Civitas Blog

John Loughborough School is a mixed comprehensive school situated in the London borough of Haringey. Originally established there as an independent school in the early 1980s, after a brief period as a grant-maintained school, it gained voluntary-aided status in 1998.

The school was established by the Seventh Day Adventist church with which it remains affiliated. It was founded to provide a high-quality Christian education for local children of African and Caribbean background. The school is comparatively small, having a roll of approximately 300 children.

Last week I posted a blog here suggesting many of the ills currently bedevilling our society, including most notably the current knife-crime epidemic in the capital, were attributable to the Bible and its teachings having ceased to be the focus of religious education in many state schools.

That suggestion elicited several sceptical comments. These variously claimed that it was too late to put the clock back, and, in any case, the Bible wasn’t a particularly good source of moral instruction. It was open to infinite interpretation, contained some pretty dubious moral teachings, and was capable of informing the moral outlook of some very violent societies, the United States being cited as one.

continued on the Centre for Social Cohesion blog.

Who can fail but to be deeply moved, if not humbled, by the magnanimous words of compassion spoken by the mother of sixteen year old Jimmy Mizen, London’s latest teenage murder victim?

continued on the Centre for Social Cohesion blog.

At present, approximately a third of all schools in England and Wales are denominational, a status that permits them, when oversubscribed, to select pupils whose parents avow the same faith as these schools.

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Parents with children in their final year at primary school will today learn how successful they have been in securing for their children a place this coming September at a secondary school of their choice.

Those who have been through this process will know what a trying time it is.

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Should Saudi Royals be treated as moral outcasts?

Definitely not argues Amir Taheri in an op-ed in today’s Times. Entitled ‘They’re like camels – uncongenial, but trustworthy’, his piece bears the subtitle: ‘It’s absurd to treat the Saudi royals as moral outcasts’.

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A story appeared in yesterdays's Daily Mail on which I have been pondering hard since reading it.

It concerned a visit a fortnight ago by two police officers to a 71 year old priest of an East London Catholic church. They had called on the priest unannounced to interrogate him for nearly two hours over whether, in posting a comment on his web-based parish bulletin a year or so ago about the Shabina Begum case, he had been intending to incite religious hatred against her or her coreligionists.

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So far the country has been most fortunate not to have suffered any fatalities as a result of the latest wave of violent extremism to have descended upon it. We cannot yet know, however, whether all those involved in the violence have yet been rounded up.

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"Unfortunately, the U.S.A., Britain, the alliance, our government... are driven... by the obsession to eliminate the Muslims from the surface of the earth. Whether my colleagues, companions and Muslim brothers die today or tonight, every drop of blood will invigorate the Muslim movement."

So reportedly said the leader of the “British brigade” in explanation of why "his team" stands ready to carry out suicide attacks in Great Britain. He reportedly did so in a valedictory speech delivered at a graduation ceremony for future suicide-bombers held ten days ago at a training camp somewhere inside Afghanistan near the Pakistan border.

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In its submission of written evidence to a House of Commons Select Committee on Global Security, so this week's Sunday Telegraph reports, the Church of England claims Britain’s recent foreign policy has been counterproductive in terms of fighting Islamist terror. Rather than helping to minimise the risks of suffering it, Britain’s role in the invasion and occupation of Iraq has only served to recruit British Muslims to the cause of jihad and increase the risk it faces of suffering terror attacks.

Continued on the Social Cohesion blog.

Acres of newsprint today are given over to reporting and commenting about yesterday’s guilty verdict of five young British Muslims for conspiracy to make and explode a 600kg bomb somewhere in the Home Counties, either a Kent shopping centre or a London nightclub.

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Last Thursday, as at the time I commented upon here in a posting, the Times newspaper applied generous coats of whitewash to London’s Mayor Ken Livingstone in an effort to give the left-leaning trouble-maker a brand makeover that would transform into a paragon of responsibility and moderation. Today, it is the turn of that city’s Muslim population to receive the same treatment from this same newspaper.

Continued at the Social Cohesion blog.

It seems Basil Fawlty has nothing on our country’s classrooms when it comes to avoiding hurting the feelings of supposedly vulnerable groups.

In a soon-to-be-published report on and entitled ‘Teaching emotive and controversial History 3-19’, commissioned by the Department for Education, the Historical Association found that many schools have quietly dropped teaching about the Crusades and the Holocaust -- despite the latter supposedly being a mandatory part of the National Curriculum -- for fear of offending certain groups of pupils.

To quote the report's conclusion, as disclosed in yesterday’s Sunday Mail, the Historical Association found that: ‘In particular settings, teachers of history are unwilling to challenge highly contentious or charged versions of history in which pupils are steeped at home, in their community or in a place of worship.’

While having no wish to see either the Holocaust or the Crusades, or the both of them, exhaust the entire history curriculum, to teach neither for fear doing so might upset some pupils is not exactly the right way to go about wideneing their mental horizons or to create a cohesive community.

What delicious --yet, ultimately, deeply painful -- unintended irony is conveyed by the image that graces the NHS web-page containing details of its publications for health care workers and patients about its much vaunted electronic database of patient records.

This irony is especially piquant in light of a report in today’s Times about the concerns Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt has publicly expressed that potentially compromising information about Muslim women given by them in confidence to their GPs might be, or has been, leaked to those in their own communities who would make violent reprisals against them, upon learning of what they had disclosed. The kind of information at issue is that that which concerns ‘domestic violence or sexual health problems of these women.’

Just over two years ago when head of Ofsted, David Bell delivered a widely reported lecture on citizenship to the Hansard Society in which he warned about the potential threat to social cohesion posed by independent faith schools that failed to prepare their pupils for life in the pluralistic democracy that Britain is today.

For issuing this warning, as well as for urging the government to monitor their growth to ensure pupils at them learned ‘the wider tenets of British society’, Mr Bell received a drubbing from several Muslim community leaders.

Sir Iqbal Sacranie, then Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain, accused Mr Bell of gross irresponsibility for having suggested they posed any threat to “our coherence as a nation”. Dr Mohammad Mukadam, chairman of the Association of Muslim Schools, accused Mr Bell of ‘Islamophobia’, challenging him ‘to come up with evidence that Muslim schools are not preparing young people for life in British society’.

Since then Mr Bell has moved from Ofsted, and Sir Iqbal Sacranie has also steped down from being MCB Secretary General to make way for Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, chairman of the East London Mosque and London Muslim Centre. It must, therefore, always remain conjectural whether, had he remained at Ofsted, Mr Bell would have taken up Dr Mukadam’s challenge by citing those Muslim schools that have since then been disclosed to be not adequately preparing their pupils for life in British society.

In the last ten years, the number of Muslims inside British prisons has doubled. They now number more than 7,000 and account for some ten per cent of the total prison population.

The growth in their number has led to a corresponding increase in the number of imams serving in them as chaplains or seeking to do so.

Concern about how potentially fertile a recruiting ground for Al Qaeda prison can be has led to the increased vetting of prospective prison imams, as well as increased scrutiny of literature they might seek to bring in with them.

According to a report in today’s Times, in addition to routine counter-terrorism checks by the Prison Services and a further check by the Criminal Records Bureau, all prospective imams in the prison chaplaincy service must undergo vetting by the security services, as well as be conversant with English.

In addition, it was reported, all Arabic literature, including the Koran, will have to be translated into English before being allowed into prisons to ensure no hidden messages for prisoners are contained in it.

One hopes that it will not only be imams and Arabic literature that will be carefully scrutinised before being allowed inside. In recent years, prison has proved a particularly fertile recruiting-ground for Islamist terrorists who became converts to Islam while inside. Any literature they would have read that assisted in their passage to Islamism was certainly written in English, not Arabic.

As well as being Professor of Religion and International Affairs and of Islamic Studies at Georgetown University in Washington DC, John Esposito is also founding director of that University’s Centre for Muslim-Christian Understanding.

On the strength of these credentials, one might be tempted to suppose not only that Professor Esposito is an expert in Islam but also concerned to foster better understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims.

Perhaps, because these credentials of his project such an ostensibly benign and informed image of him that Gallup Organisation chose to appoint Professor Esposito to interpret for it the data it has gathered from a world-wode survey of predominantly Muslim countries as part of its World Poll.

This latter poll is an opinion survey which the Gallup web-site modestly describes as an ‘historical undertaking …to audit the well-being of the globe for the next hundred years’.

No less modest is Gallup's revelation on the same web-site that, as starting point for its World Poll, it has chosen to conduct ‘a study representing the hopes, dreams and fears of a billion Muslims’.

This survey of Muslim opinion world-wide is under the direction of Gallup’s Muslim Studies director, a Ms Dalia Mogahed. One of her key areas of interest, according to the Gallup web-site, is ‘the depth of misunderstanding regarding religion and government between the Western and Islamic cultures’. Clearly, Ms Mogahed must be another person concerned to promote better understanding and relations between Muslims and non-Muslims, one might also be tempted to suppose.

