Islam – All Things Considered

10 Apr

Dig your own grave

Let me try to put his in context…

In the next few days the USA military will launch an attack on Syrian army bases. This will not be merely symbolic but real. But it won’t amount to very much

The reason for this attack is said to be righteous outrage against Assad’s use of chemical weapons against civilians. This use is verified and we have the pictures to prove it: so now we enjoy a unanimity of condemnation which extends even to that moral squalor which goes by the name of The Guardian.

All “civilised” and “democratic” and “liberal” opinion agrees that Assad must be punished

And – Guardian readers all – rest assured Assad will be punished

Assad will receive the unbearable punishment of the slap on the wrist

The world’s media will look at the TV footage of the CIA’s drone attacks, cruise missiles, fast jet fighter-bombing and so on – and sit back with satisfaction

Assad’s chemical weapons attacks have nothing to do with the real-politic that pertains in the Middle East

Let’s instead look at the reality.

Israel last week launched an attack on a Syrian military airbase,

Ben Netanyahu followed up this attack by saying (in effect): “We did this because the base we attacked was full of Iranian Republican Guard, and we will not tolerate a strong Iranian presence on the borders of Israel. Do something, Donald – or we will”

So Donald will “do something” amounting to doing nothing

In this way the cowardly West continues to dig its own grave

03 Jan

The new Iranian revolution

I just write this blog and I have no part in compiling the speeches of Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump. But the other day I suggested: “No doubt the Israelis and the Americans are making all efforts to encourage the Iranians who have seen the possibility of a change for the better.”

Then Mr Netanyahu said: “When this regime, the Iranian government, finally falls, and one day it will, Iranians and Israelis will be great friends once again.”

And Mr Trump declared: “The people of Iran are finally reacting against the brutal and corrupt Iranian regime. All of the money that President Obama so foolishly gave them went into terrorism and into their own pockets.”

I am encouraged by the comments of these leaders to notice that, in their support for the Iranian uprising against the mullahs, at least some western leaders are backing the right side this time. That is not what the west did in its foolish enthusiasm for the so called “Arab Spring” that began with the Tunisian revolution on 17^th December 2010.

The Tunisian Revolution effect spread strongly to five other countries: Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain, where either the political establishments were toppled or major uprisings and social violence occurred, leading to insurgencies and in Syria civil war. Sustained street demonstrations took place in Morocco, Iraq, Algeria, Iranian Khuzestan, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman and Sudan. Minor protests occurred in Djibouti, Mauritania, the Palestinian National Authority, Saudi Arabia, and the Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara. A prominent slogan of the demonstrators in the Arab world was ash-shaʻb yurīd isqāṭ an-niẓām – “the people want to bring down the regime.”

In Egypt “the people” – or rather the Muslim Brotherhood – did succeed in bringing down the government and President Mubarak was deposed. Unfortunately, the Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist organization and not composed of bright-eyed teenagers on their mobile phones and avid for “democracy” – as neocons in the west firmly believed. And so the fatuous hopes of western politicians were dashed. These starry-eyed political enthusiasts in the west reminded me of William Wordsworth’s words when the French revolution broke out in 1789: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, and to be young was very heaven.” Willie soon changed his tune when the Reign of Terror got going, Madame Guillotine toured the country and Englishmen abed feared that the revolution would catch on over here too.

The French got Napoleon, Egypt got Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Syria got a genocidal war which is hardly finished eight years later, and the world got the fundamentalist psychopaths of Islamic State.

Why did the west for so long and so consistently back the wrong side? For decades – for centuries, dammit – it was obvious that the real danger to western civilization was the same as it has been for 1400 years: a militant Islamic insurgency. 9/11 should have removed finally any doubts that remained. This insurgency was first rebuffed by Charles Martel at Tours in AD 732, later at Lepanto and then with the relief of the Siege of Vienna, 1683. How come we didn’t notice?

