation."

The problem is, rights can only be protected by sovereign states upholding their territorial integrity. How is "the global community" or "the human race" going to protect Mr. Zinn's liberties? For a free society to function, the state has to pass laws in the best interest of its citizenry and enforce these within its territory. Otherwise, self-government is impossible. In order to defend this territory from outside aggression, people need to identify with it as something more than just a random space on a map. By removing sovereign states, you remove the very foundations of a free society. Maybe some groups actually desire this?

The British Foreign Minister Milliband stated late in 2007 that the European Union should expand to include Muslim nations in North Africa and the Middle East. The French President Sarkozy and the German Chancellor Angela Merkel confirmed this early in 2008. Since the EU involves the free movement of people across borders, European leaders are thus opening the floodgates to tens of millions of Muslims at a time when native Europeans already feel like aliens in their own cities. It's the greatest betrayal in the history of Western civilization and it has been planned for many years, as those who have read Bat Ye'or's writings about Eurabia will know.

I believe native Europeans should seriously consider creating a European Indigenous People's Movement to protect our interests. Our authorities currently reward those who use violence and punish those who don't. Native Europeans are ignored if we protest peacefully against mass immigration or the expanding pan-European superstate. Muslims get concessions while we are treated with increasing hostility from those who are supposed to be our leaders.

Muslims in Jordan, a country that takes part in the Barcelona process of "Euro-Mediterranean cooperation" and thus a likely future EU member, recently sued the Danish cartoonists who drew Muhammad for "blasphemy" against Islam, a "crime" that potentially carries the death penalty according to sharia law. Not too many years into the future, we could face a situation where citizens of, say, Denmark could be arrested by their own authorities and handed over to be tried for "crimes against Islam" in one of the Arab "partner countries" of the EU. If this sounds unthinkable to you, look at the case of the Dutch cartoonist who was recently arrested by a dozen police officers for the crime of publishing cartoons insulting immigrants.

PM Tony Blair expressed "profound relief" over the end of a hostage crisis in 2007 where British soldiers had been kidnapped by the Islamic Republic of Iran, telling the mullahs that "we bear you no ill will." Blair will be remembered as one of the worst leaders in history. Even Chamberlain didn't flood his country with enemies and present this as something positive. Mass immigration has been going on for decades but showed a spectacular increase under Blair's and Brown's Labour regime. The spike was so powerful that it is tempting to speculate whether the authorities had deliberately set out to dismantle their own nation.

According to newspaper columnist Leo McKinstry, the English are being turned into second-class citizens in their own country: "England is in the middle of a profoundly disturbing social experiment. For the first time in a mature democracy, a Government is waging a campaign of aggressive discrimination against its indigenous population."

Similar things are happening all over the Western world, not just in England or Britain, but Britain is definitely one of the worst countries, yes. I've been debating with people which country is most likely to get the first Eurabian civil war triggered by mass immigration. There are several possible candidates, but my money is on Britain, because the anger among ordinary citizens is only rivaled by the brutal political repression tactics.

In a survey published in April 2008, one in three medical doctors in Britain said that elderly patients should not be given free treatment if it were unlikely to do them good for long. At the same time, Muslim men with multiple wives have been given the go-ahead to claim extra welfare benefits. The "welfare state" now means that the natives should watch grandma die because she's getting old anyway and we need the money to pay Muslims with multiple wives and numerous children so that they can feel comfortable while colonizing the country.

Also in April 2008, David T, a stunned dad and his little boy, were banned from swimming at a popular public sports center in east London because this was a "Muslim men-only swimming" session. Several Christian priests have been physically attacked by Muslims in east London, leading one bishop to worry about "no-go-zones" for Christian in some parts of the country. In early June, a Muslim police community support officer ordered Christian preachers to stop handing out gospel leaflets in a predominantly Muslim area of Birmingham. They were threatened with arrest for committing a "hate crime" and were told they risked being beaten up if they returned. In March 2008, two Islamic terrorists were moved to different prisons after complaining that their fellow inmates were "too white." Dhiren Barot had masterminded a radioactive bomb plot involving limousines packed with nails and explosives and Omar Khyam plotted to blow up the Bluewater shopping centre in Kent.

