Cameron's assault on multiculturalism, launched this morning, is an out and out attack on the rights of different communities to be different, indeed it's an assault on difference as such. He entirely wrongly claims that various Muslim organisations, and be clear it is the Muuslim community which is being targetted in his criticisms, have failed to stop the "radicalisation" of young Muslims because they have celebrated their Muslim culture and failed to be British enough. Sometimes they have even dared to tell a different history from that which the British imperialist tradition, of which Cameron is the very wealthy heir, would prefer to hear. The claim they are responsible for the radicalisation of young Muslims is utterly absurd and motivated by the usual ignorant right wing racism. This is compounded by the fact that these Muslim organisations usually tend to be more supportive of Labour than of the Conservatives, as Muslims tend to be poorer on average, and the Con/Lib Dem coalition government wants to slash public spending.
The reality is that "radicalisation", by which is meant the attraction of young Muslims to the politics of Al Qaeda, has been and continues to be fuelled by the foreign policy of the British government, still killing Muslims in Muslim countries and still propping up dictators like Mubarak who serve the interests of Western imperialism and Israel. This, of course, is combined with plenty of everyday racism.
All the Muslim organisations in receipt of public funds in Britain counsel against the politics of Al Qaeda and seek to channel the political energies of young Muslims into the political process. However those many who do engage in the political process and then wish to challenge the policies of the British government are themselves demonised.
I hope all progressive forces in Briatin will unite against Cameron's despicable policies and not be diverted or confused by fifth columnists like Malik.
________________________________ From: Bhaskar Sunkara <bhaskar.sunkara at gmail.com> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Sat, 5 February, 2011 20:37:51 Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] multiculturalism? really?
Also, "multiculturalism" means something different in the British context... see Kenan Malik's "From Fatwa to Jihad" for a decent left-wing critique.
>From Turley's review of that book:
The early 80s, despite seeing a dramatic drop in the paper membership of the NF, did not produce any significant calming of racial tensions. In 1981, a large-scale riot took place in Brixton, which had an overwhelmingly black population; similar riots followed in Toxteth in Liverpool, Bristol and elsewhere. The response of the Greater London Council and other municipal governments was to give multiculturalism - already coined as a vague approach by Labour governments of the 60s and 70s - a very specific organised form: cash handouts to particular institutions that supposedly stood for the interests of the particular minority ‘community’ as a whole. This money, of course, came ultimately from Thatcher, who - despite a Tory press foaming at the mouth at ‘loony left’ councils, and statements along the lines of Norman Tebbit’s infamous ‘cricket test’ - considered these policies to be a perfectly pragmatic response to social unrest (pp56-57).
Malik derides this, using the example of Birmingham council’s response to a 1985 riot: outreach with such groups as the Bangladeshi Islamic Projects Consultative Committee, the Birmingham Chinese Society and the Council of Black-led Churches. “Why should the Council for Black-led Churches presume to speak for the needs and aspirations of all African Caribbeans in Birmingham? ... Cosmologists believe that the physical universe in its infancy was homogenous and uniform. Multiculturalists seem to think the same about the social universe of minority groups” (p66). The municipal money, however, tended to turn this into a ‘fact on the ground’ - by doling out cash to religious and patriarchal organisations, it became the case that ethnic minorities were more reliant on these structures - a logic brought out very well by Malik (pp68-69)
On Sat, Feb 5, 2011 at 2:38 PM, SA <s11131978 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/5/2011 2:13 PM, Alan Rudy wrote:
>
> So, uh, Cameron blames British multicultural tolerance for racial/ethnic
>> segregation in Britain... which, he says, facilitates the radicalization
>> of
>> young Muslims... apparently Merkel and Sarkozy have made similar claims...
>> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/world/europe/06britain.html
>>
>> Is it just me or is Britain hardly any different from the US where
>> structural racism trumps the multicultural embrace of difference every day
>> of every week of every month of every year.
>>
>
> I don't think the US has the problem Cameron claims to be addressing -
> i.e., radicalization/non-integration of Muslims.
>
> SA
>
>
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