Curriculum losing out to prayers
THE amount of time spent on prayers and religion means there is less time available for the rest of the curriculum at the North Dublin Muslim School, the school inspection report found.
Th
e report says that external personnel are employed by the school to teach religion. They work in all classrooms for 45 minutes each day, teaching the Koran and Arabic — in other national schools the normal period is 30 minutes a day.
Pupils in middle and senior classes also attend prayers for 20 minutes each day with additional time required for preparation, the report says.
However, the report says all of this eats into the delivery time for the national school curriculum.
The inspectors say it is imperative that the integrity of the school day be maintained and that the suggested minimum timeframe be adhered to for delivery of the six curricular areas as advocated in the Primary School Curriculum.
It notes that some of the teachers absent themselves from class during these times.
They say it is essential that the pupils are supervised at all times by qualified and recognised teaching staff and that class teachers continue to have teaching contact with pupils throughout the school day.
The board has been told it must ensure that pupils are adequately supervised at all times by qualified teachers.
Muslims angry at school’s sex education plans
British Muslims have reacted in anger at plans by a school in London to teach children about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender history.
Muslim leaders are now calling on the council in Leytonstone, east London, not to prosecute parents for withdrawing their children from the lessons.
A spokesman said that up to 30 parents may face prosecution for withdrawing their children from school, disobeying the teachers in the school, “simply to secure a decent moral upbringing for their children.”
As part of the school’s plans for the lessons, they included a special adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet retitled Romeo and Julian as well as fairytales and stories changed to show men falling in love with men.
“Rather than filling the heads of impressionable boys and girls with fatuous drivel about gay penguins, schools should be ashamed of the fact that they are sending children out into the world barely able to read, write and add up properly,” said Iftikhar Ahmad of the London School of Islamics.
He accused teachers of promoting tolerance, but did not tolerate the parents’ views that their children were too young to be taught about gay relationships.
“This isn’t education, its cultural fascism,” said Mr Ahmad.
He added: “ If the local council does decide to go through with a prosecution, it would be in line with the government’s approach to the Muslim community. Muslims who believe homosexuality is a sin would be labelled as extremists.
“Liberal totalitarianism is a growing phenomenon in Britain and the west in general but many people will be shocked that the school can override a parent’s view of what’s appropriate or inappropriate to teach their children.”
He said that the only solution was state-funded Muslim schools with bi-lingual Muslim teachers as role models.
Christian Murdered for Drinking Tea from a Muslim Cup
When Ishtiaq went to pay for his tea, the owner noticed that he was wearing a necklace with a cross and grabbed him, calling for his employees to bring anything available to beat him for violating a sign posted on the stall warning non-Muslims to declare their religion before being served. Ishtiaq had not noticed the warning sign before ordering his tea, as he ordered with a group of his fellow passengers.
The owner and 14 of his employees beat Ishtiaq with stones, iron rods and clubs, and stabbed him multiple times with kitchen knives as Ishtiaq pleaded for mercy.
The other bus passengers and other passers-by finally intervened and took Ishtiaq to the Rural Health Center in the village. There Ishtiaq died as a result of spinal, head, and chest injuries. The doctor who took Ishtiaq’s case said that Ishtiaq had excessive internal and external bleeding, a fractured skull, and brain injuries.
Makah Tea Stall is located on the Sukheki-Lahore highway and is owned by Mubarak Ali, a 42-year-old Muslim. A correspondent visited the tea stall and observed that a large red warning sign with a death’s head symbol was posted which read, “All non-Muslims should introduce their faith prior to ordering tea. This tea stall serves Muslims only.” The warning also threatened anyone who violated the rule with “dire consequences.”
A neighboring shopkeeper said on condition of anonymity that Ali is a fundamentalist Muslim and all his employees are former students of radical Muslim madrassas (seminaries). Ali kept separate sets of cooking-ware for Muslims and non-Muslims at his stall.
Ishtiaq’s family said that they immediately reported the incident to the police and filed a case against Ali. Though the police registered their case, no action has been taken to apprehend Ali or his employees.
When asked the Pindi Bhatian Saddar police station about the murder, the police chief said that investigations were underway and they are treating it as a faith-based murder by biased Muslims. When asked about Ali’s warning sign, police chief Muhammad Iftikhar Bajwa claimed that he could not take it down.
However, the constitution of Pakistan explicitly prohibits such discrimination, and the police could take strong action against the warning sign. But because the police are also Muslim, Ishtiaq’s father claims that they are being derelict in their duties to prosecute the murderers who are still freely operating the tea stall.
Parents choose religion over their child’s life
OREGON CITY, Oregon (AP) – An Oregon judge has rejected defense claims of selective and vindictive prosecution in the manslaughter trial of a couple whose 15-month-old daughter died of pneumonia while they prayed for her recovery.
Clackamas County Judge Steven Maurer told lawyers for Carl and Raylene Worthington that the couple had a duty to seek medical care for their daughter, Ava, despite their religious beliefs. A state medical examiner has said the toddler, who died in March 2008, could have been treated with antibiotics.
The Worthingtons are members of the Followers of Christ – a small Oregon City church that advocates spiritual healing instead of medical care.
If convicted, the couple faces up to 10 years in prison.
Muslim faith school fails to meet standards
A TEAM of experts will be sent in to monitor the overhaul of a primary school which has been strongly criticised in the most damning inspection report ever issued by the Department of Education.
The unprecedented move follows a litany of shocking revelations contained in an inspection report into the North Dublin Muslim School in Cabra, which is housed in the former School for the Deaf.
Education Minister Batt O’Keeffe last night said the standards of management, teaching and learning at the school were “unacceptable” and that child protection policies were “inadequate”.
The findings — the most critical of nearly 3,000 inspection reports issued by the department — are set to cause alarm within Ireland’s 32,000-strong Muslim community.
The report — seen by the Irish Independent — will be officially published tomorrow. It reveals:
- Taxpayers’ money given to the school in the form of grants since it opened in 2001 is unaccounted for;
- The quality of teaching of English, Irish and maths is “poor” or “very poor“, with teacher morale “very poor“;
- Sanitary facilities are “inadequate;
- The school is in breach of several pieces of legislation;
- The school refuses to implement the music curriculum.
Separate correspondence, also seen by the Irish Independent, reveals that the school failed to pay around €37,000 it owed to the department.
To recover some of the money, the department withheld payment of the capitation grant in June 2008 and threatened to do so again recently.
Critical
The patron of the school, Imam Yahya Al-Hussein, said the report was too critical and a bit “over the top”.
He said the current board of management, appointed last November, inherited the problems and was trying to solve them. The former board chairperson Shahzad Ahmed was unavailable for comment last night.
The draft inspection report says that no financial accounts are available since the school opened and there is little physical evidence of where state grants have been spent.
The current acting principal (the fourth since it opened) has still not completed the probationary process. All the mainstream teaching staff resigned last June and the board made 12 new appointments. No member of the teaching staff had completed the probationary period at the time of the inspection on November 28 — only four of them are fully qualified within the Irish system.
The report says that the school is unable to provide support for newly qualified teachers or those experiencing professional difficulties.
