Archive for Archbishop of Canterbury

Archbishop of Canterbury unable

October 30, 2008 at 3:12 pm · Filed under Archbishop of Canterbury

   Archbishop of Canterbury unable to

   provide strong moral leadership

By Stephen Glover

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1081654/STEPHEN-GLOVER-How-man-high-morals-preside-BBCs-descent-gutter.html

Timid

Mr Thompson is not the only well-meaning and decent man running one of our major national institutions who is unable to provide strong moral leadership. When I look at the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, I see a similar tendency to avoid passing judgment.

The Church of England, like the BBC, has become a timid organisation that is often frightened to take a public stand against moral excesses which it knows in its heart are wrong.

Both the director-general of the BBC and the Archbishop of Canterbury would be utterly incomprehensible figures to their predecessors of 50 years ago, let alone a hundred.

Timid leaders are the curse of our national life. But the events of the past few days may indicate that the general public are not so timid, and they at least have strong standards.

BBC bosses were not able to see what was objectionable about Ross and Brand’s outpourings, but thousands of ordinary people, once alerted, could. It was the shocking realisation that many licence-payers had had enough – that they still defended standards of decency and proper behaviour – that finally jerked Mr Thompson out of his holiday reveries.

How could a man of such high morals preside over the BBC’s descent into the gutter

Last updated at 2:50 AM on 30th October 2008

 

The suspension of the foul-mouthed Jonathan Ross and the forced resignation of his equally disagreeable sidekick Russell Brand marked an extraordinary historic cultural victory. For the first time in living memory, the BBC has signalled that there are boundaries of decency it must not cross.

But, my goodness, didn’t this admission take a long time coming? No one at the BBC appeared to realise that the original show broadcast by Radio 2 on October 18 was so offensive.

Ross and Brand’s vulgar abuse of the actor Andrew Sachs was passed on the nod by a 25-year-old Radio 2 producer, even though Mr Sachs had refused his permission.

Man of morals: But the BBC’s director-general Mark Thompson was slow to respond to the furore surround Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross’s prank calls

That young man evidently did not know any better. But nor did his bosses. It took several days of mounting Press coverage, and critical remarks by David Cameron, Gordon Brown and other politicians, before the BBC’s management finally responded.

Even then the person whose head was pushed above the parapet was that of Tim Davie, the ‘director of audio and music’, of whom none of us had ever heard.

Only yesterday did Mark Thompson, the BBC’s director-general, and the man ultimately responsible for the Corporation’s output, break his holiday and announce that he was suspending Ross and Brand.

His statement was certainly everything one might have wished for, referring as it did to ‘a gross lapse of taste that has angered licence payers’, but it had to be wrung out of him.

Mr Thompson is a deeply symbolic figure of our times. He is not a bad man. He is civilised and well-read, having taken a first in English at Oxford.

As a devout Roman Catholic, he adheres to moral values that are a million miles from those of Ross and Brand. And yet he has made no attempt to stem the tide of clod-hopping filth that pours out of their, and others’, mouths whenever they broadcast.

Why should this be? Perhaps Mr Thompson believes that Ross and Brand are popular figures who will attract a large audience. Although the BBC is protected from commercial realities, it increasingly conducts itself as though these are the only realities that matter.

Shielded from the market, the Corporation often strives to outdo the market in offering dumbed-down programming, and appealing to the lowest common denominator.

Vulgarity

But I fancy there is a deeper psychological explanation for Mr Thompson’s indulgence of so-called entertainers against whose vulgarity and ignorance he must privately recoil.

Whereas some on the Left embrace Brand for his nihilism and for what they regard as his welcome flouting of bourgeois values – he seems eager to copulate with anything that moves – Mr Thompson is a more elevated, as well as a more interesting, character.

Brand has now resigned from his Radio 2 show while Ross remains suspended

Like so many modern liberal-minded intellectuals, he has a horror of being judgmental. He knows that Jonathan Ross is a coarse figure, but he reasons that if there are people who enjoy his crudeness and lavatory humour and peppering of four-letter words, he is not going to prevent them from having what they desire.

There is a fissure in him that permits this moral relativism. For himself and his family he wants culture and standards of decency, but if there are others who prefer dross, he is not going to stand in their way.

Yet, more than any other organisation, the BBC should not be in the business of providing dross. It is protected from the market. It was founded on high and noble principles.