How do native Brits react to this? Well, some get angry, as they should. Bryan Cork, 49, was jailed for six months for "racist slurs" after he had shouted insults at Muslim worshippers outside a Cumbria mosque, including "proud to be British" and "go back to where you came from." This was after the London Jihadist bombings in 2005. Judge Paul Batty told him that racism in any form would not be tolerated. I hear much talk about "national suicide" these days, but Mr. Cork apparently had no desire to commit national suicide, he was held down by his own authorities for refusing to accept the organized destruction of his nation. What we are dealing with here isn't suicide; it's an execution of an entire nation, perhaps an entire civilization, the greatest civilization ever created by man.

Even children face this kind of ideological intimidation. Codie Stott, a teenage British schoolgirl, was forced to spend hours in a police cell after she was reported by her teachers for "racism." She had objected, in the mildest possible terms, to being placed during class with a group of South Asian immigrants who talked among themselves in a language she didn't understand. For this, she was dragged to the local police station and had her fingerprints and photograph taken. 18-year-old Jamie who has Down's syndrome and the mental age of a five-year-old was charged with "racism" after an argument with an immigrant. Meanwhile, the UK is being brought to its knees in an epidemic of violent crime and white native girls get raped by immigrants in spectacular numbers, just like all over Western Europe.

Why do people still take this lying down? I wonder about that sometimes. Maybe they feel that their votes don't matter and have resigned into a state of quiet apathy. Since many are dependent upon government support and being branded a "bigot" could cause you to lose your livelihood, people still have too much to lose by openly opposing these policies. Such subtle blackmail can be quite effective in suppressing dissent. This could, however, change rapidly in the event of a serious economic downturn. Another crucial element is confusion. People are deliberately kept in the dark by the media and the authorities regarding the full scale of what they are facing. Combined with Muslim violence and intimidation of critics, we have a climate of fear and confusion. People who are scared and confused can be easily controlled.

I've recently been re-reading the books of American evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond, especially Guns, Germs, and Steel. He has some points, but his most important flaw is his complete failure to explain how the Greater Middle East went from being a global center of civilization, which it was in ancient times, to being a global center of anti-civilization. This was not caused by smallpox or because zebras are more difficult to domesticate than water buffaloes. It was caused by Islam. Diamond, with his emphasis on historical materialism, fails to explain the rise of the West and especially why English, not Arabic, Chinese or Mayan, became the global lingua franca. What's so special about those rainy and foggy islands?

As Australian author Keith Windschuttle told a New Zealand audience, "The concepts of free enquiry and free expression and the right to criticise entrenched beliefs are things we take so much for granted they are almost part of the air we breathe. We need to recognise them as distinctly Western phenomena." He warns that the survival of this great achievement now depends entirely "on whether we have the intelligence to understand their true value and the will to face down their enemies."

No other civilization on earth ever created an equivalent of the European university system. One of the most important reasons why Europe surpassed China during the early modern age is more political freedom and free speech. The reason why English became the dominant language is because Britain and its offspring enjoyed great political liberty even by Western standards, and a corresponding economic dynamism.

Probably no empire in world history has been more benevolent than the British Empire, yet a report from February 2008 recommended that patriotism should be avoided in school lessons because British history is "morally ambiguous." I suppose Islamic history isn't, with almost 1400 years of brutal Jihad warfare on several continents?

I'm sure the British are being told that the ongoing mass immigration is a result of their "colonial history." I live in a country with no colonial history, yet we are still subject to mass immigration. We are also being told that we should allow Pakistani or Nigerian flags to celebrate our Constitution Day because this will be "good for integration." This has nothing to do with colonialism. So what does it have to do with? Well, I'm starting to wonder whether it has something to do with the Western love affair with free speech and political liberty. Those who desire a world where society is regulated and everybody does what the authorities tell them to do fear this Western preference for political self-determination.

If we look at the West during the past thousand years, we have generally enjoyed an unusually high degree of freedom and power sharing. This has been the case more in some periods and countries than in others, but in the big scheme of things this remains true. However, although this arrangement has been good for our civilization as a whole, some of our elites apparently are jealous of the more authoritarian system in other cultures. They want to turn the West into a "normal," meaning more corrupt and less free, civilization, aided by the forces of globalization. We are witnessing rising nepotism, and perhaps those at the top desire this.

