An Islamist cleric who has defended suicide bombings and the execution of homosexuals is to be allowed to enter the UK, sparking a major row between government departments.
The Observer understands that senior civil servants in the Home Office and Foreign Office have recommended that ministers approve an application by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who is banned from entering the United States, to come to London for medical treatment.
The news has prompted unease in the Department for Communities and Local Government, which fears that allowing Qaradawi in might offend other faith groups as well as many Muslims. Several senior civil servants are also understood to have reservations because Qaradawi, 80, has previously received treatment in France, suggesting that he can receive medical attention for his undisclosed illness elsewhere. — from this news article
Imagine, for a moment, that you were suddenly denied access to medical care. Imagine that you could not count on a Western hospital, Western nurses, Western-trained doctors. Imagine that you had to endure only what the Muslim lands offer. Imagine, even, that the Western doctors who work for high pay (pay that is going to have to get a lot higher, as a kind of security premium, and for them to continue to endure the contumely they suffer, like all foreign workers, in Saudi Arabia and, to a lesser extent, in the sheikdoms of the Gulf) were no longer available to you. You would be very scared.
Now imagine that the Western world simply denied to the daggers-and-dishdasha boys, and to the Muslim clerics such as Al-Qaradawi, what they now take as by right: access to Western medical care.
And imagine further that you could never attend a Western school, as so many of the Muslim elites have done, such as those Christian-run schools in Karachi or Baghdad or Cairo. The students and their Muslim parents never give it sufficient thought. They never ask themselves why it is that in every Arab and Muslim capital, the best schools, the schools that the elites want to send their children to, are never the Muslim schools but always the handful of Christian-run schools, such as Victoria College in Egypt, or Baghdad College (a high school run, for a long time, by Jesuits from Boston College), where Chalabi, and Allawi, and the rest of the “secularised” elite of Iraq attended school.
Now imagine that if you don’t behave yourself, the Western world will deny you, and deny your children, access to the great wide wonderful world of the West, with its hospitals and its universities, and all the rest.
Well, Qaradawi has two daughers studying in Great Britain. Qaradawi, who lives in fabulously rich Qatar, apparently prefers to use doctors and hospitals in filthily decadent Great Britain, the same decadent Infidel place where his daughters study.
Is it not possible to deny him this? And even to boot out his daughters? Why do we keep indulging someone who has defined away the category of “Israeli civilians” and who defends terrorism?
Professor Hans Jansen, a Dutch scholar of Islam, quotes Qaradawi’s carefully eliminating the “suicide” element out of what in the West are called “suicide bombings.” Qaradawi, who supports such bombings, and realizing that “suicide” is forbidden in Islam, took it upon himself to prove that the taking of a very high risk (wearing a belt that explodes is assuming a high risk indeed), the kind that non-Muslims call “suicidal” and insist is an act of “suicide,” would not be so defined, according to Qaradawi, in Islam.
On what grounds is his request being granted? As a way to win his heart, his mind? Don’t be idiotic. There is no way to win Muslim hearts or minds as long as those hearts and minds remain truly, implacably Muslim (someone falling away from Islam is another matter). But cooperation can be obtained, as it has always been obtained — by threatening rather than acquiescing or currying favor. Whenever the American government threatens to cut aid — to Egypt, to Yemen — it gets results. Small and begrudging results, but still, it is the only way it has ever gotten even those results. Without such threats, it never gets a thing. There is a lesson here. One wonders how long it will take to learn.