It does not have to follow the worst trends – far less take the lead – and lure us into the gutter. Mr Thompson might not be fitted by background or temperament to edit the Daily Smut, but he has all the attributes to guide the BBC towards higher ground. And yet he does not do so.

The French philosopher Julien Benda famously coined the phrase ‘La Trahison des Clercs’  –  the betrayal of the intellectuals. He was thinking of French and German 19th-century intellectuals who had become apologists for militarism and nationalism.

The modern trahison des clercs is that of liberal intellectuals like Mr Thompson who can recognise goodness and truth but, out of fear of appearing judgmental or proscriptive, will not help others to find them.

This moral dereliction amounts to a fatal arrogance. Mr Thompson knows why it is wrong to scatter four-letter words on television. He can see that the kind of humour purveyed by the likes of Ross and Brand does not raise people up but often pushes them down.

But, because he is terrified of being seen imposing his values – which are, in fact, almost indistinguishable from the old values of the BBC – he has so far said: let them have what they want. Then he returns to the books and music and culture of his pleasant house in Oxford.

The greatest victims of this negligence are the young, as Sir John Tusa, a former head of the BBC World Service (one of the diminishing number of bastions of excellence in the Corporation) rightly pointed out yesterday on Radio 4’s Today programme.

The young, more than any of us, deserve guidance, and need inspiration. Instead, they are offered the sex-obsessed ravings of a pathetic clown like Brand. Shouldn’t they have better from the publicly-funded BBC?

Timid

Mr Thompson is not the only well-meaning and decent man running one of our major national institutions who is unable to provide strong moral leadership. When I look at the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, I see a similar tendency to avoid passing judgment.

The Church of England, like the BBC, has become a timid organisation that is often frightened to take a public stand against moral excesses which it knows in its heart are wrong.

Both the director-general of the BBC and the Archbishop of Canterbury would be utterly incomprehensible figures to their predecessors of 50 years ago, let alone a hundred.

Timid leaders are the curse of our national life. But the events of the past few days may indicate that the general public are not so timid, and they at least have strong standards.

BBC bosses were not able to see what was objectionable about Ross and Brand’s outpourings, but thousands of ordinary people, once alerted, could. It was the shocking realisation that many licence-payers had had enough – that they still defended standards of decency and proper behaviour – that finally jerked Mr Thompson out of his holiday reveries.

Inexcusable

His inclination may well be to rehabilitate Ross – Brand, by resigning, would seem to have put himself beyond the pale – once the fuss has blown over. He would be making a great mistake if he did so.

He has commissioned a report, which he will deliver to the BBC today, but we don’t need such a document to tell us that both men behaved in an inexcusable way, and should not be employed by our public sector broadcasting organisation again.

Will this historic cultural victory stick? Yesterday’s Mail reported that, in April, a BBC1 comedy drama called Love Soup showed a woman being ‘raped’ by a dog.

The BBC still pumps out many programmes that offend against decency and taste, and are often particularly offensive to women. We should not imagine that the tap will be turned off in a trice.

But, maybe the affair of those unfunny and grossly overpaid vulgarians Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand will show Mr Thompson and his senior colleagues that the BBC has become dangerously out of step with many of the people who pay its bills.

If Mr Thompson does not have the courage to act on his moral convictions, he will be wise to listen to the outrage of those who do.

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Obduracy at Canterbury

February 13, 2008 at 3:18 pm · Filed under Archbishop of Canterbury

February 11, 2008
Obduracy at Canterbury
Daily Mail, 11 February 2008

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, is fighting for his professional life after saying that the application of Islamic Sharia law in this country was ‘unavoidable’ and that it was not an ‘alien and rival system’ to English law.

The unprecedented outpouring of fury at his observations has caused people to question his fitness for office, with at least two members of the Synod already calling upon him to resign.

In his defence, his supporters claim the entire row has been got up by the ‘tabloid press’. This old chestnut ignores the fact that people went ballistic straight after they heard Dr Williams say on the radio that the principle of one law for everybody was ‘a bit of a danger’ —well before any newspapers even wrote their stories.

And now this lame self-justification has been blown out of the water by devastating criticism from his predecessor Lord Carey, who said Dr Williams had ‘overstated the case for accommodating Islamic legal codes’ within British law, a move which would be ‘disastrous’.

This followed equally lethal criticism by the Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, who said sharia was ‘in tension’ with fundamental principles of English law. So much for the ludicrous claim that Sharia was not a ‘rival and alien system’.

