Thursday, 14th February 2008
5:45pm
I suggested in a
post a few weeks ago that American Obamania displayed key similarities with Diana Derangement Syndrome, a mass epidemic of which broke out in Britain upon the death of Princess Diana when it was revealed to be the defining disorder of contemporary British society. The main characteristics of DDS are the replacement of reason, intelligence, stoicism, self-restraint and responsibility by credulousness, emotional incontinence, sentimentality, irresponsibility and self-obsession. Political icons to which this disorder gives rise achieve instantaneous and unshakeable mass followings of adoring acolytes because they grant permission to the public to suspend the faculty of judgment and avoid making any hard choices, indulging instead in fantasies of turning swords into ploughshares (which have a habit of turning grumbling global problems into murderous crises).
These candidates are quintessentially icons of hope over experience. Such a candidate is Barack Obama. Since he now appears to have the edge over Hillary, it would appear that American Democratic voters, at least, are highly vulnerable to DDS and are going down like flies with the contagion. Hillary’s campaign, which is showing signs of panic and disarray, has been criticised for not having a strategy to counter Obama’s charisma. This is probably an impossible task, for two reasons: 1) Hillary herself has negative charisma, being the embodiment of a particularly unattractive type of experience which voters find actively repellent; and b) since DDS is in essence irrational, the question that is implicit in Hillary’s pitch —‘Do you really want to trust the leadership of this country and the free world at this time of unprecedented peril to the political equivalent of Bambi?’ is likely only to elicit the answer ‘Yes’.
A recent article on
American Thinker by Ed Lasky indicates where all this may lead America. It suggests that, on the pivotal issue of Israel (pivotal because if politicians get that one wrong, they inevitably get everything else wrong —it’s a moral compass thing) Obama has a troubling record of surrounding himself by people who are hardly on the side of civilisation. Among these are the pastor of his Black Power church who is an ally of the racist and anti-Jewish demagogue Louis Farrakhan, the anti-Israel (and anti-Bush, counter counter-terrorism and anti-drug prohibition) activist George Soros, and advisers from the Carter era (whose most significant legacy to the world was the Islamic Republic of Iran) such as Zbigniew Brzezinski, who has
publicly defended the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis that the relationship between America and Israel is based not on shared values and common threats but is the product of Jewish pressure;
and from the Clinton era, the Palestinian apologist Robert Malley. Meanwhile, Obama actively opposed the nomination of the great John Bolton as US Ambassador to the United Nations.
In other words, he’s on the wrong side on all the important stuff. The fact that so many in America either don’t know this or are actually cheering for him because they are on the same side should cause those of us who have not fallen victim to DDS more than a shudder of alarm.
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Tuesday, 12th February 2008
10:37am
David Aaronovitch writes in today’s
Times:
The conservative Jewish commentator Melanie Phillips exercised some extra-jurisdictional powers of her own in calling for the Archbishop to be dethroned (next week the Vicar of Dibley gives her choice of Chief Rabbi), entirely missing Dr Williams's conservative attack on the decline of civility and ‘customary ethical restraints’ produced by our ‘narrowly rights-based culture’.
I wonder which is the greater of my crimes — to be ‘conservative’ or to be Jewish?
Apparently, this should debar me from saying that Rowan Williams should step down as Archbishop of Canterbury or saying who I think should be his successor. Does this mean, perhaps, that correspondingly I would not be entitled to say that Rowan Williams should continue as ABofC and that all other members of the House of Bishops are pygmies by comparison to his titanic moral authority — or am I simply not entitled, as a ‘conservative’ Jew, to criticise?
Are Catholics, atheists, agnostics, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and other non-CofE British citizens of a society in which the Archbishop of Canterbury plays an important leadership role also not entitled to call for his resignation because they fear he is inviting their country to commit cultural suicide through creeping Islamisation — or is it only ‘conservative’ Jews who are not?
Is no non-Muslim entitled to condemn Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi who says it is a religious duty to kill Israelis and coalition forces; or the head of the Muslim Council of Britain when he says he wants to Islamise Britain; or call upon the Muslim community to deal with imams preaching sedition and hatred – or is it only ‘conservative’ Jews who are not entitled to do so?
