Next week: Robert Maxwell on how to run a pension fund and water safety
Wonderful chutzpah from the Guardian's latest rent-a-Muslim-gob:
It is Muslims who are condemned as book-burning bigots whose religion poses a challenge to freedom of speech. But which religion bombarded the BBC in an orchestrated display of outrage about a television programme?
The only religion about which certain things can now be said on the BBC.
Everyone knows the reason no Muslim equivalent to these scenes have occurred: as we saw with Salmon Rushdie, the result is not a bombardment of an orchestrated display of outrage, but people marching in the streets by their thousands with placards demanding the creator be killed. Anyone who made a programme or film or book interpreted as seriously insulting Islam, as Salman Rushie did, would have a jihad put on him and would, as Theo Van Gogh was, likely at some stage be murdered.
It is Muslims who are accused of mistreating their women and refuse to allow them true equality. But which religion's representatives would rather bomb abortion clinics than tolerate the idea of a woman's right to choose?
Wow, he even manages that old chestnut. Yes, that seven abortionists have been murdered in America in thirty-two years of Roe versus Wade is true and appalling. But again, the reason such a thing is unthinkable in Islamic societies is that abortion is absolutely forbidden by state after state, and anyone who even attempted to campaign for it would face the above treatment, or soon see how their governments treats dissidents.
And while it is Muslims who are criticised for their intolerant attitudes to homosexuality would anyone like to hazard a guess at which religion is convulsed in arguments about gay marriage?
And why is the Church of England convulsed in these arguments? Precisely because it is filled, especially in its top ranks, by people who would rather burn every word of scripture than be seen as taking a slightly different viewpoint on this issue than the Guardian leader column. In Islam, there is no debate about single-sex marriage because Imams are about as likely to give sermons in favour of gay rights as to read from the Torah and Talmud in their Mosques.
Look, I think there are a few things the West can learn from Islam, respect for unborn life among them. But it stretches credulity to Mecca and back to suggest that greater tolerance of religious criticism and of homosexuality and increased respect for women's rights are among them. Is this how low the Guardian has sunk in its pathetic 'Christian fundamentalists who support Creationism in schools are as bad as Al Qaeda!' moral equivalence?
UPDATE: But don't worry! His attitude to arranged marriage is certainly proportionate and sensible:
While I would not try to defend any of it I do find the reaction of my white friends rather amusing. Where is the romance in such a contrived scenario they ask, what about serendipity and spontaneity and that crazy little thing called love? They say these things as they race to their next speed-dating night or while busy finding the love of their life on some random internet site.
Speed-dating = arranged marriage. There you have it.