Long ago, Amos confessed, “I am no prophet, but a herdsman and a gatherer of sycamore fruit” (Amos 7:14). I am not even a herdsman, or even a half-competent gardener, but I saw what was going on and warned of it in my lecture Apocalypse Soon? which I gave in St Sepulchre-without-Newgate in 2003 and, a little later, in the introduction to my book The Secular Terrorist.

06 Oct

Rotherham: The Social Workers’ Mecca

The National Federation of Butchers have been awarded this year’s prize for services to vegetarianism. Praising the butchers, the Chair of the Vegetarian Alliance, Ms Flora Vegan-Nutter, said, “We know that butchers are not usually the strictest vegetarians, but the other day I watched a video of a butcher with two sprouts by the side of his T-bone steak. So the VA wants to build on this encouraging start and that’s why we have awarded the NFB this year’s prize.”

Only kidding.

But if you thought that was fake news, here’s something which unfortunately isn’t. I quote from Rotherham Council’s website:

“Rotherham Council has been shortlisted for the Best Social Work Employer of the Year prize in the acclaimed Social Worker of the Year Awards 2017 as a result of their outstanding work with vulnerable children. The Council has been singled out following its successful social work recruitment drive – which has led to more social workers than ever before wanting to come and work in Rotherham. And we have been told by Ofsted in recent monitoring visits that we are have a positive organisational culture.”

Now isn’t that nice for them?

Rotherham has been in the prize-winning frame before. It is only one among so many towns which might have won the accolade for having the most underage girls raped or otherwise sexually-abused by Muslims: 1400 – and these were only the girls definitely identified. In all probability 1400 is a massive underestimation of the scale of this outrage.

The habitual practice of Rotherham social workers – again as with those in a great many other places – was to turn a blind eye to the rape and sexual abuse of children for fear of giving “offence” to “communities” and for being found guilty of the imaginary crime of “Islamophobia.”

It was the Jay Report, under the chairmanship of Mark Greenburg, which exposed these many violent offences.

Mr Greenburg said the Rotherham Social Work Department was guilty of “Multiple and systemic failures.” And then, in what must be the year’s most unfortunate choice of words, he added, “It was more cock-up than conspiracy.”

Too many cocks up, eh Mr Greenburg?

The Jay Report was not the first investigation into the Rotherham scandal and it was earlier revealed that there have been untold thousands of rapes since the 1980s.

And the result? In all those almost forty years, there have been only twenty convictions.

Moreover, the abuse is still going on.

And that’s not fake news either.

25 Sep

We will fight them with our floral tributes

As a result of last Sunday’s elections, the AFD, the third largest party in Germany, has declared that Muslims are not welcome in that country. Meanwhile in Holland, the second largest party has said the same. Even the most cursory examination of social trends in the European nations helps explain this antipathy.

Brussels has become the jihadist capital of Europe, a city where more than half of the continent’s terrorist atrocities are planned and co-ordinated. It contains the highest per capita number of fighters in Europe. The Molenbeck suburb is a no go area, a ghetto, with twenty-two mosques. 6% of the population of Belgium as a whole are Muslim.

Malmo in Sweden is a hell-hole of violent crime organised and perpetrated by Muslim immigrants. In this formerly eirenic and ultra-tolerant country there are now so many sex crimes that it has been described as the rape capital of the world – worse even than South Africa

Hungary’s prime minster has stated, “We don’t want any more Muslims here.” There are now two razor wire fences to keep them out. Foreign minister Peter Szijarto says the fences have been built as a defence “against migration pressure.”

The rule of political correctness is absolute in Germany where Andre Schulz, head of the criminal police association complains, “Only 10% of rapes and other sex crimes are reported.”And the police have asked the media not to show photographs of suspects for fear that this would reveal them as Muslims. In the first nine months of 2016 – the latest period for which figures are available – there were 2790 sex offences – that’s about ten each day.

Italy is suffering more than most countries as it is the arrival point of choice for African immigrants – 59,000 of them this year so far.

In Spain the immigration numbers are three times what they were last year and there is widespread violence as the incomers attempt to storm the barriers erected to keep them out .

According to an American journalist working in Greece, “It is as though the population has simply been replaced by Muslims and the country’s institutions by those of Islam.”

