Posted on 10/22/2006 2:55:37 PM PDT by blam
Warning over UK race riot danger
Trevor Phillips said Britain is becoming polarised
The polarised debate over full-face veils could spark race riots in the UK, the head of the Commission for Racial Equality has warned. The issue "seems to have turned into something really quite ugly", Trevor Phillips told the Sunday Times.
"This could be the trigger for the grim spiral that produced riots in the north of England five years ago," he said.
Labour MP Shahid Malik said the issue was becoming "deeply corrosive" and that far-right parties would benefit.
Jack Straw, Leader of the House of Commons, recently sparked a media debate by saying he preferred women not to wear full-face veils at his surgeries in his constituency because he believed they made communication difficult.
Stories about a Christian British Airways worker wearing a cross, and a Muslim teaching assistant wearing a full-face veil in the classroom, have also made headlines.
Mr Malik called the debate over the past couple of weeks "raw and ill-informed".
He said: "The main beneficiaries from this debate - because it is having a corrosive impact - will be the far-right, the British National Party, and organisations like al-Ghurabaa and al-Muhajiroun.
"They would want to divide this society and to exploit it and to create mayhem, and our job, mainstream Britain, mainstream society, is to obviously not allow them to do that."
'Need to chill'
Mr Phillips said the polarised debate over race and religion risked a repeat of the Burnley and Oldham riots, adding: "This time the conflict would be much worse - we need to chill."
He told BBC One's AM programme people the debate surrounding Muslim women wearing the veil had begun courteously but deteriorated.
"We need to have this conversation but there are rules by which we have the conversation which don't involve this kind of targeting and frankly bullying."
Mr Straw feels that covering faces can make community relations difficult
Mr Phillips drew comparisons between Britain and the racial tensions in France.
"We saw it in France last year where the French allowed north African communities to grow up completely separately, not feeling French," he said.
"Eventually that frustration, that exclusion boiled over into the kind of car burning we saw last year...I do not want that for Britain."
On Mr Straw's comments, Mr Phillips told the Sunday Times Muslims leaders had been "overly defensive" in attacking the Blackburn MP.
'Injustice unleashed'
Massoud Shadjareh, from the lobby group the Islamic Human Rights Commission, told BBC News 24 that "ministers after ministers after ministers" had been attacking the Muslim community recently, which was unfair and "not a means of respectable dialogue".
"I have to say the Muslim community really has been extremely calm, and extremely responsible," he said.
The Muslim Council of Britain's Secretary General, Muhammad Abdul Bari, said the integration debate had become "increasingly shrill and ugly".
He accused Mr Phillips of having a "poor track record" on this issue and criticised him for not mentioning recent attacks against Muslims which "accompanied this so-called debate".
Mr Abdul Bari said: "We have seen veils being forcefully pulled off Muslim women and Muslim individuals, including an imam in Glasgow, badly beaten up by thugs."
Conservative shadow home secretary David Davis said Mr Phillips was right, adding that it was "absolutely necessary" to have the debate.
alarmism
Then it's not an issue.
Seriously, anything they do to discredit themselves I think is great, and I hope they instigate a very bloody riot that burns all kinds of stuff and fills all kinds of apathetic people sitting on the fence with strong animosity towards muslims everywhere.
I hope they get themselves banned everywhere.
The word 'chill' (used in this context) isn't in the Islamic vocabulary.
It is their UK-born DAUGHTERS.
It's some kind of sick, "in your face" rejection of the system that generously took them in. It's spit in the face of a culture that gave them a higher standard of living they or any one of their descendants would have known in the Turd World.
Ya'all are slow, so I'll say it;
This is nothing but a veiled threat.
It's already ugly. This politico just hasn't taken the time to notice what the man in the street could have told you years ago.
Sic the soccer hooligans on the religion of peace.
I saw Phillips being interviewed on the BBC this morning and the thing I found really ugly was his verbal constipation which caused him to abdicate from the truth...
He also stated that diversity in culture was in Britain to stay whether we liked it or not!!!.........we'll see about that Mr Phillips, perhaps we should have been consulted first don't you think???
Unfortunately when people have been silenced with political correctness for so long when the lid on the pressure cooker blows it comes off with avengeance, just stand well back Mr Phillips!!
Yep, the backlash against PC insanity in both Europe and America is inevitable, and it's going to be a whopper. .....probably sparked by another major terror attack &/or series of riots.
It's not about race.
I was reading an article in the very respected Conservative Daily Telegraph (UK Daily) and the guy stated that no matter how much we told muslims to intergrate they would never buy any of it because their relgion will simply never allow it.........hhhhmmmm!!
He suggested the only way for them to live here would be the state within a state solution......hhhmmm!!
Add that solution together with the future demographic nightmare we have which nobody in the media dares ever mention and suddenly you realise that the future itself is a real ticking bomb!!............now what to do????
"Since when has islam become a "race". Which race is it? Certainly not the human race."
It's not a race. Muslims could be of Asian, Middle Eastern, European, or African origin. They just use the "race" word when they want to smack people into silence. The "race" gambit is starting to wear a little thin because it's been used so much by so many different groups.
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