In April, leaks from the review of extremism in prisons, which was commissioned by former British Justice Secretary Michael Gove and conducted by former prison governor Ian Acheson, revealed that Islamic hate literature — misogynistic and homophobic pamphlets and hate tracts endorsing the killing of apostates — is freely available on the bookshelves of British prisons. The hate literature is distributed to inmates by Muslim chaplains, who themselves are appointed by the Ministry of Justice.

According to the Daily Mail, a Whitehall source said that the material was kept in prison chaplaincy rooms and was available for anyone to come in and pick it up. The leaked review also found that chaplains at some prisons encouraged inmates to raise money for Islamic charities linked to international terrorism.

The review will finally be released to the public in August, after a long delay due, according to the Daily Mail, to the findings of the review sparking an urgent internal alert, because of the risk of “severe reputational damage” to the Ministry of Justice. Chris Phillips, the former head of the National Counter Terrorism Security Office, a police unit that works closely with the government on its counter-terrorism strategy, warned last year that staff shortages in prisons were making it harder to tackle Islamic radicalization, because extremists were not properly monitored. Then Home Secretary Theresa May rejected the claim by saying that the government was looking at “and continue to look at” preventative measures.

One former prison officer told the BBC that the “problem within prisons now is getting to a critical point”, with “many Muslim prisoners basically taking over the law of the prison.”

In June, a Muslim cleric told the BBC that a manual used by imams to teach prison inmates about Islam risks “turning people into jihadis.” Sheikh Musa Admani, who according to the BBC is a chaplain and expert in interpreting Islamic texts, and has worked extensively on anti-radicalization programs in the UK and abroad, told the BBC that the so-called Tarbiyah programme, used in English and Welsh prisons since 2011, could turn people towards violence and should be withdrawn. A section of the program is on jihad, and it says taking up arms to fight “evil” is “one of the noblest acts.” According to the BBC, the Tarbiyah program was co-written by a number of imams and Ahtsham Ali, a prisons adviser to the Ministry of Justice. According to Sheikh Musa Admani:

“This document sets out the steps and then addresses various forms of jihad and then goes on to emphasise a particular type i.e. the killing and the fighting. It incites people to take up arms… It prepares people for violence. It could turn people when they come out of prison, supposedly rehabilitated, back into violence.”

Notably, all this is happening despite the fact that the British government’s anti-extremism Prevent strategy requires prisons to stop extremists radicalizing inmates. Clearly, that is not going very well.

Ian Acheson presented his findings from the review for the first time on July 13 at a meeting in the Commons Justice Committee. According to the Daily Mail, Acheson said that he found staff lacked the training to confront and deter Islamist extremist ideology, and were often fearful that they would be accused of racism if they did.

Judging by Acheson’s words, the review is damning of the National Offender Management Service (the institution in charge of prisons): “The service had made no provision at all to forecast the return of jihadi fighters from Afghanistan or ISIS-controlled territory or anywhere else… I found that quite astonishing.”

He also said that there were countless examples of extremist literature being present, while the recruitment, training and supervision of prison imams was “seriously deficient.”

Acheson spoke of an “institutional timidity” in “confronting this problem front and central” adding that the “extremism unit” at the National Offender Management Service “lacked an actual strategy to deal with extremism.”

He also said, “It seemed more concerned with briefing and collating information than providing robust operational support to the front line.”

British authorities are indeed in trouble, if a fear of being called “racist” interferes with their willingness to deal with Islamism.

Hate speech, moreover, is not only being preached in prisons. The young and impressionable are also getting their fair doses at British universities where, in the words of the Express, “Red-carpets [are] laid out for Islam hate preachers at universities and no one challenges them.” According to the Express, 27 events at UK universities had radical speakers in just four months, a rise of 35% in just the last year. This welcome exists despite the requirement of all universities to comply with the government’s anti-extremist program, Prevent.

According to the Express, the messages peddled at these academic events were contemplations such as “Jews are evil”, and a man wanting to marry a Muslim woman, if he did not pray, “should be executed.” Those universities in the British capital that hosted the most extreme events were London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, King’s College, Kingston University, the Institute of Education and University College London.

