If you want to watch a deeply Christian man speaking in the US Senate in a thoroughly Christian way about an issue Christians ought to care deeply about - watch this video. Marco Rubio, US Senator from Florida, is a inspiring model for anyone aspiring to bear a Christian witness into the public square.
This case of Youcef Nadarkhani ought to galvanize world opinion and dominate the news this week. So much that is trivial and ephemeral gets talked about in an endless loop in the media but this is a matter of life and death, rank injustice and oppressive totalitarianism.
Forces within the Iranian government are conspiring to have Youcef Nadarkhani executed for becoming a Christian. It is a moral scandal - and should be recognized by any person or any religion or no religion - that in the twenty-first century a state would presume to bind the conscience of its citizens and strip them of their basic human dignity by passing a law forbidding them on pain of death from choosing which religion, if any, to believe in personally. There is no more inhumane, cruel and intrusive act of a totalitarian regime than the act of inserting a government between an individual and God so as to attempt to bind his conscience in chains. Any state that does this de-legitimizes itself and buys itself the utter contempt of free people and nations everywhere.
Multicultural relativism is a cruel joke. It is a tool of dictators and tyrants. It is anti-human and incompatible with freedom, justice and the natural law. To say that this is Iran's culture and that Islam has different values than us and so we must not judge is to abdicate reason and morality and to lower oneself to the level of thugs and murderers. It is to sacrifice Youcef Nadarkhani on the altar of personal convenience.
The moral basis of this speech is intricately rooted deep in the Christian vision of man made in the image of God and endowed with conscience, reason and the capacity for moral choice. This vision of man has shaped the human rights tradition of the West and without Christian theology undergirding and sustaining it this human rights tradition will collapse. Already there are numerous signs that the collapse is already far advanced. You can see this fact demonstrated by the silence of liberal Protestantism - and politicians shaped by liberal Protestantism - about injustices like this in Muslin countries today. The rejection of the Christian view of man followed by the embrace of multicultural relativism leads inexorably to the silence of those who should speak out and the condoning of murder, tyranny and oppression.
The people of Iran are suffering. Europe frets about its oil supply and is mute, the US pursues its neo-isolationism under Obama and the UN continues it propaganda war against Israel instead of being concerned about genuine human rights abuses in countries like Iran. All this is reprehensible and thank-you to Marco Rubio for speaking out in a reasonable, Christian manner about one of the great issues of our time: the religious liberty of all people rooted in our nature as creatures made in the image of God.
Marco Rubio is an inspiration. May his pleas for justice not fall on deaf ears.
Showing posts with label Multiculturalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Multiculturalism. Show all posts
Friday, October 7, 2011
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Deep in the Weeds (Or Was That Weed?) with Justin Trudeau
Justin Trudeau, son of P. E. Trudeau, the father of multiculturalism in Canada, is now a Liberal member of Parliament for a Montreal riding. As one com box wag had it: he got his mother's brains and his father's looks - a double whammy.
Anyway, he got into trouble the other day. The Globe and Mail explains all:
I don't think it was any of these. I think was a case of self-contradictory ideology making you say stupid things. Liberals hold simultaneously to two ideological positions: (1) the equality of women and the raging violence being done to them by the white, Western patriarchy, and (2) cultural relativism as expressed in the ideology of multiculturalism. So when they come up against a cultural expression of institutionalized violence against women perpetrated by non-white, non-Western cultures, they either just sit there and blink like a cat staring vacantly into space or they open their mouths and say something really, really stupid.
Of course, we know which thing happened here.
Multiculturalism is a dead idea. It was invented by relativists, implemented by secularists, praised by leftists and buried by terrorists. It is over. But those who still push cultural Marxist-inspired political correctness still parrot it as if it were still 1968. No matter what the calendar says, the 60s will never end for some people. But those people belong in museums, not Parliament.
Anyway, he got into trouble the other day. The Globe and Mail explains all:
OK, a Liberal MP issues a statement to clarify that he thinks that honor killings are "A Very Bad Thing." I know what you are thinking: was this in question? Well, actually it was . . . sort of. Let's let Barbara Kay of the National Post sort this one out:Justin Trudeau has apologized for saying he was “uncomfortable” with the Harper government’s description of so-called honour killings as “barbaric.”
