Last month, a curious coincidence happened in the United Kingdom that highlighted a fundamental contradiction in the British Governments attempts to legislate our society to be more equal.
A celebrated case was decided upon by a Court of Appeal. The Government’s equality Commission in Northern Ireland brought a case against a bakery run by a young Christian couple. They were accused of being discriminatory when they refused to make a cake with the words ‘Support Gay Marriage’ written upon it. Given the Bible’s injunctions against homosexual acts, they felt that to write such a message was to go against their conscience and betray the values of their God. They lost the case, but they appealed. At their appeal the Attorney General of Northern Ireland spoke in their defence, arguing the prosecution’s case was unconstitutional. The judges deliberated, and in their summing up dismissed the attorney General’s argument and found against the defendants.
The appeal court decision to punish the owners of the Ashers Bakery in Northern Ireland because they would not betray the law of the God of the Bible and make a cake saying, ‘Support gay marriage’ should be contrasted with the unrelated curious non-case of a car dealer, Mr Mursal Israr of Oldham, a Muslim, who would not serve an Israeli customer Mr Jack de Lowe, because he was an Israeli. This event happened almost on the same day as the Ashers Bakery Appeal Court ruling.
The Ashers did not withhold their services because the customer was gay: that would have been wrong. But Mr Mursal Israr, the Muslim, withheld his services because the customer was from Israel. He has been able to do so without being dragged before the courts.
The Ashers withheld their services because the request would have required them to make a statement that they, along with millions of others, fundamentally disagreed with as a matter of conscience, and for many legitimate reasons. The Court of Appeal decided that this is something they are absolutely not allowed to do: so the legal principle in this country has now been established that a matter of conscience is no reason to refuse a business service.
However, the Israeli customer did not ask Mr Israr to sign write his car saying: ‘Support Israel’s Cause’. No, all the Israeli customers asked for was a second hand wing mirror for his Ford Focus. But Mr Israr, the owner of the business, refused him, saying it is his right not to do business with an individual if he doesn’t want to.
Mr Israr continues to trade, unfettered. He has not been taken to court by any Equality Commission. He has not had to appeal its decision. He has not had the court of the land tell him that his Biblically-informed conscience is no longer of any merit, and that to comply with the law of the land he must instead offend the law of God.
These two coincidental events might be interpreted to indicate that the effect of the actual operation of the British legal process is to make it awkward for Jews and Christians to make a living or buy or sell and remain true to either their beliefs or their identity, but Muslims have no need to abide by these rules if they are not to their liking.
What appears to be a two-tier legal system in operation, one for Muslims and a more disadvantageous one for non-Muslims is starting to look a little like Sharia Law, only one enforced by Her Majesty’s, secular, Government.
Now, of course sugar paste and wing mirrors are trivial issues in themselves, but this coincidence serves as a vignette to suggest that in Britain there appears to be a growing inequality before the law. The principle of policing, which is to act without fear or favour is beginning to be at odds with the reality on the ground.
The police, the Crown Prosecution Service, and especially the Equality Commissions, do not wish to appear racist or be accused of racism, nor do they wish to strain relations between police forces and Muslim communities, relations that are often difficult to manage. So, it is easier to let things slide for one group, while putting their focus on another group that is, for them, a less problematic target to concentrate on.
This is the effect of what is called political correctness. It may seem harmless, but in at least one category of crime this bias, perhaps even an unconscious bias, has come at a tremendous personal cost to a group of people who are among the most vulnerable in British society.
The widespread phenomenon in the UK of hundreds of Muslim rape gangs has now been documented, and the full horror of the impact of these gangs has now been researched, albeit partially. These gangs groom British non-Muslim school-age girls into sex slavery, and have been able to operate with little to fear from the legal system, for only a few individuals have been prosecuted, compared to the numbers of perpetrators.
While grooming is a crime that is carried out by men drawn from all backgrounds, the statistics indicate that it is 180 times more likely for a girl to be groomed and abused by a Muslim than by a white Briton. This indicates that the problem has a powerful cultural dimension.
It took many years before the first cases were brought to trial, even though the authorities documented thousands of instances of systematic grooming and sex trafficking and sex enslavement of vulnerable girls. The authorities did nothing for so long because they were genuinely scared of being accused of racism. Careers would have been lost to placate the media when they were in frenzy mode, and these cases are genuinely tough to prosecute in any case. Even now the national effort is still dwarfed by the scale of the problem.
However, accusations of racism are not just people advocating racial, or more accurately, cultural justice. It is probable that many who engage in these accusations are actually engaging in subversion, making the authorities look away so that they can continue in what is a fundamental attack on the positive sovereignty of non-Muslim individuals, families and governmental institutions. The net effect is to create a two-tier legal system, an easy one for the Muslims and one for everyone else.
But the cost so far has been horrendous – probably at least 100,000 girls and young vulnerable women, perhaps many more, have been trafficked into prostitution, both them and often their families suffering great violence. The cardinal function of government, the defence of the people from violence and harm, has in this case been subverted to the point of near paralysis. Only recently has this situation started to improve, and it has a long way to go.
