Where Worlds Collide

Bigwig of Silflay Hraka has suggested the that Europe is already well on its way to being conquered by Islam, using this quote

One of these concludes with a warning about the Muslim fundamentalist groups, which say, “They aim to make France an Islamic Republic by the year 2015,and Britain year 2025 through conversions, immigration and high Muslim birth rates”.

What he didn’t initially say was that his quote came from overtly racist site. When I pointed this out, Bigwig eventually managed to find the website of the Islamic extremist group the racist nutjob was referring to – Hizb ut Tahrir

Reading that site reminds me very much of the tracts spread by Trotskyite sects like the SWP and Militant Tendency two decades ago. Just as Britain has not been transformed into a Trotskyite worker’s paradise, nor was it ever likely to, there is no danger of Britain ever becoming an Islamic state on the model suggested by these people, because their numbers don’t add up.

Census estimates put the total number of British Muslims as numbering about one million, out of a population of sixty million. Despite the rantings of racist groups there is no longer a significant level of immigration; the British Muslim community largely originates from immigration from Pakistan in the 1970s. Neither is there any evidence of large-scale conversions to Islam.

Finally there is no evidence that organisations such as Hizb ut Tahrir have any large-scale support. The vast majority of Muslims just want to get on with their lives and be allowed to practice their religion in peace.

This isn’t to say groups like Hizb ut Tahrir are totally harmless; the rise of extremist groups that recruit from the disillusioned and alienated is something we in Britain need to be concerned about, just as we need to be concerned about the electoral success of the far right BNP in several northern towns. However, I would not even think of taking the word of a race-hate site as evidence of the threat they pose.

Twenty years ago many British cities saw riots, and there were serious social problems caused by alienated afro-carribean youths, children of 1950s immigration. A generation on a repeat of those riots would be unthinkable; Britain’s afro-carribean population is now largely assimilated into mainstream British society. I have every hope that the British Muslim population will be just as assimilated in a generation’s time.

I’m amused by today’s Church Times cartoon. Too much ‘Christian Humour’ is pathetically lame, perhaps because people are frightened to be irreverent. Happily, “St Gargoyles” in the Church Times doesn’t fall into that category.

September 11, 1973 is the date of the coup in Chile, overthrowing a democratically-elected government. In the reign of terror that followed, three thousand died, and many more were tortured.

While we must not forget the dead of 2001, we should also remember the dead of 1973, who did not die live on TV across the world, and died at the hand of a regime backed by the CIA and the Nixon goverment.

Today, there are still people on the right wing of the political spectrum that make excuses for these three thousand deaths. It’s not acceptable to make excuses for Osama Bin Laden, equally it should not be acceptable to make excuses for General Augusto Pinochet.

www.thinkofthechildren.co.uk. Like a lot of the best satire, it’s in questionable taste, and there are people that won’t think it’s funny. Again, like the best satire, it raises a serious point. However, the mention of specific people and places probably does cross the line.

From Stuii (again!) – and thanks, Stuii, for blogrolling me!

A year ago today I was in meeting with colleagues who’d come over from other offices. I heard someone say just after lunchtime that “America had been attacked”, but no more details. This would have been just after 2pm UK time, a few minutes after the first plane hit.

I tried accessing the BBC News web site, but the site was inaccessible. This wasn’t uncommon; the Internet gateway had limited bandwidth and was frequently down. We continued through the day’s meetings with an increased sense of foreboding that something terrible had happened, only we didn’t know what. The BBC site was still inaccessible all afternoon; I tried hitting ‘reload’ whenever there was a break in the meeting, but to no avail. I didn’t occur to me to try any smaller sites or message boards.

The meeting finally broke up about 5.30pm, and before leaving for home I tried accessing Dreamlyrics, the web-based RPG community. There was a thread labelled Terrorist Attack. For a while I couldn’t believe what I was reading; the awful reality of what happened hadn’t really sunk in.

Even from a continent away it felt numbing; I find it impossible to imagine the impact this must have on Americans. Europe has suffered from occasional terrorist outrages, and had seen cities attacked and leveled during World War II – The continental US had seen nothing of the kind; up till now America had never had to fight a war on home territory.

There were people that said America had it coming; it was a punishment for their support for corrupt regimes in the middle-east. But those on the European left who said such things are as just as wrong as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson’s idiotic assertion that it was God’s punishment for American’s tolerance of homosexuality. Such people are no more representative of the great mass of European people as Falwell and Robertson are of America.

Nothing justifies killing three thousand innocent people just to make a political point.