UK Sharia financing

Melanie Phillips reports that UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown traveled last week to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states to ask them to contribute funds to help the IMF bail out countries at risk in the financial crisis. And what did his interlocutors want in return? A larger say in the IMF and other financial institutions, which only makes sense. And the Saudis, apparently by threatening violence, got UK authorities to call off a bribery investigation involving an arms deal between Saudi Arabia and the British firm BAE Systems.

Nevertheless, British authorities still want to make London the world capital of...sharia financing. As Phillips points out, not only is sharia financing designed to feed required Muslim charitable donations to various jihadi activities, but it is profoundly subversive: "The key point is that sharia law does not recognize the superior authority of the secular law of the land." A breathtaking example of how Islamists can subvert key Western institutions.