This is a pretty hilarious parody of Melanie Phillips’s latest book, The World Turned Upside Down. The Guardian’s “Digested Read” is meant to be a précis in the style of the original, but this is more of a parody of both the book and Phillips’s general obsessions (this review mentions the flotilla, but the book was published before that happened).

Conspiracy theories abound in public life. Almost all of them are based on myth. The simple fact is that global warming is a lie created by politically correct liberals who are holding the universe to ransom. The reality is that not a single glacier has melted in Israel over the last 50 years. Likewise, green activists try to claim the teeny oil-spill in the Gulf of Mexico is an environmental disaster. How much oil has been washed up on the beaches of Eilat? None.

… We now live in a world of moral relativism where to believe in scientific inquiry or to be gay or a Muslim is socially acceptable. How can any right thinking person go along with this new age of Reason? The Enlightenment has a lot to answer for. Surely it must be apparent to even Richard Dawkins that he couldn’t have written the God Delusion without God’s help? Though obviously not the Muslim God because he doesn’t exist.

Secularism is the curse of modern life. If everyone went to Synagogue to thank the Intelligent Designer there would be no more conflict. Instead there is a global coalition of Muslims, environmentalists and vegetarians whose sole purpose is to destroy the state of Israel. The 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre – co-ordinated by Osama bin Laden and George Monbiot – was nothing less than a dry run for a ram raid on the Burger King in central Tel Aviv.

Here is my review of Phillips’s last book, Londonistan.

As Muslims it’s been our recent experience that many of the voices raised loudest against Muslims in the west have connections to Israel, particularly in the United States but also in the UK; they include radical Zionists, secular Jews who like to police which types of Muslims the left, in particular, associates with, and Christian Zionists. Now, it’s the turn of the Jerusalem Post to basically tell the west how to deal with its Muslims: the “burka” cannot be tolerated because it is supposedly misogynistic, because it “undermines social cohesion”, and because it’s a security and crime risk. Do we really need them to tell us how to manage our own security?

In Israel, the problem is complicated by a small group of Jews who have decided that their women have to wear what they are calling a “burka” as well. There are said to be groups of Christians who adopt modes of dress nowadays associated with Islam, particularly in the USA, also. The problem is that Muslims, and for that matter Haredi Jews, living in the west do not attempt to impose their way of life on everyone else. When you travel through one of their districts in Jerusalem, the buses are segregated with men at the front and the women at the back. I have never heard of such things happening in London or any city in the Midlands or the North of England where there are areas with, if not a majority, then certainly a distinct Muslim character. (There is nowhere in London that has a Jewish majority, although the presence of Haredi Jews in places like Stamford Hill is certainly substantial.)

Their article clearly reveals their ignorance about Islam itself: they state that the niqaab, or “burka” as they insist on calling it, “is worn in more extremist Muslim traditions as part of a conscientious adherence to hijab”, before moving onto the issue of the “zealot sect” of Jews which has adopted it. Having come across a number of women who wear niqaab in my time as a Muslim, I can safely say that most are not extremists. It’s true that there are one or two groups whose members can be more reliably counted on to wear niqaab than others, but even this does not make them a threat to anyone, even if they tend to keep to their own kind. They are groups that can best be compared to the Plymouth Brethren, Jehovah’s Witnesses or some of the Haredi Jews, all of which keep themselves isolated (far more than any Muslim group does) and cause no great distress to society.

The editorial claims,

But while the objectification of women is wrong, it cannot be compared to the brutal erasing of their very presence. The burka deviates so radically from accepted Western norms that it cannot be permitted under the pretext of freedom of religious expression, just as full nudity can’t. That’s why the vast majority of moderate Muslims oppose the burka.

The niqaab does not “erase their very presence”; in my observation, many (though not all) combine the niqaab with overclothes which do not totally erase their femininity, much less their presence, and are often nicely decorated abayas and coloured scarves rather than single-coloured “tents”. Muslims did not come here on the condition that they obeyed western “norms”, only local laws, and generally laws do not enforce norms but forbid harms. As for “moderate Muslims”, if what is meant by this is the Melanie Phillips definition (which, judging by the talk of “social cohesion”, is what is meant) of Muslims who are pro-Israel, perhaps this is true! But no Muslim can fail to respect women who wear the niqaab because its religious merit is well-established.

They continue:

The burka also undermines social cohesion. Women who wear the burka in Western countries send out a strongly anti-integrationist message. It is part of a wider rejection of Western values by radical Islamists who insist on full communal autonomy and the official recognition of Sharia law, including the imposition of the niqab (full veiling of the female face), and sometimes the right to perform female genital mutilation.

Here we see them thrashing about looking for connections where there are none. The majority of Muslims in the UK are from north India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, where the vast majority of women are not circumcised and never have been. It is just not an issue with them; it is an issue with Somalis and other Africans (not all of them Muslims). The niqaab has nothing to do with “radical Islamists” but with women who regard it as part of perfecting their religion, most of them not at all influenced by “radical Islamists”. Not all of the women associated with the radicals wear niqaab; before al-Muhajiroun became what it is today, it was rare to see women in niqaab at functions they organised. Mostly they wore the normal hijaab with a long dress coat. However, it is more common to find women in niqaab (and men in traditional attire) in areas where they feel safe doing so, meaning areas where Muslims are numerous.

They also mention that the niqaab “can be a security or crime risk”, hiding the identity of “a potential terrorist or criminal”. They should consider the experience of the UK, where women have been wearing niqaab in large numbers since at least the 1990s, and the fact remains that robbers who want to conceal their identities wear balaclavas, not niqaabs, and will no doubt continue doing so even if Muslim women are banned from wearing niqaab. Niqaab and the clothes commonly worn with it are best suited to walking around gracefully, not making quick get-aways from scenes of crimes. The best-known “incident” of a niqaab being used for such purposes has in fact never been proven to have happened, but involves a failed terrorist supposedly using his wife’s niqaab and passport to flee the country in 2005 — not to actually perpetrate an act of terrorism. This could have been averted by the security staff at the airport doing their jobs properly and pulling him (if that’s who it was) over to ask a few questions. If something is known to be used as a means of concealing a threat, then there is a case for restricting it, but in the twenty years that the niqaab has been commonly worn by some Muslim women in the UK, it hasn’t been. That somebody in Israel thinks it could be has no relevance to the UK.