“Perhaps I got tangled in semantic weeds in my comments, particularly in view of the Conservatives' cynicism on these issues,” Mr. Trudeau wrote in an email to The Globe. “I want to make clear that I think the acts described are heinous, barbaric acts that are totally unacceptable in our society.”
An updated government information pamphlet for newcomers to Canada, “Discover Canada,” warns against such “barbaric” practices as honour killings, forced marriages and other immoral or criminal practices. Federal Liberal Immigration critic Justin Trudeau yesterday made it known that he is “uncomfortable” with the word “barbaric.” “You could say it’s absolutely unacceptable as a phrase,” says Trudeau, adding that the word could have the effect of making newcomers “defensive.”Now, I know what you are thinking: "No way! He did not really say that." Well, he says he did but now he says he didn't mean it. I suppose that makes some sort of difference - somehow. As one might imagine, the reaction was, well, shall we say, vigorous. Barbara Kay again:
Reaction from the blogosphere, as well as from Conservatives, to Trudeau’s reflexive political correctness was swift and uncompromising. Immigration Minister Jason Kenney responded that the language in Discover Canada is deliberate and accurate. “There’s nothing more brutal than killing a woman because of some perceived slight to family honour,” Mr. Kenney observed.Now, you are likely thinking. Why did Mr. Trudeau criticize the Conservative government's pamphlet for potential immigrants in the first place? Was it simply a scuzzy way to curry votes with Muslim voters in his riding? Was it a calculated attempt to appear broad-minded as opposed to those knuckle-dragging Conservatives who believe in absolute right and wrong? Or was it that he thinks killing women is a minor issue compared to horror and trauma inflicted on a potential immigrant father or brother who has already killed a sister or daughter for somehow staining the family honor by using the hurtful term "barbaric" to describe what they did?
I don't think it was any of these. I think was a case of self-contradictory ideology making you say stupid things. Liberals hold simultaneously to two ideological positions: (1) the equality of women and the raging violence being done to them by the white, Western patriarchy, and (2) cultural relativism as expressed in the ideology of multiculturalism. So when they come up against a cultural expression of institutionalized violence against women perpetrated by non-white, non-Western cultures, they either just sit there and blink like a cat staring vacantly into space or they open their mouths and say something really, really stupid.
Of course, we know which thing happened here.
Multiculturalism is a dead idea. It was invented by relativists, implemented by secularists, praised by leftists and buried by terrorists. It is over. But those who still push cultural Marxist-inspired political correctness still parrot it as if it were still 1968. No matter what the calendar says, the 60s will never end for some people. But those people belong in museums, not Parliament.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Multiculturalism and Moral Relativism
European leaders (Merkel, Cameron, Sarkozy) are finally beginning to say out loud what everybody has known for years but were afraid to say in public: the Western idea of multiculturalism has failed. It promised peace and harmony; it has produced hate and suspicion. It promised enlightened interaction between equals; it has produced ghettos. It promised respect for the other; it has produced racism.
Western culture suffered a horrendous blow to its self-confidence and its convictions in the debacle that was the 40 years war in Europe (1914-1945). The supposedly scientific, advanced nations of Western Europe fell upon each other with a barbarism, ferocity and nihilistic bloodlust that convinced much of the European intellectual elite that its own civilization - its religion, its moral ideals, its political institutions and its philosophical foundations - were all a thin veneer of superficial window-dressing covering up rapacity, greed, racism and the will to power, which were the fundamental realities of life.
There was a certain undeniable plausibility to this cynicism because the philosophical, religious, moral and cultural foundations of Europe had been rotting for centuries. Since the 14th century and the rise of nominalism, the worldview of Christian Europe had been declining. From the rise of Cartesian philosophy with its attempt to find new foundations in the autonomous self to the rise of a mechanistic technology that eschews the search for wisdom in its haste to obtain power over nature to the hubris of the Enlightenment with its call to set aside the wisdom of the past and trust man's unaided Reason, (always with a capital R), Europe attempted to rebuild its civilization on a humanistic and materialistic foundation.
