The Centre For Social Cohesion

Civitas has established the Centre For Social Cohesion because of widespread and longstanding concern about the diminishing sense of community in Britain. Work has begun and we are now actively recruiting new staff.

Today’s Times carries an interview with Ken Livingstone, spread across two pages, that is designed to reveal to Londoners what a dynamic and entrepreneurial friend of capitalism their once-ultra left-leaning mayor has become.

To rub home the message about how safe the nation’s capital is in the hands of its present mayor, the newspaper also carries a leader entitled ‘The capital’s capitalist’ whose subtitle describes him as ‘a natural City boy’ and which concludes by announcing the newspaper is ‘now long on Livingstone, the capital’s capitalist’.

According to the Daily Telegraph a spokesman for the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) conceded that ‘fear of sounding prejudiced’ has discouraged frank discussion of black gang crime involving knives and guns. However, Home Office minister Baroness Scotland recently told the home affairs select committee: ‘We accept there is an increasing problem of the use of guns and we are trying to address it. We have not had any evidence that this issue is solely or disproportionately an issue for black young men.’

As a people we have become hyper-sensitive about race, but criticism of a phenomenon like gang culture can be race-related without being racially prejudiced. The guiding principle should be that everyone ought to be judged by their conduct, not their race. Black youths have been drawn disproportionately to gang life, but it’s not because they are black. The congregations of evangelical churches are also disproportionately black but that tendency too is not causally connected to race.

It is reported in today’s Times that, despite music being a compulsory subject in school until age 14, less than an hour a week is devoted to it in most primary schools and that only 13 per cent of primary pupils learn an instrument. Apparently, a major contributing factor behind the current dearth of music teaching in our primary schools is the fact that student primary teachers receive no training in the teaching of music.

You may well be wondering, sad though the dearth of music is in our primary schools, what the early learning of music has to do with social cohesion. Well, Plato and Aristotle certainly both thought it has a great deal to with it.

At the end of last month news came through from Brussels that EU officials had compiled a lexicon of words that should and should not be used. Specifically aiming to avoid mention of ‘Islam’ and ‘terrorism’ in the same sentence, the lexicon banned words such as ‘Islamic’ and ‘fundamentalist’. Any mention of ‘jihad’ is apparently right out.

It will soon be two years since the July 7th bombs detonated across London, and memories have begun to grow a bit dim. Though not so dim, perhaps, as the legal team representing Sheikh Abdullah El-Faisal who was jailed for incitement in 2003. El-Faisal’s representatives have just announced that they will fight attempts to deport him on his early release from prison in a few weeks time - on human-rights grounds.

News arrives of last Friday’s motion passed by Britain’s National Union of Journalists calling for a boycott of goods and the imposition of sanctions on the state of Israel.

Last Thursday, as at the time I commented upon here in a posting, the Times newspaper applied generous coats of whitewash to London’s Mayor Ken Livingstone in an effort to give the left-leaning trouble-maker a brand makeover that would transform him into a paragon of responsibility and moderation. Today, it is the turn of that city’s Muslim population to receive the same treatment from this same newspaper.

In a news report in today’s issue entitled ‘Poll of Muslims in London shows hidden face of a model citizenry’, Michael Binyon reports that a Gallup opinion poll of Londoners to be published tomorrow has discovered the Muslim ones to be more patriotic and moderate in their opinions than their non-Muslim counterparts.

Elsewhere, the newspaper gives over to Mr Binyon further column inches to drive home his message. In a Thunderer column entitled ‘Muslim, British and just like the rest of us’, Mr Binyon exuberantly declares that ‘here at last are the figures to… prove… most Muslims are honest, moderate, loyal citizens’.

Why do I remain unpersuaded by what Mr Binyon claims here?

On Monday I reported on the vote by Britain’s National Union of Journalists to boycott Israel. It was picked up elsewhere too. The same day Caroline Glick cited it as one of a set of examples in her Jerusalem Post column about Britain entitled ‘The weakest link’ which sets out why Israel should ‘cease viewing [Britain] as an ally.’

