Muslims in Britain should start taking a good look at the auguries. Windsor, a town known for its genteel (and tourist infested) tearooms, has been playing host to low level riots and violence by enraged English youths for several nights now, sparked by Muslim thugs attacking a mother and daughter and by aggressive demands for a mosque to be built in the overwhelmingly non-Muslim town.
At the same time, Leader of the Common Jack Straw has been saying publicly that he would rather that Muslim women not wear veils as it is deeply divisive socially.
The Blackburn MP has come under fire after he said the veil could be seen as “a visible statement of separation and difference” […] Writing in yesterday’s Lancashire Telegraph, Mr Straw revealed he had asked Muslim women visiting his surgeries to remove their veils because he values “face-to-face” contact.
He is not calling for state imposed dress codes (which I would strongly oppose) but he is making a self-evident statement about Muslim non-assimilation. Quite rightly he has not made this a broader contention as I have yet to hear anyone voice concern over Hindu women wearing saris or Chinese women wearing cheong sams (I should think not!), because although some Chinese and Hindus choose not to assimilate (but of course many do), they are not calling for their cultures and beliefs to be legally off-limits from criticism or ridicule. It is only Muslim non-integration in the UK that is really a problem because of an apparently widespread Muslim unwillingness to reciprocate tolerance for tolerance.
The bigger point here is, of course, not that Jack Straw personally thinks it is unwise that Muslims make themselves so visibly separate from broader British society but that the Leader of the Commons should feel it appropriate to say something that was obviously going to upset a body of Muslim opinion in the UK. This was not an off-the-cuff remark and moreover, he has repeated it and elaborated on the point.
I would say that elements of the political class are starting to notice that increasing numbers of the fifty eight million non-Muslims in Britain are growing a great deal less tolerant of intrusive Muslim demands on their tolerance. There comes a time when people start to think enough is enough. In the end, democratic politicians stay in business by positioning themselves to be on the right side of that sort of ‘mass market’ issue and that is something Muslim ‘community leaders’ would do well to ponder when they do a little projecting into the future, assuming they actually want Muslims in Britain to have a future.
Why don’t they just cough up the money for land and building? Or is there some particular and unreasonable issue with planning law and/or local acceptance?
Best regards
I think Chong Sams should be mandatory for Chinese women (confession, my gf is half-chinese).
I think it is quite possible to assimilate fully into British society and maintain much of your cultural identity. Many groups have done that (I’m a Geordie and I think I’ve managed it). They become bilingual and bicultural. That’s great for all of us. You can be fully English and wear a sari because you’re of Indian stock and there is no contradiction.
Think Madhur Jaffrey.
Maybe I choose that example because it’s late on a friday night and I could murder a curry.
Why so many muslims don’t feel able to similarly join the party and become “Britains who are muslims” rather than “seething Islamists feeling themselves surrounded by the infidels” is a matter for them.
But perhaps it has something to do with Islam’s total lack of any sense of humour.
Just as irritating as any toys-ejected-from-pram response from either ‘side’ in this putative debate is the insistence of Straw’s colleagues (and non-affiliated, lazy parts of the media) that Straw has been ‘courageous’ in bringing this up.
Bollocks. It’s his job.
John Reid was also hailed as ‘courageous’ for his Watch Your Kids Don’t Get Radicalised speech a couple of weeks back. They can be right (Straw) or wrong (Reid) but to treat them as lone, mewling pioneers of opinion is to collude in their domestic game of Cabinet chairs at the expense of the vastly more important issue actually raised.
Better yet, make cheong sams mandatory for Muslim women. Then all the Muslims will leave. Or, at least, the ones who stay probably aren’t anything to worry about.
Seriously, I think your resident beachhead of the Religion of Rage is about to discover that no matter how long one may seem to get away with poking a sleeping bulldog in the eye, it eventually turns out to be a bad idea.
