"What's A British Version of Judaism?" asks the imam defensively, to applause

Before going on to declare:  "Islam is all about love.  Islam is all about peace."

Welcome to Al Beeb's discussion, in Bradford, Yorkshire, of "The Big Question," in this case, "Do we need a British Islam?"

 In perhaps too up-beat a tone than is strictly necessary, the BBC studio host, Nicky Campbell, points out that Islam is the fastest growing religion in today's Britain, with 100,000 converts adding to the number, two-thirds of them women.

Going against stereotype, a woman in a sombre black face covering interrupts and hassles the opening speaker, Adam Deen, before being assured by the host that he'll call upon her in due course.

As for that "British version of Judaism," since Jews believe "the law of the land is the law," have never sought to impose their religion on others, and have contributed to general society in a myriad of fields out of all proportion to their numbers, I'd have thought the imam's question redundant.

Comments (inter alia) the website Is the BBC biased?:

'It was impossible to derive any kind of satisfaction from this unpleasant programme.  Viewers were further away from knowing whether or not British Muslims think they need a British Islam at the end of the programme than at the beginning. At one moment, when Nicky Campbell tried to elicit a straight answer from an Imam, one might have thought we were dangerously close to getting somewhere. But no.

It was just an unstructured row, with no beginning, middle or end. Maybe they’d have forced out a more definitive answer if they’d stuck to the usual format, stuffing three different Big Questions into the allotted hour. Condensing it might have taken them by surprise. Who knows what might have come out in the rush....

Judging by what we saw on this programme and what we already know, that is insoluble. True Islam is unBritish and true Britishness is clearly unIslamic.

I’m suspicious of people who wear a collar and tie with a jumper so I felt obliged to Google Adam Deen.  He has an extensive Youtube / web presence.

I learned that he used to be called Hakkan Cerrah and is married to T[he] B[ig]Q[estion]regular Myriam Francois Cerrah....

The Big Question that needs answering is  one that no TV presenter ever gets round to putting.

Is Islamic antisemitism acceptable in Britain? Why does the antisemitism in Islam get a free pass? The British don’t like it when antisemitism or racism emanates from any other individual or group, be it a non-Muslim individual, a right-wing antisemite or a bunch of Nazi sympathisers. But with the majority of Muslims antisemitism and anti-Zionism are a given.

Mindless opposition to Israel’s existence is rooted in gross antisemitism, and that is the elephant that’s always present in the studio. An enormous elephant that’s allowed to career around, willy nilly, trampling on everything with impunity, utterly and completely confident it can get away with it.' [Emphasis added]

See the rest of that post here

And, incidentally, in a feature called "Why French Jewish people are moving to London," Al Beeb coyly hints at a tusk but nevertheless fails to acknowledge the elephant in the room.

Still Laid Up On The Beam Ends

Well, here I am, still laid up on my beam ends, thanks to the flu (yes, it's that time of the year Down Under.)  I'm afraid that I couldn't manage a Tuesday column this week for Elder of Ziyon, though readers who are interested in the quite remarkable degree of goodwill towards Israel that pertained during the Yom Kippur War may enjoy my last week's column.

As the column notes, even Gerald Kauffman was on Israel's side.

But then, as a commenter noted wryly, MP Gerald wasn't confronted by the reality of a significant Muslim presence in his electorate back then.

Talking of Islam, here's (hat tip: Vlad Tepes blog)  an interview with the Christian scholar Raymond Ibrahim that deserves attention.

It certainly deserves the attention of the naive teachers at this Yorkshire state school.

Another lovable crusty old fella:

 Meanwhile, among the anti-Israel Christian and Muslim forces on social media, united by their antisemitism, a new set of cartographic crapology is doing the rounds:

On A Dundee Bus, & In A Bradford Supermarket

The Scottish city of Dundee has the distinction of being Gorgeous George's birthplace and cradle, and it was under Gorgeous George's influence that, getting on for 40 years ago, its council chamber became the first in all of (post-)Christendom to fly the Palestinian flag.  And not long afterwards the city twinned with Nablus.

Innovative folk up there, it seems:

But to judge from certain of the comments, some people suspect an ulterior motive.