Professor Esposito and Ms Mogahed were both quoted at some length in yesterday’s Times in a news report by its religion correspondent, Ruth Gledhill, about the interim results of that Gallup survey of Muslim opinion world-wide.

What a travesty of good reporting that account turned out to be.

Today’s Spectator contains an article by John Gray, criticising, as doomed to failure or, even worse, as being liable to be counter-productive, the government’s recently announced strategy against the growth of domestic Islamic extremism by encouraging local initiatives to foster closer integration of Britain’s Muslims and encourage the moderates to stand up to and speak up against the extremists.

Globalisation, Gray argues, has caused Britain to become so culturally diverse that it is folly to think we could or should seek any value consensus beyond the need for mutual tolerance in a social arrangement he calls 'modus vivendi'. To demand any more of Britain's Muslims, he argues, is to ‘single them out for deviating from a national consensus that is now largely mythical’ and positively fosters their radicalisation.

Last Saturday’s Times reported that a Cambridge under-graduate has gone into hiding in a safe-house after receiving threats for having recently reproduced in a weekly satirical college flysheet one of the notorious Danish cartoons of Muhammad, along with a highly deprecatory remark about him, albeit one that some serious thinkers consider warranted, however misguidedly.

It also reported that, as well as dissociating itself from, and condemning, republication of the cartoon and publication of the comment, the student’s college is also beginning an investigation and disciplinary measures to determine whether he should be sent down for what he has done.

One can understand the college’s desire to avoid violent protests against the student as well as itself, sad though it be for the country to have found itself in a situation where, for something seemingly so comparatively trivial, such grave consequences have been thought liable to follow.

Should the college have announced it is considering whether to send the student down only as a way of taking the immediate heat out of the situation and until tempers cool, then its decision would be understandable. However, if it is seriously considering sending the student down, even if should he have been in breach of any student code of conduct it might have, its decision would represent a most serious and ill-advised restriction on freedom of thought and expression in one of the country’s oldest seats of learning.

Some think that, within any liberal democracy, the state must be entirely secular and neutral as between different religions and none, as both France and the USA are. State schools, on this view, must be entirely secular in their teaching and ethos.

Others deny liberal democratic values to be incompatible either with religious establishment or with the state-funding of faith schools. To be compatible with liberal democratic values, all that is required of a state is that it extend tolerance to all tolerant religions, and impose no element of coercion in matters of worship, religious education, or religious conscience.

Next Monday evening at 8pm, Channel Four is scheduled to broadcast a Dispatches programme which promises to make compulsive viewing for all concerned with how little progress the British authorities have seemingly made since 7 July 2005 in curbing the propagation of Islamist extremism.

Entitled ‘Undercover Mosques’ and reportedly twelve months in the making, the programme is an expose, using secretly filmed footage, of several British mosques playing host to, as well as selling dvds of, radical imams disseminating hate-filled messages that no responsible government should allow to be purveyed.

One of the mosques accused of selling such inflammatory dvds is the Central London Mosque situated in Regent’s Park whose attached bookshop is accused of selling dvds of incendiary speeches by two radical preachers, Sheikh Feiz and Sheikh Khalid Yasin.

2007 promises, or rather threatens, a dramatic escalation in mutual hostilities between the two contending forces in the current war between western liberal democracy and Islamism whose effects are likely to be most fully felt in the main current theatre of hostilities -- the Middle East.

This is because, rather than heed the Iraq Study Group which proposed capitulation to the forces of jihad, President Bush seems about to make one final push to quell the insurgency in Iraq and quite possibly also to endeavour, through or in concert with Israel, to destroy Iran’s nuclear capability before it acquires or worse still exercise it.

While Anatole Kaletsky and Matthew Parris in the op-ed page of today’s Times pour scorn on Bush's likely new strategy to end the war against terror by confronting its sponsors, quite wrongly in my view, buried in the News in Brief columns elsewhere in today’s Times is another indication of the gathering storm that lies ahead of us this year and which promises or threatens to be felt much nearer to home.

'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.’

The annual pilgrimage to Mecca, incumbent on all Muslims at least once in their lifetimes, today reaches its climax.

Concerning this annual festival, today’s Times reports the Saudi Minister for Islamic Affairs as saying: ‘The pilgrimage to Mecca is not a place for place for raising political banners … The haj is a school for teaching unity, mercy and cooperation’.

To that sentiment I say: ‘Amen, brother’.

Yet if that is the official view of the Saudi government, how come it has allowed a two day conference to take place in Mecca at the same time as this year’s haj which is being used by its organisers as a platform to call for world-wide concerted legal action against anyone criticising Islam or suggesting any link between it and terrorism?

Following the success of the authorities last August in nipping in the bud an Islamist plot to hi-jack and blow up ten transatlantic aircraft, Prime Minister Tony Blair asked John Reid, the Home Secretary, to undertake a review of current counter-terrorism in the UK and propose ways it could be improved.

That review is now apparently completed, and the Home Secretary’s report, along with his proposals, have been sent to the Prime Minister for reading over the Christmas holidays.

According to Wednesday’s Times, what is being recommended by the Home Secretary is the creation of a new Whitehall department to oversee and coordinate all counter-terrorism. In announcing to a House of Commons Select Committee on Tuesday completion of his review, Dr Reid explained in the following terms what had persuaded him of the need for such a new department in light of the current terror-threat:

‘This is now a serious threat. It is no longer is easily divided into foreign affairs, defence or domestic affairs. It therefore needs a seamless, integrated, driven, politically over-seen counter-terrorism strategy which places at its heart the recognition that above all this is a battle for ideas and values.’

In an intriguing twist to the story about Channel Four’s plan to make over its alternative Christmas Day message to a niqab-wearing Islamic Studies lecturer from Leicester, today’s Times reports the lady in question appears to have had second thoughts about appearing in the slot, claiming she hadn’t been told it was designed for broadcast at the same time as, and in competition with, the Queen’s Christmas Day message.

Channel Four is reported as not being at all concerned that the lady in question, Ms Khaija Ravat, might pull out, insisting it will go ahead with the broadcast anyway.

Could it be that, if Ms Ravat should not turn up for the recording of the message, all Channel Four need do is garb someone else in a niqab and no one would be any the wiser a substitution had been made!

Better still, should Ms Ravat pull out, Channel Four could employ a singer to do the slot and ask her to sing that time-honoured classic ‘I only have eyes for you’!

How silly of me to think Channel Four might do that. It would risk offending Muslims, whereas diss’ing the Queen by broadcasting a rival alternative Christmas Day message to hers, and ridiculing Christmas by giving over the slot to a niqab-wearing Muslim, apparently matters not one iota.

A few weeks ago, our airwaves and newspapers were filled with criticisms of the growing practice among Muslim women in this country of wearing the full face veil or niqab -- at work or elsewhere in public. What had triggered this wave of criticism was license for it having been given by several prominent Labour ministers who had set it in train.

For a time, these criticisms seemed destined, if not to stamp out the practice, then at least to make serious inroads into its public acceptability.

Well, if a week in Westminster politics is a long time, a month in identity politics is almost an eternity. Yesterday, as if to register how unserious an issue it considered it to be, Channel Four announced this year its annual alternative Christmas message, broadcast to coincide with the Queen’s, will be given by a niqab-wearing free-lance lecturer on Islamic issues from Leicester named Khadija Ravat.

Come the appointed hour, so today’s Times reports, Ms Ravat will not be tuning into Channel Four to see herself. Instead, it reports, she will be watching the Queen. ‘I’m going to be watching the Queen’s speech. I like being British – being British has so much that can be shared by many people’, she is reported as saying.

All nice clean, good-humoured, knock-about but essentially harmless stuff, you might think, that fully accords with the spirit of peace and good-will to all men that lies at the heart of the festive season. Might I beg to differ?

I don’t like what you wear but I will defend to the death your right to wear it? Surely anyone who believes in liberty should feel a twinge of unease when there’s talk of banning certain items of clothing. Yet today the BBC reports that a survey carried out for it by ICM has found that one in three people would support a ban on the niqab – the veil – in public places.

The debate sparked by Jack Straw, who said earlier in the year that the wearing of the veil is ‘a visible sign of separation’, has clearly moved on. It is one thing to object to the veil, or to wish that women would choose not to wear it in Britain, but to force them not to wear it? Beyond its visible divisiveness, let us recap some of the objections to the veil made by Muslim commentators and non-Muslims alike.

