well thank you very much it's it's a great pleasure to be here and it's a
great pleasure to be speaking for the National Secular society strangely
enough I have quite happy memories of this somewhat Pyongyang esque building
because the last time I was here about ten years ago for a conversation on
Philo Semitism between Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis a wonderful
event I'm sure you could probably see online somewhere the evening went
slightly downhill but the fact that I remember we tried to find somewhere in
the Russell Square area afterwards to have dinner and could find nowhere
except for one establishment I remember which promised that they could give us
food but not drink which was exactly the opposite of what we wanted
anyhow it's a great pleasure to be speaking of the National Secular society
and also I might say to see some great heroes of exactly the discussion we're
having today in this room it's a particular pleasure to see Peter
Tatchell and Richard Dawkins who have I
know I know I can speak for everybody else through not just the admiration of
everyone here but so many people around the world apart from anything else on
having been willing and able to talk about precisely the difficult issues
which we're talking about here today it's also always as ever a great
pleasure to be with Rahul Reiser majid Nawaz who I can never hear enough
of and I'm short same for you they are real points of light these days both of
them and the work they do is a rare bit of illumination I think in difficult
times I'm going to limit my remarks I think to have as much time as possible
for QA discussion argument whatever you like and we just make a few comments
further to those that's already been made which I very much agree with the
first is just to observe that I mean we are we are stumbling through this period
in this country and I would argue in the West in general particularly in Europe
we're stumbling through this period and we nobody anticipated it nobody expected
it to come I'm in the middle of a book at the moment and you know it's just
extraordinarily read any of the thinkers politicians in particular in recent
decades across Europe and just nobody predicted the kind of conversations we
are having today in 1989 until Valentine's Day that year nobody had
heard of a fatwa until 2015 and January very few people
in Europe understood the details of Islamic blasphemy law until 2005 and
Denmark and so on and we're sort of trying to struggle through this and find
a way and it's very messy and it's going to be very messy for a long time to come
and I think it would be very unwise to predict how it's going to go but I
wanted to make a few comments about trends as it were well it's been
exceptionally unhelpful but utterly understandable that politicians
throughout the West have responded to the upsurge in Islamist violence and
intimidation by saying that their behavior has nothing to do with Islam
it's absolutely understandable we know what they're trying to say they're
trying to say that the terrorists and the extremists speak for minority and
what's more you mustn't blame Muslims you mustn't take this out on your
mother's and neighbor and so on it's a very laudable and understandable
political stance as it were to take but the difficulty is of course that we all
know that it's also wrong and a mistake to say for other reasons for years we've
had this David Cameron when he was Prime Minister slowly soar evolved his
rhetoric on this but my favorite ever I think was US President Barack Obama when
he said after one of the there was a set of of the everyone remembers Isis
beheadings in Syria and after everyone David Cameron or Obama whoever it was
whose Citizen had just been beheaded would come out and the steps and say
this had nothing to do with Islam and and then I think the last of the u.s.
hostages who was beheaded Barack Obama said at one point it not it not only had
nothing to do with Islam it had less to do with Islam than any other religion
which is kinda if a guy cuts someone's head off while shouting aloes greatest i
I don't think the Buddhists Chabert any anything for that but but but everybody
is at that and there's another strange movement you can see during the same
period which is the the thing of absolutely everybody becoming an expert
on Islam and absolutely everybody becoming an expert on the Quran and
hadith and you hear this all the time now only three years ago Conservative
Party conference to then home safely now Prime Minister Theresa May in her
conference bee starts quoting her favorite bits of the Quran I mean it was
it was weird I mean it was like I mean George Bush did that famous year after
2001 he went for a local Islamic Center in Washington and said as the Quran says
although I find it better in this translation as if he'd spent the
previous evening you know its roof
doesn't quite get the demotic Arabic but it'll do and you know in treasom a does
it everybody does it again I mean we know why but but but it might just be
unhelpful it certainly unhelpful when our new
Prime Minister Commission's an inquiry into the practice of Sharia law in the
UK and appoints the inquiry and who does she put on the inquiry but some Imams
hey what do you think their conclusions going to be about Sharia law in the UK
roughly speaking starting from a point of deep criticism or now you see these
are very very deep waters and I don't envy the politicians on it it's very
easy to mock them but it's it's it's obviously not gonna be easy I warned and
have them for a long time though about some of the euphemism which is being
going on because I think that no good can come from it and I'll explain why
and during the period that politicians have all tried to keep up this facade
that the Islamic blasphemy police have nothing to do
