McKinstry on Sharia courts in Britain

The big news today from Dead Britain is that local sharia courts are already operating in parts of the fabled isle, with jurisdiction over domestic issues like divorce and child custody.

Leo McKinstry has a column on it in the Daily Express. There are good things about the article, and not so good things. I will quote selected passages and offer my just, fair, and balanced comments.

It has been one of the cornerstones of our liberty, stretching back to the time of Magna Carta. Now, thanks to the pernicious doctrine of multi-culturalism, it is under attack as never before.

He’s still blaming multiculturalism, not Islam. If Islam were actually on the point of taking over Britain and subjecting everyone to it, would he still be saying, “We must oppose multiculturalism”?

The establishment of Sharia law will only increase the trend towards Muslim separatism.

Which means what—that he WANTS to be with the Muslims? That he thinks separateness from Muslims is the problem, and that togetherness with them is the solution? Doesn’t he see that whether they’re separate or “integrated,” they will still be an unappeasable problem, making greater and greater demands that cannot be satisfied short of Islamizing Britain?

Well, if they really think Sharia law is better than our own, why don’t they go and live in some brutal theocracy such as Saudi Arabia rather than trying to destroy the judicial fabric of Britain? It is sickening that they want to have it both ways: enjoying the fruits of our prosperous society while demanding that their superstitious, barbaric, misogynistic ideology be given official legal status.

All right, that’s better.

But then he falls down:

Indeed, it is this misogyny that is perhaps the most sinister aspect of the arrival of Sharia law in Britain.

Oh, please, Mr. McKinstry, the Muslims want to take over your whole bleeding country, they want to destroy you and your whole civilization including its freedoms, and you think that their unequal treatment of women is the most sinister thing about them? Are you one of those people who think that what’s objectionable about the Muslim full face-covering is that it makes Muslim women inferior to men, rather than that it is a declaration of total hatred and war—by those “subjugated” Muslim women themselves—against your society? Which concerns you more: the status of Muslim women within Islam, or the very survival of Britain?

We thus see that in certain key respects McKinstry is still a liberal, making rights and equality his highest concern rather than the country and culture and polity and people without which there will be no rights and equality.

But (I told you I would be fair) now McK gets better:

This could be just the first step towards the creation of localised Taliban regimes in Muslim areas of British cities, enforcing their own distorted moral codes, clamping down on alcohol, imposing new forms of censorship, promoting anti-western attitudes and peddling yet more grievances against the British state.

Good. Seeing this as nothing less than a Taliban-like growth in Britain takes us beyond the shadow issues of multiculturalism and women’s inequality.

[W]e have made the grievous error of thinking that Islam is another religion, like Christianity or Buddhism, based on the individual relationship between the believer and God. In reality Islam, certainly in its modern manifestation, is as much an aggressive political ideology as a faith. [Emphasis added.]

Ok, Mr. McKinstry. You’ve just seen the single most important thing that must be seen about Islam, that it is not a mere religion, but an expansive ideology aimed at the subjugation and Islamization of all non-Islamic countries.

Which leads me to the “therefore” question (just as in the Roman empire all roads led to Rome, at VFR all discussions of Islam lead to the “therefore” question): since it is the case that Islam is an imperialist political/religious movement aimed at the domination and destruction of Western society, what should we DO about the Muslims who are still coming en masse into the West, and what should we DO about the Muslims who are already in the West? Do we let the Muslims just keep coming? Do we let their populations and their power in the West just keep growing?

Neither McKinstry, nor any other Islam critic in the British press, has yet to utter a single syllable about stopping or slowing—or even slowing just a tiny little bit, even by one Muslim per year—the invasion whose effects they constantly decry as signalling the death of Britain.

I’ve written to McKinstry repeatedly about this, and have yet to hear back from him. To the vitally urgent question, why does he remains silent about Muslim immigration?, his answer is—silence.

We can only hope that as McKinstry’s understanding of the true nature of Islam and the deadly threat it poses grows deeper, he will not remain silent.

- end of initial entry -

Sage McLaughlin writes:

This line more or less captures what’s so very sick about our prevailing political and social order: “Oh, please, Mr. McKinstry, the Muslims want to take over your whole bleeding country, they want to destroy you and your whole civilization including its freedoms, and you think that their unequal treatment of women is the most sinister thing about them?”

What distinguishes modern liberal society, and therefore modern liberals, is the utterly bizarre notion that inequality is simply the worst thing there is. To be fair, McKinstry did say that it was misogyny, and not merely unequal treatment, that makes sharia so reprehensible.

My gut sense it that what liberals really hate most about the “Islamists” is that they’re making the whole “dissolution of Western culture” thing so much more bloody and complicated than it has to be. If they would stop doing things that get everybody’s attention, this could all go so much more smoothly…

LA replies:

Sage M. writes:

My gut sense it that what liberals really hate most about the “Islamists” is that they’re making the whole “dissolution of Western culture” thing so much more bloody and complicated than it has to be. If they would stop doing things that get everybody’s attention, this could all go so much more smoothly…

If by “liberals,” Mr. McLaughlin means not just the people who are conventionally called liberals today but the whole range of mainstream “conservatives” including the Islam critics themselves, then his observation is one of the most disturbing things I have read. If the Islam critics are at bottom liberals in the generic sense in which modern Western people are virtually all liberals (and everything I’m about to say is based on that “if”), then it would mean that, as liberals, they give their ultimate loyalty to liberalism, the advance of society toward an open, non-discriminatory, culturally diverse, and equal condition, with people of all races, all religions, all ethnicities, all national backgrounds, truly blending together as pure individuals. It would mean that their highest loyalty is not to the respective historic nations of which they are members, but to the liberal project. If this is true, it would explain why the Islam critics don’t touch Muslim immigration. To advocate the end of the immigration of a major group such as Muslims would be to oppose the fundamental axiom of liberalism, that all people are basically the same and discrimination is the worst evil. True, the Islam critics dislike and fear Islam, but they cannot take a real stand against it, because to do so would mean adopting a discriminatory posture against a fifth of the human race and thus turning against the liberal project itself.

If this is true, then they do not believe in their respective nations or in the historic Western civilization of which those nations are a part, except as carriers of liberal values; rather, they believe in a project which, if it went smoothly, would lead toward the gentle dissolution of the historic Western nations in a liberal global society. And Islam, as Sage M. points out, gets in the way of that smooth transition. So they oppose Islam, but only insofar as it violates liberalism. But they can’t oppose Islam effectively (i.e. by stopping and reversing Islamic immigration), because that would require taking actions that would also violate liberalism. Thus Islam disrupts the transition to the liberal global society. And serious opposition to Islam disrupts the transition to the liberal global society. So the Islam critics, paralyzed by their own liberalism, remain in their incoherent middle position, much as President Bush does in Iraq, pretending to fight a war which is not a war but only, at best, a holding action.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 30, 2007 03:33 PM | Send