Several policies that relate to the care, welfare and protection of children have not been drawn up. The school is in breach of the Education Welfare Act (2000) and of the Rules for National Schools.
The report says there are no policies on attendance; child protection; social personal and health education and on the duties of special needs assistants. The Relationships and Sexuality Education programme has not been implemented. There are no plans for assessment; for English as an additional language; for visual arts, physical education; drama and music.
The North Dublin school is one of two schools catering for the Muslim community. Pupil numbers there have fallen significantly since 2006, the report says. However, the report found inconsistencies between class roll books, the attendance book and the register of pupils.
Since 2006 almost 3,000 inspection reports have been published by the department on its website. There are two kinds of reports: single subjects; and Whole School Evaluation (WSE) such as that prepared for the North Dublin Muslim National School.
The inspectors review the quality of school management, school planning and the quality of learning and teaching. There have been a few very critical reports, mainly at post-primary level, but none come anywhere near this one in terms of the directness of the language and the criticism.
It represents a significant step change in the approach taken by the department whose lawyers checked and double checked the report before agreeing to its publication.
Watch out – that engineer could be a terrorist!
WHO becomes a terrorist? An MI5 report leaked to London newspaper The Guardian in August 2008 concluded that there is no easy way to identify those who become involved in terrorism in the UK because there is “no single pathway to violent extremism” and that “it is not possible to draw up a typical profile of the ‘British terrorist‘ as most are ‘demographically unremarkable’”.
The extraordinary lengths the German authorities went to after 9/11 to track down potential terrorists are a stark example of how useless profiling can be. They collected and analysed data on over 8 million individuals living in Germany. These people were categorised by demographic characteristics: male, aged 18 to 40; current or former student; Muslim; legally resident in Germany; and originating from one of 26 Islamic countries. Then they were sorted into three further categories: potential to carry out a terrorist attack (such as a pilot’s licence); familiarity with locations that could be targets (such as working in airports, nuclear power plants, chemical plants, the rail service, labs and other research institutes); and studying the German language at the Goethe Institute.
With the help of these categories authorities whittled the 8 million down to just 1689 individuals, who were then investigated, one by one. Giovanni Capoccia, an Oxford-based political scientist who analysed this case, reported that not one of them turned out to be a threat. All the real Islamic terrorists arrested in Germany through other investigations were not on the official “shortlist” and did not fit the profile.
Does it follow, as some scholars now think, that anyone, given the right conditions and the wrong friendships, can end up joining a terrorist group? Not entirely. We found that engineers are three to four times as likely as other graduates to be present among the members of violent Islamic groups in the Muslim world since the 1970s. Using a sample of 404 Islamic militants worldwide (with a median birth date in 1966), we tracked down the education of 284. Of these, 26 had less than secondary education, 62 completed secondary education (including madrasas), and 196 had higher education, whether completed or not. Even if none of the cases where we lack data had higher education, the share of those with higher education would be a hefty 48.5 per cent.
The next move was to find out what they had studied – and we tracked down 178 of our 196 cases. The largest single group were engineers, with 78 out of 178, followed by 34 taking Islamic studies, 14 studying medicine, 12 economics and business studies, and 7 natural sciences. The over-representation of engineers applies to all 13 militant groups in the sample and to all 17 nationalities, with the exception of Saudi Arabia.
Our finding holds up quite well in another sample of 259 Islamic extremists who are citizens or residents of 14 western, mostly European, countries, and who have recently come to the attention of the authorities for carrying out or plotting a terrorist attack in the west. Although this sample contains far fewer people with higher education than the older members of the first group, nearly 6 out of 10 of those with higher education are engineers.
We also collected data on non-Muslim extremists. We found that engineers are almost completely absent from violent left-wing groups, while they are present among violent right-wing groups in different countries. Out of seven right-wing leaders in the US whose degrees we were able to establish, four were engineers: for example, Richard Butler, the founder of the neo-Nazi group Aryan Nations, was an aeronautical engineer, and Wilhelm Schmitt, leader of the right-wing, extreme anti-government, pro-localism group known as the Sheriff’s Posse Comitatus, was an engineer with Lockheed Martin. Among the total membership of the Islamic groups, however, the over-representation is still much higher.
This could be a coincidence: if the group founders are engineers they would also be more likely to recruit other engineers via their educational or professional networks. This explanation only works up to a point. It does not explain why engineers are over-represented in groups in which the founders were not engineers, or why the founders of groups that were not in contact with each other were often engineers.
Why engineers? Everybody’s first reaction is that they are recruited for their technical proficiency in bomb-making and communications technology, but there is no evidence for this. A tiny elite tends to do the technical work in these groups, and jihadist recruitment manuals focus on a personality profile rather than technical skills.
So we are left with two hypotheses: either certain social conditions impinge more on engineers than on other graduates, or engineers are more likely to have certain personality traits that make radical Islamism more attractive to them. Our best guess is that the phenomenon derives from a combination of these two factors.
With engineers in the Middle East we have very intelligent, ambitious students who have found it difficult to find professional satisfaction, both individually and collectively in their desire to help their countries develop. Graduates of very selective degree programmes, they may have endured relatively greater frustration in a stagnant and authoritarian environment.
The fact that engineers are not over-represented in Saudi Arabia offers some support for this, for, alone among the countries of origin of terrorists, Saudi Arabia has had a shortage of engineers and has thus offered better employment opportunities. However, even in western countries and south-east Asia, where labour market opportunities are better for all graduates, engineers appear relatively more attracted to violent Islamist groups than other graduates. Why is this?
We reckon that something else is going on, something at the individual level, that is, relating to cognitive traits. According to polling data, engineering professors in the US are seven times as likely to be right-wing and religious as other academics, and similar biases apply to students. In 16 other countries we investigated, engineers seem to be no more right-wing or religious than the rest of the population, but the number of engineers combining both traits is unusually high. A lot of piecemeal evidence suggests that characteristics such as greater intolerance of ambiguity, a belief that society can be made to work like clockwork, and dislike of democratic politics which involves compromise, are more common among engineers.
So the bottom line is that while the probability of a Muslim engineer becoming a violent Islamist is minuscule, it is still be between three and four times that for other graduates.
Can religion really save the world?
Tony Blair is not the first person to think that religion will decide the fate of the modern world.
“The 21st century”, said André Malraux, at the height of the Cold War, “will be religious or it will not be at all.” But can they be right? When we look round the world today, the presence of religion in any conflict seems to make it more intractable, and bitter. Our instinct is to take the principle out of conflicts and turn them into pragmatic disputes, susceptible to reasonable resolution.
That is certainly the approach the Tony Blair’s “peace process” took in Northern Ireland. Many people will feel that the answer to religious wars is less religion, not more of the “right” sort. But there are two problems with this approach. The first is that secularism is losing prestige in the places where wars are actually under way. There’s not enough of it about to quench the fires. The second is a very simple question: if secular common sense doesn’t start disputes, what makes us think it can end them? Perhaps the kinds of dispute for which people will kill, and die, will always have a religious dimension.
Muslim waitress wins nearly £3,000 for hurt feelings over skimpy dress
A Muslim cocktail waitress who quit after refusing to wear a bright red dress for work has won almost £3,000 in compensation for sexual harassment.
