“For too long we have been urged to ‘celebrate diversity’. How can it be helpful to highlight the differences between us?”
Ann Cryer makes her usual helpful contribution to the defence of multiculturalism. Mind you, compared with some of her other interventions (see here and here) her Evening Standard piece is relatively restrained.
“Anyone who has been keeping up with British opinion since the July 7 bombings will have noticed that ‘multiculturalism’ is under sharp attack. Multiculturalism preaches that we should allow and encourage immigrants and their children to maintain and celebrate their own culture apart from the national culture. Society should be not a melting pot but, in the phrase of former New York Mayor David Dinkins, ‘a gorgeous mosaic’. That mosaic, of course, looked less gorgeous as people surveyed the work of the British-born-and-raised bombers.”
Michael Barone at Washington Times, 8 August 2005
“Premier Dalton McGuinty was tapdancing very cautiously around sharia law yesterday. And rightly so. Of all the nasty issues likely to blow up in his face before the next election, this is a huge one. What it boils down to is, how much multiculturalism is too much? Chowing down on souvlaki at Taste of the Danforth is one thing. But what about entrenching an ancient legal system that, in its extreme forms, calls for stoning and amputation?”
Christina Blizzard in the Toronto Sun, 7 September 2005
The article includes a friendly interview with Homa Arjomand of the Worker Communist Party of Iran. I confess to being unfamiliar with Christina Blizzard’s oeuvre. However, I googled her name and found her described as “one of the most partisan pro-right writers in Ontario in the mainstream media”.
“Multiculturalism was a non-policy. It was a vacuum, a retreat from thinking that there was any need for a solution. The pretence was that there was no problem, because to admit that there was one was tantamount to saying that immigration was a problem, and that you were going to have to do some serious thinking about its consequences. The idea that many cultures could coexist in one country, going their own ways, living by their own values, and cultivating their own disparate and distinct identities, was always a cop-out.”
Janet Daley in the Sunday Telegraph, 7 August 2005
“Lord Tebbit, the former chairman of the Conservative Party, has claimed Enoch Powell’s controversial ‘river of blood’ speech in 1968 was a correct prophesy of the climate of fear that Britain is now facing following the two terrorist bomb attacks in London last month.
In an interview with the Sunday Herald, Lord Tebbit claimed Powell’s views were misinterpreted as racist and that Powell’s warning was focused on the dangers of a multicultural British society that would be fed from uncontrolled immigration…. Tebbit’s overt backing for a Powellite stance on immigration, shows the extent to which criticism of multiculturalism has become almost mainstream since the London attacks.”
“If young Muslim women have embraced the hijab as a badge of identity in a way their mothers never did, as a public political symbol, this is more a result of the demands of British multiculturalism than a spontaneous assertion of allegiance. Furthermore, the distinctive character of the identity promoted by multiculturalism is the identity of victim. In the world of multiculturalism, claims of victimhood provide the basis for recognition and status. Thus British Muslims proclaim a litany of persecutions and humiliations of Muslims around the world – in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Israel, in Bosnia – as the justification for their sense of grievance and their claim to a privileged position in the hierarchy of victimhood…. But the cult of victimhood in Britain has merely a vicarious relationship with the sufferings of people in Iraq or Palestine – its real origins are to be found in Britain. In the competitive struggle for prestige (and state resources) unleashed by multiculturalism, every minority must justify its claim by elevating its sufferings…. Muslims inflate every personal slight into a manifestation of Islamophobia.”
Another rant by Mark Steyn in the Telegraph, perhaps? No, it’s ex-RCPer Michael Fitzpatrick.
“You filthy Muslim dogs. You will be torched this Friday. Many Muslim pigs will burn,” the hand-scrawled note reads.
At a recently vandalised mosque in the east of Britain’s capital, a shocked 65-year-old Siddique Ali handles one example of hate mail targeting British Muslims after the deadly bomb attacks on London’s transport system on 7 July.
“We are afraid,” said Ali, a member of the committee which runs the mosque. “These people are giving us warnings. But if they came in front of us we could give a reply or try to understand, but they are not coming.”
Muslims must start integrating into mainstream British society, says David Davis, the shadow home secretary and front-runner to take over the Conservative leadership.
Writing in The Daily Telegraph today, Mr Davis signalled a significant shift away from the policy of multi-culturalism, which allows people of different faiths and cultures to settle without expecting them to integrate.
“Often, the authorities have seemed more concerned with encouraging distinctive identities rather than promoting the common values of nationhood,” Mr Davis writes.
Daily Telegraph, 3 August 2005
See also Guardian, 3 August 2005
For Davis’s article, see here.
And over at Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer applauds this example of “common sense from David Davis”.
“July stands as proof that our model of integration, the way we absorb difference, has somehow failed.” Jonathan Freedland joins the anti-multiculturalist Right in arguing that the London bombings were caused by the state’s failure to inculcate a sense of “Britishness” in Muslims.
Freedland’s piece gets a recommendation from warmongering ex-leftist Norman Geras, the apologist for state terrorism and darling of the US neocons: Normblog, 3 August 2005 I rest my case.
The Muslim Council of Britain said today there was “no contradiction” between having a multicultural society and achieving integration. Responding to a call for a rethink on multiculturalism by shadow home secretary David Davis, the MCB said it fully supported integration but being a good Muslim necessarily meant being a good British citizen. Spokesman Inayat Bunglawala told politics.co.uk the Conservative party should first look at itself and “consider the lack of Muslims in the parliamentary party”.
The Muslim Association of Britain attacked the suggestion by David Davis that multiculturalism should be rethought in the wake of the London terror attacks. Spokesman Anas Altikriti told politics.co.uk that people in the UK should be proud of the country’s diversity. “The Tory party seems to believe that we should rid ourselves of something we take great pride in, but our multi-layered identity makes us richer, better and stronger as a nation,” he said.