Those who support such legislation realize that an easygoing multiculturalism works only when there are basic shared values and a willingness to integrate. But European multiculturalism has deteriorated into rudderless moral relativism and a pusillanimous reluctance to criticize radical Islamic customs for fear of being branded an Islamophobe.

This is a piece of nonsense which has been discredited many times before. The press in this country are certainly not shy of being called Islamophobic — why would some newspapers have printed front-page attacks on the niqaab if they had any such fear? Articles hostile to Islam and aspects of Muslim culture appear in the western press all the time. Where did they get this nonsense?

Sadly, some Jewish leaders, such as Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, chief rabbi of Moscow and leader of the Conference of European Rabbis, have helped foster such unfounded fears. “Sixty-five years after the liberation of Auschwitz,” wrote Goldschmidt in the New York Times in February, in an op-ed opposing the idea of bans on the burka, “Europeans can permit themselves to be squeamish about how things start and how things, if left unabated, can end.” As a rabbi, he added, “I am made uncomfortable when any religious expression is restricted, not only my own.”

Goldschmidt has got it wrong. Europeans have a right to feel uncomfortable. But not, as Goldschmidt argues, because Europeans are being too hard on Muslims. Rather, because they are being too soft.

So, Goldschmidt should stop behaving like an downtrodden, self-hating diaspora Jew and treat Muslims like what that author considers Muslims to be: the enemy. Jews and Muslims living in the west have various things in common, such as being a religious minority with dietary customs in particular which aren’t shared by the majority population, and with differing dress codes in some cases and a well-founded fear of discrimination and persecution, particularly in Russia where there is a long history of anti-Semitism, of hostility to religion, of an aggressive dominant Christian church, and a recent upsurge of fascist and racist violence. It is an environment where religious minorities have to stick together, not fight each other in the interests of a foreign power. That is not the case in Israel, where Jews are dominant but the Muslim (and Christian) minority they have occupied are the enemy. Why does this writer not just do the honest thing and tell Goldschmidt to move to Israel?

It’s impossible to escape the feeling that this author simply wants Europeans to stick the boot into Muslims because he or she fears them as an Israeli Jew. Israel is reliant on America and Europe to support it by both buying its agricultural exports and by paying for its defence. It is a myth that Israel is some sort of vanguard for western interests in the Middle East; it is a subsidised armed encampment in hostile territory that the West could actually do without. As it happens, Israelis do not particularly welcome foreigners, including diaspora Jews, telling them how to run their country and how to deal with the Palestinians, so why on earth should they expect the west to change the way they deal with Muslims simply to suit their interests? Of course, an Israeli op-ed writer is not the only foreigner who could tell the west that he or she “knows all about the Muslims” — the leaders of the Indian BJP and its associated organisations, various Serbian religious figures, Peter Akinola and his fellow-travellers in the Church of England; would the west be taking their advice also? None of the arguments presented here stack up, and while it may be true that only a tiny percentage of women on the continent wear niqaab, the experience in the UK is of large numbers wearing it over a 20-year period without any significant problems.

Melanie Phillips, in response to the attempted aeroplane bombing on Christmas day, writes another of her rants for the Daily Mail, claiming that it was all down to the fact that “Londonistan” has become a hub for Islamic extremists and radicals from all around the world and that “British universities have been turned into terrorism recruitment centres”, etc. (Also available at her website.)

Phillips has clearly forgotten basic facts about this incident.

First, Britain was a magnet for these extremists in the 1990s, not the past decade. I have said it more than once here before that they were a menace to the Muslim community, on at least one occasion taking over a mosque from the local Muslim community. Anyone who attended Regent’s Park up until 2001 will remember these dark-faced, prowling men of mostly Algerian, Egyptian and Palestinian origin. I even remember what came close to a fist fight in there caused by one of these men, and on one occasion (reported in Q-News in 1996 or 1997) they stormed a mosque wedding, calling the guests kaafirs and accusing them of drinking alcohol. I haven’t been back there in a while, but I’ve been told that they’ve gone, and that the mosque is all the better for it.

These people came in as part of the waves of refugees who were fleeing the civil war in Algeria in particular. Most of them were perfectly innocent. Whatever set dominates the Islamic society at Kingston University, the town itself is not known for this sort of trouble despite the high Algerian presence.

Second, the terrorist’s views were established long before he even came to the UK — his teachers at a British-run school in Togo claim they heard him support the 9/11 attacks, for example, at the time. He studied in the UK between 2005 and 2008. He has not been back since then, and was banned from returning because he appeared to be applying to study at a non-existent college.

So how does this constitute a British connection to the attack itself? He moved to Egypt after leaving the UK, and then to Dubai, and claims that he received training in Yemen. He was also involved with the group known as Boko Haram, which caused a lot of bloodshed in Nigeria in 2008 and 2009. He attempted to bomb a plane out of Amsterdam, not somewhere in the UK. He attended East London mosque, but so do thousands of local Muslims; it is the main mosque for that part of east London, and probably for numerous Muslims who work in the City of London. Whoever is left in London that could influence someone to become an extremist, the chances are that his “education” came from somewhere else, possibly the internet.

Her solution is to ban Shari’ah courts and Hizb-ut-Tahrir and to stop talking to the MCB:

So the Government should say that Muslims are welcome to live here on exactly the same basis as all other religious minorities - that they accept the principle of one law for all, and do nothing to threaten or undermine the prevailing culture.