Fata Lemes, 33, was handed the payout even though a tribunal panel rejected her claim that the dress was “sexually revealing and indecent”.
It concluded that the Bosnian Muslim “holds views about modesty and decency which some might think unusual in Britain in the 21st century”.
But it accepted that Miss Lemes genuinely believed that the short, low-cut dress was “disgusting” and made her look “like a prostitute”.
Bosses at the Rocket bar and restaurant in London’s Mayfair should have made allowance for her feelings and their insistence that she wear the dress amounted to sexual harassment, it ruled.
The panel at Central London Employment Tribunal found that Miss Lemes “overstated” her trauma at being asked to wear the sleeveless dress that was open at the back.
It rejected Miss Lemes’ claim that she was left with no choice but to walk out of her job after just eight days.
It branded her compensation claim of £20,000 including £17,500 for hurt feelings – as “manifestly absurd”.
But it awarded her £2,919.95 for hurt feelings and loss of earnings.
Miss Lemes told the tribunal that she “might as well be naked” in the dress, adding: “I was brought up a Muslim and am not used to wearing sexually attractive clothes.”
A photo of Miss Lemes on Facebook, however, showed her wearing a low cut T-shirt revealing her cleavage.
In its judgment, the panel ruled that restaurant group Spring & Greene, which owns the Rocket chain, must “take their victim as they find her”.
It said of the dress: “It is eye-catching, not only because of its colour but also because of its cut and lines.
“It is clearly a garment for a girl or young woman. It is intended to, and does, show the curves of the body.
“It seeks to make the wearer attractive. It might be seen as a party dress or something to wear at an informal celebration.”
But the panel ruled that wearing the dress could not amount to “conduct of a sexual nature”.
Miss Lemes told how she was pestered for sex by customers at the bar shortly after starting work in May last year.
The tribunal ruled: “In our judgment, the effect of requiring her to wear the dress was to violate her dignity. We further consider that it created for her an environment which was degrading, humiliating and offensive.”
It pointed out that a summer uniform of “brightly coloured, figure-hugging garb” had not been introduced for male waiting staff.
But the tribunal rejected Miss Lemes’ claim of constructive dismissal.
The company’s lawyer Tom Grady told the tribunal: “There is no evidence to support the suggestion that it is a sex club or some sort of seedy brothel.”
Briton faces prison in Dubai on adultery charge
A British mother faces a year in prison after she admitted committing adultery in Dubai.
Sally Antia, 43, was arrested as she left a Dubai hotel with a man. Appearing in a court in Dubai on Sunday, she confessed to cheating on her husband and paying to fly her lover from Britain to the United Arab Emirates. The 44-year-old man denied the charge.
The pair had their passports confiscated. Mrs Antia, who had spent three weeks in police custody before the hearing, was denied bail.
It is understood that Mrs Antia’s husband, Vincent, 48, also believed to be British, informed the police of his suspicions this month. Divorce proceedings are under way between the couple.
“[Mrs Antia] is mortified,” The Sun reported a source as saying. “Her husband has wrought the ultimate revenge. She is trying to come to terms with the fact that her life and career could lie in tatters.
“No one here believes she would be able to cope with prison. She has two children and she’s desperately worried about what will happen to them.”
Adultery is illegal in the United Arab Emirates. The maximum punishment is a year in jail followed by deportation. Another British woman, Marnie Pearce, served a three-month prison sentence this year and lost residency rights with her two young sons after her Egyptian former husband accused her of cheating on him while living in Dubai.
Mrs Pearce, 40, originally from Bracknell, Berkshire, has been allowed since her release to stay in the country to try to win back her children.
She said that she had lost more than a stone while she was at al-Awir prison. “Many of the women seemed to have psychological problems and should probably have been in a hospital,” she said. “I kept muttering that I shouldn’t be there.”
She also told The Mail on Sunday that she had not been allowed to speak during a number of court appearances, which were conducted in Arabic, and that a translator had been present only at one hearing.
Mr and Mrs Antia, originally from Liverpool, have been living in Dubai for more than a decade and have been married for 14 years. Mrs Antia is believed to have worked for a corporate entertainment company.
She wrote recently on her page on the networking website Friends Reunited: “Living in Dubai for the last 12 years. Married with two girls now aged 11 and 13. Enjoying the sunshine, but often home to watch a match. Massive Red fan. Happy and healthy … what more can you ask for?”
Mrs Antia was arrested at 2.30am outside the Radisson SAS Deira Creek Hotel. Her detention will prompt criticism from those who reject the UAE’s practice of combining civil and criminal law with Sharia, which is identified in the constitution as the main source of legislation. Social laws, such as family law and succession, all fall under its direct influence.
Tim Hancock, of Amnesty International, who campaigned for the release of Mrs Pearce, said yesterday: “Sally Antia should not be sent to prison. The sex lives of consenting adults simply shouldn’t be a criminal matter. She should be released, immediately and unconditionally.”
A Foreign and Commonwealth Office spokeswoman said: “We can confirm the arrest of two British nationals in Dubai for adultery on May 2. Their cases are going through the courts in Dubai. Next of kin have been informed and we are providing consular assistance.”
The court case has been adjourned until next month. 
Girls raped by Catholic priest told to stop ‘dwelling on old wounds’
A father who wants to confront the Pope about the rape of his daughters by a Catholic priest has reacted angrily to claims by a senior Australian bishop that he was dwelling crankily on old wounds.
Anthony Foster, who is flying from Britain to Sydney, is demanding that Benedict XVI and Australia’s senior Catholic, Cardinal George Pell, beg for forgiveness over the repeated rape of his daughters by the priest at a Melbourne primary school between 1988 and 1993.
Mr Foster said that his daughters had been devastated by the attacks. The elder, Emma, committed suicide this year, aged 26. Her younger sister, Katie, who became a heavy drinker, was hit by a car, aged 15, and now needs 24-hour care.
The Pope, who begins his official duties today at World Youth Day celebrations attended by an estimated 225,000 people, has promised to issue an apology this week to young people sexually abused by priests.
But when asked yesterday about an Australian Broadcasting Commission report on the Fosters’ complaints, the Church’s World Youth Day spokesman, Bishop Anthony Fisher, sounded dismissive. He said that he had not seen the report because he had been at the celebrations. “Happily, I think most of Australia was enjoying, delighting in the beauty and goodness of these young people,” he said, “rather than dwelling crankily, as a few people are doing, on old wounds.”
In an interview with an Australian website at Tokyo airport, Mr Foster rejected the comments and said that they showed “a complete lack of understanding of the victims, that there are so many people out there that really do have open wounds”. His wife, Christine, said that she was also deeply hurt: “There are no old wounds for victims. It is always current.”
The bishop’s comments forced Cardinal Pell — who was Archbishop of Melbourne at the time of the attacks — to try to repair the damage by making a public statement in which he said that he had been “very saddened” by Emma’s story.
She had endured “one of the worst things that can happen to a young woman”, he said. Cardinal Pell repeated his earlier apology to the family.
He did not say that he would meet Mr Foster, who insists that he will only accept the pontiff’s planned apology “if the Pope will embrace the notion of begging forgiveness from victims, and supporting them in every way possible and putting the resources of the Church behind that support”.
