When, a decade ago, the Bishop of Rochester Michael Nazir-Ali was warning of Muslim ‘no-go areas‘, where sharia police stalk the streets and the real police fear to tread (and where Christians were threatened with arrest for handing out gospel tracts), he was vilified by politicians and rebuked by the Church of England.
You couldn’t easily hurl ‘Islamophobe’ at him, not least because of his ethnicity and cultural heritage. His learning never seemed to count for much, but brown skin and Muslim forebears qualified him to pitch a tent in the national debate on multiculturalism, which, then, was no kind of debate at all, for its precepts were absolute and its prophets infallible.
Scroll forward a decade, and now no less a personage than Trevor Phillips, former head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, is sounding the very trumpet that Michael Nazir-Ali had been blasting till he was blue in the face. Apparently, many British Muslims are creating a nation within a nation.
The solution, he avers, is a “muscular approach to integration“, which will demand, for example, such policies as “schools limiting the presence of any ethnic minority group to no more than 50 per cent.. It will mean strict monitoring of the ethnic composition of housing estates to prevent them becoming ‘ghetto villages’..” And you can’t easily hurl ‘Islamophobe’ at him, either: his ethnicity and EHRC dignity nullify such disgrace. [Archbishop Cranmer] Read more