So when the postmodern philosophers criticize the Enlightenment worship of Reason, they are right. But because they believed that the Enlightenment was somehow a legitimate or even inevitable development of the Greco-Roman and Christian civilizations which preceded it, the entirely of Western civilization, including Christianity, was implicated along with the Enlightenment.
A multude of diverse voices have warned that a wrong turn was taken at the dawn of the modern age and that the rejection of Christian worldview of the Medieval world must lead to disaster. They included Lewis and Tolkien, Dawson and Butterfield, von Balthasar and Milbank, Elliot and Kirk, Chesterton and Belloc, Newman and MacIntyre, John Paul II and Benedict XVI. They have been largely ignored by the elites of our society.
Europe is dying of old age because she has cut herself off from her Medieval Christian roots. The failure of modernity is not the failure of Western civilization; it is the failure of the Modern rebellion against the Christian West.
Relativism is the standpoint of all civilizations in their dotage. It is not new, nor is it unique to the West. It is the standard default position of any civilization which has cut itself off from its roots from which alone can come renewal. Moral and cultural relativism lies behind the failed policy of multiculturalism and behind that lies moral and cultural rot.
Since the 1960s cultural Marxism has marched through the institutions of the West trumpeting moral relativism, multiculturalism and a self-loathing that is difficult to watch and painful to endure. This is marketed as the sophisticated views of a self-confident culture but the object of the confidence of these confidence men is as ephemeral and unreal as the snake oil they would have hawked in earlier times.
The equivalent of the ancient Sophists hated by Socrates have taken over our universities and taught our young people the slogans and political correctness needed to rise in this kind of decaying society. They exist because those who lead us intellectually have failed us. Modernity is dead as an idea even though the institutions it created live on for a time until the bills come due and fiddler demands his pay.
Multiculturalism is the rotten fruit. Moral relativism is the disease. The tree is Western civilization. How long before the axe is taken to a tree that no longer bears good fruit?
Western culture suffered a horrendous blow to its self-confidence and its convictions in the debacle that was the 40 years war in Europe (1914-1945). The supposedly scientific, advanced nations of Western Europe fell upon each other with a barbarism, ferocity and nihilistic bloodlust that convinced much of the European intellectual elite that its own civilization - its religion, its moral ideals, its political institutions and its philosophical foundations - were all a thin veneer of superficial window-dressing covering up rapacity, greed, racism and the will to power, which were the fundamental realities of life.
There was a certain undeniable plausibility to this cynicism because the philosophical, religious, moral and cultural foundations of Europe had been rotting for centuries. Since the 14th century and the rise of nominalism, the worldview of Christian Europe had been declining. From the rise of Cartesian philosophy with its attempt to find new foundations in the autonomous self to the rise of a mechanistic technology that eschews the search for wisdom in its haste to obtain power over nature to the hubris of the Enlightenment with its call to set aside the wisdom of the past and trust man's unaided Reason, (always with a capital R), Europe attempted to rebuild its civilization on a humanistic and materialistic foundation.
So when the postmodern philosophers criticize the Enlightenment worship of Reason, they are right. But because they believed that the Enlightenment was somehow a legitimate or even inevitable development of the Greco-Roman and Christian civilizations which preceded it, the entirely of Western civilization, including Christianity, was implicated along with the Enlightenment.
A multude of diverse voices have warned that a wrong turn was taken at the dawn of the modern age and that the rejection of Christian worldview of the Medieval world must lead to disaster. They included Lewis and Tolkien, Dawson and Butterfield, von Balthasar and Milbank, Elliot and Kirk, Chesterton and Belloc, Newman and MacIntyre, John Paul II and Benedict XVI. They have been largely ignored by the elites of our society.
Europe is dying of old age because she has cut herself off from her Medieval Christian roots. The failure of modernity is not the failure of Western civilization; it is the failure of the Modern rebellion against the Christian West.
