“Last week Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-Dutch polemicist, spoke to a gathering of what The Spectator called ‘Britain’s biggest brains – politicians, editors, academics’. She told them that they were ‘actually at war, not just with Islamism, but with Islam itself’. Apparently, a good Muslim has no choice but to strive ‘to establish Sharia law’. Martin Amis, too, has recently informed us that moderate Muslims, if they ever existed, have lost out to radicals in Islam’s civil war. In any case, Islam is ‘totalist’: ‘There is no individual; there is only the umma – the community of believers.’ Never perhaps in history has so much nonsense been so confidently peddled about a population as large and diverse as this planet’s billion-plus Muslims.”
Pankaj Mishra in the Guardian, 8 December 2007
“Hospital chiefs who told nurses to point Muslim patients’ beds towards Mecca five-times-a-day last night climbed down. They said they would now only do it for the ‘terminally ill’. Nurses had been breaking off from health care duties to perform the ritual at Dewsbury and District Hospital in West Yorks….
Young Muslims are being convicted of thought crimes and branded as terrorists for life, the country’s most prominent Islamic leader has told The Times.
The novelist Martin Amis has fired another shot at Islam by condemning the “abject failure” of Muslims to denounce suicide bombings.
A hospital in northern England is playing down media reports saying that nurses have been ordered to stop normal duties five times a day to turn Muslim patients’ beds so that they face Mecca.