Religious minorities have a difficult, sometimes horrendous, time in Pakistan. In previous posts I have cited the murder of Christians in Gojra (here) and the persecution of the Ahmadi Muslim sect (here) . More recently Shazia Masih, the 12 year old Christian domestic servant of Lahore High Court attorney and former president of the Lahore Bar Association Muhammad Naeem, allegedly has been raped and killed by her well-connected and wealthy employer (here) and three Sikh men who refused to convert to Islam were beheaded by the Taliban in Peshawar (here).

So when the charismatic Wilson Chowdhry of the British Pakistan Christian Association, together with his cousin Alex, asked me recently to join a group of UK-based Sikhs and Christians who were presenting a petition and letter at Downing Street about these atrocities, I accepted with alacrity.

Our joint protest not only covered the Sikh beheadings and the Shazia rape and murder case, but also the urgent need to change the Blasphemy Laws of Pakistan, Sections 298A and 295B & C, which are used to persecute and harass minority faiths in the country.

Besides the BPCA and the Christian Peoples Alliance, the delegation included representatives from the British Sikh Council, United Sikhs and the Sikh Human Rights Group.

As ever, leading, organising and energising the delegation was Wilson:

This is a cause close to my heart and worthy of the support of everyone who sees freedom of speech and religion as vital human rights.

A friend recently drew my attention to an ‘Official Response’ issued to the press on 23rd December by the Muslim Debate Initiative which slates me for comments I made about Islam and women in posts on this blog. The Response was authored by Dr Tabasum Hussain, a UK-born Muslim now living with her family in Canada, and is published in full on the MDI website (here).

On behalf of MDI Tabasum took strong exception to a couple of light asides I made about the lack of women in the their organisation in London: In one post last November I wrote (here) ‘Yes, only guys, no girls of course – this is Islam’, and in a December post I remarked (here) ‘No women of course, this is Islam’.

In her Response Tabasum writes that ‘Mr Craig (makes) ignorant and often hateful comments about Islam in general, and in his failing to get his facts straight about this whole issue he does a great job of highlighting the lack of credibility in anything else he may blurt out against Islam, Prophet Muhammad (saaw), Women, and Muslim organisations.’

Fortunately this is neither true nor is it the view of all Muslims. Indeed in my December post, above, I quote journalist and blogger Umar Farooq who listened to my trenchant views on the niqab (Islamic face veil) and the gender bias inherent in Sharia law at MDI’s own Islamification debate, yet gave me the highest rating of the six panellists (here for Farooq’s full report).

So yesterday I emailed Tabasum as follows:

Dear Tabasum,

I was both surprised and sorry when a friend recently pointed out your Statement on the MDI website dated 21st December: ‘Official response to Head of Christian Peoples Alliance party, Alan Craig’s article: ‘Off with their heads.’’

I was surprised because, regrettably, in your Statement you don’t seem to take any account of my genuine warm regard for the MDI organisers as expressed in my comments such as “I take my hat off (to MDI)”, “The (MDI) event was democracy in action”, “courageous”, “genuinely interested in grappling with the issues”, etc.

I was sorry because, understandably but also regrettably , neither do you attempt answer the main thrust of my 9th November post which was a stonking great criticism of convert Paul Williams’ foul fetid views on the ‘hot issue’ (as he excitedly describes it) of the execution of apostates. I’m pleased Paul has since taken down his offensive post, but he refuses to debate the execution of Islam’s apostates with me and instead has retired upset into his shell. Perhaps he has had a slight taste of the distress that the growing number of people leaving Islam in the UK may feel when they read such murderous drivel.

Instead in your Statement you major on my light-hearted asides: ‘Yes, only guys, no girls of course – this is Islam’ and ‘No women of course, this is Islam’.

The fact that MDI takes such huge exception to my asides about Islam seems to indicate that I’ve touched a raw nerve.

This raw nerve – and Achilles heel, to mix my metaphors – is of course the fact that Islam is at root a misogynistic religion. There are all sorts of explanations for this, most of which go back to the Founder of Islam himself and the in-built inequalities between the genders within the religion. Of course there are exceptions which prove the rule (Benazir Bhutto became Prime Minister of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan less than a decade after Margaret Thatcher was elected Britain’s first and, so far, only female PM). And I don’t doubt you personally are an effective member of MDI, nor that the new appointee in the UK, Nazli Ali, will be too although I’ve yet to meet her.

