No-go for British society

Monday, 14th January 2008

When the Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, wrote the other day that in some of Britain’s Muslim communities there were now no-go areas, the great and the not-so-good rose as one to denounce him for talking nonsense. From William Hague to Hazel Blears, people said they simply didn’t recognise what on earth he was talking about. There were no no-go areas, they cried. All a figment of the Bishop’s over-active imagination, apparently.

Sigh.

The Sunday Telegraph, which ran an opinion poll on the subject, also reported the following:

Church leaders in communities with large concentrations of Muslims said that Christians were being targeted. An east London vicar who had delivered Christmas leaflets in his parish said he was told to stay away from ‘Muslim areas’. He said: ‘Despite this being a mixed area, where Muslims make up only about 15 per cent of the population, I was told that the leaflets were offensive and could make people angry.’Another churchman said his path had been blocked by Muslim youths as he drove through a district of Oldham, Lancashire, last year. ‘They wanted to know why I was coming into “their” area,’ he said.

A priest ministering in the Manchester district of Rusholme said he knew of ‘dozens of cases’ in which Muslim converts to Christianity had been attacked. Another church leader said that Asian Christians in Leicester feared being identified when leaving churches. ‘They are scared of being stopped and beaten up if they are found carrying Bibles,’ he said. None of the church leaders we spoke to wished to be identified for fear of retaliation, but Don Horrocks, of the Evangelical Alliance, said: ‘It's increasingly difficult for non-Muslims to live in areas of high Muslim density, especially if they are practising Christians.’

The issue is not merely the ‘no-go areas of the mind’ caused by radical Islamism, to which a number of reformist Muslims have attested in the past few days. Nor is it ‘living increasingly separate lives’, troubling as that may be in such areas. Much worse than that, in some Muslim-dominated areas non-Muslims are being intimidated or attacked on the grounds that they have trespassed into 'Muslim territory'. That is something that should cause the most acute alarm, so much so that any normally functioning government and police force should take swift and strong measures to stamp it out. Instead they are ignoring it -- thus also acting as a recruiting sergeant for the British National Party, which is exploiting this legitimate grievance to mask its true agenda of prejudice against all racial or ethnic minorities.

A society which allows the development of religious and cultural no-go areas for its citizens ceases to function as a society. The fact that our establishment is not only ignoring this development but is even trying to deny that it is happening is the surest sign that this sorry outcome is indeed coming to pass.