The Middle is Always Evil

The British government has officially adopted sharia law. Special “Sharia courts” have been set up that have the authority to arbitrate among Muslims according to Muslim law and tradition; the rulings of these courts carry the full weight of British law, and are enforced by the British government. The courts can rule on any range of civil issues, from financial disputes to divorce and domestic violence; I find this to be laughably absurd.

In order for a government to work properly and efficiently, it must govern according to an objective, impartial standard to which all people must adhere with equal consideration; such a standard is commonly referred to as the law. When two governmental bodies operate under different standards, there is a problem of competing governments, which inevitably results in mobbery and thugs with guns ruling hand over fist. What muddles this particular issue so much is that in this case, the conflicting parties are courts sanctioned by the same government. How can one government faithfully execute the laws according to two different standards, two different value-systems? It cannot. To put it simply: “No man can serve two masters.” Mark my words: this flawed system will prove to be a problem for the organs of the British government in the near future; worries over a “parallel legal system” seem small when the potential damage of this move is fully considered.

It must be noted, however, that currently, the Sharia courts are not mandatory for anyone; Muslims who wish to live under normal, British Common Law are free to do so. The choice is theirs. But what is to say that a Muslim man will not force his wife to attend Sharia court, where the beatings he gave her are sanctioned, or are at least met with a much less severe penalty than that of the normal courts of England? In divorce cases, like all others, Sharia law favors men, who are usually permitted retain all of their assets, in addition to some of their wife’s. The British government’s sanction of this kind of tribunal is disturbing, and it sets a dangerous precedent.

What has really happened here is the British have ceded Her Majesty’s Government to Islamic Totalitarians, people (men, mostly) who feel that it is their duty to Allah to convert the entire world to Islam, by force if necessary. But there are two kinds of Islamic Totalitarians; there are those that we see (the gentlemen in masks on television, who fire AK47’s into the air on the streets of Pakistan), and there are those who choose to remain largely unseen. These men do not wear masks or carry AK47’s, they wear suits, and they carry briefcases. They talk about Muslim discrimination, and demand special treatment and rights because of their religion; they talk about benefiting British society as a whole, “through the promotion of Islam and Islamic values,” a quote I pulled off of The Islamic Society of Britain’s website. Think long and hard about what is meant by “Islamic values,” and you will realize that it is men such as this that we should be paying attention to, with equal if not greater intensity than the men with the guns.

We have already seen Muslims attempt to use the force of government to restrict the freedom of speech of individuals in the West. Now the situation has become more severe; a dangerous precedent has been set by the British government, one that cannot go unchallenged here in the United States.