It is troubling that the first non-Christian to address the Church of England synod can be linked to extreme Islamist networks. By inviting Fuad Nahdi, the Church is lending credence to the notion that only radical Islamism can represent British Islam. What hope, then, for those genuine moderates within Britain’s Muslim community?
So writes Sam Westrop for the Gatestone Institute, in a rather smeary piece entitled ”˜The Church of England Chooses Extremist Islam”˜, in which he twists together a few frayed threads of tenuous association to weave a desperate anti-Anglican fiction of “Church conspires with Islamists just like it always has” kind of narrative. You know, the sort where the sapless Church of England caves in to corruption, compromises with iniquity, dances with demons and cavorts with the Devil. The social objective is a brave new world of undiscerning inclusion; the method is imaginative interfaith dialogue where Christian orthodoxy is safely caged away in episcopal notions of diligence and adequacy. This is sludge-dredging masquerading as theo-political scholarship, all swallowed hook, line and sinker by Donna Rachel Edmunds for the frenzied Breitbart UK, without so much a theological reflection or rational rumination. As sure as tweet follows blog, it is now doing the rounds in email boxes and social media feeds around the world to the manifest glee of the apocalyptic fellowship of the teleological clash of civilisations…