On Islamophobia
I've been thinking about the contrast between the overwhelming majority of the British Muslims who I know personally and the idea of what Muslims are like which one could so easily get from the press. Not to mention from material like the stomach-churning election election address which the BNP circulated during the european elections.
The two largest groups of muslims who I know personally are those who I met and worked with as colleagues at BT and fellow Conservative activists. In both cases some of these individuals are personally very devout but neither the BT managers nor the Conservatives are obviously different in most of their attidudes, behaviour, or at all in the way they do their jobs, from those BT managers or Conservatives who are Christians, Jews, or atheists.
Back in my days at University - which included a year as Treasurer of the Union at Bristol, which made me the Union sabbatical responsible for dealing with societies - I did find that some of the Islamic societies - though by no means all - for students from middle eastern countries could occasionally display attitudes which made them difficult to deal with. I remember one such society sent an extremely nice "complements of the season" Christmas card to myself and most of the members of union council which initially produced a positive reaction, that sadly was totally destroyed when talking among ourselves we discovered that the three members of union council with Jewish sounding names had been excluded from the circulation.
But these were young men - it always was men - and in my later experiences as a councillor when dealing with planning applications from mosques and with organisations for immigrant communitites from Islamic countries I nearly always found the applicants and other representatives of Islam in Britain to be reasonably polite and constructive.
Obviously people like the 7/7 suicide bombers, the murderers of Lee Rigby, and those who go on dmonstrations with banners like "Behead those who insult Islam." do exist. But if my own experience is anything to go by, the extremists are an incredibly small minority of the communities they come from.
We do need to keep an eye open for the threat posed by the small minority of genuine extremists and guard against things which might result in young men becoming radicalised. We also need to ensure that everyone in our society is treated equally and subject to the same laws, that those laws are even-handedly enforced, and that everyone has the same protection under those laws.
But it is also important not to become paranoid or to scapegoat entire communities because of the actions of a few hotheads.
My uncles' and grandparents' generation had to go to war against a really serious threat in the form of the Nazis. (My father was a year or so too young to be called up in World War II.)
I lived the first three decades of my life under the shadow of the Cold War, when a Russian regime which was far more evil and dangerous than Putin's had a massive arsenal of nuclear weapons and other WMD aimed at our country. Despite what has happened in Iraq this week, and despite the occasional horrible atrocity perpetrated by the likes of Al Queda and the Taleban, the threat posed to Western society by Islamic extremism is utterly trivial compared to dangers which the West has successfully seen off over the last century.
The two largest groups of muslims who I know personally are those who I met and worked with as colleagues at BT and fellow Conservative activists. In both cases some of these individuals are personally very devout but neither the BT managers nor the Conservatives are obviously different in most of their attidudes, behaviour, or at all in the way they do their jobs, from those BT managers or Conservatives who are Christians, Jews, or atheists.
Back in my days at University - which included a year as Treasurer of the Union at Bristol, which made me the Union sabbatical responsible for dealing with societies - I did find that some of the Islamic societies - though by no means all - for students from middle eastern countries could occasionally display attitudes which made them difficult to deal with. I remember one such society sent an extremely nice "complements of the season" Christmas card to myself and most of the members of union council which initially produced a positive reaction, that sadly was totally destroyed when talking among ourselves we discovered that the three members of union council with Jewish sounding names had been excluded from the circulation.
But these were young men - it always was men - and in my later experiences as a councillor when dealing with planning applications from mosques and with organisations for immigrant communitites from Islamic countries I nearly always found the applicants and other representatives of Islam in Britain to be reasonably polite and constructive.
Obviously people like the 7/7 suicide bombers, the murderers of Lee Rigby, and those who go on dmonstrations with banners like "Behead those who insult Islam." do exist. But if my own experience is anything to go by, the extremists are an incredibly small minority of the communities they come from.
We do need to keep an eye open for the threat posed by the small minority of genuine extremists and guard against things which might result in young men becoming radicalised. We also need to ensure that everyone in our society is treated equally and subject to the same laws, that those laws are even-handedly enforced, and that everyone has the same protection under those laws.
But it is also important not to become paranoid or to scapegoat entire communities because of the actions of a few hotheads.
My uncles' and grandparents' generation had to go to war against a really serious threat in the form of the Nazis. (My father was a year or so too young to be called up in World War II.)
I lived the first three decades of my life under the shadow of the Cold War, when a Russian regime which was far more evil and dangerous than Putin's had a massive arsenal of nuclear weapons and other WMD aimed at our country. Despite what has happened in Iraq this week, and despite the occasional horrible atrocity perpetrated by the likes of Al Queda and the Taleban, the threat posed to Western society by Islamic extremism is utterly trivial compared to dangers which the West has successfully seen off over the last century.
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