Anyway, remember Gorgeous George's bombastic declaration last August that the Yorkshire city of Bradford is and must be an Israel-free zone, sans Israeli goods, sans Israeli academics, sans Israeli tourists, sans Israeli everything?

Well, how pleasing to learn on the grapevine (hat tip: reader P) that Israeli peppers are doing a brisk trade in Bradford, as, it seems, elsewhere.

Yep, this is a pack of three – one red, one orange, and one green – at Morrison's:

And not surprisingly the usual suspects are getting all – well –  peppery over it.

Morrison's, they're moaning to each other, is (shock, horror) selling Israeli avocados as well!

Sainsburys, they're complaining between themselves, is stocking lots of Israeli goods, and so is bargain-price supermarket chain Lidl.

Waitrose, too, is not to be trusted.  A veteran Israel-hater from London declares:

"I am tired of turning over the boxes to find out where stuff is from, it should be clearly labelled, I am not popular in my local Waitrose .. but I will not stop"

 Notes another veteran Israel-hater, darkly:

"Our supermarkets like to con us into buying what they want to sell rather than what we want to buy. Managers know that if it is good for Israel it is good for their career prospects."

Grumbles another:

 "Those long red peppers nearly always come from Israel and I have plenty Muslim friends who buy them without a care."

(And why not, indeed?  For very nice indeed those peppers taste.  Too bad that, as a result of the Coop caving in to the BDSers some time ago, its customers can no longer enjoy them too.)

A Motherland Mired in Madness

Observes Douglas Murray in a recent article of characteristic insight and intellectualism that should be mandatory reading for ostriches (or should I say Oztriches?) with their heads in the sand, who look with equanimity upon the prospect of increased Islamic migration to Australia:

'.... I have ... travelled across Europe, and must admit that it can be terrifying to see the way in which the unsolved problems which Islam brings with it are dangerously simmering. Every European country is now experiencing this in the same ways. From the streets of Scandinavia to the outskirts of Paris, the northern cities of England to the East End of London, we have a set of societies in our midst about which even the use of the word "integration" must be regarded as some cosmic joke.

.... What has been created are not multicultural societies but parallel societies. Every country faces similar challenges and all are going through similar debates.

Yet .... They encourage Muslim leaders to "condemn" extremism but do little to tackle it. They praise "moderates" when they should be insisting on Muslim progressives. Lacking the resolve to change this, we all cling to an unfounded hope that the absorption of tens of millions of Muslims into Europe will change nothing very significantly....

 Britain had no significant Muslim presence until the latter part of the last century. There was a negligible Muslim presence in Britain until postwar immigration brought waves of migration predominantly from the Indian subcontinent, and Islam played no important role in our history.

By the 2001 census, there were around 1.5 million Muslims in England and Wales. By the 2011 census, that number was 2.7 million. Over a single decade the Muslim population had doubled — and that is not including the hundreds of thousands of people who are here illegally. 

If anyone in power had wanted to alter the vast increase in Muslim immigration during the post-9/11 period, to work on absorbing the people who were already here before welcoming in any more, they could have done so. But they did not and no politician looks set to do so in the near future....

Today Britain's Muslim community is growing ten times faster than the rest of the population. Half of British Muslims are under the age of 25. And among young people under 25, one in ten are now Muslim. Conversions of Britons to Islam are also at an unprecedented high. In the decade since 9/11 more than 100,000 British people converted to Islam. Three-quarters of these were women....

[I]f current trends continue, in the next 20 years or so there will be more Muslims in Britain than Christians. Some demographic studies suggest that on current trends Britain could have a Muslim majority by the middle of this century....

In the last couple of years the leaders of all three main political parties have conceded that it is not racist to have concerns about immigration. But they neither know what to do about the next step, nor can get beyond generalities about the need for "debate" or the sending around — as during this past summer — of occasional dog-whistles to pretend something is being done while the issue truly remains unaddressed....

There is a blockage of common sense or assertion of values....

Last year Mohammed was the second most popular name for newborn boys in England and Wales. In the country as a whole it was narrowly beaten to the top spot by Harry (which received a boost from the popular prince and a member of the pop group One Direction). But the figures also show that Mohammed is now easily the most popular name for baby boys in many areas of the country, including London and the West Midlands....