What such critics understand only too well is the threat posed to this country by a brand of radicalised Islam, or Islamism, that wants to take it over. As Lord Carey said, Dr Williams’s comments will embolden those Muslims in their attempt to turn Britain into a country ruled by Islamic law which contravenes human rights.

The only proper response to this threat is to say that not one inch of leeway will be given to it. But, instead, the Archbishop has gone down on his knees to welcome it.

Astoundingly, he does not seem to understand that this country is being targeted by a pincer movement of terrorism and cultural takeover. He does not seem to understand Sharia. And he does not seem to understand the role of his own religion in underpinning British laws, culture and society.

Certainly, the state should accommodate minority religious practices as long as they don’t contravene the law of the land — as this country does. But that is entirely different from changing the law of the land to accommodate those practices or afford them equal status.

The former is the essence of a tolerant, pluralist society. The latter leads inexorably to the ‘multicultural’ destruction of a society.

What’s more, it abandons those anti-Islamist British Muslims who, far from wanting-Sharia to be recognised, rely on English law to protect them from it — especially Muslim women whose second-class status under Islamic law subjects them to systematic injustice, violence and ‘honour killings’.

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.

Worse still, he actually advocated that English and Islamic law would thus ‘be forced to compete for the loyalty’ of British Muslims —who were faced with the ‘stark alternatives’ of allegiance to their culture or their country.

Alas, it is indeed the case that, according to Lord Carey, up to fully 60 per cent of British Muslims want to live under Sharia. But is it not astonishing that the head of the Anglican church should effectively suggest as a remedy that, if such Muslims refuse to live under Britain’s own laws, Britain will have to become partly Muslim?

Furthermore, there are many British Muslims who are entirely loyal to Britain and who most certainly do not want the state to recognise Sharia. Just where does the Archbishop’s suggestion leave them?

Puzzlingly, the Archbishop’s ‘clarification’ on his website statement also compounds a significant error by him. To bolster his claim that there was nothing novel about his proposals, Dr Williams said the state already delegated aspects of law to Jewish religious courts.

The statement repeated that there were ‘overlapping jurisdictions’ between English and Jewish law and that British Jews could choose between two systems of justice. But this is totally untrue. Jewish law has no legal authority in Britain, and British Jews have never asked for it.

Jewish religious courts can arbitrate in disputes only on a voluntary basis, and Jews must be married and divorced according to the same law of the land as everyone else.

The distinction is crucial. Does Dr Williams not understand this?

His supporters now say all he wanted to do was defend religion against the assault from secularism. But why then has he chosen not to bolster his own church to fight off secularism but instead resorts to Islam – which would consume both of them?

Instead of defending his embattled Bishop of Rochester, who has received death threats for telling the truth about Islamic ‘no-go areas’, the Archbishop of Canterbury has run up the cultural and religious white flag.

Dr Williams is said to be profoundly shocked by the reaction to his remarks. Well, we are all profoundly shocked by him. He should stand down and Dr Nazir-Ali, who is trying to defend the religion and culture of this country, should take his place.

If Britain really wants to defend itself and Western civilisation, what a powerful statement that would be.

http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles-new/?p=565

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Why the Archbishop shouldn’t get away with it

February 13, 2008 at 3:16 pm · Filed under Archbishop of Canterbury

February 13, 2008
Why the Archbishop shouldn’t get away with it
Daily Mail, 13 February 2008

So that’s all right then.

The Archbishop of Canterbury’s remarks about sharia law were completely and totally misunderstood. He has apologised for his ‘unclarity’ and expressing himself clumsily, but definitely not for what he said. End of story.

This, four days after Dr Williams’ comments on the need to accommodate sharia law in Britain ignited public outrage.

His remarks united in condemnation politicians from all parties along with people of all religions and none. Phone lines to radio and TV programmes were jammed with furious calls, website were deluged and inside the church there were calls for him to resign.

Yet the day after Dr Williams faced the Synod to fight for his professional life, liberal voices were loud in support of the ‘misunderstood’ prelate. He was apparently the victim of both ‘the tabloids’ and ‘traditionalists’ in his own church who had been gunning for him since he took office.

To the BBC he was merely ‘guilty of innocence’; his problem was that his enormous brain was simply incapable of ‘neatly packaged soundbites’; and it gushed that he was ‘a great’ Archbishop of Canterbury.

For its part, the Synod had given him a standing ovation. The arch-muddler had turned into a martyr. So how had Dr Williams pulled off this miracle?