I wonder, in the light of these catastrophic events, will there ever come a tipping point when Europeans say to hell with political correctness and accusations of “Islamophobia”: enough is enough?

Allow me a personal anecdote. On 9/11 I was at a conference in Oxford. After the attacks on New York and Washington, I returned quickly to my family and to the church where I was rector in the City of London. On the crowded train, travellers were sombre and subdued. I noticed the Daily Telegraph’s front page headline AMERICA AT WAR. i was moved with a sensation very far from happiness but something like the first stirrings of a sense of relief. I said, almost aloud to myself, “Well at least these attacks mean the end of political correctness. Now at last the West will wake up.”

But we didn’t. If the deaths of 3000 innocent people going about their daily business would not provoke us to take decisive action, whatever in the world would?

Nothing apparently. Not 9/11 and not the hundreds of Islamic terrorist attacks perpetrated in the intervening sixteen years in London, Paris, Manchester, Boston, Nice and in so many other towns and cities.

After each attack, our inertia follows a familiar pattern. First, a blaze of exciting scenes on TV – the media love it, because it gives them a real story above the dull round of politics. Then comes the prime ministerial or presidential fatuous declaration: “They will never divide us and never defeat us.” But the prime minister/president hasn’t noticed that they have already divided us and defeated us. Then follow the mawkish Dianafication scenes with wayside shrines, teddy bears galore and carpets of flowers. (Islamic terrorism does wonders for the florists’ trade)

What we are suffering today is a violent Islamic insurgency – the fourth, at least, since Charles Martel defeated the Muslims at Tours in 732 and thereby saved Europe from conquest. Incursions continued on and off throughout the Middle Ages. There was the siege of Malta in 1565, the Battle of Lepanto in 1572 and the relief of the encirclement of Vienna by Jan Sobieski in 1683.

All these victories were achieved by Christian armies under the command of Christian princes and blessed by bishops and popes. But now Europe has abandoned Christianity and therefor lest its soul. We no longer hold to the values which created Europe and sustained it for almost 2000 years as the greatest civilisation and cultural efflorescence the world has ever seen.#. When a civilisation loses its self-belief, no power on earth can save it.

Unless of course you think the jihadist’s axe and his bomb and his Islamovan will be seen off by Equality, Diversity, Multiculturalism and a population of transgendered snowflakes.

09 Sep

Preposterous and shameful

“Chief Constable defends his decision to take evidence which helped to convict a paedophile gang from a man convicted of raping children.”

That was the newspaper headline. But Chief Constable Steve Ashman should not be required to defend his actions

Northumbria Police’s decision to pay the unnamed convict almost £10,000 came to light when details of the case were revealed last month.

The seventeen rapists were sentenced for their crime of recruiting mainly underage girls, giving them drugs and then persuading or forcing them into sex, Steve Ashman described the “outpouring of public support” for his force’s decisions.

Mr Ashman said: “When reflecting upon the morality of the decision, I think it’s important to take account of public opinion. If the moral compass was spinning when it was first made public a few weeks ago, when the verdicts were handed out, it’s absolutely fixed now in our favour. If I had any doubt, and I didn’t personally, but if I had any doubt whether it was the right thing to do, then I’m absolutely determined now that it was right.”

Of course it was right. The only consideration in this matter is not the pedigree of the witness but that of whether his evidence was reliable: in a word, whether it could be certified that what he told the police was the truth. It was. And without it the seventeen men and one woman who constituted that gang of child molesters would still be at large. The fact that these wicked people are now behind bars is a tribute to Steve Ashman’s courage and a cause for small rejoicings.

Regrettably, mind you, only for small rejoicings.

The conviction in Northumbria was a rare event. For the systematic rape and sexual abuse has been going on for decades in a score of British towns and cities. The perpetrators get away with it because they are all Muslims and they operate in ghettoes into which the police rarely venture. If they do so venture and make accusations, the cry goes up, “Islamophobia!” And the police, fearful they will be charged with “racism” and lose their livelihood, back off.