Islam the jihadists have nothing to do with Islam Islam has nothing to do with
Islam during the same period the public's of the West have come to
totally different conclusions and let me give you just three polls from three
countries from three years ago so this is these are polls carried out in Europe
in 2013 okay before Charlie Hebdo before last November in Paris before but the
Brussels attacks and before the Cologne attacks New Year and so on so in 2013 7
% of the German public said that they associated Islam with openness tolerance
or respect for human rights 7% of the Germans said that turned the other way
around in France in 2013 67 percent of the French public said that they thought
that Islam itself the religion not Islamism Islam is incompatible with the
French state 67 percent the same poll showed that 73% percent 73 percent of
the French public viewed Islam very negatively it's the same story across
every European country in the Netherlands the same year 68 percent of
the Dutch people said that they thought that there was quote enough Islam in
Holland now I would submit that and there are polls from last year's but I
would submit to you that in the last three years those concerns haven't gone
down that it's not the case that more French people in 2016 have favorable
views towards the religion of Islam than they did in 2013 and so we see this huge
gulf emerging and I think it is a very troubling gulf and it is a gulf between
publics who as it were to use a slightly gross left/right analogy but to use it
for a second publics who are are going very very clearly to the right on these
issues because of the facts that are happening in front of them and
politicians simultaneously stampeding to the left and that that
opens I put it no stronger than this an extremely troubling possibility in our
time it's my belief by the way that the problems for Islam not insuperable and
ovens in solvable pass apart Lee because of what both measured and he'll have
said earlier but that they are exceptionally difficult and that they
may well be even harder than Christianity's troubles in recent
centuries in one example I would give you but I think it's a sort of useful
place to start is that if you do go through the
Christian scriptures there is a verse in Gospel of Matthew that is usually
wheeled out but apart from that most people would find it hard to disagree
with very much said by Jesus and when somebody says to him you know how many
times should I forgive my brother he you know says seven times no seventy times
seven in other words forgive endlessly a pretty good message whatever your views
on the rest of what his followers did but I would just put it like this I mean
would the history of Christianity bloody as it undoubtedly has been and still is
would it have been less bloody or more bloody if even on one occasion the
founder of Christianity had when asked what to do with your brother when he
offends you said chop off his head I think it would have been a lot worse and
this is a simplification of one of the problems that all Muslim reformers have
and as I say it's not unsolvable it's not unseen superable but it is very
considerable and it's a big mistake to pretend otherwise finally I would just
make these observations in the UK to go back to that issue of is it what
mainstream public opinion is I would submit that under underneath a lot of
this is another concern and it's concerned that rahil's excellent film
and remarks in particular touched upon deep concern that people have and I
would give you one example to focus on the Trojan horse affair in Birmingham
two summers ago that revealed terrible things being taught in British schools
not in is make seminaries not in madrassas loving
but in in in what were meant to be secular state-run schools but have been
taken over by these extreme ideologues that story was concerning enough but I
think I'm not the only person in Britain who also noticed with great concern the
fact that those revelations were objected to pushed back against cold
lies by absolutely every organized Muslim group in this country that I can
think of other than the coulomb foundation everybody else tried to cover
it over everybody else tried to say it was lies everybody else tried to say
well it's all Michael Gove making it up or so on and so forth and this is a very
very troubling thing because I would trust that you I anybody else if we
discovered that a school that in any way was associated with us was teaching
hatred in assemblies and chants and songs against minorities in the morning
that that we wouldn't just say thank goodness you've caught this but would
feel a deep sense of shame that this was happening in our name and I think that a
great many people are very worried when they see these organizations that as I
say endlessly present themselves as representing a community pushing back
against every single thing like that that comes out it's an understandable
instinct not to want as it were your community's dirty laundry to be aired in
public we've seen it with the Catholic Church we've seen it with all sorts of
institutions but this is one that really is going to be a problem in the years
ahead that as I say in wrapping up these remarks and as I say leaving as much
time as possible for questions and discussion this is why secularism
matters so much now I I hope I'm not insulting you if I say that were it not
for the subject of this panel it would be my view that the national secular
society would be a sort of you know Pleasant you know a meeting place of
people with similar thoughts whose raison d'être had passed arguably and I
would submit that because of this issue you and your association are on
the very front line of the most important discussion of our time I'm
extremely proud that you are there and very proud to be here and I look forward
to your questions thank you