Oh Douglas!

What a speech!

I saw this on Biased-BBC. (Thanks very much by the way)

Update.

Below it, B-BBC’s midnight commenter Dez (Hope he’ll forgive me for borrowing it) says:

dez says:

December 10, 2012 at 3:23 am

Hell yeah! It’s great when you only have to listen to one side of an argument.

I recently came across the following. I wonder if you agree:

“What, then, is the East End like under the sway of the immigrant, and what is its future to be if it is to remain an asylum open to all without condition or restriction?

Many English people living in the neighbourhood have summed up the situation to me in a phrase : ‘We are living in a foreign country.’

East of Aldgate one walks into a foreign town. In the by-streets north and south of the main thoroughfares it is an exception to hear the English language spoken…

…The English working man asks, with un-deniable justice, why he should be turned out of the most convenient neighbourhood to make room for a foreign population, and why his rent should be raised from 50 to 100 per cent, in consequence of the demand for house accommodation which foreigners have created.”

Sound familiar?

Would it change your opinion if you knew it was written in 1903 and the subject of the author’s complaint was Jews?

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Since this blog is eerily silent I’m taking it up here, on “Is”, rather than on a somewhat congested B-BBC to show that we do listen to the other side of the argument - if that is what Dez’s comment actually represents.

Here Dez is ‘turning the tables’, a test one should always carefully try out before opining on sensitive matters such as racism. 

Well Dez, it might surprise you to know that some of us routinely do test our arguments in this  ‘Muslims are the new Jews’ type of way.  

Dez is right, these are indeed the things that people say about immigration, and yes, in the early 20th c people were suspicious of Jews - just as they are to this day - but then people were openly racist through fear of the unknown right up till events during WWll showed them where this sort of ill-informed narrow-minded thinking could lead.  

But is there a parallel?  Is there moral equivalence between the  hard-working Jewish immigrants who fled from pogroms in Eastern Europe to Britain and America, who were determined to assimilate and integrate, who made no demands of their hosts and were well disposed towards the counties that gave them refuge?

Dez is trying to say, look, these two groups are “other”. Look how they misunderstood the Jews then, therefore -  accordingly, you’re misunderstanding the Muslims now.

But no. There is little or no similarity. Muslims, as a collective, are not the new Jews. They’re not even the old Jews.

 They are, as a collective, (and with individual exceptions) demanding, separatist, hostile, unreasonable, Judeophobic, misogynistic, homophobic, destructive, repressive, belligerent, confrontational, supremacist, disputatious and quarrelsome.

There you are. I’m saying something racist, something which mustn’t even be thought, let alone said out loud. 

When I use the term ‘Muslims’, I am of course referring in general terms to an ideology that is proud of the very things I am disparaging.  They believe these things are righteous and they aspire to them. They are not ashamed of any of them because they sincerely believe they are morally desirable, and they hold the hypothetical afterlife in higher regard than the actual material life.

The religion of peace?  One interpretation of ‘peace’ is the vision of the glorious time when all opposition has been extinguished. 

So turn the tables if you must, but who really wants to sit at an upturned table?

This is not a rant against immigration by the way, unlike some commenters on B-BBC whose little Englander views tend to validate your point rather than mine. 

It’s worth pointing out that in the early 1900s the number of Jews in the UK was about 150,000. Even now there are only around 250,000, whereas the figures for Muslims in the UK presently appear to be up to five million, many of whom are financially dependent on the state.