Islam

Canon Andrew White is one of the bravest men you could ever meet. He is the Anglican vicar of St George’s Church in Baghdad and has continued his service in that country throughout its recent horrors. He has lost hundreds of members of his congregation but he has remained an extraordinary, humbling and hope-giving presence throughout recent years. But now, with ISIS having taken over Mosul and surrounding areas in recent hours, he says that things are worse than at any point in the last decade. This, Nineveh, is the heartland of Iraqi Christianity. In this heart-breaking call for help, Canon White writes: ‘Iraq is now in its worst crisis since the 2003 war.

Following Freddy Gray’s piece yesterday about the pundits’ efforts to exploit the ‘Trojan Horse’ affair in order discredit ‘faith’ schools, I thought you might be interested in the statement below, from the Catholic Education Service, which pretty well sums up the argument. One person the CES may have in its sights when it talks about the charge of indoctrination is the former Education Secretary, David Blunkett, who observed yesterday that: there was a ‘muddle’ in the heart of government when it comes to religious schooling. ‘Our society does need an open, liberal — small ‘l’ — curriculum that embraces all faiths and no faiths, and teaches children to think for themselves ...

Attending public executions, whether beheadings or stonings, is not my predilection, yet one does come across them in the course of life in Arabia and Pakistan. Beheading and stoning are the accepted penalties for a range of presumed offences in much of the Muslim world, and the all-male crowd — especially the old men — push and shove outside Riyadh’s main mosque after Friday morning prayer for a better view of offenders losing their heads by the ceremonial sword. The seeping cadavers and their heads are left on the tarmac pour encourager les autres.

Just over a week ago a gunman opened fire at the Jewish museum in Brussels. Four Jews – including two Israeli tourists – were killed, shot in the face and throat. The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said immediately after the killings, and before a suspect had even been identified: ‘This act of murder is the result of constant incitement against Jews and their state. Slander and lies against the State of Israel continue to be heard on European soil even as the crimes against humanity and acts of murder being perpetrated in our region are systematically ignored. Our response to this hypocrisy is to constantly state the truth.’ It looks like Netanyahu was right.

Pastor James McConnell of the Metropolitan Tabernacle in Belfast has gone and done it. He declared in a sermon that: "Islam is heathen, Islam is satanic, Islam is a doctrine spawned in hell”. Golly. Not since the Rev Ian Paisley got the boot into the pope as Old Redsocks and indeed as the Scarlet Woman herself have we heard anything quite so robust in the way of religious rhetoric. (Oddly enough, there was something almost lyrical about it; he had lovely cadences.) But the anti-popery tradition is precisely the context these remarks should be seen in. Evangelical Protestantism has a thing about false prophets; it also has a thing about telling it like it is.

It doesn't matter. It really doesn't. At least not very much. The notion, apparently scandalous, that the Great British food market is being contaminated - sorry, infiltrated - by meat slaughtered according to traditional religious practices is the most #MiddleClassProblem of the year. I mean, you know it's serious when Waitrose is in the dock. Waitrose! Now I can see that there is a case for requiring meat slaughtered without the animal being stunned to be labelled as such. But, as Melanie McDonagh concedes, the proportion of livestock slaughtered in this fashion is tiny. Perhaps 10% of sheep but only 3% of cattle and 4% of poultry. A reasonable person might conclude that the attention devoted to this newly-discovered problem is as hysterical as it is disproportionate.