I have this mental image of a dam labeled “political correctness” holding back a vast, roiling, angry flood, and cracks spreading, spreading, spreading…..
For sure as they are nothing of the sort. My observation is that they are just starting to get a whiff of what many (most?) people outside the foetid corridors of power really think.
However when politicos like Straw start saying things like that, it is of interest if even they are starting to notice.
Sorry, one other thing. An example of how OTT this ‘debate’ can spill. Someone speaking on BBC News 24 today violently disagreed with Straw, equating his desire for women to remove the niqab to burns victims removing their faces.
What’s funny is that part of the stated motivation for the government/MSM/PC crowd to silence critics of Muslims in Britain is that they wanted to stop the brutish, stupid, average white people from going out and attacking Muslims.
But by pressing the lid down on a situation where legitimate criticism needed, like steam, to be let out, Windsor ends up finding itself in exactly the situation that was supposed to be avoided.
Unsurprisingly, it follows the usual template for leftist ideas: discount human nature; assume that somehow elites can plan/control/engineer the desired result; end up with a result which is either completely not what you wanted or is in fact the exact opposite.
How many mistakes does it take to be discredited?
Mr. Neuman — our President Kennedy once said, “A government which makes peaceful revolution impossible makes violent revolution inevitable.”
This remark embodies a certain wisdom which the politically-correct types in many lands have studiously refused to absorb. They seem to think that if they can systematically block off and frustrate every peaceful route by which the put-upon masses might voice their discontents, then those discontents will somehow vanish, and all will be well. It doesn’t work that way.
Alfred E. Neuman wrote:
Personally, I doubt that average people (of whatever colour), are stupid, brutish or wish to go out attacking Muslims.
The average might just, however, be somewhat irritated by unreasonable behaviour, by whoever. And like to feel free to say so, as and when they like.
Best regards
Nigel, I wasn’t implying that I myself think that. I was implying that (in my opinion) that is the viewpoint of the government/MSM/leftisits, and is part of their motivation for supressing speech critical of Muslims.
If you hadn’t noticed, the political and cultural elites have a somewhat low opinion of the average person.
Hmmm… So you don’t think this has anything to do with Jack Straw wanting to stand for the deputy leadership of his party? Or that he feels the need to emphasise that, despite having a 1/3 Muslim constituency, he can still speak on behalf of the rest of the (non-Muslim) country?
Just curious.
Quite. That was the main point that I was making.
Perry,
Of course, but I think his possible candidacy to the Labour Party deputy leadership contest is central to his comments.
I don’t think he did this just to say how he felt and to score brownie points with the rest of us. He doesn’t have to, if he’s only going to carry on being an MP- it’s only his constituency that really matters.
In light of his comments, he probably feels he is building up more of a mandate to play a more representative role (ie, Deputy Leader).
The Daily Express is not the most reliable source on this particular topic, and I suspect the story is more complicated than a gang of Muslim youths swarming, in scarey uniforms, out of a building to offer an unprovoked attack against some bystanders. It has the uncanny clarity of a retold tale. Other papers do not report it like that.
According to the local police commander:
“This disorder appears to have escalated from a minor disagreement. As a result, we have seen groups of Asian and white local youths gathering. We are working closely with local community groups and partners to ensure the harmony of the town is not disrupted.”
(Working with “community groups” doesn’t sound like a good idea if you want to break down tribal violence, rather than encourage it, but let that pass: this is a comment about aetiology not epidemiology.)
– according to the Telegraph (not known for its soppy multiculturalism) today.
All the interviews I’ve heard or seen with the “local” (i.e., white – the dairy owner and his employees are locals too, surely) rioters are couched in the language of ‘respect’. Which leads me to suspect that this is a matter of thuggish territoriality, familiar in many British towns and cities.
Windsor is not all the castle, river, and Eton College, you know. The town is very close to despondent Slough. Like many a not-quite country town, it has its fringe of dull estates (think Blackbird Leys in Oxford, if not quite so blasted) full of brutish youths with no constructive thing to do. Dedworth, the area in which youths are reported as gathering before attacks on the dairy, is just such an area.
