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The law, the multicultural society, and Muslims

13th December 2006

One law for them… On Sunday 17th of September this year a group of Muslims held a demonstration outside the Roman Catholic Westminster Cathedral in London in response to the Pope quoting 14th century Manuel II of the Byzantine Empire saying that the Muslim prophet Mohammed introduced 'things only evil and inhuman'. As the Christian congregation left the Cathedral it was met by chanting Muslim protesters some of whom carried placards saying, "Pope go to Hell", and "Jesus is the slave of Allah". Afterwards complaints were made to the police about protest organiser Anjem Choudary who had threatened anyone who insulted Mohammed with “capital punishment”. Choudary explained; “Muslims take their religion very seriously and non-Muslims must appreciate that and must also understand that there may be serious consequences if you insult Islam and the prophet…I think that warning needs to be understood by all people who want to insult Islam and want to insult the prophet of Islam." Needless to say the police took no action against either Chowdary’s threats or his demonstration. Now imagine this situation as the reverse of what it was, although I accept it takes a lot of imagining. Suppose a group of Christians had decided to stage a protest in response to recent outrages perpetrated by Muslims on Christians in the Muslim world. And suppose they planned to hold their demonstration outside an important mosque after Friday prayers in one of Britain’s major cities. And here’s where I ask you to stretch your imagination to breaking point, suppose also that the local Chief Constable had given his blessing to this Christian demo, “…in the interest of free speech.” Finally, suppose that on the day of this hypothetical demonstration some of the Christians carried placards that were as offensive to Muslims as the Muslim-designed placards “Pope go to Hell” and “Jesus is the slave of Allah” were to Christians. How do you think the Chief Constable would have viewed those placards? Would he have taken the decision to let them have their say ‘in the interest of free speech’ as was done with the placards carried by the Muslims at their demonstration outside Westminster Cathedral? Or would he have argued that the Christians’ placards were irresponsible and gratuitously offensive, and would he have threatened arrests in order to prevent actions likely to cause a breach of the peace? The rule of law and the multicultural society One of the pillars of British democracy is the rule of law, a guiding principle of which is equality before the law, where everyone, no matter whom, is equally subject to the ordinary law of the land administered by the ordinary courts. The rule of law means there are no distinctions. And you’d think that given the establishment’s avowed commitment to equality its adherence to the rule of law would be absolute – because the rule of law, if it is anything, is equality in action. Yet ironically, in a society whose watchword is equality, the rule of law in Britain has been undermined by none other than the egalitarians themselves. There are two motivating factors behind this; firstly, many members of the liberal establishment would find themselves behind bars were the rule of law to be applied strictly; and secondly, the multicultural society and the rule of law have been found to be mutually exclusive necessitating much liberal tinkering. It is this latter factor that I want to focus on here. A people’s culture is the amalgam of its religious belief, its music, art, and literature, its philosophy and politics, its architecture and codes of dress, its science and technology, and its social relationships and law. It is a product of a people’s interaction with nature. And because different peoples interpret nature differently cultures differ. It’s as simple as that. Ideally a people will have its own living space in which to express itself according to its own way of seeing the world – the form of that expression is its culture. But in multicultural Britain, British culture is compromised by the need to consider the world views of the other peoples that reside here. And the further apart the various peoples are in terms of their world views the more difficult it is to compromise their belief systems. Mass third world immigration and the multicultural society are consequences of the establishment’s ‘commitment to equality’, yet, paradoxically, the multicultural society and the principle of equality before the law are incompatible. In multicultural Britain different laws are applied to different peoples and the same law is applied differently to different peoples. The principle of the rule of law has been weakened in the process of maintaining the multicultural society to such an extent that we now have a system of legal pluralism; there’s now no such thing as the ordinary law of the land. Legal pluralism in act and action British law should be an expression of the British people, like the other facets of our culture it should be a reflection of how we are. But it’s not like that. For example, the British people recognise a responsibility to animals and so naturally we’ve enshrined in our law the right of animals to live free from cruelty. Man’s duty to exercise this right on behalf of animals is defined in law, our method of slaughter is designed to comply with this law, and we have forces of law whose function is to ensure that compliance. But cultures differ in their world views and thus they differ in their relationship with nature, and as we are discovering, occasions arise in multicultural societies when those differences become mutually exclusive. The liberal establishment has dealt with this predicament by in effect creating parallel codes of law where certain laws are applied according to the culture of the subject. This is most obvious in the case of ritual slaughter, where it is perfectly legal for instance for Muslims to slaughter animals by bleeding them to death whereas for ethnic Britons it would be a crime punishable by imprisonment. Muslims have their own understanding of animal welfare; they see things in their own way not in ours. Ritual slaughter is a non-negotiable mutually exclusive - that is it is fundamental to the Islamic belief system and diametrically opposed to our own. The choice for the liberal establishment was stark: Respect for Muslim beliefs or