Among those given a platform at these universities were former Guantanamo inmate Moazzam Begg, director of the lobbying group CAGE, which opposes the British government’s anti-terror program, and South African politician Julius Malema — convicted of a hate crime for claiming a rape victim must have had a “nice time.”

In 2014, at least 70 events with Islamic hate preachers took place at British universities.

Under the Prevent strategy, British universities have to put in place policies to stop extremists radicalizing students and ensure they have measures in place to recognize and respond to signs of radicalization among their students. That, too, does not seem to be working very well.

While the British authorities do not seem equipped to deal with Islamic hate speech, they are impressively efficient when it comes to dealing with what they perceive as “Islamophobia.” British police acted promptly when Tommy Robinson was recently pictured at the Euro 2016 football championships in France wearing an anti-ISIS T-shirt and holding up an English Saint George Cross flag with “F**k ISIS” written across it.

Upon his return to London, Bedfordshire police immediately charged Robinson with inciting racial hatred and brought an application for a “football banning order” against him. Robinson, a Pegida UK organizer, previously received a three-year football ban, which expired in 2014. He has not been known to be involved in football disturbances since. The application against him claimed that he

“poses a significant risk of both violence and disorder… This is especially so in terms of his established capacity to organise disorder from an anti-Muslim perspective… Despite… recently reported ‘good conduct’ at Luton Town Football Club, significant concerns remain regarding his intentions and influences upon others to inflame racial hatred in a country where tensions are already high.”

Offending a murderous terrorist organization such as ISIS is apparently no longer protected by the rules of free speech and is now considered “inciting racial hatred” against Muslims. Does this, then, mean that British police assume that all Muslims identify with ISIS and are thus in some way victims of “racial hatred” when someone wears a T-shirt or holds up a flag that says “F**k ISIS”?

Not only do British police know how to deal swiftly with other people’s “Islamophobia”, they also know how to censor their own speech, when need be, in order not to come across as “Islamophobic.” At one of the UK’s largest shopping centers, during a terror drill designed to be similar to the Paris and Brussels terror attacks, the Greater Manchester police had the fake suicide bomber shout “Allahu Akbar” before detonating a mock device.

A video still from the mock terrorist attack staged on May 9, 2016 by the police in Manchester, England.

For this realistic scenario — after all, that is what Muslim terrorists shout before they detonate themselves or their bombs — the Greater Manchester Police were subsequently criticized: The mayor of Greater Manchester and the area’s police and crime commissioner, Tony Lloyd, said the operation had been “marred by the ill-judged, unnecessary and unacceptable decision by organisers” to have those playing the parts of terrorists shout the Islamic phrase. “It didn’t add anything to the event, but has the potential to undermine the great community relations we have in Greater Manchester.”

The new British government has its work cut out for it.

Judith Bergman is a writer, columnist, lawyer and political analyst.

Attorneys for the defense of two Michigan doctors from India, and one of their wives, who were indicted by a grand jury on April 22 and charged with mutilating the genitals of two seven-year-old girls, intend to put forth a religious-freedom argument on behalf of their Muslim clients.

The defendants are members of Dawoodi Bohra, an Islamic sect based in their home country. In the federal case, the first of its kind since female genital mutilation (FGM) was banned in 1996, the defense team is claiming that the practice is a religious ritual and therefore should be protected by U.S. law.

Their plea unwittingly exposes the false claims made by prominent Muslims — such as Iranian-American religion scholar/TV host Reza Aslan and Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour, who have insisted that FGM is “not an Islamic practice.”

Female genital mutilation, also known as female circumcision, is the cutting or removal of the clitoris and/or the labia, as a way of eliminating a girl’s sexual desire and pleasure, to guarantee that she be a virgin before marriage and remain faithful to her husband afterwards. According to the World Health Organization:

FGM has no health benefits, and it harms girls and women in many ways. It involves removing and damaging healthy and normal female genital tissue, and interferes with the natural functions of girls’ and women’s bodies. Generally speaking, risks increase with increasing severity of the procedure.

