28 April 2014

The arrest of Paul Weston

.... People like Weston hamper the efforts of those (including Muslims) who are concerned about both radical extremism and illiberal conservatism. Last night Yasmin Alibhai Brown and Khalid Mahmood laid into Massoud Shadjareh on Channel 4 News over the Birmingham schools issue. We need to reject Weston’s Manichean vision of some kind of struggle to the death against Islam, and welcome Muslim allies.

[A COMMENT] "We need to reject Weston’s Manichean vision of some kind of struggle to the death against Islam, and welcome Muslim allies."

This thing about living in a multicultural society is that we are always "needing" to do all sorts of things. But if we just had restrictive immigration laws we wouldn't "need" to abolish habeas corpus and we wouldn't "need" to abolish free speech, and we wouldn't "need" to reach out to X, Y or Z and we wouldn't "need" to fund A, B and C, all of which seems to a be a lot of effort.

So, the massive elephant of a question remains: if we "need" to do all sorts of things to cope with a substantial Muslim minority, why do we "need" to have them in the first place? [Harry’s Place] Read more