Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

Anti Mosque petition which I will not be signing



Originally uploaded by Karin in Paris.

I received an email asking me to sign a petition against a proposed mosque in east London. I will not be signing it.

It was not clear exactly what was proposed nor exactly what was opposed but it referred to Britain as being a Christian country. As the email had come from and been circulated among people, whom I have never known to darken the doors of a church, this looks like bare racism and I said as much to the person from Brighton Swimming Club who had sent me the request to sign the petition. If the originator of this is traced and reprimanded, it will be well deserved, but as I am far away, it isn't going to be me.

However, all this is not to say that I do not regard the unintegrated Muslim presence as problematic.

I am at present in Sweden, which like Denmark, has generously offered hospitality to people in need of refuge, in line with a long and honourable tradition, only to find it abused. So to claim there is not a problem is a dangerous pretence. On the whole, Moslems are not integrating. They come from such a different culture that they are inevitably going to be at odds with our secular materialist one. In this respect they differ utterly from the large number of Christian immigrants from the Middle East and Asia who now make up a significant minority and have mostly integrated well. So this is not a question of racism.

A further layer of complexity is created by an unholy alliance anti-Christians masquerading as liberals who are anxious to pretend that there is not a problem. The trouble with petitions like the one I was asked to sign is is that they play into the hands of stupid little Englanders like those who dominate Brighton Swimming Club through which I received the request. And equally, it enables the unholy alliance to dismiss the problem as mere prejudice and bigotry.

Kommentarer

Skicka en kommentar

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

Importing people to sustain demand

I got involved in a discussion with a Youtuber called “Philosophy all along”. This was in connection with criticism of Trump’s policy of deporting illegal migrants, which he argued would be bad for the economy as it would reduce demand. This implies that there is a need to import people to sustain demand. There is no obvious reason why a population should not be able to consume everything that the same population produces. If it can not, then something else is going on. It is a basic principle that wages are the least that workers will accept to do a job. Wages are a share of the value added by workers through their wages. The remainder is distributed as economic rent, after government has taken its cut in taxes. Monopoly profit is a temporary surplus that after a delay gets absorbed into economic rent. Land values in Silicon Valley are an example of this; it's like a gold rush. The miners get little out of it. Rent and tax syphon purchasing power away from those who produce the g...
Skicka en kommentar
Läs mer

The Zombie Train that refuses to die

The Guardian has published a couple more articles against HS2, one by specialist rail commentator Christian Wolmar, and another today by journalist Simon Jenkins. The main arguments in favour will doubtless be wheeled out by the commentators: the need for capacity and the disruption caused by upgrading existing routes. HST itself will severely disrupt services to Euston during the construction period. Capacity can be increased at a fraction of the cost by a variety of measures, provided that it is accepted that the additional traffic will run at existing speeds. It is not generally known that the Midland main line is, or was, four track all the way from London to Trent Junction, between Nottingham and Derby. This is because the additional tracks are separate, having been added for coal trains which trundled down to Brent sidings, on the edge of London, from a collection point at Toton in Nottinghamshire, where the Midland Railway build a huge marshalling yard. Beyond Derby, the main l...
Skicka en kommentar
Läs mer

How much more will the British tolerate?

The British are phlegmatic, tolerant and slow to rouse. Thus there was no great reaction after the terrorist attack in July 2005. The murder of Lee Rigby created a sense of outrage, but nothing more, since it appeared to be an isolated incident. Two serious incidents within a fortnight are another matter. Since the first major terrorist incident in 2001, authority has tried to persuade the public that Islam is a religion of peace, that these were isolated events, or the actions of deranged "lone wolves", having nothing to do with Islam, or to reassure that the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack were infinitesimally small. These assurances are are beginning to wear thin. They no longer convince. If government does not act effectively, people will take the law into their own hands. What, however, would effective action look like? What sort of effective action would not amount to rough justice for a lot of innocent people? Given the difficulties of keeping large n...
Skicka en kommentar
Läs mer