Faith schools – they’re OK so long as they’re not Muslim

Posted on August 31, 2006 by Bob Pitt

In a letter to the Times, Lord Baker of Dorking has written: “The Government, in its first flush of multiculturalism, allowed new exclusive faith schools to be established and funded by the state…. There are 100 Muslim schools waiting to apply. Their entrance criteria are explicit: the purpose is to create a total Muslim personality, and the required familiarity with the Koran means that non-Muslims would not be acceptable.”

Oddly enough, when he was education secretary under Thatcher in the late 1980s, I can’t remember Baker proposing to withdraw support from the thousands of Church of England schools that receive state funding.

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Multiculturalism, terror and shariah

Posted on August 29, 2006 by Bob Pitt

osama saeed 2 “The argument of the government goes roughly as follows. Asians have lived parallel lives in this country for too many years, and because of this segregation, they care nothing at all for white people and are thus quite willing to blow them up on public transport.

“This is simply not true. For one, Al-Qaeda have regard for nobody’s lives, and white people should not take it personally. US, UK, and Australian targets have been hit in Muslim countries, resulting in the deaths of many hundreds of their co-religionists. For Al-Qaeda, there are no rules to the game. They kill, and it doesn’t matter about your creed or colour in pursuit of their goals.

“The second count on which it’s not true is that it bears no resemblance to the bombers we know about to date. Richard Reid the shoebomber was a white convert. The July bombers all spoke English. One was a teaching assistant, one worked in his father’s fish-and-chip shop, one was married to a white Englishwoman, and one was known to have gone on wild drinking binges (thus passing Jon Snow’s integration test).”

Osama Saeed at Rolled Up Trousers, 28 August 2006

Blair’s trail of destruction

Posted on August 29, 2006 by Bob Pitt

Soumayya Ghannoushi “At the beginning of his tenure, Blair embarked on a privatisation spree that saw much of our public service sector shift from state ownership and control to those of a cluster of private businesses. Going further than Thatcher herself, he set about privatising schools, hospitals, transport and the mail, scrapping the university grant and breaking the backs of countless students with ever rising tuition fees. Seizing, like his Hobbesian allies across the Atlantic, 9/11’s immense opportunities, he then turned to Britain’s legal corpus with a vengeance, waging endless battles against judges and civil liberties associations.

“Today Blair seeks to destroy another age-old British tradition, multiculturalism, as though it were a passing affliction that could be dispensed with at his royal whim. As they use all the tricks in new Labour’s book of spin to force us into line, he and his ‘communities minister’ ought to bear the following historical fact in mind. Britain’s multiculturalism was not born today or yesterday with the coming of Muslims from the Indian subcontinent: it is intrinsic to the fabric of British society, which is made up of a multitude of races, creeds and sects: Scots, Irish, Welsh, English, Catholics, Protestants and Jews, along with myriad other groups.

“Blair, who would be more comfortable reading the Daily Telegraph than the Guardian, has adopted an extreme discourse that plays on our basic instincts of fear, insecurity and national pride. In so doing, he has shifted a nauseating rhetoric that had long been confined to the British National party and its ilk into the government, and thence to the mainstream of public opinion. That 53% of Britons now see Muslims as a threat is thus hardly surprising. This has been a victory for no one in Britain except the far right….

“Those who cite France as a role model for Britain do not know what they’re talking about. What is shielding France from our 7/7 is not its abysmal record with its minorities, but its more reasoned foreign policy and the distance it has maintained from Bush’s insane wars of aggression.”

Soumaya Ghannoushi at the Guardian’s Comment is Free, 29 August 2006

Flaws in the government’s response to terrorism

Posted on August 27, 2006 by Bob Pitt

“After each crisis there is a focus on the Muslim community not doing enough to root out militants, although the families of the terrorists have had no inkling of their doings. Statements are made about multiculturalism preventing the integration of Muslims in the west, although the terrorists are completely integrated in ways such as speaking English and participating in wider British society. Attention is concentrated on mosques and madrassas, although militancy is developed in secular spaces not religious ones. Immigration is seen as a problem, although the terrorists were born in Britain, their immigrant parents being the most law-abiding of citizens.”

