Civitas Blog

Last Saturday’s Daily Telegraph reported that a group of Oxford University students had started to campaign for the dismissal of one of its dons for being associated with Migration Watch UK and for having publicly voiced the scepticism he shares with it about the alleged economic benefits of the recent large scale of net immigration Britain has experienced.

The campaigning students belong to the Oxford branch of Star, Student Action for Refugees, a group lobbying on behalf of refugees and asylum seekers. Their quarry is no less than their University’s Professor of Demography, David Coleman.

Today’s issue of the Daily Telegraph contains a characteristically robust, good- humoured and flawlessly argued defence by Professor Coleman of the concerns he shares with Migration Watch about the recent scale of immigration, as well as of his association with it and another organisation to which the students have also taken exception.

Among their several complaints against Professor Coleman is that he has used his status as a university professor to legitimise the views and reports produced by Migration Watch UK.

In the apparent absence of any reasons or arguments adduced by the students against these views and reports, one feels like retorting it is they who are using their status as Oxford university students to de-legitimise free debate about an important public issue and to stifle academic freedom.

Given Oxford is notoriously the home of lost causes, the only consolation that may be taken from this sorry episode is that it augurs well for those, like Professor Coleman and Migration Watch, who have long sought to challenge the left-liberal consensus on this issue.

'I don’t wear the niqab to separate myself from society… It’s not about separation.'

So said the veil-wearing British-born Muslim woman who finally appeared on Channel Four’s Alternative Christmas Day Message to talk about the practice.

Apparently, Al-Qaeda’s second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahri doesn’t agree. Last Sunday, an audio-recording was posted on websites used by Al-Qaeda in the past of someone who purported to be and sounded like Zawahri who called every Muslim women in the west who wore a veil ‘a soldier in the battle of Islam against Zionist-Crusader.’

Should Pete Doherty ever find himself banged up for possessing hard drugs, he would soon discover that incarceration had not remotely put them beyond his reach. This is especially so, should he have been incarcerated north of the border.

According to a report in yesterday’s Times, so easy has it become for inmates in Scottish prisons to gain access to illict hard drugs while inside them, and so awash with drugs have they become, that they are shortly all to be given personal drug-taking kits, complete with syringes, swabs, filers, and a sharps disposal box.

I was only surprised to read that a gram or two of heroin or coke is not be thrown for good measure.

Maybe I have a rather outdated image of what a nun gets up to, but I have to confess to being amazed as I watched Channel 4’s ‘Dispatches’ last night, to see Sister Barbara Raferty of Scoil Chriost Ri in Portloise, County Carlow, overseeing a budding arms brokerage business managed by her sixth form girls. Needless to say the good sister was not pursuing a lucrative way of repairing the Church roof, but was leading an exercise to demonstrate the continued loopholes in EU control of the arms trade. The message of the programme was that three years after the EU leaders reached a common position on arms brokering, it is still shockingly easy to trade lethal weapons and instruments of torture from within the European Union. For those who are sceptical of the worth of the Union, this programme provided pause for thought.

‘Some comfort/pleasure from Barney the dinosaur/Teddy and his awareness of his family are all that MB has. But… these assets are precious and real.’

So said Mr Justice Holman in the High Court yesterday in explanation of his decision to withhold legal permission from doctors who had sought it to withdraw life-support from an eighteenth-month boy in their care, identified in the case only as ‘MB’, suffering from acute muscular atrophy and with a life expectancy of only a year.

Had Mr Justice Holman been less able than his quoted remark reveals him to have been to put himself imaginatively into the acutely painful shoes in which the baby boy currently languishes in a hospital somewhere in the north of England, then doubtless today the boy would no longer be on a respirator there but in its morgue.

‘There should always be charity and goodwill between different beliefs; toleration must be the norm, but even toleration has its limits. Locke would not have believed in insulting publications….’

Thus writes William Rees Mogg in an op-ed in last Monday’s Times entitled ‘Tolerating the Intolerable: Even Locke, our greatest prophet of liberty, would never have defended those offensive cartoons’.