Relativism is the standpoint of all civilizations in their dotage. It is not new, nor is it unique to the West. It is the standard default position of any civilization which has cut itself off from its roots from which alone can come renewal. Moral and cultural relativism lies behind the failed policy of multiculturalism and behind that lies moral and cultural rot.
Since the 1960s cultural Marxism has marched through the institutions of the West trumpeting moral relativism, multiculturalism and a self-loathing that is difficult to watch and painful to endure. This is marketed as the sophisticated views of a self-confident culture but the object of the confidence of these confidence men is as ephemeral and unreal as the snake oil they would have hawked in earlier times.
The equivalent of the ancient Sophists hated by Socrates have taken over our universities and taught our young people the slogans and political correctness needed to rise in this kind of decaying society. They exist because those who lead us intellectually have failed us. Modernity is dead as an idea even though the institutions it created live on for a time until the bills come due and fiddler demands his pay.
Multiculturalism is the rotten fruit. Moral relativism is the disease. The tree is Western civilization. How long before the axe is taken to a tree that no longer bears good fruit?
Monday, February 7, 2011
Multiculturalism as a Method for Imposing Soft Totalitarianism
Finally, European politicians are beginning, just beginning mind you, to question the extreme multiculturalism that has left the continent divided and which has facilitated the growth of a radical form of Islam within the very heart of what was once "Christendom." First it was Angela Merkel, and now even David Cameron has dared to point out the emperor's utter nudity.
Reaction to the speech, with its ever so mild and measured criticism of the failures of 30 years of multiculturalism has been predictably laden with cliches and school boy Marxist rhetoric. But this article by Ed West is exceptional for its clarity of analysis. He writes in a post entitled: "It is state multiculturalism that is racist, and David Cameron who is a liberal" as follows:
Multiculturalism serves as a tool for undermining the majority culture in several ways. For one, it makes all honest affirmations of one's own (white, European) culture implicitly racist. For another, it uses minorities as allies, as West says, in the fight against majority cultural institutions and practices. For another, it implements a cultural and moral relativism that erodes belief in absolute standards of right and wrong.
What all this is setting up is a divided society of hatred, misunderstanding and endless tribal warfare. Then, the "enlightened" bureaucratic class of social engineers who caused the problem in the first place can present themselves as the ones who can fix the problem by top-down, intrusive government regulation and control of more and more of the lives of ordinary people. So rather than mothers teaching children that prejudice is wrong because all people are made in the image of God and promoting a liberal society (i.e. "liberal in the classical 19th century sense) in which everyone is treated equally by the law and everyone has the same chance to succeed, we see "human rights tribunals regulating what they consider to be "hate speech" and "equality legislation" designed further erode further the common traditions, religion and morality of the nation.
Once we have been turned against one another by the real racists, the real racists will ride to the rescue to fix by government fiat a problem that would not exist without their interfering, illiberal policies in the first place.
Reaction to the speech, with its ever so mild and measured criticism of the failures of 30 years of multiculturalism has been predictably laden with cliches and school boy Marxist rhetoric. But this article by Ed West is exceptional for its clarity of analysis. He writes in a post entitled: "It is state multiculturalism that is racist, and David Cameron who is a liberal" as follows:
Read the rest here.One of the most moronic themes running through the internet reaction was that Cameron had made his speech in, wait for it, the birthplace of Nazism! Yet Cameron’s line, the cultural assimilationist line, is the polar opposite of Nazi doctrine. In contrast, state multiculturalism, which proposes that each ethnic and religious group should only be treated as a group, and aspects of their culture, religion and identity promoted by the state, is based on ideas not entirely different to scientific racism.
Contrary to the idea that the far-Right stole the language of multiculturalism in the 2000s by using such phrases as “biodiversity” or “Indigenous rights”, multiculturalism itself was based on ideas not too far removed from the old-fashioned racist notions that exaggerated differences between peoples. Polygenism, the original 19th century scientific racist theory that held blacks and whites to be different sub-species, was originally called “the doctrine of diversity”. (For anyone wishing to understand just how it all went wrong, I cannot recommend Kenan Malik’s From Fatwa to Jihad enough).
