What “British” Muslims? 29

Yesterday, Thursday April 13, 2016, a documentary film was shown on British TV, titled What British Muslims Really Think.

What it revealed about Muslims in Britain was so subversive of Authorized British Opinion that there had to be some special reason why it was allowed to be shown at all.

There was. It was the work of one of the last men in Britain from whom such a daring act of mutiny could be expected: Trevor Phillips, who for years headed the Equalities and Human Rights Commission [EHRC], an institution or fortress founded to monitor and enforce, throughout the land, full compliance with the First Commandment of post-war Europe:Though shalt not be racist.

As head of the EHRC, Trevor Phillips commissioned, in 1997, a report on the attitudes of the British public towards Muslims. Though titled Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All, it was commonly called The Runnymede Report. It made the word “Islamophobia” known and held in awe by the morally intimidated public.

From then on, Phillips was tacitly understood to be the knight whose personal errand it was to defend Islam against all criticism.

He above all would unhesitatingly be given media opportunities to speak about Islam.  And last night he did. If what he had to say astonished the nation, it wasn’t because the brow-beaten Britons didn’t know in general the undercover story that his film revealed, but because it was Mr. Phillips revealing it.

To readers of Breitbart, there would have been less surprise. There Raheem Kassam wrote four days before the film was shown:

The former head of Britain’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), Trevor Phillips, has admitted he “got almost everything wrong” on Muslim immigration in a damning new report on integration, segregation, and how the followers of Islam are creating “nations within nations” in the West.

Phillips, a former elected member of the Labour Party who served as the Chairman of the EHRC from 2003-2012 will present What British Muslims Really Think on Channel 4 on Wednesday. An ICM poll released to the Times ahead of the broadcast reveals:  …

Writing in the Times on the issue, Phillips admits: “Liberal opinion in Britain has, for more than two decades, maintained that most Muslims are just like everyone else… Britain desperately wants to think of its Muslims as versions of the Great British Bake Off winner Nadiya Hussain, or the cheeky-chappie athlete Mo Farah. But thanks to the most detailed and comprehensive survey of British Muslim opinion yet conducted, we now know that just isn’t how it is.”

Phillips commissioned “the Runnymede report” into Britain and Islamophobia in 1997 which, according to both Phillips himself and academics across the country, popularised the phrase which has now become synonymous with any criticism – legitimate or not – of Islam or Muslims. …

Phillips says his new data shows “a chasm” opening between Muslims and non-Muslims on fundamental issues such as marriage, relations between men and women, schooling, freedom of expression and even the validity of violence in defence of religion. He notes … that “the gaps between Muslim and non-Muslim youngsters are nearly as large as those between their elders”. …

“Twenty years ago… I published the report titled Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All, we thought that the real risk of the arrival of new communities was discrimination against Muslims … [and] 1996 incidents showed that there was plenty of it around. But we got almost everything else wrong.”

His comments will come as a blow to those who continue to attack elements in British society who are concerned about Muslim immigration and integration, and in fact may even go some way to shoring up comments made by U.S. Presidential candidates Donald Trump and Senator Ted Cruz seeking to slow down or pause the rate of Muslim immigration into the West.

We estimated that the Muslim population of the UK would be approaching 2 [million] by 2020. We underestimated by nearly a million. We predicted that the most lethal threat to Muslims would come from racial attacks and social exclusion. We completely failed to foresee the urban conflicts of 2001 that ravaged our northern cities. And of course we didn’t dream of 9/11 and the atrocities in Madrid, Paris, Istanbul, Brussels and London. For a long time, I too thought that Europe’s Muslims would become like previous waves of migrants, gradually abandoning their ancestral ways, wearing their religious and cultural baggage lightly, and gradually blending into Britain’s diverse identity landscape. I should have known better.

And Mr. Phillips even acknowledges that the mass sexual grooming and rape scandals that are plaguing heavily Muslim populated towns across Britain are because of Muslim – not ‘Asian’ – men. …

The media had been too afraid to call the sex-slavers, rapists, and pimps “Muslims”, but did not scruple to risk offending citizens of oriental descent in general.

Phillips comments: “Some of my journalist friends imagine that, with time, the Muslims will grow out of it. They won’t.”

And indeed he lays the blame at the feet of the liberal, metropolitan elite, media classes:

Oddly, the biggest obstacles we now face in addressing the growth of this nation-within-a-nation are not created by British Muslims themselves. Many of our (distinctly un-diverse) elite political and media classes simply refuse to acknowledge the truth. Any undesirable behaviours are attributed to poverty and alienation. Backing for violent extremism must be the fault of the Americans. Oppression of women is a cultural trait that will fade with time, nothing to do with the true face of Islam. Even when confronted with the growing pile of evidence to the contrary, and the angst of the liberal minority of British Muslims, clever, important people still cling to the patronising certainty that British Muslims will, over time, come to see that “our” ways are better.

Recent studies other than Mr. Phillips’s have shown that, far from time being on the side of integration, the younger the Muslim, the more likely he is to hold hard-line views.

In terms of solutions, Mr. Phillips opines on “halting the growth of sharia courts and placing them under regulation”, ensuring that school governance never falls into the hands of a single-minority group, “ensuring mosques that receive a steady flow of funds from foreign governments such as Saudi Arabia, however disguised, are forced to reduce their dependency on Wahhabi patronage”, and an end to the “silence-for-votes” understanding between local politicians and Muslim leaders

These are not solutions of course. Solutions would be: rendering militant Islam impotent, and keeping the Muslim population small. But the measures required to do this are not the sort that contemporary Britain is likely to take.

