Shifting Sands

The Archbishop of Canterbury may be unhappy at the extrajudicial execution of an unarmed man who had never been convicted of anything, but the Dalai Lama, that un-Papal cheerleader for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, is right behind the move. Of course they all knew where bin Laden was. He had been harmless for most of the period since 9/11. All that he had wanted in any practical policy terms was that what had in any case become the pointless American troops in Saudi Arabia be withdrawn. They were, almost immediately. Ever since, there has been no further attack on American soil. Give even Dubya his due.

In Egypt, the Copts are paying the price of our failure to talk those Anglophile and still basically social democratic creatures of British intelligence, the Muslim Brotherhood, into doing a deal with them, as it would have been, and remains, massively in their international interest to do. There would have been no audience for the Salafi if that had happened, and it is not yet quite too late. If the Copts were so well off under Mubarak, then why were they so prominent in the demonstrations against him? They want a deal with the Ikwhan. If it has any sense, then it will want, and strike, a deal with them.

One quarter of the Parliament to be elected on a constituency basis, one quarter on a proportional basis, forty-five per cent (an equal number of men and women) to be nominated by the General Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, and five per cent (an equal number of men and women) to be nominated by the Coptic Patriarch, although not the Catholic one, whose following is so much smaller, in spite of which these appointees ought certainly to include members of the Catholic and other minorities within the Christian community. No legislation could be introduced unless sponsored by at least one MP from each of those four categories, nor could it be enacted without the approval of all four of the General Guide, the Patriarch, and the first and second-placed candidates in a direct Presidential election, termed the President and the Vice-President but enjoying exactly equal powers. Why not?

And who would be the civic embodiment of Christianity then? The country founded by revering those who unanimously ratified the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli’s specification that “the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion”, and against whom the several states had to insist on the First Amendment in order to protect their Established Churches, since disestablished anyway? Or a state in which nothing come become the law unless and until approved by the occupant of one of the oldest Episcopal offices in Christendom?