But at a fundamental level it is impossible for Islam to provide for the intrinsic equality of worth between the genders that, for instance, Christianity offers.

However, we are members of our respective debating organisations so rather than writing Statements, how about us publicly debating the issue? I suggest I propose the motion: ‘This House believes that Islam is misogynistic’. You would be free to respond to the motion as you see fit.

Unfortunately I cannot undertake such a debate during your immediate visit to the UK, although I’m looking forward to attending your debate with Beth Grove on 5th March. But perhaps we could fix it for sometime during your next visit this side of the Atlantic?

With best wishes,

It will be interesting to see if Tabasum accepts the challenge, and also see if she is willing to debate Islam with a member of the opposite sex.

I’ll keep you informed.

Following my criticism of the National Secular Society as an essentially deceitful organisation (here), it’s interesting to find myself in agreement with them for once.

Last August Shamso Miah, described as an unemployed 25 year-old and devout Muslim, left his mosque and went to the East Ham branch of Lloyds TSB, just a couple of hundred metres from Newham Town Hall. There he was involved in a ‘queue rage’ assault on Mohammad Furcan, hitting him three times and breaking his jaw.

Miah came before Cherie Booth QC at Inner London Crown Court on 27 January, and the wife of former Prime Minister Tony Blair gave him a suspended six month sentence plus community service.

But it was her comments that caused a minor storm. According to last week’s Newham Recorder (here), she told Miah that her reason for suspending the jail term was ‘based on the fact that you are a religious person and have not been in trouble before’. She added: ‘You are a religious man and you know that this is unacceptable behaviour’.

But the fact that Miah is a ‘religious man’ (she mentioned it twice) should not of itself qualify him for special treatment. In the UK at least, religious and non-religious people are all equal before the law and what the NSS wittily calls ‘Cheria Law’, with its apparent bias in favour of people of faith, is un-nuanced and inappropriate.

However judges have to take individual and personal factors into account of course and those of previous good character may expect to receive a more lenient sentence than habitual criminals. A law-breaker who is normally embedded in a stable family within a close-knit local community may be less likely to re-offend than a solitary unattached inner-city dweller. And a man who is a leader, earning obscene sums of money from his fans and promoted as a role model for youth such as John Terry, may expect less sympathy in court than ordinary Joe Soap. And in sentencing, religious belief is as relevant as these other personal factors

But spiritual discernment is required to assess such belief as not all religions are the same, and it’s regrettable that most of our judges, like most of society, are religiously illiterate. For instance, as the Royal Navy shows (here), many authorities seem to think Satanism may be treated as the spiritual and moral equivalent of, say, Quakerism. And it’s rare for a member of the media commentariat to throw political correctness to the wind and draw a fair distinction between ‘harmless’ Christianity and ‘sinister’ Islam, as Andrew Brown did recently in the Guardian (here).

Different religions, like different foods, have different effects on their consumers. And good food is good for you while bad food ain’t. And as a case in point, it ought to be blindingly obvious even to our secularised authorities that Devil-worship – including the Admiralty-approved variety – certainly ain’t good for a soul, a ship’s crew or society.

So instead of making blanket catch-all assumptions about ‘religious people’, Ms Booth should have looked at Mr Miah’s particular faith – as well as his crime record, employment status, family and home background, education, etc – and its effect on him personally. Then she could make the right judgement about an appropriate sentence for this particular individual in respect of his particular crime.

I guess we are no longer surprised that the government, led by The Harperson, does its best to write fatherhood out of the script. Men are the cause of the financial crisis (here), are no longer required on the birth certificate (here), and, as Melanie Phillips observed in her usual incisive style, have been reduced to ‘sperm donors, walking wallets and occasional au pairs’ (here).

In theory the church should do better. After all, it was Christ – alone of the founders of the monotheistic faiths – who majored on the fatherhood of God and introduced the possibility of a warm personal relationship with ‘Our Father which art in heaven’ (Matt 6:9; Mark 14:36; Gal 4:6; etc).