If these rapists were white men, they would be behind bars before you could say “Allahu Akbar – drug that girl!”

The most shocking aspect of this sordid affair is that, in all those towns and cities, the systematic rapes are still happening and the perpetrators remain free to do as they like.

There was one word missing from that newspaper report I read this morning. The word is “Muslim.” It is the correct word. For all the rapists were Muslims. There was not a Methodist among them, nor a Seventh Day Adventist, nor a Guardian-reading freethinker. The rapists’ defining characteristic is their adherence to Islam.

Two different systems of criminal justice are operating in this country today: one for Muslims and the other for indigenous whites. This is shameful and utterly preposterous. And the matter is further compounded by the fact that hardly anyone dares mention the fact.

18 Aug

WW2: Don’t blame the Germans–it was the terrorists wot dun it

The front pages are full of it with headlines: “Massacre….Terrorism…Evil strikes again…Holiday horror…” The always enterprising Sun sports “BASTARDS!”

Why will none of these editors tell the true story?

We know who the “Terrorists” are. We know who are inflicting “Massacre” and the “Horror.” In every case they are Muslims. “Muslim” is the most accurate description of the perpetrators. Some may be Somali – but not all. Some Pakistani – but not all. Some Palestinian – again not all.

But they are all Muslims. Moreover, they commit their atrocities explicitly in the name of Islam. Before bombing a tube train or driving a truck into a crowd of shoppers, they don’t exclaim, “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.” Or “The serenity of Gautama be always with you.”

They yell, “Allahu Akbar!” which translated means, “Our god is greater than your god.”

Muslims are committing these atrocities every day of the week across four continents.

Only when we acknowledge this fact might we learn how to beat this enemy. But no, we pussyfoot around with evasions and euphemisms. The West is dying of political correctness.

Lake me take you back to the Blitz on London. The BBC newsreader didn’t come on the wireless the morning after an air raid to inform the nation, “Last night terrorist aeroplanes once again bombed the capital, destroyed many homes and killed more than a hundred Londoners.”

No, newsreaders in those days were honest. they came on and said plainly, “Last night German bombers dropped many tons of high explosive on the City of London.”

Once we had thus correctly identified the enemy, our soldiers, sailors and airmen worked out how to fight back most efficiently. And so in the end – not the terrorists or the anonymous perpetrators of horror – but the GERMANS were defeated.

As in 1941, so in 2017, there is a world war on. And this world war has been going on for a lot longer than the last one.

This is obvious to everyone except politicians and newspaper editors.

Here are some words of Professor Marcello Pera, a philosopher and former president of the Italian Senate:

“Is there a war? I answer, yes there is a war and I believe the responsible thing is to recognise it and to say so, regardless of whether the politically-correct thing to do is to keep our mouths shut.

“In Afghanistan, Kashmir, Chechnya, Dagestan, Ossetia, the Phillipines, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, Bosnia, Kosovo, the Palestinian Territories, Egypt, Morocco and much of the Islamic and Arab world, large groups of fundamentalists, radicals, extremists – the Taliban, Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Muslim Brothers, Islamic Jihad, the Islamic Armed Group and many more have declared a holy war on the West. This is not my imagination. It is a message they have proclaimed, written, preached, communicated and circulated in black and white. Why should I not take note of it?”

27 Jul

Goodnight sweetheart

“Such modest attainments as you can boast in the way of polite society will hardly survive the faith to which they owe their significance.” – Choruses from the Rock (1934) by T.S.Eliot

In other words, if Christianity goes, the lot goes. Europe has rejected the Christian faith and consequently the form of life which was created by that faith and which sustained our continent for fifteen hundred years has disappeared. People imagined that western societies could, with impunity, abandon Christianity and somehow all the good things which we value and cherish would remain.

They won’t and they haven’t.

The secular modernity which has replaced Christianity has delivered us into spiritual, intellectual, moral and aesthetic decadence.

