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October 8, 2006

UK: Government's Islamic Agenda Neglects Christianity

It has been obvious that over the past few years, the Labour government has been making abnormal compromises to the Muslim minority community. With its special advice from the Muslim Council of Britain, an unelected body, actually affecting policy in the form of the elected government abandoning its plans to outlaw forced marriage, something is wrong. Muslims officially comprise only 3% of the British population, yet the government has acted as if this minority is the majority.

Ruth Kelly, communities minister, had a meeting in May with no more than two dozen Muslim women, yet in September announced that there should be more Muslim women in headscarves on British television.

Has it been done from fear? Or perhaps some strange British notion of evenhandedness - after being accused of being "anti-Muslim" for engaging in Afghanistan and Iraq, is Britain's Labour government trying to assuage its accusers by going overboard to prove its Muslim-friendly credentials? Does any other minority group have the "ear of government" listening to it, in the way that the Muslim community does?

In its attempts to appease its Muslim critics, the government has neglected the beliefs and opinions of the majority of citizens, as if, by being the majority, they are irrelevant and not worth engaging with.

The government allows the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to annually waste 8.5 million ($15.8 million) on its "Engaging with the Islamic World Group (EIWG)", under the auspices of a 26-year old former student Islamist called Mockbul Ali. This group actively supports the Muslim Brotherhood, with its Islamic agenda, and this year funded its anti-semitic "spiritual leader" Yusuf al-Qaradawi to attend an Islamic conference in Turkey, all at tax-payers' expense.

Church attendance in Britain might be down on what it was in previous years, but a poll in late 2005 showed that 66% of Britons thought of themselves as Christians, and 75% of respondents thought the UK should keep its Christian values. In 2001, the national census revealed that 72 per cent of Britons describe themselves as Christian.

The recent comments by former foreign secretary Jack Straw concerning the wearing of the Muslim "veil" or nikab, which covers the face, have brought hostile reactions from Muslims. All Straw said was that the covering of the face increased segregation and made communication difficult. The Daily Express newspaper did an online poll of its readers, which found that 97% of its respondents thought that BANNING the veil would help to safeguard racial harmony. And on Saturday (October 7), Muslims in Straw's Blackburn constituency protested outside the town hall. The leader of the protest, Yaasmin Mubarak, 38, said: "Jack Straw is really in trouble here. We want him to apologise and will keep on protesting until he does. I feel outraged and want him out of his job. The majority of Muslim women want him out."

Today, the Sunday Telegraph, followed by the Mail on Sunday, the Observer, BBC and This is London reveals that a leaked document indicates that the Church of England is finally mounting a response to the marginalization of Christianity by the government.

One must also state that the Church itself has not helped matters. It has engaged in multi-faith ceremonies, giving unnecessary credibility to Islam, as if Islam and Christianity are remotely compatible. In deference to the future titular head of the Church of England, the adulterous Prince Charles, Church of England leaders have advocated that Charles' future coronation should be another ghastly "multi-faith" service. And in September last year, a group of Church of England bishops suggested writing an open "apology" to Muslims for Britain's involvement in Iraq.

These issues aside, the "response" to the government's pro-Islamic agenda is a sign that at last, the Church of England may be ready to assert itself as the religion of choice for the majority of British citizens, and will be finally demanding that this is acknowledged by government.

The details have been revealed in a leaked report, written by Guy Wilkinson, who is the interfaith adviser to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams. Canon Wilkinson was an archdeacon in Bradford during the riots which happened there in 2001. The report, entitled "Cohesion and Integration – A briefing note for the House [of Bishops]" pulls no punches. It assesses the current bias of the government's programs towards Islam, a minority faith, and states that despite these preferential initiatives, no "cohesion" of the Muslim community within Britain has been achieved.

The report states: "Indeed, one might argue that disaffection and separation is now greater than ever, with Muslim communities withdrawing further into a sense of victimhood, and other faith communities seriously concerned that the Government has given signals that appear to encourage the notion of a privileged relationship with sections of the Muslim community."

The report notes that Muslims make up only three per cent of the population, and that Britain remains an overwhelmingly Christian country, and suggests that measures to call Britain a "multi-faith" society gloss over a hidden agenda.

It states that the government's "schizophrenic" initiatives to tackle multiculturalism have actually divided communities, rather than bringing them together. It lists how the government has been "using public funds" to import Muslim scholars to Britain, the decision to abandon the outlawing of forced marriage, and its support for Islamic banking. These moves have undermined the governments own interfaith agenda and have resulted in no "noticeable positive impact on community cohesion".

On August 30, communities minister Ruth Kelly launched the new Commission on Integration and Cohesion. Last week, Dr Rowan WIlliams met Ruth Kelly to discuss how the Church of England could become involved as a contributor. Bishops are alarmed that no Christian demonination is represented in this commission, even though it contains several Muslim representatives. Wilkinson's report casts doubt on the possible effectiveness of the commission. It says that resolving issues of community cohesion should not involve one special minority being expected to be responsible for sorting the problem. Instead, it states that the responsibility should lie "with the 'majority' communities and in the core culture".

It states: "In relation to faith, there has been a divided, almost schizophrenic approach" and says the government was wrong "scapegoating the Muslim community as the source of the problem at the same time as believing that they should be uniquely responsible for solutions....The contribution of the Church of England in particular and of Christianity in general to the underlying culture remains very substantial.'

The document claims: "It could certainly be argued that there is an agenda behind a claim that a five per cent adherence to 'other faiths' makes for a multi-faith society."

The report has been met with a positive reaction from the House of Bishops. A Church of England spokesman says of the document: "This internal briefing note, produced by a Church official, is not designed as an attack on the Government but as a contribution to debate."

Last year, Archbishop of York Dr John Sentamu claimed that multiculturalism suppressed the benefits of the majority culture. As we reported on November 29 2005, he said: "What is it to be English? It is a very serious question. I think we have not engaged with English culture as it has developed. When you ask a lot of people in this country, 'What is English culture?', they are very vague. It is a culture that whether we like it or not has given us parliamentary democracy. It is the mother of it. It is the mother of arguing that if you want a change of government, you vote them in or you vote them out."

"It is a place that has allowed reason to be at the heart of all these things, that has allowed genuine dissent without resort to violence, that has allowed all the fantastic music that we experience in our culture." He said that multiculturalism as a concept failed to convey the essence of what it meant to be English. "England is the culture I have lived in, I have loved.... My teachers were English. As a boy growing up [in Uganda], that is the culture I knew......I think the Church in many ways has to be like a midwife, bringing to birth possibilities of what is authentically very good in the English mind."

The Church of England's Bishop for Urban Life and Faith, the Rt Rev Stephen Lowe, said the document by Canon Wilkinson did not reflect the bishops' view, according to the BBC (who else?).

However, he agreed on BBC Radio 4 today that Christians have become "sidelined" by a bid to deal with political extremism.

Lowe said: "This was a six or seven-page document which the Church of England House of Bishops used as a briefing document for their own debate about cohesion and integration, and that briefing paper led to a good debate which reflected the experience of the Church across the land."

"It's not the view of the bishops. The bishops did not actually agree the document, vote on it or adopt it as policy of the Church of England."

"But what I think actually they are saying is that we are worried that the government's agenda around political extremism has led to a skewing of the whole process around community cohesion and integration to a point where maybe the other faiths including the Christian faiths has actually to some extent been sidelined in this process."

Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at October 8, 2006 11:07 PM

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Posted by: MisIslamist at October 8, 2006 11:17 PM

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