Are all ‘conservatives’ who are troubled by the ‘decline of civility’, ‘ethical constraints’ and ‘our narrowly-based rights culture’ to be expected therefore to endorse a) sharia b) the Archbishop’s belief that the principle of one law for everybody is ‘a bit of a danger’ — or is it only ‘conservative’ Jews?
Aaronovitch appears to think he is the only member of the commentariat to have read Dr Williams’s lecture (given the banality of his synopsis, he should have saved himself the bother). I have read it many times, and even heard it being delivered. Presumably however to Aaronovitch, since I am a ‘conservative’ Jew, that counts as not having read it at all.
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Monday, 11th February 2008
11:42pm
In a biting commentary on the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Asia Times columnist Spengler rightly highlights the fact that the authority on Islam whom Dr Williams cited in support of his assertion that sharia law was not an alien creed was Tariq Ramadan, a man banned from the US and France on account of his suspected links to Islamist extremism:
It is triply hypocritical when Williams, the spiritual leader of the Church of England, speaks of sharia law as if it were a private matter of conscience between consenting parties, rather like the use of rabbinical courts by Orthodox Jews. First, he admits outright that Muslim communities combine to coerce women but pretends that this is not relevant to sharia. Secondly, he offers concessions to sharia in the first place to appease the threat of social violence on the part of Muslims. As a final insult to conscience, he cites as his authority on sharia Professor Tariq Ramadan, who notoriously refuses to condemn the stoning of women for adultery, precisely because Muslim legal rulings specifically endorse such violence...
‘You should have a pedagogical posture that makes people discuss things’ such as stoning women, Ramadan insisted, which is to say that were he to condemn violence against women outright, he would be unable to speak to Muslim communities. That is Williams’ source. Coming from the leader of a major Christian denomination, this depth of hypocrisy is satanic, if that word has any meaning at all.
The Williams defence is now in full spinning mode. Useful idiots are being wheeled out to say that he has been appallingly treated, misquoted, misunderstood, vilified, victimised; it’s all got up by the tabloid media; it’s all got up by ‘traditionalists’ who’ve been gunning for him from the start. But like the British people in general who have exploded in unprecedented fury over his remarks which they understood only too well, there are too many serious-minded and highly well-informed individuals both inside and outside the church who realise that with Dr Williams’s remarks a line of the utmost importance has been crossed for this issue to be laid to rest by his slippery equivocations and disingenuous self-justifications.
Let us remind ourselves of the enormity of what this man said — that he thought one law for all was ‘a danger’, that sharia law was not an ‘alien’ creed and that its adoption by the British state was inevitable. With those unequivocal remarks people understood that this man would deliver Britain, the ancient cradle of individual liberty, into tyranny. The Archbishop may have manipulated the Synod today by playing both the penitent and the martyr. But the people of Britain, who are most certainly not the fools he takes them for, have finally decided they’ve had enough and are now ( thanks, ironically, to him) prepared to say so; and they will no longer tolerate the Church of England until and unless it rids itself of this holy fool and chooses a leader who will actually defend this country rather than capitulate to its enemies.
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7:10pm
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The Church of England has just made itself totally irrelevant to the defence of civilisation. It appears to have rallied to the support of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who has managed to turn his famed unintelligibility into his salvation. According to Times Online, he blamed himself for causing ‘misunderstanding’ among the public at large. This is obviously much more disarming than accusing the public of being too stupid to understand, but it amounts to the same defence — that there was nothing wrong in the substance of what he actually said. Once again, he repeated that he was
not talking about parallel jurisdictions
— but then went on to show that this was indeed the inescapable meaning of what he was saying:
The question remains of whether certain additional choices could and should be made available under the law of the United Kingdom for resolving disputes and regulating transactions. It would be analogous to what is already possible in terms of the legal recognition of certain kinds of financial transactions under Islamic regulation, including special provision around mortgage arrangements.
