Yet another hugely unpopular public spending announcement – likely to have the exact opposite effect to the one they intend – finds the city council proposing to fork out £80,000 of our money on a survey to help Muslims “integrate into the Bristol community”.
This daft and unnecessary proposal may have the unique attribute of both managing to upset Muslims – who might just be a little of wary of the state banging on their door asking a series of questions – and the wider community who might not see this as a spending priority for our cash-strapped council.
However, this survey must be done, we’re told, to get “a better picture of the estimated 30,000 people in the Somali, Pakistani, Bosnian and other Muslim communities living in Bristol.”
And in a further proof that the lunatics appear to have set up an equalities team with a media monitoring unit in the asylum, the council have also announced that they will be spending yet more money producing a 37-page “myth-busting” glossy leaflet to dispel “common misunderstandings” we’re told we hold about Islam and to point out to us its unique contribution to British culture.
Let’s hope this leaflet is a little more sophisticated than the council’s 5 myths about Islam leaflet currently doing the rounds that can be viewed here (pdf).
The leaflet seems to largely consist of ‘straw man’ statements that nobody actually believes anyway, which the city council’s in-house equalities team can then expertly disprove for us.
Hence we’re spoon fed “myths” like “Muslims worship a different God from Jews and Christians” – despite the fact very few people actually think this – just so the council can set us straight.
On some of those trickier “myths” like “Islam oppresses women, condones wife-beating, forced marriage and honour killings” we find the council taking a different tack and resorting to academic ruses from the cultural studies department in their efforts to persuade us to tolerate intolerance.
So the equalities team assures us that any apparent sexism you might equate with Islam is no such thing at all. It is in fact simply “the result of male-biased, cultural misinterpretations and a lack of understanding of Islam by some Muslims.”
So that’s all right then.
However, the “myth” that really caught The Blogger’s attention was this one: “There is no such thing as ‘Islamic terrorism'”.
No argument there really. Technically this is an objectively true statement, although it is also a misleading one as there certainly is such a thing as ‘islamist terrorism’, which the council’s leaflet fails to mention at all.
Another statement from the council seems determined to confound the issue even further:
“Data from the EU Terrorism Situation and Trend Report of 2007 for Europol (European Law Enforcement Organisation), shows that of the 498 reported terrorist attacks across Europe in 2006, only one was carried out by a Muslim.”
Is there no Islamist terror threat then? Can we conclude attacks such as 9/11, the Madrid bombings, 7/7 and the attempted attacks last summer in the UK were nothing to do with Muslims? Perhaps the media – a clear target of criticism and derision in the council’s leaflet – have just made it all up to sell newspapers?
But if – as the bulk of evidence strongly suggests – Islamists are involved in terrorism, why is a leaflet funded by the tax payer doing its best to make it appear otherwise? Does our council think this kind of confusing and misleading information is helpful?
To whom exactly?
It appears no one has the balls to reply on this blog.
What ,yet another complete waste of monies – monies that could make a difference in so many other areas of our great city.
Me, I could do a shit-load of integrating with 80,000 !
The only way we can help with their integrating is to give up Alcohol, pork , sex outside of marriage. For the female population of Bristol “to dress with modesty,arms , head & legs covered, wearing pre-scribed styles of outer clothing” and go back on gay rights. Until numbers are sufficient for that to start to happen they’re going to have to protect themselves from our culture, however well meaning. It doesn’t need £80,000 to tell them that!
HERE,HERE TLB.
all in the name of god, religious dogmatic, overtly political groups are a pile of wank. not all muslims are nut jobs. but the council statement is a sack of shit brushing over obviously fucked up problems which wont help, more democracy would help. less of an alienating system would be a good un too. theres so much institutional segregation going on . the fact that the state spends 80,000 pounds just like that for one group of people for a fucking survey shows us where we are. COMPLETE WASTE OF MONEY INIT
We do those same types of things here, but they are institutionalized – stuff like welfare, food stamps and low-interest loans for start up businesses to promote immigrant independence. Most of the cash earned is sent back to the countries of origin, on and on. I’m all for opportunity and integration into society. Equity is elusive. You still get a shopping cart up yer ass in queue at the grocery because foreign custom allows it and our society finds it offensive. So integrate already and when in Rome…..???
Touchy subject – 99% of the people that need to be educated about Muslims in Bristol also need proper information about other non-white people in general. I don’t think a leaflet will help that.
Integration comes with socialising and communication and understanding, and again: leaflets won’t do that. The folk that don’t know about anything different from their lives don’t want to know, they don’t like anything that deviates from their norm and that’s the way it will always be. Goes across colour/religion, it’s an ingrained habit that is hard to break. It’s sad, and even sadder that that amount of money has been spent on nothing.
I wonder where the expensively produced leaflets/surveys to help Sikhs and Hindus integrate are?
Any group that makes enough noise will get money chucked at them.
Apart from people who want to use Bristol’s public transport, of course.
Yeah I’m all for “community engagement” type initiatives but this is truely one of the worst ideas I’ve ever heard.
“We’re not sure what to do with them, so let’s count them.”
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Belatedly, the reason for this exercise becomes clear:
Via The Guardian:
Hazel Blears, is distributing £45m over the next three years for local communities to build resilience to violent extremism.
In the first year the funds will only be distributed to areas with a Muslim population of more than 4,000 based on 2001 census data. “This data is now 6-7 years old and given high population growth in Muslim communities is likely to be fairly out-of-date,” says the internal Whitehall correspondence adding that each qualifying local authority will receive a fixed minimum allocation with increments dependent on the size of its Muslim population.
Reading the Guardian now James?!!!
Actually I saw this too. No doubt Bristol’s money will be distributed through our old friends GOSW who have quite a lot of form at throwing money around in the inner city to little effect.
It’ll also be interesting to see which “moderate” Muslim organisations get the cash. For instance I wonder how much will go to the Bristol Muslim Cultural Society?
Last week in the Evening Post, of course, their boss compared the State of Israel to the Nazis and suggested that Europeans (all of ’em!) showed a pattern of genocidal behaviour.
This week he’s claiming Pakistanis aren’t “politically involved” in this country because only six turned up to a meeting about Pakistan organised by a group promoting a Leninist-style anti-imperialist foreign policy that includes support for the Iraqi insurgents, Hamas and Hezbollah among others.
Shouldn’t it be a matter of some relief, rather than regret, that British Muslims aren’t buying in to this kind of politics?