History > 2007 > UK > Religion, sects (I)

A young British Muslim woman

who would only allow her last name, al-Shaikh,

to be printed, wears a full-face veil.

"It's an act of faith," she said.

Photograph:

Hazel Thompson for The New York Times

Muslims’ Veils Test Limits of Britain’s Tolerance        NYT        22.6.2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/22/world/europe/22veil.html

Dismay and anger

as Pope declares Protestants

cannot have churches

· Text quotes 'absence of sacramental priesthood'
· Declaration criticised as huge step backwards

Wednesday July 11, 2007
Guardian
John Hooper in Rome
and Stephen Bates


Protestant churches yesterday reacted with dismay to a new declaration approved by Pope Benedict XVI insisting they were mere "ecclesial communities" and their ministers effectively phonies with no right to give communion.
Coming just four days after the reinstatement of the Latin mass, yesterday's document left no doubt about the Pope's eagerness to back traditional Roman Catholic practices and attitudes, even at the expense of causing offence.

The view that Protestants cannot have churches was first set out by Pope Benedict seven years ago when, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he headed the Vatican "ministry" for doctrine. A commentary attached to the latest text acknowledged that his 2000 document, Dominus Iesus, had caused "no little distress".

But it added: "It is nevertheless difficult to see how the title of 'Church' could possibly be attributed to [Protestant communities], given that they do not accept the theological notion of the Church in the Catholic sense and that they lack elements considered essential to the Catholic Church."

The Pope's old department, which issued the document, said its aim was to correct "erroneous or ambiguous" interpretations of the Second Vatican Council, which ended in 1965. Quoting a text approved by the Council, it said Protestant churches, "because of the absence of the sacramental priesthood", had not "preserved the genuine and integral substance of the Eucharistic Mystery".

However, other Christians saw the latest document as another retreat from the spirit of openness generated by the Council, which laid the basis for talks on Christian unity. Bishop Wolfgang Huber, head of the Protestant umbrella group Evangelical Church in Germany, said: "The hope for a change in the ecumenical situation has been pushed further away by the document published today."

He said the new pronouncement repeated "offensive statements" in the 2000 document and was a "missed opportunity" to improve relations with Protestants. The president of the Federation of Evangelical Churches in Italy, pastor Domenico Maselli, called it a "huge step backwards in relations between the Roman Catholic church and other Christian communities".

A statement from the French Protestant Federation warned that the internal document would have "external repercussions".

The Church of England reacted more cautiously than seven years ago when Dominus Iesus was issued and the then Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, denounced it as unacceptable. The spokesman for the current archbishop, Rowan Williams, said: "This is a serious document, teaching on important ecclesiological matters and of significance to the churches' commitment to the full, visible unity to the one church of Jesus Christ."

The Vatican's statement had fewer misgivings about the Orthodox Church, which had "true sacraments" and a genuine priesthood. But their failure to acknowledge the Pope's authority meant they suffered from a "defectus", politely translated from Latin as "a wound".

On Saturday, the Pope freed Catholics to ask for masses to be celebrated according to the Latin rite abolished by the Second Vatican Council. This meant the reinstatement of a Good Friday prayer describing Jews as blind to the Christian truth.

The president of the Italian rabbinical assembly, Giuseppe Laras, yesterday called it "a heavy blow". He told the daily Corriere della Sera: "We are going back. A long way back."

Dismay and anger as Pope declares Protestants cannot have churches, G, 11.7.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/pope/story/0,,2123195,00.html

Al-Qaida's deputy leader

threatens retaliation

for Rushdie's knighthood

· Audio message addresses Gordon Brown directly
· Award not meant to insult Muslims, says UK official

Wednesday July 11, 2007
Guardian
Ian Black in Cairo


Osama bin Laden's deputy warned Gordon Brown yesterday that Britain would be hit with "a very precise response" in retaliation for the knighthood given to the novelist Salman Rushdie.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, the number two in al-Qaida, made the threat in an audio tape produced by the organisation's media wing, as-Sahhab, and distributed to jihadi websites yesterday.

The Egyptian's 20-minute speech was entitled Malicious Britain and its Indian Slaves and was monitored by Site, a US-based group.

Zawahiri, deliverer of most recent al-Qaida messages, accused Britain of defying the Muslim world by honouring the author of The Satanic Verses, who was deemed to have insulted Islam.

Addressing the prime minister, he said: "The policy of your predecessor has brought tragedy and defeat upon you, not only in Afghanistan and Iraq but also in the centre of London.

"And if you did not understand, listen, we are ready to repeat it for you, with the permission of Allah. We are sure that you have quite understood it."

Diaa Rashwan, an expert on jihadi groups at Cairo's al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, said: "This is part of an attempt to encourage the al-Qaida franchise, not an operational order. I don't think it exists any more as a centralised organisation. Zawahiri and Bin Laden often threaten individual countries."

A Downing Street spokesman, while not responding directly to Zawahiri's remarks, said last night: "As the prime minister has said we will not allow terrorists to undermine the British way of life. The British people will remain united, resolute and strong."

The Foreign Office said that it would maintain efforts to thwart terrorists. A spokesman said: "We will continue to tackle the threat from international terrorism as a priority in order to prevent the risk of attacks on British interests at home and overseas, including from al-Qaida.

"These terrorists care nothing for the peoples of the Middle East, Iraq and Afghanistan. Al-Qaida has been killing civilians of all faiths, including many fellow Muslims, for years."

Intelligence experts believe Zawahiri is in Afghanistan or in a rugged border area of Pakistan. The image of him used to accompany this latest message was identical to one used in a Sahhab release last month, marking 40 years since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

The message was his ninth this year. His most recent videotape, which lasted 95 minutes, appeared only last week, suggesting an attempt to step up propaganda efforts. That singled out the al-Yamamah defence contract between Britain and Saudi Arabia.

Zawahiri suggested Rushdie's knighthood was motivated by anger, claiming the Queen and Tony Blair meant to tell Muslims that though British forces may be defeated in Iraq and Afghanistan, they can take revenge by cursing their prophet.

The Foreign Office reiterated that the award was purely in recognition of his literary achievements. "The government have already made clear that Rushdie's honour was not intended as an insult to Islam or the prophet Muhammad," the spokesman said. "It was a reflection of his contribution to literature throughout a long and distinguished career."

Zawahiri also attacked Hamas for accepting Saudi mediation to broker a deal with the rival Fatah movement and railed against Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, declaring that opposition to him should not be through "farcical" elections, but by supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan. Ominously he praised a car bomb attack which killed six Spanish UN peacekeepers in south Lebanon last month. He warned that "those who conspire against jihad and the mujahideen in Lebanon ... must start to dig their graves with their own hands."

"The Jews and the Americans are not from the planet Mars, but they are on our borders and in our land with their gear, equipment, and numbers," he said. The answer was to confront these enemies with "jihad and unity", he said.

Backstory

Ayman al-Zawahiri is Osama bin Laden's deputy and regarded as the strategic brains behind al-Qaida. A qualified surgeon, he was born in Egypt in 1951. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood at the age of 14 but then moved on to the more radical Islamic Jihad where he became a prominent organiser. He was one of hundreds arrested following the assassination of President Anwar Sadat. In the 1980s he went to Afghanistan to join the mujahideen resistance against the Soviet Union's occupation. There he met Bin Laden. In 1998 he formally merged Egyptian Islamic Jihad into al-Qaida and, with Bin Laden, issued a joint fatwa with the title World Islamic Front Against Jews and Crusaders. Since the US invasion of Afghanistan, al-Zawahiri's whereabouts are unknown, but he is generally thought to be in tribal Pakistan.

    Al-Qaida's deputy leader threatens retaliation for Rushdie's knighthood, G, 11.7.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/alqaida/story/0,,2123444,00.html

3.45pm update

Muslim Council of Britain

declares 'condemnation is not enough'

Tuesday July 3, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
Hugh Muir

Britain's most influential Muslim umbrella group today signalled a major shift in policy as it urged its communities to play a key and potentially decisive role in the fight against terrorism.

Declaring that "condemnation is not enough", leaders of the Muslim Council of Britain, which has 400 affiliate organisations, voiced its most robust message yet and appealed to all Muslims to work hand in hand with the police.

The message carries dangers for the MCB, which has been criticised by radical activists for being too close to the government and the establishment.

But today Muhammad Abdul Bari, the MCB secretary general, said the current crisis meant that issues of conflict between the government, the police and Muslim communities - who have clashed in the past over anti-terrorist incidents and foreign policy - needed to be put to one side.

"When the house is on fire, the concern must be not to blame each other but to put the fire out. Our country is under threat-level critical.

"Those who seek to deliberately kill or maim innocent people are the enemies of us all. There is no cause whatsoever that could possibly justify such barbarity."

He said the police and security services "deserve the fullest support and cooperation from each and every sector of our society, including all Muslims."

The MCB has called a meeting in London on Saturday of key imams and activists from all over the country to discuss what Muslim communities can do to confront the threat and to discuss whether more should have been done in the past.

"We hope to discuss how we can work better with other partners, including the police, to try to undermine and defeat the terrorists who seek to attack us," said Dr Bari.

"It is our Islamic duty not only to utterly and totally condemn such evil actions but to provide all the necessary support to prevent such atrocities from taking place."

Inayat Bunglawala, the MCB's assistant general secretary, said anyone with information should not feel conflicted.

"There must be no hesitation in coming forward," he said. "Clearly we face a threat from extremists who happen to be Muslim."

Mr Bunglawala said the group was confident that affiliates would back the new stance.

"The overwhelming majority of Muslims will understand the predicament our nation is in. The risk is not that we will lose affiliates. We are more likely to gain them."

Though shocked by the failed terrorist attacks on London and Glasgow, there are signs that both the MCB and the government are seeking to seize the moment.

Relations between Muslim leaders and the Blair government deteriorated amid concerns that the prime minister, the former home secretary John Reid and the former communities secretary Ruth Kelly gave succour to those who sought to blame the wider Muslim communities for terrorism.

But Dr Bari was quick to praise Gordon Brown and Jacqui Smith, the new home secretary, for the "calm and reassuring tone" of their comments since the weekend's attacks.

"They made clear that it was unacceptable to hold any one faith group responsible for the actions of a few," he said.

He also praised Alex Salmond, Scotland's first minister, who provided high-profile reassurance to Muslims north of the border.

This approach, though criticised by some newspapers, has allowed the MCB to call for a period of soul searching without facing new accusations of pandering to hostile politicians.

One official privately described the events and the political reaction to them as a "line in the sand moment".

The unfolding events, though horrific, may well strengthen the hand of moderate Muslim opinion.

One source said: "There is little room for manoeuvre for those who have previously been in denial or have clung to conspiracy theories. People have been able to see for themselves what happened. That could be important."

Anti-terrorist chiefs have been quick to stress the need for communities to provide them with the intelligence they need to find and monitor suspects.

But close liaison between Muslim leaders and the authorities is also seen as crucial in the battle to stop a whole new generation of young people becoming radicalised.

Daud Abdullah, the MCB deputy secretary general said: "We accept there is a degree of extremism and radicalisation taking place in the community. This is a long-term problem."

    Muslim Council of Britain declares 'condemnation is not enough', G, 3.7.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,,2117530,00.html

11.45am

Britain bans two more Islamist groups

Tuesday July 3, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
Peter Walker

The government is to ban two extreme Islamist groups accused of carrying out terrorist attacks in south Asia, ministers announced today.

Jamayetul Mujahideen Bangladesh and Tehreek Nifaz-e-Shariat Mohammadi would be added to the list of organisations proscribed under the Terrorism Act. The additions were unconnected with the attempted car bombings in London and Glasgow, a Home Office statement said.

The minister for counter-terrorism and security, Tony McNulty, published a draft order in parliament today. Once passed, it will be an offence to belong to or encourage support for either group.

"As events over the last few days have shown only too clearly, the threat we face from terrorism remains real and serious," Mr McNulty said in a statement.

"Proscription powers are a key tool in the fight against terrorism, creating a hostile environment in which terrorists find it increasingly difficult to operate, whether in this country or abroad."

Jamayetul Mujahideen Bangladesh is already banned in that country, where it seeks to impose strict Islamic law. It has claimed responsibility for attacks in Bangladesh, including a wave of bombings in 2005 that killed at least 30 people. The group's leader, Shaikh Abdur Rahman, and his deputy were among six people hanged in March for their role in the violence.

Tehreek Nifaz-e-Shariat Mohammadi is active in tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. The group "regularly attacks coalition and Afghan government forces in Afghanistan and provides direct support to al-Qaida and the Taliban", according to the draft order.

The group was blamed for a suicide bombing that killed 44 Pakistani military cadets in November 2006.

Thus far, 44 primarily Islamist organisations have been banned in the UK, along with 14 groups in Northern Ireland outlawed under earlier legislation (see the full Home Office list).

    Britain bans two more Islamist groups, G, 3.7.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,,2117456,00.html

Not in our name

July 3, 2007
12:00 PM
The Guardian
Asim Siddiqui

The events of the last few days have been sobering for us all. The response from some UK Muslim groups (influenced by Islamist thinking) is still largely to blame foreign policy (undoubtedly an exacerbating influence but not the cause), rather than marching "not in my name" in revulsion against terrorist acts committed in Islam's name. By blaming foreign policy they try to divert pressure off themselves from the real need to tackle extremism being peddled within. Diverting attention away from the problems within Muslim communities and blaming others - especially the west - is always more popular than the difficult task of self-scrutiny. And what part of foreign policy do the Islamists want us to change to tackle terrorism? Withdrawal from Iraq?

The UK presence on the ground in Iraq is minuscule compared to the US. We currently have 5,500 troops from 40,000 at the start of the invasion. We will reduce them further to 5,000 by the end of the summer. The bulk of which will be located near Basra airport in a supporting role. Next year will likely see the numbers dwindle even further. Our troop presence is far more symbolic than military. It provides the Americans with their "coalition of the willing". The US, by contrast, is the only serious occupier in the country with over 160,000 troops. The government will not (and cannot) admit it, but we have been in withdrawal mode since the end of the war.

And once we've left Iraq, will they be satisfied? Of course not. Their list of grievances is endless: Afghanistan, Chechnya, Kashmir, Palestine, Burma ... so long as the world is presented as one where the west is forever at war with Islam and Muslims there is nothing we can do to appease the terrorists and those who share their world view. Instead it is this extremist world view that must change.

Take for example the idea that radical Islamists are concerned about Muslim life (let's ignore human life in general for a moment). Where is their outrage at the 400,000 Muslims slaughtered in Darfur? Where are the marches and calls for action against this ongoing genocide? Where is the "Muslim anger" boiling up amongst British Islamists? It is nowhere to be seen because the Darfurians have been massacred by fellow Muslims, not by the west. Hence it does not appear on the Islamist radar screen as a "grievance". Such is the moral bankruptcy of this ideology.

No, it's not foreign policy that's the main driver in combating the terrorists; it is their mindset. The radical Islamist ideology needs to be exposed to young Muslims for what it really is. A tool for the introduction of a medieval form of governance that describes itself as an "Islamic state" that is violent, retrogressive, discriminatory, a perversion of the sacred texts and a totalitarian dictatorship.

When the IRA was busy blowing up London, there would have been little point in Irish "community leaders" urging "all" citizens to cooperate with the police equally when it was obvious the problem lay specifically within Irish communities. Likewise for Muslim "community leaders" to condemn terrorism is a no-brainer. What is required is for those that claim to represent and have influence among young British Muslims to proactively counter the extremist Islamist narrative. That is the biggest challenge for British Muslim leadership over the next five to 10 years. It is because they are failing to rise to this challenge that the government feels it needs to act by further eroding our civil liberties with anti-terror legislation to get the state to do what Muslims should be doing themselves. If British Muslim groups focus on grassroots de-radicalisation then this will provide civil liberty groups the space they need to argue against any further anti-terror legislation.

Of course I would like to see changes in our foreign policy and have marched on the streets (with thousands of non-Muslims) in protest on many occasions. But blaming foreign policy in the face of suicide attacks is not only tactless but a cop-out that fails to tackle extremism, fails to promote an ethical foreign policy and fails to protect our civil liberties.

    Not in our name, G, 3.7.2007, http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/asim_siddiqui/2007/07/not_in_our_name.html

We need Muslims to do more

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 01/07/2007
The Daily Telegraph
By Philip Johnston



Home front

This Saturday is the second anniversary of the murderous attacks on the London transport system that killed 52 travellers and four suicide bombers. It is only thanks to luck, and an apparent lack of expertise on the terrorists' part, that dozens more families are not mourning the loss of their loved ones. The failed car bombs in London, and what seems to have been a suicide attack at Glasgow airport, are an alarming escalation in the campaign being waged by fanatical Islamists principally, for the moment, against this country. So concerned are the counter-terrorist agencies that the threat level has been raised to "critical" - the highest grade, last reached after the July 7 atrocities.

