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Integration..still a good thing?
Church
sidelined 'by Government favouritism to Muslims'
The memo was written by Guy Wilkinson, interfaith advisor to the
Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams. The Church of England has
privately blamed the Government for favouring Islam over other
religions, it was revealed today.
A document prepared by the Archbishop of Canterbury's adviser on other
faiths accused ministers of showing political preference to Muslims and
using taxpayers' money to promote Islam.But, it said, the result has
only been to deepen the divisions in society.
And the report questioned why Britain is regarded as a 'multi-faith' society when more
than seven out of ten people say they are Christians and only one in 20
follow another faith.
The protests within the Church of England are a further blow to the
left-wing doctrine of multiculturalism that denigrates British history
and tradition while insisting on the right of every minority group to
develop its own culture.
The criticism of Labour's attitude to Muslims was presented to the
CofE's bishops last week and is said to have been 'well received.' In
it, Dr Rowan Williams' advisor Canon Guy Wilkinson said that the Church
of England had been 'sidelined' while 'preferential' treatment was
accorded to Muslims.
The report cited a series of instances of bias in favour of Islam.
These included public funding to fly Islamic scholars to Britain to
preach, the abandonment of laws that would have made forced marriage a
crime, and official encouragement for the development non-interest
mortgage and loans that obey the letter of Islamic law.
But Canon Wilkinson, who made a reputation as an outspoken cleric in
the 1990s while trying to maintain congregations at his inner city
Birmingham church in the face of growing Muslim influence in his local
area, said all of this had not helped to heal the gulf between some
groups of Muslims and the rest of society.
His report said: 'One might argue
that disaffection and separation is now greater than ever, with Muslim
communities withdrawing further into a sense of victimhood, and other
faith communities seriously concerned that the Government has given
signals that appear to encourage the notion of a privileged
relationship with sections of the Muslim community.' It added: 'In relation to faith, there has been a
divided, almost schizophrenic approach.'
The document said that the 'contribution
of the Church of England in particular and Christianity in general to
the underlying culture remains very substantial. 'It could certainly be
argued that there is an agenda behind a claim that a five per cent
adherence to other faiths makes for a multi-faith society.'
Canon Wilkinson, who was an archdeacon in Bradford during the 2001
riots, said that Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly's Commission on
Cohesion and Integration that is designed to help bring Muslims into
the mainstream is doomed to fail.
His report adds to the sense of frustration with multiculturalism
within the CofE that was expressed last year by Archbishop of York Dr
John Sentamu. Dr Sentamu said the doctrine tended to suppress the
benefits of majority culture.
A spokesman for the Church of England said: 'This internal briefing note, produced by
a Church official, is not designed as an attack on the Government but
as a contribution to debate.'
Dalai Lama warns
against talk of 'clash of civilisations'
The Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, has warned against
portraying Islam as a religion of violence, saying Muslims have been
wrongly demonised in the West since the September 11 attacks.
Promoting religious tolerance, the world's most influential Buddhist
leader said on Sunday that talk of "a
clash of civilisations between the West and Muslim world is wrong and
dangerous."
Muslim terrorist attacks have distorted people's views of Islam, making
them believe it is an extremist faith rather than one based on
compassion, the Dalai Lama told a press conference in New Delhi.
Muslims are being unfairly stigmatised as a result of violence by "some mischievous people," said the
Dalai Lama, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 for his work to
bring democracy and freedom to his people.
All religions have extremists and "it
is wrong to generalise (about Muslims)," the 71-year-old
spiritual leader said. "They
(terrorists) cannot represent the whole system," he said.
The Dalai Lama, who has lived in Dharamsala since fleeing Tibet after a
failed uprising against Chinese rule in 1959, said he had cast himself
in the role of defender of Islam because he wanted to reshape people's
views of the religion.
Asked about the uproar last month when Pope Benedict XVI quoted a
14th-century Christian emperor to portray Islam as a religion tainted
by violence, the Dalai Lama said "if
you return to past history there are a lot of complications." "It is better to forget ... and to deal
with today's reality," he said. "Past history is (full of) uncivilised
events," he said.
Benedict had quoted statements by Emperor Manuel II -- ruling from what
is now Istanbul -- that everything the Prophet Mohammed had brought was
evil and that he spread Islam by violence. The pontiff later apologised
for the comments which triggered angry reactions around the world from
Muslims who said the pope's statements harked back to the medieval
Christian crusades against Islam.
The Dalai Lama noted the "conflict
and divisions caused in the name of religion," referring to
violence in such places as Ireland, Pakistan and Iraq. But despite that "religion has great potential to help
humanity on the basis of mutual respect," he said.
Multiculturalism hasn't
worked: let's rediscover Britishness
By Patience Wheatcroft,
08/10/2006
The tyranny of political correctness has for years suppressed the
qualms that many Britons have had about what was happening to their
country. Radical imams were allowed to preach hatred while being funded
with state benefits, but few dared to question such madness, let alone
act against it. The doctrine of multiculturalism dictated that all
beliefs should be allowed to flourish, and to challenge that view was
as politically incorrect as pinning up a Pirelli calendar in Islington
Town Hall or suggesting that two married parents usually provide the
best start in life for a child.
Gradually, however, people are gaining the courage to defy the diktats
of political correctness and to question the assumptions of what should
be acceptable in Britain today. In Bournemouth last week, David Cameron
admitted to feeling uncomfortable about the segregation that now exists
in many cities, where people remain isolated in ethnic communities.
