A new right-wing take on the multicuturalism debate. Mark Steyn asserts that it is not the co-existence of multiple cultures within a society that is a problem but the supposed fact that in Europe there are only two cultures – Muslim and non-Muslim. With its “ageing native populations, and young Muslim populations”, Europe is heading for inevitable confrontation between these two irreconcilable cultures – “you can’t buck demography – except through civil war”.
Category Archives: UK
BBC News in tangle over ICM poll
Yesterday BBC News online reported an ICM poll on religious attitudes under the headline “Many ‘less positive about Islam'” (see below).
In fact, the poll found that 73% of respondents said the London bombings had made no difference to their views on Islam, and only 19% said they now felt less positive. After complaints, the BBC replaced the article with another one. The new piece is headlined “Britons ‘back Christian society'”.
Even that finding is somewhat dubious, given that the question was loaded. Interviewees were asked whether they backed a society “based on Christian values originating from the bible such as human life being regarded as sacred” – which rather implied that if you rejected such values you were in favour of killing people!
Fascists join Mad Mel and Boris Johnson in warning of the nightmare of Eurabia
“The one small consolation that I get when I imagine the future of our Europe nations transformed into the nightmare state of Eurabia, is that after all the French Nationalists, Jews and homosexuals, Christians, Hindus, Pagans, Atheists and Communists have all been killed by the Muslim extremists – is that it will then be the turn of all those demented white liberals that defended the Islamic terrorist Al Qaeda Youth Brigades that began the European Intifada in 2005, to be dangling like so much dead meat from the street lights of Paris and Toulouse. They, like us, will not escape the nightmare of Eurabia.”
‘Ziauddin Sardar explains the long history of violence behind Hizb ut-Tahrir’
Thus the headline to an article in the New Statesman, 14 November 2005
And what precisely is this “long history of violence” on the part of Hizb ut-Tahrir that Ziauddin Sardar explains to us? Er … actually there isn’t one. He tells us that HT “has not, strictly speaking, advocated violence. But this does not mean that it is not a violent organisation.” Now there’s a reasoned argument for you. An organisation does not advocate (never mind practise) violence … but it’s violent all the same. Needless to say, this rubbish is applauded by the likes of Harry’s Place and Norman Geras.
A Muslim colleague recently told me that Ziauddin Sardar was almost as bad as Irshad Manji, and I thought that was an exaggeration (I quite enjoyed Desperately Seeking Paradise). But now I’m not so sure.
Is the BBC lost in its own Moral Maze?
“In my article earlier this year (19 July 2005), I questioned the BBC’s persistence in keeping the anti-Muslim Melanie Phillips on the panel of the Radio Four programme, The Moral Maze. Four months on and her poisonous spin continues to fill the airwaves twice a week…. She utilises every opportunity on air to pour scorn on Islam and Muslims. The BBC shoulders the blame for promoting Ms Phillips at a time when the need for community cohesion and sincere dialogue has never been more pronounced….
“In order to understand the absurdity of the BBC’s persistence in this matter, it would be instructive for the producers for one moment to consider what they would do if it became clear that a permanent panellist on one of their high profile programmes was also a hard-line ‘fundamentalist’ who routinely used the opportunity to ridicule Jews and Judaism?”
Shaykh Riyad Nadwi on the OCCRi website, 14 November 2005
The crescent of fear
“… there have been whole legions of pundits wheeled out to offer an explanation. It’s deprivation, a lack of integration, poverty, unemployment, incipient French racism and so on. But the dreaded ‘M’ word has scarcely been mentioned at all; these were ‘young’ rioters or sometimes ‘immigrant’ rioters – they were never Muslim rioters. Islam was almost never mentioned … the suspicion persists that it is the North Africans who do not wish for integration – much as they might whine about a lack of employment opportunities – even more than the indigenous French…. It may well be that the motive for the rioting was nothing more than an inchoate grievance allied to youthful exuberance and a penchant for bad behaviour, but it was Islam which gave it an identity and also its retrospective raison d’être.”
Rod Liddle offers us his insights into the French riots.
Regarding the French, Liddle assures us: “Of all the countries in Western Europe, they have pursued the most extreme form of that discredited ideology, multiculturalism…” What an ignorant prat.
‘Muslim apartheid burns bright in France’
“It is perhaps pointless to look back at the shamefully irresponsible immigration policies that have brought so many European countries to this explosive point…. However, we might at least recognise the problem. As usual a great many people are deliberately avoiding it, in particular by editing the word Muslim out of their debates, as if Islam had nothing to do with the dangerous mood sweeping Europe. Poverty and rejection have played a significant part, but there is an unmistakable sense in which the riots are Muslim, consciously so.
