Historic Evening of Debate: Muslims and the BNP

http://www.thedebateinitiative.com/#/press/4533600579

It was nothing like Question Time. The audience were politely invited to to take their seats. Many knew each other, and chatted before the debate started, 15 minutes late. CNN, Channel 4 and BBC Arabic were there, apparently. The Moderator Paul Williams stressed the importance of free speech and civility as well as that of not rambling on off topic.

The first to speak was Jeffrey Marshall of the BNP who sat between Alan Craig of the Christian Alliance Party and Robin Tillbrook of the English Democrats. Polite applause.

Jeffrey Marshall began by saying that it was a privilege to be invited and a honour to be there. He spoke of the undeniable Islamification of parts of London and other parts of the country that are clearly Muslim-majority and of brown on white violence, with particular reference to the assault of a priest in the East End, whom Muslims called "a fucking priest". Though apparently inflammatory, he ended up by saying that perhaps the Muslims and the BNP do have a number of things in common:

1. their opposition to the invasion of Muslim lands
2. disapproval of homosexuality and
3. support of family values

"Finally, I would like to re-emphasise what Nick Griffin referred to recently on Question Time as a truce with Muslims. I would remind you that the Labour government has colluded in the murder of some 800,000 Muslims in its wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. The Conservatives also support the war. Why Muslims would vote for either of these parties I simply cannot understand.

The BNP has always been against the war and we intend to withdraw our troops immediately from Afghanistan.

The BNP and Muslims were right all along about not invading Muslim lands.

We have other things in common too. The BNP and Muslims both support family values.

According to a survey carried out this year, 63% of British Muslims thought that the death penalty was morally acceptable. 77% said they strongly identify with the UK and numbers of Muslims who thought that homosexuality was morally acceptable was 0%."

It seems to me that Muslims could do a lot worse than vote BNP."

It would seem that the BNP is now soliciting the ethnic vote.

This was in direct contrast to the studio audience at White City during the filming of Question Time were on the hand whipped up to a frenzy of anti-rightism that they booed at a black man for daring to express socially conservative views, I was told by someone who was there.

Alan Craig, an eloquent speaker, craggy and distinguished, was the Christian Liberal who wanted to ban the niqab, because he felt it was "anti-social". When he complained that if he felt he "could not have a relationship with woman in niqab" when an outraged woman in a niqab took him to task for saying he would ban it, we all fell about laughing at the unintentional suggestiveness of his remark.

Most surprising of all was the question and statement of a Nationalist (a euphemism for BNP), who made an eloquent speech to the effect that it was the "LibLabContrick" who were dividing and ruling those it sought to control, who criminalised both Muslims and Nationalists from saying what they regard as the truth. He at any rate knew that the enemy was not Islam, but the "LibLabContrick" who started wars and then used paranoid thoughtcrime legislation to silence dissent. "We know Muslims are not our enemy," he declared. The Muslim holding the mike for him smiled with the surprise of this declaration of non-hostility from a party whose Chairman once called Islam "an evil and vicious faith".

An angry large man seethed with rage when Abdullah Al Andalusi (representing Islam on the panel) - an attractive, bearded and engaging young man of Portuguese extraction who is an ex-Christian - appeared to have all the answers. The gist of it was:

"How dare these foreigners come to our country and just sweep our traditions and our religion away, telling us they know what is better for us? How dare they think they know better? Worse, how dare they appear to know our religion better than we do by quoting the Bible at us? Especially that bit in Timothy which proves that Christians also oppress their women, like all other religions? http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Timothy+2%3A11-12&version=NIV Grrrrr!"

The angry large man said he was a Christian with a small "c". This to my mind meant not really Christian, but from a Christian background - a Cultural Christian who does not really believe that Christ is Son of God, who finds hymns and churches reassuring and only goes at Christmas or Easter, who might attend more regularly if this meant the difference between his children going to a decent church school rather than a sink comp or going private. But such a person will have formed no view on the Holy Trinity and is agnostic about the divinity of Christ, or prefers not to discuss it because that would be opening a can of worms.

Angry large man was mocked by Alan Craig who said he did not know what "Christian with a small c" meant, though it was clear to me that he wanted spires and churches to be in his landscape, rather than mosques and minarets. Alan Craig himself campaigned vigorously against the Olympics mega mosque but said he didn't mind smaller ones more befitting the religion of a minority faith. (Personally, I wanted it to go ahead because it looked nothing like a traditional mosque and looked like one of those impossibly curvy ultra modern buildings the Chinese were madly building in Beijing in the run-up to the Olympics. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article1853589.ece)

Even if there were no Muslims beetling around in black to annoy, alienate and alarm Christians committed or merely cultural, no mosques and minarets to clutter up the British landscape, we would all be faced with changes we find unwelcome.

"O tempora! O mores!" was surely a complaint as old as the hills even when the Romans themselves uttered it.