I’m sorry but this really looks like smoke and mirrors. There are no fewer than seven cogent reasons why Dr Williams’s position is more untenable today than it was at the start of the week.

ONE: His mea culpa that his ‘unclarity’ had led people to misunderstand what he said. Put to one side the implied insult behind the self-deprecation, that the public were too stupid to understand him.

His excuse ignored the key fact that the public had exploded in anger five hours before his lecture, when he said on BBC Radio’s The World At One that ‘one law for everybody’ was ‘a bit of a danger’, that Islamic sharia law was not ‘an alien and rival system’ and that the adoption of sharia was ‘unavoidable’.

It was this, a shocking and unequivocal renunciation of the core principle of equality before the law, that provoked the fury. So his excuse that people had jumped to the wrong conclusions from his lecture demonstrably didn’t hold water.

TWO: He gave that interview in the first place as part of a strategy to manipulate public opinion. Well before his lecture was even written, Lambeth Palace’s press advisers were pondering how to secure the most favourable media reaction from a densely argued address which was bound to be intensely controversial.

The wheeze they hit upon was to offer an exclusive interview with Dr Williams to The World At One, so that they could carefully ‘manage’ the reaction to his lecture.

Unfortunately, this cynical plan spectacularly boomeranged when Dr Williams said on air a number of things which were both incendiary and crystal clear. The result was that within minutes of the interview, the radio programme’s phones were ringing with calls from furious listeners.

THREE: Having seen his attempt to control public reaction go so badly wrong, Dr Williams tried to pretend that he had not said what he did in fact say. In particular, he told the Synod that he had not been talking about ‘parallel jurisdictions’ of sharia and English law.

But in his lecture he had talked in terms of ‘supplementary jurisdictions’, and suggested an end to Britain’s ‘legal monopoly’ so that British Muslims could choose to be dealt with under either sharia or English law.

That inescapably implies equal status — or parallel jurisdictions. But on this point Dr Williams chose be less than transparent — and added to the confusion.

He told the Synod that he merely wanted to offer additional choices for ‘resolving disputes and regulating transactions’. This implied that all he wanted to do was extend the existing system, already used by both British Muslims and Jews, of informal religious tribunals whose decisions have no force of law.

A ‘jurisdiction’, however, is a very different matter. It is a means of enforcing a body of law. And indeed, in his lecture Dr Williams actually spoke of ‘a delegation of certain functions’ of English law to sharia courts.

So his disavowal was disingenuous to the point of being downright misleading.

True, he said nothing should prevent Muslim women from having recourse to the remedies of English human rights law. But in his interview he also spoke about ‘an alternative to the divorce courts’.

How on earth would human rights law help protect a British Muslim woman who is exposed to manifold injustice, violence and even ‘honour killings’ under the sharia family law Dr Williams wishes to entrench?

FOUR: The Archbishop’s inexcusable naivety about sharia law. He made clear he was talking about a ‘soft’ kind of sharia. But while this is espoused by reformist Muslims, there would be nothing to stop its more draconian provisions being enacted here.

Indeed, Islam has never allowed itself to be a pick and mix religion, nor to be subservient to any other legal system. Entrenching it within our system would inevitably introduce principles that are inimical to British justice.

FIVE: Dr Williams’s prescriptions would spell the end of British identity. Until now, all minorities have set up their own communities of faith and culture under the law of the land, which binds us all as equally loyal citizens of this country.

But Dr Williams suggested that English and sharia law should engage in a grotesque ‘competition for loyalty’ among British Muslims, whom he described as facing the ‘stark alternatives’ of allegiance to their culture or the state.

It is simply unacceptable for the head of this country’s established church to say, in effect, that if Muslims refuse to adhere to British values then Britain will have to become a bit Muslim.

SIX: Dr Williams’s remarks will already have emboldened British Islamist radicals and recruited yet more to their cause. Some will disagree but I believe they will see in his willingness to accommodate sharia law evidence that British society is now terminally weakened and is theirs for the taking.

SEVEN: His remarks will have a devastating effect on Christians in the Third World. Don’t forget Dr Williams is the head of a church whose members, in countries such as Sudan, Nigeria, Pakistan and elsewhere, are being persecuted, harassed, attacked, forcibly converted and murdered in large numbers at the hands of the enforcers of sharia law.

By proposing to entrench sharia law in Britain, he has both betrayed his besieged flock worldwide and weakened Britain against the danger that it faces from the same Islamist enemy that threatens Christians around the world.

