The war within and against the west

Once again, Britain’s ‘moderate’ Muslim community is upping the ante against the British society in which it resides. The Sunday Telegraph reports that senior Muslims are pushing to integrate sharia law into English law. Dr Suhaib Hasan who, we learn, has been presiding over sharia courts in Britain for more than 25 years, is anxious to dispel any idea that sharia means flogging, stoning or amputations. Good grief no, perish the thought apparently it’s ‘only’ about family law.

 
Uh huh. But as Baroness Cox points out in this story, sharia family law is utterly inimical to English law and British values, based as it is on the subjugation of women and the negation of individual freedom. Moreover, a few paragraphs on it turns out that Dr Hasan actually thinks that stoning adulterers and cutting off thieves hands is an absolutely splendid idea for reducing Britain’s crime rate! Who could object?!

 
And to back up his whole sinister proposal, he makes the utterly false analogy with Jewish religious law. We are told that he argues that

British law would benefit from integrating aspects of Islamic personal law into the civil system, so that divorces could be rubber-stamped in the same way, for example, that Jewish couples who go to the Beth Din court have their divorce recognised in secular courts.

This is rubbish. Jewish couples who divorce have to do so under English law for their divorce to be recognised by the state. The separate Jewish religious divorce (which incidentally causes much distress to women in certain circumstances to whom it does not grant a divorce, precisely because it does not correspond to English law) is just that, an entirely separate and culturally private matter. Although there are Jewish religious courts giving judgments over a wide range of issues, the whole point is that they have the status of informal arbitration and do not impinge at all upon the laws or customs of the country. They are based on the acknowledgement that, where Jewish religious law conflicts with English law, Jewish law gives way. Wherever they have settled over the centuries, Jews have always accepted that, as citizens of that country, they are bound by its laws. They have never required the host country to change its laws or customs to accommodate them; nor do they set their own religious laws above those of their country.  

 
It is very important that people realise the crucial difference between allowing a minority the right to practise its own precepts while fitting in with the law of the land, and allowing members of a minority to force the law of the land to fit in with them. It is very important that people understand that the pressure to sharia-ise Britain is far more dangerous even than terrorism because – see the government’s embrace of ‘sharia finance’ – its implications simply aren’t understood and it is likely therefore to be accepted. Salami-slice by salami slice, this is how British society will be dismembered.