...born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad

Tarring fundamentalists with the same brush: The Independent’s Yasmin Alibhai-Brown points to a disturbing trend—the rise of fundamentalist Islam in the U.K. However, since it would be, you know, prejudiced to single out one religious group, she insists that Christian and Jewish fundamentalists are equally dangerous. With no evidence to speak of, she makes the outrageous claim that all three fundamentalisms are plotting together:

…Go into any British university and you see huddles of manifestly Muslim men and women sitting apart from others, including Muslims who refuse to cover up or live separate lives. You never saw this before because, until a decade back, there wasn't this distorted Islamicisation of Muslim life. An evocative film to be broadcast in July on Channel 4 on the Qu'ran examines this alarming spread across the world. More Muslims hate this reactionary Islam than do outsiders. Our thoughts tend not to matter to people like Odone.

The reason so many Muslim girls are abused, denied education and pushed into early marriages is because the community and family patriarchs and matriarchs violate their human rights. Proportionately more Muslim girls and boys run away from home than do the children of other Britons. Are they trying to escape the freedom of British society, or trying desperately to find it? Our state needs to protect these girls, not hand them over to their oppressors.

Odone praises one school where girls, covered up completely except for the face, are kept apart from boys. An "elegant Arabic-style courtyard with a fountain" is the barrier. That's fine then. What about those young girls so swathed and swaddled they constantly fall over in playgrounds? These shrouds sexualise them as much as boob tubes do the daughters of the "infidels". Both see young females as objects of unhealthy desire.

The report disapproves on our behalf of state education which offers "mixed gym classes or art classes where they are asked to draw a human body". Ya Allah. What next? Maybe science books, fiction with male and female characters falling in love, poetry? You want our children to go to hell like yours?

A bigger game is being played here. Some ardent Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Muslims are rising, collaborating to demolish secularism in the UK, which has always been weak and too loosely committed to the separation of faith and state. So the Archbishop of Canterbury ruminates fondly about Sharia family law and his conservative bishops plot to gain moral supremacy. Some from this devious coalition briefed against the nascent British Muslims for Secular Democracy and Ed Hussein's Quillam Foundation. They condemn gay rights, liberal principles and personal freedom…

Ms. Alibhai-Brown is a bit confused. The Archbish’s ruminations aren’t a function of some fundamentalist plot to demolish secularism. They are a sign of the cleric’s fear that Islam is in ascendance while Christianity is in decline—thus his rush to be one of the first on his block to publicly embrace what he sees as an all but inevitable dhimmitude. Christian and Jewish by-the-bookniks may not exactly be thrilled with modernity, but it’s absurd and dangerously wrong-headed to claim that they’re in cahoots with the Islamists. Muslim fundamentalists want to foist dhimmitude on all Christians and Jews, regardless of the intensity of their religious beliefs and level of discomfort with modernity.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:21 | link | comments (1)

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