That means an end to the increasing toleration of Islamic sharia law as the effective jurisdiction in Muslim areas, which so badly threatens in particular the safety and well-being of women, homosexuals and converts from the faith.

She knows full well that Muslim Shari’ah tribunals have no more power or authority than the Jewish Beth Din. They exist only to settle property disputes and religious marriage issues between those who consent to their arbitration and are not an “effective jurisdiction” anywhere in the UK as they have no power to administer criminal law, as they all seem to accept, so threatening the “safety” of anyone is out of the question. As for Hizb-ut-Tahrir, it is widely known that they have nothing to do with these bombings and that anyone who gets involved in them will become nothing worse than a religious-political bore unless they decide that HT are not radical enough. HT are not Sinn Fein to al-Qa’ida’s IRA; they and al-Qa’ida have two entirely different ideologies. You cannot get rid of al-Qa’ida by banning HT.

So, Phillips is advocating a clampdown on British Muslims so as to stop this — an attack on a plane that didn’t go from, or to, the UK by a man who wasn’t from the UK, had not been here for more than a year and was trained somewhere else; in short, an attack which probably had nothing to do with the UK — happening again. It is quite ridiculous, but Phillips can get away with it because her audience does not care whether or not she is telling the truth and her publishers can make money from it.

Melanie Phillips had this article published yesterday in the Daily Mail (also on her home page) and she comes out with her usual line about the BNP being a vile, racist party, but that politicians are to blame for its rise because they do not address the supposedly legitimate questions they raise. This is, of course, a fairly typical position of Phillips’s particular kind of right-wing bigot.

Phillips alleges that Griffin and his party have an appeal not because of their racism or because those who vote for them are racist, but because “he also opposes mass immigration, Islamisation and the loss of sovereignty to the EU”. He also opposes loss of sovereignty to the USA and involvement of British troops in American wars, but Phillips doesn’t, so she doesn’t mention that. She mentions her own personal hobby horses, none of them factually based, but ‘Islamisation’ had to be in there somewhere.

And there hasn’t been any, at least not unless you count increasing numbers of actual Muslim people, mosques and (in some places) Muslim schools. Yes, they look different and often dress differently, but so do certain other minorities. Of course, the nonsense about “Shari’ah courts” causes some concern, but they are only private tribunals for settling civil and family disputes as allowed by law, not criminal courts empowered to chop hands and heads off. It is all a storm in a teacup cooked up by the media to cause a sensation and thereby boost ratings and sell papers. Our supposed “loss of sovereignty to the EU” is also highly exaggerated; besides Ireland we are the only country that has not signed the Schengen accord, which would free us from having to use a passport to travel in the EU, as has already happened for citizens of other EU countries as well as Norway. This kind of isolationist nonsense won’t stop any invading army; it just avoids displeasing editors of mid-market tabloids with provincial readerships.

It may be true that the political classes are to blame for the rise of the BNP, but not for these three reasons. It is the commercial press which is to blame for whipping up resentment against Muslims and immigrants with exaggerated stories about “Muslim demands” based on dubious sources or the antics of one or two individuals or small groups. Besides the party’s own falsifications, including claiming murders in which the alleged victim turns out to be still alive, this is what the BNP feeds on, and it most likely can’t be refuted in a one-hour Question Time session.

She promotes Douglas Murray as an appropriate figure to oppose him on the grounds that he agrees with the bits of the BNP’s platform that she agrees with herself, but opposes the “nasty” bits, i.e. the racism and anti-Semitism. Douglas Murray is an anti-Muslim bigot with a dubious record on free speech, advocating in his Pim Fortuyn memorial lecture in February 2006 that “all immigration from Muslim countries must stop”, that any Muslim who condones violence against western troops anywhere in the world be forcibly deported, and that if he were born in the UK then he should be ‘returned’ to a parent’s or grandparent’s country of origin. As I noted here in July last year, Murray responded to assertions by Peter Oborne that various reports about violent Muslim behaviour were baseless with a story about a small group who plotted to murder a soldier, and an individual, a Muslim dentist, who tried to dictate a dress code to his Muslim female patients. Murray conveniently overlooked the fact that incidents involving tiny numbers of people, or outright trivial incidents, were given exaggerated importance; in fact, he was doing the same in his article.

I’m not sure if Bonnie Greer would be any better as an opponent, but it’s all academic, because Griffin should not be on the programme anyway. They need to be exposed as fascists who are looking to exploit any crisis and using dishonest rhetoric, such as talk of “identity” rather than race, which is what they say they are when they think nobody unsympathetic is listening. It’s true that there are other parties which have their fair share of bigots, but no other party seems to have such a high proportion of violent, racist criminals. To oppose him with the likes of Douglas Murray, who confirms Griffin’s currently most prominent prejudice while decrying the anti-Semitism and anti-Black racism he is trying to play down, is to play into his hands and both insult and risk injuring the targets of his prejudices. The policy should remain “no platform”.

The Christians who objected to White tipping me off were concerned about threats to Christian missionaries and to Sookhdeo himself. Phillips is more concerned about the fact that Ben White and some of his associates have a less indulgent attitude towards Israel than she would like:

A recurring thread of White’s writing is his hatred of Israel. He justifies Palestinian terrorism against Israel as legitimate self-defence to bring about the ‘decolonisation and liberation from occupation and Zionist apartheid’.

He says he can ‘understand’ why some people are unpleasant towards Jews because of Israel’s ‘ideology of racial supremacy and its subsequent crimes committed against the Palestinians’ and also ‘the widespread bias and subservience to the Israeli cause in the Western media’.

Enter at this point the non-evangelical, secular Left in the shape of Andrew Brown, who joined White’s onslaught against Sookhdeo on the Guardian’s Comment Is Free website. Brown claimed of Sookhdeo’s supporters that they constructed ‘a closed mirror-world of hatred to stand against the Islamist one’.

