British Muslims bait hook and cast

Wednesday, August 16th, 2006 11:26 am by Neal

How long before American Muslims take a page out of this playbook? How stupid do people have to be to fall for this, but as the old saying goes, “It never hurts to ask.”

Muslims call for special bank holidays

Muslim leaders summoned to talks with the Government on tackling extremism in their midst called for public holidays to mark their religious festivals.

The Whitehall meeting was set up in response to last week’s airline bomb plot discovery.

Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly had prepared an uncompromising message on the need to tackle dangerous radicalism.

But, in what she admitted were ‘sharp’ exchanges, some senior Muslim figures turned the tables yesterday and made a series of demands which also included the introduction of Sharia law for family matters.

Dr Syed Aziz Pasha, secretary general of the Union of Muslim Organisations of the UK and Ireland, said: ‘We told her if you give us religious rights, we will be in a better position to convince young people that they are being treated equally along with other citizens.’

Dr Pasha said Miss Kelly had agreed to look at the proposals, though her spokesman insisted later that she did not favour any legal change which would give ‘special treatment’ for the Muslim community.

Some of the 30 moderate Muslim leaders at the meeting told Miss Kelly that important days in their two main religious festivals – Ramadan and Eid-ul-Adha – should be made public holidays for followers of the faith.

Sharia law, which is practised in large parts of the Middle East, should also be introduced in Britain, they argued. While it specifies stonings and amputations as routine punishments for crimes, Dr Pasha said he wanted it only for family affairs.

Under the law, a husband pays his wife a dowry on marriage, and money and assets are shared out between family members in specified amounts after someone dies.

‘We are willing to co-operate but there should be a partnership,’ Dr Pasha said.

‘They should understand our problems then we will understand their problems.’

A recent poll suggested that a third of British Muslims would rather live under Sharia law, while a similar number said they also hope Britain will one day become an Islamic state. But Dr Pasha claimed the legal changes he proposed would help convince young Muslims to integrate better into British society.

Notice the trick: “Pretend” that Muslims in Britain are “victims” of a political problem which can be “remedied” by “accomodating” Islamic law as an enclave in a Western country. Separate but equal. Then we’ll stop blowing up airplanes and bombing subways and buses. “We just want some political accomodation like all other aggrieved minorities in this country.” In reality this simply means, “If you don’t institute Islamic law, we will blow you up.”

You’ve got to give them credit for trying, and it’s apparent that this nonsense can only work in a country whose citizens and government are so ridden with liberal self-guilt that they could be tricked into believing that the threat of ongoing terrorism is a legitimate form of lobbying the government in a democratic country.

Here’s how Diana West sees it in “Jihad and Dhimmitude: A Real-Life Test Case”

Alas, we can now watch as a new progression of jihad-to-dhimmitude potentially unfolds by taking a look at what’s going on this week (basically non-covered by our MSM) in Great Britain.

OK. Last week, we had the disrupted Airplane Plot–an act of jihad averted. We had the ensuing police round-up of Muslim Britons. We had, and have, intense public panic, and an ongoing rupture in “normal” life–in a way, almost as if the plot had gone off as planned.

Then what? I would argue that what’s going on in GB today may be seen as an attempt by British Muslim leaders to use the ongoing threat of jihad by British Muslim terrorists to intensify Islamic influence, which necessarily deepens non-Muslim British dhimmitude.

Here’s how.
What you could (and should) call Mainstream British Islam–as represented by 38 British Muslim groups, three of the four Muslim MPs, and three of the four Muslim members of the House of Lords–took out full-page newspaper ads over the past weekend to declare in an open letter to Prime Minister Tony Blair that it was British foreign policy in the Middle East that provided “ammunition to extremists who threaten us all.” In other words, as Liberal Democrats deputy leader Vince Cable put it, the letter’s message might “give some comfort to the kind of people who say: ‘Well, change your foreign policy or we’ll blow you up'”.

The missive didn’t go over too well with British officials. As Home Secretary John Reid told the BBC, “”No government worth its salt would … be supported by the British people if our foreign policy or any other aspect of policy was being dictated by terrorists.

“That is not the British way, it is antithetical to our very central values. We decide things in this country by democracy, not under the threat of terrorism.”

It is true that only 2.7 percent of the British population is, in fact, Muslim, but it is also true that some large segment of British Muslims would like to live under sharia, and that some other large segment actually supports the Other Side in the war on terror.

Moving right along.

In the wake of the Airplane Plot, The Independent reported today that Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott will meet with Muslim Labor MPs who are demanding “a change in Government foreign policy in the Middle East.”

In the wake of the Airplane Plot, the same story reported that Ruth Kelly, who is something official called the Secretary of State for Communities (sounds squishy), met yesterday with British Muslim leaders. They called on the government to sanction sharia for British Muslims in matters of family law and marriage as a means of preventing Muslims from becoming what are rather quaintly known as “extremists.” Of course, if sharia isn’t extreme, what is?

So here we are. Britain narrowly averts another 9/11 that was to have been caused by British Muslim terrorists, and British Muslim leaders take the opportuity to press forward a political agenda (ending GB-US cooperation abroad, and urging the adoption of sharia at home) that could only please the terrorists. What happens next will tell us how deeply into dhimmitude Great Britain really is.

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