Abhijit Pandya, an Indian-origin candidate for the Leicester South byelection, has sparked fury by making critical remarks about Islam in his blog less than a week before the May 5 elections.
Pandya, 31, is the candidate for the UK Independence Party, which is opposed to Britain’s membership of the European Union.
On his blog, Pandya called Islam “morally flawed and degenerate” and said he backed Geert Wilders, a controversial Dutch politician who allegedly called Islam a retarded ideology.
He wrote: “A theological system that fundamentally encourages discrimination between those who believe it and those who don’t, treating the latter as second-class citizens, is backward. A system that treats women as slaves without chains is morally flawed and degenerate.
“Cultural practices in many parts of the world which include child marriages and the death penalty for practising homosexuality are reminders that man is capable of going back to the dark ages very quickly.”
He goes on to ask: “Why should Britain, the country that fathered the modern world, put up with this, as Wilder’s [sic] put it, ‘retarded ideology’.”
Pandya wrote: “Islamic culture inherently rejects the Western way of life, more specifically the Protestant work ethic that has successfully built the economies of the West.
“It is also fundamentally socially intolerant, closing itself off to the rest of society and local communities and forming ghettos that are economically dysfunctional and ethically espouse, perhaps without realising it, intolerance that undermines both social and human capital”.
Pandya also wrote: “The increase of Islam in the UK is going to be a problem for the welfare state. A removal of multi-culturalism and assimilation of these people needs to done to save them from the abyss of exclusion and welfare. Above all, one should not shy away of contemplating forced repatriation, or threatening it to further assimilation, as a result of their lack of economic contribution to the UK.”
See Leicester Mercury, 27 April 2011
Update: See the Leicester Mercury editorial which condemns Pandya’s blog post as “a wildly inflammatory rant which boiled down to a crass and nasty characterisation of Muslims as lazy, intolerant spongers who are a threat to the British way of life. It was not part of a reasoned debate about multiculturalism, but a series of sweeping, unsubstantiated generalisations which demonise the Muslim community.”