Greater even than loss of fossil fuel, threat of nuclear war

Worse than plagues of locusts

Threat of Islamic supremacists

Impose iron will on world

Sharia law

Heated debate at our AHS team meeting this week

Meet to discuss the show for the weekend

Everyone said – Do not do it – bad topic

But I have no choice – morally irresponsible if I do not talk about this

Rowan Williams

“1 law for everybody” is a dangerous idea

“Maintain social cohesion” - sharia law in England

Actually agree with Christopher Hitchens of all people

Imagine telling that to a woman brutalized by her husband – you will need to take it back to your community – handled there rather than in our courts and legal system

Head of Church of England has his head in the sand

Look around you dude

France coming apart at the seams – decades of unchecked Muslim immigration

England can feel the volcanic lava bubbling up beneath it – still percolating

Years of immigration disaster coming home to roost

But Americans refuse to learn - sound like Michael Savage

hard to believe that I am echoing Hitchens and Savage tonight

But Americans are arrogant and figure it won't happen to us

So obsessed with false god of tolerance

That refuse to open our eyes all around us

Uva footbaths – dozens of schools – Michigan-Dearborn

Youngstown State prayer rooms

Sex segregation – creeping sharia law by intimidation and fear

Australian demands for halal food in cafeterias

Prayer room at universities

Prayer breaks demanded at work places

Prayer rugs not to be touched

Walls to segregate men and women in gymnasiums and schools

Refusal to play BB games with men in the stands

Americans are self-centered – so obsessed with getting more stuff that fail to see the grim reaper is standing on the doorstep – worry about economy rather than long-term security

Accommodation creeping into every area of our lives – with 2% of the population

We are where France and England were years ago – and they did nothing

Now they face extinction and their way of life

And Church of England yells for more accommodation – appease the Muslim world view

Lord Chamberlain would be proud – if we are polite, maybe the problem will go away

We refuse to say any world view, any culture, any values are better than any others

Want to believe that all belief systems are equal

Live in a Pollyanna world – where safe and free to believe what we want

Because 220 years ago, people left everything, lost everything, died even – in order to create a place where folks could be free

And now we are too soft and too weak to stand up with a backbone to a worldview that threatens our very existence

Continue to throw the doors open, bend over backwards to be tolerant and open-minded

Once your mind is wide open – everything of substance has drained out

Wake up – before it is too late



MISC

End immigration

3 pigs story judged offensive to Muslims

Revolutionary and Pilgrim examples of sacrifice for freedom

Islamic world view incompatible with tolerance – Hirsi Ali

Incompatible with equality for women

Cannot make a case that it is a peaceful movement

Simply cannot be done

Pakistanis – 3% of births – 33% of genetic diseases – inbreeding



1.6MM Muslims – 60MM - 3%



In December 1931, George Orwell got himself arrested in the slums of East London in order to find out about conditions "inside," and then he wrote an essay about the people he met while in detention. One of them was a buyer for a kosher butcher who had embezzled some of his boss's money. To Orwell's surprise, the man told him that "his employer would probably get into trouble at the synagogue for prosecuting him. It appears that the Jews have arbitration courts of their own, and a Jew is not supposed to prosecute another Jew, at least in a breach-of-trust case like this, without first submitting it to the arbitration court."

You might think that such relics of the medieval ghetto, and of the rabbinical control that was part of ghetto life, had more or less disappeared in England in the 21st century. And you would largely be right. There exists a "Beth Din," or religious court, in the prosperous North London suburb of Finchley to which the ultra-Orthodox submit some of their more arcane disputes. (This little world is very amusingly described by Naomi Alderman in her lovely novel Disobedience.) But to speak in general, Jews in Britain consider themselves, and are considered, to be answerable to the same laws as everybody else. Should I mention any of the numerous reasons why it would be extremely nerve-racking if this were not true?

But now the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has cited the Beth Din as one of his reasons for believing that sharia, or Islamic law, can and should become a part of what he called "plural jurisdiction" in Britain. His reasoning, if one may call it that, is clear: Other faiths already have their own legal authorities, so why not the Muslims, too? What could be more tolerant and diverse? This same argument has been used already, and will be used again, to demand that laws governing "blasphemy," originally written to protect only Christians from being upset, should now, in a nondiscriminatory way, be amended to cover Muslims as well. The alternative—don't have any blasphemy laws and let religious people's feelings be hurt, just as the feelings of the secular are regularly offended by religion—doesn't occur to the archbishop and people who think like him.

A BBC interview with Williams had him saying that the opening to sharia would "help maintain social cohesion." If that phrase is even intended to mean anything, it can only imply that a concession of this kind would lessen the propensity to violence among Muslims. But such abjectness is not the only definition of social cohesion that we have. By a nice coincidence, a London think tank called the Center for Social Cohesion issued a report just days before the leader of the world's Anglicans and Episcopalians capitulated to Islamic demands. Titled "Crimes of the Community: Honour-Based Violence in the UK," and written by James Brandon and Salam Hafez, it set out a shocking account of the rapid spread of theocratic crime. The main headings were murder and beating of women, genital mutilation, forced marriage, and vigilante methods employed against those who complained. It could well be—since we are becoming every day more familiar with the first three—that the fourth is the one that should concern us most.

Picture the life of a young Urdu-speaking woman brought to Yorkshire from Pakistan to marry a man—quite possibly a close cousin—whom she has never met. He takes her dowry, beats her, and abuses the children he forces her to bear. She is not allowed to leave the house unless in the company of a male relative and unless she is submissively covered from head to toe. Suppose that she is able to contact one of the few support groups that now exist for the many women in Britain who share her plight. What she ought to be able to say is, "I need the police, and I need the law to be enforced." But what she will often be told is, "Your problem is better handled within the community." And those words, almost a death sentence, have now been endorsed and underwritten—and even advocated—by the country's official spiritual authority.

You might argue that I am describing an extreme case (though, alas, now not an uncommon one), but it is the principle of equality before the law that really counts. And just look at how casually this sheep-faced English cleric throws away the work of centuries of civilization:

[A]n approach to law which simply said "there's one law for everybody and that's all there is to be said, and anything else that commands your loyalty or allegiance is completely irrelevant in the processes of the courts"—I think that's a bit of a danger.

In the midst of this dismal verbiage and euphemism, the plain statement—"There's one law for everybody and that's all there is to be said"—still stands out like a diamond in a dunghill. It stands out precisely because it is said simply, and because its essential grandeur is intelligible to everybody. Its principles ought to be just as intelligible and accessible to those who don't yet speak English, in just the same way as the great Lord Mansfield once ruled that, wherever someone might have been born, and whatever he had been through, he could not be subject to slavery once he had set foot on English soil. Simple enough? For the women who are the principal prey of the sharia system, it is often only when they are shipped or flown to Britain that their true miseries begin. This modern disgrace is deepened and extended by a fatuous cleric who, presiding over an increasingly emaciated and schismatic and irrelevant church, nonetheless maintains that any faith is better than none at all.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2184186/