Nigel,
Or is there some particular and unreasonable issue with planning law and/or local acceptance?
Yes. I think it is interesting this is mentioned in the context at all. It further fuels my suspicion than this is messier than ‘Muslims acting uppity again’ as some commentators have taken it.
It seems the owner of the dairy, which is on an industrial estate, already has a building next door, which he applied to change into a mosque and Islamic centre in 2002. Planning permission has not been forthcoming, and there have been objections. According to the Express report:
People opposing the conversion claim there are not enough Muslims in Windsor to warrant a mosque. There are said to be around 500 Muslims in a town with a population of more than 30,000.
Warrant a mosque? What business is it of theirs whether someone wants to build a place of worship? The moslems who might go there are the ones to determine whether the mosque is “warranted”. I doubt such objectors would even try offering that argument against a Masonic lodge, a synagogue, a (white, not black pentecostal) church, or a bowling club. It’s not numbers they object to, it is who’s involved.
I recall similar fatuous objections being raised to a small Sikh-funded recreation ground and garden near my family’s village in Warwickshire.
“What business is it of theirs whether someone wants to build a place of worship? ”
Perhaps people have the same objections that they might have had during WW2 if a small German part of the town had wanted to build a Germans only community center in the middle of town, with the occasional speaches being given by high ranking member of the German government.
Since England is a Christian country, I think they have the same rights to object to a mosque that a muslim has regarding Christian buildings in muslim countries.
I don’t care whether the objections to the mosque are “reasonable” or not.
Given the behaviour of Muslims, the fact that a very significant percentage of them have expressed hostility to Western culture (while living in the West and enjoying the benefits of it), given their often thuggish behaviour and threats of violence whenever anybody has the nerve to criticise them..
given these things–and the fact that so many politicians and bureaucrats obstinately refuse to acknowledge the problem, that so many concessions are made to their primitive ideology in the name of “peaceful relations”, it’s about time that the anger that’s been building for so long had some violent and public expression.
I’ve had enough. Enough of being lectured about supposed multiculti benefits, about how islam is the “religion of peace” while areas of our cities have been made no-go areas in the name of it, enough of seeing police stand idly by while thugs carry placards threatening to behead others, yet those same police are very quick to stamp on any expressions of anger directed against muslims.
A rant? You bet. Racist? No. No more than objecting to nazism is “racist”.
One could equally well apply Ring’s argument to the confrontational insistence on maintaining strict-Islamist forms of dress, such as the veil, in a secular (not Christian, really) country which is in a de facto state of war with radical Islamism.
I suspect that ethnic Germans living in London during the Blitz who insisted on parading around in makeshift Nazi uniforms would have attracted similarly unfavorable reactions.
The owners of the former Express Dairy, now the Medina Dairy, I would hazard are not originally from Windsor.
No doubt. but sometimes that is the correct response and just maybe the ‘upitty Muslims’ need to be confronted.
Which suggest that maybe they are not just mindless racists then, but are rightly reacting to the one community that is a threat and needs to be contained, not pandered to.
It is going to get ugly in the future and maybe it needs to for the Muslims to realise that tolerance of them is not limitless.
As my granny used to say two wrongs don’t make a right. Just because religious extremist in Muslim countries try to stop Christians (or Sikhs or Hindus or Buddhists) having a place to practice their beliefs does not mean we should do likewise – even if you believe as I do that they are all mere superstition.
If there is a desire for a Mosque, then it is surely a matter of zoning, if the dairy is indeed on an industrial estate. An industrial estate is for…industry. That is why it is there. That is why the land was allocated and fields grubbed up, the roads put in and the council tax bands allocated.
Once you have a cultural centre, you may then get “accomodation for visiting ‘scholars'” and all manner of things…in the middle of an industrial estate on land sold at a price that reflected the zoning.
