From Melanie Phillips

The best thing I have read on Cantuar's folly is from a Jewish cource.

"FIVE: Dr Williams’s prescriptions would spell the end of British identity. Until now, all minorities have set up their own communities of faith and culture under the law of the land, which binds us all as equally loyal citizens of this country.

But Dr Williams suggested that English and sharia law should engage in a grotesque ‘competition for loyalty’ among British Muslims, whom he described as facing the ‘stark alternatives’ of allegiance to their culture or the state.

It is simply unacceptable for the head of this country’s established church to say, in effect, that if Muslims refuse to adhere to British values then Britain will have to become a bit Muslim.

SIX: Dr Williams’s remarks will already have emboldened British Islamist radicals and recruited yet more to their cause. Some will disagree but I believe they will see in his willingness to accommodate sharia law evidence that British society is now terminally weakened and is theirs for the taking.

SEVEN: His remarks will have a devastating effect on Christians in the Third World. Don’t forget Dr Williams is the head of a church whose members, in countries such as Sudan, Nigeria, Pakistan and elsewhere, are being persecuted, harassed, attacked, forcibly converted and murdered in large numbers at the hands of the enforcers of sharia law.

By proposing to entrench sharia law in Britain, he has both betrayed his besieged flock worldwide and weakened Britain against the danger that it faces from the same Islamist enemy that threatens Christians around the world.

That, disgracefully, is what the Synod rose to its feet to applaud when it gave Dr Williams its standing ovation.

No, there was no public misunderstanding over the Archbishop’s remarks. People understood precisely what he was saying. But now he has compounded that gross misjudgment by spinning it as cynically as any venal politician.

For shame. "