So why did the Left embrace such an idea? Because it never rejected ethnic nationalism, racial pride or religious identity, only, in line with the turgid Marxist theories they learned at university, when it was expressed by the “dominant culture” ie whites. And minority chauvinism, however unpleasant and bigoted, could actually be used to promote the Left’s agenda. As James Bennett writes in New Criterion magazine this month:
Postmodernists deliberately embraced mass immigration without assimilation – specifically suppressing assimilation, in fact – in order to break down adherence to a common culture and to subvert prevailing family systems. A population without a common language, common assumptions, or indeed any means of generating a genuine polity is easier to manipulate and turn into the common clay from which a new transnational order can be moulded.
As few outside of the minority recruited in the universities find such a future attractive, postmodernism has cultivated (or imported) as allies groups that holds or can be taught to hold grievances against the mainstream societies. They include racial, ethic, religious, and sexual minorities who do not accept one or more shared premise or cultural characteristic of the common culture. Concepts of racial and ethnic authenticity and grievance narratives are used to bind these groups as allies against the majority culture, no matter how divergent the actual practices of the minorities are from the preferences of the postmodernists.
Indeed. Multiculturalism is a way not of making Britain more diverse but of imposing a new and different uniformity. But opposition also springs from confusion; many people confuse “hard” multiculturalism with immigration itself, so that when conservative politicians attack “multiculturalism” they’re really giving a little wink and a nod to racists. Yet by those rules of engagement it is simply impossible for any conservative to criticise a system that encourages forced marriages, female circumcision, honour killings and religious extremism.
Multiculturalism serves as a tool for undermining the majority culture in several ways. For one, it makes all honest affirmations of one's own (white, European) culture implicitly racist. For another, it uses minorities as allies, as West says, in the fight against majority cultural institutions and practices. For another, it implements a cultural and moral relativism that erodes belief in absolute standards of right and wrong.
What all this is setting up is a divided society of hatred, misunderstanding and endless tribal warfare. Then, the "enlightened" bureaucratic class of social engineers who caused the problem in the first place can present themselves as the ones who can fix the problem by top-down, intrusive government regulation and control of more and more of the lives of ordinary people. So rather than mothers teaching children that prejudice is wrong because all people are made in the image of God and promoting a liberal society (i.e. "liberal in the classical 19th century sense) in which everyone is treated equally by the law and everyone has the same chance to succeed, we see "human rights tribunals regulating what they consider to be "hate speech" and "equality legislation" designed further erode further the common traditions, religion and morality of the nation.
Once we have been turned against one another by the real racists, the real racists will ride to the rescue to fix by government fiat a problem that would not exist without their interfering, illiberal policies in the first place.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Even Angela Merkel Knows Multiculturalism is a Failure
Here is a story from the BBC announcing that, finally, the German Chancellor is facing the reality that European multiculturalism is a failure. Remember, this is not a "far-right politician" speaking, but a mainstream pillar of the EU.
So the geniuses who invented the liberal idea of multiculturalism are finally starting to admit that it is a disaster. Perhaps now one of them will actually come up with a solution. But don't hold your breath.
Read the rest here. (The BBC has a video as well as a partial transcript.)The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel: "lmmigrants should learn to speak German." Attempts to build a multicultural society in Germany have "utterly failed", Chancellor Angela Merkel says.
She said the so-called "multikulti" concept - where people would "live side-by-side" happily - did not work, and immigrants needed to do more to integrate - including learning German.
The comments come amid rising anti-immigration feeling in Germany. A recent survey suggested more than 30% of people believed the country was "overrun by foreigners".
The study - by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation think-tank - also showed that roughly the same number thought that some 16 million of Germany's immigrants or people with foreign origins had come to the country for its social benefits.
Mrs Merkel told a gathering of younger members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party on Saturday that at "the beginning of the 60s our country called the foreign workers to come to Germany and now they live in our country."
