| Telegraph Calls The Prophet PBUH A Paedophile - Twice! |
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| Sunday, 19 December 2004 | |
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It is not worth complaining to the Telegraph, they hate Muslims, they love Zionism. They purposely print letters from Muslims that are bland and weak in content. The best letters that people have forwarded on to us are never printed. The Telegraph only ever questions Islam, they never insult (or in Telegraph language “have a debate on”) any other religion So what can you do? The thing we must do is write to our MPs and ask them to support the new law on incitement to religious hatred. You can also express your disgust at Charles Moore’s articles. To find your MP go to: www.faxyourmp.com Understand the game because this is a great example of how it is played. If you want to understand the game click here. The articles are reproduced below. Is it only Mr Bean who resists this new religious intolerance? Was the prophet Mohammed a paedophile? The question is sometimes asked because one of his wives, Aisha, was a child when he married her. As Barnaby Rogerson gingerly puts it in his highly sympathetic recent biography (The Prophet Muhammad, Little, Brown): "…the age disparity was considerable: she was only nine while Muhammad was 53". Aisha was taken from her seesaw on the morning of her marriage to be dressed in her wedding garment. After sharing a bowl of milk with the prophet, she went to bed with him. To me, it seems anachronistic to describe Mohammed as a child-molester. The marriage rules of his age and society were much more tribal and dynastic than our own, and women were treated more as property and less as autonomous beings. Aisha was the daughter of Mohammed's right-hand man, and eventual successor (caliph), Abu Bakr. No doubt he and his family were very proud of the match. I raise the question, though, because it seems to me that people are perfectly entitled - rude and mistaken though they may be - to say that Mohammed was a paedophile, but if David Blunkett gets his way, they may not be able to. As I write, I am looking at a Christmas brochure for Channel 4. It contains an interview with Paul Abbott, author of the "current hit show, Shameless". Clever Paul swears a lot, and proudly tells a story about how, when his brothers held him upside down to help him steal a Christmas tree from his Yugoslav next door neighbour, he was so frightened that he started urinating. Ha ha. There follows a two-page pictorial spread of Paul's characters, the Gallaghers, having their Christmas lunch. The tableau is presented (sub-Buńuel) as a parody of the Last Supper. (Do Paul Abbott and Channel 4 believe, perhaps, that this took place at Christmas?) The first page shows a line of yobs - mimicking the Apostles - beginning their meal in reasonably good order. The second depicts them towards its end, violent and drunk. The "Jesus" figure is lurching forward, halo awry, beer can in one hand and cigarette in the other. The natural inclination of Christians in the face of such affronts is anger. But would it really be a better society in which silly, urinating Mr Abbott could go to prison for such a thing, and perhaps the bosses of Channel 4 with him? Before lots of respectable readers shriek "Yes!", think what it means. Why is it that so many people resent religion and turn against it? Surely it is because of its coercive force, its tendency to mistake the worldly power of its priests and mullahs for justified zeal for the truth. It is not God who turns people away, but what people do in the name of God. If a law against religious hatred is passed, even when blessed by St David Blunkett, the natural consequence will be a rise in the hatred of religion. Particularly hatred of Islam. The BNP website describes Islam in the hands of some of its adherents as "less a religion and more a magnet for psychopaths and a machine for conquest". If a law says they can't say that, the BNP will, in the minds of many, be proved right. On Tuesday, Mr Blunkett said that it would be illegal to claim that "Muslims are a threat to Iqbal Sacranie, of the mainstream Muslim Council of Britain, wants the new law because any "defamation of the character of the prophet Mohammed (Peace Be Upon Him)" is a "direct insult and abuse of the Muslim community". In effect, he is asking for the law of libel to be extended beyond the grave, giving religious belief a protection extended to no other creed or version of history. Where does all this come from? Not, I fear, from the right, if misapplied, desire for different faiths to live at peace. Incitement to violence, after all, is already an offence, and so it should be. No, the pressure is chiefly from Muslims. If we want to understand its context, we should look at what happens in Muslim societies. According to Muslim law, believers who reject or insult Islam have no rights. Apostasy is punishable by death. In Under Islam, Christians and Jews, born into their religion, have slightly more rights than apostates. They are dhimmis, second-class citizens who must pay the jiyza, a sort of poll tax, because of their beliefs. Their life is hard. In Saudi, they cannot worship in public at all, or be ministered to by clergy even in private. In The ancient plurality of the region is vanishing. Tens of thousands are fleeing the Muslim world, and in some countries - Sudan, Indonesia, Ivory Coast - large numbers die, on both sides. In The push for a religious hatred law here is an attempt to advance the legal privilege that Muslims claim for Islam. True, Muslim leaders are happy that the same protection should be extended to other religions in this country. But to a modern liberal society which claims the freedom to attack all beliefs, this should be no comfort. It says a good deal about the quality of churchmen and politicians in Because it is usually called Boxing Day, people forget that December 26 is the feast of St Stephen, the first martyr. Somewhere in the Muslim world on that day, there will be more Christians martyred, as there are every day of the year. Muslims are not martyred in It is Muslims who have most to fear from Islamists By Charles Moore On Wednesday, I wrote a letter to David Blunkett. As he resigned 15 minutes after my fax arrived (I cannot claim the two events were related), I do not complain that I have not yet received an answer, either from him, or from his successor, Charles Clarke. But an early response, as they say on bills, would be appreciated. What I asked the Home