That, disgracefully, is what the Synod rose to its feet to applaud when it gave Dr Williams its standing ovation.

No, there was no public misunderstanding over the Archbishop’s remarks. People understood precisely what he was saying. But now he has compounded that gross misjudgment by spinning it as cynically as any venal politician.

For shame.

http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles-new/?p=566

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The batty old booby

February 13, 2008 at 3:12 pm · Filed under Archbishop of Canterbury

The Archbishop of Canterbury is a batty old booby, but dangerous with it

09:55am 8th February 2008

 

Stephen Glover

Dr Rowan Williams likes to give the impression that he is a liberal-minded Archbishop of Canterbury.Who would have guessed that there lurks beneath that genial, bearded exterior a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary who wants to take Britain back to medieval times?

His amazing suggestion in a BBC interview yesterday that Sharia Law should be adopted in Britain marks a gigantic step backwards.

We have one law in this country. It may be based on Christian values, but it is a secular law upheld and interpreted by secular judges.

To have produced a single body of law, observed and respected by the great majority of people, is one of the triumphs of our civilisation.

Many centuries ago the Church had to accept that it should play no part in the administration of worldly justice. Its role is to appeal to our consciences – not to arbitrate in our everyday disputes, or to apportion guilt and pass sentences.

Yet it is exactly such powers that the mild-mannered and apparently rational Dr Williams envisages Sharia courts enjoying in this country.

Muslims could choose to have marital disputes or financial matters dealt with in Sharia courts.

There would, he suggests, be a “right of appeal” to a secular court if those involved did not like Sharia justice.

Really? Would a young Muslim woman who had been refused a divorce in a Sharia court be able to seek a second opinion?

 

How can a reputedly highly-intelligent man and self-proclaimed liberal hold such antediluvian opinions?

Let us try to follow his batty logic. He starts from the position that we live in a “fragmented society”. That is sadly true, after four decades of multiculturalism.

In Dr Williams’s view, one of the reasons for this fragmentation is that some Muslims do not relate to the British legal system – or, to put it in Rowan-speak, which is like wading though cold porridge with a lead weight attached to one’s feet: “What we don’t want is a stand-off where the law squares up to people’s religious consciences.”

But there are lots of non-Muslims in this situation, and they are not encouraged to set up their own courts.

For example, many Roman Catholics regard abortion as a form of murder.

This belief entitles them to abjure abortion themselves, but not to treat women who have abortions as though they are murderers.

They are free to try to change the law if they wish, and some are doing so, but they are not at liberty to create courts in which Catholic doctrine replaces the law of the land.

Many of us in fact object very strongly to various laws – I certainly do – but we do not suggest we should set up courts that embrace and propagate alternative measures of right and wrong.

When Dr Williams says that the argument that “there’s one law for everybody … I think that’s a bit of a danger”, he is talking dangerous, reactionary nonsense.

One secular law for everyone, evenly applied and without discrimination, is the mark of a fair society.

And, of course, his prescriptions would have exactly the opposite effect to that which he says he wants.

Far from increasing social cohesion, separate Sharia courts would be resented by the non-Muslim majority, and they would encourage Muslims to entrench themselves further as a distinct social and cultural group, not only with their own religious values but also with their own legal means of enforcing those values.

Sharia law, in fact, would be liable to deepen the kind of “hostility” which Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, recently suggested Christians encounter in some Muslim areas.

It would almost certainly exacerbate divisions, not lessen them.

Dr Williams tried to suggest in characteristically convoluted language yesterday that he and the Bishop of Rochester are on the same side of the argument.

They are in diametric opposition. I accept that for many Muslims in this country Sharia offers a code for living, just as, for some Christians, “the Christian way” shows them how to conduct their lives.

But it is one thing to use Sharia – the teachings of the Koran and the practice of the prophet Mohammad – as a kind of personal guide, quite another to employ it as the basis of what would soon become an alternative legal system.

Dr Williams was good enough to say that he does not recommend Sharia law where it might lead to “intensifying oppression inside a community.”

He is not in favour of women being stoned to death for adultery, as happens in a few Muslim countries where Sharia law is applied in its most extreme form. I suppose we should be grateful for that.

But once Sharia courts were set up here, it would be difficult for the archbishop or anyone else to ensure that judgments were not handed out that were at odds with the concept of justice enshrined in our secular legal system.