For a start, the wearing of the veil owes more to culture than creed, since nowhere in the Qur’an is it required as part of the female sartorial code, so encouraging Muslim women to communicate more fully with others in society can hardly be categorised as discrimination. It has also often been pointed out that the veil is an agent of repression. There have, for example, been reports of women being forced to wear the veil so hide wounds after they’ve been beaten. Another argument against it is that the veil is impractical. The most emotive of the arguments is, I think, Straw’s; namely, that the veil is frequently worn as a symbolic statement of Islamic unity in opposition to western society. What is particularly noteworthy, though hardly surprising, is that in Straw’s local constituency sales of the veil have risen significantly since he made his comments. Censorship and proscription always polarize.

So how can we avoid making this separatism worse? In a sense all of the cases made so far present us with serious causes for concern but not necessarily with absolute reasons for legislating against the niqab or jilbab or hijab.

But there are areas of social life where the wearing of the veil is potentially hazardous, where freedom of choice is not a strong enough argument. For instance, as Zareen Roohi Ahmed, chief executive of the British Muslim Forum, has said: ‘If security is at stake, such as at an airport, then yes, of course, the veil should be removed.’ The public evidently agrees, for six out of ten people believe that the veil should be prohibited in airports and at passport controls. There are also areas where being unable to see a person’s face prevents the execution of the law or contradicts common sense – such as in a court of law or academic examinations where you need to be able to verify the identity of the person sitting the exam – and a majority of the respondents in the BBC/ICM survey would support a ban in courtrooms and schools.

Banning in circumstances where it can legitimately be regarded as a threat to society should make it possible for us to permit it in circumstances where, though we may feel uncomfortable about it, we should be seen to be cooperative, discerning and fair.

Agreed?

Forget their constantly escalating estimated cost and the security nightmare of hosting them in the capital, a far more profound and compelling reason why London should not host the 2012 Olympics is that doing so seems likely to provide the perfect pretext for the construction of a giant mosque there able to hold 70,000 worshippers that those with some claim to who know about these matter claim will prove fertile breeding-ground for incipient jihadis.

It is not raving Islamopbobes who are making this allegation about the mosque, but local Muslim residents of the London Borough of Newham, where, if planning permission is granted, the mosque is to be built. So concerned are they that 2500 of them have in the last ten days signed a petition objecting to it addressed to London mayor Ken Livingstone.

Forget their constantly escalating estimated cost and the security nightmare of hosting them in the capital, a far more profound and compelling reason why London should not host the 2012 Olympics is that doing so seems likely to provide the perfect pretext for the construction of a giant mosque there able to hold 70,000 worshippers that those with some claim to who know about these matter claim will prove fertile breeding-ground for incipient jihadis.

It is not raving Islamopbobes who are making this allegation about the mosque, but local Muslim residents of the London Borough of Newham, where, if planning permission is granted, the mosque is to be built. So concerned are they that 2500 of them have in the last ten days signed a petition objecting to it addressed to London mayor Ken Livingstone.

Clearly, with every passing day, the Islamist terror threat grows ever more grave. It is also becoming ever more widely recognised, as increasing numbers awake up from their previous comforting dream that all such talk was merely ‘Islamophobia’ or else a guise by which the authorities here seek to justify grabbing ever more power to intrude into our private lives and to curb our time-honoured civil liberties.

In a recent posting in her web-diary, the redoubtable Melanie Phillips draws her readers’ attention to a very perceptive analysis of the causes of the threat made by the Conservative MP for High Wycombe, Mr Paul Goodman, in his comment in Parliament on the Queen’s Speech.

Yesterday’s Telegraph carried a frank and unequivocal comment article by the Labour MP and sometime Foreign Office minister Denis MacShane. MacShane says that while Britain’s politicians have been sedated by the opium of multiculturalism and political correctness, radical Islam has been spreading in our midst. He is damning of a leftwing that has aligned itself with anti-Semitism in favour of Islamism, damning of the failure to prosecute or extradite known terrorists, and damning of both the Home Office’s and the Foreign Office’s censorship of the debate. In actual fact, MacShane has been speaking out intermittently on this matter for some time, but he has also been accused of saying different things to different people. It is notable, then, that his denunciation of government policy to date includes a swipe at Tariq Ramadan, the high priest of double-speak or taquiya, and that he has been willing to see it printed in the national press. As MacShane presents it, there can be no ambiguity: we have a choice between terrorism - and free, democratic societies maintained by the rule of law. He is all for the latter. Perhaps he has finally decided to nail his colours to the mast. Not just this, but now, what with the recent pronouncements of Ruth Kelly, Jack Straw and John Reed, there is a growing sense that the government has finally realised that if it has a problem then it has to confront this problem robustly. Hence, perhaps, the timing of Tony Blair’s pronouncement yesterday, that his government’s position on multiculturalism had changed, and that the priority is now integration. No doubt the usual suspects will howl with horror. We should be cautious in our optimism and manage our expectations. There is a long way to go yet. But, as a Telegraph leader says today, if this government is serious about reversing the separatist legacy of multiculti politics and challenging the lethal ideologies infiltrating the Muslim mainstream in Britain, then this new political posture can only be a good thing.
Nick Seddon

Well, I never. What’s going on?-- to borrow the title of Marvin Gaye’s illustrious soul ballad.

You wait forever for a New Labour minister to say something moderately critical about the intransigence of some British Muslims, and then, blow me, in the space of a week no fewer than three of them show up doing so.

The first was Jack Straw who last week-end publicly expressed his preference for Muslim women in Britain not to wear the niqab, especially when visiting his parliamentary surgery. The niqab is that particular form of veil favoured by some Muslim women which conceals all but the eyes of its wearer. Straw said he preferred they didn’t because he claimed their doing so placed a barrier between them and whichever non-Muslims wth whom they happened to be having dealings at the time that prevented communication and so was not conducive to social harmony and cohesion.

The response of some British Muslims to Straw's remarks has been predictably negative: ‘The Muslim community feels angry and let down’ one Labour-party Muslim activist in Straw’s Blackburn constituency is reported to have said. ‘We want him to apologise and will keep on protesting until he does. I feel outraged and want him out of his job. The majority of Muslim women want him out’ another Muslim woman reportedly said at a protest held in Blackburn against Straw.

Judged by the tone of these comments you would have thought Straw had asked Muslim women to disrobe completely before entering his surgery.

It seems strange that Jack Straw should have said what he did when he did. Up until now, he has established a reputation for pandering to Islamists – during the cartoon fiasco he seemed more offended by the portrayal of Mohammed than the banners calling for ‘a real holocaust’ – and at all costs seeking to woo the Muslim vote. So why court controversy by expressing discomfort about the wearing of the veil?

Boris Johnson, we are told by all of the media, is not a very popular man at the moment, on account of a virulent case of foot-in-mouth disease. All the same, one of his comments yesterday in Bournemouth actually made rather good sense. To the calls for localism he posited an important caveat. ‘I may be in trouble for saying this,’ he told his audience, but we must not avoid ‘the issue of people’s failure to feel British, especially large chunks of the Muslim population.’ He added: ‘Supposing Tower Hamlets or parts of Bradford were to become governed by religious zealots believing in that system. Are we ready for complete autonomy if it means sharia law? I believe we should make people feel more British first, before encouraging more balkanisation and multiculturalism.’ Yes indeed.

Boris Johnson, we are reliably informed by our media, is not a very popular man at the moment, on account of a virulent case of foot-in-mouth disease. All the same, one of his comments yesterday in Bournemouth actually made rather good sense. To the calls for localism he posited an important caveat. ‘I may be in trouble for saying this,’ he told his audience, but we must not avoid ‘the issue of people’s failure to feel British, especially large chunks of the Muslim population.’ He added: ‘Supposing Tower Hamlets or parts of Bradford were to become governed by religious zealots believing in that system. Are we ready for complete autonomy if it means sharia law? I believe we should make people feel more British first, before encouraging more balkanisation and multiculturalism.’ Yes indeed.
Nick Seddon

Pope Benedict XVl delivered his controversial lecture at the University of Regensburg on Friday 15th September. His lecture was controversial because it included a quotation from a 14th century text that was highly critical of Islam.

The inclusion of that passage ignited massive protests around the world from Muslims who claimed that it had insulted their religion and its founding prophet. In the Middle East, churches were burnt in protest, and, in one north African country, a nun murdered in apparent retaliation for what the Pope had said.

Where there have been demonstrations against the Pope, some have merely demanded that he apologise for having insulted their religion. Others have gone further, calling for the Pope to be killed by way of punishment. Demonstrations of this latter sort arguably verge on incitement.

On the Sunday following the lecture, a widely reported demonstration against the Pope took place outside Westminster Cathedral at which various placards were displayed and slogans chanted that bordered on calling on Muslims to kill the Pope in revenge for including the quotation in his lecture.

This demonstration was well-attended by police who received a score of complaints from those attending the Cathedral service that morning who claimed to have been upset and intimidated by what they witnessed upon leaving it.