respect for British tradition and the rule of law. The liberals came down on the side of Islam and gave Muslims the right to ignore aspects of the law that the rest of us are bound to obey. And this is how the agents of the law behave also. They too tend to interpret their responsibilities according to the culture of the subject. I began this article by referring to the Muslim demonstration outside Westminster Cathedral on a Sunday after Mass and wondered how the police would react to its Christian equivalent. All the evidence suggests that the police force, rather like the law itself, would be harsher on the Christians than on their Muslim counterparts. The establishment prefers to accommodate Islam rather than enforce the rule of law. Consider for instance the lack of police response* to the placards carried by Muslims at the anti-cartoon protests in London earlier this year: “Freedom go to hell”; “Europe you will pay – 9/11 is on its way”; “Behead those who insult Islam”; “Butcher those who insult Islam”. And compare it with the arrest of peaceful Christian campaigner Stephen Green, who was charged with “offensive and insulting behaviour” for including a quote from the Bible, "Turn from your sins and you will be saved" in a leaflet he was handing out at Cardiff’s Mardi Gras gay and lesbian festival. Consider also the response of the police to the aggressive nature of those Muslim anti-cartoon demonstrators and compare it to its response to the equally aggressive pro-hunt demonstrators in London in 2004. Whereas the police smiled benignly as Muslims incited violence against all who offended their way of life, they cracked the skulls of ethnic Britons for defending their traditions. The examples of this are legion, where parliament and the forces of law and order are more severe in their attitude towards ethnic Britons than they are in their attitude to minorities, particularly Muslim minorities. We have two codes of law, a liberal code for Muslims and a more severe code for ethnic Britons. What is the law for? The law can have only one legitimate purpose: To act in the best interest of that which created it. And since the law is a function of a people’s interaction with nature, it stands to reason that the law should be an expression of that people’s way of viewing the world. But because of its belief in the theory of equality and more recently because of the necessity imposed on it by the multicultural society, the establishment sees British law in abstract terms of ‘universal equality’ and ‘absolute objectivity’. And now it is as if the link between British law and the British people has been severed, where for instance the law sees no contradiction in putting the interest of Afghan hijackers (and countless other ‘asylum seekers’ and immigrants) before that of the indigenous British. The Libs, Labs, and Cons are all guilty of supporting multiculturalism, and they’ve all gone out of their way to sing its praises and silence its doubters. It’s only very recently that they’ve changed tack, and then only because the writing is on the wall. But in their initial eagerness to construct the multicultural model and latterly in their desperation to hold it together, the politicians enshrined cultural relativism in law: in a multicultural society no culture can be seen to be superior to any other. Of course it was complete nonsense, and it was only a matter of time before it was exposed as such. And now they’re backtracking and talking in wishful thinking terms about British values as the mortar which binds Britain’s diversity. The British judiciary lags behind the politicians’ re-evaluation of multicultural values. Contemptuous of ordinary Britons and full of its own self importance, the judiciary has disregarded its true reason for existing, which is the wellbeing of the nation, and instead it has gone off in pursuit of a fantasy – absolute objectivity. Consisting in the large of pompous and self righteous ideologues, the judiciary fools itself and tries to fool the rest of us that it’s an objective arbiter dealing exclusively in the currency of pure reason. In reality its decision making is a function of the increasingly absurd Marxist notion of worldwide egalitarianism, as laid down by such as the European Court of Human Rights. This has created a tension between parliament and judiciary, especially in the law relating to asylum, immigration, ethnicity, and culture. The judiciary’s constant ruling in favour of migrants both thwarts Parliament’s (admittedly nervous) response to the growing disquiet amongst ethnic Britons and encourages further disquiet. This was inevitable. Limits on immigration and asylum and the defence of British tradition carry with them a belief in the ideas of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’, which are antipathetic to the judiciary’s commitment to absolute objectivity. But the politicians have only themselves to blame. They complain that the judiciary takes advantage of ambiguity so as to interpret the law in a manner contrary to that that was intended. But that’s because politicians are themselves so cowed by equality dogma that they’re reluctant to ‘draw a line’, which in turn has created the ambiguity that undermines the original intention. Lawyers and judges feed on the margins; and if there’s no line it’s all margin. British law should serve the interests of the ethnic British people; if it doesn’t it ceases to be British law and becomes something else. The universal egalitarianism of Lib, Lab, and Con politicians and the absolute objectivity of the judiciary are two sides of the same fantasy. They are both theoretical concepts that don’t exist in the real world; nothing is equal to anything else and there is no such a thing as an absolutely objective point of view. This is not to say that the two ideas are of no use in politics and law, rather that they should be employed only in issues involving ‘like’ with ‘like’, where both parties subscribe more or less to the same world view. When parties differ radically in their world views then at best their understanding of equality and objectivity will be radically different, at worst they may not even acknowledge their existence. The mistake our politicians and judiciary have made is that instead of employing equality and objectivity subjectively, which they would do were they to accept the ‘inner: outer’ duality, they employ them universally. This is rather like refusing to differentiate between