Once again, therefore, Dr Williams has displayed the cognitive dissonance which has been evident since he delivered his lecture — saying things the implications of which he appears not to understand and indeed promptly denies. But now the backlash against the backlash is well under way, and the Synod displayed as usual the intellectual rigour of a sponge by giving this absurd incoherence a standing ovation.
Dr Williams’s performance bears out the truth of a masterly piece in today’s Times by the incomparable Ruth Gledhill, who laid out unsparingly the intellectual arrogance that leads Dr Williams to say idiotic things and then be quite incapable of grasping there is anything wrong in what he has said:
Although he is a holy and spiritual man, danger lies in the appearance of the kind of intellectual arrogance common to many of Britain’s liberal elite. It is an arrogance that affords no credibility or respect to the popular voice. And although this arrogance, with the assumed superiority of the Oxbridge rationalist, is not shared by his staff at Lambeth Palace, it is by some of those outside Lambeth from whom he regularly seeks counsel. Top of Form
Botto
Neither the Archbishop nor his staff regard his speech as mistaken. They are merely concerned that it has been misunderstood. This characterises the otherworldliness that still pervades the inner sanctums of the Church of England.
If such intellectual hubris is bad enough for Britain, this is as nothing compared to what it means for Christians around the world. Dr Williams is the head of a church whose members are being persecuted, harassed, attacked, forcibly converted and murdered in large numbers at the hands of sharia law across Africa and Asia. He has, to my knowledge, said nothing at all about this. Instead, he is now proposing that sharia should be made a ‘supplementary jurisdiction’ in Britain, thus signalling his abandonment and outright betrayal of his flock who are suffering so badly at the hands of Islam worldwide. As Synod member Alison Ruoff said:
There are Christians overseas in Islamic countries who cannot believe that their Archbishop, who is not only head of the Church of England but of the Anglican Communion, has said such a thing when they are suffering from massive persecution in Islamic countries.
If he’d paid the slightest attention to their plight, he might have grasped the lethal frivolity of his suggestion that only the unthreatening elements of sharia law should be accommodated by the British state. As Dr Chris Sugden told the Synod:
…he had over the past few days had concerned emails from Christian clergy in Sudan, Nigeria and Pakistan. He said they had warned him that ‘Islam has never allowed itself to remain as a subservient legal system, neither can its system be taken piecemeal, on a pick or choose basis. It is exclusive and it is integral.’
As Canon Dr Patrick Sookhdeo, head of the Barnabas Fund which campaigns on behalf of persecuted Christians worldwide and one of Britain’s most authoritative experts on Islam and its relations with other faiths, has
written of the Archbishop's comments:
His view of shari`a is utopian and naïve. He has claimed that shari`a is not the monolithic system of detailed rules which most Muslims consider it to be, but rather an expression of universal principles being implemented flexibly according to context by means of ijtihad (individual effort at interpretation). While this expresses what liberal Muslim reformists would like to see happen, the reality is that for the vast majority of Muslims shari`a is still viewed as God`s immutable divine law regulating all areas of life…
Embedding shari`a in British law will negatively impact many vulnerable members of the Muslim community: women, children as well as secularists and liberals. They will all face increasing pressure to comply with traditional shari`a norms. Once shari`a is in place, community and religious pressure will make it exceedingly difficult for them to opt to be judged by English law…The process of setting up a system of shari`a courts recognised by the state and its civil law will help those Muslims in Britain who appear to be working to develop a network of loosely-knit Islamic autonomous regions, a de facto non-territorial Islamic state. Seemingly innocent and gracious concessions to such demands on shari`a contribute to building up an Islamisation trend which could become unstoppable…
It will open the door to a totalitarian and discriminatory system that denies individual rights and seeks to control both the public and the private spheres in ways typical of Muslim states. The increasing application of shari`a will profoundly change the character of British society in ways which hitherto would have been considered completely unacceptable.
This is what the Synod has today applauded. For shame.
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5:54pm
As a result of all the rumpus over the ABofC, I overlooked the fact that the School of Oriental and African Studies cancelled the propaganda-fest it had been due to host on behalf of the Islamic Republic of Iran which I wrote about below.
Well done, Potkin. Protest can make a difference. Message to all the fighters for freedom in Iran: you are not alone.