Although a spokesman for the CPS is reported to have not ruled out that some prosecutions may result from what was said at the demonstration, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair is today reported as being satisfied none were.

He is reported as having said of the demonstration: ‘We are living in an angry time. It is the job of the Metropolitan Police to hold the line of free speech and it is a difficult line to hold. But in this particular case I am satisfied there were no offences committed by anybody.’

On the Sunday of the demonstration, a Catholic medical student living in London who keeps a blog attended the service in the Cathedral. This is what he posted about the demonstration that same day:

‘My family decided this Sunday to make the trip to Westminster Cathedral together. As we came out about 100 Islamists were chanting slogans such as "Pope Benedict go to Hell", "Pope Benedict you will pay, the Muja Hadeen are coming your way", "Pope Benedict watch your back", and other pretty hateful things.

‘There were about 100 police around and about keeping an eye on things and video recording the protestors. I asked if they'd be prosecuted, and the policeman sounded edgey. He said they'd been warned about their behaviour already but arresting any of them might just fuel them up ever more.’

In light of this personal testimony, backed up by several photographs taken at the time by him and posted along with his account, presumably Sir Ian Blair’s denial that any offences were committed at the demonstration illustrates what sort of policing he had in mind for the capital on appointment when he introduced a new logo for the force which runs: ‘Working Together for a Safer London’.

That this form of policing may result in Rome or elswhere in the world becoming less safe is presumably of no concern to the Met.

Today’s Times reports senior members of the German government to be critical of the decision by the German national opera to cancel its planned run of a Mozart opera for fear that a recently added coda in which the hero appears brandishing the severed heads of several religious leaders, among whose is that of Mohammed's, and then announces the gods are dead, might so offend Muslims that they decide to bring the house down in an altogether novel way of registering audience disapproval of a show.

Of course, this kind of self-censorship is deeply regrettable. But under present circumstances, it is hardly unwarranted. Even if the opera went ahead with ‘Caveat Emptor’ warnings stuck on all billboards and tickets, it would still risk exacting reprisals that a theatre company is perfectly entitled to think are not worth taking, even for artistic reasons.

That is just a sign of how badly under threat Europe is now.

In a Times op-ed on Monday of this week, William Rees-Mogg defended Pope Benedict for having spiced up a lecture last week with a quotation describing Islam as a violent religion. Despite recognising the quotation to be offensive to Muslims, Rees-Mogg defended the Pope for including the quotation in his talk on the grounds that the Koran does contain much that Muslims can and do construe to endorse, if not demand, the use of violence in the furtherance of the spread of their creed.

‘Pope Benedict will have done Islam a service' concludes Rees-Mogg in his piece, 'if he has started a debate within Islam and between Islam and … critics’.

Can the author of Monday's defence of the Pope be the same William Rees-Mogg as wrote an op-ed published in the Times last February criticising on grounds of their offensiveness to Muslim sensibilities a Danish newspaper for having published cartoons of Muhammed designed to make the very same point about Islam as that which this week's Rees-Mogg defends the Pope for having made?

If so, surely, it would have helped regular readers of the Times had Rees-Mogg given some explanation in Monday’s piece of what had led to his apparent change of mind. Or, should he consider this week's defence of the Pope not at odds with his earlier condemnation of Jyttlands Posten for having published cartoons of Muhammed, to have explained what the morally relevant difference is between these two forms of criticism of Islam.

After a fortnight of concern about the ‘state’ of childhood, the Archbishop of Canterbury has stepped in: to warn us about the huge pressures that children are under. A key strain Rowan Williams highlighted in an interview this morning with BBC Breakfast, was the ‘relentless’ testing children are now subject to, which starts from a very young age. The saddest part of this particular contributor to the nation’s increasingly unhealthy and unhappy children is that it is so needless. Far worse, in fact, it is actually setting back holistic primary school learning, with inevitable effects on pupils’ later school careers. Last week, fresh evidence came to light of the widespread cramming which is now happening in primary schools. Research found that children who had gained the required level in the tests at the end of Year 2, were found to be significantly below that level when tested informally the subsequent year. Tragically, the purpose of this so-called ‘teaching to the test’ was to reach government targets. Pupils under pressure not for their own benefit, in other words, but for party politics’.

In what threatens to be a rerun -- mercifully, on only a more sedate and much smaller scale -- of last year’s Danish cartoons furore, an ecumenical group calling itself the Churches Advertising Network (CAN) is rapidly becoming the centre of controversy over a poster it commissioned for display this coming Christmas. The poster is intended to remind to all in need of one that, at the core of the festive season, lies an event of religious significance being commemorated, a fact that makes the season more than just an excuse for a two-week bender which for so many is all it has become.

Displayed on the poster is an empty beer-glass down which froth has assumed the form of an image of a bearded face that can, and is clearly intended to, be taken as that of Jesus. Next to it, the poster asks: ‘Where will you find him?’

Newspapers have had no difficulty finding people who object to the the poster.

It has been widely reported in the media this week that an Anglican vicar is in the process of garnering enough support from his fellow clergymen and women to be able to table at the General Synod of the Church of England a private member’s motion calling for St George to be replaced by St Alban as patron saint of England.

His ostensible reason for seeking the change is his claim that, of the two purported Christian martyrs to receive canonisation, it is the fourth century British-born Alban who is far more likely to have actually existed and lived in England than George, supposedly a third century Christian Roman soldier born in Cappadocia, now in Turkey, and who, according to legend, was beheaded in Lydda, Palestine, on orders of the Christian-persecuting Emperor Diocletian, after refusing to renounce his faith.

I cannot for the life of me see what entitles the Revd to his apparent confidence that St Alban more probably existed than did George. Granted as pure legend the latter’s victorious tussle with a dragon, that no more shows George never to have existed than does Jesus not accompanying Joseph of Arithemea to England show Jesus never existed.

Given the Reverend’s purported grounds for wishing to retire George as England’s patron saint, are we to assume that, should he have his way, we would next read about him calling for the removal from his church’s hymnal and its wider place in English national life of William Blake’s wonderfully evocative and inspirational poem ‘Jerusalem’?

A year on from the bombings here in London, what are we to make of how the Muslim and mainstream community in Britain has reacted to the traitor within the gates - extreme Islamism? Here are a couple of pieces to consider: a disturbing Times poll which reveals how widespread is the militancy within the Islamic community, along with a concerned leader, and the slightly muddled optimism of Ziauddin Sardar's usually trenchant New Statesman column.

Cast your mind back to February. We weren’t allowed to see the cartoons, but the reactions to them were everywhere. On our screens, in our newspapers, we were treated to the spectacle of Muslim extremists holding up banners praising the ‘magnificent’ attacks of 9/11 and calling for ‘a real holocaust’. There was even a cute little two-year-old girl wearing an ‘I love Al-Qaida’ cap, and that comedian who decided to don a suicide belt for a joke. After 9/11, 7/7, and various other Islamist atrocities, we could be forgiven for feeling that these weren’t just empty gestures. And then of course there were the riots all around the globe, the bizarre sight of Danish flags being torched, and the sacking of Danish embassies, a violation of diplomatic immunity that for some incomprehensible reason went unpunished.

In Britain, the apologies we heard from the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, the former Met chief, Lord Stevens, and others, indicated they were more upset about the depiction of the Prophet than about the fact that there are people in this country who are hell bent on slaughtering the rest of us. As I predicted here at the time, while people have been arrested for protesting outside the Cenotaph, not to mention clobbered by the police for opposing the fox-hunting ban, the public’s call for the cartoon protesters to be punished was quietly brushed under the plush carpets of Whitehall and Scotland Yard. Freedom of speech was most evidently lost in identity politics: incitement to murder, which has been on our statute books for a long time, was carefully glossed over. It’s called cowardice, folks, and it’s not something the Brits have been very well known for in the past. What’s happened to us?

As some pointed out at the time, and have continued to do so, this pusillanimity can be emblematic as one of the critical failures of multiculturalism. A politically enshrined doctrine that prioritises difference over unity can only fatally weaken the society in which it is enforced. Rather than seek common ground – or, since history has given us a very great deal of that, rather than assert common ground – we have allowed the glue of our common values to be loosened by the glue of minority cultures and religions. Thus could Anne Owers, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons, ban the flying of the English national flag in our prisons on the grounds that it showed the cross of St George, which was used by the Crusaders and is thus offensive to Muslims. Society, in this environment, becomes friable, liable to crumble when a rigid wedge, such as that of radical Islam, is driven in.

It has recently been announced that Sir Iqbal Sacranie is to step down as head of the Muslim Council of Britain in favour of his deputy, Dr Muhammed Abdul Bari.