What should not happen is a cave-in to constant, persistant pestering. This should apply to Muslims and mates of the planning officer equally.
Agreed – people have had enough of this group of whiners. Honestly – what does anyone have to learn from islam? What does it contribute? Very little. If anything, it gives us in modern form an idea of pre-reformation christianity. Again I repeat – of you are a fundamentalist of any creed and despise the open, tolerant society here, the world is big enough to accommodate you elsewhere and small enough for you to go and live in that place – so for fundamentalist muslims, go and live where you will be happy : Iran, Saudi, Pakistan etc etc. I’m not joking, by the way – you will be happier there. So book the plane.
The great irony about all of this is that the jihab and head covering has nothing to do with the religious tenets of islam at all. There is absolutely nothing in the Koran that demands it.
The head covering has been imposed by men who regard their women as chattels who should remain invisible to the external world. It’s a primitive, 7th century symbol of fundamentalist thinking. It’s a disgrace and should be banned.
As for the Windsor situation – as far as I’m concerned, the last thing the country needs is another mosque. Not until this minority has proved to us all that their religion is peaceful, inclusive and constructive – and not a death cult.
And your granny was correct, Ian.
However this is not about religion (it never was), it is about people reacting to an assertive and violent ideology (which just happens to also be a religion) and increasingly I suspect non-Muslims will just react to who is doing the demanding , not what they are demanding.
If my experiences in both Ulster and the Balkans is anything to go by, when community relations deteriorate beyond a certain point, you can no longer break things down into logical discrete chunks, such as “they want a mosque”, because people stop listening and start throwing bricks right after they hear the “they want…” bit.
I am not saying it will be just, or reasonable, but as long as a critical mass of vocal Muslims keep making demands that are antithetical to broader British society, that is the process that will start to unfold. I assume the Windsor fracas is not a domino falling but I do expect more of the same. I also have no idea if this process has gone past the point of no return in the UK (perhaps not).
TD,
There’s plenty in the Koran along the lines of “The head covering has been imposed by men who regard their women as chattels” so if one follows from the other…
It’s about time some think tank did a cost benefit analysis of having Muslims in western societies. In my own country, Canada, the cost of having a Muslim minority in terms of the expense to the country of having to protect terrorist targets (a group of seventeen or so Muslims is presently in custody for plotting to destroy various strategic sites as well as behead the Prime Minister) when compared to their failure to contribute anything but social disruption is a no-brainer. The benefits of Muslim immigration are non-existent. The costs to the receiving society are enormous. The old mantra that they do the work the indigenous population refuses to do is certainly not the case in France where the unemployment rate among the Muslims is 40% – and the picture while less drastic is similar in other European countries. So what’s the point. Surely the prisons can be kept filled by other means. (cf Theodore Dalrymple on the composition of Uk prison populations). Muslims refuse to integrate, they indulge in criminality, they cause social disruption. Who benefits?
“assuming they actually want Muslims in Britain to have a future”, writes Perry.
This is the “Elephant in the Living Room” issue for me. Unless they get the point, we could be in a situation, say as little as 10 years from now, when this sort of confrontation occurs daily across our towns and cities and when Powellite calls for Muslims to be kicked out of this country gets louder and louder. It can happen. We may already be close to that point where forced expulsion, even of UK-born Muslims with passports, is on the political agenda. And that includes the agenda of mainstream parties and not just the far-right.
So maybe Muslim “community leaders” might want to consider that point. I am not of course implying that expulsion is right, but that it is going to be mighty hard to resist such calls politically if violence gets worse. We assume that given our relatively benign history of the past 200-plus years that mass expulsions do not happen but I am afraid that would be naive.
On the veil issue, an important point here is that as human beings, we are biologically hard-wired to want to know the facial expression of a person when they speak. We want to know about whether the person is friendly, trustworthy, or shifty or aggressive. By refusing to go along with this and putting a distance between themselves and others, Muslim women are effectively saying to non-Muslims: you are apart. Good on Jack Straw for saying what he did.