members of one’s own nuclear family and everybody else; and the consequence is the same too – you end up losing control of your own house. Politicians and judiciary have made British politics and British law no longer British, since neither exclusively serves the interests of ethnic Britons. The British have been pushed to the back for the benefit of ‘mankind’. Liberals, Muslims and the law The establishment’s fundamental contradiction is that whilst they regard all peoples as equals they also believe that were all those peoples blended into one the resulting melange would be greater than the sum of its parts. And the fundamental hypocrisy is that when liberals say that all people are the same, what they really mean is that people should be the same as them with the same aspirations. Yet different peoples respond to the same things differently – that’s what tells us they’re different. And to their horror the liberal establishment are finding out that not everyone wants to be a middle class liberal, especially not Muslims who have their own way of viewing the world which, they believe, is superior to that advocated by Western liberals. The conceit and insolent pride of the liberal establishment led to mass third world immigration, to the development of the multicultural society, and to the fracturing of our society along ethnic and cultural lines. As always hubris leads to nemesis. The willingness of the liberals to undermine our (and their) way of life for an idea may very well have been an innocent expression of their egalitarianism. Perhaps they really did believe that they could create a better way of living from the top storey down. At the beginning the liberals were in charge; they had it in mind to make British society into a precursor of worldwide egalitarianism. It was idealism gone mad. They invited millions of third world immigrants to live here and then changed our way of living so as to take into account the newcomers’ religious and cultural sensitivities. But in so doing they gave immigrants the confidence and moral authority to justify the existence and expansion of their own cultures within our culture. The establishment’s plan has backfired. Instead of being in charge they now cling to a tiger’s tail. They made compromises of their own volition, initially. But that was when they were blinded by egalitarianism and when they were doling out concessions to immigrant communities in the belief that it would ease their transition to becoming fully fledged middle class Western liberals. But now the establishment has lost the initiative. Its position has shifted from one where it made concessions as a means of moulding society to one where it makes concessions as a means of stopping society from running out of control. Laws were made and applied out of respect for other cultures; now they are made and applied out of fear of them. In multicultural and multiracial Britain the vigour with which the law is enforced is in inverse proportion to the vociferousness of the community on which it is applied. Thus a pacifist Christian is banged-up for upsetting homosexuals whilst a threatening Muslim is given carte blanche to intimidate the wider community. It’s not the offence that matters so much as who is committing it - so much for the rule of law in multicultural and multiracial Britain. Why didn’t the police remove the placards carried by Muslims on their recent demonstrations? They were threatening and offensive, as were the chants and behaviour of the demonstrators - one of the event organisers was even quoted making threats, yet the police let things go ahead without intervention*. What’s so special about Islam and Muslims that they should be handled with kid gloves? The issue, obviously, is one of response – could it be anything else? How would Muslim worshippers respond to a Christian demonstration outside an important Mosque on a Friday after prayers? How would Muslim worshippers respond to placards offending their beliefs? Would they turn the other cheek? How would Muslim demonstrators respond to the police behaving towards them as they’d behaved towards the countryside marchers, and how would the wider Muslim population in Britain respond to news footage of these events? The establishment is wary of the negative impact that Muslim reaction to the fair and equal application of British law would have on the ethnic Briton’s perception of the multicultural society. And no doubt they’re also worried that things could spiral out of control – so they go easy. They say that all people and cultures are essentially the same, but their actions suggest otherwise. Why else treat Muslim demonstrators differently? The Libs, Labs, and Cons first made allowances for Muslim beliefs as a way of integrating the Muslim way of life with ours, but the medium term consequence of that has been that Muslims are now more separate than they were when they first arrived here in the early 1950’s. Now they’re making allowances for Muslims as a means of maintaining the increasingly unstable society that 60 years of mass third world immigration has created, but in doing so they can’t help but alienate a growing proportion of ethnic Britons. The establishment rode to power on the back of the false ‘feel-good’ universal equality argument that peaked sometime in the mid 1990’s. It was the sort of idea that had an immediate appeal for idealists on the make, and so it’s no coincidence that a significant section of today’s political, judicial and media elites consists of former communists and their brothers in arms. But the habit of seeing only that which one wishes to see is not confined to the liberal establishment; sometimes the facts are hard to face whatever one’s position. And by the same token, no one, no matter who, can put off facing the facts forever; all we can do is delay it for a while, and very often make things worse in the process. We’re at the stage now where the liberals are being forced to face the facts. And it is the establishment’s relationship with Britain’s Muslim minority that more than anything else is exposing the contradictions in the equality of man idea; Liberalism is being pushed into crisis by Islam. n.b. Some of the Muslim demonstrators have since been prosecuted ‘after an investigation’, but this rather proves my point – the arrests took place after the demonstration so as to minimise the chance of an unfortunate response.

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