Posted on 10/16/2005 3:45:07 PM PDT by Alouette
As ministers accuse Muslims of failing to integrate into mainstream society, a leading black intellectual and anti-racist campaigner calls on Tony Blair's government to face up to the reality of continued racism in Britain
A. Sivanandan Sunday October 16, 2005 The Observer
No country in Europe could be prouder of its multicultural experiment than Britain. But in the wake of the bombings of 7 July, multiculturalism has become the whipping boy. In a widely heralded speech, Margaret Hodge, the Work and Pensions Minister, blamed a surge in white, working-class racism on its black victims' failure to 'integrate', adding that 'promoting an understanding of other cultures should not involve abandoning British cultures and traditions', such as, apparently, school Easter bonnet parades, which she claimed have been eclipsed by Diwali celebrations. She was speaking to a debate which has moved so far to the right that the gains made by the black struggle are being jettisoned. Even the term 'coloured' instead of 'black' is up for rehabilitation. What's next? The replacement of 'racism' by 'colour bar'?
The road to assimilation, as opposed to integration, is already being cleared by scrubbing out multiculturalism. It is unlikely that Blair's Commission on Integration would have arrived at any other conclusion. But multiculturalism did not create segregation or ethnic enclaves. There is a failure to distinguish between the multicultural society as a fact of Britain's national make-up, arrived at through the anti-racist struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, and multiculturalism as a cure-all for racial injustice, promoted by successive governments. The first envisages a culturally diverse society. The second - not really multiculturalism, but what I term 'culturalism' - engenders a culturally divisive society.
'Culturalism' or 'ethnicism' was Margaret Thatcher and Lord Scarman's answer to the racism that ignited Britain in 1981. In his investigations into the Brixton riots, Scarman located the cause of the riots in 'racial disadvantage', the cure being to pour money into ethnic projects and strengthening ethnic cultures.
As the institute of Race Relations pointed out at the time, the fight against racism cannot be reduced to a fight for culture; nor does learning about other people's cultures make racists less racist. Besides, the racism that needs to be contested is not personal prejudice, which has no authority behind it, but institutionalised racism, woven over centuries of colonialism and slavery into the structures of society and government. Scarman, however, denied its existence.
For 20 years, our analysis was largely ignored, until Sir William Macpherson unexpectedly gave it official currency with his 1999 report on the murder of Stephen Lawrence, finding institutional racism throughout the police force. But the notion was soon killed off again by the tabloids and the right.
Now Tony Blair's government seems determined to undermine the functioning diverse society that exists in large parts of Britain, on the basis of a segregation theory conjured up to explain the alienation of Muslim youth. This theory is not borne out by the facts.
First, in as far as the idea of segregation has validity, it applies not to the 7 July bombers, but to the generation of their parents, when it arose from racial segregation in public housing combined with the closure of the factories and foundries where they worked.
Second, all of the bombers were well integrated. Abdullah Jamal, formerly Germaine Lindsay, was married to a white, English woman; Mohammad Sidique Khan was a graduate who helped children of all religions; Shehzad Tanweer, also a graduate, often helped in his father's fish-and-chip shop; Hasib Hussain's parents sent him to Pakistan because they felt he had fallen into the English drinking- and-swearing culture.
Yet these young men were prepared to take their lives and the lives of their fellow citizens in the name of Islam. One reason, therefore, must be as Mohammad Sidique Khan stated it: the invasion and destruction of Iraq.
The more Blair denies his complicity in the destruction of Iraq and its part in the terrorist cause, the more he has to find other reasons for 7 July, and the more he engages in the politics of fear to erode democratic rights and civil liberties. Conversely, the sooner he owns up to the Iraq debacle, the sooner he will be able to address the most important element in apprehending terrorists: intelligence, intelligence, intelligence.
Instead, his government substitutes authoritarian measures. The September 2005 anti-terrorist bill was the fourth counterterrorist measure in five years, expanding the definition of terrorism and creating new terrorist offences. The Anti-terrorism Crime and Security Act 2001, hurried through parliament after 11 September, effectively abolished habeas corpus for foreign nationals. When the law lords ruled against this, the government merely replaced detention without trial with control orders. Now it has signalled it will extend them to British nationals, while the proposal to hold suspects for three months without trial is internment by another name.
Blair argues that 'the rules of the game have changed'. But the game is democracy, and one part of it cannot be changed without starting a chain reaction that damages the whole and debases British values.
And yet Blair exhorts ethnic minorities to live up to these British values. When our rulers ask us old colonials, new refugees, desperate asylum seekers - the sub-homines - to live up to British values, they are not referring to the values that they themselves exhibit, but those of the Enlightenment which they have betrayed. We, the sub-homines, in our struggle for basic human rights, not only uphold basic human values, but challenge Britain to return to them.
But the greatest threat to Western values arises from globalisation and market fundamentalism, changes that affect personal morality. For the market reduces even personal relationships to a cash nexus. And the transition from welfare to market state has made corporations rather than people the priority of government, which, in turn, replaces moral values with commercial values, caring with indifference, altruism with selfishness, generosity with greed.