A BBC news profile of Dr Bari informs us that he is chairman of the East London Mosque, as well as a specialist teacher in London’s Tower Hamlet for something the web-site terms ‘behaviour support’ and for which, it further reports, Dr Bari received an MBE in 2003.

According to this profile of him, at last year’s general election, Dr Bari, in his capacity as chairman of the London Mosque, helped to secure a healthy turnout of the Muslim vote in London’s East End by informing its attendees they had a duty to vote.

It would be tempting, although doubtless mistaken, to think that part of Dr Bair’s remit as a teacher of ‘behaviour support’ involved this call to active citizenship.

To think this of what falls under Dr Bari’s remit as a teacher of ‘behaviour support’, would doubtless be mistaken, however tempting, since it was precisely the large Muslim turnout his intervention is reported to have helped secure that was responsible for the return to parliament of George Galloway and his notorious ‘Respect’ party, hardly a good day for parliamentary democracy.

There was a revealing exchange on the Today programme yesterday morning, with sometime culture secretary Chris Smith, would you believe it, who was defending western values, and Tariq Ramadan, who was not.

The bravest and most articulate apostate critic of Islam in the West has been stabbed in the back by those who should have most supported her.

The manner and speed with which Dutch immigration minister and aspirant leader of the liberal party (VVD) Rita Verdonk yesterday set about the task of stripping fellow- party member and Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali of her citizenship because of lies she had admitted she told when applying for asylum some 14 years ago are as truly and utterly appalling as they herald a form of capitulation to those who would prefer appeasement to Dutch Islamists than confrontation that is truly dismaying in terms of what it heralds for the future of this once liberal nation.

Those of a similar generation to the present writer will be able vividly to recall just how dull it was to grow up as a child in Britain during the 1950s.

The Goons, Billy Cotton, and then Hancock’s Half Hour on the BBC Home Service (now Radio 4) in the background, over a bland but nutritious and entirely alcohol-free Sunday lunch – for the adults as well, that is!

Then followed a walk to the local park for a desultory kick around of a football, before home to tea of jam and bread, with a few squashed fly-biscuits or a slice or two of Jamaica ginger-cake as well if lucky, all eaten to the accompanying strains of a worthy but dull edifying black and white TV programme, before homework and an early bed in preparation for the school-week ahead.

Back then cinemas did not open on Sundays before the evening. Nor were any professional football matches played on that day. Pubs opened briefly for an hour or so at lunch-time, and the local high street was practically deserted with all shops shut apart from corner newsagents and convenience stores.

It wasn’t just post-war austerity at work here.

Much of the dullness of a traditional British Sunday back then -- and even well before, since, as I recall, even Friedrich Nietzsche commented on their dullness in Beyond Good and Evil -- was deliberate.

Sunday trading laws imposed severe restrictions on trading and entertainment to preserve and protect the sanctity of the Christian Sabbath.

According to a disturbing report in today’s Times, British Muslims currently studying to become imams at a Muslim college in London have voiced disquiet- understandably anonymously -- about the disparaging way in which some of their set texts describe non-Muslims. They study them on their eight-year programme of study the last three of which are spent in the Iranian city of Qom, described by the report as ‘the power base of Iran’s religious leaders’.

Study of the text in question forms part of their introductory course on Islamic jurisprudence, and, apparently, it likens non-Muslims to filth, as well as offering a literalist interpretation of jihad.

The seminary in question, Hawza Ilmiyya, shares its premises and staff with a second Muslim institute, the ‘Islamic College for Advanced Studies’, that offers a BA in Islamic Studies validated by a British university. That BA forms the first three years of their eight year programme of studies.

From the report in the Times, it is unclear whether the course-unit which includes study of the text students on it commendably find offensive forms part of the BA or their later studies. By describing the course-unit in question as an introduction to Islamic law, the report suggests students are made to study this text as part of their BA programme.

The Times quotes a representative of the course who teaches at both institutions as denying the text is taught as true doctrine. ‘We just read the text and translate for them… The idea is that they would be able to read classical texts and that is all.’

However, if the text in question forms part of the BA programme, one wonders how any British University could have validated that degree without requiring that text be subjected in class to critical exegesis that calls into question the legitimacy of any literal reading of it. After all, the British state funds that validating body and, to put it mildly, there is a legitimate public interest that all home-grown imams be strictly moderate ones.

Accursed be that tongue that tells me so,
For it hath cow'd my better part of man!
And be these juggling fiends no more believ'd,
That palter with us in a double sense;
That keep the word of promise to our ear,
And break it to our hope!

Funnily enough, I don’t like liars. I know all about Shakespeare’s equivocators – Macbeth’s witches, Iago, Richard III, etc. – how much damage they can do when they tell us what we want to hear, not what is true. And I’m suspicious of moral relativists. I suspect them either of knavish duplicity or wilful stupidity. You know, I just don’t think that if a Catholic priest is convicted for paedophilia Cabinet ministers would be calling meetings to tell the Catholic Church that it hasn’t happened - or that Henry VIII was in fact to blame. It just wouldn’t strictly be true.

I’m not a great fan of criminals either. I take one of those terribly outmoded approaches towards personal responsibility, that if you’re caught doing something illegal, not only you should be punished, but you should also be denounced. It sends out the wrong messages if you’re not. If everyone knows you're guilty, but don't punish you or denounce what you've done we’ll feel that things are unfair, and the British care dearly about fairness. Don’t we?

You’d have thought so. Except that the ongoing fiasco about the cartoons challenges such an assumption. The protesters against the cartoons in London – the ones calling for murder, decapitation, and similar charitable acts – were guilty of incitement to violence and incitement to murder. Added to which, those who burned down Danish embassies around the world broke the international law of diplomatic immunity. We should be in no doubt. What they did they did in the name of Islam and what they did was wrong. Most people are now agreed about that, even if it did take a lot of people a long time to discover their spines. Yet this is what Jack Straw said last night:

‘A large number of Muslims in this country were – understandably – upset by those cartoons being reprinted across Europe and at their deeply held beliefs being insulted. They expressed their hurt and outrage but did so in a way which epitomised the learned, peaceful religion of Islam. In doing so they were not being “unreasonable” or “un-European”. They were not threatening anyone’s values...’

Melanie Phillips is typically trenchant about the matter in her blog today. When you become indebted to bad guys at best you end up compromised, cowering and cowtowing; at worst you end up giving them everything they want. Islam might mean submission, but the extremists want Britain and the rest of the West to surrender.

When the social order is threatened we need a robust debate, not crapulous whining and pietistic cant. The newspapers broke no laws. It was the Muslim extremists who broke laws. Until we can be clear about this, we cannot begin to discuss how we orchestrate or promote greater racial and religious harmony. And we should be clear – those of us who believe in freedom of speech and the rule of law – how the social contract works. If you subscribe, you’re welcome; if you don't, you’re not. End of discussion. And we should stop feeling guilty about it.

Addendum: last week I posted the latest episode in the life and times of Ken Livingstone. Kindly enough, he has supplied us with another, affectionately calling the US ambassador to London a 'chiselling little crook'. The leader in the Daily Telegraph says what needs to be said. Has Red Ken become Mad Ken? When's this farce going to end?

Today’s Times carries a report about Abdul Rahman, the 41 year-old Afghani facing trial in his home country for what still remains there the capital offence of having converted from Islam to Christianity, something he did some fourteen years ago whilst residing in Pakistan. Apparently, it is reported, he might be able to avoid the death penalty by pleading being unfit to stand trial by virtue of insanity.

One need not be a follower of the libertarian anti-psychiatrist, Thomas Szasz, who rejected the very notion of mental illness, to be disinclined to pin one's hopes for this poor man’s future on faith in any such a sanity clause.

The reason the man should not be having to face trial or the death penalty for having done what he is alleged to is not that he is unfit to plead by virtue of insanity. It is, rather, that he has no case to answer, having done nothing for which he deserves to stand trial or be punished in having left his previous faith for another.

We have had to wait an – as David Davis called it – ‘unconscionably’ long time for the police to get round to it, but they have finally arrested some of the incediary Islamists who were protesting so outrageously against the cartoons last month, as the BBC reports today.

It is, sadly, unlikely that the offending extremists – guilty of incitement to violence and murder – will be prosecuted. The police force’s evasive procrastination is typical of their approach towards Muslim extremists: the strategy is one of deferral until the issue is forgotten.

You won’t hear this often, but I recommend having another look at an article by Christopher Hitchens, written at the time. His point is that freedom of speech is paramount – that it is Denmark we should be protecting, not the enraged Islamic umma.

If proof were needed that, on occasion at least, the pen can be a match for the sword, it has been more than amply provided by the recent spectacle of widespread disturbances within the Muslim world over the publication by a small Danish newspaper of cartoons of the prophet, Mohammed.

