The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

David Cameron to Brits: ‘They Be Snatching Your People Up Out Here’

Posted on | February 7, 2011 | 7 Comments

The prime minister channels Antoine Dodson:

David Cameron has criticised “state multiculturalism” in his first speech as prime minister on radicalisation and the causes of terrorism.
At a security conference [Saturday] in Munich, he argued the UK needed a stronger national identity to prevent people turning to all kinds of extremism.
He also signalled a tougher stance on groups promoting Islamist extremism. . . .
“Frankly, we need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and much more active, muscular liberalism,” the prime minister said.

You may wonder how the “hide your kids, hide your wife” angle fits here, but note this part of the story:

The speech angered some Muslim groups, while others queried its timing amid an English Defence League rally in the UK.

Hmmmm. Let’s see, the English Defence League staged an event in Cameron’s home district of Luton and perhaps, indeed, we should question the timing. Why would there be a recent upswing of EDL support in Britain? Why would this “right-wing” sentiment represented by EDL be sufficiently strong that the Tory PM felt obligated to criticize “multiculturalism” and “passive tolerance” toward Islamic extremism?

You won’t find the answer in the respectable mainstream press, but let us turn to the Communist Party’s British publication, the Morning Star:

The EDL . . . tars all Muslims with religious intolerance and systematic criminality based on “cultural” attitudes.
[EDL spokesman Stephen] Lennon would have us believe that Muslim gangs push heroin outside schools, that schoolgirls are forced to wear the burqa, that Muslim gangs murder non-Muslim youth with impunity and that 15-year-old girls are routinely raped and pimped by Muslim gangs.
And this “systematic rape of our youth,” in which Muslim communities are supposedly complicit because of a “cultural thing” goes unchallenged by the authorities “because of a fear of being called racist,” according to the EDL.

Do you perhaps recall the lurid Fleet Street headlines? C’mon, my fellow Americans: Where did you first read about the U.K. Muslim “rape gang” scandals?

Nov. 26: Muslim Men Led U.K. Girl-Rape Gang
Nov. 27: Report: ‘Issues of Culture, Ethnicity and Identity’ Raised in U.K. Rape-Gang Case
Nov. 30: Muslim Columnist: U.K. Rape Gang Case Exposes ‘Disgusting Cultural Beliefs’
Jan. 24: VIDEO: British Girl, 13, Says Rape Threats Are ‘Happening to Lots of Girls’ at School

To borrow a phrase, this blog is on the cutting edge of societal evolution. One of the problems with much of the elite media is that they stumble over the “is”/”ought” distinction, preferring to report things the way they think they ought to be, rather than the way they really are. And so, when confronted with a phenomenon that discredits (or at least, mismatches) their ideological worldview, they either ignore it or else try to force-fit the obtrusive facts into the preconceived narrative.

It is by such mental gymnastics that a crime committed by a deranged leftist like Jared Loughner becomes transposed to function as confirmation of the dangers of “vitriol” from Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, et al. And the situation that developed in the industrial slums of northern England — lower-class teenage white girls being seduced and exploited by relatively affluent young Pakistani Muslim men — was something that both the government and the press in Great Britain ignored as long as they could.

While the respectable voices of authority were silent, however, ordinary Britons were talking quite plainly about a phenomenon that was scarcely impossible to ignore.

Last summer, I went to a reception in Washington where there were three or four British college students of Tory leanings. We began talking over refreshments about the differences between U.S. and U.K. politics, about the Tea Party and how conservatives in Britain did not have the sort of institutional infrastructure of think-tanks, activist groups and talk radio that we in America take for granted.

This conversation about political differences led into a conversation about cultural differences and I remarked how the term “Asian” has different connotations in the U.S. and the U.K.

Whereas in America, an “Asian” is most often denotes someone of Chinese, Japanese or Korean ancestry, in England an “Asian” is most often a Pakistani Muslim. After I’d noted that cross-Atlantic difference about the connotation of “Asian,” one of the young Brits — who had perhaps been enjoying more than his share of refreshments — then went on a brief rant about groups of Paki guys cruising around in their expensive cars and stylish clothes, picking up trashy British girls.

This unexpected turn in our conversation rather startled me, and I wondered if this young Tory was perhaps exaggerating. However, another of the Brits ssured me that the situation was just as his friend described it. “Quite so . . . You don’t see it in the papers — political correctness and all that — but it goes on all the time.”

That cocktail chat at a summer reception was just one of those things you hear and usually never think about again. I was gearing up for the mid-term campaign season and wasn’t paying any attention to British politics. But after the election was over, while browsing through Google News for some blog fodder, I came across a startling Daily Mail headline:

Asian gang of predators abused and
raped up to 100 girls as young as 12

Hunter S. Thompson once remarked, “Nothing catches an editor’s eye like a good rape,” and what editor could resist a headline like that?”

Quite a few, as it turns out.

The “Asian rape-gang” story was carefully ignored by the American media. They’re only too happy to report on Charlie Sheen’s latest sexcapades, but no respectable American journalist would go near a story that upturns their preconceived immigrants-as-victims narrative.

Politics and journalism are different in Ye Merry Olde Across the Pond. The Fleet Street press doesn’t give a damn about politics if a story that gives them an excuse to put “sex” or “rape” in a headline. That’s the stuff that sells papers, after all. And while there are similiarities in politics, of course, the British Labour Party is not a carbon copy of our Democrats, nor are their Tories a duplicate of Republicans.

Indeed, it was a Labour leader, former Secretary of State Jack Straw, who last month shocked England by speaking the blunt truth about the Pakistani men who “see these young women, white girls who are vulnerable . . . who they think are easy meat.”

Straw’s willingness to risk being (predictably) denounced as a racist seems to have inspired others on the British Left to speak out in defiance of political correctness.

“The EDL did not arise out of some political vacuum. They are themselves a clever, post-modern response to our muddled discourse about race, culture, identity and religion. . . . The failure of successive governments to deal with what is euphemistically called ‘social cohesion’ is precisely what leads to extremism. The complete inadequacy of particular kinds of multiculturalism is yet to be properly acknowledged.”
— Suzanne Moore, “If the Left is to rise again, it must lift the official silence on race and culture,” Guardian (U.K.)

Imagine that: A leftist in good standing — a writer for the Guardian, no less! — confessing the “inadequacy” of multiculturalism, and acknowledging that persistent problems of immigration, ethnicity and culture have been smothered in euphemisms. Will wonders never cease?

For years, neither Tories nor Labour would address the kinds of issues raised by the “rape gang” case. What Suzanne Moore calls a “muddled discourse” was actually an enforced silence, leaving the unaddressed concerns of ordinary Britons to bubble up into the kind of “extremism” she of course abhors.

It is silence that creates the danger, and it is cowardice that requires the silence. England now seems fully awake to the danger, and one hopes Cameron’s speech signals that England will be silent no more.

The New York Times reported on Cameron’s speech, but said nothing about the EDL or the rape-gang story that helped shine a light on the problems that “passive tolerance” and “state multiculturalism” have permitted to fester in Britiain.

Category: Crime, Great Britain, Immigration, Islam, Racism

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