What has happened is here is that the principle of equality before the law has been set aside in practice. This has been achieved not by accident but by a determined plan, in order that one section of society, the Muslim one, can effectively wage low level war against the non-Muslim society it lives among, the purpose of which is to seek to effectively destroy that society through the grievous harm it consciously inflicts, by destroying sovereignty at the individual, family and governmental levels.
It must, however, be stressed that most Muslims do not actively participate in this despicable lawlessness, and indeed many do support the governmental institutions to enforce law and order, but this is by no means universal, and is not necessarily the majority in the Muslim communities who share this view.
The truly shocking reality is that there is almost no effective movement within the Muslim community to root out this kind of sex-enslaving criminal behaviour, for to do so would require Muslims to address the so-called religious motives for these actions, such as the teaching and example of their religions founder, which is well-documented in their own early documents. That would be regarded by their fellow Muslims as a betrayal of Islam.
Indeed, the current world crisis concerning Islam is based on the incompatibility between the theology of Islam and modern notions of universal ethical values, or even the principles of secular humanism, against which Islam disagrees absolutely on every point. Furthermore, Islamic theology places obligations upon all Muslims everywhere to displace all philosophies, ethics and religions, sources of power and institutions possessing both negative and positive sovereignty with Sharia.
Sharia Law is primarily a process of social control that treats Muslim and non-Muslim worlds according to different standards; it is the opposite of common law, in other words. Its goal and effect is therefore to destroy all other sovereignties and replace it with a system which exists only to displace and destroy all other sovereignties.
For example, concerning nations, nations exercise positive sovereignty in order to promote the stability, security and prosperity of their citizens. Islam is not really concerned about any of these outcomes, it is only concerned that no other power exercises sovereignty to promote these outcomes. This is why highly Islamic countries, for example Yemen, Afghanistan and Somalia, are all failed states haemorrhaging refugees.
What is most damaging is when government authorities motivated by their own desire to appear accommodating and understanding of Islam, then knowingly operates to exclusively target one section of the community with dubious campaigns for ‘equality’ while turning a blind eye to the lawlessness of another. Whatever the result, it is simply not accurate to describe this outcome as fostering equality. Rather, the effect is the exact opposite. And the vulnerable suffer the devastating consequences.
Sugar paste and wing mirrors have served as the canary down the coalmine. They are indicators of a much deeper problem that not only is destroying lives and families of already tenuously cohering communities traumatised by the collapse of their industrial economies, but they reveal a problem that, left unresolved, in the long run have the potential to destroy the nation.
You may believe that being concerned about the nation should be no concern of Christians. I must then ask you, what are you concerned about? Nations, like families, are institutions that have the potential to foster the full potential of individuals. When they go wrong, nations, like families, have the potential to destroy individuals. So, given the call of the Good News of Jesus to every individual, nations and families are an inevitable concern of the Church – i.e. every Christian. If not, why did English archbishops in the Middles Ages go to so much trouble to bring the Magna Carta into English Law?
The sad fact is this: the operation of the Muslim community, understood as a total system, albeit a complex and multi-facetted one, despite the many Muslims of good will, is waging an existential war on the fabric of the rest of society by all means at its disposal. The institutions of Government, by following the (misguided) principles of secular humanism, is enabling them, even though the principles of Islam run absolutely counter to the espoused principles of secular humanism at every point. To not support the Muslim would require the abandonment of multi-culturalism, the idea that all cultures are equal enough to be ultimately compatible. The problem is that all cultures, like all ideas, are not created equal. Furthermore, some cultures, perhaps one in particular, is absolutely and utterly resolute in its determination to destroy all others. Fourteen hundred years of Islamic history should be sufficient to have demonstrated this point without doubt.
This fundamental philosophical contradiction at the heart of British national life, if left unresolved, can only have one outcome, the complete collapse of British society. British society is already under great strain, so we can see this process already at work, if we care to observe. All we have to do is ask how many times we read about some horror done by a Muslim or a Muslim group in the name of Allah, compared to, say the Mormons.
In London there is a long-running comedy musical about the Mormons. It is disrespectful, satirical; it may even be funny. To their credit, the Mormons, while not liking it, have ‘turned the other cheek.’ I was unable to find another comedy musical about the Moslems, or Allah, or Mohammed. I wonder why.
What a nation and a society to do? Buckle and submit to Sharia?
The solution is what the solution has always been: to put Christ and His Word at the centre of national and family and personal life once again. For only in the Gospel is the full flowering of the Jewish universal ethical and standard of goodness to be seen for the benefit of all. In the end, the positive sovereignty of Christ is the source of all positive sovereignty that can bring true stability, security and prosperity to the whole person and every person. The rejection of His sovereignty is what has brought us to this point, and only the realisation of what we have done and the reestablishment of His sovereignty into the heart of every sovereign institution, be they individuals, families or the nation, can bring about the salvation we so desperately need.
But for that to happen, the Church must itself utterly commit to the full acceptance of Christ’s sovereignty, so as to be the visible and understandable ambassador, becoming the people in whom both the grace and the truth of Christ-the-sovereign are authentically broadcast in word and deed. God bless you
Graham Ford
President
Jesus Christ for Muslims and Partners with the Persecuted.