Category Archives: Multiculturalism

Blame ‘grievance-nurturing multiculturalism’ for Muslim outrage at Pope

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The combination of grievance-nurturing multiculturalism and instant headlines is having a disastrous effect on the worldwide Muslim community. There seems to be no limit to its spokesmen’s willingness to voice outrage; and their messages are then picked up by fanatics who mount appalling attacks on Christians in Muslim countries. When was the last time a Muslim leader apologised for such atrocities?

“The truth is that barbaric attacks happen weekly. No wonder that Benedict favours an urgent dialogue with Muslims on the subject of religious violence, rather than the usual touchy-feely exchange of compliments…. We suspect that Western public opinion is not displeased that Benedict has said the unsayable. Now it is time for other churchmen to tell their Muslim counterparts that, in addition to dishing out criticism, they must learn how to take it.”

Editorial in the Daily Telegraph, 18 September 2006

Over at Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer welcomes these “trenchant words from the Telegraph”.

Chief rabbi blasts multiculturalism, calls on Muslims to integrate

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A crisis of national and social identity is undermining Britain’s efforts to integrate its immigrant population, according to the Chief Rabbi. Sir Jonathan Sacks told The Sunday Telegraph that multiculturalism had led to segregation and a country that was no longer confident of what it stood for.

The Chief Rabbi echoed the call last week by the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, for Muslims to do more to integrate. Sir Jonathan said that the Islamic community, particularly second-generation Muslims, were struggling with “a conflicted identity”.

Continue reading →

‘Our failure to confront radical Islam is there for all to see’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“At long last, the debate on Islamism as politics, not Islam as religion, is out in the open. Two weeks ago, Jack Straw might have felt he was taking a risk when publishing his now notorious article on the Muslim veil. However, he was pushing at an open door. From across the political spectrum there is now common consent that the old multicultural emperor, before whom generation of politicians have made obeisance, is now a pitiful, naked sight.”

Daily Telegraph, 17 October 2006

Melanie Phillips, perhaps? No, the appalling Denis MacShane – the man who chaired the All-Party Parliamentary Committee on Anti-Semitism that issued the ludicrous report claiming that Islamists in Britain are in an alliance with the BNP.

In 2003 MacShane delivered a speech in which he said: “It is time for the elected and community leaders of the British Muslims to make a choice – the British way, based on political dialogue and non-violent protests, or the way of the terrorists, against which the whole democratic world is uniting.” In response, his constituency party passed a resolution stating: “Denis MacShane is inciting racial and religious hatred, by publicly implying in the press that the Muslim community elected members and leaders are in favour of terrorism and being anti-British.”

Guardian, 28 November 2003

Attacks on multicultural Britain pave the way for enforced assimilation

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Now, after 7/7, despite the discovery that the suicide bombers were homegrown and wholly British, the thinking in the UK is to embrace the backward and undoubtedly Islamophobic discourse issuing from mainland Europe. Cultural pluralism has gone too far; it threatens our values and our national safety. A line has to be drawn on difference. Ethnic minorities have now, in the domestic context of the war on terror, effectively to subsume their cultural heritage within Britishness.

“Going against the grain of its history, the UK has taken a leaf out of Europe’s monoculturalist book and descended into nativism – conflating multiculturalism with culturalism and ethnicism, assimilation with integration, and extolling British values to the exclusion of all others – foreshadowing a monolithic society and a centralised state.”

A. Sivanandan in the Guardian, 13 September 2006

An interesting article, though some might question his negative view of ’80s multiculturalism. But the last bit hits the nail on the head.

‘Multiculturalism’s failure’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The Communities Minister, Ruth Kelly, has set up a commission to examine ‘integration and cohesion’ in British society. As she launched this, she suggested that the ‘multiculturalism’ model was not entirely successful. You can say that again. With so many alienated young Muslims emerging from British society – the Americans are appalled that so many of those who stand accused of intended terrorism are British citizens – it is evident that there is something seriously amiss with our present version of multiculturalism…. if a nation is to prosper, and not produce sullenly alienated young people, the civil standards of the host culture must also be commonly accepted. Certain values have to bind people together to develop a loyalty to this host culture, including the Queen, the English language, the British traditions of law and civil society, and the religious heritage – which I would call Judeo-Christian….”

