Minette Marin is upset by a report that Gloucestershire police have turned down some white would-be recruits, on the (according to her, self-evidently absurd) basis that they want to raise ethnic minority recruitment to 7% of the total by 2009 (last year the figure was 1.6%). She writes:
“What, in this lamentable story, is this guilty obsession with race, this daft and patronising determination to exclude and demoralise the indigenous people? It is actually imposed in Gloucestershire by people who are mostly white males themselves. What is wrong with them? Why are they unwilling to hold the line against thoughtless, intrusive, guilt-ridden, destructive stupidity? One word for it is self-hatred. Another is decadence.
“It is for the same reasons, whatever they may be, that we are so obviously failing to hold the line against the extremes of Islam. We no longer carry high the standard of free speech for fear of offending people, usually Muslims. Stalwart citizens have recently felt it their duty to reprimand the Pope and a former Archbishop of Canterbury for discussing Islam and violence – for even raising such offensive questions.
“The results, for which we have only ourselves to blame, are alarming. Anyone who heard it must have been horrified by a British Muslim haranguing John Humphrys on Radio 4’s Today programme on Friday. Abu Izzadeen, the Jamaican convert who had heckled the home secretary at a meeting with Muslims, sounded even more terrifying on the air. Aggressive, illogical and blustering, he expressed his hatred of our government and its ‘crusade’ against Muslims. He thinks free speech and democracy are incompatible with Islam.
“When Humphrys asked him what was wrong with democracy, with trying to change things through Britain’s democratic process, he replied that ‘democracy means sovereignty for man, Islam means sovereignty for sharia … The UK doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to Allah’, and Allah has put Muslims on earth to implement sharia (Islamic law). So, Humphrys insisted, ‘the Islamic process but not the democratic process?’ ‘Yes’, said Izzadeen confidently, ‘that’s right’.
“It would be comforting to assume that Izzadeen is solitary and ignorant. Unfortunately he isn’t. An NOP poll for Channel 4 found that almost one in four British Muslims believed that the slaughter in London on July 7 was justified. Muslim community leaders can say what they like about Islam being all about peace; it’s perfectly clear that not all Muslims see it that way. For a long time now they have spread rage and resentment among their people and we have lacked the will and the instinct for self-preservation to resist it.”
Sunday Times, 24 September 2006
These days, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish the outpourings of “mainstream” right-wing commentators like Marin, with her indignant concern for the oppression of “the indigenous people”, from the sort of filth you read on the BNP website.