“… his bold and frankly brave comments about the danger posed by Muslim ghettos do not diverge wildly from what you might have read in a Monday Club pamphlet of 20 years ago”.
Rod Liddle on Trevor Phillips. Says it all, really.
Category Archives: Multiculturalism
‘A brave voice’ – Daily Mail applauds Trevor Phillips
The language is stark, the message almost apocalyptic. Is Britain really ‘sleepwalking to segregation’, with ‘the walls going up round many of our communities’ and growing barriers to integration in cities where most of the population is non-white?
Not for the first time, the black chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, is venturing into territory where few white politicians would dare to tread.
Didn’t the London bombings in July expose the dangers of a ghetto mentality encouraged by multiculturalism? Isn’t something very wrong when young British-born men are so alienated from the mainstream that they can plan mass murder against their fellow citizens?
If segregation is turning Britain into a ‘breeding ground’ for terrorists, as Mr Phillips argues, it is time to think again.
Should we encourage more Muslim faith schools, if they don’t cater for other religions too, as CofE and Catholic schools do? Can’t we at last find the courage to challenge the woefully misbegotten liberal obsession with multiculturalism?
Trevor Phillips has raised some serious issues. Don’t they demand honest debate?
Leader in the Daily Mail, 23 September 2005
‘Say no to Muslims who demand special favours’, says Yasmin A-B
“Those of us Muslims who are heartily sick of the politicisation of our faith and the Islamicisation of politics and society are this week rejoicing over a small but significant victory.”
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown on the defeat of the proposal for so-called “Sharia courts” in Canada.
Double standards against Muslims and Islam in Canada
“The polemic on the possible introduction of the so-called sharia law in Ontario … highlights the double standards against Muslims and Islam. It exposes the polarizing methodologies of our media. It tests the Dalton McGuinty government’s commitment to the core liberal-democratic principle of the equality of all citizens. The dominant theme of the news coverage is clear: Medieval Muslims want to import the misogynistic Islamic penal code to Canada. And Queen’s Park is crazy to even consider it. There are sub-themes: Muslims have been plotting for long to supplant our secular laws with Allah’s. They are using multiculturalism to undermine it. Why would we let them, given what they do to women in Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, etc.?”
Haroon Siddiqui in the Toronto Star, 11 September 2005
Siddiqui asks: “why are journalists drawn to the same handful of critics? … Is it that the critics are media savvy? If so, it only confirms our vulnerability to manipulation. Or, is it that the critics are saying what the journalists want to hear? It seems so. Is it an accident that the only Muslims the media idolize are those who attack Islam or the broader Muslim community?”
Of course, some of the most prominent “Muslim” opponents of the Ontario proposal, who have been boosted by the Canadian media, are not Muslims at all, but members of the Islamophobic sect, the Worker Communist Party of Iran.
Outrage! in ignorant attack on Islam shock
“Human rights campaigners and refugees from Islamist persecution will protest against the introduction of Sharia law in Canada, outside the Canadian High Commission, in London on Thursday 8 September 2005 from 12 noon – 2 PM. The protest is being supported by gay human rights group OutRage! and one of the keynote speakers will be OutRage! organiser, Peter Tatchell.”
Outrage! press release, 7 September 2005
Outrage! appends articles by Maryam Namazie, Azar Majedi and Homa Arjomand – all central committee members of the Worker Communist Party of Iran. Namazie attributes the Canadian proposal to “the racist concepts of multi-culturalism and cultural relativism. It promotes tolerance and respect for so-called minority opinions and beliefs”. And we can’t be having that, can we?
In fact, as anyone who has studied the subject will be aware, the proposal is not to introduce Sharia law but to amend Ontario’s Arbitration Act, which already allows Jews and Christians to choose religious arbitration if they like, in order to extend the same opportunity to Muslims. Oddly enough, I can’t remember Tatchell protesting outside the Canadian High Commission when Jews and Christians in Ontario were accorded that right. But then, I was forgetting, for Tatchell and Outrage! Islam is a uniquely evil religion.
