Islamophobia Watch has not always seen eye to eye with Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, but this article, from yesterday’s Evening Standard, is right on the button.
Not all Muslim Somalis are violent thugs
By Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
Evening Standard, 21 December 2006
Yusuf Abdillh Jama and his brother Mustaf will, I hope, burn slowly in hell for slaughtering PC Sharon Beshenivsky, mother of two, who was called to duty during an armed robbery.
With other hard gangsters, the two were violent career criminals. Yusuf was convicted of murder and faces years of incarceration. The more villainous Mustaf escaped to Somalia. Speculation is spreading that he slipped away under a full veil using his sister’s passport. What evil lurks under some of these shrouds: you can see why criminals and terrorists would take up a garment that gives them absolute facial anonymity.
Yusuf and Mustaf are evil. They are also Muslim Somali refugees. A simple reminder: that doesn’t mean all Muslim Somali asylum seekers are violent thugs who should be banished. Yet I bet, as people read reports of this heinous crime and the court case, many will have thought exactly that.
With the many crises this year over asylum arrivals, ineligible or fake claimants, Immigration Service paralysis and Home Office ineptitude, public attitudes have hardened against migrants in general and asylum seekers in particular – including the deserving. Asylum seekers have never had it so bad. Many are destitute, others wrenched from the places they have settled in to be detained and processed. Their children are traumatised.
Detectives said on Wednesday that a man wanted for questioning over the murder of a female police officer could have fled the country disguised as a Muslim woman wearing a full veil.
“One of the lethal confusions generated by the multicultural paralysis is the reluctance to acknowledge ideological weapons being deployed against the free world which masquerade as religious piety”, Melanie Phillips tells us.