Newsline 28 March 2013

Girl Guide troop kicked out of church hall because they didn’t attend services

News | Wed, 27th Mar 2013

A Girl Guide group in Hove claims it has been kicked out of its base in a church hall because its members don't attend church services.

The Vicar at St Leonards Church says the Guides of the 7th Hove troop – which held its weekly meetings for free in the church hall – were given access only if they promised to attend services and do work for the church.

The Reverend Stephen Terry says they were not fulfilling their part of the deal and so he had "no option" but to give them the boot.

But group leader Julie Winder said that it wasn't her place to force the girls to go to church services, adding that the church was "out of touch" with modern life.

In a letter to parents, she said: "The church has informed us that we can only remain on our present terms if we drastically improve the attendance records. The only way we can do this is to only have practicing Christians as members which means we must exclude non-Christians. If we don't comply with his wishes, we are being priced out. So much for a caring community church."

She told The Argus newspaper that many of her members were either Roman Catholic or of different religions, adding a number of others were from separated families and visited their other parent at the weekend.

She said: "We try to get them to go when we can. If not, then the leaders try to represent them."

Reverend Terry told The Argus he had asked the group to attend at least four services a year: Remembrance Sunday, Christingle, Palm Sunday and Harvest Festival.

He said: "We also ask for them to help out at a few church events. We have no problem with the concept of Guides and the girls are no trouble at all. We have found it very difficult working with the leaders. It is not the case that we have thrown them out – they have walked away from this standing agreement."

The group has now moved to Portslade Town Hall, which they have secured for a cheaper rate.

Stephen Evans, campaigns manager at the National Secular Society, said: "It is not unusual for churches to insist that scouts and girl guides attend services or hold 'church parades' as a condition of using church buildings for weekly meetings.

"This shows what little regard the Church has for respecting freedom of conscience. It needs to recognise that that the Girl Guides has never been a Christian organisation – so requiring attendance at Church is wholly unreasonable."

The Guides are currently reviewing their 'Promise' and considering replacing the religious oath with one secular promise for all.

Secularist of the Year prize fund donated to girls’ education in honour of Malala Yousafzai

News | Sat, 23rd Mar 2013

The National Secular Society has donated its Secularist of the Year prize fund to a global charity campaigning to ensure girls everywhere have equal access to education.

The prize fund of £7,000 was awarded to Plan UK in honour of Malala Yousafzai, the schoolgirl from Pakistan who was shot by the Taliban in October for campaigning in support of female education. Her story sparked outrage around the world after the Taliban said they shot Malala for "promoting secularism".

The prize was collected on Saturday at the National Secular Society's Secularist of the Year event by Debbie Langdon-Davies, whose father John founded Plan in 1937. The prize was handed over by NSS honorary associate Michael Cashman MEP. The money will be used to support Plan's Girls Fund which, as part of its 'Because I am a Girl' campaign, helps girls to claim their rights and access life-changing education.

Malala Yousafzai was nominated for Secularist of the Year by NSS supporters for campaigning for girls' education in the face of violent and brutal Islamist opposition.

Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society, said: "Plan UK does fantastic work campaigning for girls' education so we are delighted to be able to offer this award. It is also important to honour the incredibly inspiring Malala Yousafzai, who risked everything to stand up for her, and others', right to an education. Secularism will always champion human rights above religious discrimination and oppression – which is precisely why secularism offers hope to oppressed women and minorities everywhere."

A special achievement award was also presented to the Nigerian Human Rights campaigner Leo Igwe. Leo has campaigned at much risk to himself against the naming of children as "witches" and "warlocks" by manipulative and fanatical evangelical churches. Children branded in this way are often abandoned by their parents or become the subject of mistreatment or even violence.

Terry Sanderson said: "Leo Igwe is an incredibly brave and tenacious fighter for human rights in very difficult circumstances. He has been harassed and threatened by those he has opposed, and so has his family. We were very honoured to have him at this occasion and to honour him in this way. Few people deserve it more."

An award will also be presented to Queen Mary University of London Atheism, Secularism & Humanism Society for their efforts to promote secularism on campus and in particular their defiant and robust response to attempts to close down free expression on campus.

The Irwin Prize for Secularist of the Year award is presented annually in recognition of an individual or an organisation considered to have made an outstanding contribution to the secular cause. The award is sponsored by NSS honorary associate Dr. Michael Irwin. Previous winners include Peter Tatchell, Sophie in 't Veld MEP, Southall Black Sisters, Maryam Namazie, Professor Steve Jones, Mina Ahadi, and Evan Harris MP with Lord Avebury.