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Saturday, 9th February 2008
6:07pm
The man doesn’t even have the courage of his lack of convictions. Far from defending what he actually said about sharia law, the Archbishop of Canterbury is fighting to save his job by frantically back-tracking and claiming he has been misunderstood. It was all got up by the tabloids… no-one actually read the lecture… people have jumped to the wrong conclusion from a few misleading headlines. Ye gods. What planet is he living on? Everyone heard what the man actually said on the
World at One; by now, many have heroically ploughed through his
lecture as well. It is the words that he actually uttered that have caused unprecedented numbers to take to their keyboards in outrage. And it is the words that he actually uttered that make the statement on his
website attempting to justify himself, written in the third person by an anonymous apparatchik at Lambeth Palace, disingenuous to the point of being seriously misleading.
The statement says:
The Archbishop made no proposals for sharia in either the lecture or the interview, and certainly did not call for its introduction as some kind of parallel jurisdiction to the civil law. Instead, in the interview, rather than proposing a parallel system of law, he observed that ‘as a matter of fact certain provisions of sharia are already recognised in our society and under our law’. When the question was put to him that: ‘the application of sharia in certain circumstances - if we want to achieve this cohesion and take seriously peoples' religion - seems unavoidable’, he indicated his assent.
This implies that it was only in answering a question that he coyly agreed that the use of sharia was unavoidable. But he was actually promoting this idea himself as a desirable development. And as for not having proposed a parallel system of law, this is simply untrue. In his lecture, he said in terms that he was talking about the state recognising sharia in certain circumstances as a ‘supplementary jurisdiction’. It was a central argument of this lecture that the state, which already recognised some provisions of sharia (alas, too true) should recognise other provisions such as family law, and that individuals should be able to choose which system they wanted, in
…a scheme in which individuals retain the liberty to choose the jurisdiction under which they will seek to resolve certain carefully specified matters, so that ‘power-holders are forced to compete for the loyalty of their shared constituents’. This may include aspects of marital law, the regulation of financial transactions and authorised structures of mediation and conflict resolution – the main areas that have been in question where supplementary jurisdictions have been tried, with native American communities in Canada as well as with religious groups like Islamic minority communities in certain contexts.
That means two systems existing side by side with equal status. In other words, parallel systems. Next, the statement says Dr Williams
importantly…noted that there was room, even within Islamic states which apply sharia, for some level of ‘dual identity’, where the state is not in fact religiously homogenous.
So what? All that
‘importantly’ means is that not every Islamic state is a theocracy, any more than Britain is a theocracy even though it is a Christian country (someone please tell the Archbishop of Canterbury). There is a great difference between that distinction — the essence of a liberal society — and the attitude of those British Muslims who want to live under sharia rather than English law, a situation Dr Williams himself described as leaving them
systematically faced with the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty…
This is actually a shattering thing to say about Britain’s Muslim community. For it says that their loyalty to their culture is in conflict with their loyalty to the UK — a conflict experienced by no other minority in the UK, which Dr Williams appears not to grasp. His whole lecture was devoted to attempting to resolve that conflict — which he did by suggesting, in effect, that if Muslims can’t be British under existing law, then Britain will have to become at least a little bit Muslim, in order to enable what he called in terms
a competition for loyalty
with Muslims given the ability to choose between English and Islamic law. This shocking suggestion is the undeniable meaning of his words, delivered at such great length. Can it really be the case that no-one at Lambeth Palace actually understands what these words mean? Or are they really so arrogant that they thought no-one else would understand?
Next, the statement attempts to suggest that Dr Williams wasn’t really talking principally about sharia at all:
In his lecture, the Archbishop sought carefully to explore the limits of a unitary and secular legal system in the presence of an increasingly plural (including religiously plural) society and to see how such a unitary system might be able to accommodate religious claims… He explained that his core aim was to: ‘to tease out some of the broader issues around the rights of religious groups within a secular state’ and was using sharia as an example.
Oh come
on. Using sharia merely ‘as an example’? His lecture was
all about how sharia might be accommodated by the state, a question which he set in the context of the broader issue of religious and legal pluralism.