The political elites no longer believe in stupid things such as borders, cultures and national sovereignty. Islam upsets their world-view, so they ignore it and move on with their project of globalization, anyway. The most hardcore Leftists actively side with Islam because its hatred of the West and its concept of a global umma coincide with their own globalist outlook. Yes, I know that Socrates stated "I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world," but I don't think he meant it quite as literally as Western elites do now. Socrates didn't have an entire village of Muslims transplanted to his street during the space of a single generation, and he didn't have his daughters or female relatives raped by Muslims in his own country.

Our traditional freedoms were the result of a specific culture, developed over centuries of hard struggles. Maybe other cultures have to go through similar struggles of their own to achieve this, and some will perhaps never be able to do so. We should protect our freedoms at home before we try to export them, and we should protect them by preserving the European-derived culture which created them.

Our enemies, internal and external, want to destroy the Western world because we represent liberty, and they want to destroy Britain in particular because it gave birth to the most powerful pro-liberty culture within the Western tradition. I hope the British can regain their strength and throw off their traitor class, but they need to do so soon. We cannot allow the greatest nation in human history to be destroyed by the planet's most barbaric cultures. The British people, like their Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish and Danish counterparts, have every right to desire self-determination and self-preservation, and limit or even completely halt immigration as they see fit to ensure this. Those who say otherwise are evil, and need to be exposed as such. The Western world is under attack by a global Islamic Jihad. To support continued mass immigration of Muslims in this situation should be regarded as high treason, and punished as such.

(H/T Europe News)

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God Save The . . . Caliphate?

Next to the Church of the Holy Sephulcre, the most famous Church in the world is the Hagia Sophia built about 532 A.D.. Except that it is not a church. Now a museum, it was captured by the Ottomans when they overran Byzantium in 1453. The Ottomans tore out the crosses, painted over the iconic images, added several minarets, and made it into a Mosque to the glory and ascendancy of Islam. Much the same thing is happening in the UK today, though at the invitation of the secular left – no need for any force or coercion.

Since the forced dechristianization of France by Robespierre, and later, the condemnation of religion as the opiate of the masses by Marx, the socialist left has been a determined foe of Christianity. They have succeeded in gutting Christianity in Britain and across Europe. This, coupled with the insane immigration policies and multiculturalism of the left have led to the suicidal but inexorable march towards the ceding of their lands, laws and traditions to those who still devoutly believe in a religion – Islam. According to the latest estimates, the religion of Islam will dominate in the land of King Richard within thirty years.
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This from the Church of England Church newspaper.

If recent reports of trends in religious observance prove to be correct, then in some 30 years the mosque will be able to claim that, religiously speaking, the UK is an Islamic nation, and therefore needs a share in any religious establishment to reflect this. The progress of conservative Islam in the UK has been amazing, and it has come at a time of prolonged decline in church attendance that seems likely to continue.

This progress has been enthusiastically assisted by this government in particular with its hard-line multi-cultural dogma and willingness to concede to virtually every demand made by Muslims. Perhaps most importantly the government has chosen to allow hard-liners to act as representing all Muslims, and more liberal Muslims have almost completely failed to produce any leadership voices to compete, leading many Britons to wonder if there are indeed many liberal Muslims at all, surely a mistake.

At all levels of national life Islam has gained state funding, protection from any criticism, and the insertion of advisors and experts in government departs national and local. A Muslim Home Office adviser, for example, was responsible for Baroness Scotland’s aborting of the legislation against honour killings, arguing that informal methods would be better. In the police we hear of girls under police protection having the addresses of their safe houses disclosed to their parents by Muslim officers who think they are doing their religious duty.

. . . The point is that Islam is being institutionalised, incarnated, into national structures amazingly fast, at the same time as demography is showing very high birthrates. Charles Taylor’s new and classic work on the Secular Age charts the rise of the secular mindset and what he calls the ‘excarnation’ of Christianity as it is levered out of state policy and structures. Christianity is now regarded as bad news, the liberal elite’s attack developed in the 1960s took root in the educationalist empire, and to some extent even in areas of the church.

Today the Christian story is fading from public imagination, while Islam grows apace. There needs to be some fresh thinking in this area where the claims of Christ are sensitively explained. Our church leaders must develop ways of explaining this, as our feature on mission and evangelism this week demonstrates.

Read the entire article. (H/T LGF). God help Britian and the West. The socialist utopia of Marx has turned into a British nightmare with the determined and suicidal policies of the left. One wonders how they will fare under Sharia law. Or will they just move elsewhere in the EU and leave the working class to sort it out?

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