…

Procedures are mostly carried out on young girls sometime between infancy and adolescence, and occasionally on adult women. More than 3 million girls are estimated to be at risk for FGM annually.

More than 200 million girls and women alive today have been cut in 30 countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia where FGM is concentrated.

The influx of immigrants and refugees from these parts of the world into Western countries has led to a dramatic and dangerous increase of FGM in Europe, Britain and the United States. According to National Health Service statistics, at least one girl each hour is subjected to this excruciating procedure in the United Kingdom alone — and this is nearly 30 years after it was outlawed there.

In addition, a European Commission report revealed that around 500,000 women in Europe have undergone FGM, while many others are at risk of being forced to undergo it. In Germany, for example, a clinic was opened in 2013 to provide both physical and psychological treatment to victims of the procedure; an estimated 50,000 women in the country had been affected by it, with approximately 20,000 in Berlin. Called the Desert Flower Center, the endeavor was spearheaded and funded by Somali-born supermodel/actress Waris Dirie, a prominent anti-FGM activist.

Somali-born supermodel/actress Waris Dirie, a prominent anti-FGM activist, spearheaded and funded the Desert Flower Center, a clinic in Germany that provides physical and psychological treatment to victims of female genital mutilation. (Photo by Carlos Alvarez/Getty Images)

On May 15, in the wake of the case of the FGM doctors in Michigan, the Minnesota House of Representatives and Michigan Senate approved legislation that would extend in the those states the existing federal anti-FGM laws to the parents of the girls subjected to the ritual. After all, it is the mothers and fathers who force their daughters to undergo it — or, as in the instance of Somali-born author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, her grandmother.

In a 2013 interview with the UK’s Evening Standard, Hirsi Ali — a former Muslim who rejected her faith and became an outspoken critic of Islam and Sharia law, particularly as it affects women — explained why it has been hard to prosecute family members involved in FGM:

“It was done to me at the age of five, and 10 years later, even 20 years later, I would not have testified against my parents,” she said. “It is a psychological issue. The people who are doing this are fathers, mothers, grandmothers, aunts. No little girl is going to send them to prison. How do you live with that guilt?”

The larger issue, however — which must be tackled alongside legislation — involves Western multiculturalism gone wild. Take, for instance, the decision on the part of New York Times health and science editor Celia Dugger in April to stop using the term “female genital mutilation” on the grounds that it is “culturally loaded.”

“There’s a gulf between the Western (and some African) advocates who campaign against the practice and the people who follow the rite, and I felt the language used widened that chasm,” she wrote.

FGM is no less appalling a crime than rape or slavery, yet self-described feminists in the West — including Muslims such as Linda Sarsour and non-Muslim activists on a crusade against “Islamophobia” — are either silent when it comes to barbaric practices or deny their connection to Islam. Does she support slavery as well, another practice supported by Islam, and still practiced today in Saudi Arabia, Libya, Mauritania and Sudan, as well as with Islamic State and Boko Haram?

This is why anti-FGM legislation, no matter how crucial, is insufficient. The time has come to be vigilant not only against practitioners and parents, but to expose and discredit anyone who tries to protect this brutality.

Khadija Khan is a Pakistani journalist and commentator, currently based in Germany.

When Father Gabriel Naddaf, a Greek Orthodox priest in Nazareth, Israel, launched his campaign to convince Israeli Christians to enlist in the Israel Defense Force (IDF), he unwittingly ignited a firestorm between opposing forces within and around Israel’s Christian and Muslim communities.

His decision, born of his love and respect for his native land — combined with his acknowledgement of Judaism and Israel as the cradle of Christianity — perhaps has set the stage for a long overdue reunification in Israel between contemporary Christians and Jews.

In the short term, Father Naddaf’s decision has polarized the Christian community, a large part of which has aligned itself with the Arab-Palestinian narrative — a narrative engineered by forces behind Yasser Arafat in the 1960s — and designed to obliterate Israel as a Jewish nation.