In his case Mr Foster said that it had taken eight years to win a financial settlement. He said that Cardinal Pell had introduced a system that imposed a A$50,000 (£24,000) cap on compensation. “It wasn’t just,” he said. Others had been offered as little as A$2,000. Emma and Katie’s attacker, Father Kevin O’Donnell, was convicted in 1996 of the abuse of 11 boys and a girl, aged 8 to 14, between 1946 and 1977.
Cartoons didn’t insult Muslims, rules Danish court
A Danish appeals court yesterday rejected a suit filed by seven Muslim organisations against newspaper editors who in 2005 first published a dozen controversial cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.
The appeals court judges ruled that the caricatures, which have since sparked angry and in some cases deadly protests across the Muslim world, did not aim to insult followers of Islam, as the plaintiffs had charged. One of the cartoonists is still in hiding under police protection following death threats. The seven Muslim organisations, all based in Denmark, had accused the Jyllands-Posten daily’s chief editor and culture editor of wilfully offending believers by printing the “offensive and degrading” drawings. Yesterday’s ruling confirmed a verdict handed down in October 2006 by a lower court in the central Danish town of Aarhus, where Jyllands-Posten is based.
Appeals court president Peter Lilholt stressed that the Danish judiciary, in accordance with the European Convention on Human Rights, could not “restrict freedom of expression” unless it clearly affected national or public security.
Christianity ‘could die out within a century’
The Telegraph says that Christianity could die out in the UK within a century
More than half of Britons think Christianity is likely to have disappeared from the country within a century, according to a survey.
Research by the Orthodox Jewish organisation Aish found that just over a third of people thought religions like Christianity and Judaism would still be practiced in Britain in 100 years’ time.
Although four in 10 people said they would choose to be a member of the Christian religion, almost the same number said they would rather practice no religion at all.
Buddhism however, proved more attractive than both Islam and Judaism, and was chosen by nine per cent of those questioned.
Aish UK’s executive director Rabbi Naftali Schiff said the results of the YouGov poll of 2,000 people were alarming.
“It clearly demonstrates that religion, including Judaism, is becoming unattractive to the British public.
“At Aish we know that Judaism provides real meaning and enrichment to one’s life. Whilst we have attracted many disinterested Jews back to Jewish identity it is clear there is much work to be done.”
Research published earlier this year suggested that church attendance is declining so fast that the number of regular churchgoers will be fewer than those attending mosques within a generation.
According to Religious Trends, an analysis of religious practice in Britain, the huge drop off in attendance means that the Church of England, Catholicism and other denominations will become financially non-viable.
In contrast, the number of actively religious Muslims is predicted to increase from about one million today to 1.96 million in 2035.
Religion (for entertainment purposes only)
NEW consumer protection laws that came into force last week covering stuff like clairvoyancy and fortune-telling has set the internet buzzing with speculation as to whether religions ought to be covered by the new regulations.
According to a Times report:
Fortune-tellers and astrologists will be bracketed with double-glazing salesman under the new Consumer Protection Regulations. Fortune-tellers will have to tell customers that what they offer is ‘for entertainment only’ and not ‘experimentally proven’. This means that a fortune-teller who sets up a tent at a funfair will have to put up a disclaimer on a board outside.
Similar disclaimers will need to be posted on the websites of faith healers, spiritualists or mediums where appropriate, as well as on invoices and at the top of any printed terms and conditions.
Andy Millmore, a partner at the law firm Harbottle & Lewis in London, is quoted as saying:
What is significant is the sweeping nature of the regulations. They will effectively criminalise actions that might in the past have escaped legal censure, even if they may perhaps have been covered by industry voluntary codes. Personalised services may also come under scrutiny. A tarot pack reader, for instance, cannot just pick one of several templates – it would have to be a proper reading designed for that person.
Claims to secure good fortune, contact the dead or heal through the laying-on of hands are all services that will also have to carry disclaimers, other lawyers say.
Said one:
You could argue that this is no different from promises given by the Church of Eternal Life, which people pay for, in the sense that they feel obliged to give to the collection. It’s no more proven.
The Spiritualist Workers’ Association attacked the changes, saying on its website:
We do not believe we are conducting a scientific experiment. To have to stand up and say so is a denial of our beliefs. It is also sending out a message that we do not believe what we are saying and doing.
Lyn Guest de Swarte, a clairvoyant, said:
Commenting on the new regulations, Times columnist and atheist Matthew Parris said:
Another example of careless jurisprudence this week: on Monday a new law came into force requiring fortune-tellers, clairvoyants, astrologers and mediums to stipulate explicitly that their services are for ‘entertainment only’.
Well, trades descriptions legislation is anciently established; but in the realms of the spirit, prophecy, invisible worlds, ghosts and human souls, it has generally been felt that the whole thing is too cloudy for law … By deeming in law – for that is what this measure does – that claims about worlds undreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio, are false, Parliament has taken a serious step in principle, even if the measure itself is trivial and most clairvoyants are only jokers anyway.
What, for instance, about the “faith” community? Perhaps it’s there in the legislative small print already. There will have to be an exception in law for ‘religions’. Whereupon clairvoyants will presumably rename themselves spiritualists. And spiritualists will presumably claim the status of a religion. Whereupon lawmakers will stipulate that a ‘religion’ has to centre around a deity. Whereupon Buddhism will cease to be a ‘religion’; and …
Here is a selection of amusing readers’ comments that followed the original Times report:
• Does this mean that placards should be placed at the entrance to all places of worship saying, ‘all who enter here don’t believe all you see and hear.
• I trust that every Bible and other such book will carry an appropriate disclaimer regarding the reliability of its content and promises. And that preachers will similarly preface every sermon with ‘for entertainment only’.
• Coming soon to a church near you….. A huge great ‘not experimentally proven’sign. If you’re going to discriminate against one form of spiritual activity (be it questionable or not) at least discriminate against them all.
• Will this stop religions obtaining money from the Government, particularly in education, on the basis of their predictions of life after death, the claimed existence of God and the validity of their doctrine which they may believe, but cannot prove?
• Does this mean that people who promise salvation or 42 virgins if you do what they tell you can be done under the new regulations ? This looks like a good way to get rid of religions
• We should also get Trading Standards to target religious establishments. After all they too invoke the supernatural and superstition, in order to give their customers some sort of reassurance about the future. Despite holding huge financial assets they also continually ask the public for money.
• The difference is that religion doesn’t charge you for the service they provide, any money they receive is purely voluntary. Astrologers, psychic healers, mediums etc charge you for a service that is claimed to do a lot of things that are scientifically unproven. I agree with the change.
• Religion not charging? Islam makes a big deal about the faithful paying the “religious tax” and even imposes punitive taxes on non-muslims to permit them to follow their own faith. Look up zakat and jizyah. These are not voluntary, though perhaps they cannot be enforced in the courts here.
• Hmm, religion doesn’t charge … money from the government, collections at the church/mosque/synagogue/temple, purchase of the Qu’ran, Bible, Torah, Vedas, etc, ‘donations’ to the church to obtain that date for your special day. We all pay for religion even if it’s just through taxes. It’s a farce.