So I became concerned at church recently as we prayed through a prayer about Haiti which was projected onto the screen.

Like others I had watched with tears as the human tragedy of the Haiti earthquake unfolded. In particular I had identified with the panic and despair of fathers as they picked frantically with bare hand at the rubble of collapsed buildings, looking for their families inside: I too have young children.

In context the prayer was beautifully empathetic. Someone had emailed it to a member of the church at work and – at the urging of a Muslim colleague who perhaps had felt the compassion in the prose and shared the urge to appeal to the Almighty – he forwarded it to the company’s HR department who in turn published it for all the staff. Not bad for our secular age.

“Lord I thank you… because this morning I woke up and knew where my children were… because my home was still standing… because I am not crying as my spouse, my child, my parent does not need to be buried or pulled out from beneath a pile of concrete…

“Lord I cry out to You, the One who makes the impossible possible, the One who turns darkness into light. I cry out that You give those mothers strength, that You give them the peace that surpasses all understanding…

“(I cry out) that You may open the streets so that help may come… that You may provide doctors, nurses, food, water… Give them peace… hope… courage to go on… Protect the children and shield them with Your power.

“I pray all this in the name of Jesus.”

It was an admirable prayer that I, together with the rest of the congregation, entered into with full but heavy hearts, willing the Lord to answer urgently.

“But hang on,” I thought half way through, “what about the fathers? Why are we praying for mothers in Haiti but not their partners?”

I concluded sadly that the world often impacts the church more than vice versa, and the writer of the prayer – consciously or unconsciously – had simply bought into the secular mindset that ignores the primal social and spiritual importance of fatherhood.

So the invisibilisation of fathers continues apace. The cost to our society, and to the church if she follows suit, will be enormous.

Midnight on Monday found me in BBC Radio 5 Live’s studios at White City discussing faith schools with Keith Porteous Wood of the National Secular Society. We were on Tony Livesey’s late night chat show, and the issue triggering the discussion was the news that Foreign Secretary and avowed atheist David Miliband is avoiding the local state primary school near his home in Camden and sending his five year old adopted son instead to a church school further away (here). Apparently Miliband’s wife Louise attends the Anglican church linked to the school.

It is of course amusingly reminiscent of – but less spectacular than – the decision a few years ago by left-wing former fire-brand Diane Abbott MP to shun local Hackney schools and send her son to the private £10,000-a-year City of London School (here).

But it is the disingenuous nature of Keith Porteous Wood’s National Secular Society that I want to discuss here rather than the hypocrisy or otherwise of David Miliband or Diane Abbott. I’m not surprised that, when push comes to shove, parents want to do the best for their children, nor that the Milibands have chosen a church school in order to achieve this.

But the real hypocrisy and rank cant lies with the NSS, and Keith Porteous Wood is a pleasant and occasionally formidable spokesman for this deceptive organisation. NSS is better described as a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

The organisation likes to present itself as a benign pressure group that aims to achieve an equitable and just secular society in which religious viewpoints are appropriately represented but restricted in public life. “We campaign… against the undue influence of religion in public affairs and education,” purrs the NSS website (here) claiming they also defend values such as human rights and freedom of speech. NSS, it seems, would persuade us that it promotes a sort of ‘procedural secularism’ (to use the jargon) that includes a neutral public square where no religious worldview predominates and where the state benevolently holds the ring between alternative and often competing beliefs and creeds. This secularism entails a separation of religion and state and non-discrimination between religions by the state that guarantees plurality and religious freedom. For historical and pragmatic reasons I personally wouldn’t advocate disestablishing the national church, for instance, but for many people such ‘procedural secularism’ is an attractive way of organising public affairs, and they point to the US and India as societies where religion thrives within a secular framework.

But in fact the National Secular Society offers no such benign vision. Rather it is another vehicle for shrill and aggressive New Atheism, whose intention is not only to ride religion out of public life, but also to attack faith – especially Christianity – wherever it finds it, including in private belief and practice. According to New Atheists, religion should not even be carried on by consenting adults in private. Their virulent strain of ‘ideological secularism’ (to use the jargon again) which attempts to exclude or severely control religion in private as well as public, is what NSS in fact promotes.

