A model of diversity

There’s nothing quite like diversity. Take Manchester. It has a large Muslim population and a lot of gays. What could possibly go wrong?

Last week Manchester University’s Student Union played host to the ‘Global Aspirations of Women Society’. This appears to be a front group of the extremists of Hizb ut-Tahrir and therefore by no means does what it says on the tin.

Anyhow – as the university’s student newspaper puts it:

‘A speaker at a Students’ Union affiliated society workshop said that homosexuals would be executed in an ideal Islamic state, describing the practice of two men kissing as an “atrocity.”

1st year Middle Eastern studies student Colin Cortbus attended a public meeting at the Students’ Union last Wednesday 13th February organised by Global Aspirations and asked the chairperson of the meeting whether “in the Islamic society in which you strive for,” they would “feel comfortable, personally and morally, to kill a gay man.”

She responded, “Absolutely,” and added later that homosexuality was an “atrocity, because it goes against what God says.”

Mr Cortbus sent an undercover recording of the talk to The Mancunion the following day.

In the meeting Mr Cortbus also asked whether in the Islamic state they were advocating they would feel confident to kill him if he “did something as completely innocent as kiss another man outside the Students’ Union.”

In response, the chair of the meeting said to the small group, “Yeah, absolutely,” adding, “But it’s the fact that you can’t just see it as it is. People have this issue that the punishment, penal code, everything is so completely inhumane, but who even says that these things are inhumane?”’

Indeed. Who are we to say that chopping someone up or stoning them, or throwing them off a cliff is inhumane? British universities are certainly fertile ground for such pseudo-thought.