Jack Straw has publicly raised the veil on an issue that, privately,
many will have admitted to finding disturbing. And even the Church of
England, it seems, may be rediscovering sufficient backbone to assert
the importance of its role as the predominant faith in the country.
Multiculturalism, as an increasing band of influential voices is
prepared to say, has not worked. Both Labour and Conservative
politicians have now stressed the need for all immigrants to learn
English, but merely speaking the language is not enough. For the
country to feel comfortable, there needs to be a sense of cohesion.
That is unlikely to be achieved by the Commission on Cohesion and
Integration set up by Ruth Kelly, the Secretary of State for
Communities. The omission of any representative of the Church of
England on the 14-strong Commission, which includes the
secretary-general of the Hindu Forum of Great Britain, indicates that
it may be starting from the wrong place. To start from the right place
requires a degree of confidence in core British ideals. That does not
mean harking back to John Major's Hovis-style vision of bicycling
delivery boys doffing their caps to village worthies. But we should
reassert Britain's claim to be a country that believes in tolerance,
politeness and compassion, and one in which, even if the church-going
habit has faded, Christian values prevail.
No, Jack Straw is not
islamophobic! The veil excludes women from
society
If the war on Iraq was the worst idea ever to establish peace and
democracy, the niqab (large veil covering the face too) is definitely
the worst mean to integrate Muslim women into Western European
societies.
And if it is indeed unfortunate that Jack Straw did not dare denounce
the first lie (about the war on Iraq), it does not mean that he should
not been supported for telling now a useful truth to British society:
the niqab indeed prevents women’s integration (and simultaneously
increases xenophobic feelings among mainstream population by making
those women and their beliefs even more alien to the society they live
into).
From Germany to France, Jack Straw’s finding is already a well known
fact and has been handled with no serious difficulty. The main reason
is that besides a few extremists, Muslim women do not dream of being 'jailed' within their own clothes.
The question now for UK is to know whether it will be able to get out
of the intellectual ghetto where political correctness has trapped it
for at least one decade and which can be summarized this way:
- a good leftist mindset should be: pro-Palestinian,
anti-Israeli, pro-multiculturalism, pro-minority (whatever they are or
ask for), anti-American and a bit pro-European
- a good rightist mindset should be : pro-Israeli,
anti-terrorist (especially from Muslim origin), pro-multiculturalism,
pro-minority but nationalist too (understands who can), Americanist and
very much anti-European.
The problem is that British society is moving in a complete different
direction. Its 'multiculturalism' is
in pieces (if it ever existed) as shown by all recent surveys (1) indicating that the British
Muslim population shares the same convictions regarding Western values
as Muslim populations from the Middle East (while on continental Europe
they share the same opinions as the people of their own country, the
European country they live into).
British elites are totally colonized by US interests and values; and
since the Iraq war, the country has lost any international visibility
worldwide, being now taken for a mere subsidiary of Washington Inc.
Britishness is becoming a key asset for xenophobic political movements
which are getting an increasing popular support. And the negative
fallout of the Iraq war, together with Blair’s belief that there is
such a thing as a ‘war on terror’,
obliges British authorities to constantly use double standards
speeches: pretending to be very opened to Islam whatever form it takes,
while pursuing a very aggressive anti Muslim activists policy.
Such a context does not help to generate a productive intellectual
environment to deal with the Muslim veil complex issue as it lacks a
constructive debate on the issue. For Newropeans, in line with its
recently adopted proposal regarding Immigration, each EU Member state
has to find its own balance between its tradition in matter of
relations between religious and public behaviours, and the immigrants’
religious traditions. But it has to be a policy aimed at integrating
the immigrants, and especially their children. Therefore all factors
whose effects are to discriminate or to separate the immigrants and
their children from mainstream population have to be forcefully
opposed. UK is not France, nor Germany. It has to find its own way to
deal with the veil issue. One lesson though: in places where the policy
starts at school, when people are young, it definitely increases the
chances to limit in the future the problem with adults!
In anyway, Jack Straw has brought the UK debate on that issue closer to
the continental one. And UK elites could be well inspired to look at
other European experiences in that field rather than at US ones,
because whatever they may believe, they belong to a European society
fabric, where there is no ‘free space’
available (contrarily to the USA) to let immigrants develop their own
way of life.
I always remind my audiences when such questions are raised, that
within Europe, our history teaches us one terrible lesson: we have
inside our own European civilisation dark forces, nurtured by the fear
and hatred of the ‘Other’,
which are always sleeping just beneath the surface of our ‘open societies’. The most
efficient way to wake them up is to ignore them and pretend that we are ‘angels’.
As Pascal once wrote, ‘who wants to
be the angel becomes the beast’(2). Though it is a French
philosopher’s opinion, I do believe that it is a sentence which British
opinion leaders could right now usefully meditate upon.
Notes
[1] Read for instance this very interesting survey from the Pew
Research Center : ‘Muslims in Europe: Economic Worries Top
Concerns About Religious and Cultural Identity’ (07/06/06)
It namely underlines that ‘Muslims in Great Britain, however, are the
most likely of all groups sampled to see a strengthening of Islamic
identity with fully 77% agreeing.’
[2] With this sentence, Pascal also provides us with a crystal-clear
anticipation of the long-term effects of ‘political correctness’.
See also
Multiculturalism
The key to
successful integration
Globalization isn't
working
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