Harron Siddiqui analyses the contradictions in the Bouchard-Taylor commission’s report.
Category Archives: Multiculturalism
‘Britain’s phoney war on terror’
“After spending time recently with senior Pentagon officials and other Americans involved in counter-terrorism, I was struck by the global scope of their concerns. Above all I was reminded how different their attitudes are from those of their British counterparts, still obsessed with ‘community cohesion’ and the ‘radicalisation’ of young Muslims. In Britain the views of the non-Muslim majority are largely ignored – or lead to them being branded as potential ‘Islamophobes’. In the United States the unthinkable and unsayable are debated openly….
“Europe can be weak in combating terrorism at a political level, largely because of the effects of officially decreed multiculturalism and a failure to do much about the impact of population movements on the host culture and economy. Not surprisingly, the failure of European governments to get a grip on what are still relatively small Muslim minorities provokes exasperation in America.
“Many of the 1.6m Muslims living in Britain, for example, still do not seem fully to appreciate the outrage that a finger-jabbing minority causes at home and abroad with each escalating demand for Islamist enclaves. Like a perennial student, new Labour favours debate and dialogue. But in dealing with the Muslim Council of Britain, the government has unwittingly accepted as ‘community’ interlocutors men who have blamed Islamist terrorism primarily on British foreign policy, while failing to condemn suicide bombing outside the UK….
“The one British politician who grasps the need to be as frank as our American cousins about the threat from terrorists who are actively plotting indiscriminate slaughter is not the prime minister, who appears to be locked into the globalising vapidities that thrill Davos seminars, but David Cameron. The leader of the opposition understands the existential threat from jihadism and has comprehensive ideas about how to combat it…. He is fully conscious of the need to balance ancient liberties with the right to stay alive.”
Michael Burleigh in the Sunday Times, 25 May 2008
Update: See Yusuf Smith’s comments at Indigo Jo Blogs, 27 May 2008
Quebec’s culture clash
Is it likely that Hérouxville, set in Quebec’s overwhelmingly white and francophone heartland, will ever witness the stoning of a Muslim woman? Not really, mused Gérard Bouchard, the co-chair of a provincial commission looking into the reasonable accommodation of minorities at an October 2007 public hearing in Trois-Rivières, 30 minutes from the town. “We’re pretty far from stoning here,” he said.
Bouchard was speaking to Andre Drouin, a member of the Hérouxville town council which, in January 2007, created a national firestorm by adopting a code of conduct that banned the stoning of women and covering of faces, among other practices. Yet Drouin held his ground in the face of Bouchard’s skepticism. “Stoning takes place, and some of those people will want to come here. It’s important to be preventive.”
Exchanges like these have consumed the province since Premier Jean Charest formed the Bouchard-Taylor commission in February 2007, largely in response to the public firestorm over the Hérouxville news.
Munira Mirza joins Boris’s team
A glamorous young Muslim [sic] woman is the latest Cameron favourite to be parachuted in to keep a close eye on Johnson. Munira Mirza, who argues that racism in the UK is greatly exaggerated, is to serve as a cultural adviser to the mayor.
She is the third member of his new team to have worked for Policy Exchange, the organisation behind many of the policies adopted by Cameron’s Conservatives.
Mirza’s appointment will also be viewed as an attempt to neutralise any accusations that Johnson is racist, especially as he seeks to slash grants to fringe ethnic groups, many of which received lavish funding from Livingstone.
Mirza believes race relations policies based on multicultural ideas have been divisive.
For more on Munira Mirza and Policy Exchange see here. Pointing to Mirza’s asssociation with the tendency around Spiked Online and the Institute of Ideas, which was formerly the Revolutionary Communist Party, we wrote that the ideology promoted by the ex-RCP these days “fits in quite well with Tory values”. And in another piece we observed that the RCP had “morphed into a bunch of right-wing libertarian individualists whose obvious natural home now is the Tory party”. How right we were.
Update: See also Jenny Bourne’s comment piece on the Institute of Race Relations website.
Martin Freeman on multiculturalism
Chris Sullivan interviews Martin Freeman:
Politely, I comment on his lovely house and the tranquillity that surrounds it. “When I moved up here this woman I know said, ‘Ooh! There are a lot of whiteys up there’, and I said, ‘I love white people; I’ve no problem with them at all’. The idea was that I was going to complain because there weren’t enough blues dances out here; not enough ragga around. But I’m not bothered by it.
“Multiculturalism hasn’t and doesn’t help, because rightly or wrongly it polarises people so much,” he continues. “Racism is one thing – and I don’t agree with that in any form – but noticing that there are differences is normal and fine and to be encouraged. We’ve reached a state now where it’s, ‘You shouldn’t notice. Why are you noticing he’s got a bomb and has a beard and is Muslim and wants to kill your family’?”
‘An Anatomy of Surrender’
“Motivated by fear and multiculturalism, too many Westerners are acquiescing to creeping sharia.” Another paranoid Islamophobic rant by Bruce Bawer, author of While Europe Slept.
