When it turned out that the London bombings were carried out by four young Muslim men born in England, it seemed to give a lie to Tom Friedman's theory that Muslim terrorism sprouts from the anger of young men in Arab nations who have no hope of economic prosperity and freedom.Here were young men who may not have been born into Windsor Castle, but they were living in a land of freedom and opportunity. So how can they be portrayed as anything other than what they are: murderers?
As Jeff points out, leave it to the New York Times to provide justification for the London Bombers--they where just 4 angry young men. You can't blame them, can you?
"I don't approve of what he did, but I understand it. You get driven to something like this, it doesn't just happen."To the boys from Cross Flats Park, Mr. Tanweer, 22, who blew himself up on a subway train in London last week, was devout, thoughtful and generous. If they understood his actions, it was because they lived in Mr. Tanweer's world, too.
They did not agree with what Mr. Tanweer had done, but made clear they shared the same sense of otherness, the same sense of siege, the same sense that their community, and Muslims in general, were in their view helpless before the whims of greater powers. Ultimately, they understood his anger.
The news that four British-born Muslim men from neighborhoods around Leeds were suspected of carrying out the bombings in London has made the shared dissatisfaction of boys like these and the creeping militancy of some young British Muslims an urgent issue in Britain.
The bombers are an exception among Britain's 1.6 million Muslims. But their actions have highlighted a lingering question: why are second-generation British Muslims who should seemingly be farther up the road of assimilation rejecting the country in which they were born and raised?
You can thank strong conservatives, intellectuals with a backbone and enough intelligence to know better when it comes to multiculturalism. That is why I say, I am an American first, a Hispanic by heritage, but a US citizen and proud patriot always!
Multiculturalism is of another era and should be scrapped. That conclusion, expressed last year by Trevor Phillips, caused a sensation. The Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), which he chairs, was founded to promote multiculturalism and governments of both parties pursued that policy since the 1960s. Phillips went further: “We need to assert there is a core of Britishness.” He lamented the “loss” of Shakespeare. “That sort of thing is bad for immigrants,” he said, who come here not just for jobs but because of Britain’s tolerance and parliamentary democracy.
Despite the CRE’s retreat, immediately after the London bombings the prime minister referred to Britain as tolerant, multi-ethnic and multicultural. It’s clear from the way he spoke that he regarded those three words as interchangeable. One reason why we in Britain have enjoyed a broad consensus on multiculturalism is that we have been so imprecise about what it means. Given that Britain has attracted waves of immigrants who in their new home still celebrate Passover, Ramadan or Diwali, to many it seemed to be just a statement of the obvious.
In the 1960s Enoch Powell foresaw immigration leading to rivers foaming with blood and was sacked from the Conservative party’s front bench for saying so. In 1990 Norman Tebbit talked of a cricket test, meaning that you doubted whether people were integrated into this country if they supported Pakistan or India when those teams played England. Those remarks embarrassed the Tories, too.
With those exceptions the respectable British right has left multiculturalism unchallenged out of fear that it would be accused of racism. Phillips’s remark indicates that multiculturalism has passed its high water mark. But that occurred because the left got cold feet, not because the right won the argument.
The American right has not been so passive. For example, the Ayn Rand Institute (which bears the name of the author of The Fountainhead, the bible of individualism) claims that: “Multiculturalism is the view that all cultures, from the spirits worshipping tribe to that of an advanced industrial civilisation, are equal in value.” It continues: “A culture that values freedom, progress, reason and science is good; one that values oppression, mysticism and ignorance is not.”
The institute has battled against such terms as “black American” on the grounds that they invite us to categorise a person according to his ancestry rather than his qualities as an individual. The voters of California rejected the use of teaching in Spanish, which had become standard practice in state schools. Victory went to those who argued that American children who could not speak English would founder in later life.
Read the rest of this piece by Michael Portillo in The Sunday Times of London. Hopefully, we don't have to wait for something like this to happen on our soil from home-grown terrorist for more people to wake up.
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