It came as a shock when we learned that many of our universities had entered the lucrative business of selling visas to foreign nationals, with a bit of higher education as a legacy.
A new question now looms: is nothing sacred? Because we need to think about the idea that churches also seem to be participating in the immigration racket. It appears that some sort of ‘pray to stay’ ruse was used on people from non-Christian backgrounds who entered Britain illegally.
A sort of “pray to stay” ruse has been used for people from non-Christian backgrounds.
THE Telegraph reports that about 40 of the 300 inhabitants of the Bibby Stockholm Dorset barges are already attending local churches in a bid to be accepted into the Christian faith, while Sky News reported on Saturday that last weekend 20 asylum seekers were baptized near RAF Wethersfield in the Essex.
And while the clergy seem happy to believe that these conversions constitute a joyful triumph in their efforts to spread the word of Jesus Christ, those of us who have long followed the difficulties of the British asylum system have our doubts.
The case of an alleged chemical attacker and a convicted sex offender Abdoul Ezediwhich made headlines last week, is the second striking example of an apparently fake conversion from Islam to Christianity used by a dangerous foreign national.
The first was Liverpool suicide bomber Emad al-Swealmeen, who fortunately only managed to blow himself up rather than the maternity ward he had targeted on Remembrance Sunday 2021. A Quran and an Islamic prayer rug were found in the apartment of this “Christian convert”.
In Ezedi’s case, his local halal butchers in Newcastle testified to how he remained a good Muslim, despite his apparent defection to the Christian faith a few years ago. A reference from a priest would have been crucial in persuading an immigration judge to ignore a Home Office recommendation that he should not be granted leave to remain.
It is, after all, indisputable that many Muslim countries persecute Christians, particularly those who have defected from Islam. So how could such a person be considered safe in their home Islamic country?
After the al-Swealmeen affair, a local cleric reportedly said that of 200 recent conversions from Islam to Christianity at Liverpool Cathedral, none involved someone who already had the right to live in Britain. In Dorset, church elder David Rees told the BBC he was convinced the barge residents’ 40 conversions were genuine: “Obviously we have to make sure they believe in the Father, in the Son and to the Holy Spirit and that they repent of their sins. and they also want to start a new life in the Church,” he added.
In Islam, the doctrine of taqiyya allows sin to feign unbelief in order to pursue a godly goal or for security reasons. I dare say there has been a lot of this sort of thing going on in recent times and Christian clergy have proven spectacularly and strangely easy to deceive.
The bigger question is whether their own faith leads them to widespread confirmation bias or whether they are anti-border zealots who know exactly what’s going on. In other words, are they just naive or are there crooks in the ships?