Another thing that bugs me is that I doubt many women who wear veils actually choose to do so but are in fact coerced, and threatened by ostracism from their families, sometimes through the threat of violence.
Did he define what he meant by ‘veil’? Hair covering (with or without neck covering) doesn’t bother me, but face covering does.
It’s a big fat loogy hawked at the concept of civil society. It’s a personal choice in favor of family-based disdain of public life and distrust of strangers that’s toxic for western democracy. I can’t help but despise those who do it and everything they stand for. If you’re ashamed to show your face you have no place in western society.
hmm… im not greatly liking where this debate is going.
first up, jack straw, as thier MP, *ought* to be the employee of his constituents. If your employee started making demands about how you dressed in his precence, you would be a little concerned. I see this more as hectoring from an MP who thinks we all owe him a favour, as opposed to a blow for western values.
Furthermore, there is a rather pathetic element in some of the comments above. the idea that this small number of crazy muzzies are somehow going to manage to end western civilisation is a little strage (which communism and fascism both somehow failed to do). To get all shouty about how soon the gloves will be coming off avoids the real problem; namely our society has lost its balls intellectually.
Any number of threats to string people up wont counter the fact that mainstream society can no longer engender loyalty in young british asians (or many young people more broadly). the imams are entirely parasitic on cultural relativism and multiculturalism, and the more radical groups like Hizb ut tahrir etc are entirely parasitic on peoples overblown fears. theyre essentially bullshit artists. getting hot under to collar just encourages them.
being cynical about these things, I get the feeling that as the polls have narrowed, new labour has come to realise that there aren’t as many voties in being nice to muslim – as the census that came showed there are just 1.5milion – as there are in talking to the working classes.
Even for Jack Straw, where a quarter of his electorate is muslim – he’s clearly more dependent on the white working class vote.
Wrong on so many levels. Young Asians are not the problem, young Muslims are, the fact they are Asian is irrelevent. Hindus and Chinese were Asians last time I checked and I do not see a problem with them. Also, the assimilationist tendencies of British society work just fine, with the singular exception of with Muslims… amongst other communities I see no challenge to the tolerant secular consensus.
The problem lies in how the state has reacted to Islamic intolerance. It prohibits society from reacting rationally to intrusive non-assimilating outsiders (i.e. discrimination) and moreover subsidises the process of non-assimilation via welfare programmes which off-set the economic (and political) consequences on non-assimilation. British society is not the problem at all.
"The problem lies in how the state has reacted to Islamic intolerance. It prohibits society from reacting rationally to intrusive non-assimilating outsiders (i.e. discrimination) and moreover subsidises the process of non-assimilation via welfare programmes which off-set the economic (and political) consequences on non-assimilation. British society is not the problem at all."
But isn’t the point that this problem was a long time in coming. No one really talks anymore about any value beyond unrestricted "tolerance" and a fuzzy mix of social justice and corporate stabling. We have had no satisfying ideology for a generation or two and in a sense, Islamism has just managed to highlight this by ruthlessly exploiting this tolerance and appealing to a section of despondent youth (some of whom becomes islamists, others who just become their allies amongst the morass of anti-american ex-socialists). It is not enough just to crack down on Islamism, you also need a unifying ideology to fill the vacuum that let Islamism in.
Rob, you don’t like how the debate is going, but I don’t think there is anything irrational about the fears that libertarians might have about a noisy minority making more and more demands upon the largely secular society in which they have chosen to live. I agree that we should not forget that we have overcome other collectivist ideologies before – and Islam falls into that category, IMHO – but we did not win those battles by being quiet.
Jack Straw’s comments, even if cynically motivated – he’s a politician – bring out a truth that has been evaded by our political establishment for too long. A group has come to live in Britain that, by dress and conduct, is determined to stand apart from everyone else in a way more radical and challenging than in living memory.