Opposition to Sharia courts goes global
An upcoming international demonstration designed to pressure Queen’s Park [home of the Ontario Legislature] into rejecting shariah courts continued to grow yesterday, even as the premier promised any decision on a faith-based court system will not jeopardize women’s rights.
They [women’s rights] will not be compromised,” Premier Dalton McGuinty told reporters at a news conference in Toronto yesterday.
So far, Amsterdam, Stockholm, London, Paris and Los Angeles are among the confirmed participants in tomorrow’s protests. They will join similar demonstrations in Toronto, Ottawa, Waterloo, Montreal and Victoria.
Ontario Attorney-General Michael Bryant delayed a highly anticipated decision on the future of faith-based arbitration this summer, choosing to wait before making changes to a law that allows any set of principles – including religious ones – to be used to privately settle family disputes.
Critics say Ontario has become the target of an international political movement by extremists to entrench Islamic law in Western democracies.
“This has nothing to do with the faith of Islam. It’s political Islam,” said Homa Arjomand, founder of the International Campaign against Shariah Court in Canada [and central committee member of the Worker Communist Party of Iran]. “Ontario is an easy target because we have multiculturalism.”
Outraged Europeans take dimmer view of diversity
It was less than genteel, not the kind of thing a Londoner liked to admit, but Matthew Pickard couldn’t help himself when drawn into a discussion about the recent bombings on the city’s transit system. There is an “undertow”, he said, a feeling of resentment toward ethnic communities that had long been welcomed.
“My friends, who are all educated and professionals, they’re saying, ‘What gives those people the right to come up from other countries and set up homes and set up families and then start bombing and maiming people?’,” the 33-year-old engineering consultant said. “They just don’t move in and integrate with society. They move in and take over. I just think enough’s enough.”
Living together: an interview with Tariq Ramadan
Tariq Ramadan is one Europe’s leading progressive Muslim scholars. He talked to Oscar Reyes about integration, multiculturalism and the role of the global justice movement after the London bombings.
Woman defies law banning the burqa
A Moroccan woman living in a small town in Belgium has single-handedly triggered a national debate on multiculturalism after refusing to obey a municipal injunction to stop wearing a burqa.
The woman has now prompted politicians in the Dutch-speaking north of Belgium to talk about changing federal law, after she became the first person in Belgium to be fined for wearing the all-enveloping veil and robe. She has so far refused to pay the £80 fine, or even to co-operate with police and municipal authorities in the Flemish town of Maaseik.
The burqa, together with a smaller type of face mask, the niqab, has been banned by bylaw in the cities and towns of Ghent, Antwerp, Sint-Truden, Lebbeke and Maaseik. The mayor of Maaseik, Jan Cleemers, said he acted after six women started wearing burqas, alarming locals. Five of the women stopped wearing the garments.
A police inspector in Maaseik said the head-to-toe covering of Bouloudo’s wife, who has refused to speak to police or give her name, offended and alarmed locals. “You cannot identify or recognise someone when they’re wearing a burqa, especially at night. It’s not normal, we don’t have that in our culture,” he said.
Why multiculturalism has failed Britain (according to Gilles Kepel)
“France, ridiculed when Bernard Stasi and his commission first recommended a ban on all religious symbols in schools, has since excited the interest of those who note that this is, nevertheless, the country with the largest number of Muslims, with a population far greater than either Germany or the UK. The social control, they also remark, exerted by the combined results of secularism, conscious integration and a preventative security policy has led – according to the inverse terms of multiculturalism – to France being spared from terror attacks for the past decade.”
Gilles Kepel in the Independent, 22 August 2005.
Note the use of “the past decade” as the period of comparison. This has presumably been chosen so as to exclude the Paris Metro and other bombings of 1995. The “combined results of secularism, conscious integration and a preventative security policy” didn’t seem to have much effect then, did they? At that time, as I recall, the London Underground was, by contrast, spared any terrorist attacks by Islamist extremists, despite Britain’s commitment to multiculturalism.
Is it stating the obvious to point out that in both cases the bombings were provoked by the foreign policy of the country under attack – in 1995 by French support for the Algerian government’s brutal suppression of the FIS (which had been about to win a democratic election) and in 2005 by Blair’s participation in the bloody invasion and occupation of Iraq?