Author: Ophelia Benson

We still don’t know whether that police trainer was fired for his beliefs or what he did about them or indeed some other reason, such as getting a hard-on while being frisked during a training exercise. ‘”We welcome all races and religions,” a police spokesman said’ – somewhat idiotically, since beliefs aren’t inherently part of ‘races’ while they are inherently part of religions, and some beliefs could well be incompatible with being a good cop or cop trainer.

Assistant Chief Officer Julia Rogers said: “GMP notes and fully supports the judge’s ruling. This matter has never been about Mr Power’s beliefs and we vehemently deny any claim he was discriminated against on those or any other grounds. GMP welcomes all races and religions and employs and actively recruits people with diverse beliefs and from many different ethnic backgrounds.” In an earlier hearing, the employment tribunal said his psychic beliefs fell under the Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003.

The not quite explicit assumption seems to be that all beliefs should be protected, in other words that no belief should ever be a reason to fire someone. But that’s crazy. Some beliefs are incompatible with some jobs – obviously. If UK law gives blanket employment immunity to all beliefs, then it’s creating a hornets’ nest.

Struck by a novel and original idea, our commentator decides to look up said Regulations – and finds that they do in fact include an exemption, where, for one, ‘being of a particular religion or belief is a genuine and determining occupational requirement.’ Look in Part II, under ‘Exception for genuine occupational requirement.’ So in fact an employer can fire an employee who has a belief that would interfere with doing the job properly. That would, surely, apply to a police trainer whose belief about psychic powers got out of his head and into his police training. So it’s all a fuss about nothing – unless, I suppose, all the employment tribunals are staffed by maniacs. Which is always possible, especially if their beliefs are protected under – oh never mind.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is having a hard time putting things together.

Among western elites – artistic, political, scientific, media – I notice more expressions of abhorrence of Islam and its diverse adherents than ever before…Influential anti-Muslim voices are no longer bothering with nuance. Douglas J Hagmann, director of the non-governmental Northeast Intelligence Network in the US writes: “The latest murderous rampage should be enough to illustrate that Islam is totally incompatible with freedom, democracy and the western culture.” I wonder how many of my British friends think exactly this…Radical Islamists peddle partial narratives about the Crusades, forgetting the Nato interventions to save Bosnian Muslims from genocide and the fact that millions of us would never leave the West where we have human rights we would not have in Muslim nations.

Okay stop right there. Stop there, and think about it. Alibhai-Brown should have, and she didn’t – she rushed on to make a different point, instead. She apparently didn’t even register what she’d said. If she had, she couldn’t have left the first part of the article as it was – she would have gone back and re-written it, or possibly abandoned it in despair. She needed to stop and think very hard about the implications of what she blurted out there: that ‘in Muslim nations’ she and everyone else would not have certain human rights. Well – why is that? Why is that the case? Why did even Yasmin Alibhai-Brown not say ‘in most Muslim nations’ much less ‘some Muslim nations’ much less ‘a few Muslim nations’? Why is it the case that ‘in Muslim nations’ in general, some human rights are not available? Is it not possible that that is because of something about Islam itself, which she doesn’t want to admit to? Because if it’s not something about Islam itself, it seems awfully surprising that it applies to ‘Muslim nations’ without qualification, and that even Yasmin Alibhai-Brown takes this for granted as a fact.

The horrible truth is that it is something about Islam itself that renders some human rights unavailable in places where Islam is entangled with the government, which is to say ‘in Muslim nations.’ Islam itself, as the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam makes so unpleasantly clear, does rule out certain rights, especially for certain people, such as women. This isn’t ‘extremist’ Islam, or terrorist Islam, or radical Islam, or any other minority or eccentric Islam, it’s just Islam. That fact could be different – it’s a contingent fact, as it is a contingent fact that some religions have learned to ignore the nastier parts of its holy books while others have not – but in the world as it is now, that fact is not different. Alibhai-Brown almost admitted that – but not quite. She clings to the idea of Islam’s ‘diverse adherents’ and fails to point out how much of the content of ‘Islam’ has to be ignored for that putative diversity to amount to anything.