Sorry to return to the same topic in the same week (I do have other interests you know) but today I was sent a link to a documentary from the so-called BBC entitled Panorama: White Fright: Divided Britain. This deals with the Lancashire town of Blackburn ten years after the so-called BBC first made a programme about how the area was becoming divided along ethnic and religious grounds.
Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with this blog will know that I am not a fan of the corrupt denizens of Jimmy Savile House. Their shilling for the Establishment and the EU (how astonishing that the so-called BBC should be a fan of a bloated and incompetent bureaucracy!), nauseating identity politics and all-round Islamophilia are bad enough but the fact that it is funded by a highly regressive poll tax is enough to make one burst a blood vessel. But, credit where credit is due, in this case the cliché is right – even a broken clock is right twice a day. Although when dealing with the so-called BBC, once in a Blue Moon is more accurate.
The Panorama documentary, described by their fellow identity-obsessed racists at the Guardian as “bleak,” looked at how Blackburn’s ethnic divide has worsened since the previous programme in 2007. It followed the experiences of two taxi drivers, one white and one of Pakistani heritage. Both said that the division in Blackburn has worsened over the past decade and that both ‘communities’ were to blame. It appears that as the UK as a whole has become more ethnically diverse, its neighbourhoods, towns and cities have become increasingly monocultural or monoethnic. This is not the brave new world that the aforementioned Guardian/BBC racists predicted; instead of a multicultural paradise, it appears that people are increasing choosing to live in segregated areas.
To be fair to the makers of this programme, it did not follow the usual script we have come to expect from the self-loathing racists at the so-called BBC. Apart from the high priest of Remain, Chuka Ummuna, a man who has cried wolf so many times since June 23rd 2016 that he should be included as a character in modern versions of Little Red Riding Hood, no-one was trying to claim that all the white people in Blackburn were racist thickos or secret white supremacists. A scene that really struck me was when a visibly upset lady wearing a niqab asked her English language teacher why everyone hated Muslims. The teacher, herself a hijab-wearing person of South Asian descent, said that many British people were unused to seeing people wearing face veils and that there was nothing wrong with their concerns. This was so far from the usual narrative pedalled by the so-called BBC – that anyone who opposes any aspect of Islam is a horrible racist who probably wants to fire up the ovens – that I had to rewatch the scene to make sure I had heard what I thought I had heard.
The niqab is one of the most divisive issues in the West today. Whilst I would never tell anyone else what they can and cannot wear, the brutally misogynist dress codes imposed on many women labelled Muslim is a real mystery to me. While such clothes may or may not have been practical in medieval Arabia, I cannot see why they are being worn in a cold and rainy town in the north of England. The taxi driver of Pakistani heritage said there had been a huge increase in the number of people wearing these garments over the past decade.
I’d like to include an anecdote that probably proves nothing but I think is worth recording. In two of the past three journeys I have undertaken to the UK, I have seen families where the mother (and in one case the eldest daughter) was wearing a niqab. On one occasion I was passing through a country where Islam is very much a minority pursuit, in the other it is by far the most common religion. In both these cases, the man of the family was wearing what one might call Western clothes; in the case of the gentleman in the Muslim-majority country, he was wearing shorts and a t-shirt. If ‘modesty’ is a compulsory part of being a good Muslim, why are these garments – hijab, niqab, burka, whatever – only ever imposed on women?
Immigration and integration is hard. I know because I moved from the UK to Australia more than a decade ago and I found the move difficult. And that was moving to a country where the vast majority of people shared my ethnicity and language. How much more difficult must it be to move to a country where you don’t speak the language and look very different to most inhabitants, some of whom are racially prejudiced against you? After all these years I am still a foreigner in Australia; one of my colleagues greeted me with “How are you, you Pommie bastard?” when we returned to work after Christmas. This may actually be a sign of integration as Australians use the word “bastard” as a term of endearment. New students at the school where I work frequently ask me where I am ‘really’ from when they hear me speak, a question that has been labelled as racist by more than one handwringing Guardianista in the past.
For my part, I know that I will never be fully Australian as I was the wrong side of thirty when I moved here. However, I would always consider my son Australian as he was born here and has lived here all his life. What I find alarming is that in some ‘communities’ the children and even grandchildren of certain immigrants do not consider themselves British and are more conservative and more religious than their parents and grandparents. They appear to have been encouraged to do so by people who consider that even asking someone to speak English is ‘racist.’ I often wonder, especially in the case of women seeking asylum from some, shall we say, less enlightened Islamic countries, how they must feel like when they have come to these shores looking for help and are handed over to the tender mercies of the same sort of people who rule the countries from which they are fleeing.
One of the contributors to the documentary, Professor Ted Cantle who wrote the report on the riots of 2001, commented that the way we have homogensied Muslim communities has been a disaster. This is undoubtedly true, most people wouldn’t know the difference between an Ahmadi and a Sunni; in fact, I will go further and say that most people would fail to understand the difference between a Muslim and a Sikh. One Blackburn resident complained that Muslims are always having to apologise for the actions of terrorists. Anyone with half a brain knows that the average person of Middle Eastern or South Asian descent is not responsible for any terrorist atrocity.
However, exactly the same could be said about non-Muslims. All too often the opponents of Islam have been called ‘racists’ or smeared with the thoughtcrime of our times, ‘Islamophobia.’ This is “a word created by fascist, and sued by cowards, to manipulate morons.” (A quote often attributed to the late, great Christopher Hitchens but actually coined by Andrew Cummins). I bitterly resent being lumped in with knuckle-dragging members of the BNP or Britain First. I am opposed to all religious fascism and I feel deeply insulted when I am told that my opposition to Islam and Islamism are due to racial prejudice. May I reminded people that it was not a skinhead white supremacist who murdered Glasgow shopkeeper Asad Shah.
In any sane world self -described ‘progressives’ would be violently opposed to conservative Islam and its fascist political offshoot, Islamism. ‘Progressives’ claim to hate misogyny, racism, anti-Semitism and homophobia; many conservative Muslims and almost all fascist Islamists are guilty of all these things and more. The trouble is most Muslims (whether they really are Muslims or have been labelled that way by the racist apostles of identity politics) and Islamists are not white. And since the Guardian/BBC axis that so dominates the UK media cannot get past the colour of a person’s skin, they are given a free pass to spout their bigotry and hatred. As I have said many, many times before, the real far right are Islamists and the real racists are their ‘progressive’ allies in the media.
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