Only In Britain (And America)

UK Telegraph columnist Christopher Howse writes on the 'row' - a rather mild word for a dispute in which Muslims have burned down churches - over Borneo Christians using the word Allah for God, as they have 'from time immemorial':

Two-thirds of Malaysians are Muslims and about 10 per cent of them Christians. Malaysian political life is a little different from that in Britain. The leader of the opposition, for example, is facing trial on charges of "sodomy", a ploy used by the government before.

Malaysian political life certainly is a little different from that in Britain where a Daily Mail journalist can ask without the slightest hint of irony of a senior member of the ruling Labour Party:

...is he ever going to marry his boyfriend, about whom he never speaks?

... as if it is quite natural.

Meanwhile, Telegraph Religious Affairs Correspondent Jonathan Wynne-Jones breaks the news that:

A senior adviser to the Queen has met secretly with the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales to express concern over the Pope's offer for disaffected Anglicans to convert to Rome. In a highly unusual step, Earl Peel, the Lord Chamberlain, asked Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, to meet him following Pope Benedict XVI's decree.

He writes:

The Archbishop reassured Lord Peel that Pope Benedict had only issued the decree in response to the requests of traditionalist Anglicans disillusioned with the liberal direction of their Church.

He stressed that it had not been intended as a hostile act or to in any way destabilise the Church of England, which has been engulfed in rows over women bishops and gay clergy.

And recalls that:

Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, said that at the time that it had been viewed as "a dawn raid on the Anglican communion".

Meanwhile, Williams lectures capitalists in New York:

Giving a lesson at Trinity Wall Street Episcopal Church... Dr Rowan Williams attacked what he called the "straw man" of self-interest and the way in which rich countries disregarded poor ones... "We live in a world that's broken in the sense that a very large part of our world, notably Africa, feels, with a good deal of justification, that the rest of the world has more or less stopped thinking about it."

Williams is, it appears, another man on whom the irony of his own words is lost.

If Africans believe 'the rest of the world has more or less stopped thinking about' them, it is because they have been abandoned by the west to corrupt governments and radical Islam - the former which pocket the profits of capitalism while their people go hungry and the latter which drive out capitalist western ventures that could free their countries from poverty - and have been alienated by Williams' own liberally-enthralled church and its American cousin to the extent that they are about to break away from the Anglican community.

-- Nick