BISHOP NAZIR-ALI ATTACKED BY JIHADISTS AND BY CoE DHIMMIS

The Bishop of Rochester (England), Michael Nazir-Ali, is under attack.

His life has been threatened by jihadists, and the more senior hierarchs of the Church of England wish he would shut up and go away.

As reported by the Times:

The Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, is under police protection after he and his family received death threats over his claim that parts of Britain had become “no-go areas” for non-Muslims.

It is not surprising that the Bishop should be threatened by jihadists. After all, as Chairman Mao wrote in 1939, "To be attacked by the enemy is not a bad thing but a good thing." Indeed,

I hold that it is bad as far as we are concerned if a person, a political party, an army or a school is not attacked by the enemy, for in that case it would definitely mean that we have sunk to the level of the enemy. It is good if we are attacked by the enemy, since it proves that we have drawn a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves. It is still better if the enemy attacks us wildly and paints us as utterly black and without a single virtue; it demonstrates that we have not only drawn a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves but achieved a great deal in our work.

It is therefore telling that the Archdhimmi of Canterbury is allowing his own opposition to Bishop Nazir-Ali to appear in print:

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has made Islam a priority of his archiepiscopate and set up a Muslim-Christian forum to promote relations between the faiths in 2006. One senior cleric told The Times yesterday: “The Bishop of Rochester is in effect threatening to undo everything we have done.”

Has the archepiscopate of Canterbury then become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Muslim Council of Britain? Why would the Archbishop of Canterbury jump over the "clear line of demarcation" between Bishop Nazir-Ali and the jihadists?

And how has Bishop Nazir-Ali has "drawn a clear line of demarcation between the enemy" and himself? In incisive writings such as the op-ed he published this past August.

He begins:

Islamic radicalism did not begin with Muslim grievances over Western foreign policy in Iraq or Afghanistan. It has deep roots, going back to the 13th-century reformer Ibn Taimiyya, through Wahhabism to modern ideologues such as Sayyid Qutb in Egypt or Maududi in Pakistan.

He describes the emergence of jihadist movements in the late 20th century:

The movements that were born or renewed do not have any kind of centralised command structure, but co-operate through diffuse networks of affinity and patronage. One of their most important aims is to impose their form of Islam on countries such as Pakistan, Egypt, Malaysia and Indonesia. This may be why they were not regarded as an immediate threat to the West. Their other aims, however, include the liberation of oppressed Muslims in Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya and elsewhere, and also the recovery of the Dar Al-Islam (or House of Islam), in its historic wholeness, including the Iberian peninsula, the Balkans and even India.

And he explains how these disparate movements threaten the West:

In this cause, the rest of the world, particularly the West, is Dar al-Harb (House of War). These other aims clearly bring such movements into conflict with the international community and with Western interests in particular.

And how did these movements become established in Britain?

So how does this dual psychology - of victimhood, but also the desire for domination - come to infect so many young Muslims in Britain? When I was here in the early 1970s, the practice of Islam was dominated by a kind of default Sufism or Islamic mysticism that was pietistic and apolitical. On my return in the late 1980s, the situation had changed radically. The change occurred because successive governments were unaware that the numerous mosques being established across the length and breadth of this country were being staffed, more and more, with clerics who belonged to various fundamentalist movements.

Once established, there can be no appeasement:

There were no criteria for entry, no way of evaluating qualifications and no programme for making them aware of the culture that they were entering. Until quite recently, ministers and advisers did not realise the scale of the problem, even though it was repeatedly brought to their attention. Secondly, in the name of multiculturalism, mosque schools were encouraged and Muslim pupils spent up to six extra hours a day learning the Koran and Islamic tradition, as well as their own regional languages. Finally, there are the grievances. Some of these are genuine enough, but the complaint often boils down to the position that it is always right to intervene where Muslims are victims (as in Bosnia or Kosovo), and always wrong when they may be the oppressors or terrorists (as with the Taliban or in Iraq), even when their victims are also mainly Muslims.

Given the world view that has given rise to such grievances, there can never be sufficient appeasement, and new demands will continue to be made. It is clear, therefore, that the multiculturalism beloved of our political and civic bureaucracies has not only failed to deliver peace, but is the partial cause of the present alienation of so many Muslim young people from the society in which they were born, where they have been educated and where they have lived most of their lives. The Cantle Report, in the wake of disturbances in Bradford, pointed out that housing and schools policies that favoured segregation, in the name of cultural integrity and cohesion, have had the unforeseen consequence of alienating the different religious, racial and cultural groups from one another.

What must be done?

Politicians keep talking about the need to teach British values so that there can be national cohesion. But what are these values, and whence do they come? The most fundamental of these has to do with the innate dignity of all human beings, with fundamental equality, with liberty and with safety from harm. Those learning such values will know how to respect the dignity of people who are quite different from them in appearance, language or belief.

They will not see themselves as superior because of their religious or cultural roots, but regard every human life as of equal worth. They will be committed to freedom of belief and of expression. They will know that their fellow citizens have the right to safety from harm and that this extends not only to individual security, but also the safety of those institutions, such as democracy or a free press, that make liberty possible and actual.

And for this he is regarded by the Archdhimmi of Canterbury as "threatening to undo everything we have done."

Then let us earnestly hope and pray that everything the archepiscopate has done to subvert the West will soon be undone, and completely so.