The Shofar is the ancient trumpet which called the people of God to prayer, repentance, sacrifice and war.

February 2003: ISLAM IN TOWER HAMLETS

Events in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets provide an object lesson in some of the aims of Islam when its advocates attain a measure of political power. Tower Hamlets has a Christian background (the Salvation Army was started in the Borough), but the symbols and the reality of the Christian faith are now under threat.

There are seventeen wards in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, of three seats each. Labour is the ruling group, and the Liberal Democrats are the only opposition. Labour has 35 councillors, of whom 25 are Muslim, and the LibDems have 16, of which 5 are Muslims. This means that the Muslims have a majority on any genuine free vote, and by reason of their majority in the Labour Group, they can form local Labour Party policy and then rely on the Labour majority to push anything they want through the Council Chamber. Added to that, it would be difficult for most Labour and LibDem local councillors to oppose measures promoted by their Muslim colleagues for fear of being seen as racist or imperialist. (It would be interesting to know whether the Council's position on sex shops and teen sex clinics in the Borough follows Muslim orthodoxy or Labour/LibDem permissiveness.)

In the 2002 local government elections, Labour fielded 30 Muslim candidates (of whom 25 were elected) and 21 non-Muslim (10 elected). The LibDems fielded 15 Muslim candidates (5 were elected) and 36 non-Muslim (11 elected). It will not have been lost on those parties that a candidate was more likely to be elected if Muslim. Indeed in three wards where Labour and LibDem shared the spoils, both parties fielded a mixture of candidates, but at least one Muslim was elected from each party.

Even the Conservative Party put up 16 Muslims to 35 non-Muslims, and each Muslim on average polled 50 more votes than his non-Muslim counterpart. Of parties with more than 5 candidates, only the Green Party bucked the trend, with just one Muslim among its 28 candidates.

ON THE INCREASE
The Muslim political gains in Tower Hamlets have come despite that fact that Muslims are not even in a majority in the Borough. According to Tower hamlet's own figures, Bangladeshis comprise 29% of the population and Pakistanis a further 1%. These two groups are overwhelmingly Muslim, even given the small number of Christians among them. The white population is 56% and the black population from the Caribbean and Africa the third largest group at 7%. But of course the Bangladeshis and Pakistanis are stronger in the Muslim faith than white and black people are in the Christian. Black churches tend to be introspective and pietistic, and white churches liberal and defensive.

In addition, the Muslim population (again arrived at by combining the figures for Pakistanis and Bangladeshis) is the fastest-growing. They make up an amazing 47% of the population under 25 years, but only 13% of the population over 60. The white population, by contrast, is dying, top-heavy with the elderly. There are more Asians under 30 in Tower Hamlets than whites and blacks combined. Islam is a monogamous, monotheistic, fertile and aggressive faith in sharp contrast to the promiscuous, idolatrous, birth-controlling and apologetic syncreticism of post-Christian Humanism.

ALL CHANGE
The renaming of council wards was carried out between 1998 and 2002 as part of local government 're-organisation' under the Boundaries Commission. In 1998 there were 19 wards in Tower Hamlets of which 7 had two councillors. These became 17 wards with three seats each. A recommendation to abolish four of the six wards named after the Christian faith (St Marys, St Peters, St James and Holy Trinity) and rename the other two came from the 1998 Council. That Council had a ruling group of 41 Labour councillors (of whom a crucial 21 were Muslim) to 9 LibDems (no Muslims at that time, although there were some Muslim LibDem candidates). The name 'Holy Trinity' will have been especially offensive to Muslims. An attempt was also made to change the names of St Dunstans and St Katharines Wards. However, after local protests the Home Office decided that for historical reasons for the time being those names could remain, although a designation has been added to these Wards in preparation for a change in the future. St Dunstans Ward is now St Dunstan's and Stepney Green Ward and St Katherines Ward is now St Katharine's and Wapping Ward.

Plainly, the Muslims have been steadily advancing, and as soon as they had a majority in the ruling group in Tower Hamlets they began advancing their Islamist agenda. Whilst it is easy to see them achieving such an objective in Muslim enclaves such as Tower Hamlets, Southall, Bradford and Leicester, it is difficult to see a take-over happening at national level.

THREAT TO CHURCH
Mr. Dennis Delderfield, resident of Tower Hamlets, former member of the Court of Common Council of the City of London (the governing body of the City) and for five years a member of the General Synod of the Church of England, states:

"This year the Council announced that they would twin the Borough with Janine, which Israel has claimed is the centre of Islamic terrorism. This year saw the closure of St Patrick's Roman Catholic School in spite of many protests by local people, and the Council hope that more church schools will be closed. Teams of Asian youths roam the area and attacks on white people are common, some resulting in death. Christian priests and nuns have been spat at and insulted in the street. The aim is to turn the London Borough of Tower Hamlets into an exclusive Moslem enclave, and this is well on the way; anyone who objects is labelled a racist."

The ruling elite is at the moment too solidly in control of central government and the establishment willingly to allow a Muslim challenge to the humanist consensus, the power of the Muslim vote at the ballot box is not strong enough nationally to force it, and Muslim youth are not yet able to take the country by force, although they may well be arming themselves with illegal weapons even now. In thirty years time, the Muslim population may have reached the point at which a take-over could be a distinct possibility, but it does not look likely at present.

However, the creeping Islamicisation of Tower Hamlets should still ring alarms bells in Christian churches up and down the land. The way in which the Christian faith and its symbols in our land have been progressively eradicated will have been given a significant boost by the Tower Hamlets events. Edmund Burke famously said that 'All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men should do nothing.' Will anything shock the Christian church out of its do-nothing slumber before it is too late?