Faisal Devji in the Financial Times, 27 August 2006

‘How right wing the left sounds’ – Rod Liddle on multiculturalism

Posted on August 27, 2006 by Bob Pitt

Rod Liddle “Quick, somebody buy a wreath. Last week marked the passing of multiculturalism as official government doctrine. No longer will opponents of this corrosive and divisive creed be silenced simply by the massed Pavlovian ovine accusation: ‘Racist!’ Better still, the very people who foisted multiculturalism upon the country are the ones who have decided that it has now outlived its usefulness — that is, the political left….

“When an ICM poll of Britain’s Muslims in February this year revealed that some 40% (that is, about 800,000 people) wished to see Islamic law introduced in parts of Britain, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality responded by saying that they should therefore pack their bags and clear off. Sir Trevor Phillips’s exact words were these: ‘If you want to have laws decided in another way, you have to live somewhere else.’ …

“Multiculturalism insisted that communities always changed, were in a permanent state of flux and that if you were white and lived in Oldham or Burnley or Tower Hamlets then you had better get used to the idea quickly. This was a doublethink because the same latitude was not extended to the host population; while it was accepted that immigrants would naturally wish to band together and preserve their cultural identity, when the white working-class communities made similar protestations, this was regarded, once again, as evidence of an antediluvian racism. Your fish and chip shop is now a halal butcher? Your daughter’s school now has a majority of Urdu-speaking children? Good! Celebrate the change! Get over it….

“The news that the bombers of July 7 last year and those who allegedly plotted to blow up a whole bunch of aeroplanes were British born apparently came as a shock to the government. Well, it did not come as a shock to those of us who viewed multiculturalism as both dangerous and inherently racist…. In the end, it is not the mad mullahs at whom we should direct our wrath, but the white liberals who enabled them to prosper.”

Rod Liddle in the Sunday Times, 27 August 2006

Multiculturalism and ‘the British way of life’

Posted on August 25, 2006 by Bob Pitt

In today’s Daily Express Mark Palmer writes: “Yesterday Ruth Kelly, Labour’s Communities Secretary, warned in her own, typically fuzzy way that multiculturalism might not be such a brilliant idea after all. Well, not at the minute, at least, when there are Muslim extremists waiting for every opportunity to stir the racial-religious pot…. ‘We’ve moved from a period of near uniform consensus on the value of multiculturalism to one where we can encourage that debate by questioning whether it is encouraging separateness’, she said.”

Palmer broadly welcomes Kelly’s intervention. But he has his criticisms: “For starters, we have not moved from a ‘period of near consensus on the value of multiculturalism’ because for many of us it has never existed. Indeed, I would hazard to guess that the majority of tax-paying Britons have always regarded multiculturalism as a bad thing, increasingly so in a world where young men are prepared to drive aeroplanes into buildings and take bombs onto buses and Tube trains.”

He also raises another objection: “Kelly wants us to look at faith schools. She says Muslim parents should not be denied opportunities offered to Christians in sending their children to faith schools. But it is disingenuous to pretend that that all such schools serve the same purpose. Church and Jewish schools instil discipline and a moral framework. But unlike their Islamic counterparts they do not seek to keep children separate from British society.”

Palmer has his own recommendations as to how we should learn to live together: “Multicultural harmony will only be achieved when those from other cultures are prepared to accept the British way of life. And, lest we forget, Britain is a Christian country. The Church of England remains an institution worthy of respect – it’s a part of our heritage and has our sovereign as its supreme governor.”

Cant on cohesion

Posted on August 24, 2006 by Bob Pitt

“Ever since Margaret Thatcher’s comment in 1978, that the British people were worried that ‘this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture’, those on the Right of British politics have seen cultural diversity as a threat to national cohesion and security. But since 9/11, it has been parts of the ‘liberal’ Left that have attacked multiculturalism most forcefully, seeing in it the cause of segregation in Britain.

