The Centre For Social Cohesion

At the opening ceremony, Muslim, Jewish, Hindi, and Christian communal leaders recited prayers. It took the rabbi in attendance, Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg -- there’s a name with multi-faith resonance for you -- to explain the semiotics behind the shape of the garden’s path which is a cross out of which the other religions ‘flower’. He is quoted as saying: “It is a beautiful idea. But there is an assumption that the central image is the Cross. It makes an unspoken assumption about … the place of Christianity in the country.”

Unlike some religious leaders who, at this juncture, might have complained about the cultural imperialism behind such an un-stated assumption, Rabbi Wittenberg reportedly demurred not at all. On the contrary, he is reported to have said the assumption to be an accurate one and he was not intending to be critical in pointing it out.

By so remarking, Rabbi Wittenberg has become an object lesson for leaders of all other religious minorities in Britain on how it is perfectly possible to get cross without becoming angry at the same time.

The other news report about flowers with a bearing on social cohesion is far less uplifting and more serious.

Tucked away among today's news stories about the renewed violence in the Middle East is the report that this year’s poppy crop in Afghanistan is predicted to be 20 per cent larger than last year’s record harvest. This is not good news.

As well as Afghanistan being responsible for 90% of the world’s heroin, much of the proceeds derived from its production there goes to fund the Taliban fighters, currently giving our boys there such a hard time.

Some have wondered why we don’t bring them back rather than expose them any longer to the ire of the Taliban. One good reason is that, part of why British forces are in Afghanistan is to try to combat the illicit production and distribution of this deadly substance.

Muslims in Britain are often wont to draw an unfavourable contrast between the chaste and abstemious life-styles of their young folk here and the more decadent life-styles of their non-Muslim counterparts. Heroin, however, is no respecter of faiths, and young Muslims, here and abroad, are no less vulnerable than non-Muslims to becoming addicted to it and other drugs.

As for its distribution here, Muslims are seemingly even more complicit, proportionately speaking, than non-Muslims. In the decade between 1990 and 2000, the number of Muslims in British prisons reportedly doubled, reaching 9% of the total prison population -- three times their proportion of the total population. Of these Muslim inmates of British prisons, a quarter had been imprisoned for drug related offences.

Several years before their overthrow after September 11th, the head of the Taliban’s anti-drugs control force in Kandahar reportedly said that the production of ‘opium was permissible because it is consumed by kafirs (unbelievers) in the West not by Muslims or Afghans'.

He needs to think again, as do those Muslims in Britain who discourage their children from integrating and mixing with non-Muslims lest they be led astray and encouraged by them to acquire bad British habits.