So, there we have it, at last, a final admission by no less than the Labour Minister responsible for immigration, Liam Byrne, that the large-scale volume of net immigration his party has deliberately engineered with such machismo these last ten years has 'damaged the poorest communities and deeply unsettled the country’, to use the words employed by the Times yesterday in its account of what he has admitted.

It is rare to be able to report a really good news story. But just such a story has emerged from Lahore, where a demonstration took place last week. And before you say it, this wasn’t another demonstration including effigies, books, a bottle of paraffin and a box of matches, but rather a rally pressuring the government to move against the radical students in Islamabad who are running ‘a Taleban-style anti-vice campaign’ in Pakistan’s capital.

The letters ‘ELM-LMC’ stand for the East London Mosque- London Muslim Centre. Situated in Whitechapel Road, the Mosque was opened in 1941, with the London Muslim Centre being opened in June 2004.

The current chairman of the ELM-LMC is Dr Muhammed Abdul Bari, who also finds time to serve as Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain as well as on the Organising Commitee of London Olympics.

On the website of the MCB, under the title ‘Triumph of community spirit – Inauguration of Western Europe’s largest Muslim centre’, the opening of the LMC is recounted in loving detail and the reader informed it is ‘set to provide to people of all faiths and none’.

That same ecumenical inclusive aim is echoed by what the ELM-LMC declares to be its mission which is ‘to provide a range of holistic, culturally sensitive services for the communities of London with a view to improving quality of life and enhancing community cohesion’.

Doubtless, a good indication of the ELM LMC's good-faith and sincerity in its stated mission was its choice of guest of honour to open the Centre in 2004. This was Shaykh Abdur-Rahamn al-Sudais, imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, who, in one of his sermons there in April 2002, according to a MEMRI report, ‘beseeched Allah to annihilate the Jews [and] … urged the Arabs to give up peace initiatives with them because they are “the scum of the human race, the rats, of the world, the violators of pacts and agreements, the murderers of prophets, and the offspring of apes and pigs”.’

We reported a couple of weeks ago on Sheikh El-Faisal, soon to be released early from prison after his 2003 conviction for incitement.

Dominating the sky-line of Regent's Park's Hanover Gate entrance is the now somewhat slightly tarnished golden dome of the Central London Mosque. Its leafy affluent environs are a far cry from the congested run-down streets of Whitechapel home to the East London Mosque which was the subject of last Tuesday’s posting.

Some of the messages being purveyed at the Regent’s Park mosque, however, are no less worryingly divisive than those being purveyed at its East End counterpart that formed the subject of Tuesday's posting.

Neil Addison, the distinguished barrister and author of the legal textbook, Religious Discrimination and Hatred Law (Routledge Cavendish) shows some of the perverse consequences that can be expected to flow from Part 2 of the Equality Act 2006, which comes into force today, along with the Sexual Orientation Regulations. ‘Causing offence’ is now legally relevant and likely to give rise to a good deal of over-zealous litigation. It is worth reflecting on what John Stuart Mill said about giving offence.

There are already some voices calling for personal Sharia law to be applied in parts of the UK. Is it anything to worry about? Recent German experience suggests that any such calls ought to be firmly resisted. Johann Hari in the Independent describes a recent ruling by Judge Christa Datz-Winter involving a Muslim woman who asked for an early divorce because of the severe beatings meted out by her brutal husband. The judge declined to grant an early divorce because, despite police evidence of extreme violence, there was no "unreasonable hardship". Why? Because Muslim women should have "expected" to be beaten. The judge went on to cite passages from the Koran granting Muslim husbands the "right to use corporal punishment", including Sura 4, verse 34.

Five members of the ‘Bluewater cell’ have today been convicted and sentenced to minimums of 17 and a half and 20 years in prison at the Old Bailey.

The al-Qaeda cell had aimed to hit a string of targets around London, including the Bluewater shopping centre and the Ministry of Sound nightclub.