Britain’s The Sun Calls Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams a “Burkha”

By Lucy Jones


	Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, leader of the world’s Anglicans, leaves a memorial service at the Great St. Mary’s Church in Cambridge, England, Feb. 9, 2008 (AFP photo/Ben Stansall).

THE ARCHBISHOP of Canterbury’s Feb. 7 remarks that the adoption of aspects of shariah law in Britain “seems unavoidable” sparked a furor in the nation’s press.

Dr. Rowan Williams told a BBC program that the U.K. had to “face up to the fact” that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system. Adopting parts of Islamic shariah law would help maintain social cohesion, he argued, noting that, for example, Muslims could choose to have marital disputes or financial matters dealt with in a shariah court. Muslims should not have to choose between “the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty,” he added.

“What a burkha,” declared Britain’s tabloid Sun newspaper the following day. “The whole nation is appalled and outraged and incredulous that Rowan Williams should come out with such dangerous claptrap,” it said, adding, “It is hard to see how Williams can cling on to his job.”

“Dr. Williams has created the impression that some groups should be able to opt out of British society,” opined the Feb. 9 edition of another tabloid, the Daily Mirror. “Custom and community count, but Britain’s laws are paramount,” it said.

The archbishop’s idea of a “sort of parallel legal system,” is “intolerable,” The Independent waded in the same day.

“Dr. Williams claims that he merely wishes to increase social cohesion and promote tolerance in Britain,” the paper noted. “But all he has succeeded in doing is fan the flames of hostility to Muslims. This intervention was a naïve blunder and one which we trust the archbishop will not repeat in a hurry.”

London Times veteran columnist Matthew Parris wrote on Feb. 9 that those who read Williams’ speech will see that his argument “turns upon the freedom of the group member to ‘opt out’ of the ‘supplementary jurisdiction’ and choose British law instead.” But, Parris argued, “repressive faith groups make it culturally difficult—sometimes well-nigh impossible—for a member to opt out.”

He concluded: “The State, not family, faith or community is the guarantor of personal liberty and intellectual freedom, and it will always be to the State, not the church, synagogue or mosque, that the oppressed individual needs to look.”

A Times editorial on the same day argued that the archbishop should better understand his own role. “He should not render himself mute,” it wrote, “but he has to choose his priorities with more acumen and has to weigh the probable impact of his statements considerably more forensically as is his habit. If there is no sign that Dr. Williams comprehends what his role should be, then it is, to borrow his odd contention about shariah, ‘unavoidable’ that his future will be questioned.”

According to London’s Guardian of Feb. 9, “Dr Williams’ naïveté played a major part in the treatment he has attracted, particularly the casual way in which he flung the explosive term “shariah law” into the debate. This was the stuff of seminars and was never going to register in the mass market without being boiled down into sound bites. The archbishop did not do that, ensuring others would. As a result, this most humane of men finds himself being caricatured as supporting the severing of limbs,” the paper pointed out.

Independent’s Fisk Compares Mughniyeh to Bin Laden and Bush

The assassination of top Hezbollah leader Imad Mughniyeh in a Feb. 12 car bombing in Damascus fueled speculation as to who had killed him.

Mughniyeh was one of the world’s most wanted men, and until the events of 9/11 was alleged to have been involved in the killings of more U.S. citizens than anyone else in the world. He was said to have masterminded the 1983 U.S. Marine barracks bombing in Lebanon and thought to have been involved in the kidnapping of Western hostages in Lebanon in the 1980s. He was identified as the man behind the hijacking of a TWA jet bound for Rome in 1985 and is suspected of playing a role in the bombing of the Israeli embassy in Argentina in 1992.

“It was no surprise that Hezbollah blamed Israel’s Mossad secret service for the killing,” wrote the U.K. Guardian’s Ian Black on Feb. 13. “Israel saw him as the terrorist ‘mastermind’ behind the planning for Hezbollah’s July 2006 war with the Jewish state, which began with the audacious cross-border kidnapping of Israeli soldiers the organization hoped to swap for Lebanese prisoners,” he noted.

“If Israel was behind the assassination—and it has strongly rejected any involvement—it will be seen as a deliberate signal that it could target leaders of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, which has offices in the Syrian capital,” Black continued.

“Another possibility is that the bombing was the work of agents linked to the pro-Western Beirut government, which is at odds with the Shi’i organization and its Syrian backers,” he said. “The CIA has been pursuing Mughniyeh for years,” Black also pointed out.