In seeking to recruit the great British seventeenth century philosopher to the cause of those who, whether by government edict or self-censorship, would suppress publication of the cartoons, critical of Islam, that have lately become the epicentre of a firestorm of frenzied Muslim protest throughout the world, Rees-Mogg -- normally a voice of comparative sanity in an otherwise turbulent sea of media madness -- has erred very badly indeed.

‘Muslims up in arms over all over the world at irreverent Danish newspaper cartoons of Mohammed’, ‘Death threats received by Danish and Norwegian newspapers for publishing cartoons of the Prophet', ’ ‘Middle eastern Muslim countries boycott Danish goods’, ‘Armed Fatah militia surround EU offices in Gaza after EU defends Danish Prime Minister for refusing to condemn or prosecute editor of Danish newspaper’ etc, etc, scream newspaper headlines around the world.

These headlines, or words to their effect. report the latest twists and turns in the long-running and still on-going saga of the widespread outrage that has been provoked within the Muslim world by the publication of irreverent cartoons of Mohammed in a Danish newspaper last September and since in other European newspapers.

Time was when I would have been appalled by how out of all proportion to its ostensible cause was the scale of this latest outburst of Muslim outrage and indignation. But if there is such a thing as jihad-fatigue, I am beginning to suffer from it.

By this I do not mean to imply that the death threats and boycott threats should not be taken seriously by those at whom they have been directed, as well as by the authorities whose job it is to protect their recipients. I mean that it has become all to sickeningly clear that the numerous Muslims throughout the world who have responded so disproportionately to this latest perceived failure by non-Muslims to extend towards their religion the deference that they consider it due are no longer worthy of being taken seriously, intellectually or morally.

The disproportion of their sound and fury to what they claim has been its cause reveals that there is simply no other way in which to respond to them, save to say:

After having seen Parliament emasculate the Anti-Terrorism Bill by reducing the maximum period terror suspects can be detained without trial from 90 to 28 days, its remaining provisions are now under assault from the Muslim groups created by the government after 7/7 to give advice on how it should go about improving relations between Muslims and non-Muslims.

Today’s Guardian reports these groups are claiming such provisions of the bill as that proscribing the glorification of terrorism will only serve still further to alienate young British Muslims, thereby increasing their likelihood of ending up recruited in the ranks of Al Qaeda's suicide-bombers.

They claim these clauses will antagonise these young Muslims if enacted because they will then no longer feel able to engage lawfully in what they consider to be perfectly legitimate support of ‘self-determination struggles around the world’. For example, these groups are reported to have claimed, “the extremely fine line” between empathising with the Palestinian cause and justifying the actions of suicide bombers could no longer be drawn with any legal certainty.

Similarly, they claim, any list compiled by the Home Office of extremist websites, bookshops and organisations judged of concern will be seen as ‘censorship of all those who might criticise British foreign policy or call for political unity among Muslims.’

Instead of anti-terror legislation, what should begin, the Muslim advisory groups claim, is a ‘dialogue’ between British Muslims and others.

There are several puzzling things about these expressed concerns and proposals.

First, the Muslim groups opposed to the anti-terror bill for the reasons rehearsed above also tend to favour a Religious Hatred Law proscribing incitement of hatred towards those of their faith. They are apparently unconcerned about the repeatedly expressed concerns critics of this bill have voiced that it is bound to inhibit legitimate of criticism of religions, Islamic or otherwise.

How can there be open dialogue between Muslims and non-Muslims, something for which the Muslims advisory groups are calling, if non-Muslims are to be inhibited from openly voicing critical opinion about aspects of their reigion through fear of thereby exposing themselves to prosecution for incitement to religious hatred?

Muslim critics of the anti-terror bill must abandon either support for the Religious Hatred Bill or opposition to the proposed anti-glorification of terror clause of the Anti-Terrorism Bill. They cannot expect to be able to have it both ways.

Secondly, and far more importantly, ...