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By Root 990 0

forces and police are not immune to some of these pathologies. The Royal Navy, once the scourge of pirates, refuses to detain Somali pirates on the ground that their rights might be infringed if they handed them over to neighbouring states, or to take them back to Britain because they might contend they required asylum and welfare thanks to the hypothetical persecution applying in the first scenario. The police have also been loath to investigate honour killings in the Muslim community, or the abusive treatment of women, because of cultural ‘sensitivities’. The police seem to have turned a blind eye to instances where sharia courts adjudicated in cases that manifestly should have come before criminal courts, such as grievous bodily harm resulting from some unfortunate being hit over the head with an iron bar.18

Beyond such examples of elite political correctness and smug irresponsibility, there is a less exclusive penumbra of people who have graduated from the extreme left to supporting parties that are halfway houses to the reactionary Islamists. One thinks especially here of George Galloway’s Respect party which has literally absorbed the older Socialist Workers Party. Mrs Cherie Blair’s half-sister, the celebrity Palestinian activist and right-wing Sunday-newspaper columnist Lauren Booth, is a leading light of this ultra-left party. The left-wing former mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, was also zealous in extending the hand of friendship to Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi, who is banned from even seeking medical treatment in Britain because of his indulgence of Palestinian suicide bombers and his hatred of homosexuals. This was part of a multiculturalist electoral strategy in which people were supposed to vote according to a given identity, after calculations had been made whether there were more Muslim than, say, Black or gay voters. The spectacle of left-liberal sympathy for Islamists, whom many regard as latterday Fascists, has become too much for a number of decent prominent British left-wingers, including Anthony Andrew, Nick Cohen and Rod Liddle who have been traduced by their erstwhile comrades on the Guardian. They shouldn’t worry too much since many of their most angry critics are merely playwrights like David Edgar or, to move down several notches, Ronan Bennett—who has a noteworthy past in Northern Ireland. Even the Labour-supporting Ed Husain has been abused on television by a British-based Hamas activist—in 2004 this gentleman had told the BBC he would be pleased to be a suicide bomber—on the grounds that Husain was a ‘neo-conservative’, the all-purpose term of abuse in such circles.19

Once upon a time, theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich knew how to respond to evil without limp equivocation. That tradition has been continued by the present pope and his immediate predecessor. Many Western Protestant Churches are nowadays so suffused with secular liberal messianisms that they are indistinguishable from common or garden progressive opinion.20 A particularly jarring example is an archbishop of Canterbury who, in some circles, enjoys the reputation of a profound thinker, despite his self-description as ‘a hairy leftie’. Rowan Williams sought to make common cause with Muslim clerics (against militant philosophical or scientific secularists and degraded materialism in general) by contemplating the licensing of enclaves of soft sharia law, a concession that would wholly undermine the common law of England, while opening the gates to hard sharia law in the future. Williams thinks we live in a ‘market state’, a concept he borrowed from the constitutional lawyer Philip Bobbitt, although recent NATO caveats about the war in Afghanistan suggest that the nation state is alive and well when it wants to be, as is the only licensed European nationalist sentiment, that of unthinking anti-Americanism. Another line of justification for thoughts that outraged the British public, despite the archbishop’s sly resort to Greco-German theological ‘unclarity’, was that the banking sector has already noiselessly introduced