Spiritually, religiously, the churches have discarded their formative texts. Roman Catholics have ditched the Tridentine Mass in favour of modern doggerel versions. The Church of England has thrown out The Authorised Version of the Bible and The Book of Common Prayer. Our theologians – from Bultmann’s “demythologising” of the gospel to Robinson’s Honest to God and John Hick’s The Myth of God Incarnate – have ceased to believe in the Virgin Birth of Our Lord, his miracles, his Resurrection and Ascension

In the matter of morals, society, aided and abetted unfortunately by the church, has rejected the Ten Commandments and replaced those rules for living with act utilitarianism or situation ethics. This is defined as “doing the loving thing in any given situation. regardless of rules.” In other words, we make up our ethics on the spot. This is also known as “the new morality” – of which a wit remarked, “It’s only the old immorality in a miniskirt.” Whereas, the Ten Commandments are ethically sustaining because they are deontological – from being, from what is rather than what is merely thought . Separate morality from being and you end up, as Hamlet knew, in a world where “…there’s nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” So you can think yourself to be a girl even if in fact you are a boy. Or you can be non-specific or neutral. Schools have replaced the old pronouns “he” and “she” with the non-committal “Zie.”

As with our ethics, so with our intellectual life, we have descended into a new Babel of relativism. Deconstructionist critics such as Jacques Derrida claim that “Texts don’t have meanings.” (He said this in a text, by the way!) And if there are no meanings, there is no such thing as the truth. There is only “true for me” or “your” truth and “my” truth and “post-truth.”. We are so intellectually distracted that we can’t see that this means we can no longer talk about truth. In such a world our great philosophical tradition from Plato to Kant, from Aristotle to Collingwood has come to an end.

Aesthetically, we value and admire the wrong things. The rot started at The Renaissance. I’m not saying the Old Masters couldn’t paint, but that their attention was wrongly focussed. From the divine and spiritual objectivity of the Middle Ages – of such as Giotto and Fra Angelico – the Renaissance painters decided to picture humankind and the natural world instead. As T.E. Hulme said, “They rejected man’s place in the world as a species bound by Original Sin and requiring a Saviour and came to believe that, on the whole, humankind is a good thing.” We have descended further into a generalised mess which says that a work of art is anything that anyone says is a work of art. So we have installations, Saatchi, Tracey Emin and art as anti-art, Damien Hirst and animals pickled in formaldehyde, tattoos and the worship of ugliness.

We have abandoned chivalry, etiquette and honour along with natural hierarchy and deference. Our broadcast media, the Internet and the whole of our gadgeteered world of electronic devices is a lewd peep show. In their decline, the Romans had their bread and circuses. We have pizza and porn shows: Love Island in which people are paid to have sex on camera for the benefit of a depraved mass audience.

We are rotten within and we have become unable and unwilling to defend our civilisation against barbarism. This too is a consequence of our abandonment of Christianity. Four times since The Battle of Tours in AD 732 to the relief of the Siege of Vienna 1683, Christian armies led by Christian princes defended our continent against imperialistic, marauding Muslims who would first destroy it and then turn it into a dust bowl resembling the landscapes from which they originated. Secular, modern Europe invites the Islamic hordes in and reserves its condemnation only for those who oppose these disastrous incursions. The preferred word is “Islamophobia.” But a phobia is an irrational fear and there is nothing irrational about fearing a barbarous enemy who has stated times without number that he wants to kill us.

What words are left for Europe? Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine et lux perpetuam luceat eis…..Dies irae, dies illa.

Good night sweetheart

These fragments have I shored against my ruins.

08 Jun

Fings ain’t wot they used to be

This morning the BBC reported more police raids on houses in the East End of London as “part of their on-going investigation into the terrorist attack on London Bridge.”

It’s ages since I paid a visit to the East End, so I thought I’d pop along and see how the land lies these days.

The place has changed beyond recognition and presents a bewildering spectacle to those of us who knew what it was like in the old days. I thought the best place to start would be down by The Old Bull & Bush but, whether it’s just me getting disorientated for space and time at my age or what, I couldn’t find it. I called in Saleem’s minimarket…

“Nah,” said Saleem “The Old Bull ain’t there any more,guv. Most of the old boozers in these parts ‘as been shut down and turned into madrassas in’t they? For the learning ov the kids innit? My boy’s up to Taleemul Haq in Class 8”

“So much seems to have changed?”

