Which brings me back to that sense of icy rage at modern intolerance, accepted and even sometimes encouraged in the name of delicacy or diversity. Sainsbury\u2019s are allowing Muslim check-out staff to opt out of touching even sealed bottles containing alcohol. Worse, some Muslim medical students refuse to attend lectures or answer exam questions on alcohol-related or sexually transmitted diseases, and a few will not help patients of the opposite sex. The BMA and GMC confirm that such demands are being made. They have been turned down; moreover, the Muslim Council of Britain and the Muslim Doctors and Dentists Association condemn the requests and say rather nicely: \u201cThe prophet said, Learn about witchcraft but don\u2019t practise it.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n
But there it is: a terrible self-righteous minority who must not be indulged: not ever, not at all. Myself, I would not only fail such students but demand repayment of all the money spent on their training.<\/p>\n
This is not an Islamophobic observation; intelligent Muslim scholars distance themselves from this nonsense. They also say the shopworkers \u201cexploiting and misusing\u201d\u009d Sainsbury\u2019s goodwill. It is also not Islamophobic because precisely the same applies to Christians \u201d\u201c who also have been known to behave with disgraceful intolerance, and not only in the 16th century.<\/p>\n
Last week\u2019s statement by the Archbishop of Mozambique, Francisco Chimolo, that condoms are secretly infected is downright wicked. Simply because his co-religionists believe that fidelity and abstinence are the best life, the Archbishop utters nonsense like: \u201cI know that there are two countries in Europe, they are making condoms with the virus on purpose . . . they want to finish with the African people.\u201d\u009d He also claims that retroviral drugs sent from Europe to help Aids victims are infected with HIV. Similarly, there are US Christian charities that will not help African prostitutes; and closer to home, we have had plenty of soi-disant Catholic and Protestant Irish bombers who thought it fine to kill innocents, and clerics who did not condemn them.<\/p>\n