“… a cacophony of voices has singled out Muslims in the ‘integration’ debate: it is their cultural difference which needs limits placed on it; it is they who must subsume their cultural heritage within ‘Britishness’; it is they who must declare their allegiance to (ill-defined) British values. In so doing, an idea that Muslims are inherently at odds with modern values, into which they need to be forcibly integrated, has been reinforced …. But it is entirely dishonest to pretend this is a demand for ‘integration’, when what is really being called for is assimilation.”

Arun Kundnani on the IRR website, 24 August 2004

Don’t blame multiculturalism

Posted on August 22, 2006 by Bob Pitt

“The Commission for Racial Equality boss, Trevor Phillips, opened the floodgates to this erroneous debate about multiculturalism two years ago. Like the BBC newsreader George Alagiah, writing in yesterday’s Daily Mail, he blamed the ‘policies of multiculturalism’ for the alienation and radicalisation of British Muslims. Both men are prominent, powerful public figures and their views make front-page news. The damage they are causing to good race relations cannot be underestimated. ”

Simon Woolley at the Guardian’s Comment is Free, 22 August 2006,

‘Europe’s fellow travellers’

Posted on August 18, 2006 by Bob Pitt

“The present technological, cultural and financial strength of Europe is a façade that conceals a deep underlying moral and demographic weakness. The symptoms of the malaise are apparent in the unprecedented demographic collapse and in the loss of a sense of place and history that go hand-in-hand with the expansion of the European Union.

“The emerging transnational hyper-state is actively indoctrinating its subject-population into believing and accepting that the demographic shift in favor of Muslim aliens is actually a blessing that enriches the Old Continent’s culturally deprived and morally unsustainable societies. Europe is losing the ability to define and defend itself, to the benefit of unassimilable multitudes filled with contempt for the host-society….

“Most Muslims in Europe live in a parallel universe that has very little to do with the host country. Their mindset has nothing but contempt for the liberal concept of ‘tolerance’ and ‘diversity’, and they possess a disdainful and hostile attitude to the host-society. Such hostility is clearly manifested in hard-core anti-Semitism – in its raw, unadulterated variety that is repugnant to most Europeans but regarded as normal, legitimate, and divinely ordained by most Muslims. But since the dictum of the multiculturalist ruling elite is that Islam is peaceful, tolerant, and as European as the Sistine Chapel, the truth must not be spoken….

“In recent years, a notable trend in the [European] Monitoring Center’s documents is to include ‘anti-Semitism and Islamophobia’ under the same heading, with the definition of ‘Islamophobia’ so broad as to preclude any possibility of meaningful discussion of Islam. The implication that Islamophobia thus defined and anti-Semitism are equally repulsive and deserving of similar legal sanction is a regular feature of the EU race relations industry output. It also routinely refers to ‘institutional Islamophobia’ as an inherent social and cultural sickness of most European societies that needs to be rooted out by education, re-education, and legislation.”

A paranoid rant by Serge Trifkovic in Front Page Magazine, 18 August 2006

‘Radical Islam plagues UK’

Posted on August 17, 2006 by Bob Pitt

Radical Islam plagues UK

By James Forsyth

New York Daily News, 16 August 2006

Straight after 9/11, American Muslims proudly flew the Stars and Stripes. New York cabbies plastered their cars with patriotic decals. In Britain, days after the security services busted a plot that could have been as deadly as 9/11, so-called Muslim leaders delivered an open letter to Prime Minister Tony Blair demanding that Britain change its “foreign policy to show the world that we value the lives of civilians wherever they live and whatever their religion.” Or to put it more bluntly, pull out of Iraq, denounce President Bush and abandon support for Israel.

Here’s the hard truth: Britain now has the biggest “community relations” problem of any Western country – a problem compounded by the fact that the vast majority of my fellow Britons are in denial about it.