We could write off Dr Williams as a silly old booby who, like some other supposedly clever men, is in the habit of digging a hole in the wrong place, and then of continuing to dig all the way to Australia.

But he is the Primate of the Church of England, and will be taken seriously in some quarters, even though politicians from Gordon Brown to the LibDem leader Nick Clegg have already taken exception to what he said.

Muslims of an extremist hue will draw comfort from his prediction that Sharia law in Britain is “unavoidable.”

Moderate Muslims who had not expected that there would ever be Sharia law in this country may think the idea practicable now that it has been endorsed by no less a figure than the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Raised as I was in an Anglican vicarage, it pains me to have to write about the senior cleric of my Church in such terms.

It pains me even more that the senior cleric of the Established Church should be advocating Sharia courts, which would deepen the already serious cultural divisions in our country, besides discriminating against women and undermining the authority of secular justice.

Can he really have intended to do this? Who are the idiots advising him? What has happened to him?

He is right to respect Muslims for their devotion and their high moral standards, and I can understand that he wants to defend the rights of religious people in an irreligious age.

No doubt he means well, but history teaches us that good and well-meaning men who misuse their power can do a great deal of damage.

The Church accepted hundreds of years ago that it is not the proper role of religious figures to administer worldly justice and uphold religious law in place of secular law.

Dr Rowan Williams may think of himself as a progressive, liberal figure, and he has often been criticised for being a parody of a trendy archbishop, but the measures he proposes would take us back to the Middle Ages.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/columnists/columnists.html?in_article_id=512981&in_page_id=1772&in_author_id=244

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Sack the Archbishop

February 13, 2008 at 3:07 pm · Filed under Archbishop of Canterbury

The church should have the guts to sack the Archbishop…and pick a man who TRULY treasures British values

22:36pm 10th February 2008 Comments

 

Melanie Phillips

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, is fighting for his professional life after saying that the application of Islamic Sharia law in this country was “unavoidable” and that it was not an “alien and rival system” to English law.The unprecedented outpouring of fury at his observations has caused people to question his fitness for office, with at least two members of the Synod already calling upon him to resign.

In his defence, his supporters claim the entire row has been got up by the “tabloid press”.

This old chestnut ignores the fact that people went ballistic straight after they heard Dr Williams say on the radio that the principle of one law for everybody was “a bit of a danger” – well before any newspapers even wrote their stories.

Dr Rowan WilliamsWelcoming Sharia law: Dr Rowan Williams

And now this lame self-justification has been blown out of the water by devastating criticism from his predecessor Lord Carey, who said Dr Williams had “overstated the case for accommodating Islamic legal codes” within British law, a move which would be “disastrous”.

This followed equally lethal criticism by the Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, who said sharia was “in tension” with fundamental principles of English law.

So much for the ludicrous claim that Sharia was not a “rival and alien system”.

What such critics understand only too well is the threat posed to this country by a brand of radicalised Islam, or Islamism, that wants to take it over.

As Lord Carey said, Dr Williams’s comments will embolden those Muslims in their attempt to turn Britain into a country ruled by Islamic law which contravenes human rights.

The only proper response to this threat is to say that not one inch of leeway will be given to it.

But, instead, the Archbishop has gone down on his knees to welcome it.

Astoundingly, he does not seem to understand that this country is being targeted by a pincer movement of terrorism and cultural takeover.

He does not seem to understand Sharia. And he does not seem to understand the role of his own religion in underpinning British laws, culture and society.

Certainly, the state should accommodate minority religious practices as long as they don’t contravene the law of the land – as this country does.

But that is entirely different from changing the law of the land to accommodate those practices or afford them equal status.

The former is the essence of a tolerant, pluralist society. The latter leads inexorably to the “multicultural” destruction of a society.

What’s more, it abandons those anti-Islamist British Muslims who, far from wanting-Sharia to be recognised, rely on English law to protect them from it – especially Muslim women whose second-class status under Islamic law subjects them to systematic injustice, violence and “honour killings”.

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 widely seen as a statement of the creed of Islam and as such is 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.

Worse still, he actually advocated that English and Islamic law would thus “be forced to compete for the loyalty” of British Muslims – who were faced with the “stark alternatives” of allegiance to their culture or their country.

Alas, it is indeed the case that, according to Lord Carey, up to fully 60 per cent of British Muslims want to live under Sharia.

But is it not astonishing that the head of the Anglican church should effectively suggest as a remedy that, if such Muslims refuse to live under Britain’s own laws, Britain will have to become partly Muslim?

