What part of "One law for all" doesn't he get?
First it was the Archbishop of Canterbury, and now the Lord Chief Justice of Great Britain has said UK law should make room for Islamic sharia law:
The most senior judge in England yesterday gave his blessing to the use of sharia law to resolve disputes among Muslims.
Lord Chief Justice Lord Phillips said that Islamic legal principles could be employed to deal with family and marital arguments and to regulate finance.
He declared: 'Those entering into a contractual agreement can agree that the agreement shall be governed by a law other than English law.'
In his speech at an East London mosque, Lord Phillips signalled approval of sharia principles as long as punishments - and divorce rulings - complied with the law of the land.
But his remarks, which back the informal sharia courts operated by numerous mosques, provoked a barrage of criticism.
I'm not surprised. Lord Phillips shows an almost complete ignorance of the terrible disadvantages faced by women under sharia, for example. And even in the situation the Chief Justice describes, no one under contract law can sign away their rights under the law, as they would surely have to do if they agreed to be bound by sharia. I'm sure that rule holds as true in England as it does here.
This is just another very stupid step away from the principle of one law for all and toward a multiculturalist patchwork that looks away from the worst abuses in the name of "tolerance." The prospect appalled moderate Muslims in Britain:
Muslim and Christian politicians expressed fears that at a time of heightened tensions, encouraging Muslims to live by their own distinct rules could make it harder for different communities to integrate.
Khalid Mahmood, Labour MP for Birmingham Perry Bar and a practising Muslim, said that allowing sharia in parts of the UK would be divisive.
He said: "This would create a two-tier society. It is highly retrograde. It will segregate and alienate the Muslim community from the rest of British society.
"The majority of British Muslims want to live only under British law and they would reject anything that means they are treated differently.
"What Lord Phillips and the archbishop are discussing is something that is completely outside their area of understanding."
LINKS: Hot Air and Melanie Phillips, who makes the following acerbic observation on the Lord Chief Justice's choice of venue for his speech:
One final point about Lord Phillips’s craven naivety. At the beginning of his talk, he disclosed for the very first time that he has Jewish ancestry in that his maternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants to Britain. He presumably vouchsafed this information, which he has never before made known in public, in order to ingratiate himself with his Muslim audience on the presumed grounds that they would warm to his identifying a common experience with them of being in some sense an outsider to the culture.
However, he delivered his address at the London Muslim Centre. This centre shares the ideology of Jamaat e Islami, an extremist Islamist organisation which aims to Islamise the state and follows the teachings of Maulana al Maududi, who believed that the Jews worshipped Satan. The dignatory who opened the Centre a few years ago was one Sheikh Abdur-Rahman al-Sudais, who has in the past called the Jews ‘calf-worshippers, prophet-murderers, prophecy-deniers... the scum of the human race whom Allah cursed and turned into apes and pigs.. these are the Jews, a continuous lineage of meanness, cunning, obstinacy, tyranny, licentiousness, evil and corruption’.
This is where Lord Phillips chose to use his Jewish background to grovel to those who would destroy the very values which afforded his maternal grandparents sanctuary. How can England’s most important judge be quite so clueless?
It's simple, Melanie: he's a well-meaning idiot, a perfect candidate for dhimmitude.
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