A holy fool?

Monday, 11th February 2008

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.