How do I know? NSS’s real motives are uncovered by the ‘debaptism’ campaign currently running on the organisation’s website (here) in which we are urged to ‘Liberate yourself from the Original Mumbo-Jumbo that liberated you from the Original Sin you never had!’ For a ‘bit of fun’ you can also purchase from NSS your very own ‘Certificate of Debaptism’ printed, indeed, on quality parchment paper. Yippee!

Baptism of course is a sacred Christian initiation rite as old as the faith itself. It is personal to the believer and his/her family and is carried out in and by the church. It has no impact whatever on public life or wider social policy.

So why is the NSS sticking its nose into our private business? Because it is two-faced, publicly proclaiming its vocation to promote fairness and restrict religious privilege in public life whilst actually using this as a front for its all-consuming anti-Christian crusade.

Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett et al are open and honest about their desire to eradicate Christianity. The duplicitous National Secular Society is not.

And that’s why Keith Porteous Wood could only talk cant about Christian and church schools on Monday night.

This week’s conviction of five Luton Muslim men for the public order offence of ‘using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress’ during the home-coming parade of the Royal Anglian Regiment last March (here) is regrettable and wrong.

Our increasingly unconfident and insecure society is, one by one, closing down the freedoms for which previous generations worked and fought and, inch by inch, reducing public space for the genuine difference and debate that’s the life-blood of democratic vitality and progress. We’ve left behind the glad confident morn of the 18th and 19th centuries when Non-Conformity flourished and many of our freedoms were formed and honed; we’ve used up the public moral capital bequeathed us by the Victorians; we’ve replaced public Christianity with a God-less public secularity (if there is such a word) – and our small-minded restrictive nanny state is the inevitable result.

Commenting on the convictions (here), the often admirable Peter Tatchell – no friend of Christianity as he defines it, of course, since he converted to Science-Is-God in his late teens – is exactly right:

“The conviction of these five men is a dangerous infringement of free speech and the right to protest.

“I abhor everything they stand for, but defend their right to freedom of expression. Even though what they said was offensive to many people, their right to speak their mind is one of the hallmarks of a democratic society.

“They want to destroy our democracy and freedoms. I want to defend these values. If we silence and criminalise their views, we are little better than them…

“Democracy is superior to their proposed theocratic state and we need to prove it by demonstrating that we allow objectionable opinions and contest them by debate, not by repression and censorship…

“I defend their right to express their opinions, even though they are offensive and distressing to many people.

“Insult and offence are not sufficient grounds in a democratic society to criminalise words and actions.

“The criminalisation of insulting, abusive or offensive speech is wrong. The only words that should be criminalised are untrue defamations and threats of violence, such as falsely branding someone as a paedophile or inciting murder…

“The best way to respond to such fanatics is expose and refute their hateful, bigoted opinions.

“Rational argument is more effective and ethical than using an authoritarian law to censor and suppress them.”

There’s more to it than this naturally, and certainly it’s right to protect people from verbal harassment in the workplace and children from verbal persecution and bullying in the playground for instance. But the main thrust of Tatchell’s argument is spot on despite the visible distress to members of the public caused by the Luton protest.

However, while rational argument and debate is central to our democracy, they’re not the only weapon in our democratic armoury. Political satire and mockery has an honourable tradition in the UK and that’s also what we need to do against such malicious effrontery. Lampooning, cartooning, buffooning, spoofing and sending-up is what these men should experience in full measure. Their ears should echo with the derision, mocking and ridicule of the Great British Public as we laugh these wacky but dangerous Islamists, their disreputable Caliphate and their misogynistic Sharia law out of mainstream media and off most public stages.

And we have another weapon of mass derision that someone somewhere has suggested: pork scratchings. Or, if they are in short supply due to the decline in the pub trade (here), bacon rashers.

The next time such men make a similarly offensive public protest, they should be showered with pork scratchings or bacon rashers – in large quantities. No one will be hurt by these soft projectiles and the only people who may object is the local Council who would have to clear up afterwards.

But on this occasion I suspect Luton Council would have been delighted to oblige.

