David Quinn:

"The fear of the Europeans is that they won't be able to assimilate the ever-growing Muslim publications, and that the ever-growing Muslim populations don't want to be assimilated. And that what the ever-growing Muslim populations want to do is at some point introduce or impose Sharia Law upon the countries in which they live. I mean I've interviewed Muslims about it. I've interviewed Muslims in Clonskea Mosque about this. And I put it to them: If we ever had a majority Muslim population in Ireland, would you want to see Sharia Law introduced, and the answer was, Of course. Now my opinion is, if you have a large body of Muslims wanting Sharia Law introduced, which is so utterly incompatible with Western constitutional democracy, then you have got a major problem. I think that is one of the key issues—the attitude of your average Muslim to Sharia Law being introduced into European countries."

In response, the Secretary of the Irish Council of Imams said he thought it was democracy when the majority of the population established the kind of law that it thought best. And Professor Fred Halliday, of the London School of Economics, who was an enthusiast for the 1991 war on Iraq, and can hardly be accused on being soft on Islamic Revolution in Iran, pointed out that there is no Book of Laws in the Koran as there is in the Bible, and that the term Sharia Law is not any specific body of law, Muslims in each situation being free to arrange it for themselves.

But David Quinn's fears were not calmed. He appears to live in the certainty that the one per cent are destined to become 51% in Ireland, that we will lose our English Common Law, that the contentment of the dark Egyptian night is about to descend on us, that we will be relieved our our recently acquired existential angst (a thing unknown to our Gaelic ancestors), and that life will then not be worth living.

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