Once there were great movements, within countries and internationally, against poverty and exploitation and all kinds of injustice - against capitalism and imperialism. Today, there are no great working-class movements, no Third World revolutions. Hence, struggles against poverty, against dictatorships and against foreign occupation grow up around religion, 'the sigh of the oppressed', and take on the characteristics of millenarian movements. At the same time, they give rise to distortions such as fundamentalism.
Yet I am not without hope. I see Islamic fundamentalism as a passing phase, certainly in its intensity, because 7 July has also rebounded on the Muslim leadership and clergy in this country, demanding that they consider what is being done in the name of the Koran. And in the soul-searching that must follow, I see the first stirrings of the Islamic Reformation.
From that may follow a profound and desirable shift in the anti-imperialist struggles waged by the Muslim world: away from individual acts of terror, to mass, collective action that finds common cause with the anti-globalisation, anti-imperialist movement beyond it.
· A Sivanandan is Director of the Institute of Race Relations
Warning! This is a high-volume ping list.
Warning! This is a high-volume ping list.
I'm waiting for the Brits to finally realize the mohammedans are not going to assimilate and they need to pack them up and send them home, all of them. Then maybe the rest of Europe will get some sense and do the same....we're not far behind here in the U.S. regarding this matter, I hope. And any discussion regarding tolerance...did we tolerate Nazis or Communists on our soil when we were at war with them?
She is blind to almost 14 centuries of mass murder but can rail agaist even the smallest racial injustice.
Actually I think this barking moonbat is a Hindu, not a Muslim, which would make him/her/it on the list of "Kuffars to be decapitated" should Sharia become the law in Britain.
Globalism's imperial war (snip)
by A. Sivanandan
"The war on Iraq is the opening salvo in a war to redesign the world to the needs of corporate America.
The plans for it were already in place long before 9/11 - in the September 2000 report of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), for instance, which mapped out a strategy for 'American global leadership' well into the future. That among its founder members were Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, now at the centre of the US administration, attests to the seriousness of the project. That its implementation awaited a corporate President 'elected' by the corporate machine and not by popular vote attests to its viability. And '9/11'
presented the occasion, the 'catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor' which, the report hinted, would mitigate the unpopularity of war. The impetus for the war, however, derives from the imperative of global capital to break free of the geopolitical fetters that prevent it from bestriding the world.
read more:
http://www.statewatch.org/news/2003/mar/13siva.htm
Is that symbol on the right for netscape navigator????
Hijacking the culteral war on Islam to serve the purposes of race baiting is not allowed.
Yep, evidently a Marxist handmaiden to the islamofascists he so dearly loves...despite the unceasing history of islamic aggression against the Hindu, now he wants everyone else to bare their necks to allow the muslim sword to strike.
The man is a craven coward and proud of it. Would a history lesson help? I doubt it.
http://www.flex.com/~jai/satyamevajayate/index.html
Genocide committed in the name of Allah: 3,000,000 Bangladeshi Hindus Killed during the Pakistan-Bangladesh war in 1971. From 1894 to 1896 Abdul Hamid, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, killed 150,000 Armenian Christians. In India, Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur along with his disciples was burned to death by the Moghul ruler Aurangzeb in 1675. Another Sikh, Bhai Mati Das was sawn into right and left halves while he was still alive. In July 1974, 4,000 Christians living in Cyprus were killed by Fahri Koroturk, president of Turkey and his Islamic army. From 1843 to 1846 10,000 Assyrian Christians including women and children were massacred by the Muslims. From 1915 to 1918 750,000 Assyrians were killed in the name of Islamic Jihad. In 1933 thousands of Assyrian villagers were murdered by the Iraqi soldiers in Northern Iraq. Since 1990 more than 10,000 Kashmiri Hindus have been brutally murdered by Islamic fundamentalists. Over 280,000 Ugandans killed during the reign of Idi Amin from 1971 to 1979. Over 30,000 Mauritanians have been killed by the Islamic dictators since 1960. In 1980, 20,000 Syrians were murdered under the rule of Hafez Al-Assad, President of Syria. Since 1992 120,000 Algerians have been murdered by the Islamic fundamentalist army
What a loon. The Islamofascist is the same as the Nazi, Communist, eugenist, Natavist, Peronist.... a middle- or upper-middle class person, educated, alienated, sour because his or her educated pretense isn't equalled with a good salary or political power, raised with modern ideas but filled with utopian dreams of reestablishing a mythical golden past... Osama and his followers are far more like the communist fellow travelers or the college graduates who gassed the Jews than the poor and oppressed. Of course, in the writer's worldview, when the evil racist, capitalist system is overthrown, people like the writer will finally be given the power and authority they deserve. There's a reason Lenin called people like that "useful idiots."
In practical terms, how can one be opposed to both poverty and capitalism since it has been proven, with over a century of empirical data, that only capitalism can reduce poverty?
There you go.
They hate the West. Why are they here ?
Really? I have thought that French and Dutch can be prouder.
This comes from the Guardian. Is anyone at all surprised?
If the misbegotten jihadis don't accept British values (or American values) then get the hell out of the country and back to the cesspools from whence they came.
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