The end is approaching for the Church of England, say Christian researchers
Dire warnings about the future survival of the Church of England have been sounded by the authors of the annual book of church statistics Religious Trends which is produced by Christian statisticians.
The finding that most newspapers headlined was the forecast (not particularly new) that within a generation there will be more people in Britain attending mosques than Christian churches.
The fall in attendance at the CofE is so precipitous, the researchers say, that it will soon become financially unsustainable. As congregations age and die, there will be no money from collection plates to support the Church’s infrastructure and keep on paying the pensions of retired vicars and bishops. In contrast, the number of actively religious Muslims will have increased from about one million today to 1.96 million in 2035. (In a population of, by then, 65 million, that is still pretty small).
According to Religious Trends, a comprehensive statistical analysis of religious practice in Britain, published by Christian Research, even Hindus will also come close to outnumbering churchgoers within a generation. The forecast to 2050 shows churchgoing in Britain declining to 899,000 while the active Hindu population, now at nearly 400,000, will have more than doubled to 855,000. By 2050 there will be 2,660,000 active Muslims in Britain – nearly three times the number of Sunday churchgoers. The research is based on an analysis of membership and attendance of all the religious bodies in Britain, including a church census in 2005. The findings are bound to fuel calls for the disestablishment of the Church of England.
Even the much-trumpeted growth in evangelical churches is beginning to slow and, in some cases, even starting to decline. The numbers of people who are actively involved in religious organisations of any kind is now very small.
Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society, said: “It is difficult to see how the Church of England’s special status as the established church can be justified. It is a tiny denomination of a dwindling religion. The other religions are also tiny, so even though it’s projected that there will be more Muslim worshippers than Christians by 2050, that doesn’t mean to say that this will be a really significant number. The numbers involved in all these religions pale into insignificance beside those who declare they have no religion. And yet still we have MPs who are arguing that the CofE should be disestablished in order to give all religions equal status. For instance, Martin Salter, the Labour MP for Reading West and a member of Reading inter-faith group is quoted in The Times as saying: ‘I think all faiths could be treated equally under our constitution. These figures demonstrate the absurdity of favouring one brand of Christianity over other parts of the Christian faith and the many other religions that grace our shores.’”
Terry Sanderson replied: “Mr Salter’s approach is the very worst of all worlds. No religion should be given special status and nor should all religions be given it. We should have a complete separation between religion and the state. This would be a much more accurate reflection of the nature of this country and by privileging no-one would be much fairer.”
Hazel Blears, the Communities Secretary with responsibility for community cohesion, has said that she will “look closely at the findings”. She said: “Britain is a secular democracy with a strong Christian tradition but many faiths have a home in Britain.” The question now becomes: What kind of secular democracy does Ms Blears think Britain is?
Predictably, the Church of England tried to rubbish the figures. Lynda Barley, its head of research, launched a counter-attack, saying that the findings were “dangerous and misleading.” She said: “These statistics represent a partial picture of religious trends today. In recent years church life has significantly diversified so these traditional statistics are less and less meaningful in isolation.”
Human Rights committee says pupils should be able to opt out of RE and collective worship
The Government has rejected a recommendation from the parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR) that school pupils of “sufficient maturity and intelligence” should be able to opt out of religious education and collective worship. The National Secular Society has said that it will try to find a case with which to challenge the policy that forces children to worship in schools, even if it is against their conscience.
The JCHR, in its report, says: “As we have said in previous reports, provisions which fail to guarantee a child of sufficient maturity, intelligence and understanding the right to withdraw from compulsory religious education and collective worship are incompatible with the child’s human rights…. We therefore recommend that the Government reconsiders its objection to permitting a child of sufficient maturity and intelligence to withdraw from religious education and takes into account our previously expressed views on this issue. As for religious worship, we recommend that children who are not in the sixth-form but who have sufficient maturity and intelligence, be permitted to withdraw. This could be simply remedied in the Bill by replacing “sixth-form pupil” with “child of sufficient maturity.”
After pressure from the NSS last year, the Government gave 16 year olds the right to withdraw themselves from collective worship (but not religious education). As the law stands, all other students must have their parents’ permission to withdraw from religious education and collective worship.
The British Humanist Association, in its press release on the matter, said “The best situation would be the replacement of the law requiring religious worship with a law requiring inclusive assemblies that would be suitable for all children.” But Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society, said: “‘All-inclusive’ assemblies will mean even more religion in schools as each faith seeks to have its share of school time. The only equitable answer is to seek the phasing out religious involvement in schools, not invite even more.”
NSS news http://www.secularism.org.uk/legalactionthreatenedoverreligio.html
C of E : “What credit crunch?”
The Church commissioners — the trustees who manage the assets of the Church of England (who also included the Prime Minister, the Lord Chancellor, the Home Secretary, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, and the Speaker of the House of Commons!) — this week published news of record profits from investments for 2007. The 33-strong board announced overall returns of 9.4 per cent on their investments last year and a 9.5 per cent total return on invested funds over the past 10 years.
The commissioners will report that the value of assets under their management has grown to £5.67
billion and that their fund, which is a closed fund accepting no new investment, has been able to return £37 million more each year to the Church over the past decade than it would have done if it had performed at the industry average.
Reporting this news, the Daily Telegraph said “Congregations should not start planning for new roofs and church halls, however, as the commissioners say that their funds contribute just 17 per cent of the total running costs of the Church of England – the balance being made up from the pockets of congregants and Diocesan investments.”
Oh, (the reporter and the commissioners forgot to mention) and hundreds of millions from the taxpayer.
Despite having this fantastic stash (and that is only a small proportion of its total wealth, which is tied up in property, such as shopping centres and farmland) the Church of England continues to sting the taxpayer for church repairs, gigantic tax concessions, grants from statutory bodies, subsidising of its ‘chaplaincies’ in hospitals, prisons and the armed forces, and hundreds of millions ploughed into church-run schools.
However, despite all this, the Church continues to plead poverty, whingeing about a growing pension bill for retired clergy. It is also agitating to be exempted from paying water bills (a change in the way this is levied means that suddenly the church has to pay its way like everyone else.) Yesterday representatives of the Church of England, Methodist and other churches met officials from Ofwat, the industry regulator, to argue that they shouldn’t have to pay for the water they use in the same way that everyone else does. After all, they’ve only got £6 billion in the bank.
And even in secular Australia, the churches have managed to get their greedy hands into the exchequer. You can read about the objections to that here
Abuse,rape and torture: the future of UK faith based services
Faith-based welfare was the norm in Ireland up until only a few short years ago. The Catholic Church, in all its compassion, ran schools, orphanages, children’s homes, hospitals – just about everything.
The result? A catalogue of cruelty and abuse that has left the state with a compensation bill that could run into billions of euros – not to mention thousands of damaged and traumatised individuals who will never properly recover from the physical, mental and sexual torture they suffered at the hands of priests and nuns. In 2002, the Catholic Church agreed to pay over €128m in cash and property to the State as part of a deal to prevent bankruptcy – the actual total is more likely to be between €1bn and €1.3bn.