“Muslims vary and their beliefs vary. But the response of some Muslims to frustration – whether or not the fault of westerners – has been to retreat into more extreme forms of Islam and into the arms of fundamentalists. Yet although we know this, and despite the Salman Rushdie affair, despite the bombs and assassinations that led up to 9/11, despite the recent atrocities, we seem unwilling to recognise that what this can mean is deliberate separatism – apartheid. Islam in the European ghetto can mean an unwillingness to integrate at all, a desire to practise the faith with as little interference from the geographical host country as possible.”
Minette Marin in the Sunday Times, 13 November 2005
I mean, these foreigners, they come over here and insist on living in areas with the worst housing and, try as you might, you can’t dissuade them from taking low-paid jobs or remaining unemployed, which ensures that they can’t move out of those areas. For some unknown reason, some of them even see the need for the sort of defensive solidarity that results from living together with fellow members of their own oppressed minority community. And they even insist on the right to follow their religious beliefs free from state interference. Clearly the existence of ghettos is entirely the responsibility of the people who live in them and has nothing whatsoever to do with the racism of the “host” society.
Spectator reveals ‘Eurabian nightmare’
This is the cover to the current issue of the Spectator, for which editor Boris Johnson has commissioned several articles responding to the conflict in the French banlieues. (“Eurabia” refers to the demented “Muslim takeover” conspiracy theory invented by Bat Ye’or – a sort of present-day Islamophobic equivalent of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.)
Rod Liddle (“The crescent of fear“) writes: “… there have been whole legions of pundits wheeled out to offer an explanation. It’s deprivation, a lack of integration, poverty, unemployment, incipient French racism and so on. But the dreaded ‘M’ word has scarcely been mentioned at all; these were ‘young’ rioters or sometimes ‘immigrant’ rioters – they were never Muslim rioters. Islam was almost never mentioned … the suspicion persists that it is the North Africans who do not wish for integration – much as they might whine about a lack of employment opportunities – even more than the indigenous French…. It may well be that the motive for the rioting was nothing more than an inchoate grievance allied to youthful exuberance and a penchant for bad behaviour, but it was Islam which gave it an identity and also its retrospective raison d’être.”
Mark Steyn (“It’s the demography, stupid“) concedes that all Muslims are not the same: “… it’s true there are Muslims and there are Muslims: some blow up Tube trains and some rampage through French streets and some claim Mossad’s put something in the chewing gum to make Arab men susceptible to the seduction techniques of Jewesses. Some kill Dutch film-makers and some complain about Piglet coffee mugs on co-workers’ desks, and millions of Muslims don’t do any of the above but apparently don’t feel strongly enough about them to say a word in protest. And it’s also true that it’s better to have your Peugeot torched than to be blown apart on the Piccadilly Line. But what all these techniques – and those of lobby groups who offer themselves as interlocutors between bewildered European elites and ‘moderate’ Muslims – have in common is that they advance the Islamification of Europe.”
Right-wing Christian evangelist Patrick Sookhdeo (who was given a platform by Johnson earlier this year to denounce “The myth of moderate Islam“) poses the question “Will London burn too?” He thinks it likely: “A book published in 1980 by the Islamic Council of Europe gives instructions for how Muslim minorities are to work towards achieving domination of European countries through a policy of concentration in geographical areas.”
France and the Muslim myth
“Analysts and commentators often seek to find evidence to support their well-established ideas in any given event…. But little compares with the extraordinary way in which the disturbances of the last two weeks have been hijacked by those who appear set on either finding, or creating, a ‘clash of civilisations’ between Islam and the West. Take one particularly egregious example. Melanie Phillips, writing in the Daily Mail, described the riots in France as ‘a French intifada, an uprising by French Muslims against the state’.”
Jason Burke in the Observer, 13 November 2005
Muslim warns of community fears
A leading Welsh Muslim has warned that the detention of a Libyan man in Cardiff six weeks ago is damaging race relations in Wales. Mohammed Javed, chair of the Cardiff Police Advisory Committee, said the case had panicked the community.
“People in Islamic communities are asking, ‘Who is next?’,” he said. “If people can come and pick anybody without disclosing why they are doing it, it will affect race relations in Wales. This one arrest has already made quite a bit of difference to race relations here.”