Another in the audience, was outraged by the Reverend Frank Gelli's story about the ladybirds. (It is spring. Here they come. What can you do? Moral of the story: You bring yourself to love ladybirds and all will be well. But I wondered: "What if they are not ladybirds but cockcroaches? Or fleas carrying the bubonic plague?") "It means," an distinguished-looking elderly man hissed to me later after the debate, in horror and disgust, "that we have no choice but to get used to this, this ... infestation!"

At one point the meeting was disrupted by the BNP's most persistent "followers". A UAF man upstairs shouted something about "Nazi scum on the panel". There was a collective groan of exasperation. Did someone say "Oh, get a life"? At any rate, he was swiftly removed.

The leader of the English Democrats, Robin Tillbrook, received the least attention, simply because he did not address the question on Islamification but merely took the opportunity of setting out his stall and proclaiming the virtues of his party, with a membership of just over 3200. (The BNP have over 10,000 last time I heard and may have considerably more now.) They too had impeccable Islamophobic credentials but weren't racists like the BNP. And they are English and did not visit Libya in the hope of getting a bit of money from Colonel Gadaffi like Nick Griffin did in 1986. Vote for the English Democrats who are just as Islamophobic but English and not racist. Er, that's it (as Private Eye would put it).

When Jeffrey Marshall declared that the BNP would ban the niqab and not allow any old foreign to just come here and do as they pleased, because the niqab was simply an affront to the English, in opposition to our cultural traditions and frankly just annoying, the woman in front of me sitting with the English Democrat contingent spontaneously burst into applause, which others joined in, accompanied by protests of indignation from some Muslims.

The pleasure of that evening for me was that I found myself applauding in turn everyone on the panel for making really quite good points, with the exception of Robin Tillbrook, who didn't really get a chance to speak after his opening speech because no one had any question to ask him about the English Democrats, or sought his opinion about Islamification since he used the time allocated to him to talk exclusively about his party.

The views expressed were diverse, at times strident, and the emotions and intellect were engaged. Good speeches were made from the panel and the floor and the evening was entertaining, informative and civil.

I believe the position on the niqab was this: Alan Craig, Jeffrey Marshall in favour of banning it and Abdullah, Reverend Frank Gelli and Andrew Copson of the Humanist Associaton against banning it. I cannot remember Robin Tillbrook's view or indeed whether he was asked.

It seems clear to me that Islam - because it is holistic, coherent and "faith-lite", because it does not require Muslims to believe in the impossible, ie the divinity of their prophet, because their religion is framed in legalistic principles and drafted like a contract between God and Man - will now trump Christianity, especially now when the West is out of money, out of ideas and the Catholic Church with its celibate priests tragically associated with paedophilia, the Anglican Church with openly gay priests and female bishops but worst of all, the fundamentalist Christians insisting that believing in Creationism is a badge of Christianity. (The Koran's theory on the Creation would have no quarrel with current scientific theory. http://www.creationofuniverse.com/html/science_01.html)

What is however most attractive about Islam, for those who do not wish to persecute homosexuals but want to show disapproval, is that it is abundantly clear that the Koran would tolerate them, while judiciously denying their relationships from ever acquiring equality with marriage.

Islam does not confer a special privilege on those who do not have sex, ie a corrupt priesthood, and that is what lies at the heart of its appeal: it is for normal people who want to get married and have children, who run businesses and engage in commerce, and who even wage war with each other from time to time.

There was a brief moment of mass bemusement when a woman in the audience asked Abdullah about Martin Luther King, but he misheard and was just stopped by the Moderator from launching into a lecture about Lutheranism, Calvinism and the Reformation. This was probably what the large angry man found so infuriating: that Abdullah had trashed his impression that Muslims are mostly a backward race with a backward religion with not much knowledge about Christianity or much else.

Indeed, there were some in the party who warned against participating in the debate precisely because Muslims had all the answers and were capable of showing that. Abdullah repeated that Sharia law always takes into account human nature, implicitly suggesting that Christianity and other legal systems (eg liberal, Nazi, Communist, Socialist) do not, which is why they eventually fail.

Muslims are all fundamentalists, in the sense that the duties and prohibitions in the Koran are well-drafted enough to be safe to be taken literally, unlike Christianity, which requires judicious selection, excision and supplementation.

Christians repeat their mantra of the absolutely necessity for the separation of Church and State, because the flaws of their religion require this, or the Spanish Inquisition would begin all over again, when anyone who dared question the mysteries of the Trinity would find himself at risk of being tortured and burnt at the stake.

The Koran arguably contains no such flaws and is therefore safe to be taken literally. That has always been the contention of those who practice what they call the "perfect religion" whose God is the God of Politics, Government and Law, whose Koran contain the founding principles of running an economy that would discourage irresponsible borrowing and lending as well as that of consumer law and the Geneva Convention.

If only enough people would read it to argue for or against this contention. Perhaps that could be the subject of the next debate.

http://www.hurryupharry.org/2009/12/11/the-big-dawah-event/