Next, the statement actually repeated the significant error Dr Williams made about Jewish law and the relationship between British Jews and the state:
At the end of the lecture the Archbishop referred to a suggestion by a Jewish jurist that there might be room for 'overlapping jurisdictions' in which ‘individuals might choose in certain limited areas whether to seek justice under one system or another’. This is what currently happens both within the Jewish arrangements and increasingly in current alternative dispute resolution and mediation practice.
This is completely untrue. As I wrote in my post below, there are no ‘overlapping jurisdictions’ between English and Jewish law, and Jewish law is not a ‘supplementary jurisdiction’ in the UK. A jurisdiction is a body of legal authority which has binding force upon those to whom it is applied. Jewish religious law in the UK has no legal authority over British Jews and no such binding force. Jews most certainly do not choose ‘whether to seek justice in one system or another’ except where their participation in Beth Din religious tribunals is entirely voluntary on the part of all concerned, such as in the informal arbitration of disputes. For the enforcement of justice, they must seek remedies from English law, just as they must be married or divorced under English law — Jewish marriage and divorce rituals having no official standing — for such status to be recognised by the state. It is a Jewish religious requirement for Jews to live under the law of the land in which they reside. It is simply astounding that Lambeth Palace continues to perpetuate a false impression about this. Do they really know nothing about Judaism? Why do they insist upon dragging the Jews into this?
The statement also omits any reference to the most astonishing thing of all that the Archbishop said: that there should not be one law for all. In the lecture he said he wanted to end our
unqualified secular legal monopoly;
he wanted the rule of law to be detached from
any one form of corporate belonging or any particular history
— ie, to be detached from one thousand years of British history, Christian ethics, the English common law and western civilisation; because, as he said so jaw-droppingly in his radio interview:
An approach to law which simply said - there's one law for everybody - I think that's a bit of a danger.
Dr Williams says he has been misunderstood. Tellingly, his website statement makes no defence at all of this devastating renunciation of the doctrine of equality before the law. This omission suggests that at least someone at Lambeth Palace understands what Dr Williams actually said only too well.
The lecture and radio interview were bad enough, heaven knows. But this statement on his website raises yet further concerns. How can the Archbishop of Canterbury put out such a seriously misleading and, in parts, demonstrably false statement? It moves this affair on from questions about judgment — which are serious enough — to questions about integrity. Either Dr Williams really does not understand what he himself said — in which case he is a fool; or he understands exactly what he said and is trying to pretend that he didn’t say it — in which case he is a knave.
Either way, he has done great harm to his church and is a danger to his country (although through this furore he has also, unwittingly and ironically, set back the agenda of Islamisation by stealth which had been making such headway; hence the very carefully modulated support for him by such Islamist strategists as the Muslim Council of Britain). He should stand down and the courageous and sharp Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali — a man whose life is now in danger for having spoken the truth about Islam in a Britain whose religious and cultural identity he actually defends, but about whom Dr Williams has said not one word in support — should take his place.
Now that really would be a statement in defence of Britain and western civilisation.
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Friday, 8th February 2008
11:48pm
The most bizarre aspect of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s extraordinary declaration today of abject religious and cultural surrender to Islam was the extreme lengths to which he went to avoid precisely the furore which has now erupted — and then proceeded dramatically to depart from his own strategy.
In a major
lecture this evening, which I attended, he argued for an accommodation between English law and Islamic sharia law: an end to the ‘legal monopoly’ of English law, in order to allow people to choose between Islamic and English law for the resolution of disputes and the administration of marriage, divorce, inheritance and other matters. This incendiary proposition was nevertheless expressed in the lecture in language so convoluted and ambiguous — ‘nuanced’ is, I think, the current expression of choice — that many in the audience admitted they didn’t have a clue what on earth he was actually saying. So nervous was Lambeth Palace, however, that the press would sensationalise his remarks, it tried to control the reaction by restricting embargoed copies of the text so that few papers would be able to report the lecture — and instead giving an exclusive interview with Dr Williams to BBC Radio Four’s
World at One.
