Author: Douglas Knight

The UK now has a de facto blasphemy law which protects Allah, Mohammed and mosques more than it did in during the modern era the names of Jesus and YHWH or the Church of England. It is ironic that whilst Parliament was legislating to abolish the crimes of blasphemy and blasphemous libel as they related to Christianity, that the vacuum was being filled by politicians, police and the judiciary increasingly taking the view that Islam had to be treated with kid gloves, and blind eyes had to be turned to those professing Muslims who threatened murder and called for ‘Jihad’ against the apostate and the infidel.

But this UN resolution is now becoming a global blasphemy law by stealth. It is titled ‘Combating Defamation of Religion’, and is sponsored by the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and has been approved by the world body annually since 2005. It comes up for renewal again later this year. Whilst it lacks the force of law, it has been used to provide diplomatic cover for Islamic regimes that wish to deny speech that is critical of them.

Cranmer Global Blasphemy Law

All of our faith-based respondents reported ‘?immense religious illiteracy’ on the part of local government officials, politicians and throughout the policy-making community as a whole. As we have said, the view most consistently expressed was that all faiths were ‘?˜private ideas’ or ‘?˜private practices’ with relevance only on one day of the week. This contrasted with a ‘gut feeling’ expressed in other quarters that the Church ‘?is doing a lot around the place’?. Prevalent also was a misinformed belief that across the board ‘Christian churches are declining and relying on ageing white women for their numbers’. Dioceses such as London and Southwark, which have enjoyed an increase in Church attendance and an internationalisation of congregations, would seem to refute such a claim. It is also a statistically contested area of forecasting. Notwithstanding these comments, we were astonished to be told by civil servants that there is no evidence base in government circles on Christian institutions. Indeed, in some quarters the very idea that such an evidence base may be relevant to a modern social or policy agenda seemed fantastic.

Based on our interviews with politicians, government officials and people in the faith communities themselves, we can only conclude that the absence of a ‘churches’ evidence base is grounded in a judgement that churches are not worthy to have even a modest role in government schemes. Such a judgement contrasts strongly with public declarations by Ministers that all of civil society is welcome to the public service reform table and that the government’s agenda is for all faiths rather than for a few. Yet if what we were told is correct, the churches simply do not register on the policy-making radar in serious terms.

Von Hügel Institute report – Moral but no Compass

As a matter of course, BBC writers have blamed crimes against humanity perpetrated by the enemies of the West on the â??root causeâ?? of Western provocation. Occasionally, but more frequently than the casual viewer might appreciate, they have gone a step further and presented the atrocities of totalitarianism as the atrocities of the West.
Maybe they were frightened that they would upset their employers or friends if they wrote honestly. More probably, contemporary liberal ideology has so enveloped them, they cannot understand the implications of their own work.
For whatever reason, the BBC still had the brass neck to show fanatically racist white Christian sectarians beheading a moderate Muslim, when nowhere in the world are white Christians, fanatically racist or otherwise, beheading Muslims.
Subconsciously, the executives of BBC Drama must have registered the terrors of our time. The dogma of their social set, however, has imprisoned them in a looking-glass world where Left becomes Right, Right becomes Left and the crimes of one side become the crimes of the other.

Nick Cohen

One week after the beginning of the violence in Orissa, thousands of people, most of them Christian, are still hiding in the forests or have found refuge in the shelter camps set up by the government. According to the latest figures, there are at least 6,000 people in the refugee camps, and 5,000 hiding in the forests around Kandhamal, but the number of refugees could soon reach 10,000. Today, in Bhubaneswar, a protest demonstration is planned in front of the state government headquarters in Orissa, organized by the activists of the Global Council of Indian Christians (GCIC), following the closing of Catholic schools yesterday all over India. About 25,000 institutes closed their doors, while the students and teachers marched peacefully through the streets of the country calling for an end to the violence against Christians.

Asia News.
And see the All India Christian Council and Mission India for more news.