Not Mulling It Over

What an appalling faux pas! One has to conclude that our new Archbishop of Canterbury certainly did not mull it over carefully when deciding to give the Hubert Walter Award for Reconciliation and Interfaith Cooperation to a Pakistani Imam. Then some awkward person pointed out that Imam Ashrafi has suggested that Osama Bin Laden should have been honoured as a “Sword of Allah”, in response to Salman Rushdie’s knighthood. So what did this bimbo bishop do? She has withdrawn this award, a sort of clerical Hokey Cokey.

Yes, it seems to me that Archbishop Mullally really has not thought this one through at all. For a start, this award is supposed to be for “reconciliation and interfaith cooperation”, so why give this award to any Pakistani imam? If there is so much reconciliation and interfaith cooperation going on in Pakistan, then why are Christians in that country still living in fear? Sometimes it is Muslim mob violence, with the Pakistani police standing by doing little or nothing, and sometimes the Pakistani Christians have to endure government-backed persecution, including the blasphemy laws.

As well as providing a refuge for Osama Bin Laden, Pakistan also seems to be very good at producing rapists and paedophiles. Is it true that the Pakistani grooming gangs in the UK may have abused as many as 250,000 white girls? Well, you only have to look at Imam Ashrafi’s wife in the photo to understand Islam’s degradation and humiliation of women. The Pakistani Ulema Council claimed that wearing these dreadful black head coverings is her “personal and religious right”. No, it isn’t. The niqab is an insult and a betrayal of all those brave women, both in the UK and elsewhere, who for many years have campaigned and struggled for equality and women's rights. Why do we now have a female Archbishop of Canterbury? Isn't that because many men (and women) in the UK have accepted the idea that women can do the same jobs as men? Therefore for the Archbishop to present this award to Imam Ashrafi, with his wife standing next to him in her dreadful black thing, was the most appalling hypocrisy. Denmark, that liberal and progressive country, has made the public wearing of the niqab illegal. Let us hope that the British government will soon follow Denmark's excellent example.

There was more ecclesiastical Hokey Cokey with the tapestry. First it was in Leeds Cathedral, then it was taken out, and no, they did not shake it all about. Stitched on the tapestry were hundreds of names of those who have been killed in Gaza, but then someone pointed out that eighteen of those names belonged to people who were members of terrorist organizations.

As if all this was not enough, Archbishop Mullally has recently been to Ghana. Now she supports "Project Spire", a plan for the Church of England to give £100 million from "reparations" for slavery. But what about Africans acknowledging that very often they themselves were involved in the slave trade, selling their own countrymen to the foreign slave traders? Yes, British ships transported slaves for the notorious "middle passage", but who bought the slaves at the other end? Not surprisingly, many churches throughout the UK are deeply unhappy about Project Spire, at a time when many parishes do not even have priests and a lot of church buildings need to be repaired and renovated. And by the way, how about some European countries receiving reparations from the Muslims who enslaved them?