She added: "We kidded ourselves a while, we said: 'They won't stay, sometime they will be gone', but this isn't reality." "And of course, the approach [to build] a multicultural [society] and to live side-by-side and to enjoy each other... has failed, utterly failed."
So the geniuses who invented the liberal idea of multiculturalism are finally starting to admit that it is a disaster. Perhaps now one of them will actually come up with a solution. But don't hold your breath.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
No More Hiding Your Libertinism Behind Multiculturalism
Now there is a headline I've been waiting to see for quite some time. In the Globe and Mail yesterday we read:
I'm so tired of while, middle-class, liberals hiding behind the banner of "multiculturalism" in order to justify their institutionalization of the sexual revolution over the wishes of parents.
The fact is that it is the social conservatives who have many cultures on their side. Most Muslims and members of other religions are conservative in sexual morality: it is not some sort of weird pre-occupation of Evangelical Christians. The "liberals" are Western imperialists who seek to impose the relativism of the postmodern West on everybody else.
Let us be honest: it is not a question of "open-minded, multiculturalists" against "narrow, racist, Christian fundamentalists." It is not a religious thing at all. And it is not about being open or closed minded. It is a clash of political ideology versus a traditional way of life that most of us actually like and want to preserve. It is the traditional morality common to all world religions versus the cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt School that is still on its "long march through the institutions" as it attempts to subvert the middle class and Western society itself.
It is time that traditionalists of all religious banded together to defend our children against the predations of utopian revolutionaries who are out to destroy our way of life. I am willing to make common cause with Canadian Muslims and Orthodox Jews and conservative Roman Catholics and sensible agnostics against them any day of the week.
I'm so tired of while, middle-class, liberals hiding behind the banner of "multiculturalism" in order to justify their institutionalization of the sexual revolution over the wishes of parents.
The fact is that it is the social conservatives who have many cultures on their side. Most Muslims and members of other religions are conservative in sexual morality: it is not some sort of weird pre-occupation of Evangelical Christians. The "liberals" are Western imperialists who seek to impose the relativism of the postmodern West on everybody else.
Let us be honest: it is not a question of "open-minded, multiculturalists" against "narrow, racist, Christian fundamentalists." It is not a religious thing at all. And it is not about being open or closed minded. It is a clash of political ideology versus a traditional way of life that most of us actually like and want to preserve. It is the traditional morality common to all world religions versus the cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt School that is still on its "long march through the institutions" as it attempts to subvert the middle class and Western society itself.
It is time that traditionalists of all religious banded together to defend our children against the predations of utopian revolutionaries who are out to destroy our way of life. I am willing to make common cause with Canadian Muslims and Orthodox Jews and conservative Roman Catholics and sensible agnostics against them any day of the week.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Some British Muslims Who Get It
In support of the thesis of my last post, in which I attacked while, middle-class, busy-bodies for persecuting Christians in the name of "multi-cultural sensitivity" here is a heartening story from Britain via The Daily Telegraph. Well, the beginning isn't heartening but it gets better. Let's give it a fisking. [My comments in red and square brackets.]
__________________
"A five-page advice booklet tells civil servants that eating lunch near a colleague who is fasting can make them feel hungry. [It is hard not to be sarcastic about this sort of thing. I just imagine civil servants slapping their foreheads and saying "I never thought of that." It is just a good thing we have higher ups to think of these things for us.]
The Home Office Islamic Network produced the advice which said: “In practical terms, please be sensitive when eating lunch near a Muslim colleague who is fasting. [Are they not going to come right out and recommend that everyone fast? Or are you just supposed to hide?]
“This can make an individual feel hungrier and make it more challenging to observe the fast.” [Apparently the Home Office has a vested interest in how perfectly Ramadan is kept. I wonder why that is; I thought Britain was supposed to be secular.] It also urged Home Office managers to be flexible over working hours because Muslims may be following a different routine during Ramadan, which finished this weekend.
“The most likely need Muslim staff may present to managers during this period is for flexibility around working hours and break times as those fasting will have a slightly different routine from usual. Managers and Muslim staff should discuss what their needs are and be responsive and sensitive,” the document said. [In other words, please tip toe around these dangerous people. You never know when they are going to blow up - figuratively or literally.]