Brown’s article, too, seemed to be driven by hostility to anyone who supported Israel. His objection to Sookhdeo was principally that ‘in practice the Sookhdeo view of Islam is always coupled with a stance in favour of the greater Israel’ — which enabled Brown to make a witty crack insinuating that the Jews were ‘people who are instructed by their religion to be violent, treacherous and imperialist’.

Andrew Brown has another explanation for why Anglican clergy are often not Israel-lovers:

But most of the Anglican ambivalence towards Israel is much simpler and less completely worked out than a conspiracy: it arises from the simple fact that Palestinian Christians are Arabs, and if you go to visit them, as Anglican clergy often do, you will see how Arabs are treated under Israeli occupation. That makes the travellers dislike the Israeli army. No doubt this will be interpreted by Melanie as “blaming the Jews”, but occupying armies get blamed for their behaviour whether they are Jewish, Chinese, or even British. It goes with the territory.

I had two qualms with Phillips’s references to me. The first is that she called me an “Islamist”, a term used so broadly by those who use it that it really does not mean anything anymore. The same goes for “radical Muslim”, a term used for me on the Barnabas Fund’s prayer request:

Indigo Jo does say on his website that he is a British convert to Islam, original name Matthew Smith, now using the name Yusuf, and that he is pro-madhhab http://www.blogistan.co.uk/blog/about/about-me-and-my-blog.html (Madhhab is the word for a school of sharia, Islamic law, so this means that he is pro-sharia, i.e. a radical Muslim.)

Whether this is ignorance or dishonesty, I’m not sure. What I do know is that most radicals, except for some in Pakistan, are actually anti-madhhab; at least, against them in the way Muslims traditionally follow them. The Shari’ah is the entirety of Islamic law, including the food laws and rituals, not just the political aspects.

The second is the description of Sookhdeo as an “Islam scholar”. Sookhdeo’s articles on Islam frequently contain brazen distortions of the truth and outright falsehoods, and what makes them more egregious is that they appear in mainstream magazines and newspapers, such as the Spectator and Evening Standard in London, not just obscure Evangelical publications. The Spectator published one entitled Will London Burn Too?, in November 2005 (available here on a sympathetic Evangelical site, or here at the Spectator’s site in four tiny parts), which demonstrated his tendency to seize every opportunity to present Islam as a threat, magnifying small incidents out of their propoer proportion (e.g. a bit of trouble between Kurdish and Pakistani youths in Peterborough), and also contained this false accusation:

Migrant Muslim communities in the West are constantly engaged in sacralising new areas - first the inner private spaces of their homes and mosques, and latterly whole neighbourhoods (e.g., Birmingham) by means of marches and processions. So the ultimate end of sacred space theology is autonomy for Muslims of the UK under Islamic law.

Quite apart from the ridiculous description of Birmingham as a “neighbourhood” (it’s a city - where were the editors when this was being published?), the claim that marches and processions are used to sacralised the areas marched in is just baseless. Besides political demonstrations, some sections of the Muslim community partake in marches for certain celebrations, most commonly the birthday of the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam), which is actually condemned by most of the radicals.

Is this man a total idiot, or a liar? One thing he is not is a scholar. He is nothing more than a hatemonger who uses a few long words. As I said before, his work for Christians abroad does not offend me, and his pro-Israel stance does not offend me a tenth as much as his repeated, malicious slurs against Islam and Muslims. The spectacle of Boris Johnson getting promoted in the Tory party after publishing the utter nonsense this scoundrel writes convinced me that the party had nothing to offer Muslims.

The Daily Mail alleged that there are about 35 Muslims among the 240 pupils at the school; the Times’s report puts the figure at “more than 20%”, which means more than 48. Both articles are littered with reports from anonymous teachers and parents, but the Mail did name one of the Muslim interviewees:

Fiyza Awan, 19, a Muslim whose younger sister is a pupil, said problems began when hymns were introduced to the all-pupil assemblies.

‘When Mrs Robinson took over she said she wanted one assembly for all the students,’ she said.

‘We didn’t have a problem with that but wanted a secular assembly where no hymns were sung and topics involving all the children could be discussed. But after a while hymns were introduced again and we objected.

‘We told Mrs Robinson we wanted our children withdrawn and to have a separate assembly again.

‘We felt we were being marginalised. We didn’t put any pressure on her, we want continuity at the school, it was her decision to leave.’

This has not stopped Damian Thompson alleging on his blog (hosted by the Daily Telegraph website) that this represents the formation of another of the “Muslim ghettoes” he sees “being constructed across the North of England”. Separate assemblies — for what, half an hour a day? — hardly constitute a ghetto when the children still sit in class together, and where there is no suggestion that they do not go into the same playground as well. Besides which, “Muslim ghettoes”, or rather, Asian ghettoes, as they exist in northern England are the product of the politics of an age before widespread Islamic “fundamentalist” revivalism, and in a real ghetto, children do not even go to the same school, let alone the same assembly. They are not “being constructed” now.

His attitude towards the separate Muslim assemblies, which the Muslims were happy to do without as long as they were not expected to participate in any Christian worship, reflect a wilful, ignorant suspicion about “what goes on” in Muslim assemblies:

Those Christians who think that it’s better to have separate Christian and Muslim assemblies rather than the “inclusive” services Mrs Robinson planned are missing the point. They think “faith” is good, irrespective of what faith it is. Myopic idiots.

Admittedly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the “inclusive” services were annoyingly PC, like 99 per cent of all school assemblies in Britain. And I don’t know what went on in the weekly Islamic assemblies led by a parents at Meersbrook School. But I do know this: Muslim ghettos are being constructed across the North of England, and among their building blocks are school-sanctioned meetings for children from ethnic minorities designed to turn them into strictly observant Muslims - whether they like it or not.

