We have a similar problem here in the U.S.
Keep your powder dry.
Posted on 05/07/2002 9:52:53 AM PDT by kaylar
LONDON - If there is such a thing as an "asylum shopping list" for refugees, Britain is at the top.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers leave their impoverished home countries embarking on perilous journeys in search of a better place to live: Their destination is Britain, considered a modern-day El Dorado, especially by Muslims.
The government provides shelter, food and medical care while their applications for asylum are considered.
They can live in Muslim immigrant communities where they can speak their language and in many cases send their children to long-established Muslim religious schools paid for by leading members of the community. Unlike in other European countries, they can win the right to work after only six months.
But the anti-immigrant sentiment that is sweeping Europe, winning nearly 20% of the vote for Jean-Marie Le Pen's xenophobic National Front in France's presidential election, is beginning to make important inroads in Britain.
Last week, the British National Party, an ultra-rightist political party that has long remained on the fringes of the country's political scene, shocked the nation when its members won three council seats in municipal elections in Burnley, an impoverished former mill town in northwest England.
Although the gains are modest in political terms -- there are more than 6,000 council seats throughout the country -- mainstream parties worry the recent attention being paid to right-wing anti-immigrant movements throughout Europe may soon have an impact in Britain.
There are more than one million illegal immigrants in the country already and thousands more arrive every month. Last year, the government received 72,000 applications for asylum.
Nick Griffin, chairman of the BNP, regularly spouts xenophobic statements about Britain becoming an "Islamistan," where Muslim immigrants will outnumber native Britons.
Mr. Griffin, whose party won seats in areas that have been hardest hit by unemployment and where tensions between whites and Muslims are particularly acute, advocates returning Muslim asylum-seekers to their home countries.
"We certainly would seek the removal of all people who had come here as asylum-seekers because as far as we are concerned, under UN law, people are supposed to seek asylum in the first safe country they come to and we are not next to Afghanistan, Algeria and so on," he said in an interview last week.
"So none of those people have the slightest right to be in this country and we would seek to remove them immediately, with much tougher enforcement and legislation."
The BNP leader, who was convicted of incitement to racial hatred in 1998, believes the British government is "too soft on Islamic terrorism and illegal immigrants."
"The society is on the verge of collapse, and all those who say that cultural co-existence is possible are simply wrong," he said.
Although Labour and Conservative politicians dismiss him as a political crank, Mr. Griffin's statements have had particular resonance in recent days as the conflict in the Middle East has fuelled tensions between Muslims and Jews.
Yesterday, members of the two faiths eyed each other suspiciously from opposite sides of London's Trafalgar Square, where about 30,000 Jews from across Britain had converged to protest a spate of anti-Semitic attacks in recent weeks and to demonstrate their support for Israel.
A group of 500 Muslim counter-demonstrators, some wearing kaffiyehs, the women dressed traditionally in long black coats and headscarves, stood behind police barricades holding a banner that read "Victory to the Intifada, Isolate the Zionist State."
The two groups were separated by a phalanx of armed police officers.
"It's total discrimination the way the police treat us at demonstrations," said Zenyah, a 24-year-old Muslim woman, who wore a black and white scarf around her nose and mouth against a potential tear gas attack. She said she and her friends had come to denounce "Jewish murderers" in Israel and to protest what they called discrimination against Muslims in England."They should ship them all back to Poland," she said, pointing to the Jewish protesters and referring to the Nazi concentration camps set up to murder millions of Jews during the Second World War."What do they want now? Israel has all the support in the world. It doesn't need any support and it does not have the right to exist."
Sam Jacobs, 18, a Jewish student, stood in the centre of the square waving an Israeli flag to denounce what he saw as rising anti-Semitism in Britain, perpetrated by Muslim extremists and right-wing fanatics, such as members of the BNP.
"Jews are still seen as targets here," said Mr. Jacobs, who came from Cardiff, Wales, for the demonstration, which took place on a public holiday. He stood beside a group of elderly women from Sussex who carried signs reading, "We are Christians Who Stand for Israel."
"We are not going to stand around and be victims anymore," said Mr. Jacobs, raising his Israeli flag. "We are here for peace."
Since the conflict flared up again in the Middle East, British authorities have diligently tried to prevent it from spilling over here.
Last week, in order to head off any clashes between Muslims and Jews, the government won an appeal to ban Louis Farrakhan, the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader, from entering Britain on the grounds his political views are a threat to public order and "could incite violence among militant Muslims."
"Farrakhan is well known for expressing anti-Semitic and racially divisive views, particularly at a time of political unrest in the Middle East," said Monica Carss-Frisk, the government's lawyer.
In the same week, a synagogue in north London was desecrated when vandals ripped prayer shawls, carved swastikas into the lectern and urinated and defecated on religious artifacts.
The Finsbury Park synagogue stands next to a mosque where the imam regularly delivers anti-Israel sermons. London police believe the recent desecration of the synagogue -- the second in the past year -- may have been the work of Muslim militants.
Since the fighting intensified in the West Bank, Jewish community leaders say anti-Semitic incidents have been on the increase in Britain, which is home to 300,000 Jews.
"We have seen a marked rise in anti-Semitic incidents," said Neville Nagler, director general of the Jewish Board of Deputies in Britain. "April saw the second highest level of anti-Semitic incidents for any month." Of 50 such incidents, he said, "15 involved physical assaults, the highest ever monthly total."
