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Why should we tolerate these Islamofascists who hate us all?**
By Julie Burchill
AT THE ROOT of my friend Michael Collins’s quite brilliant book The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class, and the recent TV show on the obliteration of the same, one truth hit home with agonising ease. And that was his righteous anger not with immigrants — as many seat-sniffing, mosque-bothering critics have accused him — but with the ruling and chattering classes who dared to criticise the working-class attitude towards them.
From the word go, the white working class have been portrayed as the fat white fly in the joyous rainbow ointment of cultural diversity, SPOILING EVERYTHING FOR EVERYBODY ELSE, set up against noble, chaste, hard-working immigrants as the undeserving or deserving poor.
Of course, it is all very well to spend your days lecturing others to “celebrate diversity” when you go home each night to Hampstead. But surely the faces of the people who were killed last week told their own story — if this is such an unwelcoming, racist place to live, why do all races continue to flock here, as they do to evil, imperialist America?
We are told to celebrate the diversity of life, but the diversity of death has a totally unforced, unbossed, unmanaged poignancy, a million miles away from English toddlers being forced to celebrate the Muslim festival of Eid when they are still trying to get their heads around the Easter Bunny. The capital city gave much to immigrants — freedom — as they themselves gave much to it, and now they have given their lives for that city and that freedom.
Still, there was something a little creepy about the way in which certain people went on about the diversity of the dead. For one thing, it showed a willingness to believe the best of the bombers: that if only they had known that they had murdered delegates of all creeds and colours, they wouldn’t have done it.
Bull****. This sort of Islamofascist hates multiculturalism. Just you try building a church in Saudi Arabia! They won’t even let our troops out there celebrate St Valentine’s Day. And as for any idea of the races being equal . . . it is the Muslim world that keeps slavery alive, and Muslim governments, as in Sudan, that see nothing whatsoever wrong with ethnic cleansing. Recently a Muslim columnist wrote sorrowfully of how in her culture a Muslim girl marrying a black man was the greatest shame that could fall upon a family. So much for equality under Islam.
There was also the implication from some quarters that if all the dead had been white Christians, the tragedy and abomination would have been somehow less. This seemed particularly inappropriate at a time when we were celebrating this country’s wartime suffering and resilience. We were white then — but did we bleed less because of it?
In an effort to fight racism, certain people like to pretend that there was no fun, no culture, no nobility here before multiculturalism — but there was. And to follow that weird logic, you’d also have to say that the Third World also had none of the above before the white man went there and interfered. And before you know it, you’re making all sorts of mad claims.
What we have learnt recently is that diversity is not just to be celebrated mindlessly, but also navigated and negotiated. We, the host community, have accepted multiculturalism; the issue now is whether hardline — and I stress hardline — Muslims can do the same.
To my eyes at least, “live and let live” seems to be a concept they have a problem with; until they can grasp it, as the Sikhs and Hindus have (who have at least as strong and rich a culture, but feel no need to burn books, form parliaments, set up separatist schools and kill their fellow Britons to demonstrate this), the jury is still out on whether hardline Muslims can truly live happily in non-Muslim countries. And, after all, they have 56 — count ’em! — of their own to go to if they don’t like it. They are spoilt for choice.
Or will they not be happy until every last country in the world is composed of veiled women, bearded men and dead infidels, of all creeds and colours?
sigh if only this applied to the masses