Furthermore, there are many British Muslims who are entirely loyal to Britain and who most certainly do not want the state to recognise Sharia.

Just where does the Archbishop’s suggestion leave them?

Puzzlingly, the Archbishop’s “clarification” on his website statement also compounds a significant error by him.

To bolster his claim that there was nothing novel about his proposals, Dr Williams said the state already delegated aspects of law to Jewish religious courts.

The statement repeated that there were “overlapping jurisdictions” between English and Jewish law and that British Jews could choose between two systems of justice.

But this is totally untrue. Jewish law has no legal authority in Britain, and British Jews have never asked for it.

Jewish religious courts can arbitrate in disputes only on a voluntary basis, and Jews must be married and divorced according to the same law of the land as everyone else.

The distinction is crucial. Does Dr Williams not understand this?

His supporters now say all he wanted to do was defend religion against the assault from secularism.

But why then has he chosen not to bolster his own church to fight off secularism but instead resorts to Islam – which will consume both of them?

Instead of defending his embattled Bishop of Rochester, who has received death threats for telling the truth about Islamic “no-go areas”, the Archbishop of Canterbury has run up the cultural and religious white flag.

Dr Williams is said to be profoundly shocked by the reaction to his remarks. Well, we are all profoundly shocked by him.

He should stand down and Dr Nazir-Ali, who is trying to defend the religion and culture of this country, should take his place.

If Britain really wants to defend itself and Western civilisation, what a powerful statement that would be.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/columnists/columnists.html?in_article_id=513503&in_page_id=1772&in_author_id=256

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The Archbishop of Canterbury & Sharia Law

February 10, 2008 at 3:12 pm · Filed under Archbishop of Canterbury

Joan Smith: British women are already suffering from Islamic law

The Archbishop of Canterbury says sharia courts could rule on family issues, but this is exactly where they can cause most harm

 

Sunday, 10 February 2008

There are moments when public debate in Britain appears to take place in a vacuum. As the Archbishop of Canterbury gave a convincing impression yesterday of a man suffering the torments of the Inquisition, the debate was moving away from his actual observations about Islamic law, sharia, to the question of his fitness (or otherwise) to hold his office. Rowan Williams claimed that his remarks about the unavoidability of adopting some aspects of sharia in this country had been misunderstood, prompting an interesting response from his critics: the cleric was a brilliant man, they said, but his utterances were simply too opaque for hoi polloi (especially the media) to comprehend. This prompts an obvious question – if no one understands what the Archbishop is saying, how do they know how intelligent he is? – but it also diverted attention from something much more important. Williams’s clarification of his remarks seemed to suggest that he wasn’t calling for a parallel legal system for Muslims, more a recognition of something that is already happening. Yet there has been a strange reluctance to ask a real expert who has seen the way sharia operates in this country: someone like Rahni Binjie, project manager of Roshni Asian Women’s Aid in Nottingham.

Binjie was interviewed in a major study of honour-based crime published by the Centre for Social Cohesion last week, and argued that Islamic leaders are reluctant to grant divorces to women who have children. “This is because the community sees the family structure as being of so much importance,” she said. Her colleague Tanisha Jnagel said that the Islamic Sharia Council hears both sides but relies on religious texts to decide whether a divorce should be granted: “In our experience, this isn’t going to result in a solution which is fair for the woman.” According to the study, Crimes of the Community: Honour-Based Violence in the UK by James Brandon and Salam Hafez, women are being forced to stay in violent marriages as a result. “Many women from the Muslim and Sikh communities report that they have difficulties gaining religious divorces from their respective religious leaders,” they say.

This will come as no surprise to Britain’s agunot, or “chained women”, who have been denied a religious divorce in Orthodox Jewish courts; even if they obtain a civil divorce, they are still married under Jewish law and any children they have with new partners will be mamzer, or illegitimate. Last week an Islamic Council in Leyton, east London, revealed that it had handled more than 7,000 divorces, but did not say what proportion was refused.

As soon as you look at the actual operation of religious law in this country, the picture looks less rosy. Even if the Archbishop didn’t have in mind barbaric punishments such as stoning women to death for adultery, there is plenty of evidence that sharia courts are a means of consolidating patriarchal power in societies where Muslim women have begun to demand the same rights as men. The Department for Work and Pensions recently made an astonishing decision to pay state benefits to Muslim men for each of their wives, as long as the marriages were contracted legally abroad. Bigamy is illegal in Britain and the spectacle of the Government colluding in the practice of polygyny – not polygamy, for Muslim women cannot have four husbands – is a signal that ministers are losing their moral compass on the subject of women’s rights.