In the long term, however, Father Naddaf’s decision could facilitate an opportunity for Christians to focus on the value of Israel as its most important friend and partner. Naddaf’s journey has the potential to model the way in which Israeli Christians relate to each other, to their homeland and to their Jewish neighbors.

Perhaps by announcing his support of Israel and by boldly acknowledging Christianity’s roots in Judaism, Naddaf took one small step towards decoupling contemporary Israeli Christians from their current misplaced identity of themselves as “Arabs,” as “Palestinians,” and as a kind of fifth column within Israel.

As a Times of Israel article by Mitch Ginsburg asserts:

“Naddaf wants to carve out a new identity and a separate community. He believes that in the coming years he can rally 50,000 Arabic-speaking Christians in Israel to align themselves with the Jewish people and with Israel. The first order of business on the path toward that new identity, he said, was ‘breaking the fear’ that has gripped the community. He likened the Arabic-speaking Christians in Israel, the minority of the minority, to the Jews of the Diaspora: good grades, pretty good jobs, few troubles. ‘Christian Arabs are hostages,’ he said, adding, ‘the only time they feel free to identify as Christians is when they are castigating me.’

How Christians in the region began to identify as Arabs is a complex puzzle; Christian history from 30 CE until the Siege of Jerusalem in 637 CE was not Arabic at all, but rather Jewish and Roman.

Early Christian anti-Semitism, evidenced as early as the second century CE, certainly played a large part in separating Christians from their Jewish roots. Another wedge was the seventh century invasion of the region by Arab Islamic armies, which turned the region into an Islamic colonialist stronghold where Christians lived largely as dhimmis (second class, “tolerated” citizens who had to follow a humiliating set of laws and buy protection) until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1916 and the end of World War I.

Father Gabriel Naddaf is now at the forefront of what one side sees as a hopeful unity movement and what others loudly decry as a political plot to fragment the Arab-Palestinian political cause.

Chapter one of this story began when Father Gabriel Naddaf, then a newly appointed priest of Greek Orthodox Church, started to speak up for the idea that it was time for Christians to embrace their homeland, Israel, and their Jewish roots. At the time, the Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church, Iranaeus, rejected the idea as too controversial.

Mitch Ginsberg’s article points out how unique and extraordinary is Naddaf’s decision:

“[A]n Arabic-speaking Christian clergyman, Father Gabriel Naddaf, a Greek Orthodox priest, has done the unthinkable: He has issued a call for Christian Arab citizens of Israel to reassess their Arab identity and to consider themselves indigenous Christians, of Greek and Aramaic origin, inextricably linked to the Jewish people and the Old Testament, and to fortify that bond by serving in the Israeli army.”

Chapter two launches the remake of an identity. It starts in 2007 when a member of the Maronite Christian Church from the Northern Israeli town of Jish (Gush Halav), IDF Captain (res.) Shadi Khalloul met with soon-to-be member of Knesset (MK) Yariv Levin. Out of that meeting came a new term from an ancient saga — Arameans. It also became a cause of interest for Levin, who, when elected MK in 2009, began to advocate on behalf of Israeli-Arameans.

Arameans, considered by historians a lost civilization, are of Semitic origin. The Aramaic language — a language similar to Hebrew — was a common trade language throughout a large swath of the Middle East during the Second Temple period. Jesus and his Apostles spoke the Aramaic language, which, at least until recently, was still spoken in towns throughout Syria — long after its ethnic origins had disappeared.

The term “Aramean” has not yet caught on with the news media which continues to call the Christians in the Middle East “Christian Arabs” — a confusing term, in part because “Christians” from many different streams of Christianity, and “Muslim Arabs” have been thrown into the same convenient pot.

Typically, and for reasons that can only be speculated on — the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox denominational streams have aligned themselves with the Palestinian-Arab and Muslim politico-religious agendas. Similarly, some Protestant denominations, which have aligned themselves with Palestinian Arabs, have joined the chorus against Israel.

Father Naddaf’s ideas run counter to some Christian theologies today that seem less religious than politically motivated. Christian “Palestinianism,” for example, is a manipulative and erroneous theology linking Jesus with the Palestinian Arab political cause.

