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Politics : Actual left/right wing discussion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (1139)	9/18/2006 5:31:23 AM
From: thames_sider	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10087

If you mean there are towns with very large % Muslim, or areas within cities with very large Muslim %ages, then yes... but these are no more ghettoes than were the concentrations of German or Dutch immigrants into the US in the 19thC. Basically new immigrants tend to congregate together on original arrival in a strange land; and if they have unique cultural or social needs then facilities are likely to be founded to cater for them - specialist shops, places of worship, etc. Saying that "They are ... gathered into ghettoes centered on mosques." mistakes cause and effect - the mosques go there because there are so many people wanting to worship in a mosque. (http://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=22820503) However, unlike the Warsaw ghetto or the similar actual definitions of ghetto, they are not required by any law to live in them, nor marked out by legal requirement. Nor are there shanty-town conditions, gangs of leprous beggars, or whatever... Clusters of immigrants - of all kinds - we have, living in close proximity, and often overcrowded, and maybe a lot of those immgrants are poor. As you'd expect if you have a lot of people without many usable skills and without much money. As for "poorly educated", well, those born here or arriving as children get the same education as anyone else. British Muslims originating from Bangladesh or Pakistan, as a group, do worse than average, along with blacks and the poorer whites: Hindus, other Asians (including e.g. Indian Muslims) and better-off whites do better. In other words, family circumstances and attitude to education dominate. We've recently had a typically cretinous decision by Blair to allow more state-funded religious schools (Muslim, Hindu etc) instead of consigning all such theocratic mumbo to the dustbin of history, so maybe we will see more one-track obsessives focussed on religion at the cost of progress after 1000AD. There is also, at least now, ill will towards the Muslims on the part of many English. Well, no more than there ever was and probably less than (say) the days of PLO terrorism. There was no mindless mob whipped up for war with Iraq, quite the opposite. We're not fooled by Blair's parroting of Cheney's dementia and we don't have little neocon carbuncles releasing purulent poison into our body politic. So again we distinguish cause and effect, and the cause here was basically our invasion of Iraq. As indeed our own maniacs have claimed. For sure, we despise our homegrown nutters but we've always had some and they're just murderous thugs, not some existential threat to all we hold dear. We're not panicky old paranoids cowering under our bedspreads, afraid to fly, terrified by the strange, and we're not the ones whimpering for all the ME to be burnt alive in nuclear annihilation to appease our own madness.