We are only just beginning to realise the extent of violence against women from ethnic minorities. Last week, Commander Steve Allen, who leads for the Association of Chief Police Officers on honour-based violence, gave evidence to the Home Affairs Committee. Responding to a question about whether forced marriage and “honour” crimes are under-reported in this country, Allen responded with a single word: “Massively”. He believes the real level of violence might be 35 times higher than the number of cases (around 500) reported each year to the police and the Foreign Office forced marriage unit.

If a woman is running away from her parents or a violent husband, mosques and sharia courts are not the obvious place for her to turn to get justice. The Centre for Social Cohesion study contains a startling insight into attitudes in one British mosque, reported by Mohamed Baleela, a team leader at the Domestic Violence Intervention Project in Hammersmith, west London. “Last time I talked about marital rape in a mosque,” he said, “I nearly got beaten up. Because we said that the law makes it illegal to rape your wife, someone got up and hit me because he was ignorant of the law.”

There is an argument, and it is a compelling one, that we should all be subject to the same laws. People who look favourably on a parallel system of religious courts for civil matters claim they do no harm if all parties consent to their use. This, of course, is the crux of the matter: how can we know that women from traditional and religious families have given consent when they are under huge pressure from relatives? They may be threatened into accepting the authority of a religious court, just as hundreds of young women (and some young men) are coerced into getting married against their will.

The few cases that hit the headlines are unbearably tragic: 17-year-old Shafilea Ahmed from Warrington, Cheshire, drank bleach when she was confronted with an unwanted suitor in Pakistan, and later disappeared from her parents’ home. Her body was found five months later in a river in Cumbria and a coroner ruled last month that the student had been the victim of a “very vile murder”.

Another young woman, 20-year-old Banaz Mahmod from south London, was raped and murdered by Kurdish hit men hired by her father and uncle when she left an unhappy, arranged marriage and fell in love with another man. The notion that young women like Shafilea Ahmed and Banaz Mahmod would be helped by an expansion of Islamic law in this country is laughable; indeed the European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2003 that sharia is incompatible with the fundamental principles of democracy and European values. Secular law protects people’s right to practise their religion, but it also protects them from aspects of their faith which are unjust and oppressive.

Only someone as out of touch with modern Britain as the Archbishop of Canterbury could possibly think otherwise, or line up so willingly with the forces of reaction. Just because someone looks like an Old Testament prophet, he doesn’t have to think and speak like one as well.

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False teacher – Archbishop of Canterbury

February 9, 2008 at 3:27 pm · Filed under Archbishop of Canterbury

No Biblical leadership 

False teacher – Archbishop of Canterbury

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The Very Reverend Colin Slee, Dean of Southwark Cathedral, said the archbishop’s advisors were not up to the job.

“I have said to him on many occasions that his staff actually aren’t up to the job and he needs a bigger staff and more expert advice,” he said.

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Col Edward Armitstead, a Synod member from the diocese of Bath and Wells, was among those calling for Dr Williams to step down, telling the Daily Telegraph: “I don’t think he is the man for the job.”

He said: “One wants to be charitable, but I sense that he would be far happier in a university where he can kick around these sorts of ideas.”

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Alison Ruoff, a Synod member from London, said: “Many people, huge numbers of people, would be greatly relieved [if he resigned] because he sits on the fence over all sorts of things and we need strong, Christian, biblical leadership right now, as opposed to somebody who huffs and puffs around and vacillates from one thing to another.

“He’s a very able, a brilliant scholar as a man but in terms of being a leader of the Christian community I think he’s actually at the moment a disaster.”

 she said he was no longer “the right man for the job”. She said of his speech: “At best it was politically inept and at worst it was sheer foolishness. Christians, particularly in Islamic countries who are being severely persecuted, are really incredibly upset.”

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Brig William Dobbie, a former Synod member, described the archbishop as “a disaster, a tragic mistake”.

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His predecessor Lord George Carey accused Dr Williams of overstating the case for accommodating Islamic legal codes.

Writing in the News of the World, Lord Carey warned: “His acceptance of some Muslim laws within British law would be disastrous for the nation.”

But he said Dr Williams should not be forced to quit over his remarks, adding: “He is a great leader in the Anglican tradition and he has a very important role to play in the Church.”

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