Allison Pearson
Why we still need to talk about Muslims
You probably skipped past it on the news pages last week. I know I did. Why bother reading about yet another case when the details are so numbingly familiar? Let me guess. Ten or 12 men of Pakistani origin? Check. Grooming and pimping? Check. White girls in care or from chaotic homes coerced into sexual slavery? Check. Vile and sadistic crimes that “defy description”? Check. Jail sentences of up to 25 years that astonish the men in the dock because they don’t think what they did was bad? Again, spot on.
Back in February, in the case before this case, a gang of men of Pakistani origin were jailed for 143 years in Bradford. A Muslim councillor said that some in “the community” felt that “it takes two to tango”. The girl had “played her part”. The girl was 14 and had learning difficulties when she became the plaything of a hundred men. Some tango.
How do you even begin to deal with that kind of attitude? Keighley MP Kris Hopkins did his best. He was lambasted for claiming that Muslim men are “fundamentally racist” and that groups “are out raping white girls at this very moment”. Mr Hopkins was expressing an inconvenient truth that our ruling elite, on the Left and the Right, has preferred to ignore, hoping things are not so bad and that, with any luck, certain Muslim minicab drivers will stop regarding poor white girls – sorry, “slags” – as an all-youcan-eat buffet.
One reason we have been so slow to address the problem of Muslim attitudes to liberal values is because, officially, there was no problem. It was the loathing that dare not speak its name. Lately, there have been some breaches in that wall of denial, led valiantly by Trevor Phillips, former chairman of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission. Tonight, on Channel 4, Phillips goes further still in What British Muslims Really
Think. Devastating data, collected by ICM, suggests that, far from following the normal pattern of integration, a “chasm” is opening up between Muslims and non-Muslims on key issues such as marriage, sexuality, freedom of expression and even the validity of violence.
The constant reassurances that only a “tiny” number of Muslims hold any of those dreadful views are swiftly revealed to be dangerous wishful thinking. One in three British Muslims thinks that taking a second wife is acceptable, while 52 per cent say that homosexuality should be illegal. (And, no, this is not a product of “Asian” culture, because Sikhs and Hindus are among the strongest supporters of same-sex marriage.) Anyone hoping that more liberal voices will emerge from younger Muslims can dream on: 35 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds think it’s cool to keep more than one wife.
As for the place of women, 39 per cent of British Muslims believe that women should always obey their husbands. Ah, so that would account for the extremely low rate of Muslim inter-marriage: no self-respecting female would hook up with that kind of honking chauvinist piggery.
The part of the programme that upset me most is an interview with Elham Manea, a Muslim academic from Zurich who sat in on sharia courts in the UK for four years. Elham was shocked to encounter “the most fundamentalist reading of Islam” you can find outside of the Taliban. She says ruefully: “I did not expect to see segregated communities living by their own rules in the UK with grave consequences for the rights of women”. Nor did we, Elham, nor did we.
Female plaintiffs are regarded as “minors”, and any woman who decides to remarry after divorce will lose custody of her children. That’s not what British law says, but who cares? As Phillips points out, one reason the majority of Muslims feel “a sense of belonging to the UK” is because the tolerance they find here allows them to do exactly as they please.
Some 23 per cent told ICM they would like there to be areas of Britain where Islamic law (sharia) is introduced instead of laws laid down by Parliament. Not long ago, you would have dismissed that scenario as fantastical, but given that our government has allowed 85 Islamic courts to operate across the UK, we can rule nothing out. The prospect of “a country within a country”, of zones where gay people are outlawed, adulterers stoned, women treated as children, and little boys tell a primary school headmistress to cover her head “because only slags don’t cover their heads”, needs to be resisted with every fibre of our national being. If we have any moral fibre left after 30 years of multiculturalism.
The task is urgent because ICM found a direct correlation between Muslims who don’t want to integrate and sympathy for extremism and violence. Trevor Phillips advocates a much more muscular approach to “active integration”. The Prime Minister is on the right track, insisting that Muslim women learn English so they’re not prisoners of their men. School segregation must end, with state schools prohibited from admitting more than 50 per cent of one ethnicity.
To Phillips’s list, I would add closing down Islamic schools that teach contempt for women and non-Muslims. Ban all sharia courts immediately and insist on British law for everyone. As for Muslims who think that white girls are fair game or who don’t want to fit in, I can recommend a really good airport.
This is serious. Unless we succeed, the liveand-let-live attitude that makes Britain such a great place could end up being its death warrant.