The congregations had managed orphanages and schools in which abuse took place. Under their 2002 deal, religious orders were granted indemnity against future legal actions by former residents at the residential institutions. To date, the average award has been €66,845. Some 23 victims received the maximum award of €300,000.
More than 14,500 compensation applications for sexual, emotional or physical abuse were received by the board by the 2005 deadline.
Only 38% of Britons believe in God
The new edition of Social Trends gives some revealing new statistics about religion the UK and Europe. Social Trends is described by its publisher, the Office for National Statistics, as “An established reference source”, drawing together “social and economic data from a wide range of government departments and other organisations; it paints a broad picture of UK society today, and how it has been changing.”
This year’s edition should give the Government — with its obsession with the needs and opinions of “faith groups” — something to think about. To start with, we discover that only 38% of British respondents to a Eurobarometer Survey said they believed in God.
Other figures then give an indication of just how confused the nation is about religion. In reply to the question “Do you regard yourself as belonging to any particular religion?” 45.8% said they didn’t. The most astonishing figure of all is that those belonging to the CofE/Anglicans have dropped from 29.3% to 22.2% in just a decade. That this has not been national news can only be because it is no surprise and/or people want to keep it quiet. Obviously some of the drop can be attributed to deaths, but not when the drop is so massive. So where have the rest of them migrated to? The figures suggest that it is to “Christian – no denomination” and no religion, both of which showed 3% – 5% increases. It seems plausible that “Christian – no denomination” is a half way house for the cultural Christians who bolstered the 72% figure in the 2001 Census before they join those of “no religion”.
With the exception of the Roman Catholics, presumably because of Eastern European immigration, all other Christian denominations are much reduced, as are Buddhists. There are large proportional increases for Hindus and (surprisingly) Jews and above all Muslims (from 1.8% to 3.3%), and in some communities they may well be in the majority.
Incredibly, 13% of men and 15% of women claimed that they attended a religious service once a week or more. Even the churches own figures don’t support that.
So, how are we to reconcile the disparity between those claiming to belong to a religion while at the same time saying they don’t believe in God? Or those who claim to go to church when they quite plainly don’t?
The fact is that when people are questioned by opinion pollsters about their religion, they still, for some reason (residual guilt, perhaps?), feel the need to exaggerate and even lie about their beliefs and activities. Taking this into account, the figures must be even more alarming for religious leaders who try to give the impression that they are important figures in the life of the nation.
This research shows once more that Britain is one of the most irreligious nations on the face of the earth. So, what is it with this Government and “the faith communities”? When is the majority non-faith community going to get a look in?
Local Council spies on family for three weeks
A family were spied on for three weeks by a council to check whether they lived in the catchment area of their child’s school.
An undercover official made a detailed log of the family’s daily activities without their knowledge, tailing the morning and afternoon school runs and returning in the evening to watch their £350,000 house.
He made notes including one that reads: “Female and three children enter target vehicle and drive off.” Another states: “Curtains open and all lights on in premises.”
Yesterday the family at the centre of the investigation into their private lives said they were furious their local authority had “stalked” them.
Poole Borough Council in Dorset acted under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) which was introduced by Labour in 2000, partly on the grounds of improving national security. Any evidence obtained under the Act may be used in a criminal prosecution.
The mother who was watched with her partner and three children aged three, six and ten, said: “I can’t bear to think about those people watching my family, it sends a chill down my spine.
“I’m incensed that legislation to combat terrorism can be turned on a three-year-old.”
The 39-year-old businesswoman, who asked not to be named, said the discovery her family had been spied on had left her feeling on edge.
She continued: “My partner is often away on business and when someone parks outside we wonder who they are.
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Oversubscribed: The Lilliput First School, in Poole. Council workers spied on a family who were suspected of living outside the catchment area
“The council won’t tell us if the people watching us were police checked or whether they were taking photographs.”
The surveillance operation began after the couple applied for their youngest child to go to the same school as her sibling, Lilliput First School in Poole.
They were planning to move further away from the school, but asked the council for advice on its admissions policy to ensure their daughter would not be denied a place.
The parents were told that as long as they did not move before the end of January, their daughter would qualify to start at the school in September.
Several weeks after the deadline, they moved two miles away. Then a member of the public incorrectly told the council that the family were living at the new house but registering themselves for school admission at their previous address.
Such tactics are becoming widespread as parents take increasingly desperate measures to ensure their child is admitted to the school of their choice.
The couple were later summoned to a meeting with the council’s schools admissions manager, when it emerged they had been subject to the surveillance operation.
The mother said the council began investigating on February 13 and concluded on March 3.
The log made by the council surveillance officer states that in that period, daily visits were made to both properties.
On entry says: “Female driver with children as passengers”, then lists ten roads their car drove along.
The mother and her partner of 16 years, a 37-year-old computer programmer, want to warn other parents what councils are capable of doing.
She said: “We followed the council’s advice and moved after the date they gave us. But still they stalked us.
“We even turned down an offer on the house in October because we knew we couldn’t move until after January.
“I can’t imagine a greater invasion of our privacy. I’ll admit that we have played the system, but it’s no worse than moving into an area to get your children into a particular school.”
The child has been admitted to the school and is due to start in September.
Yesterday Tim Martin, head of legal and democratic services at the council, said: “RIPA procedures have been used to investigate potentially fraudulent applications for school places.
“In such circumstances, we have considered it appropriate to treat the matter as a potential criminal matter.
“An investigation may actually satisfy the council that the application is valid, as happened in this case.”
Men arrested under religious law in Canterbury
Two men who were protesting about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s comments on Sharia law were arrested in Canterbury Cathedral on Sunday. They held up placards just as Rowan Williams was about to deliver his sermon.
The men, aged 26 and 56 and from Yorkshire, waved banners and shouted protests about the Archbishop’s comments. They were arrested and taken away by police who are considering charging them under the Ecclesiastical Courts Jurisdiction Act, 1860 (ECJA), which forbids interruption of church services and carried a potential penalty of seven years in prison.
People present at the event said it was a low-key affair and the men were led away peacefully by the police seconds after the protest began. However, the Archbishop then changed his sermon to speak of the persecution of Christians. (Seems he equates this fairly gentle protest with the jailing and murder of Christians in Muslim countries).
The NSS has had reason to protest about the ECJA in the past, when Peter Tatchell was arrested in Canterbury Cathedral for protesting at the previous Archbishop’s silence on gay rights (Read details here). In that instance, the NSS raised a petition calling for the law to be scrapped. In the end, Peter Tatchell was fined £18.60 – which was regarded as a message of contempt for the law by the magistrate who imposed it.
In the recent debate about blasphemy in the House of Lords, Lord Avebury tried to introduce an amendment abolishing the ECJA, but it was rejected by the Government, which was not in the mood for a further confrontation with the Church of England, who see it as one of their privileges.
Islamic vote marks the end of Universal Human Rights
For the past eleven years the organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), representing the 57 Islamic States, has been tightening its grip on the throat of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yesterday, 28 March 2008, they finally killed it.