According to The Daily Telegraph’s Con Coughlin the same day, however, “the manner of his death suggests Israel’s Mossad was more likely to have been responsible for the assassination, rather than Washington.

“Although Mughniyeh inflicted more carnage against America than he did against Israel, the Israelis have never forgotten his involvement in the Buenos Aires bombings and, just as they hunted down the perpetrators of the Munich Olympics massacre, they were never going to allow Mughniyeh to die peacefully of old age in his bed,” Coughlin continued.

Robert Fisk of Britain’s Independent, who met Mughniyeh when he had pleaded for the release of U.S. journalist Terry Anderson, kidnapped in 1985, described him on Feb. 14 as “a man of frightening self-confidence, of absolute self-belief, something he shared with Osama bin Laden and—let us speak frankly about this—with President George W. Bush.”

Concluded Fisk: “Live by the sword, as they say, and you die by the sword.”

Differing Views on Kosovo’s Declaration of Independence

“Kosovo has been a success of liberal interventionism,” said the UK’s Independent on Feb. 17, the same day the mostly secular Muslim province declared independence from Serbia.

“Two things are clear,” the newspaper editorialized. “One is that it was absolutely right to stand up to the Serbian nationalism epitomized by Slobodan Milosevic. The most shameful policy of John Major’s government was its appeasement of aggression in the Balkans, standing aside from ‘ethnic cleansing.’ The Kosovo war of 1999 finally put an end to all that. As a result, Milosevic fell and Serbia began the long journey to joining the international community.

“The other is that it should have been obvious in 1999 that Serbia had lost Kosovo, although it would have been tactless to say it. It has taken a long time for that inevitability to work itself out, but that is no bad thing,” it continued. “The intervening years have allowed adjustments to bruised Serbian pride. In that time, the Serbian people have come to see their future as lying in the European Union, and that pragmatic ambition has brought about, at some level, a grudging acceptance of the facts on the ground.”

The BBC’s world affairs correspondent Paul Reynolds, however, warned the same day that the “diplomatic gulf between Russia and many Western governments is widening with the declaration of independence by Kosovo.” He explained, “What the United States and many EU countries see as the inevitable result of war and history is regarded as ‘immoral and illegal’ in the words of Russian President Vladimir Putin. East and West,” he concluded, “are still divided.”

Berlin’s Deeper Afghanistan Involvement Called a “Responsible Decision”

Germany’s decision to send over 200 Bundeswehr combat troops to northern Afghanistan, announced on Feb. 6, signaled the country crossing “a magic line,” said Die Welt the following day.

“After ignoring for years the cries for help from the allies, it’s now high time that German politics came clean with the population about what’s necessary for a successful operation in Hindu Kush, that the Bundeswehr’s main job is not civilian reconstruction but to militarily ensure security so that reconstruction is possible in the first place,” the paper opined.

“All the NATO partners, such as Britain and the Netherlands and especially the Canadians, who lost 60 men over a short time in hostilities with the Taliban, have pushed Germany for more assistance,” it noted.

“It’s a responsible decision,” echoed Bild Zeitung of Feb. 7. “It overturns the picture that the government has painted so far of the Afghanistan mission—of a military mission that could somehow be different, somehow more civil than that of the big NATO states,” the newspaper added. “Germany’s special role has definitely come to an end.”

“The growing criticism from the U.S., Canada and Britain over the German involvement in Afghanistan is justified,” commented the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung the same day. “Chancellor Merkel doesn’t have much success to show, either militarily or in reconstruction.”

The German daily criticized the breadth of the mission, saying that 3,000 Bundeswehr soldiers in the relatively safe northern region of Afghanistan and 60 police trainers were not enough.

“Apparently, the Social Democratic Party and the Christian Democratic Union would, for domestic reasons, prefer to let the NATO alliance and 24 million Afghans slide deeper into crisis than massively expand the German mission to Hindu Kush,” the paper remarked.

British Universities Issued “Tool Kits” To Prevent Extremist Behavior

“University leaders in Britain have agreed to inform police of any extremist behavior by students or visiting speakers that they suspect may lead to terrorism,” reported the London Times on Jan 22.

A new “tool kit” for universities issued by Universities Minister Bill Rammell advises universities to draw up a national watch list of guest speakers who should be banned from speaking on campus, the newspaper said. Universities were also urged to set up multifaith chaplaincies, rather than separate prayer rooms for different faiths, to promote integration and prevent pockets of extremists forming, it added.

Lucy Jones is a free-lance journalist based in London.