Secretary concerned his department's proposed law against "religious hatred". Readers may remember that, last week in this column, I defended the right of people to say - though it is not a proposition with which I agree - that the Prophet Mohammed was a paedophile. So my question to whoever happens to be Home Secretary is whether it would be an offence under the new law to assert this proposition. Muslims are also very offended by any pictorial depiction of the Prophet; so I asked whether such depictions would also be an offence under the law. Fiona Mactaggart, who is minister for race equality, has accused critics of the new law of a misunderstanding. It is not a blasphemy law, she says. You can say anything you like about the beliefs: what you will not be allowed to do is to insult the believers because of what they believe. I do not see how this distinction will be possible to maintain: it is certainly not one which Muslims accept. On this page on Tuesday , Iqbal Sacranie, the secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, clearly saw the law as a way of preventing "the vilification of dearly cherished beliefs". He sees attacks on the Prophet as attacks on all Muslims - therefore, in his view, they should be banned. That is what Muslims think Labour has promised them. The reaction to my own article shows the problem. The Muslim Association of Britain (not to be confused with the MCB) said that what I had written was "repulsive", composed out of an "arrogance borne by only the most zealous of racists". Because of my "filth and drivel", I should be dismissed from The Daily Telegraph, and the paper should apologise. Just in case the point was missed, the MAB reminded the paper of the lessons of the Salman Rushdie affair. It also referred readers to a website, IslamOnline.net which globalises the denunciation of my column with a what should happen to non-Muslims who insult the Prophet ("In Islam, it is well known that the punishment for the one who insults the Prophet is to be killed… However, we Muslims are advised to be forgiving and pardoning.") Who are the Muslim Association of Britain? I've been looking them up. They have close links to the extremist Muslim Brotherhood, one of whose leaders, Qutb, advocated takfir, the branding of all Muslims as infidels unless they conform to sharia. Some MAB activists support Hamas and its policy of suicide bombing. One of its senior chaps, Azzam Tamimi, has boasted of this "human bomb" against the Israelis: "We love death, they love life." The IslamOnline website is the mouthpiece of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi. It debates, among other things, whether the best treatment for homosexuals is 100 lashes or chucking them over a cliff, and Qaradawi rejects interfaith dialogue in favour of "the language of the sword and force". The Taqwa Bank, of which he is a shareholder, has had its assets seized by the US Treasury because of its suspected terrorist links. On the same programme on which Miss Mactaggart appeared (Radio 4's Today), a spokesman for the MAB popped up to support the religious hatred law and said that people should not be allowed to shout things like "Bin Laden" at Muslims in the street. (By the way, why does he see that, from his point of view, as an insult?) So here we have a body with activists who support the killing of Israeli Jews, telling people in Britain that they must stop displaying religious intolerance - all of this listened to respectfully by the BBC. I am trying to avoid the word "Orwellian", but I can't. It will be said, and it is true, that the MAB does not represent moderate Muslims. But one has to wonder, different though their tone undoubtedly is and personally decent though most of them clearly are, whether moderate Muslims really disagree with the extremist doctrines. I have not been able, for example, to get the MCB (the main moderate organisation) unequivocally to condemn the killing or kidnapping of British soldiers in And it is clear from Iqbal Sacranie's piece that he thinks that what he calls "taking liberties with the Prophet" should be against the law. In a country where taking and exercising liberties is a profoundly important part of our way of life, that is not a moderate position. And even when moderate views are held, are they acted on? Elsewhere in this paper today, we report the secret meeting that recently took place at Clarence House in the presence of the Prince of Wales. The idea, prompted by the Christian contingent, was to try to shift Muslim attitudes to "apostasy". All the main Islamic schools of law state that apostasy – the abandonment of one's Muslim faith - is punishable by death. That is the law in several Muslim states – the prevalent, mainstream teaching of the religion whose critics the Government now proposes to criminalise. What happened at Clarence House was interesting. The distinguished Muslim delegation agreed that the law on apostasy was extremely unsatisfactory and should be changed. They were adamant, however, that this was something about which Christians should say nothing – even though the Nigerian archbishop present explained that members of his flock are being murdered under the apostasy law - and that it was not a matter that Muslims could pursue in public at this time. What they were saying, really, was: "We're too frightened to do anything." And that is the worst of it. The word "Islamophobia" is thrown at people who criticise some aspects of current Islamic thought. But "phobia" means fear, and I suspect that it is moderate Muslims who are, in that sense, Islamophobic, frightened of what the Islamists are turning their faith into. They cannot find the courage and the words to get to grips with the huge problem that confronts Islam in the modern world. This is: how does a belief system founded, in part, on conquest, and preaching a virtual identity between religious and political power, live at ease in plural, free, secular societies? Instead of answering this question, they tend to attack the people who ask it, and ask for special laws to silence them. I don't want to give offence, but I'd just like to wish all my readers, whatever their faith, a very happy Christmas. Comment On This Article:    |
Charles Moore is one of the thought leaders of the game. The latest boundary to be pushed is one accusing the Prophet (pbuh) of being a paedophile. The question is dressed up as a piece opposing the proposed incitement to religious hatred law. Many of us have written to the Telegraph and some got letters printed others didn’t. 