The new generation of renegades
“Commentators Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch and Andrew Anthony all had left-wing parents, and were involved in political campaigning around race, gender and class in the 1970s…. Although none of them has abandoned the whole progressive package, their main target is a left-liberal intelligentsia, which, as they see it, opposed the overthrow of a fascist dictator, Saddam Hussein, and is now in an unholy Faustian alliance – justified by modish, postmodern cultural relativism – with the far right.
“The far right in question is not the BNP, but political Islamism, represented by those main Muslim umbrella organisations that are seen to have links with Islamists in Muslim countries, particularly those who joined the coalition that organised the demonstration on February 15 2003 against the invasion of Iraq….
“Certainly, the progressive left is in alliance with a group whose traditional views run counter to some central planks of its platform. Twenty-five years on from Maydays, I have written a new play (Testing the Echo), which is partly about the temptation – on these understandable grounds – to reject any kind of religious affiliation, to brand fundamentalist Islam as brown fascism, and (thereby) to abandon an impoverished, beleaguered and demonised community.
“For, let’s be clear, the alliance to which the new defectors object – the alliance enabled by a multiculturalism that sought to give visibility and confidence to entire communities – is not just between a few deluded revolutionaries and the odd crazed Muslim cleric. Martin Amis denies he’s declaring war on the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims, but his ‘thought experiment’ about meting out collective punishment on Muslims (travel restriction, deportation, strip searching) ‘until it hurts the whole community’ makes no distinction between followers of Hizb ut-Tahrir and the man in the Clapham mosque. Cohen is careful to point out that ‘Islamism has Islamic roots’, and, clearly, the group that he dubs the ‘far right’ goes beyond the adherents of Jamaat-e-Islami.”
David Edgar in the Guardian, 19 April 2008
Public pool bars father and son from its ‘Muslim-only’ swimming session
A father and his five-year-old son were turned away from their local swimming pool because they were the wrong religion. David Toube, 39, and his son Harry were told that the Sunday morning session was reserved for Muslim men only.
Mr Toube, a corporate lawyer, described his experiences on a blog. “I arrived at the pool to discover that they were holding what staff described to me as ‘Muslim men only swimming’,” he wrote. “I asked whether my son and I could go as we were both male. I was told that the session was for Muslims only and that we could not be admitted.”
Yes, it’s our friend David T from the “left-wing” blog Harry’s Place, finding his true political home in a right-wing Tory rag.
See also “Banned from swimming pool for not being Muslim” in the Daily Express, “Multiculturalism gone wild: UK father and son banned from public swimming pool for not being Muslims” at Dhimmi Watch and “No swimming for dhimmis: how will the Left excuse this latest Western Muslim ‘tolerance’?” by Debbie Schlussel.
Update: Read the excellent post by D.B. at The People’s Republic of Teeside, 19 April 2008
Blears blames Muslims for social divide
Community Secretary Hazel Blears stood accused of “scapegoating” immigrants and Muslim groups on Thursday for what she called the development of “social apartheid” in Britain.
In a speech to the Fabian Society in Westminster, Ms Blears claimed that community cohesion could only be maintained by preventing one single faith or ethnic group from dominating a neighbourhood to the extent that others feel “alienated, insecure or unsafe.”
However, the minister said that she saw “nothing wrong” with cultural enclaves of “particular groups” such as “Chinatowns and Little Italys.”
Her comments follow Church of England Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali’s recent attack on the Muslim communities for supposedly creating “no-go zones” for whites in parts of Britain.
Furious left campaigners and politicians dismissed Ms Blears’s seeming concern as “beyond satire” when “no-one has done more” than new Labour to create poor and ethnic minority ghettos through its big-business policies and anti-terror laws.
Morning Star, 4 April 2008
See also the Daily Mirror, Daily Express and Daily Mail.
‘Drowning in a sea of migrants’
White Brits are set to reveal what they really think about immigration in a series of bombshell telly shows. Members of the UK’s “forgotten” working class say they are drowning in a rising tide of immigrants. And they blast Labour politicians for abandoning them in the name of “multi-culturalism”.
They speak openly and honestly in a series of shows for the BBC’s White Season, but their controversial views are sure to spark outrage. Tomorrow night’s Last Orders features members of struggling Wibsey Working Men’s Club in Bradford, West Yorks. They say they are being driven into the arms of the extremist BNP by a Labour Party that no longer cares about them.
They say the heart has been ripped from their communities as mass immigration has seen them lose their traditions and their jobs. And they warn of a bloody race war. Scaffolder Paul, 21, said: “It isn’t our area any more, it is theirs. The Asians hate us and we hate them. The Muslims get all the new houses and the whites all the sh*te houses. There will be one big mass battle start in Bradford. I give it five years and it will explode.”
BBC documentaries head Richard Klein insisted last night: “I don’t think we have given a platform to extremist political parties. We have given a platform to people whose views aren’t often heard on TV.”