Interesting and, despite what Rennie will sqawk (if he's still here: looks
like there's about 4 of us now), even handed look at the immi word, islam
and the upshot of Powell's speech.
Sunday Telegraph
The tide is turning and we are unprepared
By Kevin Myers
(Filed: 14/12/2003)
The local council in High Wycombe has banned an advertisement on a library
notice-board for a carol service in the neighbouring All Saints church, on
the grounds that Buckinghamshire now has "a multi-faith community and
passions could be inflamed by religious issues". In France, a government
committee has advocated the banning of Muslim headscarves in schools.
Each affair confirms that something irreversible has occurred in Europe:
Islam has taken root in what for the best part of 1,500 years was the
evangelical heart and administrative home of Christianity.
The British response has been the typified by the Buckinghamshire approach,
which is to make the majority conform with rules which in practice had been
devised to deal specifically with a minority. The French attitude is
characteristically centrist, and one which would have been recognised by the
Sun King or by Napoleon: government by edict.
Well, if the French government does try to outlaw the hijab in schools, it
will fail: and fail spectacularly. In doing so, it will probably give the
CRS, the special internal security police, lots of opportunity to practise
their riot control techniques in Muslim ghettoes: meanwhile the French
prison system might be well advised to prepare for hundreds of teenage girls
and their parents.
"We must be clear," declared the French ombudsman, Bernard Stasi. "There are
forces which are seeking to destabilise the republic and it is time for the
republic to react." Well and good; but reacting for the sake of reacting is
likely to aid and abet those very forces of which the French are so very
frightened - as indeed, are councils and police forces in many parts of
Britain. And rightly so.
The worst consequence of Enoch Powell's "rivers of blood" speech was that it
prevented all reasoned debate about immigration. Anyone who questioned
immigration was promptly locked up in an intellectual box called "racism",
to be reviled, mocked and ignored. Immigration thus became a standard
feature of British and European life, and within my lifetime, millions and
millions of non-Christian Asians and Africans poured into the traditionally
white, Christian cities of a dozen countries.
Islam is much like Christianity: its spectrum is very broad, and many forms
of it encourage moderation and toleration. But there are extremes which have
no parallel in Christianity, nor even in communism or Nazism: the suicide
bomber who believes that paradise awaits those who die in the act of the
killing the infidel is a creature for whom the European mind, and European
institutions have been wholly unprepared. And at a less extreme level,
though the experience of communism has prepared them intellectually for the
idea of national disloyalty, Europeans are hopelessly ill-equipped to deal
with an abiding mass loyalty to foreign entities by their fellow citizens.
At its most extreme, this is less a question of the Tebbit test of loyalty
than the altogether more demanding Taleban test. Britain has so far produced
three suicide bombers, and intelligence files found in Afghanistan indicate
that 1,192 Britons were trained there by Islamic terrorists. A handful are
prisoners in Guantanemo Bay: most of the rest are - presumably - back home,
awaiting instructions.
Of course, because one is a Muslim doesn't mean one is a terrorist or a
terrorist-sympathiser, and the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain has been
active in denouncing the Taleban. Moreover, moderate Muslims are as
vehemently opposed to extremism as any of us. But I'd be interested to know
what proportion of the Muslim population of Bradford or Blackburn, Paris or
Marseilles, are "moderate" in the way I understand the word, or how many
European Muslims genuinely yearn for the foundation of the khilafa, a single
Islamic world run on religious lines.
But what about the alienation which so many European Muslims feel towards
the states they inhabit? How many young British Muslims have been racially
abused by police officers? And how many French Muslims live lives of
desperation, violence and exclusion in the vile concrete cites which
surround Paris, Lyons and Marseilles?
These are not irrelevant questions, if only because they touch upon one of
the key features of western European life, one which is absent entirely from
Muslim societies: the notion of social justice for all, regardless of creed.
But it is a liberal fallacy simply to connect social conditions with
terrorism. Slums tend to produce lumpen-criminals rather than religious or
political fanatics: the Islamo-fascist murderers of 9/11 came from affluent
families. Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber and petty felon, is the exception to
the rule that Islamic fundamentalists tend to be well-educated and
law-abiding.
Headwear in France, notices on libraries in Buckinghamshire: they speak of a
permanent alteration in the way that Europeans must live. Moreover, other
changes, unrelated to immigration, also become relevant here. All Saints
church, home of the carol service, has no vicar: but you can be sure the
local mosque has an imam. The stark reality, palatable or otherwise, is that
Islam is now the rising church of England.
c/o ROBBIE
--
Incapacity Benefits~ the blog
http://robbie.journalspace.com/
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