The incremental  effect  of Islamic sharia law  into British and European legal systems by virtue of the political pandering to petro wealth has been  in the view of many nothing short of  dangerous.

That figures, such as Dante Alighieri  (author of the  Divine Comedy), Sir Winston Churchill, and Polish king Jon Sobieski,  among others, would be liable to arrest and  criminal prosecution  today, due to their opinions of  Islam (as  a legal  - political - religious system), is itself an outrage, as  is the prosecution of Paul Weston, (a British candidate for the  European parliament) for the crime of  publicly quoting Winston  Churchill due to fundamentalist Islamic objections.

This progressive dismantling of democratic rights of free speech  has now reached the point of threatened religious persecution with the police investigation of Pastor James  McConnell, of Whitewell Metropolitan Tabernacle  Belfast, for the expression  of his  theological views concerning Islam. At no point did James McConnell voice any personal hatred or remarks of a racist nature. When one poll of UK Moslems after the 2005 London tube & bus attacks revealed 40 percent of British  Moslems  would not report knowledge  of a planned terrorist attack to the police, his personal inability to trust members of that community, coming from a city like Belfast, haunted  by its own history of terror, is an opinion to which he entitled. He  did not however  engender any hatred of Moslem people  as  radical Islamic clerics have been exposed,  doing against  'infidels', with virtual immunity from arrest and prosecution. Despite our disbelief  in Islam,  we  do not despise Moslem people or deny them their rights  and  neither does James McConnell -  a man with whom we ourselves,  at times, have theologically  disagreed. The issue however is not agreement or disagreement  but the  right of religious conviction and expression inside of a church. It is an undeniable fact that not a  single Islamic nation in the world  provides Christians  and Jews the same  rights Western  societies give Moslems. Are Christians now also being denied that freedom in Christian societies also? We urge the public of all communities to rally to the support of Pastor McConnell and we respectfully urge the Northern Ireland police to refrain from, what it is impossible  to see as anything other than, a politically motivated attack on religious freedom.