It goes without saying that we have a serious problem here. But consider how serious it really is. Although they were only jailed recently, the terrorists who planned to use a fertiliser bomb to target nightclubs and shopping centres were operating in 2003-4, more than a year before the London attacks. So, too, was the jihadi cell led by Dhiren Barot, a hardened and experienced al-Qa'eda operative, whose plot - possibly to detonate a "dirty bomb" - was thwarted only because arrests in Pakistan alerted Western intelligence services to what was going on.

advertisementLast summer's alleged airline plot, smashed by MI5's Operation Overt, could have caused the most appalling carnage, as well as halting transatlantic flights and leading America to impose even more Draconian travel restrictions than are already in place. The London car bombs, had they gone off, could have killed or maimed many revellers in the heart of the West End. There is a pattern emerging here of good intelligence intercepting a number of conspiracies; of inexperienced, almost exclusively home-grown, terrorists who have yet to acquire the expertise to make each attack work; and of a co-ordinated, al-Qa'eda-inspired campaign that is seeking to ratchet up the scale of the terror every time.

What the al-Qa'eda commanders based in the Pakistan border areas want is a "spectacular" attack, and they are getting perilously close to pulling one off. They have evidently created a sophisticated cell structure, using the large Pakistani community living in Britain as cover, because those within it who are prepared to carry out terror attacks can come and go as they please between the two countries.

MI5 is watching a lot of these cells, unsure which are false leads and which are the ones that will go live. According to the Security Service, nearly 2,000 Britons linked to al-Qa'eda are under surveillance, and as many as 30 potential terrorist plots are being tracked. We can only assume that the cell that carried out the latest attacks was not under close observation, since its members would have been intercepted before planting their bombs. In other words, despite the extraordinary number of suspects being watched, there will inevitably be potential terrorists of whom MI5 is unaware.

But the police and intelligence agencies are only as good as the information they receive. There is an increasingly important role to be played here by the Muslim community. It was notable yesterday that when Alex Salmond, Scotland's First Minister, spoke about the Glasgow attack, he was at pains to say it should not lead to suspicion falling on the Muslim community. "Individuals are responsible for their actions, not communities," he said.

Mr Salmond is, of course, correct. To tarnish a whole group of people because of the activities of a few would be wrong. But this approach is too defensive, too apologetic. Instead of bending over backwards to reassure the Muslim community that it is not to blame, political leaders should be actively seeking to recruit its help. In a truly integrated society, we all have a duty to protect each other from those who would destroy it; and the majority of law-abiding Muslims are in the best position to help because, like it or not, the perpetrators live in their communities.

The arguments over why a small group of radicalised British Muslims, many of them from good backgrounds and well educated, hate this country so much that they want to inflict serious harm on it have been well rehearsed. Grievances over Iraq or foreign policy in the Middle East are known to be motivating factors, though there are many people who also feel strongly about these issues who do not then use them as justification for mass murder. "Social exclusion" has also been blamed, though many of the conspirators jailed recently have been far from down-trodden, and at least three were university graduates. In any case, the levels of deprivation that would even remotely justify such intense hostility do not exist here.

Ed Husain, an ex-jihadist British Muslim, has pointed out in this newspaper that because Islamists shun all engagement with British democracy, there is a need for politicians to confront the spread of the violent ideology that influenced him before he turned away from it. But it is little good Gordon Brown or the new Home Secretary calling for militant Islam to be faced down unless this message also comes from within the Muslim communities.

There are those who fear the continuing terror campaign places Muslims at risk of being scapegoated as a potential fifth column in our midst. But to focus exclusively on what Mr Salmond called the "responsible individuals", it is necessary to know a lot more about where they come from and what they are up to. For that the police and MI5 have to rely on information provided from their neighbours, even their families. Is this forthcoming? Peter Clarke, the head of Scotland Yard's counter-terrorism command, recently alleged that some people were withholding information about the July 7 bombings. "I know it for a fact," he said.

Everyone must play his part if this threat is truly to be confronted. Politicians are often too concerned about offending the majority of Muslims, and therefore blind to opportunities to recruit their help. The Government says it wants to win their hearts and minds. This should not be necessary when we are dealing with mass murder. It is their eyes and ears we need.

    We need Muslims to do more, DTel, 2.7.2007, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/07/02/do0202.xml

Johann Hari:

The jihadis hate

not just the worst acts of our rulers,

but the best aspects of our society

The bombers are not only opposing Guantanamo Bay,
but the freedom of women to choose their partners

Published: 02 July 2007
The Independent

So the jihadists who pine for 7/7 and 24/7 are back, trying to make a Brown week into a black one. It is only luck that their incompetence turned their attempts at mass murder in London and Glasgow into a scene from "Carry On Up the Jihad", where one of their car bombs was towed away and their merry tossing of Molotov cocktails succeeded only in incinerating themselves.

But as we sit anxiously on the highest security alert, the old question is back. Why? Why would young British men (and they will probably turn out to be British) want to murder randomly as many of their fellow citizens as possible in nightclubs and airports?

The French intellectual Regis Debray once called car-bombs "manifestos written in the blood of others". What does this manifesto say? I have interviewed jihadis and wannabe-suicide-murderers from London to Gaza, from Abu Hamza's hooks to the teenagers he inspired. Their motives are a black gloop of contradictions, but let's look at the two over-arching - and conflicting - explanations that have been most frequently served up for home-grown jihad, because both contain some truths.

We can call the first the Blowback Thesis. In the early 1950s, the CIA invented this term to describe the unintended consequences that would hit the United States as a result of its interfering in other countries. Its application here is obvious: turn Iraq into a killing field, and some Muslims back in Britain will be so enraged that they will - to use the old phrase coined by violent anti-Vietnam protesters - "bring the war home".

The exponents of this view have some impressive evidence on their side. In the videos they left behind, the July 7 bombers named the British government's invasion of Iraq and its support for Israel as their primary motives. Britain's own Joint Intelligence Committee had warned before the war began that "the threat [from al Qa'ida] would be heightened by military action against Iraq."

But the blowback thesis also contains holes. It can make the jihadis sound far more humanitarian than they actually are. One expert declared this weekend on the BBC World Service that these bombers are "outraged by the killing of civilians in Afghanistan" - but actually, these Islamists vehemently support the killing of Afghan civilians, as long as it's being done by Jihadis Like Us. When the Taliban were butchering civilians in Afghanistan for the "crimes" of adultery, homosexuality or simply being female and showing their faces in public, they held them up as a model for the world. Abu Hamza told me it was "the perfect society".

A bigger problem still with this thesis is that jihadist bombs have been recently planted on trains in Germany (thankfully defused), while in Canada a plot was rumbled to behead the Prime Minister. Both countries vehemently opposed the war in Iraq and offer vast sums in aid to the Palestinians.

So blowback is a necessary but not sufficient explanation for these bombings. What fills the holes? We can call the second explanation the Totalitarianism Thesis. This argues that jihadism is not simply a mirror-image of what our governments do to Muslims: it has its own vision of a renewed Islamic Caliphate under sharia law that it wishes to impose on the Middle East - and eventually the world.

In the absence of achieving this impossible goal, jihadis will voraciously seek out grievances, based on the failure of the world around them to conform to their puritanical desert morality.

Is this true? A few hours before the first car bomb was discovered, a contributor to the chatroom on the Islamist al-Hesbah website wrote: "Today I say: Rejoice, by Allah, London shall be bombed." He gave his reasons for the murder plot he was clearly involved in: the Iraq war, and - just as important - the honouring of perhaps our greatest novelist, Salman Rushdie.

The choice of target - a nightclub on Ladies' Night - is also revealing. When a similar gang plotted to blow up the Ministry of Sound in 2004, they talked about their desire to burn alive the "slags dancing around".

This is a reminder that the bombers are not only blowing back against the worst in our system of government: the torture and chemical weapons in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and our support for Arab dictators. They oppose the best in our system of government too: the intellectual freedom to write novels that question religion, the sexual freedom of women to pick their own partners.

When I receive my own tedious drizzle of jihadi death-threats, they always mention my homosexuality long before they get round to my views on foreign policy. Their jihad is a war against free women, gays and novelists, as well as a war against occupation.

On all fronts, the solution lies not in abandoning the values of liberal democracy, but in adhering to them much more scrupulously. If we restrain our leaders whenever they try to violate our values by using torture, or chemical weapons, or by arming tyrants - indeed, if we put them on trial for it - we will choke off the more obvious blowback.

But that's not enough. We also need to unpick the totalitarian ideology of jihadism by democratically opening up Islamic theology, so that over a generation, fewer and fewer young men can convince themselves they are "good Muslims" when they murder innocents.

At the moment, there is an epic battle going on within Islam between jihadi literalists and those Muslims (disproportionately women) who want to reinterpret the Koran to make it compatible with modernity. This is a horrifyingly lop-sided fight. The literalists are lavished with cash from the Saudi Arabian monarchy: their mosques are flooded with petrodollars, their imams are trained in Mecca, they receive piles of poisonous textbooks free of charge, and they are even given British government cash to run their own schools. The liberals, by contrast, scrape by with almost no funds at all.

We need to reverse this situation by banning the Saudi money designed to fundamentalise British Islam, and instead lavishing government cash on the brave Muslim women's groups sprouting across the country. Free, independent Muslim women will raise their children with liberal readings of the Koran incompatible with blowing up "slags" or novelists.

The French government has just begun to do this, with the President, Nicolas Sarkozy, appointing the heroic Muslim feminist Fadela Amara to devise his strategy for the banlieues. But our government is failing to stop the Saudi poison because we are addicted to the oil they pump our way. As in Iraq, it seems that securing petroleum trumps undermining fundamentalism every time.

Until we complete this slow work of whittling down blowback and opening up Islam, we could face a car park full of car-bombs - and we may not be so lucky next time.

    Johann Hari: The jihadis hate not just the worst acts of our rulers, but the best aspects of our society, I, 2.7.2007, http://comment.independent.co.uk/columnists_a_l/johann_hari/article2727882.ece

Muslim groups 'appalled by sinister plot'

Published: 02 July 2007
The Independent
By Rob Sharp

Community leaders were yesterday quick to condemn the terror attacks in Glasgow and London, while politicians played down fears of a backlash against British Muslims.

MPs, Muslim organisations and police chiefs were universal in their condemnation of events and emphasised the moderation of the vast majority of British Muslims. Mohammad Sarwar, the MP for Glasgow Central, led calls to condemn extremists who "brainwash" British-born Muslims, adding the Glasgow outrage had come as a major shock in a country in which mosques preach a moderate message.

He said: "This is a big surprise ... we were not expecting this type of incident in Scotland. This is the first incident that has happened in Glasgow and everybody is shocked and terrified."

Campaigners from the British Muslim Initiative issued a statement damning the incidents. A spokesman said: "We urge all British Muslims to fully co-operate with the authorities to apprehend and bring to justice the perpetrators."

The organisation's president Muhammad Sawalha added: "We are utterly appalled by this sinister plot and commend the professionalism of the security services in aborting it."

Osama Saeed, Scottish spokesman for the Muslim Association of Britain, said: "Terrorists do not care who they kill. We are seething with anger about this."

Police chiefs in areas where police inquiries are proceeding spoke out to calm the public. Staffordshire Police Chief Superintendent Steve Loxley said: "In spite of the current police activity, I do need to stress that there is no specific threat to our county."

Scotland's First Minister, Alex Salmond, played down the possibility of a backlash against Muslims in light of the attacks. He said: "I would expect Scotland to behave with its usual perfect good sense in these matters ... No community should feel under suspicion as a result of individual actions."

    Muslim groups 'appalled by sinister plot', I, 2.7.2007, http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article2727899.ece

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown:

Sane, ordinary Muslims

must stand up and be counted

These nihilists undermine
our fundamental right to belong in this country

Published: 02 July 2007
The Independent

As they wake up to news of the foiled car-bomb attack on Glasgow Airport, I know what millions of my compatriots - atheists, Hindus, Sikhs, Jews and Christians - will be saying, their easy Sunday ruined by yet another alleged Islamicist plot: "What's wrong with these crazed Muslims?" "Why the hell are they here if they hate it so much?" "When will we be rid of the lot of them?" "What do they want?" "Other minorities also have a hard time, they don't blow up nightclubs and airports".

What these aggrieved Britons don't realise is that exactly the same conversations are taking place in most Muslim households too, with many more expletives flying. Sane, ordinary British Muslims are even less forgiving of such nihilists, whose barbarism undermines our fundamental right to belong to this country as absolute equals. These are hobby terrorists with screwdrivers and screwed heads; they appropriate legitimate concerns, turn them into excuses on their own violent reality shows, sure to be broadcast again and again on screens around the world.

With no politics, no aim, no dreams, no noble imperative, for these Islamicists and their ideological masters, the means is the end. They are at once satanic abusers of our faith and social misfits unloved by all except their own reject band of brothers. Scorned by those they claim to defend, the dreaded sociopaths now seem determined to wound fatally the social contract made between this country and Muslim citizens. Only each assault deepens our sense of nationhood. We still rail against racism and unethical government policies - and I do so incessantly, as you know. Unlike self-righteous neocon liberals, we see how our young are profoundly affected by Iraq and Palestine. However, when bloodthirsty Islamicists strike, we experience a collective intensification of our attachment to Britain. There is no place like this home for us, the only place we want to live and die in.

On Saturday night, at a lavish Shia wedding in Hertfordshire, Muslim guests were livid about "these bastards giving us a bad name". "Send them packing to the Middle East or Pakistan," said a solicitor to much cheering at one table. "Time to say we love this country. For Muslims, no better country - that's why so many want to come over," added a businessman, who had come here penniless and turned his fortunes around within 10 years.

The father of the bride, too, arrived in Britain with little and joined a small English family firm. He brought entrepreneurial energy; they gave him encouragement and support. This ultra-loyal immigrant for many years led the pre-dawn prayers at our main mosque in Kensington.

As we enter another hyper-crisis period, the danger is we will again succumb to the dystopian nightmare of irreconcilable clashes and culture wars. Calls for draconian laws are sure to ring through the nervous land, although thus far the new government sounds more temperate.

The measured response is an acknowledgement that few Muslims now excuse the killing brigades. The apologist Muslim Council of Britain, whose leader was knighted by Mr Blair, is a spent force. It tried to incite rage and riot over Salman Rushdie's knighthood and failed. Muslims realise what a disaster that confrontation was for both sides. Now, the MCB grovels and seeks rehabilitation. Ex-militant Ed Hussain and Hassan Butt have written denunciations of fellow jihadis. The hardline Hizb-ut Tahrir asks Muslims not to "fuel dangerous political agendas". These organisations have been humbled and discredited.

One Independent reader, a graduate, described how Islamicists operated on campus. An idealistic young woman, she fell for the leader, a charismatic man who all too soon did her head in and wrapped it up in a cloak of his choosing: "He commanded me to declare I hate this country and got me into a niqab. Then one day I heard him chatting up this new student and he was saying exactly the same things to her as he said to me when we met, about beautiful eyes, and how he loved women with spirit. I told him to bugger off." Her hair is lovely in the photo she sent me, free now as she is.

I am not naive. Islamicists are cunning and well-connected. Their backers pretend to believe in liberal democracy while plotting its demise. But there are now passionate Muslim democrats standing up to be counted.

Imran Ahmad, young trustee of British Muslims for Secular Democracy, writes in Unimagined, his evocative memoir: "I have had great opportunities and choices. There still is racism in the indigenous society, it's undeniable ... but [compare] Britain to all those so-called Islamic countries, where tribalism is endemic and anything is used as an excuse for discrimination, hatred and mistreatment: village, clan, family, sect, province, class, money, gender, occupation, even shade of skin. At least Britain is committed to implement the highest ideals - personal freedom, social equality, human rights and justice."

With friends like these, Britain can beat its enemies within. Have faith; a time will come when jihadis will terrorise our lives no more.

    Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: Sane, ordinary Muslims must stand up and be counted, I, 2.7.2007, http://comment.independent.co.uk/columnists_a_l/yasmin_alibhai_brown/article2727903.ece

After 30 years as a closet Catholic,

Blair finally puts faith before politics

Outgoing PM seizes early opportunity
to convert free of dilemmas of public role

Friday June 22, 2007
Guardian
Stephen Bates, religious affairs correspondent


His spiritual awakening goes back at least 30 years, to his time as an undergraduate at Oxford, but due to political considerations Tony Blair's conversion to Catholicism has been a long time coming.
He has been attending Catholic mass, often with his family but also occasionally alone, since long before he became prime minister. His wife, Cherie, is a lifelong and practising Catholic, and in accordance with church rules their children have been brought up as Catholics and were sent to church schools.

More than 10 years ago Mr Blair was slipping into Westminster cathedral and occasionally taking communion, until the late Cardinal Basil Hume told him to stop because it was causing comment as he was not a Catholic - an injunction that bemused him at the time.

Since then he has regularly attended services conducted by Canon Timothy Russ, parish priest of the Immaculate Heart of Mary at Great Missenden, the nearest Catholic church to Chequers.

He is also known to have had discussions with priests such as Father Timothy Radcliffe, former head of the worldwide Dominican order, now at Oxford, and with Father Michael Seed, who has shephered a number of high-profile figures, including Ann Widdecome and, allegedly, Alan Clark, towards conversion. Fr Seed, an engaging if indiscreet figure, has claimed to have paid regular backdoor visits to Downing Street to talk religion, if not necessarily to advise the prime minister.

So why has it taken so long? Almost certainly because of Mr Blair's sensitivity about the place of Catholicism in British public - and particularly its constitutional - life. The only positions specifically barred to Catholics are marriage to the sovereign or heir to the throne, or becoming sovereign themselves, a legacy of the Act of Settlement that followed the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the deposition of the last Catholic monarch, James II; there has never been a Catholic prime minister.