Ostensibly, what has affronted the protestors has been the cartoons violating an injunction of their religion forbidding pictorial representations of him. Since drawings of Mohammed have long existed in both the Muslim world as well in the West without occasioning comparable protests, their true cause must lie elsewhere.

The present government has great faith in faith schools, and amongst the other objectives of its current educational reforms is a desire to encourage still more of them. Subject to certain important caveats offered below, so it should.

This is so for several reasons. One is that faith schools have been proven to achieve, ceteris paribus, better exam results than community schools. Another is that, while some parents send their children to them only for the sake of the better exam results they are likely thereby to gain, many others, quite possibly the majority, do so because they subscribe to the faith with which the school in question is affiliated and want their children to attend it because they believe it will best inculcate and reflect their faith in its curriculum and ethos. Both these reasons are perfectly legitimate reasons why there should be faith schools.

However, many critics of faith schools oppose them on the grounds that, in a society as ethnically and religiously plural as ours, they impede integration and social cohesion and foster sectarianism.

Perhaps, it was because faith schools have started to believe this of themselves, or else have begun to fear that, unless they make more effort to demonstrate their non-sectarian credentials, those who do might eventually seek their closure or an end to state funding of them, that, as was reported in yesterday’s Times, they have decided to adopt the National Framework for Religious Education. This framework was originally devised for non-denominational community schools. What is distinctive about its approach ro religious education is that it requires children be taught about all the major religions practised in Britain today.

‘A jolly good job’ you might say, and possibly you will be right.

Caterpillar Inc is a US manufacturer of the bulldozers with which the Israeli authorities knock down houses and other buildings in the occupied territories that they judge need demolition in the interests of Israel's national security.

The Church of England has investments in Caterpillar Inc, and, of late, many Anglicans have expressed qualms that their church might be profiting from these, given what they consider to be the violations of their human rights suffered by those who lose their their homes as a result of the use to which the bulldozers are put by the Israelis that the corporation in which it invests manufactures.

Last Monday, the C of E’s governing body, the Synod, passed a resolution, with the personal support of the Archbishop of Canterbury, calling on its investment managers to disinvest from Caterpillar Inc..

Presumably, the Anglicans who so voted can all sleep easier in their beds safe in the knowledge that no part of their church’s income will shortly be likely to derive from so nefarious a source.

In fact, of course there is a large amount of disingenuousness on the part of those who voted for the Church of England to disinvest in Caterpillar. Their call for the church to disinvest in that company was born less out of concern that their church might otherwise profit from forms of activity of which they so strongly disapprove, than it was by a desire thereby to use the moral authority of their church to send out a signal that it abhors the Israeli government’s policy towards the Palestinians with whom it stands shoulder to shoulder in their struggle with this modern-day Goliath.

Assuming this to be the prime motive of all those Anglicans who, like Rowan Williams, voted in favour of their church disinvesting in Caterpillar Inc., what a glow of moral self-satisfaction there can be anticipated as forming on their faces when they read of the some of the most recent forms of Israeli governmental activity involving these bulldozers that their gesture of protest might be pressuring the Israeli government to cease to engage in.

According to a report coming from Jerusalem today, ‘Israeli Defence Force officials have been ordered to demolish …a small section … outside … a biblical city … in the West Bank … consisting of … several homes…. The IDF sources [said] they have been cleared to use “all necessary force” to remove [the] …residents.’

Even if the world manages to avoid the very real risk of a nuclear Armageddon, triggered by Iran's acquisition of nuclear capability and then either it or Israel deciding to neutralise the threat that each perceives that the other one poses it, there is another no less serious danger that humanity faces emanating from the same quarter.

This is the risk of global mental sclerosis to which humanity would fast be in danger of succumbing were either the UN, or failing that then the EU, to accede to current Muslim demands for each to impose curbs on the freedom of individuals publicly to criticise or lampoon religions.

On the surface, such called-for curbs can appear fair and reasonable. Jews, Christians, Hindus, atheists, Buddhists Sikhs and Muslims will all receive equal protection from their respective religious beliefs and practices, or lack of any, being criticised, satirised or insulted. In reality, such blanket protection is neither fair nor reasonable. For not all belief systems, and associated codes of practice, are equally as benign and hence worthy of respect and protection as each other.

Just as it would be ludicrous for the UN or EU to accede to any demand by neo-Nazis for their creed and its associated practices to be spared criticism, insult, or being lampooned, so there are versions of some world religions -- even, maybe, some world-religions simpliciter - that equally deserve not to be protected from severe criticism, insult and ridicule.

Should, in the supposed name of equal fairness to all different religions and faith groups, all religions become insulated by international or EU law from criticism or being lampooned, then humanity would suffer almost as profound an injury as that which it would sustain through suffering the calamity of nuclear holocaust.

For what is the special value of humanity, if it is not based on its being the one species with the capacity to think for itself and develop mentally?

What point does its survival have, if it should cease to be able to exercise that capacity and thereby develop and progress through thought and enquiry?

At least, the other animals do not pose the risk of which mankind has been recently accused -- of threatening to induce ecological catastrophe.

By their very nature, people’s religious beliefs, or the lack of them, touch matters of their deepest concern. Therefore, these beliefs of theirs are ones whose criticism, challenge, or being mocked are liable to evoke in those who harbour them the strongest emotions of hurt. But to deny people the right to criticise and challenge such beliefs, or the lack of any, on the part of others is to inflict on these latter a potentially far greater harm than any that they might suffer by having their religious beliefs or unbelief criticised, challenged, or lampooned.

‘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.

So there we have it: the collision of the two great British characteristics of decency and freedom of speech. On the one hand there is politeness, the wish not to hurt anyone’s feelings or cause offence; on the other hand there is the inviolable right to say almost anything. Generally the two act as checks on each other, encouraging us not to be, on the one hand, wimps, while preventing us, on the other hand, from being thugs. While many felt that the decision of the British newspapers not to publish the Danish cartoons represented an abandonment of their responsibility to exercise free speech, a majority felt that printing them months after their first appearance would've been gratuitous. Offence is good - and it's good to be free to offend - if offence is necessary. The worry, if it's not, is that acts of provocation end up being used to provoke more provocation. Then we're back in the playground again.

Despite 9/11, Madrid and July 7, as well as myriad other instances, it seems that we have constantly to be reminded that there are rogue elements in western society that seek to destroy both the tolerance of others and the right to speak out. The pandemonium surrounding the Danish cartoons - the savage vandalism and killing around the globe and the incitements to it in our own country - are only the latest instance. The government and its police force to whom, under the terms of the Hobbesian contract, we look to protect our safety, are going to have to get a whole lot better at protecting legitimate free speech - few things make people want to be rude as much as being told they’re not allowed to be rude - and punishing those who refuse to live by the laws of the land.

‘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:

Muslim cleric, Abu Hamza, is currently standing trial at the Old Bailey, charged with having incited racial hatred and with having solicited murder in statements that he is alleged to have made in sermons he delivered at the Finsbury Park mosque when an imam there.

Today’s Times reports that Mr Hamza’s counsel, Edward Fitzgerald QC, is running the defence that the statements made by his client in his sermons that have been construed as criminal in intent could not possibly have been so, since all Mr Hamza was doing was quoting from the Koran and other sacred Muslim texts.

‘It is said he was preaching murder, but he was actually preaching from the Koran’, Mr Fitzgerald is reported to have explained on Mr Hamza’s behalf.

One such statement, whose purpose in Mr Hamza's having quoted which is at issue, comes from the Koran. It runs: ‘Fighting is ordained for you, though you dislike it. You may dislike something although it is good for you, or like something although it is bad for you: God knows and you do not.’ (Chapter 2, verse 216)

A second comes from the Hadith, the compendium of sayings attributed to Muhammed. It runs: ‘The trees will call out to the Muslims “There is a Jew behind me, come and kill him”.’

In further exoneration of his client, Mr Fitzgerald is reported to have observed that all the great monotheistic religions have scriptures that contain “the language of blood and retribution”.

The trial continues.

Having been subjected to a fatwah that called for his death for blaspheming against God and insulting the man Muslims consider His supreme prophet, few besides Salman Rushdie can be considered better qualified or to have more of a right to call on Muslims to modernise their outlook.

Such a call is precisely what Mr Rushdie makes in an article in today’s Times, entitled, ‘Muslims unite! A new Reformation will bring your faith into the modern era’.

Amidst all the various flim-flam this week about how the anger of young alienated British Muslims might be abated by re-branding them British Asians or Asian British, Mr Rushdie goes to the heart of the problem when he writes:

‘It is high time, for starters, that Muslims were able to study the revelation of their religion as an event inside history, not supernaturally above it….

‘However, few Muslims have been permitted to study their religious book in this way. The insistence within Islam that the Koranic text is the infallible, uncreated word of God renders analytical scholarly discourse all but impossible….