Well, the law gives parents the right to decide which form of worship children undertake while in school, so parents can withdraw their children from, say, religious education classes, but this right is not, at least explicitly, extended to children. The same is true for Catholic as for Muslim children. Thompson does not bother to find out what goes on; his imagination is enough for him. The Muslims were not proposing to force anyone else to join in their worship, although it was actually open to non-Muslims; rather, the school was trying to force Muslims to sing Christian hymns. Thompson claims that secularism does not bother him as much as allowing Muslims to bring their religion into school; the problem is that if the school had stuck to the religiously neutral assemblies, there would have been no problem.

The Times notes that the law states that there must be a daily act of collective worship which should be “wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character”. In a school which is not a Christian faith school and not predominantly Christian, this law does nobody any good and should be changed or scrapped. After all, these may well often be daily acts of mass hypocrisy carried out purely to satisfy the state. Engage notes that the Education Act “also allows for other faiths to be catered for in the school system through a process of determinations - whole or part - which, if approved by the Standing Advisory Council for Religious Education (SACRE), permits the mainly Christian based collective worship requirement to be adapted to reflect the faiths of the school’s pupil population”, but surely, what is required in a mixed school is for the school assembly to be separate from any act of worship.

Thompson’s rant, and the presentation of the Mail’s story in particular, is yet another example of the malice freely directed at Muslims in the popular press. Another is Melanie Phillips’s attack on Islamic banking on the Daily Mail’s website (an online exclusive). She starts off by claiming that Britain’s Islamic banking sector is bigger than that of Pakistan - not a great achivement when one considers that British people are just richer than Pakistanis, particularly when the currency exchange rate is considered. A fair proportion of people in Pakistan probably do not have bank accounts, Islamic or otherwise.

The article makes ludicrous claims about what the banks require of their customers:

What they refuse to acknowledge is the real price that is to be paid for this. They don’t understand that the spread of sharia banking in Britain and America is a significant part of the attempt to Islamise Britain and America. Acceptance of sharia finance furthers the Islamist objective of gradually legitimising Islamic sharia law more generally in the west.

The point which is being missed is that all who use it must conform to the dictates of sharia law. Sharia financial institutions may not be making this clear now - they don’t want to frighten people away - but at some point that IOU of sharia-compliance will be called in. This is how sharia-compliance will be spread to both the Muslim and non-Muslim population.

Any Western institution that endorses sharia-compliant products therefore effectively endorses the extremist ideology behind it of conquering the west for Islam, whether it knows it or not.

The most important point to grasp is that Islam recognises no authority superior to sharia. Sharia banks will therefore not recognise the superior authority of the law of the land. When trillions of pounds and dollars are locked into them, who will argue with them?

The only way these banks can stipulate “Shari’a compliance” on the part of their customers is to refuse to lend money or offer services to projects which are un-Islamic. Apart from that, they cannot tell anyone what to do any more than any other business can. Whether they recognise laws other than Shari’ah or not, the law of the land is the law, and the government can and does seize and freeze assets, particularly when the owner is allegedly connected to terrorism.

Does this paper have no shame, hosting an article containing such obvious, malicious falsehood? (Anyone who has read Flat Earth News would probably not be surprised, however.)

The article is also accompanied by an inset picture of two women in niqab (the same picture featured on the front of one edition of Phillips’s book Londonistan, albeit with the woman giving the V-sign cropped out), a complete irrelevance to this article. Phillips alleges that the religious authorities associated with Islamic banking, which include “the Fiqh Academy in Jedda, Saudi Arabia, which is associated with the Saudi-dominated Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC); the European Council for Fatwa Research, and the Fatwa Council of North America”, are all “associated with the radical Wahabi and Salafi schools of Islam adhered to by groups such as al Qaeda and Hamas”, another breathtaking statement of ignorance. Besides getting two of the organisations’ names wrong (it’s European Council for Fatwa and Research, and Fiqh Council of North America), neither of the last two are Wahhabi in nature at all.

She also suggests that Muslims’ zakat money “may well find its way to organisations promoting jihad and supporting suicide bombing including Hamas, Hezbollah, the families of Palestinian suicide bombers and Islamist madrassas in places like Pakistan”. Well, giving money to families of suicide bombers is probably not illegal, particularly given that the Israeli army destroys the houses of suicide bombers without needing to prove that the families were in any way involved, and it is certainly not akin to actually sponsoring terrorism. It should also be noted that there are many Islamic charities in existence and that only a handful have ever been associated with terrorism, although even most of these associations are disputed; money may well find its way to illicit purposes by channels other than Islamic banks. They may use traditional hawala money transfer services or normal banks.

Phillips also claims that interest is widespread in the Islamic world, permitted even in Saudi Arabia, and that there was a fatwa issued by Shaikh Tantawi of al-Azhar in 1981 legitimising it. There have been various fatwas issued over the years allowing Muslims to charge interest while in non-Muslim countries, on the basis of a hadeeth stating that there is “no interest with a harbi (a hostile non-Muslim) in the land of war (dar al-harb)”. Most Islamic scholars reject this as a basis for allowing interest generally, because dar al-harb does not mean any non-Islamic country but rather a country at war with the Muslims. Furthermore, Shaikh Tantawi is the furthest thing from a Muslim Pope, and fatwas from “top Egyptian muftis” which allow things which are generally considered to be prohibited are generally ignored. The Syrian shaikh Muhammad Sa’id al-Buti, on hearing a more recent pro-interest fatwa from al-Azhar, is reported to have said, “Is Al-Azhar dead?”.

I have long been puzzled by the hostility shown the Islamic banking sector in sections of the media; the reality is that Islamic banks are agency banks which do not even have the power to clear their own cheques (they rely on a clearing bank, meaning one of the major “traditional” banks, to do this). The existence of the IBB has been commonly used to support claims that Muslims were forming a state within a state, when in fact, the IBB have only eight branches in total — four in London, one in Manchester, two in Birmingham and one in Leicester — which leaves large parts of the Muslim population in this country out in the cold (e.g. south London, the Home Counties, Yorkshire, Scotland). Many Muslims, and even Muslim charitable and educational organisations, bank with traditional banks. How does this make a state within a state?