Mary Kenny in the Jewish Chronicle, 9 September 2006

Christians, not Muslims, suffer discrimination – and it’s time to fight back!

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Olga Craig complains that it’s Christians, not Muslims, who are being discriminated against in Britain today:

“The cause for such a difference in treatments, many believe, lies with Christianity itself, with its own over-eagerness to encompass multi-faith movements. Damian Thompson, the editor-in-chief of the Catholic Herald, said: ‘The fact that Christians are persecuted and harassed, while Muslim extremists are left alone to spread their propaganda, can be partly attributed to the incredible wimpishness of Anglican and Catholic bishops in Britain, who have spent decades wringing their hands and apologising for the sins of Christianity – and, now that it is under threat, they simply do not know how to speak up for it forcefully,’ he said. ‘Much of the damaging appeasement of extreme Muslims can be traced back to the multi-faith movement embraced so vigorously by the liberal clergy in the Seventies and Eighties. Offending Muslim sensibilities frightens Church leaders far more than acts of terrorism.’…

“Dr Patrick Sookhdeo, of the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity, believes that ‘any society must be based on its values. And for the UK they are Judaeo-Christian. The pluralism of the Seventies and Eighties marginalised Christianity. Then secularism came along and effectively neutralised it. So, now we have a moral/spiritual vacuum and anything that is seen to be Christian can be attacked.’…

“One who has fought back is Major Malcolm Hampton, of the Salvation Army. When his band was asked to play carols at the switching on of the Christmas lights in Oakengates, Shropshire, he refused, because the local council had rebranded the event as ‘winter celebrations’ to avoid offending non-Christians. It was, Mr Hampton felt, the final straw. ‘We decided to take a stand’, he said. ‘We are a Christian church and it is a Christian festival which we did not want to see undermined or demeaned. They decided to remove the word Christmas from the event and we thought it was the thin end of the wedge. Enough is enough’.”

Sunday Telegraph, 10 December 2006

More ignorance from Sookhdeo

Posted on by Bob Pitt

You might have thought that, after he made a fool of himself by calling for a major translation of the Qur’an to be banned, there would be few people who could take Patrick Sookdeo’s self-appointed role as an “expert” on Islam seriously. Unfortunately, the press has an insatiable appetite for attacks on Muslims and multiculturalism, no matter how discredited the author may be.

Thus the London Evening Standard had no hesitation in publishing a piece by Sookhdeo which tells us that: “The Islamic creed is non-negotiable. Those who do not share this creed are despised as kafir (infidels). Hatred of non-Muslims is preached in many British mosques.”

Sookhdeo continues: “the UK’s well-meaning policy of validating every faith and ethnic community culturally, in a depoliticised way, is naive when it comes to Islam. For Islam does not separate the sacred from the secular: it seeks earthly power over earthly territory. The result is that already the UK has reached the stage of parallel societies, where purely Muslim areas function in isolation. Worse, this is about to be made semi-official. In West Ham a gigantic mosque is planned by the radical Tablighi Jamaat group. The London Thames Gateway Development Corporation says that the new mosque will make West Ham a ‘cultural and religious destination’. This will be nothing less than an Islamic quarter of our capital city. But has anyone asked the people of West Ham?”

Summarising his argument, Sookhdeo writes: “I believe Islam needs different treatment from other faiths because Islam is different from other faiths. It is the only one which teaches its followers to gain political power and then impose a law which governs every aspect of life, discriminating against women and non-believers alike. And this is ultimately why a naive multiculturalism leads not to a mosaic of cultures living in harmony, but to one threatened by Islamic extremism.”

Continue reading →

The bigger cultural picture

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Soumayya Ghannoushi“Is there anything inherently wrong in placing multiculturalism under the spotlight to critically examine it and assess its ills and virtues? The obvious answer is no. The problem is not with the question itself, but with its context, assumptions and terms.

“The current debate about multiculturalism takes place in the wrong context: terrorism. Like the non-heroes in Kafka’s tragic plots, who find themselves embroiled in situations in which they had no hand, multiculturalism has been dragged into the discussion of terrorism. It does not belong there.

“Those who have forced the subject into discussion start with a false diagnosis of the problem of terrorism. For example, that the problem is not political, but cultural. That policies and strategies are blameless. That culture and religion are culpable.

“The conclusion of this ostrich-like analysis is that the cultural pit must be drained if we are to get rid of the troublesome mosquitoes. Cultural diversity is at fault. It has allowed Muslims to continue behaving like Muslims.

