Melanie Phillips: Obduracy at Canterbury

[...] The reason why there has been such overwhelming outrage is that, despite the Prime Minister’s abrupt dismissal of the Archbishop’s views, British society is already being steadily Islamised with the Government’s tacit or even explicit approval.

Even though bigamy is a crime, the state is effectively endorsing polygamy by paying welfare benefits to the multiple wives of British Muslim men.

Gordon Brown has said he wants Britain to become the centre of global Islamic banking; Saudi Arabia and other Islamic states are buying up more and more British and Western companies, and we now have ‘Sharia-compliant’ mortgages.

The imam of an Oxford mosque wants to broadcast an amplified call to prayer three times a day on the grounds that this is merely ‘the same as hearing church bells’. In fact, the call to prayer is a statement of the creed of Islam and as such is widely seen as an attempt to Islamise Britain’s public space.

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.

And to cap it all, the Home Office is trying to censor the language by telling officials they must not use any derogatory words associated with Islam but refer instead merely to ‘violent extremism’.

Across the country, people are beside themselves about all this. So when the Archbishop appeared to be endorsing Sharia and calling for more, their anger not surprisingly erupted.

But Dr Williams doesn’t even seem to have the courage of his lack of convictions. A statement on his website attempting to defend himself is disingenuous to the point of being downright misleading in trying to pretend he didn’t say what he actually had said.

It insists, for example, that he did not call for the introduction of Sharia as a parallel jurisdiction to the civil law. But in his lecture, he said in terms that the state should recognise Sharia as a ‘supplementary jurisdiction’, and that individuals should be able to choose which system they wanted. That means two parallel systems with equal status. Read more
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