The only conclusion is that these people are so blinded by hate that they do not let facts, let alone subtleties, get in the way of one bigoted rant after another. How else does one explain the fact that they try to drag Muslims into every disaster, be it the Hemel Hempstead oil fire or the recent forest fires in Australia? How else do we explain the fact that they condemn every accommodation to Muslims, even when it is by a commercial organisation and the Muslims are their customers? That these people exist is not really shocking anymore; what is shocking is that the mainstream media give them column inches and webspace when they come out with such arrant, demonstrable garbage.

NK are a highly unrepresentative, extremist fringe group, even among strictly religious Jews. It is a commonly heard claim that real religious Jews do not support Zionism or Israel, something that may have been true when there were several million Jews living in eastern Europe whose situation was gradually improving, and saw no justification, either religious or material, to relocate to Palestine, even if they prayed for restoration to their “real home”. The Holocaust, even though it was perpetrated by an invader, and various atrocities committed by Poles after the war, and probably the threat of a return to Russian domination (Imperial Russia was notorious for persecuting Jews) and communism, changed all that. The centres of Jewish settlement simply shifted over the course of about fifty years from eastern Europe and the Arab world to Israel and the English-speaking world, so the attitude of rabbis to the state of Israel would have shifted as a state called Israel changed from a political idea to a political reality. The fact that two generations have been born in Israel and call no other country home would have undoubtedly changed attitudes also.

To date, one particular group of religious Jews remains opposed to Zionism, namely the Satmar Hassidim, which originate in a part of north-west Romania (which was, when they lived there, part of Hungary). However, you will not find large numbers of Satmars on pro-Palestinian demonstrations; you will only find a handful of NK activists. Satmars mostly live quietly in north London and New York, and a few other places. They are not anti-Zionist because of particular concern for Palestinians; they have those beliefs for their own religious reasons. NK are not particularly well-respected among their own people, not only because of their anti-Zionist stance, but because of the extremes to which they go with it, even turning up at a Holocaust denial conference in Iran. Most Muslims would baulk at that. Can anyone imagine how Jews see it?

We cannot rely on telling Jews what their religion says about Zionism based on what a small minority tells us. Perhaps we should not compare the NK rabbis to someone like Abdul-Hadi Palazzi, who is not a real shaikh, but we should remember how much credibility our scholars lose when they are seen to be cosying up to not only powerful non-Muslims, but also to the rulers of Muslim countries (the various Egyptian state muftis are a classic example). We should remember the scorn heaped upon Nasir al-Albani because of his fatwa that Muslims evacuate Palestine on the grounds of it being “dar al-harb”, or the scholars who signed the fatwa authorising the American presence in Arabia during the 1991 Gulf War. Why would a rabbi who was seen as telling the Iranians and the Muslim Brotherhood what they want to hear have any credibility among Jews?

Besides, we are Muslims, not Jews, and we have our own reasons for opposing the foreign colonisation of one of our lands, whether it be Palestine or eastern Turkestan and whether the invaders are Jewish Zionists, French and German Crusaders, Chinese communists or whoever. Whenever the Muslim lands have been invaded, Muslims have fought, regardless of whether the invaders’ religion sanctioned it (usually, it did, or at least their leaders claimed it did). We did not oppose Zionism because of anti-Semitism or because our heads were full of Nazi propaganda, as some Jews have ludicrously claimed recently. Islam is clear on the status of other religions: they are superseded by Islam, and their scriptures, such as they remain, are no longer valid, which is why we see no problem with Muslim control of Jerusalem and its environs, under which Christian and Jewish places of worship and pilgrimage survived a whole lot better than Islamic and Christian places have under Israeli rule, during which some of them have been demolished, even cemeteries, to make way for car parks and luxury hotels.

There are also secular reasons to oppose the existence of Israel, let alone its dominance of the whole of former Mandate Palestine. The right of refugees to settle elsewhere to avoid persecution, let alone mass murder, is not in dispute, and if some of them put down roots in their new country, there is no problem with them staying. This does not entitle them to a state of their own at the expense of another people, particularly when that people were not their persecutors, otherwise we would have turned over chunks of south-east London to Somalia and Nigeria. I cannot think of any other incident in history of a persecuted people being given a state elsewhere after the persecution had abated, or of a large group of people being allowed to “return” to where their ancestors lived 2,000 years ago at the expense of the present inhabitants; anti-Semitism in Europe was on the decline and Jews were increasingly being accepted as normal citizens until the Nazis came to power. Of course, the bad faith of many of the western powers, which among other things took steps to prevent Jews coming in and sent them back to Europe, cannot be forgotten in all of this.

In conclusion, we should emphasise our own reasons for the Muslim claim to Palestine as an Islamic country inhabited by its own native people, the Palestinian Arabs, Muslim and Christian. We should not emphasise the Jewish religious claim that Israel (under whatever name) is only to be re-established by the Messiah, as we do not believe that, Christians do not believe that, and the Jews who believe that are a small minority.

The Mumbai attacks were not about global jihad. The attacks on foreign tourists at the Taj and the Oberoi, and on the Lubavitch centre, were designed to secure maximum publicity - a strategy that worked splendidly. Yet the roots of this nightmarish event are to be found elsewhere: in the deterioration in relations between Hindus and Muslims in Mumbai and India since the late 1980s, and in regional relations between India and Pakistan.

The operational key to the Mumbai attacks, however, is almost certainly held by D-Company, the sprawling and hugely effective organised criminal syndicate that is steered from the Pakistani port city of Karachi by the most powerful figure in Mumbai’s fabled underworld, Dawood Ibrahim. It is virtually impossible that Dawood was unaware of the preparation of the attack, given the D-Company’s extensive intelligence network (which in several past instances has proved more effective than the Indian state’s intelligence capacity).

