Category Archives: Multiculturalism

‘Quebec’s Le Pen’ likely to make major election gain

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A young conservative populist sometimes described as Quebec’s Jean-Marie Le Pen is likely in today’s election to throw a spanner into the separatist versus federalist competition that has dominated Quebec politics for decades.

Polls indicate Mario Dumont’s Action démocratique du Québec (ADQ), a small fringe party for the past three elections, is about to seize the balance of power in the first minority parliament in 129 years. The ADQ has side-swiped the separatist Parti Quebecois and the ruling federalist Liberals, led by Jean Charest, by exploiting a backlash against multiculturism, especially Muslims.

A debate has developed throughout the province about what constitutes reasonable accommodation to the cultural and social practices of expanding ethnic communities. It was fuelled when, for example, a conservative Hasidic synagogue forced a sports centre to paint the windows of its swimming pool so students would not see people in swimming costumes.

Muslim headscarves and niqabs have also become a subject of controversy, especially when an 11-year-old girl was thrown out of a football match for wearing one. Quebec’s chief electoral officer has ordered that Muslim women must bare their faces if they want to vote, after an outcry over his original ruling that face coverings were acceptable.

M. Dumont, who describes himself as an autonomist wanting more power for Quebec, will probably tonight be in a position to implement many of the rightist, inward-looking policies on which he has campaigned. Both M. Charest and the Parti Quebecois leader, Andre Boisclair, seemed oblivious to the issue until polls showed M. Dumont was surging ahead.

Independent, 26 March 2007

Tatchell on the cultural relativism of the Left (part 398)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Tatchell No Islamic State“Large sections of liberal and left opinion have gone soft on their commitment to universal human rights. They rightly condemn the excesses of UK and US government policy, but rarely speak out against oppressors who are non-white or adherents of minority faiths. There are no mass protests against female genital mutilation, forced marriages, the stoning of women and gender apartheid in the Middle East. A perverse interpretation of multiculturalism has resulted in race and religion ruling the roost in a tainted hierarchy of oppression. In the name of ‘unity’ against Islamophobia and racism, much of the left tolerates misogyny and homophobia in minority communities….

“Some liberals and left-wingers mute their condemnation of intolerance when it emanates from non-white people; whereas they would strenuously denounce similar prejudice if it was being vented by whites against blacks or by Christians against Muslims…. Fundamentalist Muslim clerics are permitted to endorse the so-called ‘honour’ killing of unchaste women; whereas any woman who dared advocate violent retribution against Islamist misogynists would soon find herself in court…. Respect for diversity has sometimes degenerated into the toleration of abuses; as when the anti-fascist left embraced the Muslim leader Iqbal Sacranie after he denounced gays as immoral, harmful and diseased….

“The anti-racist struggle has been weakened by the excesses of the ‘diversity agenda’…. part of the Asian community has split off to identify primarily as Muslim, distancing themselves from other Asians – Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and atheists. This fragmentation has been endorsed by some on the left, who have colluded with communalism and the division of the Asian community on religious lines…. Multiculturalism can thus foster a ‘Balkanisation’ of the humanitarian agenda, fracturing communities according to their different cultural identities, values and traditions.”

Peter Tatchell in the Independent, 22 March 2007

Of course, some of us might argue that the anti-racist struggle has been rather more seriously damaged by white ex-leftists like Tatchell who spend a disproportionate amount of their time campaigning against people with black or brown skin.

Muslim schools ‘help integration’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Muslim schools could be a positive addition to the educational system and an effective way of integrating religious minorities into British citizenship, a Bristol University study found.

Muslims in Britain are currently subject to attention that has often focused upon citizenship and integration, with Muslim schools often seen as an obstacle to social cohesion.

The study, by Nasar Meer, research assistant in the Department of Sociology and the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship at the university, said there were only seven state-funded Muslim schools compared to over 4,700 Church of England schools, 2,100 Catholic schools, 37 Jewish and 28 Methodist schools.

Muslim parents want more Muslim schools so that more aspects of Islamic culture are feature within the teaching and ethos of the school their children attend.

Muslim educators argue that one of the most effective ways to pass on knowledge about different people is through teaching. And Nasar Meer said: “Contrary to the current movements seeking a ‘retreat’ from multiculturalism, more multicultural accommodations of this kind will be beneficial.”

Western Daily Press, 17 March 2007

See also “Muslim schools make a positive contribution”, University of Bristol press release, 16 March 2007

Multiculturalist fanatics and the suicide of Western civilisation

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Only one faith on Earth may be more messianic than Islam: multiculturalism. Without it – without its fanatics who believe all civilizations are the same – the engine that projects Islam into the unprotected heart of Western civilization would stall and fail. It’s as simple as that. To live among the believers – the multiculturalists – is to watch the assault, the jihad, take place un-repulsed by our suicidal societies. These societies are not doomed to submit; rather, they are eager to do so in the name of a masochistic brand of tolerance that, short of drastic measures, is surely terminal.”

Diana West at TownHall.com, 10 March 2007

Muslims threaten Australia’s identity, says Pell

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Cardinal George PellThe Muslim community is overly sensitive and is the only migrant group to have plotted violence against Australia, Catholic Archbishop Cardinal George Pell has claimed.

Dr Pell said integration was a “key tool” for a harmonious and secular democratic society. “Equal rights however, carry with them equal responsibilities – problems arise when minorities demand special consideration that places them outside the law as it applies to other citizens,” he said.

