Dear Ms Mahmood,
Your speech at the Labour Party Conference was beautifully delivered, and you are right to fear that unless the widespread discontent of millions of patriotic Britons is addressed, ‘division in this country will grow’. However, you appear to be misdiagnosing the causes of that division, attributing them to elements of racism and ethno-nationalism within the indigenous British population whose patriotism, you say, ‘struggles to accept that someone who looks like [you] and has a faith like [yours] can truly be English or British’.
You are wrong to assume that the colour of your skin militates against your being accepted as a thoroughly British national. Your faith, though, is indeed a stumbling block, since it is being used by many of your co-religionists to claim exemption from the laws of this country. You must surely agree that the absolute minimum required of anyone aspiring to be a British subject is acceptance of the same laws and fundamental assumptions as those which govern the rest of the population. Many Muslims, it seems, are not willing to comply with this basic requirement, and as long as that situation is allowed to persist, those who do comply will be tainted by association with the increasingly numerous, vocal, and, indeed, violent representatives of your religion who do not.
I refer you to The Sharia Question: barrister Anna Loutfi’s recent report for the Women’s Policy Centre, in which she examines the insidious prevalence in some Muslim enclaves of tribal practices which are in all cases offensive, and in some cases illegal or downright criminal (cousin marriage; forced and child marriage; polygamy; honour killings; the wearing of the hijab, niqab or burqa; wife-beating; female genital mutilation; forced abortion of female foetuses as a result of ‘son preference’). These practices are being reinforced by clan leaders and fundamentalist imams in informal back-room venues apparently beyond the reach of British justice. As TCW reported, the ‘courts’ involved deal principally with matters relating to marriage and family, with, in Dr Loutfi’s words, ‘the Sharia principles of male entitlement [taking] precedence over all other considerations’.
You say that you deplore the threat of increasing divisions in our country. What could be more divisive than the refusal to live under British laws?
In addition, elements of the Muslim population are prominently involved in encouraging overt sectarian conflict in what was until recently our largely homogeneous and tolerant society. In conjunction with the far left, they rampage through our streets stirring up hatred against British Jews – people whose families have lived here for generations without posing any threat to the cohesion of this country, and who now go in fear of assault by violent agitators, many of whom have not long arrived on our shores. The anti-Jewish polemics these demonstrators chant may be couched in Arabic, but they are just as hate-filled as if they were in English.
In the latest act of capitulation to the unholy alliance of religious and political fanatics, West Midlands Police have decided to appease the baying pro-Palestine mobs by banning Tel Aviv football fans from attending their team’s match against Aston Villa next month. Proving that the hatred of Israel is not humanitarian but existential, the present cease-fire has made no difference at all to the zealots threatening to wreak havoc in Birmingham if they are not obeyed: a contingency which apparently looms large enough to bend the forces of law and order to their will.
Why are the police allowing these people to use threats that the law will be broken to undermine the law itself?
The response to this bullying, as Robert Jenrick MP correctly states, should not be to give in to it. ‘Send in as many police officers as required,’ he says. ‘Sack the Chief Constable if he won’t change his mind. Deal with the extremist Imams in Birmingham who have spent the past few days fomenting hate.’
Will you follow his advice, Ms Mahmood?
The danger of increasing division does not come from the close-on-a -million people who gathered overwhelmingly peacefully under the banner of Unite the Kingdom on September 13. It comes from those who have imported their own ancestral and religious conflicts into a country where these hostilities have no place, and from those who would disunite the kingdom by putting alien tribal and religious customs above the law of the land.
This being so, it is extremely concerning that the Government has not repudiated any suggestion of bringing in a law against ‘Islamophobia’: literally ‘fear of Islam’. Leaving aside the fact that, in the light of past history and present-day activism, it is perfectly rational to have at least some reservations regarding certain expressions of ‘Muslimness’, there are many aspects of Islam which the British, and, indeed, other Europeans, find disturbing, and which need to be debated publicly and without threat of personal insult or actual bodily harm, let alone criminal prosecution. To suppress any airing of these matters by law would simply breed further animosity towards a religion which has already aroused widespread public antagonism for being granted (at present informally) a unique and grossly unfair immunity from criticism.
We do not need the reintroduction of blasphemy laws. We need free speech, and open discussion in Parliament of the problematic influence on British politics of Muslim clan solidarity and the networks of the Muslim Brotherhood which have infiltrated our country.