India’s security services have begun investigating Dawood’s possible role in the attack because he controls most of the smuggling routes into India’s great commercial centre. In 1993, he put his network at the disposal of the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence service, to let it smuggle in huge amounts of the explosive RDX …

Sasool Dock, where a dozen or so of the attackers landed, is one of the port areas under D-Company’s control. In the 1993 attacks, Dawood was able to land the RDX at night because he corrupted police officials responsible for monitoring the coast in Mumbai and its environs. If Dawood’s role in the recent attacks is confirmed, it is highly likely that officials will again have been paid to turn a blind eye.

Meanwhile, Melanie Phillips is still singing from the “global jihad” hymn sheet, entirely predictably (she need not write columns anymore; her opinions are so predictable that a committee could write them on her behalf). She insists that an “obscure” Jewish centre was targeted “because hatred of Jews as Jews is fundamental to the Islamists’ hatred of the west - and of Israel”, and ends with this flourish:

If they can do this in Mumbai, they can do it in London or other British cities; the infrastructure of Islamist terror is more extensively developed in Britain, and the authorities more paralysed in the face of what they have allowed to grow in their midst, than anywhere else in the west.

Well, the fact that London doesn’t a short boat ride from Karachi is a problem there, as is the fact that the UK has no well-organised Muslim criminal syndicates (a few drug dealers here and there, that’s all), and because our officials are probably wealthier than those in India, and thus less easy to bribe. Silly cow.

Here is one of Phillips’s outrageous statements:

Israel finds itself trapped by a pincer movement of military and psychological attack from not only the Arab and Muslim world but also the West. And Britain, whose intelligentsia has swallowed wholesale Arab and Muslim lies, is the Western leader of those baying for Israel’s head. Thanks to the poison spread by the British media, the universities, NGOs and the churches, Israel has been systematically demonised and delegitimised.

The fact is that most of the major Arab players have been bought off or neutralised since the 1970s. True, Syria and Lebanon remain hostile and Saudi Arabia nominally so, but Iraq has been occupied by allies of Israel and Jordan and Egypt are essentially at peace; Egypt in fact re-sealed its borders with Gaza when Palestinians broke out of Gaza last year. The idea that Britain (as opposed to elements in British society) is itself “baying for Israel’s head” is scandalous. For one thing, Gordon Brown accepted the position of patron of the Jewish National Fund UK in July last year after replacing Tony Blair as Prime Minister; other patrons include Blair, David Cameron and the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks. The same Jewish Chronicle article notes that he told a meeting of Labour Friends of Israel that his father, a Church of Scotland minister, had taught him of “the trials and tribulations of the Jewish people, about the enormous suffering and loss during the Holocaust, as well as the extraordinary struggle he described to me of people to create this magnificent homeland”. Hardly the words of someone baying for Israel’s blood.

On the third page of her article, Phillips alleges that the Arabs have no right even to Gaza:

Ben-Gurion would today be surprised to find, for example, that Israel is regarded as illegally occupying the West Bank (and until 2005, Gaza). Along with modern Israel, this was part of the territory of Palestine within which in 1922 the League of Nations gave Britain the task of re-establishing the Jewish national home because of the unique claim by the Jews — the only people for whom it had ever been their nation state, hundreds of years before the Arabs invaded it. In other words, far from being ‘Palestinian land’, the Jews are entitled to claim it under international law, which also gives it the right to hold on to it in self-defence.

In fact, the Jews were but one of a number of nations which occupied the land (and even then, not all of Mandate Palestine and certainly not Gaza). If we are to use the Biblical version of the land being the Jews’ Promised Land, we must accept that the promise was delivered on, and that the Jews were eventually displaced for reasons doubtless similar to those which led to them being led into captivity in Babylon. The Jews were mostly gone from Palestine centuries before the “Arabs invaded”; most of the present Palestinans are Arabs only by language; they are the native population, mostly Muslims (many of those with some actual Arab ancestry) with some Christians. The original Arab Muslim conquest of Palestine was done with a small army, most of which went back to Arabia afterwards.

Later on, on page five, she brings out the old chestnut of the establishment of the state of Jordan being the original “two-state solution”, with the remainder of the land being earmarked for the Jews. At that stage, demand for Jewish migration to Palestine was considerably less than it became after the war, since the rise of Nazism had barely begun and, although there was a Zionist movement, it had yet to become a mass movement. Phillips alleges that “Winston Churchill unilaterally gave away three quarters of the original territory of Palestine to the Hashemite dynasty, creating what is now Jordan, with the remainder supposed to go to the Jews”. In fact, most of the land in Jordan is desert, with the rest having serious water shortage issues. The most fertile land in that region is that west of the Jordan, which is why Israel has been so keen to occupy it. Contrary to popular misconception, most Arabs are not desert people; they are farmers or they live in cities.

Phillips then goes on to accuse the United States of “self-serving meddling” in pressuring Israel to accept Hamas’s ‘truce’ (her quotes) and trying to “force the agreed outline of a Palestinian state by the time President Bush leaves office”. One would have thought that the Americans would have had some right to meddle, given that Israel has received hundreds of billions of dollars in direct American aid, mostly grants rather than loans, and most of it direct military aid, on more favourable terms than other recipients of aid. However, this ingratitude and sense of entitlement is not unusual among supporters of Israel; one remembers the Israeli rabbis who claimed that Hurricane Katrina was a Divine punishment for American support for the Israeli pull-out from Gaza.

She concludes by insisting that Israel, by realising that it has to fight to survive, will still be there in another 60 years’ time, and suggests that the same might not be true of Britain or Europe:

But the future of Israel is the future of the West. If the front line in Israel were to go down, the West would be next. Given its current internal appeasement of Islamism, however, the West may go down anyway.