In the last 40 years Catholics have entered many senior positions in British public life, generally without comment except among the wilder fringes of Protestant Calvinism: in the civil service, the Foreign Office and industry, as MPs and ministers in Conservative and Labour cabinets. The current director general of the BBC, Mark Thompson, is a Catholic and, briefly, four years ago, with Charles Kennedy, leader of the Liberal Democrats, and Iain Duncan Smith, leader of the Tories, so were the alternative prime ministers.

But the motives of Catholic politicians have traditionally been regarded with suspicion by non-Catholics, both here and in the US, based on the allegation that they take their orders from the Vatican rather than the electorate. Catholic political leaders have always denied it - but the recent antics of some bishops in the US during the 2004 presidential campaign when they threatened to deny John Kerry communion because of his support for abortion rights and, recently, Cardinal Keith O'Brien's warning that he would do the same in Scotland, have tended to confirm old suspicions.

A number of potentially divisive moral issues would have been much more difficult if Mr Blair had been known to be a Catholic, even though his personal beliefs have not necessarily intruded into the government's decisions.

Ministers have enacted civil partnerships for gay couples and this year faced down demands, particularly from the Catholic church, for exemption from equality provisions enabling gay couples to adopt children, even though the prime minister favoured compromise.

Equally, the government has not attempted to limit abortion rights - an issue regarded as long settled in Britain except by some mainly Catholic groups - or pushed for reduced time limits, even though the church regards abortion as a sin. And it has permitted stem cell research without conceding to Catholic opposition.

Mr Blair, like President George Bush, ignored the condemnations and warnings of the Pope and all other church leaders over the war in Iraq.

He has been keen to expand the number of faith schools and church-supported academies, in the face of strong opposition from secular groups, but here again seemingly not for reasons of religious indoctrination but because of their parental popularity.

The criticism of Ruth Kelly when she was education secretary because of her membership of the lay sect Opus Dei - at a time when the novel The Da Vinci Code had made the group more widely known - also showed that the old prejudice could still be deployed. Mr Blair probably thought he could do without the extra hassle.

He has kept his personal religious views largely out of his political life. Ostentatious religiosity does not go down well in Britain. He dropped his wish to end a prime ministerial broadcast on the eve of the Iraq invasion with the words: "God bless" on the advice of Alastair Campbell, who famously told him "We don't do God".

Explainer: Becoming a Catholic

The path to purification

Converting to Catholicism is not a straightforward or easy process, as Tony Blair will have realised. It takes time - though how long depends on the candidate's readiness and aptitude - and is based on the church's assessment of their sincerity and commitment. The process is described in a 44-page document called the Rite of Christian Initiation.

When there was a rush of conversions from Anglicanism in the early 1990s, after the Church of England's decision to ordain women priests, there was considerable murmuring among lifelong Catholics that the conversion of defectors such as John Gummer and Ann Widdecombe had been too easily sanctioned by Cardinal Basil Hume, the leader of the Catholic church in England and Wales.

That is unlikely to be the case with Mr Blair since his conversion is clearly the result of a long period of consideration and is not due to a particular grievance.

Adults wishing to convert undergo a period of doctrinal and spiritual preparation with a priestly adviser to become catechumens, preparing for admission to the church. They are no longer required to make an abjuration of previous heresy but they do make a profession of faith and belief that they "consciously and freely seek the living God and enter the way of faith and conversion as the Holy Spirit opens their hearts."

The rite says candidates are to receive help and attention, so that "with a purified and clearer intention they may cooperate with God's grace."

The process takes several stages of indeterminate duration: after the period of evangelisation there follows acceptance into the order of catechumens, then election, when the church ratifies candidates' readiness. A "period of purification and enlightenment" follows, usually on the eve of Easter, followed by the sacraments of initiation and then catechesis as the candidates are allowed to participate fully in the sacraments, such as communion.

Although conversions usually take place during the Easter period and in public ceremonies, this need not necessarily be the case if there are special circumstances - which the church could probably find for a former prime minister.

    After 30 years as a closet Catholic, Blair finally puts faith before politics, G, 23.6.2007, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/tonyblair/story/0,,2108865,00.html

UK Muslims divided on Rushdie protests

Saturday June 23, 2007
Guardian
Riazat Butt,
Duncan Campbell
and Martin Wainwright

While some British Muslims protested against the award of a knighthood to the writer Salman Rushdie yesterday, amid reports of strikes and demonstrations in India, Iran and Pakistan, others distanced themselves from the effigy-burning and calls for violent reprisals.

About 20 demonstrators protested at Regents Park mosque in London after prayers yesterday afternoon. Men with their faces covered to avoid identification waved placards, one of which read "God curse the Queen", and shouted slogans.

"We've come to demonstrate against the apostate Salman Rushdie," said one. "He has insulted Islam and the Prophet Muhammad. Salman Rushdie is the devil. We have a responsibility - he should be punished, he should be attacked. We should not be afraid of the kuffar [non-believer]. They say Tony Blair is going to be sent to the Middle East as a peace envoy. We hope he comes back in a box."

The protesters also burned a homemade St George's flag, to the cheers of some and the dismay others. "It is disrespectful to behave like this outside a mosque," said Mohammed Ahmed, a 24-year-old part-time charity worker. "This protest will do nothing to change the negative perceptions people have about our religion."

Mosque staff also distanced themselves from the demonstration. "We do not sanction this protest or the views they are expressing," said a woman from the director general's office.

The radical Muslim group Hizb ut-Tahrir condemned the knighthood but also what it sees as cynical motives for some of the protests by foreign governments. "While some of the dictatorships of the Muslim world now rush to defend the honour of the Prophet Muhammad in order to protect themselves from the wrath of the masses, they continually insult his memory by acquiescing in the murder of thousands of Muslim civilians in Waziristan, Iraq and Afghanistan at the behest of their masters," it said in a statement.

In Bradford, where the original public burning of Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses led to images circulated worldwide, the city's Council for Mosques condemned the knighthood as "extremely irresponsible", but two former lord mayors, Mohammed Ajeeb and Choudhary Rangzeb called for a calm response as the best way to make the community's point.

Mr Ajeeb said: "I would ask the Muslim community to demonstrate restraint. The circumstances facing Muslim communities today mean that any sort of demonstration in the streets is not going to help spread peace and harmony."

In Srinagar, in India, shops and offices were closed yesterday in protest. In Iran, worshippers at Tehran university chanted "death to the English" as clerics claimed the fatwa against Rushdie was still in force.

    UK Muslims divided on Rushdie protests, G, 23.6.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/religion/Story/0,,2109471,00.html

Muslims’ Veils

Test Limits of Britain’s Tolerance

June 22, 2007
The New York Times
By JANE PERLEZ

LONDON, June 16 — Increasingly, Muslim women in Britain take their children to school and run errands covered head to toe in flowing black gowns that allow only a slit for their eyes. On a Sunday afternoon in Hyde Park, groups of black-clad Muslim women relaxed on the green baize lawn among the in-line skaters and badminton players.

Their appearance, like little else, has unnerved other Britons, testing the limits of tolerance here and fueling the debate over the role of Muslims in British life.

Many veiled women say they are targets of abuse. Meanwhile, there are growing efforts to place legal curbs on the full-face Muslim veil, known as the niqab.

There have been numerous examples in the past year. A lawyer dressed in a niqab was told by an immigration judge that she could not represent a client because, he said, he could not hear her. A teacher wearing a niqab was dismissed from her school. A student who was barred from wearing a niqab took her case to the courts, and lost. In reaction, the British educational authorities are proposing a ban on the niqab in schools altogether.

A leading Labor Party politician, Jack Straw, scolded women last year for coming to see him in his district office in the niqab. Prime Minister Tony Blair has called the niqab a “mark of separation.”

David Sexton, a columnist for The Evening Standard, wrote recently that the niqab was an affront and that Britain had been “too deferential.”

“It says that all men are such brutes that if exposed to any more normally clothed women, they cannot be trusted to behave — and that all women who dress any more scantily like that are indecent,” Mr. Sexton wrote. “It’s abusive, a walking rejection of all our freedoms.”

Although the number of women wearing the niqab has increased in the past several years, only a tiny percentage of women among Britain’s two million Muslims cover themselves completely. It is impossible to say how many exactly.

Some who wear the niqab, particularly younger women who have taken it up recently, concede that it is a frontal expression of Islamic identity, which they have embraced since Sept. 11, 2001, as a form of rebellion against the policies of the Blair government in Iraq, and at home.

“For me it is not just a piece of clothing, it’s an act of faith, it’s solidarity,” said a 24-year-old program scheduler at a broadcasting company in London, who would allow only her last name, al-Shaikh, to be printed, saying she wanted to protect her privacy. “9/11 was a wake-up call for young Muslims,” she said.

At times she receives rude comments, including, Ms. Shaikh said, from a woman at her workplace who told her she had no right to be there. Ms. Shaikh says she plans to file a complaint.

When she is on the street, she often answers back. “A few weeks ago, a lady said, ‘I think you look crazy.’ I said, ‘How dare you go around telling people how to dress,’ and walked off. Sometimes I feel I have to reply. Islam does teach you that you must defend your religion.”

She started experimenting with the niqab at Brunel University in West London, a campus of intense Islamic activism. She hesitated at first because her mother saw it as a “form of extremism, which is understandable,” she said, adding that her mother has since come around.

Other Muslims find the practice objectionable, a step backward for a group that is under pressure after the terrorist attack on London’s transit system in July 2005.

“After the July 7 attacks, this is not the time to be antagonizing Britain by presenting Muslims as something sinister,” said Imran Ahmad, the author of “Unimagined,” an autobiography about growing up Muslim in Britain, and the leader of British Muslims for Secular Democracy. “The veil is so steeped in subjugation, I find it so offensive someone would want to create such barriers. It’s retrograde.”

Since South Asians started coming to Britain in large numbers in the 1960s, a small group of usually older, undereducated women have worn the niqab. It was most often seen as a sign of subjugation.

Many more Muslim women wear the head scarf, called the hijab, covering all or some of their hair. Unlike in France, Turkey and Tunisia, where students in state schools and civil servants are banned from covering their hair, in Britain, Muslim women can wear the head scarf, and indeed the niqab, almost anywhere, for now.

But that tolerance is slowly eroding. Even some who wear the niqab, like Faatema Mayata, a 24-year-old psychology and religious studies teacher, agreed there were limits.

“How can you teach when you are covering your face?” she said, sitting with a cup of tea in her living room in Blackburn, a northern English town, her niqab tucked away because she was within the confines of her home.

She has worn the niqab since she was 12, when she was sent by her parents to an all-girl boarding school. The niqab was not, as many Britons seemed to think, a sign of extremism, she said.

She condemned Britain’s involvement in Iraq, and she described the departure of Mr. Blair at the end of this month as “good riddance of bad rubbish.” But, she added, “there are many Muslims like this sitting at home having tea, and not taking any interest in jihad.”

The niqab, to her, is about identity. “If I dressed in a Western way I could be a Hindu, I could be anything,” she said. “This way I feel comfortable in my identity as a Muslim woman.”

No one else in her family wears the niqab. Her husband, Ibrahim Boodi, a social worker, was indifferent, she said. “If I took it off today, he wouldn’t care.”

She drives her old Alfa Romeo to the supermarket, and other drivers take no exception, she said. But when she is walking she is often stopped, she said. “People ask, ‘Why do you wear that?’ A lot of people assume I’m oppressed, that I don’t speak English. I don’t care. I’ve got a brain.”

Some British commentators have complained that mosques encourage women to wear the niqab, a practice they have said should be stopped.

At the East London Mosque, one of the largest mosques in the capital, the chief imam, Abdul Qayyum, studied in Saudi Arabia and is trained in the Wahhabi school of Islam. The community relations officer at the mosque, Ehsan Abdullah Hannan, said the imam’s daughter wore the niqab.

At Friday Prayer recently, the women were crowded into a small windowless room upstairs, away from the main hall for the men.

A handful of young women wore the niqab, and they spoke effusively about their reasons. “Wearing the niqab means you will get a good grade and go to paradise,” said Hodo Muse, 19, a Somali woman. “Every day people are giving me dirty looks for wearing it, but when you wear something for God you get a boost.”

One woman, Sajida Khaton, 24, interviewed as she sat discreetly in a Pizza Hut, said she did not wear the veil on the subway, a precaution her husband encourages for safety reasons. Sometimes, she said, she gets a kick out of the mocking.

“ ‘All right gorgeous,’ ” she said she had heard men say as she walked along the street. “I feel empowered,” she said. “They’d like to see, and they can’t.”

She often comes to the neighborhood restaurant along busy Whitechapel Road in East London for a slice or two, a habit, she said, that shows that even veiled women are well integrated into Britain’s daily life.

“I’m in Pizza Hut with my son,” said Ms. Khaton, nodding at her 4-year-old and speaking in a soft East London accent that bore no hint of her Bangladeshi heritage. “I was born here, I’ve never been to Bangladesh. I certainly don’t feel Bangladeshi. So when they say, ‘Go back home,’ where should I go?”

    Muslims’ Veils Test Limits of Britain’s Tolerance, NYT, 22.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/22/world/europe/22veil.html?hp

4.30pm update

Rushdie knighthood 'justifies suicide attacks'

· Pakistani MPs pass resolution
condemning author Salman Rushdie's Queen's birthday honour.
· Muslim Council of Britain says knighthood
a final insult from departing prime Minister Tony Blair.

Monday June 18, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
David Batty and Peter Walker

The award of a knighthood to the author Salman Rushdie justifies suicide attacks, a Pakistani government minister said today.

"This is an occasion for the 1.5 billion Muslims to look at the seriousness of this decision," Mohammed Ijaz ul-Haq, religious affairs minister, told the Pakistani parliament in Islamabad. "The west is accusing Muslims of extremism and terrorism. If someone exploded a bomb on his body he would be right to do so unless the British government apologises and withdraws the 'sir' title."

After his comments were reported on local news stations, Mr ul-Haq told MPs that his aim had been to look into the root causes of terrorism.

The comments follow other condemnation of the award for Rushdie, whose novel The Satanic Verses provoked worldwide protests over allegations that it insulted Islam.

He received the knighthood for services to literature in the Queen's birthday honours list published on Saturday.

Earlier today Pakistani MPs demanded Britain withdraw Rushdie's knighthood.

A government-backed resolution condemning the author's knighthood was passed unanimously by the lower house of the Pakistani parliament amid angry protests across the country.

MPs said the honour was an insult to the religious sentiments of Muslims. In the eastern city of Multan, hardline Muslim students burned effigies of the Queen and Rushdie, chanting "Kill him! Kill him!"

Pakistan's minister for parliamentary affairs, Sher Afgan Khan Niazi, who proposed the resolution condemning the honour, branded Rushdie a "blasphemer".

She told MPs: "The 'sir' title from Britain for blasphemer Salman Rushdie has hurt the sentiments of the Muslims across the world. Every religion should be respected. I demand the British government immediately withdraw the title as it is creating religious hatred."

Also today, Muhammad Abdul Bari, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said many Muslims would regard the knighthood as the final insult from Tony Blair before he leaves office next week.

"Salman Rushdie earned notoriety amongst Muslims for the highly insulting and blasphemous manner in which he portrayed early Islamic figures," Dr Bari said.

"The granting of a knighthood to him can only do harm to the image of our country in the eyes of hundreds of millions of Muslims across the world. Many will interpret the knighthood as a final contemptuous parting gift from Tony Blair to the Muslim world."

Yesterday, Iranian politicians accused Britain of insulting Islam by awarding the knighthood to Rushdie, who was forced into hiding for a decade after the country's late spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa calling for his assassination.

Mohammad Ali Hosseini, a spokesman for Iran's foreign ministry, said the decision to honour the novelist was an orchestrated act of aggression directed against Islamic societies.

He said Rushdie was "one of the most hated figures" in the Islamic world.

"Honouring and commending an apostate and hated figure will definitely put the British officials [in a position] of confrontation with Islamic societies," Mr Hosseini said.

"This act shows that insulting Islamic sacred [values] is not accidental. It is planned, organised, guided and supported by some western countries."

"Giving a badge to one of the most hated figures in Islamic society is ... an obvious example of fighting against Islam by high-ranking British officials."

The Iranian government formally distanced itself in 1998 from the original fatwa against Rushdie, issued in 1989 by Khomeini.

But shortly after it disavowed the death edict under a deal with Britain, the Iranian media said three Iranian clerics had called on followers to kill Rushdie, saying the fatwa was irrevocable and that it was the duty of Muslims to carry it out.

A spokesman for the Foreign Office said the honour was "richly deserved" and the reasons for it were "self-explanatory".

In a statement after the announcement of his knighthood on Saturday, Rushdie, 59, said he was "thrilled and humbled to receive this great honour".

    Rushdie knighthood 'justifies suicide attacks', NYT, 18.6.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/pakistan/Story/0,,2105748,00.html

Church Asks Japan

to Join Sony Campaign

June 13, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 6:04 p.m. ET
The New York Times

LONDON (AP) -- The Church of England on Wednesday urged the people of Japan to join its campaign against a violent Sony Corp. computer game that allegedly uses a British cathedral as a backdrop.