But these days, it is not just Jews who are targets of intolerance. Many Muslims in Britain are critical of the very country that has given them refug."This society is completely morally depraved," said Mustafa, a 24-year-old descendant of Turkish immigrants who was born and brought up in London but educated almost exclusively at Muslim schools in the city's Turkish community."Look at how British women dress. So many of them look like prostitutes. It's disgusting."
The government is deeply concerned by such reverse intolerance. In February, David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, made what many here called a bold attempt to rewrite a tough-minded immigration policy that has been unchanged since 1971.
Among Mr. Blunkett's recommendations are that immigrants pass an English test, a citizenship exam and swear an oath of allegiance to the country. He urged minorities to speed up their integration process by adapting British "norms of acceptability," embracing "our laws, our values, our institutions."
Even critics of government immigration policy have agreed with his conclusions. Writing in the Sunday newspaper The Observer, columnist Will Hutton noted, "Some delicate work needs to be done to persuade Europe's Islamic community that universal principles trump cultural exceptionalism, and that refusing to acknowledge this truth helps in part to legitimate an ugly backlash. Religious schools which further these differences need to be curbed rather than expanded."
Although Mr. Blunkett was widely praised for his White Paper on immigration, he came under intense criticism for his suggestion that separate schools be set up in detention centres for the children of asylum-seekers. The Home Secretary said he did not want these children to "swamp" local schools.
For many, the word echoed a phrase used by Margaret Thatcher, the former prime minister, who in 1978 said Britons were "afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with different cultures."
In a measure of the charged political atmosphere surrounding immigration issues, a Conservative MP and member of the shadow cabinet was forced to resign on the weekend after making what was seen as a racist joke against Pakistanis.
Ann Winterton, the shadow rural affairs minister, called Pakistanis "10 a penny" at a dinner with her constituents in Cheshire. Although she apologized, she was almost immediately asked to resign because of the negative political impact the joke might have on the party.
At yesterday's Trafalgar Square demonstration, a Brazilian immigrant surveyed the crowd of Jews and the smaller group of Palestinian supporters and shook his head.
"This used to be such a good place to be an immigrant," said the man, who has lived in London for 10 years and did not want to be identified.
"But everyone has gone crazy. Tensions are high and the hatred between groups is palpable. You have thousands of Muslims who want to live here and don't want to adapt, and you have others who simply hate them. Soon, we're going to be living in some kind of armed camp."
But notice THEY haven't offered to leave, instead, Britain , who was there first, must change.
Sounds like American liberals. Patriots were here first, now THEY want socialism. The rest must change.
We have a similar problem here in the U.S.
Keep your powder dry.
The government provides shelter, food and medical care while their applications for asylum are considered.
They can live in Muslim immigrant communities where they can speak their language and in many cases send their children to long-established Muslim religious schools paid for by leading members of the community."
The English government is using the taxpayers' money to encourage all this, so what do they expect, a socialist utopia? Seems kind of shortsighted.
The article says.....The government provides shelter, food and medical care while their applications for asylum are considered.
So what do they do? Encourage the same behavior in Britain that made them a third world country in the first place! They demand it!
The media reported it as a scuffle, with no mention of the religious and racial hatreds, or of the one sided nature of the 'scuffling'.
The only reason the things in this country don't do likewise is a lack of numbers and our second amendment.
After all, they're disarmed.
Probably the UK will see little of this, maybe none. I believe France, Denmark, Holland, Spain, and Italy are the countries which will bear the brunt of the Islamic assault.
Already, they feel empowered to attack "ethnoEuropeans", insult them as "pork eaters", gang rape white girls as a gang initiation rite, demand nonmuslim women obey sharia...Just what in #$@^& is going to happen there when the Muslims exceed 15-20% of the population?
I believe the EU PTB are allowing this partially because of a belief that poorer Europeans are all racist and xenophobic, and so they deserve to be assaulted by "people of color" (some muslims are dark, some not, but all count as POC because of their religion, in the PC hierarchy).
The main reason, though, is to discredit all religion, and make having any religious affiliation a proof of stupidity, ignorance, and backwardness. The worst the muslims behave , the more disgust for ALL religion is created, within people who are already prone to agnosticism.
Once the last traces of Christianity have been extinguished in the EU, the muslims will FINALLY be repatriated because of their violence,and then a new demireligion can be imposed on the EU : Gaiaism, plus a worship of the EU superstate as well, as the means of enforcing Gaiaism on the world.
They're all pretty far down this path : Polls show that in some EU countries, the majority of the population claims to be atheist/agnostic. And environmentalism seems to be held with a religious fervor, which explains the rage over Kyoto : By rejecting it, Bush commited heresy!
Now, as for what would happen if that violence began on this side of the Atlantic... well, south Louisiana can always use more crab bait, right?
Increased TV ratings for the stations that are covering it?
Late in Belfast, a guy was going home after a hard night drinking at the pub. He heard footsteps behind him and the question 'Are you Protestant or Catholic?'
Oh sh*t, he thought. With my luck, if I say I'm Catholic, he'll be a Protestant. If I say I'm Protestant, he'll be a Catholic. He had a brilliant idea and said; "I'm Jewish". The answer came in a strong Irish brogue; "Laddie, I must be the luckiest Arab in Ireland." Rimshot!
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