“The now ubiquitous question about multiculturalism is, in reality, a question about Islam and Muslims. For ‘Has multiculturalism failed?’ read: ‘what is to be done about Muslims?’. The ‘multiculturalism problem’ is, in other words, a euphemism for ‘the Muslim problem’.”

Soumaya Ghannoushi at the Guardian’s Comment is Free, 5 September 2006

Another hate-filled rant from Mad Mel

Posted on by Bob Pitt

madmel“More than 30 Muslim groups, along with Muslim MPs and peers, demanded that the Government change its foreign policy in order to placate terrorists. This blackmail was followed by a demand from other representatives [in fact, just one representative – ed.] that a pair of Islamic religious festivals should become official holidays and that Islamic laws relating to marriage and family life be applied in Britain. These were not moderate attitudes.

“In Australia, the government has adopted a robust approach to such extremism. It has said that those Muslims who want to live under sharia law should leave the country, and that Australian Muslim leaders need to denounce terrorism in all its forms around the world.

“By contrast, rather than challenging the ideology driving Islamic terror, Britain remains paralysed by the back-to-front thinking which blames its own policies for the terrorism that threatens it. This paralysis is largely caused by multiculturalism, the doctrine which holds that minorities cannot be held responsible for the wrong that they do since they are always somehow the victims of the majority.

“This doctrine has pushed Left-wingers into the arms of Islamic radicals who are sworn enemies of the West. When Trevor Phillips, the black chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, repeated his concerns about the failure of multiculturalism, London’s mayor Ken Livingstone jeered that he expected Mr Phillips soon to join the racist British National Party.

“This was the same Ken Livingstone who last year publicly embraced as a ‘reformer’ Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, the Islamic extremist who calls for suicide bombings in Iraq and Israel and perpetrates gross libels against the Jews. Yet despite such an endorsement of true racism and fascism, the Mayor remains popular — and still remains in the Labour Party.

“Such a state of denial goes far beyond the Left. The political and security establishment still refuses to grasp that it is not enough — vital though this is — to thwart terrorist plots and break up terrorist cells. Action also needs to be taken against the paranoid, hate-filled ideas driving so many to these terrible acts….

“Virtually nothing is being done to prevent the recruitment to terror still taking place on university campuses, which have long acted as hotbeds of radicalisation, or in prisons or youth clubs. Even worse, Islamic extremists have been recruited into the very heart of Whitehall as government advisers, in the wholly misguided belief that appeasing religious fanaticism will draw its venom.”

Daily Mail, 2 September 2006

‘My vote’s for Trevor, not Ken’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Joan SmithJoan Smith takes sides in the dispute between the Mayor of London and Trevor Phillips, the newly appointed head of the CEHR who is of course a great favourite of Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch. In particular, and predictably, she endorses Phillips’s views on multiculturalism:

“Phillips’s pronouncements on the subject are robust – earlier this year he suggested that Muslims who want to live under Islamic law (sharia) should leave the country – but more coherent than anything the Mayor of London has come up with. Livingstone’s take on multiculturalism certainly isn’t mine. It’s a form of relativism that allows him to park his values when they’re inconvenient and embrace religious extremists with repellent views on women and homosexuals. Living in a society that has abolished the death penalty, Livingstone welcomes to London a Muslim cleric whose website discusses whether death is the appropriate penalty for gay men, and appears at public events with an academic who refuses to call for a ban on the hideous practice of lapidation….

“In fact, the biggest threat to multiculturalism comes not from organisations such as the BNP but politicians such as Livingstone who refuse to have this debate, seeking to close it down with accusations of racism and Islamophobia. The UK is a diverse society, but it won’t remain so if millions of ordinary people feel they’re not allowed to criticise the minority who hate gay people, treat women as second-class citizens and support political or religious violence.”

Independent on Sunday, 3 September 2006

The “academic who refuses to call for a ban on the hideous practice of lapidation” is of course Tariq Ramadan. As I think we’ve observed before, rejecting engagement with an influential Muslim liberal like Professor Ramadan is a sign that Islamophobia has reached the point of dementia. It can only be a matter of time before Joan Smith joins the likes of Melanie Phillips in ranting on about “Eurabia” and the Muslim plot to destroy western civilisation.