''For a global manufacturer to recreate the interior of any religious building such as a mosque, synagogue, or in this case, a cathedral, with photo realistic quality and then encourage people to have gun battles in the building is beyond belief and in our view highly irresponsible,'' the dean of Manchester Cathedral, the Very Rev. Rogers Govender, said at a news conference.

In Tokyo, Sony's video game unit said Wednesday it had begun talks with the Church of England over its complaint that Manchester cathedral in northwest England had been used in the shooting game for Sony's new PlayStation 3 console.

Govender denied that. He said the Church of England had sent a letter to Sony on Monday outlining its concerns and making several demands, but had yet to receive a formal response.

''We believe a silent response on the issue is not acceptable behavior,'' Govender said.

''Today I want to appeal directly to the people of Japan to help us put pressure on Sony to respond. So I speak directly to those citizens who share our concerns.''

The church's anti-Sony campaign appeared to win the sympathy of Prime Minister Tony Blair.

During Blair's weekly question-and-answer session in the House of Commons, he urged companies such as Sony to focus on their social obligations and not just profits.

''It is important that any of the companies who are engaged in promoting this type of goods have some sense of responsibility and also some sensitivity to the feelings of others,'' Blair said in response to a question from a Manchester-area legislator.

''It's important that people understand there is a wider social responsibility as well as simply responsibility for profit.''

The debate began Saturday when the church said Sony had not asked for permission to use Manchester cathedral in the game and demanded an apology.

The Church of England said it heard last week that a review of the computer game mentioned a church in Manchester and that when it examined the game it recognized images from the cathedral's flooring, stonework and nave.

The new PlayStation 3 game, ''Resistance: Fall of Man,'' involves a virtual shootout between rival gunmen with hundreds of people killed inside the cathedral. Church officials have described Sony's alleged use of the building as ''sick'' and sacrilegious.

The church has said it will consider legal action if the game is not withdrawn.

In Tokyo on Wednesday, Sony Computer Entertainment spokeswoman Nanako Kato said the company had heard about the church's complaint through the media earlier, but began direct talks with the church ''yesterday or today.''

''We take the church's views seriously,'' she said. She declined to give details of the talks. More time may be needed for an agreement because the problem was complex, she said.

Historic buildings are often used in entertainment, she said, citing iconic movie scenes involving Godzilla and the Tokyo Tower and King Kong in Manhattan.

Kato acknowledged the church in the game bore a resemblance in some parts to Manchester cathedral. But she said the point was to depict the backdrop of an old church, not to illustrate a specific church

In parts of the game, the central character walks through a cathedral armed with a gun and shoots at alien enemies, which often splatter blood when hit.

Although the cathedral appears only in some scenes, it would be difficult to delete them from the game, which went on sale with the launch of the PlayStation 3 next-generation console.

The machine went on sale in Japan and the U.S. late last year, and in Europe in March.

Kato said Sony understood the Church of England was offended especially because of its efforts to reduce gun violence in Manchester. ''Resistance: Fall of Man'' -- a Sony original -- has sold more than 2 million units around the world, Kato said.

Govender said the church was demanding the immediate withdrawal of the game, a Sony apology for using the interior of the cathedral without permission and a substantial donation to the church's education department.

Kato declined to say whether Sony would make such donations.

    Church Asks Japan to Join Sony Campaign, NYT, 13.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Britain-Cathedral-Sony.html

Church of England

Calls Sony Game 'Sick'

June 9, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:18 a.m. ET
The New York Times

LONDON (AP) -- The Church of England accused Sony Corp. on Saturday of using an English cathedral as the backdrop to a violent computer game and said it should be withdrawn from shop shelves.

The church said Sony did not ask for permission to use Manchester cathedral and demanded an apology.

The popular new PlayStation 3 game, ''Resistance: Fall of Man,'' shows a virtual shootout between rival gunmen with hundreds of people killed inside the cathedral. Church officials described Sony's alleged use of the building as ''sick'' and sacrilegious.

A spokesman for the Church of England said a letter will be sent to Sony on Monday. If the church's request for an apology and withdrawal of the game is not met, the church will consider legal action, the spokesman said.

Sony spokeswoman Amy Lake told The Associated Press on Saturday that the company's PlayStation division was looking into the matter and would release a statement later.

But David Wilson, a Sony spokesman, told The London Times: ''It is game-created footage, it is not video or photography. It is entertainment, like Doctor Who or any other science fiction. It is not based on reality at all. Throughout the whole process we have sought permission where necessary.''

The Very Rev. Rogers Govender, the dean of Manchester Cathedral, said: ''This is an important issue. For many young people these games offer a different sort of reality and seeing guns in Manchester cathedral is not the sort of connection we want to make.

''Every year we invite hundreds of teenagers to come and see the cathedral and it is a shame to have Sony undermining our work.''

The bishop of Manchester, the Rt. Rev. Nigel McCulloch, said: ''It is well known that Manchester has a gun crime problem. For a global manufacturer to recreate one of our great cathedrals with photorealistic quality and then encourage people to have gunbattles in the building is beyond belief and highly irresponsible.''

During the game, players are asked to assume the role of an army sergeant and win a battle in the interior of a cathedral.

    Church of England Calls Sony Game 'Sick', NYT, 9.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Church-of-England-Sony.html

'Tactics backfiring'

as jails try to curb radical Islam

Friday April 13, 2007
Guardian
Alan Travis, home affairs editor

The Prison Service's attempts to curb the growth of radical Islam in jails by restricting communal prayers and reading of the Qur'an during work breaks are exacerbating the problem, according to the first in-depth study of Muslim prisoners.

The research, based on interviews with 170 current and former Muslim prisoners, also reveals that bans on access to certain TV programmes and newspapers in high-security prisons have also backfired.

The four-year research project by Aberdeen University anthropologist Gabriele Marranci also finds that a small minority of former young Muslim offenders are vulnerable to recruitment by militant organisations as a result of their prison experiences. He says that individual members of Islamist militant organisations have tried to "talent scout" young Muslim ex-prisoners without disclosing their affiliations.

He also voices "extreme concern" that some had told him they had converted their group and formed an Islamist gang, although most Muslim former prisoners were uninterested or did not want to become involved. But the research challenges media claims that Muslim inmates have been radicalised by imams.

"I found no evidence to suggest that the Muslim chaplains are behaving or preaching in a way that facilitates radicalisation," said Dr Marranci. "On the contrary, my findings suggest that they are extremely important in preventing dangerous forms of extremism. However, the distrust that they face, both internally and externally, is jeopardising their important function."

The research shows that Muslim prisoners were subject to stricter surveillance than other inmates, especially when they adopted religious symbols such as beards, veils and caps: "Growing a beard is, in almost all establishments I visited, interpreted as 'radicalisation' of the individual," said Dr Marranci, a lecturer in the anthropology of religion.

The study, which interviewed prisoners in England, Scotland and Wales, also claims that security policies in prisons, including restricting prayers in a communal space or reading the Qur'an during work breaks, are exacerbating rather than suppressing radicalisation.

He warns that the continuing atmosphere of suspicion surrounding Muslim prisoners increases a sense of frustration and depression which a strong view of Islam can help to overcome.

"The respective prison services have tried to do something to address the issue of radicalisation but they're heading in the wrong direction. This is largely because the measures they have put in place have been fuelled by attempts to exempt themselves from negative media coverage and criticism." He said that far from tackling the spread of radical Islam, Prison Service efforts were facilitating "essentialist views of Islam", which was not to be confused with extremism.

The Prison Service in England and Wales said last night that governors were becoming increasingly aware of the risks of radicalisation and admitted that there were a "very few circumstances" where security considerations, including supervision problems, had led to communal prayer meetings being limited.

"The Prison Service tries extremely hard to ensure that wherever possible access to true religious material or sermons is unrestricted," said a spokeswoman. Prisoners were allowed to pray individually at the times required by their faith.

    'Tactics backfiring' as jails try to curb radical Islam, G, 13.4.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/religion/Story/0,,2056215,00.html?gusrc=ticker-103704

Bishops call for Blair slavery apology

Expressing Britain's 'profound regret' is not enough,
Archbishop of the West Indies says

Sunday March 25, 2007
The Observer
Gaby Hinsliff


Senior Clergymen last night urged Tony Blair to make a full apology for Britain's role in the slave trade, instead of only expressing sorrow for the suffering caused.

The Archbishop of the West Indies, who joined the Archbishops of Canterbury and York at a prayer service in London yesterday commemorating the abolition of the slave trade in the UK, said the Prime Minister would be the 'appropriate person' to deliver an apology, which, he insisted, would prevent human rights abuses in future. Campaigners say the failure to apologise could overshadow plans for an annual day commemorating abolition.

Blair will use a pre-recorded message to the British Council's commemorative event in Ghana today to express his deep regret at the inhumanity and degradation caused by what he has described as a crime against humanity. Lady Amos, the Leader of the Lords and herself descended from slaves, will describe it as 'one of the most shameful and uncomfortable chapters in British history'.

The Prime Minister told a press conference with the Ghanaian President earlier this month that he was 'sorry' about what had happened, but will stop short of the formal apology that Ken Livingstone, London's mayor, is making this week. The Archbishop of the West Indies, Drexel Gomez, said that while there might appear to be only a 'technical difference' between regret and a full apology, it was important. 'An apology is in order because we have to acknowledge our past if we are to build our future,' he told the Today programme.

Downing Street's position reflects concern that it is difficult for the current generation to apologise for wrongs done centuries ago by distant forebears, while apologies may also open the question of liability for reparation.

Amos, attending the event in Ghana, will tackle criticism that the celebrations have focused too much on the role of one white man - William Wilberforce, the Tory MP who led the parliamentary anti-slavery movement - and not enough on the black resistance movement.

The bicentenary of the 1807 legislation abolishing the slave trade has sparked comparisons with the maltreatment of ethnic minorities in modern Britain. Yesterday, the Bishop of Liverpool, James Jones, drew a parallel between the exploitation of Africans and the murder of teenager Anthony Walker, killed with an axe as he ran away from racist thugs in the city. Jones told a congregation at Liverpool Cathedral that the more he studied history, 'the more I believe that our racism is rooted in the dehumanising treatment of black people by white people'.

He read out an account by John Newton, the former slave ship commander turned abolitionist, describing the practice of 'jointing' - hacking slaves to death with an axe and throwing their body parts to other slaves.

Yesterday the Archbishops of Canterbury and York led a walk of witness through London, meeting the March of the Abolitionists - a group who have walked from Hull, Wilberforce's birthplace, to London wearing chains to symbolise shame at Britain's role.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, declared: 'The easiest thing in the world is to look back ... and say we wouldn't have made those mistakes.

'A part of what we're doing today is recognising that the people who worked in the slave trade, people who kept going a system of inhumanity, were people like you and me.'

    Bishops call for Blair slavery apology, O, 25.3.2007, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2042257,00.html

Blair's secret weapon

in Paisley talks: religion

· PM wooed DUP leader by swapping Christian texts
· Two men brought closer by 'religious love affair'

Wednesday March 14, 2007
Guardian
Nicholas Watt, Owen Bowcott and Patrick Wintour


Tony Blair has forged a special bond with the Rev Ian Paisley, the DUP leader who holds the future of the Northern Ireland peace process in his hands, by discussing their common interest in and commitment to Christianity.

Spearheading a government charm offensive to win round the one time Presbyterian firebrand, the two men have been swapping religious textbooks over the past year.

Mr Blair's aim has been to win the confidence of Mr Paisley, a strident critic of the government's concessions to Sinn Féin, who has become the dominant force in Northern Irish unionism in recent years.

Mr Paisley confirmed to the Guardian yesterday that his discussions in recent years with the prime minister had gone well beyond politics. Asked whether he shared an interest in religion with the prime minister, the DUP leader said: "We shared books that I thought would be good for him to read and I'm sure he read them. He always takes books away with him."

Downing Street refused to comment last night. However, Lord Bew, the professor of Irish politics at Queen's University Belfast who has good connections at the highest levels of government, believes the Blair/Paisley dialogue on religion has transformed their relations, even though they come from apparently contrasting denominations.

A fierce Protestant, Mr Paisley is the founder and moderator of the Free Presbyterian church, who has outraged Catholics by denouncing the Pope as the anti-Christ. Mr Blair is an Anglican who attends mass with his Catholic wife.

"Blair is brilliant at seducing Paisley," Lord Bew said. "This is the most amazing love affair, the last great Blairite romance.They are even exchanging books on religion. It is fantastic stuff. It is religious; it is romantic. It is brilliant. You have to hand it to him. Once again, when we thought the old maestro was fading, his capacity to seduce, politically speaking, is phenomenal."

Peter Hain, the Northern Ireland secretary, joined the prime ministerial offensive by holding a special 80th birthday party for Mr Paisley at Hillsborough Castle last year. "It was a very pleasant, delightful occasion," Mr Hain said of the evening which was dry, out of respect for Mr Paisley's strict Free Presbyterianism.

The charm offensive appeared to be paying off yesterday. Mr Blair's new ally gave his most positive statement yet that a power-sharing deal might be achieved with Sinn Féin.

"I'm not confident until it's done," Mr Paisley said. "I think we have made a bit of progress. I think we are getting down to the real issues at last. The rest was shadow-boxing."

Mr Paisley added that his success in last week's assembly elections - the DUP won 36 of the 108 seats - had given him room to manoeuvre. "I can afford now to go a bit further because I am confident the people are with me."

The prime minister, whose former spokesman Alastair Campbell famously declared that "we don't do God", is deeply reluctant to talk about his Christianity in public. But it appears he decided to mix politics and religion with Mr Paisley some time after the 2005 general election when it became clear that the future of the peace process lay in the hands of the DUP.

Mr Paisley, who had spent 40 years as an outside - but hugely influential - force, became the pivotal figure in unionism after the 2005 general election when his party all but wiped out the once mighty Ulster Unionists. So called "Flymo" unionists locked to the DUP when the IRA took its time to decommission.

The government tried to persuade the IRA to disarm by granting a series of concessions to Sinn Féin which were criticised in yesterday's Guardian by Peter Mandelson. Lord Trimble, who stood down as UUP leader after losing his seat in the 2005 general election, today echoes the criticisms of the former Northern Ireland secretary.

"I remember we said to him many times that his focus was always seen to be on republican difficulties and doing things to help them," Lord Trimble tells the Guardian.

Martin McGuinness, Sinn Féin's chief negotiator, today criticises Lord Trimble and the prime minister for failing to face down Mr Paisley when the DUP was boycotting the political talks.

    Blair's secret weapon in Paisley talks: religion, G, 14.3.2007, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/northernirelandassembly/story/0,,2033282,00.html

'The show is like a coffee morning

in slow motion'

Revelation TV, a low-budget, family-run Christian cable station,
has finally won its battle to be allowed to raise funds on air.
Is this the birth of British televangelism?
Patrick Barkham spends a day on set

Friday March 2, 2007
Guardian
Patrick Barkham

You can find heaven, and part with a small slice of your personal fortune, if you take a trip to the 700s. There are pastors on the phone, and gospel singers crying out in exultation as they make hysterical appeals for your cash on Sky channels 760 to 780. With names such as Inspiration and Loveworld, all but two of this cluster of evangelical Christian stations are beamed to the UK from abroad. In their midst at 765, however, sit a middle-aged couple from Surbiton chatting about the morning newspapers. It's a bit like a coffee morning in slow motion.
Sporting a silvery thatch of hair that miraculously thickened shortly after he took up Christian broadcasting, 60-year-old Howard Conder reads the Sun's front page on Robbie Williams. "'Happy pills, sleeping pills, 36 espressos, 60 Silk Cut, 20 Red Bulls every day'. I believe he's worth £70m, but he's not a happy bunny," he says, before confessing that he, too, suffers from depression. His wife, Lesley, nods. "We're empty inside, so we need to fill ourselves with the word of God on a daily basis," adds Howard quietly. "Although we read the newspapers, we really need to read the word of God. Sorry, I'm giving a bit of a plug for the Bible this morning."

Welcome to Revelation TV. For the past four years, the Conders have broadcast from a tiny jumble of a studio a minute - and light years - away from the sleek, amoral television companies of Soho and Charlotte Street. When not presenting - although sometimes they do these things while they are on live telly as well - Howard and Lesley direct, produce graphics, answer the telephone, book guests and order equipment. They are helped by their four children, the youngest of whom, Bethany, 11, has her own show, R Kidz, and a youthful staff of 15. Shunned by mainstream advertisers and barred by Ofcom from raising funds on air, the Conders have scrimped and saved and remortgaged their house to keep on broadcasting.

Now all that has changed. Despite the opposition of the Church of England, which fears the "potential for exploiting viewers' sensitivities", Howard Conder's lonely lobbying has paid off: Ofcom has amended its regulations to allow Revelation TV to ask for money on air. Is this the birth of British televangelism? Will well-fed pastors coerce money out of Brassic of Bolton while happy-clappy hordes charm cheques from Gullible of Guildford?

It was 18 years ago that the Lord told Howard Conder to spread God's word via the medium of television. Conder was a raffish former drummer and producer who worked for Brian Epstein, the Beatles' manager, and "had the privilege" to audition the Bee Gees. After spending the 80s in America, he heard God speak, reformed his rock'n'roll ways and, eventually, returned to Britain on a mission to create a Christian television channel. When his bank manager asked for his business plan, he responded: "Moses didn't have a business plan."