With the support of their allies including China, Russia and Cuba (none well-known for their defence of human rights) the Islamic States succeeded in forcing through an amendment to a resolution on Freedom of Expression that has turned the entire concept on its head. The UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression will now be required to report on the “abuse” of this most cherished freedom by anyone who, for example, dares speak out against Sharia laws that require women to be stoned to death for adultery or young men to be hanged for being gay, or against the marriage of girls as young as nine, as in Iran.
Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan saw the writing on the wall three years ago when he spoke of the old Commission on Human Rights having “become too selective and too political in its work”. Piecemeal reform would not be enough. The old system needed to be swept away and replaced by something better. The Human Rights Council was supposed to be that new start, a Council whose members genuinely supported, and were prepared to defend, the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Yet since its inception in June 2006, the Human Rights Council has failed to condemn the most egregious examples of human rights abuse in the Sudan, Byelorussia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, China and elsewhere, whilst repeatedly condemning Israel and Israel alone.
Three years later Annan’s dream lies shattered, and the Human Rights Council stands exposed as incapable of fulfilling its central role: the promotion and protection of human rights. The Council died yesterday in Geneva, and with it the Universal Declaration of Human Rights whose 60th anniversary we were actually celebrating this year.
There has been a seismic shift in the balance of power in the UN system. For over a decade the Islamic States have been flexing their muscles. Yesterday they struck. There can no longer be any pretence that the Human Rights Council can defend human rights. The moral leadership of the UN system has moved from the States who created the UN in the aftermath of the Second World War, committed to the concepts of equality, individual freedom and the rule of law, to the Islamic States, whose allegiance is to a narrow, medieval worldview defined exclusively in terms of man’s duties towards Allah, and to their fellow-travellers, the States who see their future economic and political interests as being best served by their alliances with the Islamic States.
Yesterday’s attack by the Islamists, led by Pakistan, had the subtlety of a thin-bladed knife slipped silently under the ribs of the Human Rights Council. At first reading the amendment to the resolution to renew the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression might seem reasonable. It requires the Special Rapporteur:
“To report on instances in which the abuse of the right of freedom of expression constitutes an act of racial or religious discrimination …”
For Canada, who had fought long and hard as main sponsor of this resolution to renew the mandate of the Special Rapporteur, this was too much. The internationally agreed limits to Freedom of Expression are detailed in article 19 of the legally binding International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and are already referred to in the preamble to the resolution. If abuse of freedom of expression infringed anyone’s freedom of religion, for example, it would fall within the scope of the Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion. To add it here was unnecessary duplication, and “Requesting the Special Rapporteur to report on abuses of [this right] would turn the mandate on its head. Instead of promoting freedom of expression the Special Rapporteur would be policing its exercise … If this amendment is adopted, Canada will withdraw its sponsorship from the main resolution.”
Canada’s position was echoed by several delegations including India, who objected to the change of focus from protecting to limiting freedom of expression. The European Union, the United Kingdom (speaking for Australia and the United States), India, Brazil, Bolivia, Guatemala and Switzerland all withdrew their sponsorship of the main resolution when the amendment was passed. In total, more than 20 of the original 53 co-sponsors of the resolution withdrew their support.
On the vote, the amendment was adopted by 27 votes to 15 against, with three abstentions.
The Sri Lankan delegate explained clearly his reasons for supporting the amendment:
“.. if we regulate certain things ‘minimally’ we may be able to prevent them from being enacted violently on the streets of our towns and cities.”
In other words: Don’t exercise your right to freedom of expression because your opponents may become violent. For the first time in the 60 year history of UN Human Rights bodies, a fundamental human right has been limited simply because of the possible violent reaction by the enemies of human rights.
The violence we have seen played out in reaction to the Danish cartoons is thus excused by the Council – it was the cartoonists whose freedom of expression needed to be regulated. And Theo van Gogh can be deemed responsible for his own death.
Freedom of expression is that right which – uniquely – enables us to expose, communicate and condemn abuse of all our other rights. Without freedom of expression and freedom of the press we give the green light to tyranny and make it impossible to expose corruption, incompetence, injustice and oppression.
But however important freedom of expression may be for us who live in the West, its overwhelming importance for those who live under the tyranny of Islamic law was highlighted by a courageous group of 21 NGOs from the Islamic States who issued a statement yesterday appealing to delegations to oppose the amendment. See http://www.article19.org/pdfs/press/petition-hrc.pdf
Incredibly, following the vote on the amendment, the Council descended even further into chaos. At the very last moment, Cuba introduced an oral amendment – clearly against the rules of procedure. When Canada objected they were overruled by the President. When Slovenia – on behalf of the European Union – tried to intervene on a point of order and ask for a ten-minute adjournment, they were ignored. When they tried to protest in another point of order their right to do so was challenged by Egypt, and the Egyptian objection was upheld.
The main resolution was then put to the vote and was adopted by 32 votes in favour, none against, with 15 abstentions.
The NGO community now needs to think carefully about what purpose can any longer be served by continuing our engagement with the Human Rights Council, and by fighting for values that are no longer accepted within the UN system. I have personally been involved with the Human Rights Commission and Council for the past five years and can see little benefit in continuing. Our well-argued position papers are ignored, our speeches are interrupted with repeated and irrelevant points of order, and we are not even supported in our efforts by the western delegations who, shockingly, did not even vote against today’s travesty, but abstained.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights died yesterday. Who knows when, or if, it can ever be revived.
I used to wonder what States who felt it necessary to kill people because they change their religion thought they were doing in the Human Rights Council. Now I know.
The wafer-thin sham of an international consensus on the promotion and protection of human rights has finally been exposed for what it was – a sham. The fragmentation of human rights now appears inevitable. The proposed Islamic Charter on Human Rights (read “Duties towards Allah”) will certainly go ahead, as will the creation of a parallel Islamic Council on Human Rights. But the OIC will nevertheless continue to attend and dominate the UN Human Rights Council, thereby ensuring its continuing emasculation and descent into total irrelevance.
Just five months before he and more than 20 of his colleagues were killed by a terrorist bomb in Baghdad, the then High Commissioner for Human Rights, Sergio Vieira de Mello, wrote:
“Membership of the Commission on Human Rights must carry responsibilities. I therefore wonder whether the time has not come for the Commission itself to develop a code of guidelines for access to membership of the Commission and a code of conduct for members while they serve on the Commission. After all the Commission on Human Rights has a duty to humanity and the members of the Commission must themselves set the example of adherence to the international human rights norms – in practice as well as in law…”
States who are genuinely concerned with human rights should immediately withdraw from the Council until such time as all member states as well as those offering themselves for election agree to honour their pledges, and undertake to expel any member state which, having been put on notice regarding its human rights record, fails to put its house in order within a reasonable timescale. Failing this, what better tribute to Sergio de Mello could there be than to create an alternative organisation – Kofi Annan’s organisation of the willing – whose members agree to adopt Sergio de Mello’s guidelines and code of conduct – and are actually held to account.
Lords approve abolition of blasphemy (after 140yrs!)
After an acrimonious debate in which the bogeyman of secularism was repeatedly invoked, the House of Lords on Wednesday accepted the amendment to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill that abolishes the common law of blasphemy and blasphemous libel.