‘The traditionalists’ refusal of history plays right into the hands of the literalist Islamofascists, allowing them to imprison Islam in their iron certainties and unchanging absolutes. If, however, the Koran were seen as a historical document, then it would be legitimate to reinterpret it to suit the new conditions of successive new ages. Laws made in the 7th century could finally give way to the needs of the 21st.’

Amen, to that, brother!

Assuming what Mr Rushdie asserts here is spot on -- as I certainly do, it follows Mr Rushdie is no less right in drawing attention to how ineffective the government's present reliance on ‘traditional, but essentially orthodox, Muslims’ is likely to prove in helping to quell Islamist radicalism, unless they too publicly affirm the need for their religion to modernise itself in the way in which he calls for.

Earlier this year, doubtless through the offices of the Prime Minister, a knighthood was bestowed on Iqbal Sacranie, head of the Muslim Council of Britain, for his work in helping to promote good inter-faith relations in Britain.

In his article, Mr Rushdie reminds readers this is the man who, as recently as January of this year, denied Muslims could be terrorists, saying that he expected use of the expression ‘Islamic terrorist’ to become an offence after the proposed law proscribing incitement to religious hatred comes into effect.

Mr Rushdie further reminds readers this is also a man who, in 1989, said of him in relation to the fatwah just issued against him, ‘death is perhaps too easy’.

Iqbal Sacranie – whoops, sorry, Sir Iqbal - readers of the Times are elsewhere reminded in today's issue, is also someone who last year responded to concerns the paper had raised about what was being taught to prospective British imams at a training college in Wales, whose course was then validated by the University of Wales, by accusing the paper of engaging in a witch-hunt against what he described as being a ‘credible and established institution’.

The curriculum of the parent body of this training college, whose course the Times reprts today has had its validation withdrawn by the University of Wales, is one devised by Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a great Muslim progressive according to the well-known authority on Islam, Ken Livingstone, whose teachings -- that is, al-Qaradawi’s, not Livingstone's -- include the legitimacy of wife-beating and the slaughter of homosexuals, apostates, and all Israelis.

Reliance by the government on ‘moderate’ Muslims of the likes of the head of the Muslim Council is unlikely to prove the way in which to curb Islamic fanaticism, given such ‘moderation’ as his.

Nor will simply requiring Imams wishing to preach at British mosques to speak in English be enough to stem the growing tide of alienation and hatred of Britain, and of much else too, to which young British Muslims are all too easily exposed today, not simply at their local mosques, but, often and far more commonly, through the inter-net or on videos – and all conveniently in the vernacular!

One thing is absolutely certain. Giving orthodox Muslims the power to prevent their religious texts being exposed to the kind of criticism for which Mr Rushdie is calling, through their being able to claim any such criticism an incitement to religious hatred, is the very reverse of what is needed.

What, then, is?

I am tempted to say that it should become mandatory for all British citizens, by the time they have completed their secondary education, to have been obliged to study and been examined in a course about religion in the modern world which would require them to become familiar with the very approach towards religious texts for which Mr Rushdie is calling in the case of Islam.

Control of marking of any such examinations would, of course, be in the hands of those qualified to teach and examine them -- an ideal way, we might think, in which to keep any idle theology and philosophy graduates fully occupied!

If it is protested that imposing any such requirement would be a gross intrusion into freedom of thought and expression, I would reply by citing in its support the words of that well-known apostle of liberty, John Stuart Mill, who, in his famous essay, ‘On Liberty’, proposed something not at all dissimilar, although, for purely pragmatic reasons that are no longer applicable reasons, he stopped short of calling for it to be made compulsory.

This is what Mill wrote on the subject:

Having argued here before that we should shut up the radicals and repress their materials, I now have to admit that I’ve changed my mind. If we call ourselves a free and open society then we cannot react to the violence and the threat of more violence from Islamists by censoring the opinions of their coreligionists. To shut down Islamic bookshops selling literature that advocates extremism is inconsistent, unless it is proposed that anything with unpalatable views – think BNP pamphlets or Mein Kampf – is also banned. Added to which, as The Economist leader points out this week, such material would simply end up on the internet, making surveillance even harder, and it’s also worth remembering - think The Satanic Verses - that censorship is fastest way to create a bestseller.

It is, furthermore, hypocritical to oppose the Incitement to Religious Hatred Bill on the grounds of its limitation of freedom of speech without realising that such a law is tantamount to what we are asking be imposed on the Muslim community. We should repeal the blasphemy laws, block the religious hatred law, enforce current laws, such as the incitement to racial hatred (if the BNP could be indicted under this in 2001 for their abuse of Muslims, then Hitzb-ut-Tahrir could be tried under this now), admit intercept evidence in court, and bring in the law for acts preparatory to terrorism.

The danger is that we respond to attack by being reactionary. If we are, as we say of ourselves all the time, tolerant, stoical in the midst of a crisis, and so on, then we must show that we are now. At least in part, how we define the current crisis effects how we decide to confront it, and allowing debate, rather than stifling it, is the best hope we have of finding a way through in the long-term.

Two short weeks to the day 56 Londoners of all races, creeds and colours were indiscriminately killed by four home-grown Islamist suicide-bombers, London’s Mayor, Ken Livingstone, has gone on public record in support of the moral distinction, drawn by Muslim theologian, Yusuf al-Qaradawi whom the mayor has called ‘progressive’, between suicide-bombings carried out by frustrated Muslims in London, unconscionable and wrong, and those carried out by frustrated Muslims in Israel, permissible, if not heroic.

The basis for the distinction, apparently, is twofold. First, whereas ordinary Londoners are innocent, ordinary Israelis are not. Ordinary Israelis are fair game in a way ordinary Londoners are not because Israel has a militia army in which all adult Israeli citizens must serve. Second, whereas Muslims in this country with a grievance against their government’s foreign policy can register their dissent through the ballot box, Palestinians have no corresponding peaceful way to register their opposition to Israeli policy in relation to them.

Dear or dear! If the Mayor thinks these differences between Londoners and Israelis will provide sufficient moral protection for the former from those Muslims prepared to kill the latter, he is even more of a fool, and a dangerous one at that, than he is in describing the views of Dr al-Qaradawi as progressive.

Precisely because Israel’s is a militia army, there is no more reason to think that Israelis who do not refuse to do their militiary service support Israeli policy in relation to Palestinians than there is to think British citizens, who do not refuse to pay their taxes which go to pay for the British army, support British foreign policy in relation to Iraq.

What’s good for Israeli geese, from an Islamist point of view, therefore, can easily be judged by one of them no less good, from their point of view, for British gander.

As for disgruntled British Muslims having, but disgruntled Palestinians lacking, a vote, it may have escaped the Mayor’s notice that Palestinians are not Israeli citizens but have been under military occupation since the 1967 War, pending a Middle-East peace settlement. Iraqis, disgruntled with Britain’s occupation of their country, cannot register their opposition to it by voting in Britain, any mmiore than can Palestinans vote in Israeli elections. (Well, perhaps, that’s overstating things a bit, sadly, since the advent here of postal voting!) Does that entitle them to register their opposition to British foreign policy in their country by bombing Londoners?.

It is interesting to note, by the way, that the Stern Gang and Irgun restricted expression of their resistance to British rule in Palestine before 1948 by targeting British military and government installations: not by indiscriminate terror bombings. So there is precedent for non-enfranchised freedom fighters being able to be a little bit more discriminating than Palestinian suicide bombers have been.

As for the Mayor championing the views of Dr al-Qaradawi as progressive and moderate, while the Muslim teacher might, unlike some still Muslims less ‘moderate’ than he ,have condemned the London suicide-bombings, this having done so offers less than full assurance of the progressiveness and moderation of his views, given some of the other things Dr al-Qaradawi has gone on public record as having supported. These include:

· The killing of homosexuals to keep society pure;
· The killing of apostates who have rejected Islam
· Female circumcision carried out on girls
· Wife-beating
· The killing of all Israelis

Returning to the last of these practices of which the friend of the Mayor is in favour, given the current popularity in Britain today of the political opinions of rock musicians, perhaps, friends of Israel could hold a concert at Hyde Park at which Bob Dylan could be invited to come and sing his 1983 song, ‘Neighbourhood Bully’ which offers greater insight into the nature of the current Middle-East conflict than does our very own neighbourhood bully. Lest readers of Civitas’ website have never or not recently heard the song, here are their lyrics:

Do you know what happens when you bomb London? The British government apologises for any offence caused and offers your coreligionists a job. No seriously, bomb us, and we’ll apologise to you. Yesterday, the BBC reported that Margaret Hodge, the Employment Minister, believes that it is important to find ways of encouraging young Muslims to feel integrated into British society, in the light of the terrorist attacks in London on 7 July, and ensuring they get jobs when they leave university is her answer. Quite apart from the ethics of such preferential treatment, she’s clearly ignorant of the circumstances of the four men (and the seven suicide bombers we previously exported to countries like Palestine and Pakistan), because decent education, jobs, the appearances of contentment and decency, really were not the cause of their radicalism.

