“Muslim leaders have sparked outrage with plans to broadcast the Islamic call to prayer over the roof-tops of one of Britain’s most historic cities. Elders at Oxford Central Mosque want to blast it out three times a day. They have already discussed the controversial idea with council chiefs and are set to submit a formal application in the New Year.

“But the move has been met with fury by people living near the mosque in Oxford – known as the city of dreaming spires. They claim the two-minute call – to be broadcast over three large speakers – is noise pollution and offensive to other faiths.”

The Sun – rather belatedly – joins in the Oxford mosque hysteria.

“With dreary predictability, our two leading Christian clerics have each used their Christmas messages this year to mouth fashionable political orthodoxies…. In his sermon yesterday the Archbishop of Canterbury, like an earnest Left-wing activist, prattled on about the threat to the environment from ‘humanity’s selfishness’, warning how our ‘greed’ could ‘distort the balance of things’. His opposite number in the Catholic Church, the Archbishop of Westminster Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, was even more politically correct. In his address at midnight mass he attacked Britain’s supposed failure to embrace immigration. Urging that we do more to welcome migrants, he moaned that too many arrivals ‘feel excluded simply because they are outsiders’….

“For a leading figure in the Christian Church, this is a bizarre stance because mass immigration represents the greatest threat to the foundations of our Christian civilisation. Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor might blather about Christian compassion to newcomers but our national religion will lose all influence if Britain is turned into nothing more than a landmass of disparate global cultures….

“The consequences of multiculturalism and mass immigration can be seen at their most graphic in the creeping Islamification of Britain. This makes a nonsense of the Cardinal’s bleat about ‘outsiders’ feeling ‘excluded’. There is no community more assertive about its rights or more confident in its beliefs than the British followers of Islam. In contrast to the cultural cringe of the Christian Church, Muslims have no hesitation in demanding acceptance of their customs. All too often the enfeebled British state is willing to oblige. So the Government takes a hard line about objections from the Catholic Church towards gay adoption, yet does nothing about the vile Muslim practice of forced marriages.

“Throughout the country, church bells are being drowned out by the wailing from the mosque. In Oxford an application has recently been submitted from one of the city’s biggest mosques to broadcast the call to prayers at least three times a day. Perhaps the most telling symbol of this Islamification is the plan from the Muslim group Tablighi Jamaat to build a mosque in Newham, East London, with a capacity for 12,000. Costing £100million, this will be the biggest Muslim centre in Europe and largest religious building in Britain.

“Muslim supporters of the project do not seem imbued with a spirit of tolerance. Alan Craig, a councillor who belongs to the Christian Alliance and objects to the plan, has received death threats, with a sick memorial notice posted on the internet. But his opposition is correct, for this mosque would be a monument to Muslim aggression and the destruction of our Christian heritage. If the Cardinal wants a cause worth supporting, it is his own religion, not the import of yet more alien culture into Britain.”

Leo McKinstry in the Daily Express, 26 December 2007