A heartbreaking yet inspirational story from Pakistan seems a good way to start the new year. It’s an incident that created a national hero in that strife-torn country and was fully reported in the US by top news outlet CNN (here), yet – as far as I can discover – seems to have been completely missed by mainstream media on our side of the Atlantic. I only heard about it over Christmas, two months after the event. It’s a story well worth re-telling.

On 20th October a burka-clad suicide bomber approached the double-storey women’s cafeteria at the International Islamic University in Islamabad where some 400 students were dining and socialising. He looked suspicious as female students do not normally veil in women-only areas. He shot and wounded a security guard at the entrance to the dining hall, whereupon 40-year-old caretaker Pervez Masih grabbed him and tried to hold him. The bomber instantly detonated the device, spraying ball-bearings and his own body parts over the entrance area and killing Pervez and three girl students.

“There would have been dozens of deaths had the bomber not been blocked by Pervez Masih,” said a senior university security official.

The caretaker, who reputedly earned just £40 a month and was his family’s sole breadwinner, was immediately proclaimed a hero for his self-sacrifice. “He’s now a legend to us,” one student is quoted as saying. “He saved our lives.”

The Pakistan government promised I million rupees (around £7,500) for Masih’s bereaved family; the university authorities contributed towards burial costs and also offered employment for his widow Shaheen and help with the education of his 3 year old daughter Diya; and student volunteers collected £400 plus toys and clothes for the family.

The interesting twist to this otherwise tragic story is that Pervez Masih came from Pakistan’s often-despised 2% Christian minority which regularly suffers discrimination and persecution in this 96% Muslim country. (‘Masih’ means ‘Messiah’ – Jesus Christ – and is the family name commonly taken as a badge of honour by Christians in Pakistan.)

“He rose above the barriers of caste, creed and sectarian terrorism,” said the rector of the university, Professor Fateh Muhammad Malik. “Despite being a Christian, he sacrificed his life to save the Muslim girls.”

True, but the “despite” betrays the Professor’s world-view. A different world-view would explain instead that it was because he was a Christian that Pervez sacrificed his life for the Muslim girls. His instincts made him follow in the steps of his Master who, the New Testament tells us, ‘gave his life as ransom for many’.

The Muslim bomber blew himself up in order kill others; the Christian caretaker sacrificed himself in order to save others. The Muslim bomber would have anticipated – wrongly and tragically – that his act of suicide and his consequent shaheed (Islamic martyr) status would deliver him straight into Paradise; the Christian caretaker will have known – and has now personally experienced – that his faith, confirmed by his self-sacrifice, would deliver him direct into heaven.

Jesus said it all: “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”

As yet another longest night comes and goes, another Christmas Day passes and another year draws to a close, it seems it is progressively easier each year to discount the glittering lights, the endless partying and the rampant commercialism of the Christmas season and to concentrate instead on the real meaning of the Christmas event.

For me of course it’s to do with the world-transforming event a long time ago in Bethlehem when Christ was born in a manger, and on a silent holy night – while shepherds watched their flocks and the herald angels sang – God became one of us.

But for me also this Christmas once again there has been a profound awareness of the unmerited privilege of living amongst the peace and prosperity of the UK in 2009 when the vast majority of our fellow residents on the globe live in poverty and in war-zones, with famine and without basic essentials, under brutal dictatorships and suffering persecution. There’s a lot wrong with cynical, selfish Britain including our own share of poverty, loneliness and hopelessness, but North Korea, Sudan, Haiti, Myanmar, Bangladesh and Zimbabwe this isn’t.

And just as Christianity provided the necessary spiritual, moral and ethical soil for the flowering of the UK’s (and Europe’s) past vibrancy, creativity and organisational ability that led in turn to our present affluence, so – as even atheist Matthew Parris noted last Christmas (here) – Africa (and by extension every other poverty-stricken and corrupt nation) needs Christ. Such countries – and I would argue all countries – need Him now, they need Him for the long term and they need Him in a big way.

However, that’s not the point of this post. Rather it’s an appeal for a dose of public gratitude for our privileges that could renew our political life and move us on from the present cynical culture of asserting rights and claiming victimhood. Thankfulness towards an ‘other’ would shift our collective attention away from the small-minded self-centredness that cripples us and onto that ‘other’ – onto God if you are religious, or perhaps onto previous generations who gave and sacrificed and provided the basis of our present privileged circumstances if you’re not. Either way, gratitude for what we have been given by the ‘other’ would lift our eyes from ourselves to a more optimistic vision of a more generous future, as gratitude leads in turn to giving.