About Plan UK
Plan UK is the UK branch of the global children's charity Plan International. It is a registered charity in the UK (number 276035) and has no religious or political affiliations. As part of its Because I am a Girl campaign, Plan UK's Girls Fund helps girls to claim their rights and access life-changing education.

Class Dismissed: Malala's Story
A 2009 documentary by Adam B. Ellick profiled Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani girl whose school was shut down by the Taliban. Malala Yousafzai was shot by a gunman on 9 Oct 2012. Six months later, Malala now attends school in Birmingham.

See also: Lessons from the frontline of Islamic fundamentalism - a review of Malala Yousafzai's autobiography

New guidance for doctors on personal beliefs in their professional life

News | Wed, 27th Mar 2013

The General Medical Council has updates its guidelines for medical practitioners – which includes updated guidelines on Personal Beliefs and Medical Practice (pdf). In response, the Secular Medical Forum (SMF) raised several concerns about the new report and issued the following statement:

The GMC rightly advises doctors that they must not impose their own personal beliefs on patients. The new guidance goes some way towards helping to prevent religious doctors from obstructing the reasonable treatment options of patients by virtue of the doctor's own personal beliefs.

However, it ultimately falls far short of the intended outcome of protecting patients, is contradictory, and signally fails to protect some of the most vulnerable people. It may also be in breach of the 2010 Equality Act referenced in the guidance.

Patients must feel confident that they can rely on their doctor's professional expertise and advice, and that, excepting specific legislation, the patient's own personal beliefs and values will guide treatment options rather than the religious beliefs of their doctor.

The SMF is therefore disappointed that the new GMC guidance empowers doctors to conscientiously object to providing medical services which would ordinarily form an integral part of a doctor's professional responsibilities. This concession for doctors comes at the expense of patient care which the GMC states should be the doctor's first concern.

Within the new guidance, doctors with religious objections to providing certain treatments are advised to advertise their objections in advance. Confusingly, the GMC simultaneously exhorts doctors not to initiate discussion of their personal beliefs.

Moreover, the risk is that the GMC will be seen to be placing an unreasonable onus of responsibility on patients to investigate in advance their doctor's personal views.

Particularly in the case of urgent care such as emergency contraception it is inevitable that some patients will be denied appropriate medical care because of the personal religious beliefs of a doctor. The SMF is disappointed that the GMC did not take the opportunity to remind doctors of their professional responsibilities to 'set aside their own personal beliefs where necessary in the interests of their patients'.

The GMC is right to place an emphasis on personal choice with regard to treatment choice or refusal. But when the person making the choice is not the person refusing necessary treatment, the GMC might follow its own excellent guidance in 'Protecting Children and Young People', GMC guidance published 3rd September 2012 , which reminds doctors that 'it may be difficult to identify where parents' freedom to bring up their children in line with their religious and cultural practices and beliefs becomes a cause for concern about a child's or young person's physical or emotional well-being'.

Instead and of significant concern to the SMF, the new guidance appears to indicate that if both parents refuse, on the grounds of their own belief, what is considered to be the best or most appropriate treatment, then other perhaps less effective treatment options should be considered for a child instead. This will rarely be in the best interests of a child.

The SMF endorses GMC advice to 'provide effective treatments based on the best available evidence' and to 'treat patients as individuals and respect their dignity and privacy'. However, we note that the new GMC guidance will fail to deliver this promise and will continue to fail in its statutory responsibilities to protect vulnerable people, particularly children, from serious avoidable harm caused by registered medical practitioners.

Dr Antony Lempert, a GP and the chair of the SMF said: "The GMC seems peculiarly unable to distinguish between reasonable therapeutic decisions necessarily made by parents on behalf of children requiring medical care, and parental requests to surgically impose their own beliefs on the normal bodies of a child who has yet to form a belief. Serious harm that would ordinarily lead to child safeguarding procedures and possibly criminal prosecution, such as the forced cutting of a child's body for no therapeutic purpose are instead excused by the GMC on the basis that parents have chosen to follow one or other religious belief system and that the parents then claim that cutting the child's body is a central tenet of that belief."