“Flexibility and adaptability are called for when refugees and immigrants arrive in our country but there is a limit in (adopting) minority demands beyond which a democratic host society cannot go without losing its identity.”

The Australian, 4 March 2007

For earlier statements on Islam by Cardinal Pell, see here and here.

There should be no covering-up in court

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Barbara Hewson argues that allowing Muslim women to wear the veil in courtrooms is an affront to open justice and (you can hear this coming can’t you?) Enlightenment values:

“A critic of multiculturalism in the UK, Elie Barnavi, argues in the recent best-selling essay Les Religions Meurtrieres (Murderous Religions) that Europe needs to recall its own bitter experiences of religious extremism and religious wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in order to counter Islamic fundamentalism effectively today. Europe’s current separation of state and church reflects the triumph of Enlightenment values over religious rule, but it needs to defend those values against political religion vigorously, and not lapse into post-colonial guilt. This is important, if democracies are not to morph back into theocracies again.”

“Post-colonial guilt”, “Islamic fundamentalism” threatening to turn civilised European societies into “theocracies” – what is this, the Telegraph perhaps, or the Daily Mail? Nah, it’s from Spiked, the online journal run by the tendency which used to be the Revolutionary Communist Party but has since morphed into a bunch of right-wing libertarian individualists whose obvious natural home now is the Tory party.

In another Spiked article, Josie Appleton attacks the evil collectivist mayor of London Ken Livingstone, who is intent on suppressing the priceless individual freedom to drive round the capital in one’s 4×4 and destroy the environment in any way one sees fit. Appleton’s proposal that voters should consider removing Livingstone at the next mayoral election does, however, suffer from the small flaw that when they turn up at the polling booth “in two years’ time”, as she recommends, the election will have taken place ten months earlier.

John Gray in the Speccie

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“When my copy of The Spectator arrived earlier this week, my heart sank to see the now rather hackneyed image of a niqabi woman’s eyes staring out from the front cover. ‘Oh no,’ I sighed. ‘It’s going to be an article against the veil. Again. However, the piece by John Gray, described by The Spectator as ‘Britain’s foremost political philosopher’ is actually quite good.”

Austrolabe, 22 February 2007

David Conway is not impressed: Civitas Blog, 15 February 2007

In defence of multiculturalism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The debates on community cohesion and national security (in the wake of September 11) found common cause in the spectre of ‘the enemy within’ – the Muslim community. Over the last five years a virulent and all pervasive form of racism, directed against Arabs and Muslims, has come to permeate British life. The demonisation of Muslims in the media is being reinforced by the application of anti-terror and policing measures which specifically target that community. And a popular racism, with increased attacks on Muslim institutions and people perceived to be Muslim, has ensued.

“In many areas of Britain, Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities and newly arrived refugees who happen to be Muslim, are amongst the poorest in the country. In such areas educational provision from pre-school to further studies is lacking, employment opportunities for the young are absent. Note the areas in which the 2001 ‘riots’ took place were those with industries, usually textiles, for which Asian immigrant labour was recruited in the 1950s. Now those industries have died (and/or been exported to the Third World) and with no new investment in the area, the job opportunities for the children and grandchildren of those original immigrants have gone.

“But instead of recognising how the economic decline in such areas, coupled with a long and unbridled racial discrimination over things like housing allocation, has led to exclusion from mainstream society, the excluded communities themselves are being blamed for their isolation. Instead of examining the impact of white flight out of mixed neighbourhoods, Muslims are blamed for self-segregating.

“What is unusual and worrying about the new anti-Muslim racism is that erstwhile liberal-thinking people who would normally eschew any form of personal racism, now find it possible to join in the clamour against Islam and Muslims. And they do so because the idea of a fundamental clash of civilisations – between enlightened, western Christendom on the one hand and benighted, barbaric Islam on the other – has become commonplace and accepted.

“Muslim people as a whole are now being stereotyped not just as terrorists but also as backward, sexist, homophobic bigots whose intolerance and values threaten all our freedoms – of artistic expression, freedom of speech etc and values of equality and fair-play. Such values are now being passed off as something intrinsically British, when they are, in fact, universal. And the challenge to such values, which is carried out all the time, by all different sectors of society, is now being racialised in order to stereotype one set of people – Muslims.”

From In Defence of Multiculturalism, IRR briefing paper by Jenny Bourne

Professor in Muslim comments furore lashes out at Australian Jewish leaders

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Raphael Israeli (2)A visiting Jewish professor has lashed out at Australian Jewish leaders for their “shameful submission to Muslim thugs”, saying his comments were less harsh than some by the Prime Minister and federal Treasurer.

Hebrew University professor Raphael Israeli, dropped from a proposed lecture tour after comments last week, said political correctness did not allow his remarks to be said, though, privately, all supported them.

He said Prime Minister John Howard and Treasurer Peter Costello had said harsher things after “Muslim riots”, but “someone elected to seize upon this opportunity now and sweep Australia into a storm in a teacup”.

Professor Israeli, who will teach his six-week Islamic history course at the University of NSW, posted his version of the stoush on a website. On the Dhimmi Watch section of www.jihadwatch.org, he wrote: “The dhimmi-like Jewish leadership cancelled all activities, in a shameful submission to the Muslim thugs and under the false claims of a ‘multicultural society’ in Australia, which they know is not true.”

The Age, 19 February 2007

For more on Raphael Israeli, see the website of the neocon PR company Benador Asssociates.