Tell Muslim leaders not just to "condemn" acts of violence but to stop them. Tell them that the era of ifs and buts about the extremists must end. Tell them to put the concerns of the state foremost in the minds of young Muslims, to have a picture of the Queen and say a prayer for the royal family in mosques as it is said in synagogues every Saturday. Tell them to teach their young that if they feel an urge to get involved in a struggle, they can join up for one the best armies in the world — the British army.

In particular, tell them to create swiftly and purposefully a type of British or Western Islam which not only is not in the hands of fanatics, but cannot be reclaimed by them. Lock the fanatical scholarship out as strongly as historically it has been able to be locked in. I say all this with a sense of hopelessness. There has been no sign, in a dozen years, that any Western country is willing to do anything like this....

Yes, it will be true that we will have access to a greater variety of food, languages and cultures than we had half a century ago. And we will have to get used to the downside that there will be more forced marriage, female genital mutilation and beheading than there used to be.

My suspicion, not to be too flippant, is that a lot of people, especially those in positions of power, have already made their peace with that deal. There is no plausible reason, if they have not, why so much attention is paid to muffling those voices who raise criticisms of Islam and so much help given to those often highly regressive figures who carry water for the fundamentalists.

....There may be tinkering, and lone voices speaking out against such developments, but there will be no significant force from inside or outside Islam persuading Muslims that the path of segregation and separation denoted by the veil is wrong.

Our politics will inevitably follow the same sectarian lines. Already there are stories — I know of two cases, from different political parties — where Jewish candidates have not been chosen to contest certain parliamentary seats because the proportion of local Muslims is too high. [Emphasis added; is that, incidentally, what we wish to see in Australia?]

With one in ten young Britons being Muslim, there is already a change in the pressures on politicians. What will it be like when it is two in ten? Will some of our closest political alliances survive?

The best we may be able to hope for is the right to pursue the type of British lives that our ancestors lived. You can see this, in rural and other communities in Britain where the concerns of the global battle for Islam, even when they are in a nearby town, appear to be thousands of miles away.

.... As the recent history of the English Defence League may have shown, any non-Muslim, grassroots yet non-racist resistance to Islamic extremism may well be impossible....

In any case, it certainly appears to have become the view of the British governing class that, if there is a problem within or from Islam it is beyond the control or influence of the political class, let alone any single here-today gone-tomorrow politician. The pretence is now so strong that it is assumed that Islam is like all other religions, that suspicion of Islam is as dangerous as suspicion of any other religion....'

Read the entire article here

Also worth a sobering  read is British Muslim Mehrdad Amanpour's "The Quiet Death of Moderate Islam" on Harry's Place (taster below):

'....When I was a child, my relatives would tell me that the hadud punishments of stoning, beheading and limb amputation weren’t part of modern Islam – such practices belonged to another time, in the same way that burning witches in Europe belonged to another time. I was told that the only Muslims that supported such practices were ‘backward’ and the only places that practiced them were ‘barbaric’ – in time ‘education’ would enlighten these simple folk and drag them into modernity.

Yet I’ve grown up and seen the opposite happen....

The gutless media. The unprincipled trade unions, universities and student unions that turn a blind eye to the wickedness being promoted in their midst. The hypocritical ‘anti-fascist’ organisations that enable and defend hate. Most of all, the lickspittle political class. Shame on them all.

‘Extreme’ has quietly become ‘moderate’ whilst Europeans have been too polite, too unprincipled or too cowardly to object....

During the past two decades, the Saudis have spent at least $87 billion propagating Wahhabism abroad.

At the same time, competing fundamentalist Shia and Sunni movements have been promoted aggressively throughout Europe, with massive funding from countries such as Iran and Qatar.

Moderate Islam is as good as dead. It didn’t stand a chance....'

An Informative Document

Earlier this past week BBC Radio One presented a programme entitled "Great British Islam":

"As Ramadan approaches, this documentary tells the story of three English gentlemen who embraced Islam at a time when to be a Muslim was to be seen to be a traitor to your country."

"A traitor to your country?"  Really?  Or rather, like Lord George Gordon, the famous eighteenth-century convert to Judaism, a great British eccentric?
 
Googling the topic of notable British converts to Islam, I came across a contemporary barrister who as the website of his chambers shows has written a number of  informative papers such as this one.

I also came across this

And then I saw this ... Oy!