The Archbishop's Sharia Amour By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, February 07, 2008 Europe: Civilization took a low blow Thursday when a pillar of its values, the archbishop of Canterbury, decided that Islamic law is now "unavoidable" in the U.K. as a matter of progress and tolerance. He's off the deep end. In Rowan Williams' own mind, it all seemed so reasonable. "People may be surprised," he told the BBC in justifying his insistence that Shariah law is inevitable, "but I hope that surprise will be modified when they think about the general question of how the law and religious community, religious principle are best and fruitfully accommodated." After all, wasn't it all happening anyway? Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams called upon Britons to accept the 'unavoidable' and adopt Shariah law in the U.K. for Muslims. "As a matter of fact, certain provisions of Sharia are already recognized in our society and under our law," said the Church of England leader, citing legal provisions for faith-based objections to abortion. But the issue isn't about a right to refrain, but the wholesale forcing of Britain's Muslim subpopulation into an alternative legal system run by an unelected theocracy. "In a plural society, all citizens are equal under the law and the archbishop's comments directly undermine this," Alastair McBay of the National Secular Society told the U.K. Press Association. It's part of a slippery slope Britain's already skidded well down on. "We have segregated schools, segregated scout groups and even segregated toilets for Muslims," noted McBay. What's worse, Britain has an especially vulnerable system because so many of its laws are unwritten except through the stubborn tradition known as common law. So what the archbishop is proposing, under cover of tolerance, is nothing less than to get rid of the invisible architecture of the law. Naturally, the archbishop premises his proposal on what he presumes are good intentions. "No one in their right mind, I think, would want to see in this country a kind of inhumanity that sometimes appears to be associated with the practice of the law in some Islamic states â the extreme punishments, the attitudes to women as well," Williams said. So it's not the beheadings, amputations, forced marriages, stonings, female circumcision, the veil, sex apartheid and jailing of rape victims that he's advocating. Just a tolerance for differences. But it amounts to stripping Britons of legal rights, and that's a slippery slope he can't quite get to the bottom of. He opens the door to it by saying Shariah would be useful for family and marriage matters to start. Though that looks innocuous and insignificant, it's really not. What he's proposing could end prohibitions on polygamy, revoke female inheritance rights and make divorce a cheap verbal affair. It wouldn't stop there. Heaven help any Muslim seeking to change his religion (it's against Islamic law) â or one who wants to write another "Satanic Verses," as Muslim apostate Salman Rushdie did. It also goes against the Council of Europe's European Court of Human Rights 2003 ruling that Shariah is "incompatible with the fundamental principles of democracy." But no matter to the archbishop. In his preening statements on tolerance and progress, he's congratulating himself on his open mind at the expense of the rights of Muslims, many of whom have fled Shariah tyrannies to practice their religion freely, and in peace. The saddest thing about Williams' proposal is that it repudiates Britain's historic distinction in Europe as a safe haven for religious dissenters since the days of the Pilgrims. No longer would a Somali Muslim dissenter like Ayaan Hirsi Ali find in Britain a safe haven. With the archbishop backing the mullahs, she'd find her tormentors waiting for her in London instead. For an archbishop supposedly upholding the oldest traditions of the West, his support for such notions are the height of intolerance.
What in the flying fuck, happened here, i tried to perform a simple comment, and end up with an entire quote, of something or other. Ok, quote time-drive anything resembling sharia law out of england, out of any former colonies, OUT OF EUROPE at the sharp end of a pointy stick, EXTERMINATE the viral shit extremism before its too FUCKING LATE. The sickness of religious extremism has no place in a democratically based europe, ISLAM IS a SICK DEATH CULT, and always will be.
Britain's encounter with Islamic law Beneath the deceptively placid surface of everyday life, the British population is engaged in a momentous encounter with Islam. Three developments of the past week, each of them culminating years' long trend - and not just some odd occurrence - exemplify changes now underway. First, the UK government has decided that terrorism by Muslims in the name of Islam is actually unrelated to Islam, or even anti-Islamic. This notion took root in 2006 when the Foreign Office, afraid that the term "war on terror" would inflame British Muslims, sought language that upholds "shared values as a means to counter terrorists." By early 2007, the European Union issued a classified handbook that banned jihad, Islamic, and fundamentalist in reference to terrorism, offering instead some "non-offensive" phrases. Last summer, Prime Minister Gordon Brown prohibited his ministers from using the word Muslim in connection with terrorism...And last week the Home Office completed the obfuscation by issuing a counter-terrorism phrasebook that instructs civil servants to refer only to violent extremism and criminal murderers, not Islamist extremism and jihadi-fundamentalists. Second, and again culminating several years of evolution, the British government now recognizes polygamous marriages. It changed the rules in the "Tax Credits (Polygamous Marriages) Regulations 2003": previously, only one wife could inherit assets tax-free from a deceased husband; this legislation permits multiple wives to inherit tax-free, so long as the marriage had been contracted where polygamy is legal, as in Nigeria, Pakistan, or India. In a related matter, the Department for Work and Pensions began issuing extra payments to harems for such benefits as jobseeker allowances, housing subventions, and council tax relief. Last week came news that, after a year-long review, four government departments (Work and Pensions, Treasury, Revenue and Customs, Home Office) concluded that formal recognition of polygamy is "the best possible" option for Her Majesty's Government. THIRD, THE archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, endorsed applying portions of the Islamic law (the Shari'a) in Great Britain. Adopting its civil elements, he explained, "seems unavoidable" because not all British Muslims relate to the existing legal system and applying the Shari'a would help with their social cohesion. When Muslims can go to an Islamic civil court, they need not face "the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty." Continuing to insist on the "legal monopoly" of British common law rather than permit Shari'a, Williams warned, would bring on "a bit of a danger" for the country. ... Although widely denounced (and in danger of losing his job), Williams may be right about the Shari'a being unavoidable, for it is already getting entrenched in the West. A Dutch justice minister announced that "if two-thirds of the Dutch population should want to introduce the Shari'a tomorrow, then the possibility should exist." A German judge referred to the Koran in a routine divorce case. A parallel Somali gar courts system already exists in Britain. These developments suggest that British appeasement concerning the war on terror, the nature of the family, and the rule of law are part of a larger pattern. Even more than the security threat posed by Islamist violence, these trends are challenging and perhaps will change the very nature of Western life. http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1202742140015&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull
This is their version of "Press one for English." When a country allows wholesale immigration by people with no interest in assimilation and who in fact have a culture and principles that are inconsistent with the host country, they invite trouble. Sometimes it simmers, as in the US. Sometimes it smoulders, as in England and France, where non muslims cannot even safely travel in certain areas. Sometimes it bursts into flames, as in the Balkans.
The Church of England stopped being relevant about 50 years ago. Britain is predominantely a secular society, just look at church attendance, it's pitiful. The vast majority of Brits think it's nuts to do anything like this, even the elected MPs have no truck with it. Just another scaremongering piece of newspaper BS.
Sure, yet they managed to ban fox hound hunting-that was considered scare mongering and unlikely to pass as well. Ban something on the basis of supposed cruelty, then advocate something 100% guaranteed to increase cruelty to people in violation of all the agreed upon human rights accords. Freakin brilliant. The archbishop should be sacked, simple as that.