Another pathetic, sweeping lie which is plainly aimed at a particular gallery. The article is a classic example of the phenomenon of “truth-space”, real or virtual “spaces” were particular ideas or notions are presumed to be true, whether or not they really are, and it is pointless to argue otherwise. “Truth-spaces” are usually blogs and webzines, not mainstream political magazines; one wonders how the majority of Spectator readers will take the assertions in Phillips’s piece, which would ordinarily have been more fitted to Phillips’s blog. It is not true that Europe has appeased Islam. It is an accusation commonly repeated in the “truth-spaces” of the American right-wing blogosphere, but in many places Muslims’ lives have deliberately been made more difficult, particularly Muslim women’s.

However, I am sure many westerners will take issue with the idea of Israel as the West’s front-line as well. Israel is not a bulwark for western values; it is an alien imposition which has become a liability for the west to prop up. It is a colony established by people descended from westerners who claimed that their roots were in the Middle East who chose to migrate to the Middle East and speak a Middle Eastern language. Geographically, it is not part of the West. Besides, the presence of Israel will not prevent an Islamic resurgence in predominantly Muslim regions of eastern Europe. Israel’s status as an outpost of the West is of value to Israel, not to the West; it would be more beneficial to the West to have all its high-tech industry and know-how in a safe place, which means nowhere near any war zone. The ingratitude displayed by Phillips is nauseating, although I appreciate that she is not Israeli; supporters of Israel should be careful what they wish for regarding Europe, since any collapse of Europe would make Israel’s position much more precarious than it is now.

Phillips accuses him of a “betrayal of the Anglican Communion”, and suggests (here and here) that he stand aside in favour of Michael Nazir-Ali, “a man whose life is now in danger for having spoken the truth about Islam in a Britain whose religious and cultural identity he actually defends, but about whom Dr Williams has said not one word in support”. As is fairly common with people of Phillips’s persuasion, the truth does not matter to her. Nazir-Ali caused controversy, and was not defended by Dr Williams, because his allegation was false, a fact borne out by his failure to back it up.

Phillips shows extraordinary presumption in demanding the sacking or resignation of Dr Williams because of this. Phillips is not a Christian, Anglican or otherwise, and her opinions on what is appropriate for Dr Williams are irrelevant unless it directly affects her community, which this does not. The speech was about the status of another community; it is not as if he made an anti-Semitic remark, or referenced the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or called his flock out to beat up Jews or smash up synagogues. I cannot think of any reason why I would call for the sacking of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Pope, the Chief Rabbi or any other religion’s clergy, although I might call for his arrest if he was encouraging attacks on Muslims, or Jews for that matter.

Phillips writes, regarding the status of the Beth Din court:

Jewish religious law in the UK has no legal authority over British Jews and no such binding force. Jews most certainly do not choose ‘whether to seek justice in one system or another’ except where their participation in Beth Din religious tribunals is entirely voluntary on the part of all concerned, such as in the informal arbitration of disputes. For the enforcement of justice, they must seek remedies from English law, just as they must be married or divorced under English law — Jewish marriage and divorce rituals having no official standing — for such status to be recognised by the state. It is a Jewish religious requirement for Jews to live under the law of the land in which they reside. It is simply astounding that Lambeth Palace continues to perpetuate a false impression about this. Do they really know nothing about Judaism? Why do they insist upon dragging the Jews into this?

However, as the BBC’s Law in Action programme demonstrated (it was repeated on Radio 4 last Sunday night), the Beth Din is in fact a court of arbitration - a court whose verdicts, if delivered after both parties agree to participate, can be enforced by a court of law if one party fails to abide by its ruling. It does not make it a parallel legal system, but it does make it a system of legally-enforceable arbitration, so while the parties’ participation in the court is voluntary (albeit subject to the same social pressures which are commonly used to oppose Muslims having access to courts of arbitration, as happened in Canada), its verdicts are legally-binding.

Elsewhere, Phillips rehashes the bigotry and ignorance which has characterised the media reaction to Dr Williams’s speech. For example, she alleges:

Sharia courts are dealing with Muslim criminals outside the criminal law; one reported case involved a gang of Somali youths who were allowed to go free after paying compensation to a teenager they had stabbed — with the police and courts apparently looking the other way.

What happened was that the victim, or his family, chose not to press charges but to settle the issue among themselves. Phillips, or I, might not agree with the decision, but it is theirs to make and perhaps the stabbing did not result in life-threatening or lasting serious injury. The insinuation seems to be that Shari’ah courts let criminals get off, but it may well be more justice or compensation than they would have got by going through the British courts and watching him get a slap on the wrist there, or claiming compensation that might never materialise (as is known to happen). She also cites one Dr Chris Sugden, who claimed to the Synod that:

Islam has never allowed itself to remain as a subservient legal system, neither can its system be taken piecemeal, on a pick or choose basis. It is exclusive and it is integral.

As I demonstrated in my last post, this is simply untrue. It is indeed possible to implement parts of the Shari’ah and not others; one must implement it all only when one can, which Muslims in this country accept is not the case here. Muslim family law, in particular, is implemented without the criminal law in most of the Muslim world, and in other countries where Muslims are a minority, such as India.

I find the harshness and intemperance of the reaction to Dr Williams’s speech amazing. Had the speech been discussed rationally, rather than used as a pretext for a Muslim-bashing orgy, most likely the most that would have come out of it is a better-established Muslim arbitration court similar to the Beth Din. Had it been about any other minority group’s law, there would not have been anything like the level of anger and indignation which has been displayed this past weekend (particularly from Phillips). People seem to forget that Dr Williams is a clergyman, not a politician, and is there not to be liked but to be a guide, and is certainly not there to defend any secular political order. He, and his predecessors, have been criticised in the past for following society rather than leading it, but when he goes against the grain he is accused of being on his knees before enemies of society (and not the ones who attack fire-fighting crews either). Generally speaking, clergy are dismissed for acts of impropriety, adopting unsound theological positions, or becoming unfit for office; making an unpopular suggestion about a political matter really does not fall into any of these categories, and his being forced to step down would make the Church look very odd and very weak indeed.