In a story almost too parodical to be true, it is being reported that Muslim groups in the United States (I repeat, “the United States”, not Europe), have issued a fatwa against body scanners now being introduced at airports to combat the threat from terrorism.

Cited by the Huffington Post, the Metro Detroit section of the freep.com website quotes The Fiqh Council of North America, a symposium comprising leading Islamic scholars, as saying:

“It is a violation of clear Islamic teachings that men or women be seen naked by other men and women…Islam highly emphasizes haya (modesty) and considers it part of faith. The Quran has commanded the believers, both men and women, to cover their private parts.”

The ruling has also been supported by The Council on American-Islamic Relations which said:

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Melanie Phillips — the outspoken and brilliant analyst of British establishment hypocrisy and denial over Islamist extremism — has once again become the target of a vicious and wholly dishonest attack for her courageous stance.

Long a hate figure among the weakest and the worst in Britain’s opinion forming classes, her prescient book Londonistan has been lambasted by a Guardian columnist who draws from a bizarre report by the University of Exeter’s European Muslim Research Centre which blames writers such as Phillips for fanning the flames of Islamophobia by having the effrontery to draw attention to Islamist extremism.

Bizarre, indeed deranged, as this line of thinking may be it is an all too familiar illustration of the mindset of a British establishment which simply cannot cope with the consequences of its decades-long love affair with multi-culturalist political correctness.

As Phillips rightly says in her blog in the Spectator (see link below): “The real agenda of this study is censorship by intimidation – to defame and smear all those who comment, however responsibly, on a matter of such intense public importance as Islamic extremism and terrorism.”

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Malcolm Grant is the president and provost of University College London (UCL), the academic institution attended by Detroit bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. He sports a list of awards and titles so long that his business card must be printed on A4 paper. In other words, although New Zealand born, he is a quintessential member of the British establishment.

Here is what he wrote in an article on New Year’s Eve defending UCL from charges that it was an institution rife with the kind of multi-cultural political correctness that had allowed Islamic terrorism to be incubated right under his own nose. Referring to Abdulmutallab’s terror plot over Detroit, he said:

“What induced this behaviour remains a mystery. He has not emerged from a background of deprivation and poverty. He came from one of Nigeria’s wealthiest families. He was privately educated, and to a high level. He gained admission to University College London, where he studied mechanical engineering with business finance between 2005 and 2008, and was president of the UCL student Islamic Society in 2006-07.

“The events of Christmas Day came as a complete shock to the UCL community.”

Oh dear.

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If you thought the Danish cartoon controversy caused a ruckus, get ready for this. Reports out of Switzerland suggest that voters have today approved a referendum to ban the construction of new minarets — spires situated next to Mosques for the Muslim call to prayer — across the country. News agencies say that the legally binding decision was backed by an astounding 57.5 percent of the population. A week ago, opinion polls put support for the move at just 37 percent.

The move is likely to provoke the kind of mass confrontation that followed the publication of a series of cartoons in Denmark in 2005 which linked the Prophet Mohammed to terrorism. In the months that followed, more than 100 people died in unrest across the Muslim world, Danish embassies and shops were burned to the ground and protests erupted by Muslim groups in Europe calling for the censorship of opinions considered insulting to Islam.

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I have written many times on the subject of how the BBC airbrushes the anti-Semitism of Hamas out of its profile of the organisation on its website. But don’t be fooled into thinking this is just about Israel. Another favourite trick in the armoury of the politically correct ideology which holds sway in the Western world’s most powerful media organisation is to play down or ignore the Islamist roots of much of the world’s terrorism generally.

Today, the BBC website carries a story entitled “Mumbai Attacks: One year on”. The attackers are variously referred to as “militants” and “gunmen”. To wit:

“On Wednesday, a court in Pakistan charged seven people in connection with the attacks, including alleged mastermind Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi - head of the banned militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba.”

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