“Everythink, mate. Even the old songs. Nah the kids sings Let’s all go down The Strand – blow up the Kuffars. But If yer wants ter find art wot’s going on, like, get y’self a copy of the Docklands & East London Gazette. Y’can read Urdu in’t yer?”

“East End traditional foods?”

“Ah, the nosh. Well, it’s the same mate innit – but different. We ‘as that jellied halal goat wiv coconut nah.”

“I see. But I suppose the really traditional things haven’t changed, and a Cockney is still someone born within the sound of Bow Bells?”

“Wot planet is you on mister? Fings ‘ave changed. Nah you’ve got ter be born wivvin earshot ov the call to prayer from 46 Whitechapel Road.”

“What’s that when it’s out?”

“East London Mosque mate. Wassermatter – in’t you religious?”

Perhaps I shouldn’t have said what i said next, but I was in shock: “And I suppose that’s where the Islamic State supporters buy their suicide vests!”

He gave be a long indulgent stare: “Nah, fing’s ain’t wot they used ter be. The boys dunt need no suicide vests, guv, There’s a geezer in the Mile End Road – know wot I mean? – wot hires out white vans. Get y’self wunna these, and ask yer old lady if she’ll lend you a few kitchen knives – and Allah’s yer uncle and Mohammed’s yer ant!”

“Some things don’t change. I see you’ve still got your taxi business.”

“Couldn’t manage wivvart it, mate. I ‘ad that Osama bin Laden in the back of my cab wunce.”

07 Jun

Good news at last!

At a time of prolonged bad news – the indisposition of Diane Abbott for example – it is cheering to have a refreshing report from Iran.

This week there occurred an agreeable carnage in the form of successful suicide-bombings of the Iranian parliament and the tomb of Ayatollah Khomenei. Saudi proxy forces (Islamic State) attacked Iranian heartlands (the republican guard) and killed more than a few

This is only the most recent episode in a much longer conflict. And it’s really comforting to know that Muslim barbarians wage war not only upon Jewish and Christian infidels, but upon their own co-religionists

For Iran versus Saudi Arabia, read Shia versus Sunni. These two sects of the same barbarism have been at each other’s throats for 1400 years.

With luck – or, as I would put it, by the grace of God – these two forms of all that is despicable might soon come to destroy one another

Here is a brief theological analysis of the situation: we are not to think that the war between good and evil is between God and his angels and Satan with his equally disciplined army of devils. For, while the angel band is united, the demons are all at odds with one another

As Milton said: “Pandemonium and confusion worse confounded”

As Our Lord put it, very nicely if I might say so, “A kingdom divided against itself cannot stand.”

Roll on, I say. Roll on

06 Jun

Saying is doing

Mishal Husain, the fatuous (Muslim) radio presenter, said on The Today Programme this morning that a Muslim man unfurling the black flag of Islamic State in public and inciting his audience to support them should not be prosecuted “only for his words.”

But it is a very rare thing for words to be only words. Many words and their usage in context are also actions.

If I make a promise, I thereby do something as well as say something.

If I declare an oath, I do something

To shout “Fire!” in a crowded theatre is to do something: its purpose is to warn.

And if, by my words, I incite people to support a murderous organisation, I certainly do something.

(If you insist on the technical, philosophical term for these sorts of utterances, I can tell you they are called logical performatives or speech acts – because in saying something the speaker is also doing something.)

Ms Husain should be told than many of the most important of our actions are all in our use of words, in our speaking and in our writing.

That is why a slander or a libel is an offence.

It is why we all agree that we ought to keep our promises: because the words of my promise commit me to a particular action

You would think that a Muslim such as Ms Husain would understand this – because presumably she believes that to blaspheme Allah – in words only – is a punishable offence?

All Things Considered

Rev Dr Peter Mullen

Category Archives: Islam