Swing open Revelation's studio door, and a religious rock anthem punches you in the guts. Howard, with a studded leather belt between blue shirt and jeans, and Lesley, wearing a comfortable jumper, have arrived seconds before their 10.30am morning show ("It's cheaper to travel on the trains after 9.30," explains Howard). They are not sure if they've got all their newspapers. Their star guest, US-based evangelist Juanita Bynum, has been delayed at Heathrow. And Lesley has a cough. "Mum, what time is this meant to come out?" pipes up their second eldest, Joel, 22, who is creating graphics for their news bulletin (Revelation's weather is a shot of the map in the Daily Mail).

Luckily, life on screen is calmer than off it. Howard and Lesley begin their morning show by discussing Revelation's fourth birthday. "I've been opening the post and there's all these lovely cards," says Lesley. "With lovely messages." They read out emails. One contains a video message, so Howard holds his laptop up to the camera and plays it: you can see the viewer, but there's no sound. "Today's technology is not just for the young folks," he urges his audience. "Get into the 21st century, because it's the way to connect with the gospel."

The modern church, he says, must be more than a building. "I believe Jesus Christ would have gone to the media, the marketplace, had he the opportunity. Today, people watch TV like never before. It's the way to connect. I believe we can have a church without walls, on the box."

The Conders spend all day, and most of the night, on television. Howard, who for several months slept on a couch in the studio so he could present a third daily live show at midnight, still stays well beyond the end of his "flagship" evening show at 10pm. When they return to Surbiton, Revelation plays on their telly - mainstream broadcasting is "an open sewer pouring into the home," reckons Lesley - although their children, who are not all committed Christians, switch over to terrestrial pretty sharpish when their mates come over.

Are Howard and Lesley the Richard and Judy of evangelical Christian broadcasting? "More like Punch and Judy," quips Howard, who has a disconcerting habit of directing while live on screen. "Joel, if you get that song ready, we'll go to that in the break," he says as he reads out an email. Later, he realises that their sole camera operator, who scampers between three cameras, has not turned on the monitor. "Peter, I haven't got a monitor there to look at," he says slightly testily. "Could you switch it on, then I know that I'm on screen."

Someone must be watching over the Conders because, despite their minimal budget, there have been no real disasters. The closest they came to broadcasting sinful obscenity was when Neil Horan, the kilt-wearing "protest priest" who barged his way into the 2004 Olympics, invited himself into their studio on the day of the London tube and bus bombings. "He was wearing a kilt the size of a handkerchief," says Lesley. Somehow they ushered him off air before he could expose himself.

They are not sure, however, who exactly is watching them, because they can't even afford to buy the Broadcasters' Audience Research Board (Barb) ratings to reveal their viewing figures. Revelation's eight phone lines keep flashing, though, and their callers are not all devout Christians. "There are so many people out there who watch Revelation because they say it's non-threatening," says Lesley. "We don't want it to be a little religious club."

Bizarrely, in the studio next door in this unfashionable corner of central London is the Islam Channel. "Their pizzas came to us yesterday," says Eleanor Angelides, 22, who began as a volunteer and now co-presents Revelation's youth show, Free4All. "We get on really well with them." Howard says he has lent his Muslim neighbours broadcasting equipment and invited them on his show as guests. "We don't agree with each other in terms of theology, but we have a lot of common ground - we agree with what the scriptures say on abortion issues and we help where we can."

Some viewers have complained to Ofcom about Revelation TV. "People call me homophobic, Islamophobic, all sorts of phobic. That goes with the territory," says Howard, unrepentantly. The gospel's message is like a "bitter pill", he reasons. "Not pleasant to take, but the after-effects are good."

Initially, at least, any UK-based attempts to raise money are likely to be modest. The only other British-run Christian TV channel, UCB, says it has no plans to show on-air fundraising.

Making television is never cheap. Revelation costs up to £200,000 a month to run, but it has survived by selling airtime to other churches for both programmes and commercials. The Conders have just launched a new youth-oriented music channel, Genesis, and want to buy an outside broadcast van so they can take Revelation on the road. "To me it's still hokey," says Howard. "I want to do something a bit more professional, but our viewers tell us, 'We like it, we don't want something like the American channels where they have gold thrones and that sort of thing'. "

Revelation TV's first fundraising week ended on Wednesday night with more than £300,000 pledged from 2,000 callers. At one point, Howard went on strike from his own channel and refused to turn up for presentational duties on Sunday because he didn't like the American style of a US pastor he invited over to help with the week.

"We won't be buying a private jet, we won't be buying a car. It's all going to go into the pot and we'll be accountable to you. We will be accountable to God," Howard tells his audience, promising just two fundraising weeks each year and the publication of their accounts every month.

He insists there will be no more American-style appeals for rainfalls of cash to cascade from the heavens. "It's going to be done in a very tasteful way. There's going to be no manipulation whatsoever," he says. "I don't know if you've seen all those screaming people ... It's not going to be like that at all".

    'The show is like a coffee morning in slow motion', G, 2.3.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/religion/Story/0,,2024907,00.html

Faith

Britain's new cultural divide
is not between Christian and Muslim, Hindu and Jew.
It is between those who have faith and those who do not.
Stuart Jeffries reports on the vicious and uncompromising battle
between believers and non-believers

Monday February 26, 2007
Guardian
Stuart Jeffries

The American journalist HL Mencken once wrote: "We must accept the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart." In Britain today, such wry tolerance is diminishing. Today, it's the religious on one side, and the secular on the other. Britain is dividing into intolerant camps who revel in expressing contempt for each other's most dearly held beliefs.

"We are witnessing a social phenomenon that is about fundamentalism," says Colin Slee, the Dean of Southwark. "Atheists like the Richard Dawkins of this world are just as fundamentalist as the people setting off bombs on the tube, the hardline settlers on the West Bank and the anti-gay bigots of the Church of England. Most of them would regard each other as destined to fry in hell.

"You have a triangle with fundamentalist secularists in one corner, fundamentalist faith people in another, and then the intelligent, thinking liberals of Anglicanism, Roman Catholicism, baptism, methodism, other faiths - and, indeed, thinking atheists - in the other corner. " says Slee. Why does he think the other two groups are so vociferous? "When there was a cold war, we knew who the enemy was. Now it could be anybody. From this feeling of vulnerability comes hysteria."

"We live together but we don't know each other," says Tariq Ramadan, the Muslim scholar and senior research fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford. "And this is something not just true of secularists, but of people of faith. I moved to Britain shortly after the July 7 2005 bombings in London and since then things have changed radically. Everyone treats the perceived 'other' as a threat."

Or so one might be forgiven for thinking if one listens to the most vocal of dogmatic believers and non-believers.

For example, Richard Dawkins, the British scientist and chair for the public understanding of science at Oxford University, whose perhaps timely insistence on the hideousness of the other fellow's wife and fatuousness of his offspring made his book, The God Delusion, sell 180,000 in hardback - a figure that rivals sales of Jordan's memoirs, thus demonstrating what an appetite there is for unapologetically militant atheism. This is the man so voguishly intemperate that when speaking to the Times recently about Nadia Eweida, the British Airways worker whose employer refused to allow her to wear a Christian cross openly to work, said: "I saw a picture of this woman. She had one of the most stupid faces I've ever seen."

Before The God Delusion was published, Dawkins wrote about something called Gerin oil that was poisoning human society. "Gerin oil (or Geriniol, to give it its scientific name) is a powerful drug that acts directly on the central nervous system to produce a range of characteristic symptoms, often of an antisocial or self-damaging nature. If administered chronically in childhood, Gerin oil can permanently modify the brain to produce adult disorders, including dangerous delusions that have proved very hard to treat. The four doomed flights of September 11 were, in a very real sense, Gerin oil trips: all 19 of the hijackers were high on the drug at the time." Gerin oil, of course, was an anagram of religion. His bestseller charged that God was a "psychotic delinquent", invented by mad, deluded people.

The backlash against Dawkins' abusiveness, as well as his arguments, has started. Oxford theologian Alister McGrath has just published The Dawkins Delusion?. He argues: "We need to treat those who disagree with us with intellectual respect, rather than dismissing them - as Dawkins does - as liars, knaves and charlatans. Many atheists have been disturbed by Dawkins' crude stereotypes and seemingly pathological hostility towards religion. In fact, The God Delusion might turn out to be a monumental own goal - persuading people that atheism is just as intolerant as the worst that religion can offer."

It is worth noting that The God Delusion included an appendix entitled "a partial list of addresses, for individuals needing support in escaping from religion". In this Dawkins offers a similar service to the National Secular Society whose certificate of de-baptism is downloadable from www.secularism.org.uk. "Liberate yourself from the Original Mumbo-Jumbo that liberated you from the Original Sin you never had," urges the site.

Dawkins and the National Secular Society, though, are no match for Christopher Hitchens in their hostility to religion. His new book, God Is Not Great: the Case Against Religion, is to be published by Atlantic Books in May. Its first chapter, drolly entitled Putting it Mildly, concludes: "As I write these words and as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hard-won human attainments that I have touched upon. Religion poisons everything." (Hitchens' italics.)

John Gray, professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, whose book Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia will be published later this year, detects parallels between dogmatic believers and dogmatic unbelievers such as Hitchens and Dawkins. "It is not just in the rigidity of their unbelief that atheists mimic dogmatic believers. It is in their fixation on belief itself."

Gray argues that this fixation misses the point of religions: "The core of most religions is not doctrinal. In non-western traditions and even some strands of western monotheism, the spiritual life is not a matter of subscribing to a set of propositions. Its heart is in practice, in ritual, observance and (sometimes) mystical experience . . . When they dissect arguments for the existence of God, atheists parody the rationalistic theologies of western Christianity."

The intolerance for people of faith, though, might not seem to be the preserve of only angry atheists such as Dawkins and Hitchens. Instead, there is a widespread fear that religion is being treated as a problem to British society, best solved by airbrushing it from the public sphere. British Airways' insistence that employee Nadia Eweida remove her Christian cross, and Jack Straw's plea to Muslim women constituents to remove their veils at his surgery, have helped bring a sense of mutual persecution to many people of different faiths (including yarmulke-wearing Jews and turban-wearing Sikhs) - and a sense of solidarity. Many people of faith share a concern that Britain may be following secularist France, where 2004 reforms meant that "conspicuous religious symbols" could not be worn in public places, such as schools.

One particularly fraught current issue creating inter-faith solidarity is gay adoptions. Many Catholics, Anglicans, Muslims and Jews last month united against the government's sexual orientation regulations that would mean all adoption agencies could not discriminate against gay couples in placing children with adoptive parents.

Catholic leaders warned that their seven adoption agencies could not breach Vatican guidelines against allowing gay couples to adopt. Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, supported the Catholics' stand, as did the Federation of Synagogues. And, of course, the issue of homosexuality is also dividing the Anglican communion. For evangelical groups such as Reform, the C of E is polarising into two churches, one "submitting to God's revelation", the other "shaped primarily by western secular culture". Again, western secular culture - if not of Dawkins' stamp - is seen as the worm in the apple, corrupting not just British society but the church itself. By contrast, for liberals in the church, whose number includes many gay vicars, the evangelicals' hostility to homosexuality seems unChristian, as does their stance on gay adoption.

The gay adoption issue also outraged many non-believers, among them philosopher AC Grayling, author of Life, Sex and Ideas: The Good Life without God. "These groups are trying to be exempt from the effort to be a fair society, and we are faced with the threat of a possible return to the dark ages. We are trying to keep a pluralistic society, and elements in the Christian church and other religions are trying to destroy it."

Why this departure from tolerant, if nicely ironic, Menckenism? Why the increasing division of Britain into shrill camps shouting unedifyingly at each other? One thing is certain: we've been here before. In 1860, one year after the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, and TH Huxley, the naturalist described as "Darwin's bulldog", went toe-to-toe at Oxford's Natural History Museum. According to a contemporary report in McMillan's magazine, "The bishop turned to his antagonist with smiling insolence. He begged to know, was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey? Huxley rose to reply ... He [said he] was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth ... One lady fainted and had to be carried out."

"At that time the church was feeling very threatened and uncomfortable with non-religious society," says Hanne Stinson, executive director of the British Humanist Association. "There is a parallel with today - the church is feeling very threatened." Hence, perhaps, the nature of a dispute at Exeter University where the Christian Union was banned from using student union facilities after the Students' Guild charged that the CU was breaking equal opportunities policy by asking members to sign up to a list of beliefs that were discriminatory against non-Christians and gay people. The CU accused the guild of threatening its right to freedom of expression by imposing the ban: as in the gay adoption issue, anti-discrimination policy was running up against religious conviction. The Exeter ban has been repeated at other universities, prompting the Archbishop of Canterbury to argue that the bans threaten "the integrity of the whole educational process".

But today everyone is feeling threatened. Not just religious groups, but also pressure groups seeking to represent those without faith (who Stinson, citing last December's Ipsos Mori poll, suggests amount to 36% of Britons). Slee argues that low (below 7%) church attendance is a result of Christians being revolted by "the church presenting itself as narrow and non-inclusive".

In any event, the British Humanist Association campaigns against the existence of religious privileges in public life. Its symbolic struggle is BBC Radio 4's Thought for the Day slot, which the BHA argues unfairly excludes humanists and other non-faith people. But Radio 4 isn't the chief culprit: "We believe that the church having privileged access to government is not good," says Stinson. "The government has had this whole thing about giving a voice to religion, which was connected to the aim of building links with minority groups. But religions have become more and more dominating . It does connect to the whole multiculturalism debate because the government is funding faith schools in order to bind British minority ethnic groups to British society. But in so doing they are paying for people to be indoctrinated, to put it bluntly."

The role of religion in education raises a terrifying spectre for Grayling. "People who cherish tolerant argument are fighting back against the teaching of creationism in schools." Last November the Guardian revealed that 59 British schools were using teaching materials promoting a creationist alternative to Darwinian evolution, called intelligent design. At the same time Dawkins, nicknamed "Darwin's rottweiler", announced he was setting up a charity that will subsidise books, pamphlets and DVDs attacking the "educational scandal" of theories such as creationism while promoting rational and scientific thought.

Atheists such as Dawkins and Grayling fear that Britain may become more like the US, where creationism has more than a foothold. "In the US, two and half million people are educated at home because their parents don't want them exposed to Darwinian thinking," says Grayling. "Instead, they are often exposed to fundamentalist educational literature such as the A Beka books that maintain the world was created in 6,000 BC and that tyrannosaurus rex was a vegetarian. These developments worry intelligent people when the faith school issue comes up."

Indeed, only last week such intelligent people were worrying when the Tory leader, David Cameron, said he would be sending his daughter to a Church of England primary school instead of one of the many non-faith state schools in his area.

Children's author Philip Pullman argues that atheism should be taught in schools. "What I fear and deplore in the 'faith school' camp is their desire to close argument down and put some things beyond question or debate. It's vital to get clear in young minds what is a faith position and what is not, so that, for instance, they won't be taken in by religious people claiming that science is a faith position no different in kind from Christianity. Science is not a matter of faith, and too many people are being allowed to get away with claiming that it is."

Others argue that faith schools should be abolished and religion have no role in public life. Such is the Dawkins-Hitchens position. Why such hatred for religion and the proselytisation for its removal from the public sphere? One answer comes from Rabbi Julia Neuberger: "I think they're so angry about Muslims being so strident," she says. "And then they become angry about the Church of England wading into the issue of gays and adoption."

Neuberger is to take on Hitchens, Dawkins and Grayling when she speaks at a debate against the motion We'd Be Better Off Without Religion next month. The debate has been moved to a bigger venue. "What I find really distasteful is not just the tone of their rhetoric, but their lack of doubt," she says. "No scientific method says that there is no doubt. If you don't accept there's doubt in all things, you're being intellectually dishonest. "

This is a thought taken up by Azzim Tamimi, director of the Institute of Islamic Political Thought. "I refer to secular fundamentalism. The problem is that these people believe that they have the absolute truth. That means you have no room to talk to others so you end up having a physical fight. They want to close the door and ignore religion, but this will provoke a violent religiosity. If someone seeks to deny my existence, I will fight to assert it."

Tamimi's words also resonate with what the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, said last November: "The aggressive secularists pervert and abuse any notion of diversity for the sake of promoting a narrow agenda." They also parallel the chilling remarks of Richard Chartres, Bishop of London: "If you exile religious communities to the margins, then they will start to speak the words of fire among consenting adults, and the threat to public order and the public arena, I think, will grow and grow."

Another reason for secularist rage at people of faith, one might think, is exasperation on the part of militant atheists that religion has not died out as they hoped. "It has taken centuries and centuries to wrestle away from the churches the levers of power," says Grayling.

Tamimi contends that this was not quite what happened. Rather, he suggests that Christians were complicit in their marginalisation from power. "Christians did that to themselves - they allowed religion to move to the private sphere. That would be intolerable for Muslims." Why? "Partly because secularism doesn't mean the same for Muslims from the Middle East. The story of secularism in the Middle East is not one of democracy, as we are always told it was in the west. Instead, it is associated with tyranny - with Ataturk in Turkey, for instance. Islam is compatible with democracy, but not with this secular fundamentalism we are witnessing."