Maybe we ought to introduce an annual North American-style National Day of Thanksgiving. Held in Canada on the second Monday of October and in the US on the fourth Thursday of November, this holiday was originally religious in nature, to express thanks to God for the harvest. It has since become secular holiday when families get together for Thanksgiving dinner with turkey – a sort of additional secular Christmas but without the commercialism – but there is still an underlying tone of gratitude and generosity.

After all, anything that lifts the UK from its long-term pit of pessimism, suspicion and cynicism would be helpful.

Meanwhile, Happy New Year!

Back in early July, the town hall sent me the following Councillors’ briefing about an incident not far from my home: “At 4pm on Saturday (4th July) 100 people gathered in Green Street, Upton Park, with banners proclaiming “Jesus was Muslim”. At approx 6.45pm a fight broke out. A man being chased by a group of youths of Asian appearance collided with a 328 bus and suffered a head injury… Green Street was closed for a couple of hours.”

In this week’s New Statesman cover story ‘The Muslim Jesus’ (anyone still doubt that religion is rising rapidly up the agenda in secular Britain?), the senior political editor Mehdi Hasan approvingly quotes Jonathan Bartley of the left-leaning Ekklesia think-tank (here): “There is a fundamental tension at the heart of interfaith dialogue that neither side wants to face up to, and that is that the orthodox Christian view of Jesus is blasphemous to Muslims and the orthodox Muslim view of Jesus is blasphemous to Christians.”

Hold those two thoughts for a moment.

Last Thursday I was panellist at a well-promoted ‘Big Debate’ at Conway Hall in Bloomsbury. It was organised by the Muslim Debate Initiative on the subject ‘Islamification of Britain: Myth or Reality?’ (here). Courageously MDI – represented on the panel by Abdullah al Andalusi – had invited the BNP as well as the quietly impressive Andrew Copson from the British Humanist Association, a pleasant but woolly Anglican clergyman billed as ‘Princess Diana’s spiritual adviser’, the chairman of the English Democrats who gave an inappropriate party political puff, and myself. BBC, CNN and Press TV covered the event inside while the militant Unite Against Fascism protested outside against the inclusion of the BNP in the programme.

400 people listened for nearly 3 hours while the six-man panel (no women of course, this is Islam) debated the hot issue. The BNP contribution was muted; Andrew Copson was articulate and credible; Abdullah al Andalusi struggled to convince; questions from the floor were frequently penetrating. At one point two members of UAF broke in to the hall to rant “No platform for fascists”, but they were rapidly shown the door by police and stewards.

I take my hat off to MDI Muslims for organising the event. It went smoothly and to time. The discussion was robust yet respectful. MDI faced down UAF’s objection to their Open Platform policy for the BNP, arguing that it’s better to debate than come to blows. Of course there was no agreed conclusion about the Islamification of Britain, but the event was democracy in action. Debate and discussion is the answer to our differences.

(Journalist and blogger Umar Farooq was the first out of the blocks with a detailed review of the debate including the publication of his YouTube videos of the event (here). Flatteringly, he marked me the highest of the panellists (rating 8/10), reckoned I had “massive influence on the crowd” and thought that the audience were impressed at the way I put my points across. Many thanks Umar!)

So now onto another Muslim ‘Big Debate’, called Jesus 4 Sharia – yes, really (here)! It’s to be held on Friday this week and is being promoted by Islam4UK, the latest front name for the fundamentalist al-Muhajiroun group led by Islamic lawyer and self-publicist Anjem Choudary.

A couple of months ago posters sprouted across Newham – including on my street – and elsewhere, advertising a ‘March 4 Sharia’ from Westminster to Trafalgar Square. Organised by Choudary’s group, it was cancelled at the last minute citing ‘security concerns’ – to the delight both of secular Muslims and of non-Muslims. “Lack of support more like,” muttered pundits and bloggers. Maybe.