Managers were also told: “Muslim staff who are fasting and whose environment allows it may wish to set out for work earlier than usual and finish their working day correspondingly early...in line with flexi-time arrangements.” During the holy month devout Muslims do not drink or eat from dawn until sunset and, according to the document, must avoid ‘all obscene and irreligious sights and sounds’.
The Islamic Network is one of a number of staff faith and equality groups within the Home Office and paid for by the taxpayer. The booklet was distributed to staff and posted on the department’s internal intranet system but the Home Office said it was not “formal departmental guidance.” [OK, so far, so depressing. But now it is about to get interesting.]
But the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, which claims to be fighting a ‘political jihad against Islamophobia’, attacked the document. [All right! An outbreak of common sense!] It said: “It is designed to create more hatred in the hearts of non-Muslims. [Bingo.] We don’t care how much non-Muslims eat in front of us. “It’s never been an issue and never will be and we have never asked for any special treatment or sensitivity from non-Muslims whilst fasting.” [In other words, we aren't children. Stop treating us that way.]
____________
This is exactly how I would expect ordinary Muslims with any sense of how to get along in a multi-cultural society to react. We don't need special treatment, just leave us alone. And don't go around making the majority afraid of us. We are not china dolls; we don't shatter easily. And if we have a problem we can work it out; we are not likely to resort to violence at the drop of a hat. Frankly, the white, middle-class bureaucrats look like the only racists on site.
__________________
"A five-page advice booklet tells civil servants that eating lunch near a colleague who is fasting can make them feel hungry. [It is hard not to be sarcastic about this sort of thing. I just imagine civil servants slapping their foreheads and saying "I never thought of that." It is just a good thing we have higher ups to think of these things for us.]
The Home Office Islamic Network produced the advice which said: “In practical terms, please be sensitive when eating lunch near a Muslim colleague who is fasting. [Are they not going to come right out and recommend that everyone fast? Or are you just supposed to hide?]
“This can make an individual feel hungrier and make it more challenging to observe the fast.” [Apparently the Home Office has a vested interest in how perfectly Ramadan is kept. I wonder why that is; I thought Britain was supposed to be secular.] It also urged Home Office managers to be flexible over working hours because Muslims may be following a different routine during Ramadan, which finished this weekend.
“The most likely need Muslim staff may present to managers during this period is for flexibility around working hours and break times as those fasting will have a slightly different routine from usual. Managers and Muslim staff should discuss what their needs are and be responsive and sensitive,” the document said. [In other words, please tip toe around these dangerous people. You never know when they are going to blow up - figuratively or literally.]
Managers were also told: “Muslim staff who are fasting and whose environment allows it may wish to set out for work earlier than usual and finish their working day correspondingly early...in line with flexi-time arrangements.” During the holy month devout Muslims do not drink or eat from dawn until sunset and, according to the document, must avoid ‘all obscene and irreligious sights and sounds’.
The Islamic Network is one of a number of staff faith and equality groups within the Home Office and paid for by the taxpayer. The booklet was distributed to staff and posted on the department’s internal intranet system but the Home Office said it was not “formal departmental guidance.” [OK, so far, so depressing. But now it is about to get interesting.]
But the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, which claims to be fighting a ‘political jihad against Islamophobia’, attacked the document. [All right! An outbreak of common sense!] It said: “It is designed to create more hatred in the hearts of non-Muslims. [Bingo.] We don’t care how much non-Muslims eat in front of us. “It’s never been an issue and never will be and we have never asked for any special treatment or sensitivity from non-Muslims whilst fasting.” [In other words, we aren't children. Stop treating us that way.]
____________
This is exactly how I would expect ordinary Muslims with any sense of how to get along in a multi-cultural society to react. We don't need special treatment, just leave us alone. And don't go around making the majority afraid of us. We are not china dolls; we don't shatter easily. And if we have a problem we can work it out; we are not likely to resort to violence at the drop of a hat. Frankly, the white, middle-class bureaucrats look like the only racists on site.
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