Grayling contends that during the late 20th century, Islam became more militant and assertive and this has changed British society radically. "In Britain we have seen Muslims burn Salman Rushdie's book. And to an extent other religions wanted to get a bit of the action - hence the protests against Jerry Springer: the Opera." When Stewart Lee, one of the writers of Jerry Springer, was interviewed amid protests against the allegedly blasphemous work being screened on TV, he suggested that Islamic culture had been more careful in protecting itself than Christian culture: "In the west, Christianity relinquished the right to be protective of its icons the day Virgin Mary snow globes were put up for sale at the Vatican. But in Islamic culture it is very different. To use a corporate image, Islam has always been a lot more conscientious about protecting its brand." Now other religions are becoming more publicly conscientious.

One example of this growing conscientiousness is a recent paper for the new public theology think-tank Theos, in which Nick Spencer concluded that in the 21st century, liberal humanism would face a challenge from an "old man" - God. "The feeble and slightly embarrassing old man who had been pacing about the house quietly mumbling to himself suddenly wanted to participate in family conversation and, what's more, to be taken seriously." Indeed, in Britain's ethically repellent consumerist society, even some atheists might consider it would be good to hear from the old man again, if only to provide a moral framework beyond shopping.

The refrain of Christians like Spencer is that unless religion is a part of public-policy debates, then society will be impoverished. Last November the Archbishop of Canterbury gave a lecture in which he distinguished between programmatic and procedural secularism. The former meant that in the public domain, everybody had to silence their fundamental convictions and debate in a value-free atmosphere of public neutrality. For Williams, this was a hopeless way of carrying on public discourse in a bewildering society that embraced not only many faiths but many anti-faith positions, and in which real disputes over very different values needed to take place. Better was procedural secularism, which promised that different groups could at least converse with each other in public discussions over sensitive questions of value and policy. This would involve, said Williams, "a crowded and argumentative public square that acknowledges the authority of a legal mediator or broker whose job it is to balance and manage real difference".

It is an idea similar to one set out by Yahya Birt, research fellow at The Islamic Foundation. "One form of secularism suggests that religion should be kept in the private sphere. That's Dawkins' position. Another form, expressed by philosophers suc has Isaiah Berlin and John Gray, is to do with establishing a modus vivendi. It accepts that you come to the public debate with baggage that will inform your arguments. In this, the government tries to find common ground and the best possible consensus, which can only work if we share enough to behave civilly. Of course, there will be real clashes over issues such as gay adoption, but it's not clear to me that that's a problem per se."

What should such a public square be like? It might not be Menckian, but it could be based on respectful understanding of others' most cherished beliefs, argues Spencer: "We should be more willing to treat other value systems as coherent, reasonable and even valuable rather than as primitive or grotesque mutations of liberal humanism to which every sane person adheres." It is, at least, a hope, albeit one, given our current climate, in which it would be foolish to place too much faith.

    Faith, G, 26.2.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/religion/Story/0,,2021337,00.html

Catholics set to pass Anglicans

as leading UK church

February 15, 2007
The Times
Ruth Gledhill,
Religion Correspondent

Roman Catholicism is set to become the dominant religion in Britain for the first time since the Reformation because of massive migration from Catholic countries across the world.

Catholic parishes will swell by hundreds of thousands over the next few years after managing years of decline, according to a new report, as both legal and illegal migrants enter the country.

It says that the influx of migrants could be the Catholic community’s “greatest threat” or its “greatest opportunity”.

While in some places the Catholic Church has responded positively, in others it has been “overwhelmed” by the scale of the challenge. The growth of Catholicism in Britain comes as the established Church of England and the Anglican provinces in Scotland, Wales and Ireland face continuing, if slow, decline.

Average Sunday attendance of both churches stood even at nearly one million in 2005, according to the latest statistics available for England and Wales, but the attendance at Mass is expected to soar.

A Church of England spokesman said: “I don’t think you can talk in terms of decline in the Church of England. It is fairly clear that with small fluctuations the worshipping population of the Church of England is 1.7 million a month. That is actually a stable figure.”

The report describes how many migrants have few or no documents, little or no English, no job to go to and nowhere to live.

The Catholic Church is the first port of call for thousands when they find themselves in difficulty, with up to 95 per cent from countries such as Poland being practising Catholics. Some churches find that they are being used as both job centres and social welfare offices. Most of the migrants settle in London, where some parishes are putting on Sunday Masses from 8am to 8pm to cope, the report, carried out by the Von Hugel Institute at Cambridge, found.

The report calls on the Catholic hierarchy to act urgently to help the migrants and their hard-pressed clergy by investing thousands of pounds in new resources.

Officially the Church is welcoming the migrants, but nearly all bishops and clergy have been taken by surprise by the influx, which took off last year and has yet to be reflected in official Mass attendance and membership figures.

But they acknowledge that the immigration is changingthe face of Catholicism across Britain.

From being an Irish-English church in a mindset of managing steady decline, the Church has within the space of 12 months found itself having to countenance an unprecedented expansion and change in its ethnic make-up.

Figures for 2005 show that there are 4.2 million Catholics in England and Wales, under one fifth the 25 million baptised Anglicans and double the number of Muslims.

But the real Mass attendance figure is higher by many hundreds of thousands. Precise numbers are impossible to obtain because of the irregular status of so many of the migrants, who prefer to keep a low profile. Some would only talk to researchers for the report through their priests, and some clergy even refusedto be interviewed for fear of attracting attention.

But the head of the Polish vicariate told The Timesthat the number of Poles in London had doubled since their country’s EU accession to at least 600,000. According to the report, the number recorded attending Mass represents a fraction of the total number of baptised Catholic migrants now in London.

The Catholic dioceses of Brentwood, Southwark and Westminster, which cover Essex, London and Kent, commissioned the report to investigate the needs of migrants in London after a Mass in Westminster last May gave an indication of the scale of the change.

Researchers at Cambridge surveyed 1,000 migrants from diocesan parishes, ethnic chaplaincies and the Polish vicariate, ran focus groups and interviewed clergy.

    Catholics set to pass Anglicans as leading UK church, Ts, 15.2.2007, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/article1386939.ece

The Polish pastor whose flock

has doubled in just two years

February 15, 2007
The Times
Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent

Monsignor Tadeusz Kukla, in charge of pastoring Polish Roman Catholics living in England and Wales, estimates that the number of Poles in London has doubled since Poland’s accession to the EU in 2004 to 600,000. Most of these arrived last year, and thousands more are arriving each month.

He was sent over by the Polish hierarchy 30 years ago to pastor Polish students in London. Five years ago he was appointed Vicar Delegate by the Polish bishops and now operates from a 75-year-old church bought from a Protestant community in Islington, North London. He is under the authority of the Catholic bishops of England and Wales and has 30 parishes in his care.

He said that the difficulty of being precise about numbers was made worse because so many Polish incomers were not registered. But he had noted an “incredible” increase since May 2004. “It has doubled or even more,” he said. “In London we have 12 Polish Catholic churches and we are trying to open new centres. We give pastoral help but people come with all sorts of pastoral questions for the priests. Many come with their whole families and they want to know about schools. We organise talks and tell them how to live in a big city such as London.”

Many Poles end up living far from a Polish chaplaincy and so integrate into their local Catholic community: “Some go to the Anglican churches by mistake and are astonished.”

Father Kukla said that a key characteristic of the migrants, including the Poles, was their youth. Many are students or recent graduates. Congregations are now bursting with young people, all with a massive enthusiasm for faith and liturgy. English priests, more accustomed to dealing with a disaffected and cynical British youth, have been thrilled but are also struggling to cope with the demands being made on their parishes to serve as job centres, social welfare centres and youth meeting places.

They also struggle to cope with the sheer scale of the difficulties faced by the some migrants. One 21-year-old Pole, Pavel, told the Cambridge researchers that he had arrived in England through an agency after paying a fee but the contacts he was given were bogus and he ended up sleeping rough in Victoria. He was introduced to someone who said he could help him, but was robbed of all his belongings, including his ID papers. He ended up in a squat with no electricity or running water run by a Polish gang with other desperate migrants who spent their days drinking and taking drugs.

His rescue came through the Cardinal Hume Centre, a Catholic youth project in Westminster founded by the late Archbishop. After being put in touch with the authorities via the centre, his papers were replaced, he was helped with basic living requirements and he found a job as a porter.

The new arrivals are not just from the accession states. They are also from the Chinese diaspora, Africa, Latin America and South and South East Asia.

One priest was called to hospital in the early hours of the morning to pastor to a parishioner who had been badly mutilated for defaulting a loan that was secured on a family member back home. The migrant had arrived in London expecting papers, a job and a place to live. He ended up eating left-over food in the restaurant where he worked and sleeping on the floor after closing time.

In another case, a couple from Argentina worked for two months on wages of £10 a week, surviving on bread and milk.

Lows and highs

- 1535 Henry VIII declared himself Supreme Head of the Church of England. The Mass was replaced by the Book of Common Prayer and Catholic doctrine by the 39 Articles of Religion. Centuries of martyrdom and persecution followed

- A Catholic Relief Act in 1778 allowed them to own property. They were allowed to inherit and join the Army

- This heralded a revival in the 19th century, when Protestants such as John Henry Newman converted and a sudden rediscovery of its Catholic identity led to the High Church Tractarian movement in the Church of England

- Centuries of suppression, which only truly ended with the Restoration of the Hierarchy in the mid-19th century, left the English Catholic Church bereft of confidence, which only began to return under the extraordinary leadership of the late Cardinal Basil Hume, Archbishop of Westminster

- Many upper-class and prominent Anglicans were received into the fold, including Ann Widdecombe and John Gummer Many Anglican priests followed, as the Church of England began what some would describe as its long, interminable descent into schism with the ordination of women in 1994

- The row over gays may bring more conversions

    The Polish pastor whose flock has doubled in just two years, Ts, 15.2.2007, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/article1386945.ece

Thousands of churches

face closure in ten years

February 10, 2007
The Times
Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent

Thousands of churches face closure, demolition or conversion in the next decade, leading to the demise of some branches of Christianity in Europe, according to experts.

In some parts of the country, former churches are being turned into centres of worship for other faiths. A disused Methodist chapel in Clitheroe on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales is the latest, destined to become a mosque for the town’s 300 Muslims.

There are more than 47,000 churches in Britain today, and 42 million people, more than 70 per cent of the population, consider themselves to be Christian. It sounds a lot, but behind the figures lies a story of decline in the country’s established religion.

Although the Pentecostal and Evangelical branches of Christianity are growing, worshippers often prefer modern, functional, warehouse-style buildings to the traditional neo-Gothic landscape of British ecclesiastical architecture.

Just one tenth of the nation’s Christians attends church, and churches are now closing faster than mosques are opening. Practising Muslims will, in a few decades, outnumber practising Christians if current trends continue.

A generation ago the churches in Britain seemed unassailable. The first mosques in Britain opened at the end of the 19th century but by 1961 there were just seven mosques, three Sikh temples and one Hindu temple in England and Wales, compared with nearly 55,000 Christian Churches.

Sometimes, with denominations such as the Methodists split into three types, there could be as many as seven or eight churches in one small town to cater for Roman Catholics, Anglicans and different groups of Protestants.

By 2005 the number of churches had fallen to 47,600. According to the organisation Christian Research, another 4,000 are likely to go in the next 15 years.

In the Church of England alone, which still has 16,000 churches, 1,700 have been made redundant since 1969.

Over the same period, the number of mosques in Britain has grown to almost the number of Anglian churches that have closed. The Islamic website Salaam records a total of 1,689 mosques.

Covenants attached to redundant Anglican churches, however, make it difficult for them to be used by another faith. None has become a mosque, and only two have become Sikh gurdwaras, and the Church of England has opened more than 500 new churches since 1969. Redundant Anglican churches tend to be developed into houses, offices or restaurants. In Cheltenham, 19th-century St James’s is now a branch of Zizzi’s, an Italian restaurant.

Methodist churches, down from 14,000 in 1932 to 6,000, and closing at the rate of 100 a year, are often sold with no restrictive covenant attached.

Inayat Bunglawala, of the Muslim Council of Britain, said: “In 1990 there were about 400 mosques in the UK. Many existing mosques are also being refurbished and enlarged.”

Peter Guillery, of English Heritage, said that the trend was not new. The 18th-century Huguenot church in Brick Lane, in the East End of London, became a Methodist chapel in 1819. It became a synagogue at the end of the 19th century, and a mosque in 1976.

Multifaith use of buildings is growing. Art and Christianity Enquiry, a Christian arts trust, is planning a seminar next

month on how many buildings in Britain are being shared by different faith groups.

But Ceri Peach, of Oxford University, said in The Geographical Review: “The new cultural landscape of English cities has arrived. The homogenised, Christian landscape of state religion is in retreat.”
 

    Thousands of churches face closure in ten years, Ts, 10.2.2007, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article1362709.ece

The loving gay family

and the archbishop next door

Thursday January 25, 2007
Guardian
Stephen Bates,
religious affairs correspondent

If anyone knows what it is like to be a gay adopter of a child, it's the Rev Martin Reynolds. He's gay, in a long-term partnership ... and an ordained clergyman of the Anglican church in Wales. And for the last 15 years, he has been fostering a boy with severe behavioural difficulties.

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, knows all about him too: he used to live next door when he was Archbishop of Wales. The boy played with his children. He knows that gay couples can provide a loving home for disadvantaged and at-risk children. Yet on Tuesday he wrote to the government demanding that religious adoption agencies should not have their consciences challenged by being required to consider gay couples as adopters.

The letter followed a threat by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, leader of the Roman Catholic church in England and Wales, to withdraw its seven agencies from adoption rather than consider the move. Pressing on Archbishop Williams's mind will be the knowledge that in a fortnight he has a meeting in Tanzania with Anglican church leaders from around the world, some of whom believe homosexuality is evil and gay people are worse than beasts, and he cannot afford to offer them any hostages to fortune if he is to hold the worldwide communion together.

Mr Reynolds said yesterday: "Rowan must know that the Church of England's own adoption society welcomes gay people. It has done for eight years. In our case we were the first gay couple in Wales to be allowed to foster our boy by Barnardo's.

"The Catholic church has allowed it elsewhere. Cardinal Levada, who's become the Vatican's doctrinal enforcer, when he was Archbishop of San Francisco allowed at least three children from Catholic agencies to be placed with gay couples."

Mr Reynolds and his partner Chris, a hairdresser, have lived together for 27 years. They were first asked to foster the boy when he was four and Barnardo's could not find another home for him because he was so disruptive. The boy is now 19. When the couple took him in he was filthy and had only one set of clothes. He had severe learning difficulties and very severe behavioural problems. They had to sit with him all night in case he damaged himself. The first hour he was in their house, he smashed 16 things.

The couple fostered the boy for 100 days a year initially and for the last five years have fostered him full-time. Next autumn he has a place in college.

Mr Reynolds said: "There are thousands of kids out there and I would not want to see one of them being denied a home with a family, but I also would not want to see them being denied a home if there was a suitable gay family who could take them. One person can make all the difference if they are suitable - that's how vital it is and the church should not knock out one section of people before they even look. Kids just need a good parent.

"You can't make kids gay. What they need is a loving home to move into. It's about children having the right place, so that the maximum number can have a chance in life."

Recently Mr Reynolds tried an experiment. He rang a Catholic agency and, posing as an atheist, asked whether he might be considered for fostering. He was told there would be no problem with that. Later he rang back and admitted he was gay and that placed him beyond the pale.

He said: "We're talking tiny numbers here. Adoption is a very expensive business. The Catholic agencies place 200 children a year and it costs them £10m. That's a lot of money per child. Their agencies have a fantastic reputation for aftercare. It's very specialist work. I think if they were closed down, the government would just take them over, or the social workers would move on to other agencies."

Yesterday, Mr Reynolds was accompanying the boy to hospital for medical tests. He said: "I think what we have given him has been a place to be angry and safe. We are proud of our boy. Now he has a real chance to live an independent life in the community. If you had asked us then we would not have wanted to take him in, but now we say we would not have missed it. It has been a most wonderful transformation of our lives."

    The loving gay family and the archbishop next door, G, 25.1.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/gayrights/story/0,,1998060,00.html

4.30pm update

No 10 mulls Catholic

opt-out from gay rights law

Tuesday January 23, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
Matthew Tempest and agencies

Downing Street appeared to be wavering today on allowing Catholic adoption agencies exemption from gay rights legislation, after a warning from the leader of Catholics in England and Wales that agencies may close rather than comply with the regulations.

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, the Archbishop of Westminster, said the church would have "serious difficulty" with the proposed regulations, putting a total of 12 Catholic adoption agencies at risk of closure.

This morning the prime minister's official spokesman admitted that Mr Blair still had to make his mind up on the issue.

The regulations, part of the Equalities Act 2006, are designed to give gay and lesbian couples the same protection against discrimination under the law as ethnic minorities.

But Cardinal Murphy O'Connor has warned that the law would force Catholics to "act against the teaching of the church and their own consciences".

Mr Blair's official spokesman said: "This is an issue with sensitivities on all sides and the prime minister recognises that, and that is why it is worth having some discussions in government before we come to a decision.

"The key thing we have to remember in all of this is the interests of the children concerned and that there are arguments on both sides.

"This is not a straightforward black-and-white issue. This is an issue where there are sensitivities on all sides and we have to respect those but equally find a way through."

