Christianity rightly sidelined to favour islam in England according to labour

[Kernunnos]

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Hazel Blears, Communities Secretary, says sidelining of Christianity is 'common sense'

By George Pitcher and Jonathan Wynne-Jones
Last Updated: 5:36PM BST 09/06/2008
It is "common sense" for Christianity to be sidelined at the expense of Islam, a Government minister claimed on Sunday.

Hazel Blears, the Communities Secretary, defended Labour’s policy on religion after a report backed by the Church of England claimed that Muslims receive a disproportionate amount of attention.
She said it was right that more money and effort was spent on Islam than Christianity because of the threat from extremism and home-grown terrorism.
Ms Blears told BBC Radio 4’s Sunday programme: “That’s just common sense. If we’ve got an issue where we have to build resilience of young Muslim men and women to withstand an extremist message.”

She added: “We live in a secular democracy. That’s a precious thing. We don’t live in a theocracy, but we’ve always accepted that hundreds of thousands of people are motivated by faith. We live in a secular democracy but we want to recognise the role of faith.”
The Church of England bishop responsible for the report, the Rt Rev Stephen Lowe, Bishop for Urban Life and Faith, said afterwards: “She said we live in a secular democracy. That comes as news to me – we have an established Church, but the Government can’t deal with Christianity.”
As The Daily Telegraph reported on Saturday, the landmark report commissioned by the Church and written by academics at the Von Hugel Institute accuses ministers of paying only “lip service” to Christianity and marginalising the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches, while focusing “intently” on Islam.
However Malaysia’s Prime Minister warned yesterday that Muslim extremism in Britain will grow unless the Government and society learn to understand Islam.
Abdullah Badawi claimed that the legacy of Britain’s imperial past has hampered its ability to appreciate its Islamic population.
In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, the prime minister urged Gordon Brown to allow the country’s Muslims to live under Islamic law, but also said that they must prove their worth to society.
Mr Abdullah argues that the Government must do more to ensure Muslims do not feel discriminated against if it is to tackle the rise of radicalism.
“The failure to understand Muslims is driving a divide between the communities,” he said.
“Gordon Brown must encourage a better understanding because Britain must appreciate its Muslims.”
Mr Abdullah argued that Britain needs to come to terms with being home to immigrants from countries that it used to rule over.
“The British Empire expanded in Asia, everywhere, throughout the Muslim land, through the land of Hindus and the land of Buddhists.
“When they were ruling it was different because they wanted it to be peaceful and to keep it peaceful they had to use diplomacy.”
He said that Muslims in Britain were more likely to be radicalised because they feel ignored rather than due to religious reasons.
“Is it because of poverty, social unrest, deprivation, feeling discriminated against, thinking people don’t care much because of the colour of their skin?”
Mr Abdullah, who was talking on the eve of a landmark summit of world leaders, echoed the calls of the Archbishop of Canterbury earlier this year for Muslims to be able to live under sharia.
The Malaysian Prime Minister also acknowledged that Muslims must also play their part in proving their value as immigrants.
“If they want to be respected then they must do something for the community,” he said.
“They must not be a liability. They have to be an asset.”

[Kernunnos]

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More madness in Londonistan



Monday, 9th June 2008





The Communities Secretary Hazel Blears has hitherto been thought of as one of the few government ministers who ‘gets it’ as far as the threat to Britain from domestic Islamism is concerned. Well, judging from remarks she is reported today to have made she still has a long way to go. Responding to the Church of England report which claims that the government is paying only ‘lip service’ to Christianity and marginalising the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches while focusing ‘intently’ on Islam, Ms Blears says brightly that yes, this is so and quite right too:

She said it was right that more money and effort was spent on Islam than Christianity because of the threat from extremism and home-grown terrorism. Ms Blears told BBC Radio 4’s Sunday programme: ‘That’s just common sense. If we’ve got an issue where we have to build resilience of young Muslim men and women to withstand an extremist message.’

