I wondered if he was abruptly gone from the Sun chain but checked and his home page is still on its website - so who knows?
PING!
Posted on 08/15/2006 6:23:21 AM PDT by Clive
There in my Canadian newspaper was a photograph of an ordinary house in an ordinary street in ordinary working-class Walthamstow in northeast London. But the bland veneer was shattered by the presence of armed police officers. For this was the home of an alleged terrorist who, it is claimed, wanted to murder thousands of innocent people by blowing up airliners over the Atlantic and give his life in international jihad.
No longer ordinary, particularly for me. Because Walthamstow is where I was born, just yards away from where this terror suspect lived. He too was born in Britain, just as are many of his supposed comrades and others who became human bombs, killing fellow British men and women in July, 2005.
This part of east London is hardly glamorous. In fact it tends to be the victim of middle-class humour. David Beckham is a product of the area, as are dozens of leading soccer players. Gangsters and television "personalities," too. But also plenty of academics and intellectuals, defying but not denying their origins and blasting the stereotypes that the decaying British elites still embrace.
Walthamstow, Ilford, East Ham, Forest Gate. Rough but homely. Dockworkers, an enormous Jewish community, cab drivers, factory workers. Soccer teams called West Ham United and Tottenham Hotspur. Pubs called The Lord Nelson and The French Hen. Areas now in the news because so many young men charged with terror offences come from these streets.
Immigration has always been fundamental to the place, beginning in the 16th century. French Protestant, Irish, Jewish, West Indian. South Asian immigration began in the 1960s and included Hindus and Sikhs as well as Muslims. Today, there are entire neighbourhoods that are overwhelmingly brown, partly because of natural community development and also because of "white flight." White families have become slightly more prosperous and moved deeper into the county of Essex.
Thus Britain is now frequently composed of two solitudes. Towns and villages where every face is white and inner cities where an often anarchic white working class mingles to various degrees of success and failure with people of colour.
Racism has always been an issue but seldom as bad as social workers would have you believe. The Hindu and Sikh communities, for example, have faced the same problems as their Muslim cousins but have generally done extremely well. There are very few Hindus and Sikhs in British jails, but almost 10% of the prison population is now Muslim. A third of Muslims have no job qualifications, the highest of any minority group in the country. And more than 100,000 of Britain's 1.6 million followers of Islam believe in the mass slaughter of non-Muslim British civilians.
But we cannot and must not connect disadvantage, even the self-imposed kind, with political extremism. The case of Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh proves that. He is a little younger than me but we grew up less than a mile away from each other. Unlike Ahmed, however, I went to the local state school because my father was a cab driver and private education was out of the question.
Ahmed was wealthy. His parents sent their son to the best private school in the area, Forest School Snaresbrook, which was renowned for the quality of its education and the cost of its tuition. A leading school, free health care, safety and security, government programs to prevent racial or religious discrimination and an assured future: not too shabby.
Yet Ahmed became the leader of the gang that arranged the kidnapping of American journalist Daniel Pearl. He, of course, was the gentle and liberal young man who was forced to "admit" to being a Jew before his head was cut off and the video shown to the world. Ahmed had many Jewish classmates and Jewish teachers. They liked him and he, they say, appeared to like them.
A few streets away from where Ahmed and I grew up is one of Ilford's many synagogues. Last year the rabbi, the cantor, the president and the warden of the Ilford Federation Temple were walking home from a service when they were attacked by seven young Muslim men. Shouting, "You're dead, Jews," the youths kicked and punched the four Jewish leaders and hit them with bottles.
Three years ago, the Ilford home of Anjem Choudary, the former British head of Al-Muharjiroun, a hard line Islamic group, was raided by anti-terrorist police. Another watched Ilford man is Sultana Parvin, from the organization Hizb ut-Tahrir. This group wants all Muslims to unite in a single Islamic state under the law of the Koran. After the London terror attacks, he said that "the whole discussion that should be taking place is why British foreign policy is so cruel."
So what does a former local boy conclude from all this? I was back home just two weeks ago and this is what I found: The enormously successful British idea of what is best described as an "assimilation blanket" simply does not succeed with a significant number of young Muslims.
Most Irish, Jewish, West Indian, Hindu and Sikh people in Britain have a strong and usually absolute sense of Englishness. They even embrace local nuance and regional pride. It's always the British way to absorb by indifference rather than try too hard to make newcomers part of the body national. The French do this and fail miserably. No blanket but an attempt to smother immigrants with the rough tricolour, generally out of an insecure nationalism.
Yet with British Muslims, the young have become far more devout and separatist and hopeless than their parents. Rather than embracing or trying to change the culture, they have rejected it. Compromise by the host community merely encourages the most militant that they are winning the battle. And nice old, ordinary Walthamstow becomes a model of failure and a rather sick icon of what went wrong.
Which for this Walthamstow boy is perhaps the saddest statement I have ever had to consider and write in my entire journalistic career.
Michael Coren ping.
Oh, "They came ..." for a minute there it sounded like one of those dreadful emails with the randomly generated bits of prose to get past the email filters. You know, like "Toast on Snow gently" or "hey came from Walthamstow." :)
In order to assimilate immigrants, you need to have a society that believes in itself. European countries laugh at America's gung-ho self esteem and overt patriotism, but in reality, it's just an expression of our confidence. Europeans no longer believe in their heritage, and see themselves tainted by capitalism, colonial pasts, and a wide variety of liberal sins.
Any culture that loses faith in itself will not assimilate others; it will be absorbed by them. Say what you will about Islam, but it's not lacking in identity or pride. That's why, once an Islamic minority gets beyond a certain percentage, it will start to become aggressive.
A liberal, politically correct culture simply confirms what Islamists believe. Namely, that Western culture knows that it is decadent and wrong, and fears offending the true believers. PC hand wringing is seen correctly as an expression of guilt, and interpreted by Muslims to be an admission of guilt. Islamists feel no such remorse, because they don't think they're wrong.
PING!
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