Провал мультикультурализма - 3

Listen to the sound of marching feet
And the voices of the ghosts of Cable Street
Fists and stones and batons and the gun
With courage we shall beat those blackshirts down

 

Nevertheless, we should acknowledge that this threat comes in Europe overwhelmingly from young men who follow a completely perverse, warped interpretation of Islam, and who are prepared to blow themselves up and kill their fellow citizens.

 

Move along the spectrum, and you find people who may reject violence, but who accept various parts of the extremist worldview, including real hostility towards Western democracy and liberal values

 

It is vital that we make this distinction between religion on the one hand, and political ideology on the other.

 

If they want an example of how Western values and Islam can be entirely compatible, they should look at what’s happened in the past few weeks on the streets of Tunis and Cairo : hundreds of thousands of people demanding the universal right to free elections and democracy.

 

I simply don’t accept that there is somehow a dead end choice between a security state on the one hand, and an Islamist one on the other.

 

What I am about to say is drawn from the British experience, but I believe there are general lessons for us all. In the UK , some young men find it hard to identify with the traditional Islam practiced at home by their parents, whose customs can seem staid when transplanted to modern Western countries. But these young men also find it hard to identify with Britain too, because we have allowed the weakening of our collective identity. Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and apart from the mainstream. We’ve failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong. We’ve even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run completely counter to our values.

 

Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, democracy, the rule of law, equal rights regardless of race, sex or sexuality.