The GMC must know that parents do not have the right to consent to harmful interventions on their children. Parents and doctors have a duty to protect children from all forms of serious avoidable harm. It is legislated that it cannot be in the best interests of a female child to cut her genitals for no therapeutic purpose. No medical body in the world actively recommends forced infant genital cutting on any child. On the contrary, an article released last week by Frisch et al in the American journal Pediatrics stated that 'circumcision fails to meet the commonly accepted criteria for the justification of preventive medical procedures in children', that it 'constitutes a violation of the UN convention on the rights of the child' and can have 'serious long-term consequences'. The 38 authors from 18 countries included senior representatives of the German Pediatric Association, the Royal Dutch Medical Association and the British Association of Paediatric surgeons amongst others.

It is unlawful under the Equalities Act 2010 to discriminate unfairly on the grounds of gender. The SMF calls on the GMC to amend this new policy on forced infant and child genital cutting which adversely discriminates against male children. The main body of GMC guidance places the healthcare needs, dignity and integrity of the patient as of primary concern. The tenets of a religious belief held by somebody other than the patient can never be sufficient reason to justify the forced removal of intimate parts of a patient's body."

The tensions between Muslim identity and Western citizenship

Opinion | Wed, 27th Mar 2013

'Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?'
'That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat.
'I don't much care where--' said Alice.
'Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat.

I wish to make the claim that no matter their political hue, British governments have, for decades, adopted an 'Alice in Wonderland' approach to migrant settlers. That is to say, like Alice they have not cared much about where they want to get to with regards to forging some kind of common citizenship. At least until recent years when some importance has been put on improving social or community cohesion and attention paid to factors which are deemed to comprise 'Britishness'.

In stark contrast, community and religious 'leaders' and 'elders' from some religious-ethnic minority groups have been very clear as to where they want to get to: the granting of resources, rights, separate laws, and exemptions to the law for their respective 'communities'. In this endeavour they have been greatly assisted by the academy whose theories and ideas have coalesced under the rubric of 'multiculturalism'. At its heart, this is the stress on acknowledging, respecting and showing 'recognition' of the differences in culture and religion between different communities and, thereby, the breaching of universalism. Unwittingly and aimlessly, this came to be adopted by national and local governments. Indeed the previous Labour government began to think of Britain as a 'multi-faith' society, an epithet implicitly acknowledged by the present Coalition government with its appointment – a first – of a Minister for Faith and Communities (whereas other European have, more sensibly, Ministers for Integration) so that there seemed to be a seamless transformation from multiculturalism to multifaithism.

Multiculturalism and multifaithism are the outcomes of cultural relativism and attendant cultural and religious laissez faire whereby there has been the absence of any attempt to forge commonalities. Separatism and segregation have been the inevitable outcomes; indeed what has arisen in towns and cities across the country are ghettoised 'monocultural' and 'monofaith' neighbourhoods where mixing with those not of the same religious-ethnic group is minimal or practically non-existent. This has poignantly been described by Ted Cantle as 'parallel lives'. A particularly disturbing aspect of this is the segregation of schools so that large numbers of children from 'faith communities' are marooned from the majority white society and indeed also from other ethnic groups.

Though there is no evidence to substantiate this, perhaps some politicians might be rather pleased by this dynamic as it potentially facilitates 'divide and rule' tactics and enables pork barrel politics to flourish with the attendant increasing grip of religious and community leaders on 'their' communities – an unfortunate and undesirable outcome.

Mono-faithism has particularly affected large numbers of Muslims – not just in Britain but throughout the Western world where they have settled in great numbers in the past three decades. It is curious in that in the so-called post-9/11 'Islamophobic' decade, the numbers of Muslims in Britain jumped from 3 percent of the population in 2001 to 4.8 per cent by the 2011census (an astonishing 60 per cent increase). It is likely that millions more Muslims – with no concern for the 'Islamophobia' that is supposed to have afflicted the country – would like to settle in the UK given the chance.

In stark contrast, large numbers of citizens in Western countries have become concerned by the Muslim presence – it is important to stress that this has nothing to do with Islamophobia. This is evidenced by the British Social Attitudes survey of 2010 which highlighted the fact that of all the major religions in Britain, only Islam generated an overall negative response. Similarly, a Populus opinion poll in 2011, considered the largest survey into identity and extremism in the UK found that 52 per cent of respondents agreed with the proposition that 'Muslims create problems in the UK' (a far higher percentage than for other religious groups).

