We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to feminism.1
Not being as ambitious as Nick, I’d settle for being able to convert the more backward parts of Birmingham, which has the advantage that we don’t need to invade anywhere first or kill anyone. It’s still not going to be easy; it may not even be possible.
1 cf, obviously Ann Coulter
Do you think the immigration of Muslims in large numbers to Great Britain has been on the whole what Sellars and Yeatman would have called a Good Thing? If so why? And if not shouldn’t we stop giving out citizenship to newcomers from now on without very careful thought?
Paul Wood
Obviously, in many ways, it has been a disaster. But the point is what can be done about it, and how to understand what has gone wrong. I don’t think “Islam” is the problem so much as particular inculturations of Islam and the manners and habits of Pakistani politics. But I don’t see what this has to do with citizenship now. So far as I can tell, the problem is not so much that people currently applying for citizenship are going to be terrorists or extremists — but that the children or grandchildren of people who got it automatically are.
Still, I really don’t know enough about what’s happening in and around the ghettoes are to have an informed opinion. So I don’t write about it much. I just liked finding a phrase which illustrated the difficulty of the neocon project.
We should also remember why we have people from the Indian sub-continent coming here. They are merely doing to us what we did to them in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Interesting link. Been there done that here in the US about 30 years earlier. Just review US history from about 1965 (publication date of Alex “Roots” Haley’s Autobiography of Malcolm X) to 1980 (approx) substituting “Marxism” for “Political Islamicism” and “black” for “Muslim.” Oh, also substitute “afro” for “hajib.”
Read about our Long Hot Summers, about how criminal street gangs like the Black Panthers were astute enough to re-brand themselves as radical political organizations to get support from rich white liberals while most black Americans thought they should be sunk in concrete, how middle class white kids got into the act because violence was “as American as apple pie,” how adults who should have known better took this crap seriously in the way that over there teenage girls intent on making countercultural fashion statements, like Shabina Begum were taken seriously–as I understand, to the tune of £500,000 (a million bucks) to get her case to the Law Lords. Now I hear there’s a 12 year old kid who will be fighting the good fight to wear a naqib at her school, in the spirit of Rene Rogers, an American Airlines stewardess who litigated (and lost) a race discrimination suit in the late ’70s against a grooming policy that forbad cornrows.
Read how cultural self-loathing together with plain fear of the damage that young, underclass, minority males could do motivated funding agencies to bankroll “multiculturalist” projects and support their separatist agendas while other members of these “diverse communities” thought that kids who behaved like jackasses should be spanked or put in jail. I’m using data from the Policy Exchange report for the book–deja vu.
I haven’t managed to get Nkck Cohen’s book yet but please believe me I am absolutely and utterly opposed to the War in Iraq. Please pull apart the US foreign policy issue from questions of how liberal governments in the first world should deal with immigrants and their descendants. And, hey, I think that when it comes to the US we should be more generous about letting people in. Neat piece anyway and thanks because y’know I’m writing a book–and curious about what your new one is about (more evolution wars??)
Robert: they’re not, though they might like to. We moved into their countries from above, so to say. I don’t think there is much danger of a Pakistani equivalent of the East India Company. If anyone from the subcontinent is going to take us over, it will be the Hindu merchants.
As to your broader point that this is a backlash of colonialism and Western imperialism: of course. That doesn’t mean we have to like or welcome it. The whole point about that sort of relationship is that it is more fun for one party than the other. If one has to choose, I will always prefer to be part of the exploiting community, and so will almost everyone else, on both sides.
HE: I know where you stand in Iraq. That’s fine. Hell, apart from Iraq, I like and enjoy Nick C, with whom I have spent happy hours drinking ad arguing. But these are deep dark waters, and I must get on with my book, which is about Sweden, and in some sense also multiculturalism, though also trout. Since you asked.
I’m curious as to where H.E. Baber gets his/her information about majority opinions among black Americans.
Since July 2005 the world seems very different to me. I see we have a terrible problem with Moslems. I also see that while white Christian minorities intermarry and assimilate with the indigenous population the other ethnic minorities are not going do so. And although the original immigrants came to England from admiration for England their descendents lack an identity and have a sense, induced by opinion-formers, of victimhood which makes them disaffected. It is not only young Moslems who feel an existential sense of belonging nowhere. Young Hindus also use the word ‘coconut’ as a sneer.
Surely an end to granting citizenship to non-EU immigrants is clearly needed. The real question is the demographic timebomb which nobody is allowed to mention.
(robert, whether or not our conquest of India was something in which we should take pride (my view) or something of which to be ashamed doesn’t seem to me to have much bearing on what our immigration policy should be.)