Boy, was that ever a mistake. For in that interview, Dr Williams for some reason abandoned nuance altogether and left no room for doubt about what he was saying. Which was, in short, that although the
sensational reporting of opinion polls
recording large numbers of British Muslims who want to live in the UK under Islamic sharia law clouds the issue,
t
he adoption of sharia law in the UK seems unavoidable
and indeed desirable, since Muslims should not have to choose between the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty.
So although
nobody in their right mind would want to see in this country the kind of inhumanity that's sometimes been associated with the practice of the law in some Islamic states,
Muslims should be able to choose to have marital disputes or financial matters dealt with in a sharia court. Such courts should therefore be
incorporated into the British legal system
as a
constructive accommodation
with Islam.
The result of this pre-emptive interview was that, hours before he stood up to deliver his lecture to a packed audience of more than 1000 people in the Royal Courts of Justice, he had achieved the remarkable feat of uniting the leadership of the entire political class and more — even the leader of the LibDems! — in a firestorm of condemnation of his astonishing abandonment of the fundamental doctrine of a democratic nation state: equality before the law.
His argument was quite extraordinarily muddled, absurd and wrong. The European Court of Human Rights has said that sharia law is not compatible with democracy. Dr Williams himself accepts its principles are pre-modern and oppressive. Yet, arguing disingenuously that
There is no single code that can be identified as ‘the’ sharia
but ignoring what inevitably follows — that one cannot therefore tell whether one will end up with the death-to-apostates code or one that is relatively benign (whatever that might mean in this context) — he nevertheless argued that the British state should recognise sharia law as of equal status to English law. On World at One, he said:
An approach to law which simply said - there's one law for everybody - I think that's a bit of a danger.
The implications of this are simply staggering. One law for all is the very basis of legal and social justice and is the glue that binds a society together. Law is the expression of a society’s cultural identity. If there is no one law, there is no one national identity and therefore no society but instead a set of warring fiefdoms with their own separate jurisdictions. To enable people to chop and choose between two jurisdictions would destroy the unitary nature of British society and fragment the country. But does Dr Williams even understand what he himself has said? For after his lecture, he insisted that he was
not talking about parallel systems but how the law accommodates Muslim practice.
Yet he had specifically said people should be able to choose which system they wanted.
Hello? Maybe Dr Williams himself gets lost in the impenetrable thicket of his own verbiage.
Either way, his proposal would also mean that Britain would simply abandon its female Muslim citizens whose parlous position in respect of forced marriages, honour killings and all the other horrors that follow from their second-class religious status would be institutionalised by giving sharia law official recognition. Dr Williams says such women should still retain the right of appeal to the English courts if their human rights were breached under sharia. What absurdity is this? It is the cultural assumptions which flow from sharia which lead to the oppression of Muslim women. How is the right of appeal to human rights law going to help women who are beaten and killed by men who do it in the name of religion? In order to protect our female Muslim citizens, we need to remove from them the yoke of sharia law, not institutionalise it with the seal of official approval.
Dr Williams appears to believe that English law would somehow absorb sharia. In fact, it would be absorbed by it for the simple reason that sharia brooks no alternative authority. But the yet more fundamental question is why he thinks we need to find any accommodation with sharia at all. He said
there remains a great deal of uncertainty about what degree of accommodation the law of the land can and should give to minority communities with their own strongly entrenched legal and moral codes.
Well no, actually there isn’t any uncertainty at all. The rules of our society have always been entirely clear: one law for all. The only challenge to that has come from those Muslims who want to destroy that foundational precept and along with it British culture and western society. And now the head of the Anglican church has joined them in wanting to tear up the rules governing the position of minorities which have been perfectly clear ever since the Enlightenment. These rules hold that religious minorities can practise their faith and religious precepts but under the over-arching umbrella of the law of the land. That means where there is a conflict between minority precepts and the law, the minority gives way. While minorities should be given the freedom to practise their religion, they must not seek to impose their own laws and customs on the majority. That is how overlapping identities can be accommodated; it is how a majority culture can acknowledge the value of other cultures without destroying itself and a nation’s identity; it is the very essence of a tolerant, decent, liberal pluralist society.