Weekend reports speculated that both Mr Blair, whose wife and family are Catholic, and Ruth Kelly, the communities secretary - who is a member of the Catholic sect Opus Dei - were in favour of allowing the church some form of exemption.

Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor released a letter the church had sent to Downing Street, saying: "We believe it would be unreasonable, unnecessary and unjust discrimination against Catholics for the government to insist that if they wish to continue to work with local authorities, Catholic adoption agencies must act against the teaching of the church and their own consciences by being obliged in law to provide such a service."

The cardinal said it would be an "unnecessary tragedy" if Catholic agencies were forced to close - rather than being forced to consider homosexual couples as potential adoptive parents.

The act is due to come into power in April, but Downing Street would not be drawn on a timetable for discussions exempting Catholic adoption agencies.

The Department for Communities and Local Government - headed by Ms Kelly - is considering whether to allow exemptions when the details of the regulations for England and Wales are produced later this year.

But, in a sign of friction around the cabinet table, the lord chancellor, Lord Falconer, today appeared to rule out any chance of a compromise, saying religions should not be excused from the legislation.

"I do not want to see any adoption agencies, which do a very good job, closing," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

"But we have committed ourselves to anti-discrimination law - on the grounds of sexual orientation - and it is extremely difficult to see how you can be excused from anti-discrimination law on the grounds of religion.

"Each individual adoption agency must make its judgment on the basis on which it places a child, and the child's interests are paramount.

"But if we take the view as a society that we should not discriminate against people who are homosexual, you cannot give exclusions to people on the grounds that their religion or their race says 'we don't agree with that'.

"The view about discrimination is one that has been taken by the country as a whole."

Asked about reports that Mr Blair backed the church's stance, he said simply: "The cabinet has got to make a conclusion about it but what I set out is the principles which should be applied."

The Labour MP Chris Bryant, himself gay and a former Anglican vicar, accused the cardinal of "putting dogma before children".

He said: "I think the cardinal is out of touch with most ordinary Catholics who believe the most important issue is the interests of the child.

"There are many splendid gay parents and we should be celebrating that rather than slamming the door in their face.

"It's a shame the cardinal is putting dogma first."

The cardinal wrote in his letter that the Catholic church "utterly" condemned all forms of unjust discrimination, violence, harassment or abuse directed against gay people.

He said that the church recognised "many elements" of recent legislation - including the Northern Ireland regulations - which take steps to ensure that no such discrimination takes place.

He said that gay couples who approached the Catholic adoption agencies were currently referred to other agencies where their adoption application might be considered.

But he said that plans to force Catholic adoption agencies to consider adoption applications from such couples would require them to act against Catholic teaching on marriage and family life.

According to the church, there are a total of 12 Catholic adoption agencies in England and Wales, which are responsible for about 4,000 voluntary sector adoptions.

Around 32% of the children they place for adoption are classified as having special needs.

A spokesman for the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales said: "It is not that the bishops are threatening to close them.

"The point is that, in the worst-case scenario, they would have to close because, essentially, their funding would cease."

The Rev Martin Reynolds, director of communications for the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement, said: "It is sad to see the Roman Catholic church holding the government to ransom.

"We believe that the best interests of children are not being served by this political game-playing."

Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society, said: "The Catholic church must not be permitted to control our legislature through this kind of blackmail.

"It did the same thing over the faith school quotas proposed last month and successfully blew the government off course.

"If it manages to achieve the same result with these regulations, we need to ask who is running this country - the government or the Vatican?"

The Tory MP John Bercow, who has argued strongly in favour of gay equality, said: "The idea of an exemption for Catholic adoption agencies is an anathema and contradicts the concept of equality at the heart of this legislation.

"People choose their religion, they do not choose their orientation.

"I believe equality is equality is equality and it is quite incredible for the Catholic church to insist its religious views should take precedence over others' human rights."

Peter Tatchell, of the gay rights group OutRage!, claimed Mr Blair's "equivocation" on the issue was giving "comfort and encouragement to homophobes".

He said: "He is showing weakness and this weakness will embolden the Catholic church to maintain its hardline insistence on the right to discriminate against gay couples.

"The prime minister ought to be giving a lead by supporting the principle that everyone should be equal before the law and that no one should be above the law."

    No 10 mulls Catholic opt-out from gay rights law, G, 23.1.2007, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/homeaffairs/story/0,,1996785,00.html

Faith & Reason:

Ruth Kelly, her hard-line church

and a devout PM

wrestling with his conscience

Catholic-run adoption agencies
should retain the right to ban gay couples,
say Tony Blair and Ruth Kelly.

Most other cabinet members
are horrified at the thought
- and the scene is set for a political holy war.
Francis Elliott reports

Published: 21 January 2007
The Independent on Sunday

She is a devout Catholic and member of the Opus Dei sect. His leanings to Rome have been rewarded with audiences in front of successive Popes.

So, when Tony Blair and Ruth Kelly team up to deny gay couples equal access to church-run adoption agencies, as we reveal today, it is little wonder that their opponents believe it is the "Catholic tendency" at work.

"We are descending into a spiral of immorality," said Cardinal Keith O'Brien, leader of the Catholic church in Scotland, when that country brought its laws into line with those of the rest of the UK to allow local authorities to place children with gay parents, just before Christmas.

Now, a further change in the law to remove from Catholic-run adoption agencies the right to ban gay people threatens to provoke a full-scale battle throughout the UK.

Archbishop Vincent Nichols, who is set to become the leader of England's Catholics, recently warned the Government not to "impose on us conditions which contradict our moral values".

"It is simply unacceptable to suggest that the resources of... adoption agencies ... can work in co-operation with public authorities only if the faith communities accept not just the legal framework but also the moral standards being touted by the Government," he sermonised last November.

When it comes to Mr Blair, the archbishop is preaching to the converted, according to senior ministers. The Prime Minister first asked Alan Johnson, then responsible, to include a loophole in anti-discrimination legislation to allow the Catholic ban on gay parents early last year.

When he refused, the PM moved him and handed the equalities brief to Ms Kelly, whom he knew could be trusted to back him on the issue. But a cabinet row last October delayed the introduction of the Equality Act until this April.

Ms Kelly now has to produce the regulations that spell out exactly how the new law will work, and the pressure is building towards an explosive political battle.

Mr Johnson remains implacably opposed to any exemption and is being supported by Peter Hain, Jack Straw, David Miliband, Des Browne and even Mr Blair's close friend Lord Falconer.

For his part, the Prime Minister can count only on Ms Kelly and John Hutton if the issue is pressed to the point of a full meeting of the cabinet committee that settles disputes on domestic policy. Members of the Domestic Affairs Committee, chaired by John Prescott, have been expecting a letter from Ms Kelly on the new regulations for weeks. Her aides say she will send them her proposals this week after further "detailed policy discussions with colleagues".

But Mr Blair can't count on much support among backbenchers. Angela Eagle, who topped a recent election to become the vice-chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, and Chris Bryant, MP for Rhondda, have been leading behind-the-scenes efforts to defeat the "Catholic tendency".

In a meeting last week Ms Kelly insisted that her wish to allow church-run adoption agencies to discriminate against gay couples had nothing to do with her own religious sensibilities.

Instead, the Communities Secretary said, she was acting in the best interests of vulnerable children since the Catholic bishops were threatening to close the seven agencies run by the church rather than comply.

The bishops point across the Atlantic at the example provided by the closure of an adoption agency by the Catholic church in Boston after the passing of anti-discrimination laws. It could no longer reconcile its operation with the Vatican ruling that gay adoption was "gravely immoral", it said.

In Britain the seven Catholic agencies account for around 4 per cent of the 2,900 children placed for adoption last year. But the agencies handle around 33 per cent of the so-called "difficult-to-place" children, some of whom have to wait years before they are found a home.

Since gay and lesbian people have proved to be more likely to adopt such children, there is anecdotal evidence that some Catholic agencies have been quietly ignoring the Vatican in a small number of cases.

Campaigners such as Ms Eagle and Mr Bryant say it is a nonsense to suggest that the best interests of such vulnerable children are best served by the exclusion of the very people most likely to provide them with a loving home.

Downing Street, anticipating the trouble the issue is likely to cause, tried to broker a compromise. Conor Ryan, Mr Blair's education adviser, suggested Catholic agencies could refuse to accept gay couples but would have a "duty to refer" such applicants to agencies that would accept them.

Ms Eagle draws a comparison with a famous incident in Alabama in 1955 that sparked the US civil rights movement to explain why she believes such a fudge would be offensive as well as unworkable. "It is the equivalent of telling Rosa Parks to wait for the fully integrated bus coming behind."

So just why is Mr Blair so desperate to maintain the ban, and can he and Ms Kelly win out in the face of the opposition? Despite the fact that his wife is a Catholic, close observers say it is unlikely that she has been a significant influence on this issue.

Cherie Blair is on the liberal wing of the Catholic church in England. She has, for instance, publicly said that she believes that the Vatican's teaching on birth control is wrong. Mrs Blair is also in favour of the ordination of women priests.

It may be that the PM is simply nervous of the Government being blamed for the closure of seven charitable agencies and is nervous of the political fall-out.

Certainly Gordon Brown is fully aware of the potentially negative electoral impression of the issue, especially in Scotland, which goes to the polls this May to elect a new Scottish Parliament.

The repeal of the legislation forbidding the "promotion" of homosexuality in schools was deeply contentious north of the border, especially in Labour Catholic heartlands on the west coast. The Scottish Executive has written to Ms Kelly asking that she take a "balanced" view - in effect supporting her attempts to win an exemption.

It is a little-noted facet of Mr Brown's political history that he has failed to vote every time there is a significant Commons division on gay rights. True to form, the Chancellor is showing scant interest in the current battle, although his most senior lieutenant, Ed Balls, is said to be firmly against allowing an exemption.

But for Ms Kelly there is no hiding place. Already wounded by the revelation that she sent her dyslexic son to a private boarding school, the Communities Secretary knows that she will sustain further damage in the coming weeks.

She first faced calls to resign from her job as the minister with overall responsibility for equality last May when she refused to say whether she believed that homosexuality was a sin.

"I don't think it's right for politicians to start making moral judgements about people. It's the last thing I want to do," she said. Later she added: "Everyone is entitled to express their views in free votes on matters of conscience."

Her membership of the Opus Dei sect, which encourages its members to take "holiness" into their working lives, has excited most suspicion among her colleagues. The sect, located firmly on the traditional wing of the church, has an uncompromising attitude to practising gays, regarding them as "serious sinners".

Ruth Kelly's advisers say that she believes that gay and lesbian couples provide loving homes for adopted children but their words would carry more weight if she, herself, said plainly that she believed that same-sex adoption was acceptable.

The scene is now set for a political Battle Royal. Tony Blair, an outgoing Prime Minister, is determined to support the Catholic bishops against the gay lobby, despite the opposition of most of his Cabinet.

In one further twist, David Cameron is likely to vote against any exemption for the Catholic agencies if the issue is put to a Commons vote, a senior member of his team has told The Independent on Sunday. It would be quite a parting gift from Mr Blair to the Opposition should he hand them the gay rights mantle.

In favour of an exemption

The coalition of leading Catholics opposed to gay adoption

Ann Widdecombe

The ex-minister, an implacable opponent of same-sex adoption, said that two men who had adopted three children made "a mockery of the law" two years after same-sex adoption was made legal.

Pope Benedict XVI

As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, and head of the "Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith", he signed a statement in 2003 that said allowing cohabiting gays to adopt was "gravely immoral".

Vincent Nichols

The Archbishop of Birmingham fired a warning shot over the Government's bows last November when he warned in a sermon of a "serious backlash" if the new gay rights laws were introduced.

David Alton

The former Liberal MP, and a vocal campaigner against abortion, now sits in the House of Lords as an independent peer, where he remains a staunch supporter of traditional Catholicism.

Equality before the law

The Act that has fuelled the clash between Catholics and gay lobby.

Same-sex couples have been allowed to adopt children in England and Wales since 2002; Scotland followed suit last year, but Northern Ireland remains opposed. Last year, the Government passed anti-discrimination legislation that comes into effect in April.

The law, supposed to guarantee gays equal access to goods and services, already faces a challenge in the High Court from religious groups this March. Now Catholic bishops want an exemption to allow church-run adoption agencies to ban gay couples applying. If it's not granted they say seven agencies will close, citing a Boston adoption agency that shutrather than flout the Vatican ruling that gay adoption is "gravely immoral".

Last year, Catholic agencies placed 4 per cent of the 2,900 children adopted and 33 per cent in the "difficult to place" category. Gay and lesbian couples such as Tony and Barry, are more likely to adopt such children, and campaigners say it is wrong to deny them a loving home. There are no reliable statisticson how many children are placed with gay parents each year.

    Faith & Reason: Ruth Kelly, her hard-line church and a devout PM wrestling with his conscience, IoS, 21.1.2007, http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article2171678.ece

Christians 'torch' SORs

Tuesday, 09 January 2007
Times

A torchlit procession takes place shortly to oppose the Sexual Orientation Regulations. My last blog on this has attracted a remarkable 420 comments so I thought it time to put up a new posting to move the debate on a little. I'll update later this evening after we know the result of Lord Morrow's attempt to annul the Northern Ireland regulations. The whole SOR factor concerns me for a number of reasons.

Tell anyone outside the Church that you're a Christian these days, and they make one assumption about you. It is not that you are spiritual, or ascetically-minded, or dedicated to helping others, or opposed to the culture of consumerism. It is that you are a homophobe.

From Section 28 onwards, the various Church-led campaigns around this issue have stamped on the mind of the public the image of the contemporary Christian as a gay-hating bigot. The protests against gay clergy such as the Dean of St Albans, Jeffrey John and the US bishop Gene Robinson have not helped. On this issue, I find myself in the uncomfortable position of being yet another conservative agreeing with Polly Toynbee.

This year we are celebrating the bi-centenary of the abolition of the slave trade, a campaign led by evangelicals such as Clapham's William Wilberforce. Would Wilberforce today be campaigning against the gays who go cruising for custom on Clapham Common? I suspect not. He would be campaigning still on behalf of the persecuted and oppressed - such as women forced into prostitution, or women stoned to death for adultery.

In Christian doctrine, the practice of homosexuality is sinful. So is adultery by a heterosexual, gluttony, greed, envy, sloth. But there aren't many Christians demanding that Christian restaurant owners be entitled to exemption from the principle that fat people be allowed to consume as many chips as they want with their dinner. Or that City workers who benefit from the annual bonus bonanza be forced to tithe. Further, not all Christians support traditional Christian doctrine on this matter, just as not all Catholics follow their Church's teaching on birth control.

Faith groups are rightly campaigning against the advance of secularism. In many important respects they are winning this campaign. The churches are winning control of more schools and academies, many religious charities receive local authority funding, all the indications are that churchgoing was up for the second year running at Christmas.

But in claiming that the regulations will force religious groups to promote homosexual rights and that they will lead to the persecution of Christians who stand up for moral values, they are in danger of making themselves look ridiculous. There is no evidence that the regulations will do either of these things. It is reminiscent of extremist Muslims who responded with violence when Pope Benedict XVI quoted an ancient text describing Islam as a religion of violence. In this way, religious leaders are playing into the hands of the secularists who seek their undoing. Although I do not by any means agree with all or even most of his argument, preferable by far in its approach to the whole question of homosexuality in Christian doctrine is Professor Oliver O'Donovan's intelligent and pastoral analysis, on the Fulcrum website.

Anglican Mainstream's response must not be dismissed however. There are legitimate concerns to do with religious liberty. The Church of England fears its clergy might be forced to bless civil partnerships. And yes, it is certainly the case that the regulations, when introduced to Britain as expected in April, should be framed in a way that they do not conflict with religious liberty. There is no harm in the churches campaigning on these grounds. But the regulations should not be opposed outright. I am not the only person who normally could be expected to take a conservative stance who is concerned by what is happening. Alistair McBay notes Ekklesia's statement on this, below. And Inayat Bunglawala, on this occasion not speaking for the Muslim Council of Britain and writing with Abdurahman Jafar, also backs the regulations in a blog shortly to be posted on Comment is Free. He says: "The new regulations are a direct outcome of the passing of the Equalities Act 2006 which pushed the equalities agenda forward by - for the first time
- prohibiting discrimination in the provision of services on grounds of religion or belief and sexuality. So, just as the followers of different faiths should be protected against unfair discrimination in the provision of goods and services, so too should people on account of their sexual orientation. It seems to be an unanswerable argument.And it is one that British Muslims should be supporting especially if the news on the grapevine that the Department for Communities and Local Government and its head, Ruth Kelly, are trying to block the statutory duty on public bodies to promote equality from being extended, is true.The DCLG apparently want to keep the statutory duty on public bodies strand specific, thereby limiting it to race, gender and disability. A comprehensive approach will mean that it is also equalised for religious belief and sexual orientation.Now that is a goal worth working for."
This is not the first time Inayat has backed gay rights. It is interesting that it is a Muslim who understands how the religious should be speaking out for the oppressed, not against them.

