The Ayatollah of Canterbury & Sharia Law

Dear Stan,

The great title is stolen from Peter Hitchens' "Mail on Sunday" article on the Archbishop of Canterbury (See below). You would not believe the uproar that his speech on Sharia Law has created in this country. Roger Bolton commented that he could not recall any religious leader being submitted to such vociferous criticism. And Roger has been covering religious news in Britain for over 40 years. Even the secularists have been using the Archbishop's speech as a rod to beat him by suggesting that he was looking to reserve legal privileges for the Anglican Church in line with the Muslims.

The main "Party Line" taken by nearly all commentators has been that there must be one secular law applying to everyone in the country - any religious tribunal's decisions would be merely ancillary and subordinate to the secular judiciary's authority. The British commentariat's "Party Line" has been so unanimous that it made Stalin's Politburo look like an anarchist commune in comparison.

Of course, this Party Line, like just about all Party Lines, is utter bunkum. Whatever "single secular law" applies in theory, the application at street level is anything but consistent or impartial. It has long been notorious that Muslim parents can flout the law on school attendance with impunity, especially when it comes to keeping adolescent girls at home. And as Peter Hitchens points out, the British Government is effectively breaking the law on bigamy by allowing social security payments to multiple Muslim wives.

But this is yet another consequence of the "humane" social security system set up in the 1940s. As I described in an earlier post, the idealists who set it up did not intend to undermine marriage and subsidize illegitimacy and adultery. As George Orwell commented in "The Road to Wigan Pier", the man who drinks a bottle of whiskey a day does not actually intend to get cirrhosis of the liver........

I should point out that Peter Hitchens is an observant Anglican, one of the few writing anywhere in the British media. We Papists have more visible secular media mouths that the Anglicans.

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09 February 2008

At least the Ayatollah of Canterbury is honest, Mr Brown
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

The poor old Ayatollah of Canterbury doesn't actually deserve all the slime now being tipped over his modernised mitre. Just some of it. Of course it is absurd for the chief of the Christian Church in this country to cringe publicly to Islam. But at least Archbishop Williams is open about his unwillingness to defend the faith – as is his colleague, the wretched Bishop of Oxford, who recently announced that he was perfectly happy for loudspeakers to blare the Muslim call to prayer across that city.

Even on their own liberal terms, this pair are clueless about sharia and its scorn for women. It was exiled Iranian Muslim women who defeated a similar proposal in Canada. They had travelled thousands of miles to escape sharia law and didn't want it in Toronto, thanks very much. Compare that with the Government, which poses stern-faced as the foe of "terror" and noisily jails figures of fun such as Abu Hamza while greasily pretending that there's no connection between Islam and terrorism.

Gordon Brown's Cabinet has also quietly agreed that Muslim men with more than one wife can now claim benefits for these extra spouses – while bigamy remains a criminal offence for everyone else, punishable by up to seven years in prison.
A
nd what about the discreet little Whitehall celebrations of the Muslim festival of Eid, attended by highly placed civil servants?

Or the incessant multi-faith propaganda in supposedly Christian State schools, where children known to me have been pestered to draw pictures of mosques but are given virtually no instruction in the faith and scripture of our own established Church?

Why is it that in Britain, alone of all countries in the world, the most exalted, educated and privileged have all lost the will to defend their own home? Most of us liked it the way it was before they began to "modernise" it.

I know of nowhere else where those most richly rewarded by a free society are so anxious to trash the place that gave them birth and liberty.