Undaunted the irrepressible Choudary has now issued his challenge to Christian leaders to publicly debate Jesus with him a week before Christmas. Like the angry Green Street demonstrators and despite the fact that Islam first appeared 600 years after Christ, Choudary argues that the Founder of Christianity was in fact a Muslim – a view universally affirmed by mainstream Islam. “If Jesus were alive today he would… wholeheartedly embrace the Sharia law of… Muhammad,” Choudary says provocatively.

“Don’t touch this debate,” emailed a friend. But in the NS article Bartley points out that the different Christian and Muslim understandings of Jesus are ‘deal-breakers’ between the faiths. And it is better the differences should be debated rather than fought over, as happened on Green Street in July.

So I’ve contacted Choudary and, together with Christian friend and Islam expert Jay Smith, we’ve taken up the challenge.

Let’s see if Choudary accepts.

(Update: In the event Choudary “postponed” the debate, admitting that he was having difficulties in obtaining a venue. He also said that Jay Smith and I were not of appropriate calibre for such a topic and audience, and that he would prefer to debate with a particular Anglican bishop that he named.

I reckon that Choudary’s real reason is that he is fearful of debating with Jay who has already soundly beaten Choudary’s al-Muhajiroun boss Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad in debate – before the latter inadvertently exiled himself in Lebanon.

Jay can publicly prove the Christian gospel from the Quran. Anjem Choudary knows he could not stand up under the challenge of such expertise, and that’s the real reason why he’s “postponed” the event.)

It was the 19th century biologist T H Huxley – aka ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’ for his public support for Charles Darwin’s recently published theory of evolution – who said that “The great tragedy of Science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.” We’ve recently seen the slaying of the beautiful hypothesis of man-made climate change by the ugly fact of the human frailty of scientists courtesy of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia.

The clandestine release of CRU’s confidential emails and documents on the internet (here) – inevitably now called ‘Climategate’ – may prove to be to science what the Telegraph’s publication of MP’s expenses is to politics. And in a wider sense it’s possible it will also   be as undermining to Richard Dawkins   and his fellow science-worshippers as child-abuse by priests and nuns is to the Roman Catholic Church.

On the top global issue of the day where accurate scientific analysis is vital, and just before the Copenhagen summit, we discover – surprise, surprise – that scientists (the high priests of Dawkins’ God-forsaken new religion, Science-is-God) seem to have feet of clay and are subject to the same mendacity and prejudice (Christians call it ‘sinfulness’) as the rest of us. It appears the CRU’s climate-change conclusions do not exactly exhibit ex cathedra infallibility nor are their theories quite as flawless as holy writ.

The ‘ugly fact’ of scientists’ frailty was amply illustrated on BBC TV’s Newsnight on Friday when Professor Andrew Watson from the School of Environmental Sciences also at the University of East Anglia attempted to defend his colleagues at the CRU in a head-to-head debate with ‘Global Warming Contrarian’ Marc Morano speaking from Washington. As I watched Prof Watson’s woeful performance, I was persuaded to take a significant mental step towards the sceptics’ camp.

It was appalling. The main thrust of Prof Andrew’s argument was that underlying CRU research is sound and that the critics are simply mounting a campaign of “character assassination” against CRU personnel. But he became shrill in his protests. He rolled his eyes like a schoolboy in a tantrum. “Stop shouting” he squealed at the bullish American. “Will you shut up just a second?” he yelped.

His piece de resistance came at the end. “What an arsehole,” spat out this esteemed professor who had previously objected to character assassination and was hereby exposed as a vulgar and intolerant hypocrite. It was an expletive for which the BBC subsequently had to apologise. (Watch key moments from Andrews’ performance here.)

Was this an example of the cool, logical, objective, factual, dispassionate, reasoned, rational, evidence-based argument of one of Dawkins’ scientists – the exact opposite (according to Dawkins) of the subjective, biased, emotional, irrational, unreasonable, partial, perverse mumbo-jumbo of religious people?

Actually, the childishness, prejudice, petulance and condescending conceitedness displayed by the professor was breathtaking. No wonder Americans think the English are a whingeing supercilious lot.

No wonder too that the arguments of global-warming sceptics are gaining traction against the theories of climate-change scientists.