You really don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Here is a government minister endorsing the sidelining of the founding faith of her country by an aggressively colonising religion whose adherents are determined that it should supplant that founding faith – and boasting that she is giving it British taxpayers’ money to do so in the name of defeating religious extremism. It’s all of a piece with the uneducation minister Ed Balls announcing that imams would be sent into schools to teach Islamic principles in citizenship lessons, or the Home Office decision not to prosecute individuals recruited to the jihad but to offer them ‘therapy and counselling from community groups’ instead.
The root of this madness is the government’s refusal to acknowledge the essence of the problem. Crippled by tunnel vision in which it sees al Qaeda alone as beyond the pale because the only threat the government recognises is terrorism, it fails to see that the other half of the attack is the attempt by Islamists to colonise the cultural sphere and transform Britain into an Islamic state. Its ‘counter-radicalisation’ strategy says that Islam is being misrepresented by extremists and so the counter-radicalising solution is to educate Muslims in ‘true’ Islam. It thus fails to grasp the key point that Islam is not the solution, it is the problem. That’s why even the Prime Minister of ‘moderate’ Malaysia has warned that Muslim extremism in Britain will grow unless the government and society learn to understand Islam – by which he means allowing Britain’s Muslims to live under Islamic law in Britain.
Yes, there are truly moderate Muslims, in Britain and around the world, who do not seek to live under Islamic law and are happy to live instead under the secular law of the land. But at present, mainstream Islam itself is not moderate. The four schools of Islamic jurisprudence mandate practices and principles which are inimical to a free society. Yes, there are brave Muslims who are now desperately trying to bring about an Islamic reformation, claiming that there are moderate traditions within the religion which can be reclaimed and thus turn scimitars into human rights. Maybe that is so; we must all hope they are correct and give them every support in their courageous endeavour.
But at present, it is not so. Many moderate Muslims are moderate because they are ‘cultural’ rather than religious Muslims and are indeed largely ignorant of the tenets of Islam. If they are taught those tenets, the state of the religion being as it is at present, they are likely to become radicalised rather than the reverse. Yet this is what Ms Blears is pouring state funding into doing. This is the true insanity of the government’s counter-radicalisation programme.
In order effectively to counter radicalisation, you have to identify correctly what is radical and what is not. But the government seems incapable of doing so. It does not seem to grasp, for example, that any ambition to colonise British public life for Islam should be absolutely unacceptable and that the core criterion of moderation is that Muslims must live in Britain under the law of the land like every other minority does.
Which is why the government’s new £12.5 million ‘counter-radicalisation’ programme to support ‘moderate’ Muslim voices and encourage positive role models to build up ‘resilience’ to extremist ideology will almost certainly go to individuals and groups who are not moderate at all but extremists because the government doesn’t know how to tell the difference. Which is why state funding already goes to jihadis, and why there are also jihadis advising the government on how to combat Islamist extremism.
For any Muslim to be truly moderate, he or she would need to subscribe to the principles set out by the Islam expert Sam Solomon in his Charter of Muslim Understanding, including the following:
· promoting the validity and the viability of the national domestic law to be fully adhered to and taking precedence over the Shari’ah...
· there will be no recriminations against any Muslim or non-Muslim who chooses to change, discard, or adopt another faith be it within the House of Islam, from any Islamic faction, or to a non-Islamic religion or faith.
· To discard all texts that discriminate with impunity against Christians and Jews by describing them as Kaffirs, apostates, polytheists, the children of apes, and swine, and prohibit any inciting, insulting, and all discriminatory references based on their religion
· To abandon the practice of takffir (infidel) against anybody, be that a Muslim or a non-Muslim. (Once a Muslim leader declares anyone as such, it is for the faithful ones to see that person eliminated.)
· To prohibit and abolish the practice of Takkiya (Islamic doctrine of legitimate lying and deception of others) to advance the cause of Muslims and Islam...
· Request all officially constituted Islamic bodies and institutions to revise and issue new interpretations of those Qur’anic verses that call for Jihad and violence against non-Muslims.
Now that’s counter-radicalisation. But you will not see that in Londonistan.