Every minority until now has lived perfectly happily under that formulation. What we are now facing is a push by certain British Muslims, backed up by Islamist violence and intimidation, to change the rules of the national cultural game. There is only one proper response to that: to say that not one inch of leeway will be given to sharia law, that British society will not dilute the legal principles which govern all its citizens, and that Muslims must observe the same rules that govern every other minority in this country.
But then, Dr Williams purports not to understand that this indeed the case. For he used Britain’s Jewish community to underpin his claim that there was nothing particularly untoward about multiple jurisdictions — but in the process significantly misrepresented Jewish practice to imply, entirely falsely, that British Jews aren't bound by the law of the land but get an exemption. He drew an analogy between Islamic sharia courts and Jewish religious courts. But there is an absolutely crucial difference between them.
Yes, Jewish religious courts, like sharia courts, deal with such issues as dispute arbitration, family issues, marriage and divorce. But the Jewish courts have never sought official recognition of their rulings, and these are not recognised under English law. Their dispute resolution is informal and voluntary. Their religious marriage and divorce rituals have no status in English law (with the exception of one tiny wrinkle designed to help resolve an anomaly in Jewish divorce law which causes otherwise unavoidable distress); for the state to recognise their marriages or divorces, Jews have to marry or be divorced according to English law just like everyone else. If sharia courts were to operate in this way, there would be no problem. Why should anyone care, after all, what minorities are doing in the private sphere as long as it doesn’t break the law? But the crucial difference is that such Muslims want their rulings to be accepted by the state as having the same legal authority as English law — and Dr Williams is endorsing this. But it breaks the fundamental precept that Jews have always acknowledged — that as a minority they live under the law of the land and do not seek to change it to accommodate them.
After the lecture, I challenged Dr Williams on this point, and said he was wrong to claim that the state had delegated legal authority to Jewish religious courts. Jewish religious law was not recognised by or incorporated into English law, and so I wondered why he thought that Islam alone should be able to gain special status in opposition to the legal and cultural norms of this country. He replied:
I didn’t say that Jewish law had been incorporated; I know very well that it is not. But it has established recognised practices with regard to marriage and divorce which the law doesn’t seek to override or displace. I used the analogy not to claim privileged access for Islam but to show where a parallel system of religious law was embedded in our social practice.
But in his lecture he had in fact spoken of whether there should be
…a delegation [from the law of the land] of certain functions to the religious courts of a community; and this latter question, it should be remembered, is relevant not only to Islamic law but also to areas of Orthodox Jewish practice’.
On the contrary: it is
not relevant to orthodox Jewish practice, because the state does not delegate any legal functions to Jewish law at all.
What Dr Williams has effectively said is that a majority culture has no right to exist and hold the ring for equal citizenship among inhabitants from different cultures:
The danger is in acting as if the authority that managed the abstract level of equal citizenship represented a sovereign order which then allowed other levels to exist. But if the reality of society is plural – as many political theorists have pointed out – this is a damagingly inadequate account of common life, in which certain kinds of affiliation are marginalised or privatised to the extent that what is produced is a ghettoised pattern of social life, in which particular sorts of interest and of reasoning are tolerated as private matters but never granted legitimacy in public as part of a continuing debate about shared goods and priorities.
If therefore we really don’t have the right to uphold the primacy of our own western liberal and Christian laws and traditions, the way is open for fragmentation and eventual rule by the religious culture which exercises the strongest muscle. Which is Islam.
People often say the church is now irrelevant. On the contrary — without a strong religious core providing the moral, ethical and cultural ballast, the society it has been instrumental in forming becomes intensely vulnerable to collapse and colonisation. The defence mounted by politicians becomes an empty shell — particularly when we can see they are already running scared and selling the cultural pass with measures such as sharia finance or welfare benefits for polygamous wives.
Is this really the way the history of a nation, which has for the last thousand years fought off invasion and defended its independence and the liberty it created for the world, finally ends — with the head of its established church on his knees before terror?
