France, Australia, Denmark, Sweden.…the number of western countries which have started to become plagued by violent clashes between Muslim and non-Muslim citizens is steadily growing.
Today, five months on from the July London undergound bombings, the Times reports police have still yet to identify all of the young British-born Muslims who attended the make-shift gymnasium housed in a mosque in Beeton where Mohammad Sidique Khan, the believed ring-leader of the London bombings, is thought to have recruited his accomplices in terror.
‘Youngsters who attended … Khan’s youth club remain hostile to police’, the Times reports in explanation of the lack of police intelligence.
Meanwhile, last week, so the Times further reminds us, Sir Ian Blair announced that, since July, his Metropolitan police force has discovered no fewer than three more bomb plots.
Clearly, recent events would suggest what we are witnessing is nothing short of a global clash of civilisations, but it is one the British government seems unwilling to confront for fear of antognising still further one particular constituency.
Indeed, in a highly worrying attempt to ingratiate itself with that constituency and court its good-will, the government seems intent on introducing to the statute book a law which, although ostentibly designed only to stop incitement of hatred towards adhherents of any religion, will, despite the government’s protestations to the contrary, almost certainly have the effect of insulating religions from the searching public criticism of which they must all perennially stand in need, especially insofar as their sacred texts remain unexposed to the same rigorous criticism to which the Bible became remoressly subject since modernity.
How will those young British Muslims, some of whom have seemingly learned to hate their compatriots to the point of being willing to slaughter them indiscriminately, be insulated from versions of their religion which encourage such hatred, if those pedalling such versions of their religion remain legally immune from public criticism?
In the immediate wake of Septembbr 11th, George Bush was quick to declare lslam to be a religion of peace and to dissociate from it those who perpetrated the crime.
However, it would seem that immediate knee-jerk reaction taken to spare Muslims criticism of their faith, or more violent retaliation, is in process of being replaced in the US at least by a more considered judgment that now sees the problem may lie much deeper within their religion than had first appeared.
According to an article posted in yesterday’s FrontPage Magazine, a key Pentagon intelligence agency involved in US homeland security has recently produced a report that criticises the response to date of western leaders to Muslim terrorists for their failure to appreciate sufficiently that ‘Islam is radical by nature’.
According to the article, the burdern of this report is that: ‘[western] political leaders don’t understand the true nature of the threat ... because the intellgence community has yet to educate them. They stll think Musliom terrorists, even suicide bombers, are mindless “criminals”, motivated by “hatred of our freedoms” rather than religious zealots motivated by their faith. And as a result, we have no strategic plan for winning a war against jihadists’.
The author of the article, Paul Sperry, quotes one US intelligence official to whom he spoke as having told him: ‘Most Americans don’t realise we are in a war of survival – a war that is going to continue for decades.’
Admittedly, threat assessments made by US intelligence agenices are by no means always infallible. However, recent events both in this country and elsewhere suggest now is not the time to spare religions and their saced texts fierce and searching public scrutiny and critique.
What would have been said about the government’s Racial and Religious Hatred Bill by Winston Churchill, the man who finally awoke the country to the enormity of the threat the country faced from Hitler and National Socialism? Some indication of what he might have said is given in the following extract from an early work of his which, doubtless, would have got him into trouble with the authorities were, per impissible, he to have written it today:
“ Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities - but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytising faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.”
—Sir Winston Churchill, from The River War, first edition, Vol. II, pages 248-50 (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1899).
Comments (2)
I paid a court order for my daughter's upkeep until she turned 17, then the court order ceased. I have not been allowed access to my daughter since she was an infant.
I then got a call from the CSA informing me I had to pay £214 a month until she turns 19 because she has gone onto further education. Whilst I accept my daughter should pursue her education, why should the responsibility lie with me who has not been allowed contact over the years ? By the way, my ex-thief, sorry wife, had my daughter's name changed to her maiden name because she had two more children out of wedlock with another man who is no longer on the scene. (3 kids=CSA cash, child maintenance cash, why should she work?)
It seems to me the CSA is geared to screw the decent hard-working father who, by the way, has brought up my now wife's child for the last 13 years at the behest of a lazy baby factory namely my ex-wife.
Posted by Anonymous | March 20, 2007 3:50 PM
Posted on March 20, 2007 15:50
After 15 years of paying for a child i believed is mine i have since been informed they are not. Because the csa say i ticked a box 7 years ago it now up to me to prove it.
The x wife refuses to force a test, my daughter refuses to so i keep on paying, its gone to court like the csa said it should but court cannot enforce on my daughter as she is an innocent party, how can you prove anything if no dna is allowed if anyone has a similar thing going on please email me Kimticktock@aol.com .uk thankx
Posted by David Dorland | November 9, 2006 12:55 AM
Posted on November 9, 2006 00:55