Bloody Moslems again

Well, actually not Moslems, but the West Midlands Police, insofar as the two groups can be meaningfully distinguished. Firstly the Channel 4 documentary, where they had to admit there wasn’t any real reason to hassle the programme for distorting what imams had been recorded as saying in the Green Lane Mosque and elsewhere. Yes, they did praise Osama bin Laden, yes, they did call for the murder of gay men, yes, they did describe the 98% of the population who are not Moslems as “filthy” and “unclean”. But in a sense it's fairly easy to follow the thought processes of the police. If these truths were to be admitted, it’s fairly clear that the police would be under pressure to close these mosques and arrest a few people. And they thought – possibly rightly – that this would lead to serious, and possibly violent, confrontation. So best, perhaps, to turn their fire on the programme-makers who had uncovered these inconvenient truths.

And then, more recently, a couple of American evangelists being told that they shouldn’t go evangelising in the Alum Rock area of Birmingham as it was a Moslem area and evangelising there counted as a “hate crime”. By a Police Community Support Officer, no less. And if the Americans came back, they were warned that they might be beaten up, with the strong implication that they should not expect any assistance from the police in that case.

Well, obviously this Keystone Kop had no authority to say anything of the sort, still less to submit the Americans to a harangue on US policy in Afghanistan and Iraq, which he did. But he had clearly worked out which way the wind was blowing in our second city.

Firstly, where Moslems predominate in an area, they want complete control, and we would be well advised to grant this. As a result, anyone trying to exercise natural British freedoms is being unreasonable and provocative, as Moslems prefer to be unchallenged in their own areas.

Well, I suppose we can still choose whether we are prepared to accept this situation or not. I’m happy to go down to Alum Rock any time. Not that there isn't enough of this sort of work to be done right here in Lancaster.