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Thursday, 7th February 2008
10:25am
Last night’s Moral Maze, on which I am a panellist, discussed the Home Office guidelines which advise officials not to call Islamists Islamists or Islamic terrorists Islamic terrorists but to use instead euphemisms based on the premise that the jihad against the west is not a war of religion but merely ‘violent extremism’ and that the jihadis are not jihadis but ‘criminals’. So gripped is the Home Office by the belief that speaking the truth to Muslims will ‘alienate’ them that its Orwellian attempt to manipulate the language descends into pure farce when it suggests that even the word ‘Islamophobia’ should be avoided since this
can be misunderstood as a slur on Islam and perceived as singling out Muslims (even though it indicates we are positively addressing their concerns).
Alas— with the sole exception of witness Anthony Browne from Policy Exchange, my own view on all this was drowned out. I found the programme deeply troubling, indeed terrifying, since it revealed so much deep denial of the blindingly obvious among otherwise intelligent people who on this subject appear to be impervious to facts and to reason itself. (There was also a notable performance by a young Muslim who, when I asked him how Islamic terrorism could be un-Islamic when it was endorsed as a religious duty by Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, one of the pre-eminent religious authorities in the Islamic world and who has a significant following among British Muslims, declared with a straight face that Qaradawi was in a minority of one).
If people really are incapable of seeing that what we have to fight is religious fanaticism operating through a strategy of mind-bending intimidation and coercion, and instead succumb to that very intimidation and coercion, then we are indeed finished.
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Wednesday, 6th February 2008
4:34pm
The Times reports the shocking news that drug dealers are getting into mental health units by posing as patients’ friends and selling them cannabis. According to Marcus Roberts, policy director of the mental illness charity MIND, this abuse is rife throughout the country. And what do the hospitals themselves say about this?
Some hospitals have brought in sniffer dog patrols to scare dealers off but staff say that they have no rights to stop patients and friends coming in or out, or to search anyone who may be carrying drugs.
No rights, eh? But they are directly responsible for the safety and well-being of the patients in their care. They are failing to prevent drug-dealing predators from targeting psychiatric patients on their wards who are in no state to resist. No
rights? It’s their flaming duty to stop this, and if they don’t do so they should be replaced by hospital staff who actually understand what this means.
Pathetic.
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4:08pm
A propos the confusion I reported below about whether the Dimona human bomb attack was carried out by Hamas members from the West Bank entering southern Israel through non-existent border security or the Fatah-affiliated Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades members from Gaza entering Israel from Egypt (who claimed responsibility, along with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), it turns out — bizarrely — that both Hamas and AAMB each simultaneously dispatched a pair of human bomb murderers to attack Dimona. The Fatah pair, who were indeed following the Egypt route, were arrested by the Egyptians before they got there. It was the pair from Hebron who got through (presumably via the West Bank route) and carried out the attack. This raises an intriguing incidental question. As Khaled abu Toameh laconically notes in the Jerusalem Post: Fatah has also not commented on an explanation for the pictures of the grieving families in the Gaza Strip of the alleged suicide bombers from Fatah.
See picture above, captioned by photographer Mahmud Hams of AFP as: Relatives of Palestinian suicide bomber Musa Aarafat, 23, hold his picture at his family house in Khan Yunis, southern Gaza Strip, February 4 2008.
Pallywood, anyone?
Pondering the uniquely bizarre nature of these events, Barry Rubin writes:
Fatah is essentially coming to the aid of a Hamas regime which threw it out of Gaza and killed, sometimes in cold blood, and represses its own people. Why? Because Fatah and the PA are competing for Palestinian popular support in the Gaza Strip and the way that one does this is to murder Israeli civilians. This is a very telling definition of Palestinian politics, ideology, and public opinion…
To summarize: Fatah acts as a terrorist group; the PA facilitates terrorism and includes people leading terrorist groups; Fatah views itself as an ally of a group that attacks it and murders its own members; the West aids Fatah and the PA with no attempt to discourage their behavior; Israeli Arab politicians side with terrorism; and Israelis, at the risk of their lives, try to save Arab lives, and would like to have a two-state solution if the other side is every able to make and implement such a deal.
Oh, yes, and guess who much of the world blames for the conflict.
Just another day in the Middle East madhouse...
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