I despair of the British Muslims who choose to live under a virtual apartheid

AT LONG LAST, a senior government official has had the gumption to warn about the devastating effect of mass immigration on local communities, highlighting the segregation, division and tension it causes in society.

Such is the scale of the problem that in a report into our increasingly fractured communities, Dame Louise Casey, the Social Cohesion tsar, has called for all migrants to swear an oath of allegiance to Britain.

Currently, immigrants do not have to make any formal commitment to integrating with the rest of society, unless they are actually applying for UK citizenship. Even then, it is a mere facade. To live here, no newcomer need make any promises at all to be productive stakeholders in British society.

Dame Louise’s suggestion of an oath of allegiance is a step in the right direction. But it does not go far enough. Every single person who comes here to live should be obliged to sign up, in writing, to the British way of life.

Think of the United Kingdom as a prestigious golf club, the kind where membership is keenly sought after.

Anyone who wants to join will be expected to obey the rules — all of them, not just the ones that confer benefits. Applicants who refuse to sign up to this will be turned away at the door, and members who fail to honour that pledge will be swiftly expelled.

No one forces the new members to apply to join in the first place — it’s entirely their free choice. But there should be no option other than to abide by the rules, and no pussyfooting around with anyone who transgresses them. Otherwise, the club will fall apart, and a great institution will be destroyed.

Supremacist

It’s not enough to say that all immigrants must sign a legally binding contract before they are admitted to Britain. We must stipulate exactly what this declaration involves, and I believe there should be three main non-negotiable elements.

First, all new arrivals should be given compulsory English language training, followed up with rigorous testing. It is unacceptable for people to come to Britain with no intention of learning the language: it’s tantamount to saying they refuse to fit into society.

Second, they must pledge to integrate effectively by heeding the core principles of British culture, observing our values and norms. If they don’t, then — sorry, no admittance.

Third, all cultural baggage must be jettisoned at the door if it violates UK law. This includes forced marriages and the wilful acceptance of misogyny and patriarchy, from wife-beating to female genital mutilation to honour killings. These abhorrent behaviours must never be tolerated in Britain.

Of course, vast numbers of Muslims have integrated and become great contributors to British society.

But for too long, misguided liberals have been turning a blind eye to those who have not, for fear of being labelled as racist.

In refreshingly colourful language for an official report, Dame Louise suggests that when these liberals do get involved with community integration projects, their approach is woefully inadequate.

‘Events and projects that have been described to us as “saris, samosas and steel drums” can help bring together, but too often attract the already wellintentioned and do not succeed in tackling difficult issues.’

The truth is that we have to abandon our insane fixation with political correctness, because it is damaging our communities. Legitimate criticism of anyone, regardless of race or creed, is part and parcel of a healthy society, but we have been too afraid to apply it.

Until now, the cultural baggage that has arrived with migrants from Islamic nations has been treated as sacrosanct and inviolable.

The time has come for Britain to be firm, and say: dump that stuff, or you can’t come in.

One of the most obvious ways to do this is to tackle head-on the pernicious propaganda of extreme Islam, such as Wahhabism or Salafism perpetrated in Saudi Arabia and fuelled throughout the world by the country’s petrodollars.

By controlling Britain’s most prestigious mosques, Wahhabi-Salafists foist this terrible creed — which is not based on the Koran but on other suspect sources — on communities here in Britain.

They reject the inclusive and pluralistic ethos of Islam’s scripture, and promote a separatist and supremacist mindset within the Muslim community, the most visible manifestation of which is the niqab and burka.

These face-masks have nothing to do with true Islam; they actually date back to a custom in ancient Persia and Byzantium, more than 1,000 years before the Koran was written. They denigrate women, are deeply divisive, encourage segregation — and, to my mind, should be banned.

I’m not talking about the hijab or headscarf which anyone should be able to wear, but garments which hide the whole face.

There is no justification for these monstrous garments. Not in religion, not in law — and certainly not in British custom.

But that’s only one, albeit important, aspect of how imported cultural practices are damaging this country by fostering division.

Segregated

I was brought up in South Africa during the apartheid era, when the races were brutally segregated. My family were forced to live in a separate enclave and I was required to go to a separate school from white people. I detested that vile system with every fibre of my being.

Now I live in a wonderful free country. Yet I sadly see voluntary apartheid taking hold — Muslims deciding that they are better off living among themselves.

They are imposing segregation on their own communities, insisting on separate schools and ghetto suburbs — the very things I hated so much under South African apartheid; the very things that Nelson Mandela fought so long to eradicate.

Not long ago I spent an afternoon walking around Highfields in Leicester. During my visit I saw only black and brown faces — not a single white person.

If that situation had been imposed by a dictatorship, we would fight against it with all our might.

Why should it be acceptable in a modern democracy?

This isolationist trend feeds on itself: Muslims, especially women and children, are encouraged to withdraw from the rest of society, to keep themselves ‘unsullied’.

They are taught that they are ‘ superior’ because they are destined for heaven while the ‘ kuffars’ ( the unbelievers) are not.

Shut away in their homes, many go day after day without seeing anyone who is not Muslim. They watch Islamist TV stations and read Islamist websites, and so the isolationism is reinforced.

Dame Louise’s report is at last an official acknowledgment that we have a problem of segregation in this country. But, as I say, it doesn’t go far enough.

For instance, the report says more English classes should be organised for Muslim children, to encourage them to venture out of isolation and to discourage the home-schooling of children.

But we need to be far more muscular than that. We have to mix up the population of schools, so that immigrant groups are never predominant in any classroom. If necessary we should be busing people to different schools to ensure this.

In some cases, Muslim children who attend state schools make up such a high proportion of the class that they grow up imagining that more than half the country looks and speaks like them.

Isolationism and separatism must be attacked and dismantled in every way. We must insist that immigrants get involved in the ordinary life of Britain, for example through sport and other cultural areas to bring the disparate sectors of society together. We have to start applying our imagination to the problem and come up with bold inventive solutions.

Irrational

Above all, we must accept it is not racist to face up to the nightmare of the failure of multiculturalism. To claim that some immigrants, because of their origins, are exempt from the common duties of integration — that’s racist.

It is idiotic to champion the view that all cultures are equal, when some endorse misogyny, homophobia, honour killings and so forth.

To say that some people, because of their religion or the colour of the skin, can ignore British values of democracy, respect, patriotism, tolerance and equality — that’s racist and irrational.

We need to be forthright and robust about this. If immigrants are not prepared to fully integrate into British society, arguing that it means sacrificing their religious identity, they can head to places such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan and Sudan.

In other words, if newcomers and other immigrants are not happy in the United Kingdom and do not wish to be an integral part of this vibrant democracy, they should leave.

Dr Taj Hargey is director of the Muslim educational Centre of Oxford, and Imam of the Oxford Islamic Congregation.