Religious concerns

There are concerns, the BBC tells me, that three sisters from Bradford, and their nine children, have not returned from their pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia. They flew to Istanbul on 9 June and nothing has been heard from them since. Their families are “gravely worried’. One of the women’s brothers is fighting for ISIS in Syria and the fear is that they have joined them. Hmm.

Eight of the nine children are of school age. You are not supposed to take your children out of school during term times and, so far as I am aware, this is currently term time, including in Bradford. I am not interested that there is a religious pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia – I am guessing it might just be an islamic pilgrimage and not one from any other religion – because the point is term time. Parents are rightly informed that they should not take their children out of school during term time because it is damaging to their education. Why should there be any distinction between taking children out of school for a holiday and a superstitious religious festival? The government needs to come down hard on this, except that Cameron and co won’t because of their fervour for creating “free schools”, including religious schools.

We are getting the wrong end of the stick here. “There are concerns” indeed. My concern is for the families of people like Alan Henning who went to Syria to help people and was murdered in awful circumstances for so doing. Did these Bradford women not see this, or did they think it was all right in the name of the greater struggle? It is not conceivable that they knew nothing about it and yet they still went to Syria?

It is all very well documenting the concerns of the people of Dewsbury and Bradford, getting locals to come up with platitudes about how this is not the real islam, but if it isn’t, what is it, then? I am not interested if islamic scholars (a contradiction in terms, if ever there was) point out that allah wouldn’t approve of what they have done because, I don’t think there’s any such supernatural being, anymore than I accept the teachings of the bible. The bible and the qu’ran are both bloodthirsty books so you are on well dodgy grounds if you say that the action of some people is a perversion of the scripture. Some, usually the terrorists, would say that they are merely following the holy book to the letter.

It is becoming clearer by the day that what this country needs, more than anything else, is secularism. There is no need to ban religion, but we do need to put it in its place. It has no place in politics, it has no place in education, there should be no special privileges accorded to the devout. They should be treated no differently to anyone else.

We do not need to have children have their sex organs mutilated, we do not need special “faith” schools. We do not need to give children time off to go on a religious pilgrimage if it falls within term time. Children shouldn’t be proselytised anyway. Let them learn about the different religions, the different cultures around the world and then let them make their own minds up about what religion they follow when they’re old enough to make up their own minds. Of course, that will never happen because the competing religions need to catch them young otherwise they might not catch them at all. And show me someone who has grown up with a different religion from their parents?

Cameron needs to do far more than arse about on the fringes with twitter and Facebook to deal with these very serious problems, but he is no more likely to do this than Blair or Brown ever did, probably less likely. Politicians are terrified of dealing with Godwhackers. Cameron even insists, against all the evidence, that this is a christian nation, but even if it was, would we want a religious state? It’s not working too well in Pakistan, Syria and much of the rest of Africa and Asia, is it?

My concerns are more with the innocent victims of ISIS and the other islamists, than the perpetrators. It is time the government and the media woke up. As ever, the victims are being completely ignored.