What was the reaction to Trevor Phillips’s revelation – or confession – in general? How will the government respond? We wait to know.

We do know how one journalist responded. Katie Hopkins writes candidly at the MailOnline:

I sat down to watch What British Muslims Really Think with my best multicultural head on.

I cleared my mind of all preconceptions; grubby Rochdale cabbies passing white girls round for sex like a fried chicken bargain bucket, Imams beating kids into devotion, and the truly indoctrinated, blowing up Brussels to get 72 virgins in paradise. …

But, much as it pains me to say it, I have been right all along. British Muslims are not part of some rich tapestry of urban life. It’s a myth, dreamed up by the BBC, and perpetuated by the Islington elite. 

It is them and us. And THEY have no wish to be anything like US. 

The reason Muslims enjoy our country is because it is tolerant. Not the bits where we are tolerant of each other, you understand. Not the fact we respect your right to be Jewish or utterly ungodly. Or our warm embrace of those who identify as straight, gay, lesbian or as gender-fluid as a snail.

No. They enjoy our country because we are tolerant of their right to be as as prejudiced against Jews and as homophobic as they please. 

Fifty-two percent disagree homosexuality should be legalised. Even more oppose gay marriage. Years of British acceptance, now rolled back under a Neanderthal rock because the Koran has come to town. And no one appears to have the moral fibre to point out the hypocrisy of it all; Islamic Societies are proliferating across every University campus, the same safe spaces where any view not militantly pro-LGBTQ is rightly petitioned into silence. Catholic bakers in Ireland are persecuted if they don’t wish to bake a cake celebrating gay marriage, the law demanding their compliance.

But UK Muslims – they can be as homophobic as they choose.

… Having watched what British Muslims think of women, I am relieved my daughters were in bed. I have already written to their schools asking for my children to be exempt from any further trips to the local mosque. I stand against any segregation of my girls from boys.

But Muslim girls are not afforded such liberty, considered to be fortunate to be educated from the back of the room in subjects deemed appropriate for their uses – like cooking and sewing.

Where are the strident feminists fighting for the rights of Muslim girls; their genitals mutilated yet defended as a cultural thing and forced into marriages with ugly uncles? 

Unbelievably, one in three British Muslims support the right of a man to have up to four wives. And that’s young Muslims as well. 18-24 year olds are utterly backwards in their thinking – defended by progressives and liberals.  Why would women share husbands like a field full of flighty deer, waiting for one mangey rutting stag to mount them with his measly Muslim member? 

One Muslim woman describes it as a privilege.

Well I’ve been there, and it didn’t make me feel special.

My first husband – allegedly a Catholic – thought he would try the polygamy thing, informally, with busty women up and down the country. We had a feisty divorce but I kept my children.

If I were a Muslim, British Sharia courts would have taken my children from me by now at the advent of my second marriage, tying my hands and crushing my heart. 

Sitting there on my sofa, listening to women say there is no such thing as rape within Muslim marriage, my pelvic floor is in spasm in disgust. 39% of British Muslims – men and women – say a woman should always obey her husband.

Extend this thinking a little further and you end up with a women in utter subservience, hidden from the world, shrouded in a burqa. For many this submission undoubtedly extends to a good beating.

From there it’s only a short sandal-footed shuffle into Sharia Law where women’s evidence is worth half of that of a man’s, and only two in three British Muslims think stoning a woman to death for being raped is wrong. 

UK Muslims can be as sexist and violent as they choose.

Imagining this new breed of Muslims want to assimilate into our country is farcical. There is no integration. They do not want to assimilate into our increasingly secular ways. 

They want to practise a more radical form of Islam, taught by Wahhabi Imams, living under Sharia law, rejecting homosexuality, promoting the subservience of women, supporting jihad.

We’ve left that sentence as it is because we like the whole article. But we were tempted to cut out “a more radical form of”. Islam is Sharia law, and subjugating women, and fighting, or supporting others who fight, the jihad. And she knows it:

Multiculturalists are determined to distance Muslims from Islamic extremism, imagining it to be the acts of the alienated few.

But the reason we so seldom hear Imams and leaders in the Muslim Community speaking out against terrorists is that in truth, many are right behind them.

Twenty-five percent had sympathy for the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris; 20% have sympathy for the 7/7 suicide bombers. Over 100,000 Muslims in the UK have sympathy for terrorist acts. Many support a future attack on the very country which showed them tolerance, allowed them to practise their particular brand of hate, and gave them a home. 

I have heard what Muslims really think and it is clear multiculturalism has never existed.

Through no fault of our inclusive culture, it is them and us. And British Muslims expect us to change our ways to fit in with them.

Right. And successive British governments, and all the governments of western Europe, and even to some extent the government of the United States, also expect us to change our ways to fit in with them.

And at every general election, majorities vote for that government policy. Anyone who opposes it is labelled “far-right”, “neo-Nazi”, “racist” by the media and the intellectual elites.

Trevor Phillips deserves our gratitude – and Katie Hopkins our admiration – for daring to tell the truth.

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Trevor Phillips