Back Towards The Locus

Following Peter Oborne’s fine documentary on Islamophobia, Melanie Phillips has a rambling and comfortingly inimitable column in the Mail, arguing that believers of Islam do not suffer from gratuitous bigotry in the UK, but are in fact indulged to a ludicrous extent.

Some of the events cited in the article are indeed disturbing, but Phillips employs the strange strategy of simply cramming claims and anecdotes together to build up and justify her central ‘dhimmitude’ thesis. Pick away enough pieces, then, and the structure falls apart.

“The Government believes that Islamic radicalism can be countered by teaching authentic Islam to Muslims. But since Islamic radicalism is based upon those very authentic religious precepts, this will undoubtedly have the effect of radicalising people who otherwise would never have thought in this way.”

Intruigingly, Phillips doesn’t even bother with the usual tactic of extracting quotes from the Quran or Haditha. The above is merely a confident assertion.

The idea of an ‘authentic’ religion is interesting in itself. Does Phillips, I wonder, believe that – after centuries of bigotry, violence and theonomic legislation – Britain has finally found ‘authentic’ Christianity? One would assume that religious institutions merely offer an interpretation of texts of beliefs.

“The Establishment queued up to say they didn’t recognise the Britain he was describing. But British public life is progressively being Islamised, with Muslim radicals in areas with large concentrations of Muslims increasingly intimidating non-Muslims.

After a vicar in East London, Canon Michael Ainsworth, was beaten up by three Muslims in his own churchyard in March, it was revealed that there had been many attacks on churches in the area by such youths, who on one occasion shouted: ‘This should not be a church, this should be a mosque.’”

This mention will only distress Michael Ainsworth, who thought that the national media were using the story for “their own ends and drawing bizarre, mainly racist, conclusions“. He did, indeed, write that he wanted “to emphasise that community relations in [his] area are, on the whole, good, and worth working at“.

A strange martyr for Melanie, then.

“But the fact is that Britain is already developing a parallel sharia jurisdiction in such matters, with a blind eye being turned to such practices as forced marriage, cousin marriage, female genital mutilation and polygamy; indeed, welfare benefits are now given to the multiple wives of Muslim men.”

By this point, Phillips has clearly donned her dark glasses. The grotesque tradition of female genital mutilation, at home or abroad, was explicitly made illegal under the Female Genital Mutilation Act. The Forced Marriage Unit was established to combat this practice and the Forced Marriage Bill, whatever its deficiencies, is still a part of British law. It is also, as Phillips daintily skips over, far from a problem only among Muslims.

The polygamy problem has certainly resulted in gratuitous dithering from Labour, which the Conservatives have called “completely unjustifiable”.

“Meanwhile, the courts still appear to be bending over backwards to appease Muslim radicalism. Last month, a judge freed from prison Abu Qatada, the most important Al Qaeda operative in Europe and the lynchpin of numerous European terror attacks, who was being held pending deportation to Jordan to stand trial.”

“His release on bail – into a kind of house arrest – followed an Appeal Court ruling that he could not be deported to Jordan because any prosecution there might have been obtained as a result of a witness being tortured – a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights.”

After this decision, Jacqui Smith said she was “extremely disappointed”, and claimed that she was “already seeking to appeal“. Is that at all indicative of our apparently impending theocracy?

Incidentally, the ‘kind of house arrest‘ that Abu Qatada is under includes 22 hours of curfew, while for the other two he is electronically tagged.

“While Islamists are being appeased, the Christian church is being discriminated against. The Bishop of Rochester said that the decline of Christian values was destroying Britishness and had created a ‘moral vacuum’ which radical Islam was filling

In reply to this cri de coeur from a civilisation under siege, Hazel Blears, the Communities Secretary, maintained it was right that more money and effort was spent on Islam than Christianity because of the threat from extremism and homegrown terrorism.”

Hazel Blears gains no sympathy from me, but it’s ludicrous to suggest that there is institutional prejudice against Christianity. Until the bishops are replaced by Imams in the House of Lords, certainly.

As well as these invalid claims, the piece contains numerous contradictions. There is an “increasing Islamisation of the police” and “the courts still appear to be bending over backwards to appease Muslim radicalism“, and yet “the police and security service have been foiling plot after plot and are bringing to court a steady stream of Islamist radicals“. On Phillips’s website, she claims that there are “2000 known British Muslim terrorist suspects” being monitored by MI5. I have my suspicions regarding this claim – if there are that many then why the need to arrest research students? – but it surely doesn’t indicate institutional ‘Islamisation’.

Indeed, in a previous documentary Oborne – again – helped to expose the dishonesty and sensationalism of the police – and, by extension, the media – in the ludicrous ‘ricin plot‘ claims. Such occurrences have been fuel for the “ increasingly aghast” public.

I suppose that Phillips’s reaction against Oborne’s documentary is to be expected, especially as she regularly regurgitates the tabloid myths that it casually scythed once more. Her paper, of course, is one of the most tendentious promoters of bollocks in the Press.

It is also to be expected when one considers her all too predictable conclusion:

“Islamism will be repulsed only if Britain once again regains the confidence of its own culture, heritage and traditions. And these are based on Christianity.”

There’s no doubt that religion has, does and will probably always intervene into liberal politics. There is also no doubt that certain interpretations of Islam present a danger to secular societies, and we should debate and be watchful of the occurences and possiblities of this. But let’s not give succour – or column inches – to headless chickens.