It came as quite a shock when we learned that many of our universities had moved into the lucrative trade of selling visas to foreign nationals, with a bit of higher education attached as a legacy sideline.
Now there is a new question hanging in the air: is nothing sacred? For we are having to get our heads around the idea of churches apparently participating in the immigration racket too. It seems that something of a ‘pray to stay’ ruse has been in operation for people from non-Christian backgrounds who have illegally gate-crashed into Britain.
Something of a ‘pray to stay’ ruse has been in operation for people from non-Christian backgrounds
The Telegraph reports that about 40 of the 300 residents of the Bibby Stockholm barge in Dorset are already attending local churches with a view to being accepted into the Christian faith, while Sky News reported on Saturday that last weekend 20 asylum seekers had been baptised near RAF Wethersfield in Essex.
And while clergy seem happy to believe that these conversions amount to a joyful triumph in their efforts to spread the word of Jesus Christ, those of us who have long followed the travails of the British asylum system have our doubts.
The case of suspected chemical attacker and convicted sex offender Abdul Ezedi, which hit the headlines last week, was the second prominent example of a seemingly bogus conversion from Islam to Christianity being used by a dangerous foreign national.
The first was Liverpool bomber Emad al-Swealmeen, who mercifully succeeded only in blowing himself up rather than the maternity unit he targeted on Remembrance Sunday, 2021. A Quran and an Islamic prayer mat were found at the flat of that ‘Christian convert’.
In the case of Ezedi, his local halal butchers in Newcastle have been testifying what a good Muslim he continued to be, despite his apparent defection to the Christian faith some years ago. A reference from a priest is said to 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, incontestable that many Muslim countries persecute Christians and especially any Christians who have defected from Islam. So how could such a person ever be deemed to be safe back in his Islamic country of origin?
After the al-Swealmeen case, a local clergyman was quoted saying that of 200 recent conversions at Liverpool Cathedral from Islam to Christianity, not one involved someone who already had the right to live in Britain. Down in Dorset, church elder David Rees told the BBC he was confident that all 40 conversions of residents from the barge were genuine: ‘Obviously we need to make sure that they believe in the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit and repent of their sins and also they want to start a new life in the church,’ he added.
In Islam the doctrine of taqiyya permits the sin of feigning unbelief in order to pursue a pious goal or for reasons of safety. I venture that there has been rather a lot of that going on lately and that Christian clergy have proved spectacularly and suspiciously easy to fool.
The bigger question is whether their own faith is leading them into wholesale confirmation bias or whether they are anti-borders zealots who know exactly what is going on. In other words, are they just naïve or are there knaves in the naves?
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