Of course, there’s been a lot of talk about tightening up the terrorism laws, extending the security services, and policing our borders, and I cautiously applaud these measures, but, as Bill Durodie wrote in Chatham House’s recent Security, Terrorism and the UK report, the ‘problem with these is that, in seeking to secure society from the outside, we fail simultaneously to engage society from the inside with a view to winning a debate as to what we actually stand for.’ It remains to be seen if we have the nerve for that. Not just in terms of frank debate, but also in terms of unequivocal clarity. Although Tony Blair said yesterday that those who advocate suicide bombing ‘whether it's in London, whether it's in Afghanistan or Iraq, or it's in Palestine or it's in Turkey or Kashmir, or anywhere … have got no place in our country’, it’s not clear whether the government will make good on this rhetoric.

I was clearly guilty of wishful thinking in the blog I wrote last Friday when I applauded the apparent decision by the BBC, in the wake of last Thursday’s London bombings, to cease referring to those who had carried them out, and perpetrators of other such atrocities, by euphemisms such as ‘militants’, as had become its practice, and instead to start calling these despicable vermin by their rightful name of terrorists!

Today’s Times carries a brief news report to the effect that the BBC has decided to refer to last Thursday’s bombers on its news website simply as ‘bombers’, and not ‘terrorists’.

In explanation of this terminological decision, a spokeswoman for the BBC is reported as having said: ‘The word “terrorist” is not banned by the BBC …. [but] we take care great of the language used.’

…. So, it’s back to normal service from the BBC, although their news bulletins have yet to fall into terminological line.

If last Thursday’s bombings in London temporarily brought some parts of the BBC to their collective senses, they showed no such signs of having been able to awake from their complacent stupor the upper echelons of London’s Metropolitan police.

Shortly before the bombings occurred, Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Ian Blair, was interviewed on BBC radio’s ‘Today’ programme about security at the supposedly still forthcoming Olympic Games to be held in London in 2012. In the interview, Sir Ian boasted how British anti-terrorist procedures were the envy of the world.

Shortly after the bombings, Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Met, Brian Paddick, took to task a BBC interviewer who had spoken of ‘Islamic terrorists’ as their possible perpetrators. ‘As far as I am concerned’, Mr Paddick said, ‘Islam and terrorists are two words that do not go together.’

Doubtless, it is because Mr Paddick’s panglossian views about Islam and terror are so widely shared by his senior colleagues that, according to a report in today’s Times, the Metropolitan Police and the Association of Chief Police Officers have not seen fit in the light of last Thursday’s bombings to withdraw their financial support for bringing to London later this month the controversial Swiss-based Muslim academic, Tariq Ramadan, to address young British Muslims at a ‘Middle Path’ conference to be held at the Islamic Cultural Centre in Regent’s Park being organised by the Muslim charity, Da’qatul Islam.

For the benefit of those who might not before have come across the names of either the speaker whose visit to London the Met are helping to finance or that of the organisers of the conference at which he is due to speak, it might help to know the following.

The government has developed something of a knack for giving with one hand and taking away with the other. Not content with the ban on fox hunting, a backhander to backbenchers disenchanted by its courting of those nasty middle classes, nor with the notion of liberalising the drinking laws but imposing spot fines on those who drink too liberally, it is seeking, as tensions have escalated with Muslims over Iraq and the war on terrorism, to administer relief in the form of proposals for the prevention of religious hatred. Using laws to strike bargains is a risky strategy, and Civitas has voiced its opposition to this bill before ; it was dropped in the run up to the general election, but as the BBC reports, it’s back.

Although the anti-terrorism legislation ended up being little more than a rickety compromise, the fact is that Britain’s 1.8 million Muslims feel got at, and slips, such as Hazel Blears’ delightful admission that the ‘reality’ was that ‘our counter-terrorism powers will be disproportionately experienced by the Muslim community’, have hardly helped matters. New Labour has for some time been seeking ways to deal with the problem. In an article last year in Muslim Weekly, senior energy minister Mike O'Brien conceded that many Muslims were ‘understandably... very angry’. In exchange, he listed reasons why the Blair administration had been good for Muslims. These included plans ‘to toughen the laws on incitement to religious hatred’.

In Australia, where a similar law was passed in 2001, two pastors from the not very incendiary Catch the Fire Ministries have successfully been prosecuted for raising human rights concerns about Islam. Notwithstanding the judge’s acceptance that theirs was a fair representation of the teachings of the Qur’an and the Shari’a, it was deemed that truthfulness was no defence if the context could be construed as offensive. There was public outrage. As Amir Butler, executive director of the Australian Muslim Public Affairs Committee, has said: ‘a few nasty words about Muslims, spoken to a small gathering by a small group, transformed an unknown organisation into martyrs with an international platform.’

Today’s newspapers report NHS executives responsible for hospitals in Leicester are due to meet today to decide whether to order the removal from patients’ lockers of copies of the Gideon bible that have long routinely been placed there, as they have been in bedside tables of hotel-rooms and prisons throughout the world.

They are reportedly entertaining imposing the ban on two grounds. First, they fear the presence of the bedside bibles might violate equality and diversity codes or else offend non-Christian patients obliged by their presence to come into contact with them. Second, they are concerned the bibles might harbour the MRSA bug and so increase the risk of patients contracting the disease though handling them.

Mm!

In response to the first concern, Gideons International, who distribute the bibles, have offered to place notices in ward lockers advising patients how to obtain any preferred alternative sacred texts. In addition, representatives of all other major faith groups represented among Leicester’s large minority population have indicated entire satisfaction with the presence of the bibles and have expressed sadness at the prospect of their compulsory removal.

As to the second alleged ground for banning the bedside bibles, apparently the hospital authorities are not also contemplating banning from wards either newspapers or any of the numerous NHS notices routinely placed in patient lockers. Doubtless, MRSA bugs are all new-age pagans who believe only in homeopathy.

The fact is we have here another example of the same crazy political correctness as lately has caused Birmingham Council to replace Christmas by ‘Wintermas’, some schools to scrap nativity plays, and some shops and businesses to stop displaying Christmas trees, putting up decorations, or allowing staff to hold office parties at Christmas for fear of offending non-Christians. One may even include the craven message broadcast by the Queen last Christmas in which she seemed almost apologetic for celebrating the festival and anxious to include as many non-Christians in the celebrations as possible.

I have no immediate answer how to stop the madness and would welcome suggestions from readers.

However, please send suggestions by email. I have decided no longer to open ordinary post, for fear of what bugs envelopes might harbour, or to answer the telephone, lest I may offend any of the acoustically challenged.

An evangelical group, Christian Voice, is reported in today's Times as having successfully managed to ‘persuade’ a cancer charity, Maggie’s Centres, to decline the donation of £3000 offered by the cast and company of the West End musical, Jerry Springer-the Opera, raised by a special charity performance of it last Friday.

Christian Voice considers the musical blasphemous in the manner of its portrayal of Jesus and hence that all proceeds stemming from any performance of it unworthy of being accepted by a charity that Christians either work at, attend or support through donations.

Christian Voice conducted its campaign by employing a number of different strategies. It spoke to the charity of the offence it would cause its Christian clients and employees were it to accept the gift. Additionally, it claimed that, were it to do so, the charity would lose even more money than it would gain because otherwise would-be Christian donors would withhold their donations to it. Christian Voice also threatened to picket the premises of the charity were the gift accepted.

No right-minded person can possibly take exception to members of Christian Voice exercising their right to protest peacefully and lawfully against a musical they consider blasphemous. More questionable is their method of conducting their campaign against the musical by extending it to a charity offered a gift out of proceeds from its performance.

Advocates of church disestablishment rarely miss an opportunity to argue for their favoured cause. Many of them believe they have been provided with a glorious one by the recent announcement of the forthcoming civil marriage of Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles in a ceremony that will immediately be followed by prayers and a dedication conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

One such opponent of church establishment quick to seize this opportunity was self-styled Anglican atheist, Theo Hobson. (You go figure!)

In an article of his in last Tuesday’s Times (Feb. 15 2005), entitled, ‘Get Off Your Knees, Dr Williams’, Mr Hobson claimed that, by having publicly expressed its approval of the marriage, despite being unable on doctrinal grounds to conduct the ceremony since the couple are divorcees, the Church of England ‘has opted to become part of the heritage industry ... [and] no longer a convincing or compelling form of Christianity.’

It remains a complete mystery why anyone should suppose, as clearly Mr Hobson does, that the Church of England would become any more convincing or compelling a form of Christianity were it to sever its special connection with the monarchy.