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November 24, 2005
Is the White-Flag Beginning to Replace the St George’s Cross?
British culture is undergoing quite a make-over at present in the interests of its becoming more friendly to British Muslims, or, at least, less liable to arouse their wrath.
Where will the process end? Should it even be beginning?
Today’s Times reports that the director of a just-ended London run of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great removed from his production a scene in which Tamburlaine burns the Koran for fear it might offend Muslims. Its inclusion, he is reported to have claimed, ‘would have been unnecessarily inflammatory’.
Across the page is a report that a Muslim insurance salesman from Bristol is suing his employer for racial and religious discrimination after it offered him and his fellow employees as a reward for their good performance bottles of wine. Because consumption of alcohol is forbidden in Islam, he accuses the employer of having subjected him to ‘exclusion’.
The insurance salesman is not the only British Muslim who complains of social exclusion because of his compatriots fondness for drink.
Monday’s Guardian carries a report of a meeting of young British Muslims the paper had organised in London the previous week to enable it to find out about their current thinking. Apart from holding Tony Blair largely responsible for the July suicide bombings, the most noteworthy finding of the paper was its discovery of how excluded the young British Muslims complained of feeling as a result of their compatriots fondness for a tipple.
‘Non-Muslim Britain hasn’t begun to grasp how big an obstacle alcohol is to Muslims’ participation…. Alcohol is probably now one of the most effective and unquestioned forms of exclusion practised in the UK, affecting every kind of social network.’ Such was the ‘new insight’ the paper claimed to have come away from the meeting having acquired.
Meanwhile on the other side of the globe, today’s Daily Telegraph reports Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, recently delivered a lecture at the Islamic University of Islamabad in which he came close to offering an apology on behalf of his coreligionists for the Crusades.
‘Most Christians would now say that the history of the crusades … w[as] a serious betrayal of many of the central beliefs of Christian faith’, he is quoted as saying
In view of the Archbishop’s statement, one wonders for how much longer the St George’s Cross will remain England’s national flag. According to a report by CNN last month, calls for its replacement by a more ‘inclusive’ symbol have already begun to be voiced. Chris Doyle, director of the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding, is quoted as having claimed it was now time for England to find a new flag and a patron saint who is ‘not associated with our bloody past and one we can all identify with’.
The white flag might be thought a suitable replacement. But there is one minority that might have difficulty identifying with such a pacific symbol.
Posted by David Conway at November 24, 2005 02:25 PM
Comments
How much longer are we going to be subjected to this nonsense? Why are we being asked (told) to surrender our way of life, our culture, our values, our traditions, to accommodate recent immigrants who, in the past 50 years have introduced a culture that is not only at odds with those of the host population but derides and sneers at it.
We've had many immigrants over recent years: Chinese, Caribbean and earlier, Jews, none of whom have asked for anything more than the right to follow their personal cultures in the privacy of their own homes. Why are we subjecting ourselves to a tyranny that most English people find not only unacceptable but intolerable?
Posted by: Henry Kaye at November 24, 2005 07:30 PM
Very obvious to me that people writing this sort of article simply do not know what they are talking about.
The Red Cross of St George is not the red cross associated with the Templars of Crusade times.
On top of which - if anyone new what they were talking about they would know that George was a Roman Army Officer who was martyred and as such is a Muslim Prophet and Christian Saint.
Posted by: Skipper at February 8, 2006 07:38 PM
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