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September 21, 2006

UK: Minister Wants More Muslim Headscarves On TV

Ruth Kelly, the Communities Secretary, has announced in a report published yesterday that she wants to see more Muslim women in hijabs on the television. The report, entitled Engaging with Muslim Women was the fruit of a seminar held in May, when Muslim women were invited to Downing Street, states the Telegraph. Then, Muslim women had said they wanted the media to take them more seriously.

She also complained that Muslim women were not so well represented in the workplace. Only 24% of Bangladeshi and Pakistani women in Britain are employed, compared to 70% of women overall. Has Kelly not considered that these women, many of whom are engaged full-time in procreation, often at tax-payers' expense, would rather receive government handouts to make babies than have a career?

It appears that Kelly is embarking on some PC mission to convince local groups that they can change society. Earlier this week, Kelly told "community groups" in Birmingham that the Labour party must reform or lose the next general election. Epolitix reported that she said: "From being reluctant decentralisers, we have reached a tipping point. We must now instinctively hand down power unless there is a good case not to....All this is part of a new era of shifting power, not just to the town hall, but also from the town hall to local communities."

"I am committed to bringing forward proposals which deliver devolution to the doorstep, putting more power into the hands of local people than we have ever seen."

She promised to make it easier for people to challenge local council decisions and to own or run facilities such as community halls, libraries and sports centres.

The decision to "empower" local people does not mean an increase of individual rights. What it means, like placing a few token Muslimahs in hijabs on the telly, is giving in to special interest groups. I lived and worked in the extreme left borough of Hackney for 20 years from 1976 to 1998. During that time I worked for many "community groups" who were sponsored by local government, as well as the (now disbanded) Inner London Education Authority.

Throughout the 1980s, any minority interest group could apply to Hackney Council and get funding. It began with racial groups, and then any so-called "minority" group started bleeding the system for any free hand-outs available. It began with black groups who claimed falsely to represent their own community, then it went to gender segregated groups, such as Irish women's support centers, and before I left London, the latest additions to the free-loaders were lesbian and gay teenager groups and gypsies' rights groups.

But the people who ran these groups represented no-one but themselves. The "Caribbean Development Fund", run by one Bilal Amin, a black Muslim from Trinidad, was a prime example. I was commissioned in 1984 to produce posters to advertise courses for this group, which I did. It then turned out that the courses were never going to take place. But Bilal Amin, who received a grant and lived in the house which doubled as the "Caribbean Development Foundation", only wanted posters, to prove to the Council that it merited funding.

Several years later in the 1990s, a black artist I knew went with a group of delinquent young people to Trinidad, funded by Hackney Council and "organised" by the Caribbean Development Foundation, to enable these ethnic youth to "rediscover" their roots. Whether they originally came from Trinidad, Jamaica or Guyana was an irrelevance. Once in Trinidad, my friend had to endure Bilal Amin knocking on her hotel room door, demanding sex. When she shouted at him, he threatened violence. She went to the police, who said that he and his family were well-known as "trouble-makers". She left on a plane and returned to Britain.

I only cite Bilal Amin and the Caribbean Development Foundation as one example of many I experienced first-hand in Hackney, a microcosm of a failed socialist state.

Empowering local people never means what it says. Most people cannot be bothered to attend council meetings, or going to Labour party fundraising events, just to have their say on whether libraries are open or not. They just want to be able to go to a library, a swimming pool, to have their drains maintained and to have clean streets, without getting involved with the Byzantine effluvium of local politics.

The people who do take the time to attend such tiresome meetings are usually paid by a charity or special interest group (often ultimately funded by the taxpayer) to do so. Local government organs are riddled with corruption. Hackney Council claimed to be the poorest borough in Britain, but managed to annually fritter away its funds on useless special interest groups.

Hackney Council is one example of local government trying to appear to be all things to all people, representing every special interest group it can find. and its management was removed and replaced on several occasions because of corruption and mismanagement.

For Labour to now advocate such "power to local people" is a step down the road to the squandering of resources and the apotheosis of local egotists from any minority who step up and claim to be a "representative".

Democracy is about letting all people contribute to deciding a group of representatives, not devolving everything down to the unelected head of a local mosque or some self-styled spokesman for disabled vegetarian whale-lovers to decide policies which affect everyone.