It is not too surprising that the Palestinian Authority (PA) has jumped on this bandwagon citing the “Palestinian Jesus” narrative as a rallying cry for its cause, but submitting to a radical Islamic replacement theology would negate archeology and history, as well as Christianity.

In a 2015 article for Breaking Israel News, Ahuva Belofsky writes:

“In response to repeated statements by Palestinian Authority (PA) officials that Jesus was a Palestinian, Israeli Christian leader Father Gabriel Naddaf denounced the claims. ‘On what authority does President Abbas claim that Jesus was a Palestinian?’ Naddaf wrote. ‘The Bible says that He was born in the Jewish city of Bethlehem to Jewish parents from the city of Nazareth and was circumcised on the 8th day as a Jew and presented to the Jewish Temple by His parents according to the Mosaic law.'”

Chapter three captures Father Naddaf’s sense of destiny for Christians hand-in-hand with Israel as a Jewish State. A day came when Naddaf realized that he did not identify at all with the epithet “Arab Christian” and that it neither applies to him nor to his Greek Orthodox followers. “We have a joint fate in this land [Israel], because whatever happens to the Jews here will happen to us,” he asserted in a recent statement.

Since those early days, he has been working continuously to differentiate himself from the “Arab” label attached him by the media, by religious tradition and until recently by the Israeli government, which has now formally recognized Aramean as an official “minority group” eligible to receive benefits from the Israeli government.

Naddaf’s work to enlist Christian youths into the IDF started quietly at first. In 2014 the Jerusalem Post reported that the IDF, which does not require Christians or Muslims to serve, began to send official enlistment notices to Christian youths of military age, inviting them voluntarily to enlist for duty. From an inconspicuous start, now more than 100 Christian youths each year are volunteering to serve, and Naddaf believes the number will increase rapidly. Through the IDF, Christians will be able to assimilate more easily into Israeli society.

However, life for a visionary is never easy. According to Ginsburg in his 2014 article in Times of Israel:

“He knows that his life is in danger. He has been called a traitor. His car tires have been slashed; bloody rags have been left outside his apartment building. He is regularly threatened over the telephone and, last year, his son was attacked outside his home by a youth wielding an iron club.”

News reports do not make it clear who the attackers are, but a billboard near his church in Nazareth, put up after his son was attacked, leaves little doubt:

The large billboard in the center of Nazareth warning Christians against slandering Allah, photographed January 2014.

The Israeli government has unfortunately been slow to prosecute the perpetrators of these attacks; evidently there are few fingerprints. But Naddaf is committed to this path, even while others of his friends and allies have abandoned the project due to threats from the religious hierarchy and elsewhere.

Many theologians, both Jewish and Christian, identify Israel as the center of God’s world — the “apple of God’s eye,” it says in Zechariah 2:8. But there are many Christians for whom the Bible is less an “authoritative” historical document and more a book of poetry or inspiration. There are also those Christian groups (some say a majority) who follow “replacement theologies,” which have written off Israel altogether. This widespread but erroneous version of Christianity transfers the covenant promises God made with Israel to the Christian Church.

In a similar vein, a common Muslim narrative says that Islam replaces both Christianity and Judaism. There are many in the Muslim world intent on rewriting the history of the Middle East; they have vowed to blot out the name of Israel and the Jews altogether. In some circles, these two groups have been in collaboration with each other. As we have been seeing recently in Nigeria, Syria and Iraq, after the Jews are targeted, the Christians are targeted next: “First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people, ” goes the saying in the Middle East.

Father Naddaf, by contrast, has been providing leadership to unite Christians and Jews. A rapidly increasing number of Christians see him as offering them the opportunity to envision and build a tremendous future.

Susan Warner is a Distinguished Senior Fellow of Gatestone Institute and co-founder of a Christian group, Olive Tree Ministries in Wilmington, DE, USA. She has been writing and teaching about Israel and the Middle East for over 15 years. Contact her at israelolivetree@yahoo.com.