Mel P on the "steady incursion of Islamic sharia law" in the UK

Melanie Phillips in yesterday’s Daily Mail exploits the latest tranche of files on Wikileaks, the Guantanamo Files, to rehash her theory on Londonistan and takes aim at what she argues is “the steady incursion of Islamic sharia law, whose principles are inimical to Western values and human rights.”

Phillips writes:

“The UK, these papers reveal, furnished no fewer than 35 of the members of Al Qaeda — more than any other nation — who ended up in Guantanamo after having been indoctrinated by Islamic preachers in Britain into murderous hatred against the West.

“The documents record how terrorist recruits from across Africa and the Middle East flocked to London to claim asylum.

“As I wrote in my book, they were drawn like bees to a honeypot by Britain’s uniquely self-destructive combination of a generous welfare state, a long tradition of turning a blind eye to foreign political dissidents, and a judiciary and political class which had effectively decided to tear up Britain’s border controls in the cause of ‘universal human rights’.

“Of course, it must not be forgotten that many hundreds of thousands of British Muslims shun violence or extremism. They want only to live peacefully and enjoy the benefits of Western democracy and human rights.

“But an alarmingly high number do not. And this radicalisation has come about through a lethal cocktail of multiculturalism, welfarism and sheer spineless funk by the British authorities, laced with political correctness which turned right and wrong upside down

“Yet there are still signs of muddled thinking at the top. For example, Security Minister Baroness Neville-Jones, who is drawing up the Government’s new counter-terrorism strategy, recently identified her task as ‘trying to convince minorities in this country that it’s their country as much as anybody else’s’.

“But since the essence of the problem is that extremists in fact regard Britain as so much their own country they wish to turn it into an Islamic one, this is surely to miss the point spectacularly.

“For it is not just terrorism that threatens Britain. It is also the steady incursion of Islamic sharia law, whose principles are inimical to Western values and human rights. This ‘sharia creep’ is now highly advanced in Britain. A parallel jurisdiction in Islamic family law has been allowed to develop in Muslim areas, turning British Muslim women into second-class citizens and worse.

“There has been an enormous growth of Islamic banking — which, WikiLeaks says,  the Americans feared might serve as an umbrella for the financing of Islamic terrorism.

“Several education authorities have quietly taken to serving halal meat to all pupils. As TV programmes have shown, some Muslim schools and apparently ‘moderate mosques’ are teaching pupils and worshippers to hate ‘unbelievers’.

“Islamic extremist speakers appear unchallenged regularly at British universities. Freely available in London are certain Muslim TV propaganda channels — one of which is owned and controlled by the fundamentalist Islamic state of Iran.”

No mention whatsoever by Phillips of the UK’s colonial and post-colonial history with the Middle East, and its interventions in the region, as possible reasons for its being the preferred choice of peoples fleeing persecution at home. And Phillips speaks of the Human Rights Act and our official stance on condemning torture and granting asylum to seekers of human rights as though these were stains on our collective conscience. A strange set of ideas from someone purportedly committed to the defence of our liberal democratic way of life. Unless the unspoken caveat is that such liberal rights don’t extend to Muslims seeking asylum and protection against tyranny and torture?

As we’ve argued before, the provision of Shari’ah tribunal services for Muslims in the UK operate on exactly the same premises as the provision of tribunal services to members of the Jewish community who defer to Beth Din courts under the Arbitration Act. The right is consistent with equal application of the law unless of course Ms Phillips regards non-Muslim Britons as more equal than their British Muslim counterparts?