Already Labour is undergoing a leadership crisis, with Blair saying he will step down within a year. Many of Labour's policies are influenced by the think-tank Demos. The new head of Demos is Madeleine Bunting, who is about as PC as they come. She is totally behind groups like the Muslim Council for Britain, as is evidenced HERE, where she slags off Pope Benedict, and HERE where she praises the terror-supporting Muslim Council, and brands its critics as Islamophobes.

Already the Muslim Council for Britain has influenced government policy, as in its successful pressuring of the government to abandon its plans to outlaw forced marriage, which it did in June. It should be an affront to any democratic values Labour claims to espouse to legally allow young girls to be forced to marry someone against their wishes. But this is the way of the Labour party in Britain.

As Robert Redeker said in Le Figaro: "intellectuals embody the outlook of the Koran, as they embodied the outlook of Moscow yesterday. They excommunicate people for Islamophobia, as yesterday they did for anti-communism."

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office currently employs a 26-year old "former" Muslim radical called Mockbul Ali to run its "Engaging with the Islamic World Group", at a cost to the taxpayers of £8.5 million ($15,165,723) per year. This group is actively trying to engage with Islamists, in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood. It recently spent money on entertaining Muslim representatives at a luxury hotel in Turkey, hosting a conference on Islam which was not of any benefit to the UK taxpayers who funded it. And Yusuf Qaradawi, who wants homosexuals killed and supports terrorist bombings in Israel was also placed in a luxury hotel - all at a cost of £300,000 ($550,863) - by the "Engaging with the Islamic World Group". Why?

One must never forget that Tony Blair's Labour government, despite its valid support of the USA, evolved from its origins as an extreme socialist party. Ruth Kelly, with her devout Catholic upbringing, is not advocating more Christian representation in the media, as that would be politically incorrect. She is advocating more Islamic representation, because, as Redeker states, it is the duty of Christians to put others first. But this is also the actions of blind leftist socialism.

Instead of having strong principles and values of its own, Labour is devolving issues to others again, passing the buck. And with this lack of a basic political philosophy, other than "someone else can do our job better than we can", the voters will find that the decisions they expected to be made by government which affect them will be made by some "advisory panel".

Ruth Kelly wants more hijabs on TV? Is she is an executive of a TV company? When Muslims comprise only 3% of the population, what do the other 97% of the population want on their telly? Hopefully her words will be treated as the vacuous inanities that they really are. What about the stamp-collectors in Britain? Why are they not represented on the television? Or people who like masturbation? (Sorry I forgot. Channel 4 is showing a "Wankathon" this month).

A poll last year showed that two thirds of Britains saw themselves as Christians, though only 17% attended Church regularly. 75% of respondents thought the UK should keep its Christian values. So if Ruth Kelly wants to see news presenters and others wearing hijabs, what about Christian programming? Currently there is little Christian programming on TV, and perhaps that is a good thing, considering the appalling standards of the fare currently on offer. There is a hymn-singing show which has been in existence since the 1960s every Sunday on BBC, and recently there was a series, laden with computer graphics, about "Christ's life". And who presented the show? Rageh Omar, a Muslim.

If one includes the programs about Muslim terrorism, the constant featuring of Muslims in news stories, and the awful imam-hosted rubbish on Channel 4 called "Shariah TV", I would have thought that Muslims are already over-represented on Britain's terrestrial TV stations.

Labour has lost its direction. Civil servants are dictated to by some 26-year old Islamist upstart, and Labour turns a blind eye. The Tories are no better. David Cameron, the newly appointed leader of the Conservatives, chose the anniversary of 9/11 to announce that Britain should move away from its "slavish ties" to the United States.

What Britain does not need is more power to local groups, nor does it need to devolve its duties of government. It needs party leaders who put the needs of Britain and the "free world" first. For too long, the rights of minorities are placed above the rights of others. In law, all are equal. Mudering a fat person is no different to murdering a Muslim, Buddhist or vegetarian. So if people are equal in law, why not in politics too? The pandering to minorities such as Muslims is not even a case of proportional representation.

With 3% of the population being Muslim, the government should accord Muslims the same rights that citizenship entitles to every person. But Muslims, (and gays, vegetarians, Buddhists and stamp collectors), should be given no more privileges or labels of "special status" than others receive. To accord them special rights is to go against the grain of democracy, and to take Britain down the road to ruin.

Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at September 21, 2006 10:32 AM

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Posted by: radishthegreat at September 21, 2006 11:42 AM

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