Similar concerns are found in other European countries. In the Netherlands, long renowned for its tolerance and liberalism, a survey conducted by Paul Sniderman and Louk Hagendoorn in 1998, that is before 9/11 and the war on terror, showed that approximately half the Dutch population thought that 'Western European and Muslim ways of life are irreconcilable'. Some of the reasons for this irreconcilability include 'nine out of every ten agree that Muslim men in the Netherlands dominate their women … Three out of every four Dutch agree that Muslims in the Netherlands raise their children in an authoritarian way'. In a similar vein, in his acclaimed book on the Netherlands and its Muslim population, Murder in Amsterdam,Ian Buruma posits the following explanation for the sudden rise of Pim Fortuyn, the anti-Islamist academic and politician in 2001-02: 'Fortuyn's venom is drawn more from the fact that he, and millions of others, not just in the Netherlands, but all over Europe, had painfully wrested themselves free from the strictures of their own religions. And here were these newcomers injecting society with religion once again'.

Indeed, we can aver that this reasoning applies a fortiorito France given its strong secular constitution and centrality of laïcité. For example, in the debates on the proposed law that prohibits the wearing of religious symbols in schools (most notably, the hijab) there was overwhelming support for the legislation across the political spectrum (one opinion poll showed 72 per cent in favour).

The opinion of Germans accords with this as is evidenced by an opinion poll commissioned in 2012 by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung to ascertain Germans' views of Muslims. Respondents were asked to choose which of 21 statements they were offered about Islam that most closely reflected their opinion: 83% thought that Islam is associated with impairing women's rights; 77% thought Islam was a literalist religion; 70% said Islam is associated with religious fanaticism and radicalism. A significant majority of Germany's population also believes that Islam is ready for violence (64%), hatred (60%), active missionary activity (56%), and striving for political influence (56%). Only 13% of respondents associate Islam with love for neighbours; 12% with charity; and 7% with openness and tolerance.

Matters are, unsurprisingly, no better in the United States. This is attested by a Gallup poll in January 2010 which showed that Islam is by far the most negatively viewed religion in America: 31 per cent view it as 'not favourable at all'; whilst 23 per cent view it as 'not too favourable' (the respective figures for Christians are 4 and 4 per cent and for Jews 15 and 10 per cent). Similarly, 43 per cent admit to feeling at least 'a little' prejudice towards Muslims – far more than the number who say the same about Christians (18%), Jews (15%) and Buddhists (14%). This theme was developed by Samuel Huntington in a work on American national identity (Who Are We?, 2005), which followed his controversial Clash of Civilisations. Huntington argues that: 'Muslims, particularly Arab Muslims, seem slow to assimilate ... The difficulties [regarding their assimilation] also may stem from the nature of Muslim culture. Elsewhere in the world, Muslim minorities have proved to be "indigestible" by non-Muslim societies ... In some circumstances, the desire of Muslims to maintain the purity of their faith and the practices of their religion may lead to conflicts with non-Muslims'.

From the above very worrying poll findings, it would be mistaken to think that unease with many aspects of Islam and with those who espouse it is confined to the margins of society; on the contrary, it appears to be widespread. Accordingly, we cannot reasonably consider negative sentiments regarding Muslim beliefs and practices as being based on some generalised, irrational, Islamophobia – an epithet suffused with racial connotations given that most Muslims in the West are non-white; or on a wilful misunderstanding or ignorance of the religion as is invariably asserted by Islamists and their apologists.

What Huntington terms 'indigestible', I have analysed as 'psychic detachment' (in Hasan, 2010). At its extreme it can be seen as immigrants' mode of thinking, belonging, living, as being rooted elsewhere: that is, their alienation from the host society is such that they might as well be living in another land. In turn, this engenders alienation among a very significant percentage of the host population. What is of urgent necessity, therefore, are measures to help Muslims (and indeed other religious-ethnic minority citizens) to break free from their isolation and segregation that is rife within 'faith communities' and fully integrate into societies into which they have chosen to settle.

The salutary goal of social cohesion requires a concerted inclusiveness into mainstream society, in both mental and material terms. But what is also of vital importance is the acknowledgment that a gradual withering away of 'faith identities' will enormously aid the cause of social justice, integration, and cohesion. Public policy, above all in regard to school education, can significantly rein in the artificial division engendered by religion, a task that is made inordinately easier as a consequence of the relentless decline in religious belief in Western societies (though significantly less so in the US) so that religious - that is, sectarian - identity has become largely irrelevant to the mass of the population. Northern Ireland's sectarian divisions are a sobering reminder of the path that must be avoided.

Rumy Hasan is a senior lecturer at Sussex University and author ofMulticulturalism: Some Inconvenient Truths(2010) and latest book, Dangerous Liaisons: the clash between Islamism and Zionism, was released February 2013.

This blog was originally published by Open Democracy and is reproduced here with kind permission of the author.

Rumy Hasan's