I personally am looking forward to the day when we never have to write or think about this ideology again, and can spend more time on our joyously adolescent passions for space travel and the rest.
brgds.
In my humble opinion, muslim wimminfolk clad in the veil don’t look a bit respectable. They look guilty and furtive. They are not even obviously women. That could be a bloke under them there curtings, heading for the ladies restroom. Yet we are expected to accept these folk in the ladies changing rooms at the shops, in the queue at the bank, and in the doctors waiting room. All situations in which a masked man would attract the immediate attention of the police. How would they like it if they were exposed to persistent danger from a generally masked, unidentifiable, indigenous population? Maybe we should try it and see….
I wonder how the tolerance brigades would react if people tried to call these “burqas”.
“We may already be close to that point where forced expulsion….”
Forget expulsion.
It makes a lot of sense to prohibit additional immigration of muslims to the UK and the rest of Europe. But the PC-multiculti dominated Europe can’t even manage that.
Fascinating incident, interesting discussion. There is no doubt the Political Class has let Britain down (again), but why should anyone be surprised at that?
There are two vacuums being filled by Muslims in the UK (and more generally in Europe). One is the “faith” vacuum — Europe has been on a grand social experiment since the 1950s to test the idea that one can have a stable society which is entirely secular; the jury is still out on that one.
The second is the “baby” vacuum — once the fertility rate drops below 2.1 children per female, a society is headed for extinction; that is just simple arithmetic. Immigration is a way of maintaining the population of a society which is not breeding copiously enough (like the UK & Europe), but that same immigration may change the society beyond recognition.
For much of history, one of the most important groups in any society was Fighting Age Males. Modern EuroLiberalism is punishing that group for the sins of their distant forefathers, and excluding young males from their magic circle. Now demographers tell us that in France the ratio of French Fighting Age Males (an oxymoron, I know) to Muslim Fighting Age Males is approaching 50/50. The implications are worth pondering.
Pardon me a moment while I enjoy a moment of schadenfreude.
UK permits immigration of a bunch of culturally, politically, and religiously incompatible people…
…and denies it of a daughter of the Empire who is fully culturally, linguistically, religiously compatible, with extensive family networks in the country, well educated, productive, hard working, nubile.
OK, you get what you want. Have fun.
The residents of Windsor might also be reacting to events like this: http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2006460631,00.html
Apparently violent Muslim “youths” have chased off soldiers who were attempting to rent an apartment in Windsor. It certainly sounds like things have deteriorated much more than we have been led to believe. It is also likely that this is part of a concerted effort to try to show control of an important town, showing dominance over the Queen, her castle, and the most eminent school of the realm.
I think that perhaps some chappies from the Horse guards need to canter on into town and have some discussions.
UK definitely needs to institute extreme punishments for any sort of “honour” crimes and ban all marriages with people from “back home”.
As to not dealing with women behind a veil… it is highly likely that the UK still has laws against wearing masks in public, as do most countries. While an MP is an employee of his constituents, he does need to know who he is speaking with. It would be far too easy to have a few people dress up in a number of burkas/niqabs in an attempt to deceive the local MP of the support for or importance of a given position. There are very many good reasons to go back to the assumption that anyone with their face covered has intent to commit mischief and should be arrested post haste.
Concerning Hey‘s point on the legality of masking one’s face, I found FreeB.E.A.G.L.E.S.: Legal Advice for Activists (v4).
This indicates it is not generally illegal, but only when a police inspector calls specifically for it not to be done, for example at a demonstration. It also looks to be a somewhat recent addition to the law (1994).
Best regards
Nigel, I read your link and noticed something interesting about the phrasing.
It seems very reasonable that Muslims could say its primary purpose is other than concealing identity.
The law needs to remove the interpretation of intent from the police and define physically what is and is not permissable.