The weakest link
In Londonistan, the appeasement of radical Islamism is lurching ever more giddily into the realm of the surreal. Hard on the heels of the Appeal Court ruling that abu Qatada, bin Laden’s right hand man and the most important al Qaeda operative in Europe, cannot be deported to Jordan under human rights law because witnesses in any future prosecution of him might themselves have been tortured by the Jordanians, the Sunday Times reported yesterday:
The Royal Navy, once the scourge of brigands on the high seas, has been told by the Foreign Office not to detain pirates because doing so may breach their human rights. Warships patrolling pirate-infested waters, such as those off Somalia, have been warned that there is also a risk that captured pirates could claim asylum in Britain. The Foreign Office has advised that pirates sent back to Somalia could have their human rights breached because, under Islamic law, they face beheading for murder or having a hand chopped off for theft.These pirates kill, steal and take ships’ crews hostage. Until 1998, the death penalty for piracy was on the English statute book. Now Britain, which once ensured the high seas were safe through its robust policing of pirate ships (the picture shows HMS Mary Rose in a battle with seven pirate ships between Salé and Tangier, December 8th, 1669) puts the interests of criminals first instead.
But this madness goes much further. For although Britain seeks to protect Somalian criminals from the horrors of Islamic religious law, the Sunday Telegraph reported:
At a conference in London on Thursday, the Government is expected to call for the opening of more Islamic study centres at British universities. Last year, ministers declared Islamic studies a ‘strategically important subject’ and put aside £1 million for the teaching of the subject, as part of a counter-radicalisation drive.Counter-radicalisation? On the contrary -- according to a forthcoming report by Professor Anthony Glees, such courses are spreading Islamist radicalisation:
Extremist ideas are being spread by Islamic study centres linked to British universities and backed by multi-million-pound donations from Saudi Arabia and Muslim organisations, a new report claims. Eight universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, have accepted more than £233.5 million from Saudi and Muslim sources since 1995, with much of the money going to Islamic study centres, according to the report…
Prof Glees's report claims that over the past five years, 70 per cent of politics lectures at the Middle Eastern Centre at St Antony's College, Oxford, were ‘implacably hostile’ to the West and Israel -- an allegation denied by Oxford. Prof Glees says universities are so strapped for cash that they risk being ‘held over a barrel’, with no option but to accept donations. He said: ‘Britain's universities will have to generate two national cultures: one non-Muslim and largely secular, the other Muslim. ‘We will have two identities, two sets of allegiance and two legal and political systems. This must, by the Government's own logic, hugely increase the risk of terrorism.’
Oh – and Prof Glees also says that Dr Ataullah Siddiqui, the Government's chief adviser on Islamic studies and a director of Leicester's Markfield Institute of Higher Education, has ideological links to extreme Islamic groups (which he denies).
The government is going to the barricades to force through its proposal to extend the period terrorist suspects may be held before charge to 42 days. Yet at the same time the ‘human rights’ obsessed English judiciary is continuing to make Britain a magnet for Islamist terrorists who know they can rely on the English courts to offer them greater protection than anywhere else on the planet, while the British government is actively conniving at the radicalisation of yet more British Muslims in its deluded belief that Islamist terror -- and, it would seem, the Islamic law from which it is so keen to protect Somalian pirates -- has nothing to do with Islam.
The country which was once a by-word for policing the world is now surely the weakest link in the defence of freedom. This is where a liberal society disappears up its own backside. Britain was the cradle of Enlightenment reason -- but Londonistan is where the age of reason is now in full retreat.