An “overwhelming majority” of Europeans believe immigration from Islamic countries is a threat to their traditional way of life, a survey revealed last night. The poll, carried out across 21 countries, found “widespread anti-immigration sentiment”, but warned Europe’s Muslim population will treble in the next 17 years. It reported “a severe deficit of trust is found between the Western and Muslim communities”, with most people wanting less interaction with the Muslim world.

Last night an MP warned it showed that political leaders in Britain who preach the benefits of unlimited immigration were dangerously out of touch with the public.

The study, whose authors include the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey, was commissioned for leaders at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland. It reports “a growing fear among Europeans of a perceived Islamic threat to their cultural identities, driven in part by immigration from predominantly Muslim nations”. And it concludes: “An overwhelming majority of the surveyed populations in Europe believe greater interaction between Islam and the West is a threat.”

Backbench Tory MP David Davies told the Sunday Express: “I am not surprised by these findings. People are fed up with multiculturalism and being told they have to give up their way of life. “Most people in Britain expect anyone who comes here to be willing to learn our language and fit in with us.”

Mr Davies, who serves on the Commons Home Affairs Committee, added: “People do get annoyed when they see millions spent on translating documents and legal aid being given to people fighting for the right to wear a head-to-toe covering at school. A lot of people are very uncomfortable with the changes being caused by immigration and politicians have been too slow to wake up to that.”

Sunday Express, 27 January 2008

It has been more than 40 years since Tim Carbin walked the length of Oak Lane, the Bradford backstreet of his boyhood. Then, when he lived with his grandmother Florence Pawson, a matriarch within the community, his task after school was to run errands. Down to Foster’s, the baker’s, for a loaf of bread and a pound of bacon from Donald Gilbank the butcher. “And mind it isn’t too fatty,” Florence would tell him.

Mr Carbin, then 13, knew all the local storekeepers by name, just as he knew the families in the surrounding terraces. Yesterday, outside number 95A, his grandmother’s former home, Mr Carbin gazed in bewilderment as he scanned his old haunt. Not surprisingly, the stores of his youth had gone: such has been the change in our shopping habits over the decades that they have given way to supermarkets and fast-food outlets.

But that was not all that had changed irrevocably in Oak Lane. Among the new stores, the clothes shops sell Muslim dress, the butcher stocks halal meat and even the local takeaway advertises halal pizza. “I feel like an alien, like I’m on a street in Karachi,” Mr Carbin says, awkwardly. “I don’t feel I have anything in common with this area.” He now lives just 10 miles away, in the north of Bradford. He hasn’t returned because Oak Lane, like so many similar areas of so many northern cities, is now an almost exclusive Asian Muslim community.

“This isn’t, as the Government would like us to believe, a multicultural society,” he says. “This is pure racial segregation. And it’s like this because the Muslim community simply refuses to integrate. So people like me feel like outcasts in our own country.”

Sunday Telegraph, 13 January 2008

“Bishop Nazir-Ali is bang on the money when he talks about ‘no-go’ areas for Christians in fundamentalist Muslim ghettoes in Britain. But he could have gone further still. This country is littered with ‘no-go’ areas, not just physically, but culturally, spiritually, intellectually and academically, too. Our very liberties are being torched in the name of ‘diversity’.

“The pernicious doctrine of multiculturalism has turned us into a society where people are frightened to speak their minds and justice has been flipped on its head. To express an opinion contrary to the ruthlessly enforced, politically motivated conformity of the Fascist Left is to risk a vicious campaign of character assassination which, if you work in the public sector, will almost certainly cost you your job. The private sector isn’t immune, either. Only last week, we learned of a banker who was sacked for making a harmless, lame joke about Shi’ites.

“We have reached the ludicrous position where a Pakistani clergyman is facing demands for his resignation and is being accused of stirring up racial and religious hatred simply for speaking the truth. All Bishop Nazir-Ali did was state the bleedin’ obvious. Yet even William Hague has attacked him, saying the idea that Christians are made to feel uncomfortable by Muslim extremists is not a Britain he recognises.

“In which case, I suggest Hague heads a few stops east of Westminster, along the Mile End and Whitechapel Roads, where Muslim monoculturalism holds sway. Or visits Leicester, Bradford, Burnley, Oldham or parts of Birmingham. It is beyond dispute that there is a concerted campaign by Islamic extremists to force sharia law on to significant areas of Christian Britain. And there is no doubt that in predominantly Muslim areas, they are winning.”

Richard Littlejohn in the Daily Mail, 8 January 2008

“There is a fair chance that the sort of comments that attract criticism, not only from the political establishment but also from the self-appointed spokesmen of the Muslim community are worth hearing. So it is with the weekend’s unvarnished warning from the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, of the perils of multiculturalism….

“By focusing on the way the adhan, or call to prayer, is delivered through amplified loudspeakers in an attempt to ‘impose an Islamic character on certain areas’ and by questioning whether non-Muslims ‘wish to be told the creed of a particular faith five times a day on the loudspeaker’, the bishop was raising an issue of genuine concern in many communities. As a tolerant, Christian country we resent it if any group seeks to take advantage of that tolerance by trying to impose its own views.

“Yet Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems have responded with knee-jerk predictability, desperate as ever not to offend Muslim sensibilities. It shows once again how difficult it is to engage in a mature debate about the damaging impact of multiculturalism in this country in general, and the threat posed by Islamic radicalism to our way of life in particular.”

Daily Telegraph, 8 January 2008

Yes, the Bishop of Rochester’s remarks have produced yet another scaremongering anti-Muslim headline in the Daily Express. And readers are invited to participate in a telephone poll on the question: “Are you fed up with the fanatics changing Britain?”

The same issue features an article by Leo McKinstry, headed “Why we must listen to the Bishop’s warnings on the dangers of Islam“. McKinstry writes:

“At last a trumpet blast has been sounded against the creeping Islamification of Britain. For too long our ruling elite has been in denial about the consequences of this insidious process, pretending the assertiveness of Muslim culture is just another element in the rich diversity of British society…. Bishop Nazir-Ali is absolutely right. His critics are living in a fantasy world conjured up by their own deceitful clappy-happy rhetoric if they think Britain does not have a problem with the growing strength of Islam in our midst. The fact is that, in all too many of our cities, Muslim radicalism has led to segregation, oppression of women, criminality and terrorism….

“Islam in Britain could be portrayed as a combination of the outstretched palm of victimhood, begging for official support, and the clenched fist of grievance, threatening violence if demands are not met. All too often the political establishment has surrendered, dressing up its feebleness as multi-cultural sensitivity…. We now have state-funded Muslim schools, housing projects, leisure centre sessions and community groups. Cultural cringe means that every superstitious demand of the radicals, no matter how absurd, is taken seriously by the authorities. So, while elderly people are dying of neglect, nurses are instructed to turn the beds of Muslim patients five times a day towards Mecca….

“The generation that fought the Second World War to protect our nation from foreign occupation must wonder why they bothered as the social landscape of our country is transformed…. There is no more graphic symbol of the change sweeping Britain than the demand from Muslims in Oxford that the city council should give mosques the right to broadcast the call to prayers over loudspeakers at least three times a day. The noisy summons to Muslim prayers smacks of ideological supremacy rather than spiritual concern.

“It is absurd to pretend that Muslim culture is not becoming the dominant force in all too many cities…. What is remarkable is that, in the name of diversity, so-called liberals have promoted the misogynistic authoritarian theocracy they claim to despise. Christianity helped to build the safe, tolerant society which for generations has attracted migrants fleeing persecution or squalor. Yet now, as Christianity withers, large swathes of our country are starting to replicate the Third World.”