A Murmur of Dissent

In Britain, a ranking Anglican cleric, Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester recently commented that in Muslim neighborhoods Christians often feel neither welcome, nor safe. British Muslims rapidly rose in their usual, well-choreographed stampede of outrage to demand that the archbishop be silenced, censured and expelled from his post. Surprisingly, so far the Anglican Church has not acceded to these demands, though given the Archbishop of Canterbury's well-known advanced case of political correctness, whether or not that holds is an open question.

The archbishop's remarks and the predictable reaction are causing some Britons to publiclly lay the blame for England's cultural balkanization directly at the feet of one ideology-turned-official-government-policy: multiculturalism. Writing in the Telegraph Philip Johnston lays out the irrefutable case.

However, few politicians have been willing to do what Michael Nazir-Ali has done, which is to question the impact of a growing Muslim population upon the very fabric of the nation, turning it within half a century into a multi-faith and multicultural land. It is hardly surprising, perhaps, for a Christian prelate to lament the powerful appeal of another faith challenging where his own once reigned supreme. Furthermore, the recent immigration of more than half a million eastern Europeans has delighted Roman Catholic leaders whose churches were full to bursting over Christmas.

But they share an historic and religious heritage. The issue that Bishop Nazir-Ali raised has more to do with our failure to integrate Muslims because our political elites were in thrall to what he called "the novel philosophy of multiculturalism". One consequence was the ease with which extremists exploited an emphasis on separatism to recruit among the more impressionable young men in their communities.

Attempts have been made to impose an "Islamic" character in some cities by insisting on artificial amplification for the adhan, the call to prayer, and even to introduce some aspects of sharia to civil law. Sitting in the background, seemingly stalled for the time being, are plans to establish Europe's largest markaz - an Islamic prayer and meeting area able to accommodate at least 40,000 people - right beside the site for the 2012 London Olympics, where it would be a potent icon of how Britain has changed.

In truth, the bishop has simply articulated what many in the Government and in the race relations world have already come to realise (and which most of the rest of us understood years ago), and that is the baleful consequences of three decades of multiculturalism. Last year, even the Commission for Racial Equality, once a cheerleader for the concept, recanted with a report that depicted Britain as an unequal and segregated nation in danger of breaking up.

Like Bishop Nazir-Ali, it feared that extremism was being fostered by the retreat of different groups behind their ethnic walls. For many years, those who wanted Britain to be recognised as a multicultural society which needed to revise, or even jettison, five centuries of Protestant hegemony held centre stage. Anyone who questioned it had their reputations trashed. The multiculturalists even coined an insult - Islamophobia - to try to close down the debate. Some of them yesterday accused the bishop of "scaremongering".

Americans should take strong notice of the disaster currently unfolding in Britain and throughout Europe, since the same thing is happening inside the US and Canada, through the mass immigration of non-Westerners, mostly Mexicans, to their shores. In America, too, any criticism of the invasion - or any defense of American culture - is attacked as "racist" or "nativist" - words meant to shut down any argument. And, as in Britain, in the US it is government policies that are driving the cultural destruction of the nation (the deliberate decision not to protect the border; the immigration laws that encourage non-Western peoples to migrate to the US).

Johnston makes the same error as many commentators, assuming the multiculturalism was originally conceived with benevolent intentions.

But while multiculturalism began as a facet of Britain's characteristic toleration of other people's ways, religions, cuisines, languages and dress, it metamorphosed into a political creed that held that ethnic minority groups should be allowed to do what they like. It became a guiding principle of governance. When he became prime minister in 1997, Tony Blair urged the nation to embrace multiculturalism. Almost 10 years later, as he prepared to leave Downing Street, he was making speeches informing immigrants they had "a duty" to integrate with the mainstream of society. "Conform to it; or don't come here. We don't want the hate-mongers, whatever their race, religion or creed," he said.

But the "hate-mongers" were already here; and if they weren't they found getting here easy enough. There was a ready-made audience for their anti-western rhetoric among some sections of the Muslim community who had become estranged from the rest of the country - not just from the white Christian majority but from everyone else. So estranged that some were, and still are, prepared to kill others and themselves. When Mohammed Siddique Khan, the leader of the July 7 suicide bombers, spoke in his "martyr video" of "the injustices perpetrated against my people" he did not mean the folk among whom he grew up in Yorkshire.

The real "hate-mongers" were those on the Left that created the ideal of multiculturalism, which was always intended as a Trojan Horse which would play upon Western values to destroy the West from within. It has been one of the most amazingly successful ideological campaigns in history, rotting the world's most powerful civilization from its core.

The problem for Britain and for the US (and the rest of the West) is that even as people wake up to the nightmare unfolding around them, simply exposing the ideology which has created the chaos does little to ameliorate it. Millions of non-Western immigrants are now firmly established within Western nations, busily creating their own little enclaves and enlarging their numbers. Their numbers - and Western fecklessness - give them the ability to resist assimilation (where that is even possible) and the power to exert change of the Western countries they are colonizing.