The amendment had originally been introduced by Lib Dem MP Dr Evan Harris in the House of Commons, but the Government had persuaded him to withdraw it after promising to introduce its own amendment later in the Lords. This it has now done, although — if Baroness Andrews’ speech was anything to go by — with something less than enthusiasm.
The Bishops in the House were divided, some saying that the abolition was unnecessary and undesirable and others saying that it was inevitable and that the Church should therefore concede. The Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, had agreed to the Government’s amendment during a consultation, but expressed strong reservations about the timing of the move.
Prominent Christian activist Baroness O’Cathain launched a blistering attack on the amendment, with particular fury aimed at Evan Harris. Lady O’Cathain maintained that abolition of blasphemy would unleash a torrent of abuse towards Christians.
Lib Dem peer Lord Avebury pressurised the Government into keeping its word by tabling his own abolition amendment.
The Government had conducted a “short and sharp” consultation with the Church of England about the amendment, and the Archbishops of Canterbury and York both agreed not to oppose the abolition, although both questioned its timing.
Evan Harris said that this debate had been going on for 21 years, since the Law Commission had recommended abolition of the law, and for the Church it would never be the right time.
Lord Avebury also introduced other amendments to the Bill that would clear out some other ancient Church privileges, such as Section 2 of the Ecclesiastical Courts Jurisdiction Act of 1860, under which Peter Tatchell was charged when he interrupted a sermon by the-then Archbishop of Canterbury in Canterbury Cathedral. Lord Avebury’s amendments were rejected by the Government and opposed by the bishops.
Keith Porteous Wood, Executive Director of the National Secular Society, attended the debate and welcomed the Lords decision. He said: “The National Secular Society has been campaigning to abolish the blasphemy laws for 140 years. They have an iniquitous history of persecution, and because it is a common law offence with no limit on punishment, they have resulted in executions and imprisonments with hard labour for people who wrote and said things that would, in the modern day, be considered trivial. It is disgraceful that such a relic of religious savagery has survived into the 21st century.”
Mr Porteous Wood pointed out that although the UK blasphemy laws are in the course of abolition, there is growing pressure in the Islamic world to outlaw so-called “religious defamation”, a kind of super blasphemy law. This pressure is being applied at the United Nations and its Human Rights Council. He commented: “If the United Nations Human Rights Council succumbs to the pressure from the Islamic countries to permit laws against religious defamation, it will be a major blow to freedom of expression, which underpins both democracy and civilisation itself. Nations who cherish freedom should wake up to the dangers of such moves, rather than sit idly by as they have done so far.”
Coincidentally, on the day before the debate, the House of Lords’ Appeal Committee rejected the petition in the Jerry Springer case from Stephen Green, the director of Christian Voice, who brought a private prosecution, and whose request for judicial review the High Court was turned down in December. “Christians will now have to take matters into their own hands when Christ is insulted on stage and on screen,” Mr Green threatened on Monday. He described the Lords’ decision as “a blatant, shameless political manoeuvre by a God-defying élite”. He said: “If this is to remain a Christian country, with the Archbishop of Canterbury crowning the future king, Parliament needs to legislate quickly to protect the honour of Jesus Christ.”
Parents say no to halal school dinners
A primary school which opted to serve only halal meat at lunch time has been accused of concealing the decision to provide Islamic compliant food from parents.
The Oxford primary school introduced halal meat to the school dinner menu in September last year as part of their inclusion policy, but failed to inform parents of the move until December. Parents at the school are now petitioning for an end to halal only meals.
In a letter to parents at the end of term Sue Mortimer, headmistress of Rose Hill Primary, said halal meat had been chosen because it was not forbidden by any religion or culture. But parents who are angered by the decision to serve just meat killed in a particular way to make it permissible for Muslims, have started a petition calling for an end to halal only meals and the introduction of a choice of meat on the menu.
Maria O’Callaghan, a parent at the school told the Oxford Mail: “I don’t agree with the way the animals are killed for halal meat.” Other parents said children should be offered a choice.
For meat to be classified halal, a Muslim must have slaughtered the animal from which it came. A prayer, including the words “Allah is great”, is said during the slaughter and all the blood is drained from the animal.
Raghib Ali, one of the founders of the Oxford Islam and Muslim Awareness project said: “The meat looks the same and tastes the same. It is just a different way the animals are reared and killed. It’s not cruel, it is better for the animal”.
Dr Taj Hargey chairman of the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford, said he believed the school was at fault for not telling parents about the change.
Other schools in the area have applied to serve halal meat but Rose Hill Primary was the first in Oxfordshire to introduce the halal only policy.
Newspapers reprint controversial Mohamed cartoon
By Jan M. Olsen, AP
Denmark’s leading newspapers today reprinted a cartoon that depicts the Prophet Mohamed wearing a bomb-shaped turban.
The papers said they wanted to show their firm commitment to freedom of speech after Tuesday’s arrest in western Denmark of three people accused of plotting to kill the man who drew the cartoon.
The drawing by Kurt Westergaard and 11 other cartoons depicting Mohamed enraged Muslims two years ago when they appeared in a range of Western newspapers.
Islamic law generally opposes any depiction of the prophet, even favorable, for fear it could lead to idolatry.
The Jyllands-Posten newspaper, which first published the 12 drawings on 30 September 2005, reprinted Westergaard’s cartoon in its paper edition today. Several other major dailies, including Politiken and Berlingske Tidende, also reprinted the drawing, which shows Mohamed wearing a turban shaped like a bomb with a lit fuse.
“We are doing this to document what is at stake in this case, and to unambiguously back and support the freedom of speech that we as a newspaper will always defend,” said the Copenhagen-based Berlingske Tidende.
Tabloid Ekstra Bladet reprinted all 12 drawings.
The police intelligence agency, PET, said two Tunisians and a Danish citizen of Moroccan origin were arrested yesterday in pre-dawn raids in Aarhus, western Denmark.
PET chief Jakob Scharf said the purpose of the operation was “to prevent a terror-related assassination of one of the cartoonists behind the cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed.”
Jyllands-Posten said the plot focused on Westergaard, 73, who works for the paper.
Scharf said the Danish suspect would likely be released after questioning, but could still face charges of violating a Danish terror law. The two Tunisians would be expelled from Denmark because they were considered threats to national security, he said.
Massive protests swept the Muslim world in early 2006 following the publishing of the cartoons. Danes watched in disbelief as angry mobs burned the Danish flag and attacked the country’s embassies in Muslim countries including Syria, Iran and Lebanon. Danish products were boycotted in several Muslim countries.
Iranian Sisters face being stoned to death
Two Iranian sisters convicted of adultery face being stoned to death after the Supreme Court upheld death sentences against them, Iranian media have reported.
The two sisters were found guilty of adultery — a capital crime in Iran — after the husband of one of the pair presented a video showing them in the company of other men while he was away. The penal court of Teheran province had already sentenced the sisters, identified only as Zohreh, 27, and Azar, to stoning, the newspaper said.
The Etemad newspaper quoted Jabbar Solati, their lawyer, as saying that the sisters had initially been tried for “illegal relations” and had received 99 lashes. However, they were convicted of “adultery” in a second trial for the same incident. The pair admitted they were in the video but argued there was no adultery as no scene on the video showed them engaged in a sexual act.