Similarly, the Board of Deputies of British Jews has denied that they are backing the protests and has issued a statement clearly indicating support for the SORs: "The Sexual Orientation Regulations will provide a further platform to combat discrimination in this country. It must be possible for people to live their lives in the manner in which they choose as long as it does not impinge upon the rights of others. We hope that to this effect the regulations will be framed in such a way that allows for both the effective combating of discrimination in the provision of goods and services whilst respecting freedom of conscience and conviction. These regulations are currently being debated and will be afforded due scrutiny before passing into law. The Board of Deputies opposes discrimination on any grounds and recognises that the rights of those within our community and in wider society should not be infringed on the grounds of ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, religious conviction or for any other similar reason."

The regulations are in line with EU requirements. They are part of our western society's welcome and civilised move towards equality of opportunity for all. They outlaw discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation. They will not force schools to teach that homosexuality is equal to marriage. But they might help mitigate the bullying in schools of gay children, a distressing proportion of which go on to attempt suicide. And if they stop a Christian hospital turning away a gay patient for Aids treatment, that will also be a good thing.

There are so many things wrong with our world on which our Christian leaders should be campaigning. Christian leaders have voiced many concerns about our actions in Iraq, but there have been no torchlit processions for the innocent on all sides who have lost their lives, nor against the guilty Saddam, nor against the disgraceful conduct of his killing in which he attained an extraordinary new dignity. And it took the US to lead us to war against this dictator when the appalling stories of the atrocities inflicted on his enemies - the "shredding" of opponents in paper shredders to name but one - began to filter out of Iraq. Where were the torchlit processions for these victims of unspeakable persecutions? Yet Christians come out onto the streets of Westminster to fight regulations designed to protect a minority, some of whom, through their sexual orientation alone, will have undergone significant sufferings already.

The regulations specifically outlaw discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. The Church has repeatedly stated that orientation is not the problem. It is the practice that is opposed. So why the fuss? The Christian protesters obviously fear that in practice, they will be forced to facilitate homosexual acts. A bed and breakfast owner will not be able to put a sign outside their establishment stating: "No gays."

It is all so reminiscent of the anti-slavery campaign. Many Christians opposed abolition of slavery. The Church of England made a small fortune from its plantations in the West Indies. The right to state: "No blacks" was seen as part of God's created order.

The proofs that this was right were also found in the Bible. The main text was in Genesis 9:25-27: "Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers. He also said, 'Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem! May Canaan be the slave of Shem. May God extend the territory of Japheth; may Japeth live in the tents of Shem and may Canaan be his slave'. "

It was believed that Canaan had settled in Africa, and that this text justified the enslavement of his descendants by the West.

In future generations, I think, we will look back on this anti-gay hysteria with the same astonishment that we now regard the racism of slavery.

    Christians 'torch' SORs, Posted by Ruth Gledhill on Tuesday, 09 January 2007 at 02:45 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink, Ts, 9.1.2007, http://timescolumns.typepad.com/gledhill/2007/01/christians_torc.html

Gay rights laws

draw religious protest

January 09, 2007
David Byers and agencies
Times Online

Christian and Muslim groups are to stage a torchlit protest outside the House of Lords tonight against a proposed new gay rights law that they say would force them to "actively condone and promote" homosexuality.

The demonstration outside the Palace of Westminster will coincide with a Lords debate on the proposed introduction of new equal-treatment rules in Northern Ireland, which are set to be replicated elsewhere in the UK in the coming months.

The legislation, known as the Sexual Orientation Regulations, would ban discrimination in the provision of goods, facilities and services on the basis of sexuality in a similar way to the rules on gender and race discrimination.

It would mean that hotels could be prosecuted for refusing to provide rooms for gay couples, and parishes obliged to rent out halls for civil partnership receptions. In a twist to the new rules, gay bars would not be able to ban straight couples.

However, Christian and Muslim groups have protested against the rules, which they say would force them to go against their religious beliefs.

Tonight, the Lords was due to debate the Sexual Orientation Regulations specifically for Northern Ireland. If they are passed, the regulations will be added to the Government's Equality Act, which completed its Parliamentary stages last year.

The demonstrators fear that if the Northern Ireland regulations are allowed to go through as they are tonight, it will have very serious ramifications for the rest of the country. This is because the Government is planning to draft its England and Wales regulations by April and, if the Northern Ireland regulations pass this evening, sources in the Lords say it is almost certain that the England and Wales regulations will be the same when they are drafted.

A total of 10,000 people have already signed a petition to the Queen organised by Christian Concern for Our Nation, part of the Lawyers' Christian Fellowship, which complains that the new law would have the consequence of "discriminating heavily" against Christians of all backgrounds and denominations.

In particular, Catholic adoption agencies have said they fear they may be forced to allow gay couples to adopt.

Some black churches have also added their voices to the protest, saying that pastors and churchgoers would go to jail rather than accept rules that would mean they had to open their meeting halls to gay lobby groups.

Muslim organisations have also put together a petition protesting against the rules.

The gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, from the group OutRage!, said today that the demonstration would be the result of "scaremongering, lies and hypocrisy".

The Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement added that every one of the objections raised by Christian groups and others had been answered, claiming safeguards were already in place to protect religious groups' freedom of speech, and accused the demonstrators of pursuing a "deeply disturbing" agenda against gay men and women.

Mr Tatchell said: "They have a highly selective and overtly homophobic interpretation of biblical morality. If there are going to be laws against discrimination, they should apply equally to everyone.

"It is wrong to give legal protection against some forms of discrimination but not against others. Last year's Equality Act gave full legal protection against discrimination to people of faith.

"Some religious leaders are now demanding that the protection they have secured for themselves should be denied to lesbians and gays. It is hypocrisy and double standards. They want the law to give them privileged protection and for gay people to be treated as second-class citizens.

"If anyone was demanding the legal right to discriminate against Christians, these zealots would be outraged. Yet they want the right to discriminate against gays. They are two-faced homophobes."

The Rev Martin Reynolds, communications director for the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement, said: "They are setting up straw dogs that they already know do not exist. They have received assurances about the points they have raised. There is a deeply disturbing agenda running in this."

But Thomas Cordrey, a barrister and an employee of the Lawyers Christian Fellowship, strongly denied that the protest was motivated by homophobia.

He said: "What we are saying is very rational and reasonable, which is that these laws do not correctly strike a balance between two competing rights.

"Every country should have to strike a balance. In Canada, for example, the Supreme Court has decided that Christian printers should not be forced to print material promoting homosexual practice as it would be contrary to their Christian beliefs.

"We are saying that if the Government takes care to actually implement this law correctly, we could have elimination of unjustified discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, which we absolutely support, and we could also have the freedom of conscience for individual Christians to be allowed to hold the view that the Bible teaches."

Dr Majid Katme, of the Islamic Medical Association, who himself has organised a petition against the rules, urged Muslims to join protests today, describing them as "unjust".

The Board of Deputies of British Jews, the umbrella organisation representing British Jewry, says that it will play no part in the demonstration and has issued its guarded support for the regulations, which it hopes will "provide a further platform to combat discrimination in this country".

The Board issued a milder statement expressing hope that the new laws must not restrict Jewish community members' "freedom of conscience and conviction" at the same time.

A Board spokesman said: "To my knowledge, there are no Jewish groups who will be participating in the protest."

    Gay rights laws draw religious protest, Ts, 9.1.2007, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2537939,00.html

Revealed:

how Scientologists

infiltrated Britain's schools

Insight: Drugs charity
is front for ‘dangerous’ organisation

January 07, 2007
The Sunday Times

Devotees of the Church of Scientology have gained access to thousands of British children through a charity that visits schools to lecture on the dangers of drugs. A Sunday Times investigation has found that Marlborough College is one of more than 500 schools across Britain where the charity has taught.

Critics of the charity, Narconon, say it is a front to promote the teaching of Scientology — the controversial “religion” founded by L Ron Hubbard, the science fiction writer.

Schools contacted last week said they knew nothing about the charity’s links with Scientology. There is no apparent reference to the church in its drugs education literature.

Narconon’s UK website states that its work is based on Hubbard’s “drug rehabilitation technology” and displays his photograph; but it refers to him as an author rather than the founder of Scientology.

Narconon promotes a number of unorthodox theories and treatments — based on Hubbard’s work — which experts say are not backed by scientific evidence. In California, where Narconon has its international headquarters, the state department of education has advised schools against using the charity.

The UK prisons ombudsman has warned governors to ban it from jails because of its Scientology association. Narconon’s international website claims: “The ministry of health in England (sic) has also directly funded Narconon residential rehabilitation.” But the Department of Health denies any knowledge of this.

Last week, during a conversation with an undercover reporter, the charity named eight of the schools it has visited. They included Coombe Girls, a state school in New Malden, Surrey, Golden Hillock, a secondary school in Birmingham, the Arts Educational London Schools (AELS), a private school in Chiswick, west London, and Ricards Lodge, a high school in Wimbledon, southwest London.

A number of the schools, including Marlborough, refused to comment on their use of the charity. Those that did said they were unaware of its Scientology background.

Parents, a senior MP and a mainstream drug advisory group expressed concern that it was being allowed to teach children.

John Gummer, the former cabinet minister, said: “Scientology is a dangerous organisation. It doesn’t stand up intellectually and scientifically. It is rather bad science fiction. If Scientologists have been getting into schools under the guise of a drug charity it is very worrying. Schools must know exactly who they are letting in and should not have anything to do with Scientologists.”

An undercover reporter approached Narconon last week posing as a businessman interested in hiring the charity to work in a number of schools. Lucy Skirrow, the Narconon director dealing with schools, is a Scientologist from west London. She named Marlborough College — the Wiltshire school whose former pupils include Kate Middleton, Prince William’s girlfriend — as a reference to endorse Narconon’s work.

Skirrow said: “We lectured to about 56,000 students and teachers last year and we did 38,000 the year before . . . It has an effect . . . Kids say their viewpoints actually do change.” She went on to claim: “A lot of behaviour in kids is because they are not getting the right nutrition, then they might end up taking drugs. Then, of course, drugs destroy vitamins in the body and it becomes a worse thing.”

Her description of the charity’s philosophy appears in more detail on the Narconon website. Here it claims that drugs stay in a user’s fatty tissue for years but can be flushed away using a regime of vitamins and saunas. This is derived from the works of Hubbard and is hotly disputed by mainstream drug therapists and scientists.

Perhaps these unorthodox views — and Hubbard’s name on the website and in Narconon’s annual report — should have rung alarm bells with teachers at Marlborough and the other schools that pay the charity £140 a session to lecture their pupils. But it was not until this weekend — when contacted by The Sunday Times — that the schools appear to have become aware of how controversial Narconon is.

The charity, based in St Leonards, East Sussex, claims to be an independent organisation. But Professor Stephen Kent, a Canadian academic who is an authority on Scientology, said: “The connection between Narconon and Scientology is solid. Of course, Scientology tries to get non-Scientologists involved in the programme, but the engine behind the programme is Scientology.”


THE disclosures come as the Church of Scientology is engaged in a push to win new disciples and gain acceptance in British society.

Its critics claim it is a cult that uses hard-sell and mind control to separate devotees from their money and, in more serious cases, from their families. Scientologists reject this and claim to have a good record in resolving family conflicts.


Andreas Heldal-Lund, who has researched Scientology and runs Operation Clambake, a website critical of the organisation, said: “Most people might see them as a bit of a joke because of their beliefs and teachings. But they are in fact the most controversial and dangerous cult in the western world today, and pose a real threat to free speech.”

In Britain, Narconon has a number of Scientologists among its trustees and leading members. They include Michael “Woody” Woodmansey, a former drummer for David Bowie.

Two years ago a panel of drug-abuse experts, including four doctors, were asked to examine Narconon’s work in schools by the state of California’s department of education. One of the panel, Steve Heilig, a director at the San Francisco Medical Society, said last week: “When we reviewed Narconon we all felt it did not reflect scientific knowledge or good educational approaches to this issue. There were a lot of problems with the science of it — there were claims made in there that drugs remain in your body forever unless you use these very specific techniques such as niacin and saunas.

“That’s where you start to get the red flags raised about this link to Scientology because those are the theories that come out of some of the writings of L Ron Hubbard, who was a science fiction writer.”

The British government expressed concern about Narconon as long as eight years ago. A 1998 memo from the Home Office’s drug strategy unit warned that the charity had its “roots in the Church of Scientology and (is) not in the mainstream of drug rehabilitation”.

Tower Hamlets council in east London advises its schools against using Narconon. DrugScope, one of the UK’s main drug charities, said: “We feel that the quality of Narconon’s information is not objective and non-judgmental. It does not have any credibility.”

Stephen Shaw, the prisons ombudsman, advised that inmates in British jails should not receive drug education from Narconon because it is so “closely associated with the Church of Scientology”.

The Sunday Times disclosures raise serious questions about how Narconon appears to have slipped through school vetting procedures.

Parents of pupils at Marlborough said they had not been informed of the lectures. “I would have preferred to know there was a connection between the Scientologists and the teaching that was given to my son,” one mother said.

It appears that the schools themselves were in the dark. Alison Jerrard, head teacher at Ricards Lodge, said: “We did not have any reason at the time to think there was anything inappropriate, or anything misleading.” Of the schools contacted, Marlborough, Golden Hillock and AELS did not comment on Narconon’s activities.

Yesterday a spokesman for Narconon said he was satisfied with the validity of the science promoted by his organisation. He added that Narconon would have been happy to declare any links with Scientology if asked by schools.

Skirrow said: “Of course it has very strong links (with Scientology). That’s not at all hidden. But I think that some people have got confused that it is Scientology. And it’s not.”

A spokeswoman for the Church of Scientology said that Narconon is separate organisation which is open to people of all religions. She said: “Narconon has a documented 75%–80% success rate with graduates (recovering addicts), which is the highest in the field. That’s why we formed the Narconon Network and why scientologists and non-scientologists continue to sponsor the opening of new centres.”

Secrets of a church that believes a galactic warlord caused all our ills

Established in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1952 by L Ron Hubbard, the science fiction writer, Scientology claims to be the world’s fastest growing religion. It opened its first church in Los Angeles in 1954 and now claims 120,000 members in the UK and more than 10m worldwide.

Members progress through a hierarchical structure and, at key levels, new “secrets” are divulged. They progress by paying for courses either in cash or by doing work that benefits the organisation.

The belief system has been described as a regressive utopia, in which man seeks to return to a once-perfect state through secret processes intended to put him in touch with his primordial spirit.

In 1995 a key secret concerning the way in which Scientologists believe the world was formed was leaked by a disillusioned “operating thetan”, one of the organisation’s most highly ranked members.

It asserts that 75m years ago an evil galactic warlord called Xenu rounded up 13.5 trillion beings from an overpopulated corner of the galaxy, flew them to Earth and dumped them in volcanoes and vaporised them with nuclear bombs.


This scattered their radioactive souls, or thetans, which were then trapped and implanted with a number of false ideas — including the concepts of God, Christ and organised religion.

These entities attached themselves to human beings and are at the root of our personal and global problems today.

Scientology has proved exceptionally robust and has grown steadily since its launch. In America it dominates entire towns and even in Britain some children have been brought up as Scientologists.

What worries critics most is the religion’s secrecy and intolerance of dissent. Members who are critical of the church are declared “apostates” and are excommunicated and often cut off from family and friends who must “disconnect” from them.

In the 1960s Hubbard issued a policy known as Fair Game, which said that all who opposed Scientology could be “tricked, sued or lied to and destroyed”.

On the inside

Eight weeks ago I was sent undercover to investigate the Scientologists at their new headquarters near St Paul’s Cathedral in the City of London, writes a Sunday Times reporter.

My experience shook me. What I had expected to find was an eccentric but largely harmless organisation. What I discovered was a paranoid and dogmatic group which — through a mixture of pyramid selling techniques and subtle intimidation — preys on the vulnerable to expand and enrich itself.

After introducing myself to one of the organisation’s “body routers” or “greeters”,

I was taken inside, shown a series of videos depicting happy Scientologist families and then given a “personality test”. This marked the start of a common theme: a constant digging to establish and mark out my insecurities and character flaws.

I was told the test had revealed that I had problems with “concentration”, “depression” and “confidence”. But I was not to worry — with only a bit of work Scientology would sort me out.

Over the following weeks I progressed through various courses at a cost of about £200. At the same time they recruited me to become an “expeditor” — the first rung on the ladder to being given a full-time post with the organisation.

I was part of a team that would be paid according to how much money the organisation made each week — a figure partly dependent on how many people we recruited.

I witnessed a number of highly unorthodox tactics and practices:


The use of a type of lie/stress detector called an “e-meter” to test recruits with a view to finding their “ruins” or vulnerabilities.

Pressuring new members of staff to divulge and document the minutiae of their sex lives, including the names of all those they had slept with.

Encouraging members to identify “suppressive persons” in their lives — people who had a negative impact on them, including parents and other family members.
Perhaps the most troubling were the four e-meter tests that I had to undergo. Hooked up to the device, I was grilled on my background, my views on Scientology and my past employment. It felt as if I was being turned inside out so that they could assess the potential for me to become a compliant member.

In another episode I was told to try to concentrate on counting a series of numbers out loud while another student shouted questions at me about my sex life.

The idea was to get me to learn to ignore distractions while focusing all my energies on a single enterprise. It was at around that point that I decided I had had enough.

Revealed: how Scientologists infiltrated Britain's schools, STs, 7.1.2007,
    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2535187,00.html