BUT WHAT DOES "MULTICULTURISM" MEAN

29 March 2024

LINK

 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/03/28/dame-sara-khan-radicalisation-post-october-7-hizb-ut-tahrir/

Is this realistic?

SUMMARY OF THE ARTICLE

1. Government Preparedness and Radicalisation

Dame Sara Khan, in her role as the UK's adviser for social cohesion, critiqued the government's delayed response to radicalisation following the October 7 events. Her report draws connections between the Israel-Gaza conflict and a rise in extremism within the UK, exacerbated by societal tensions and misinformation.

2. Approach to Protests and Dialogue

Khan advocates for a nuanced approach to handling protests, challenging simplifications of pro-Palestinian demonstrations as hate-driven. She underscores the importance of dialogue and leadership in fostering unity.

3. Personal Experience and Commitment

Reflecting on her personal journey combating extremism, Khan emphasizes the critical need for government action to address societal fractures and safeguard democracy.

4. Evidence-based Arguments

Khan's report and observations are based on her extensive work and personal experiences  Her arguments favour a proactive and inclusive government strategy.

COMMENT

SEMITE

An issue with the article is that the journalist throws around "anti-semitic" as the main cause of the UK being a divided society now, divided against itself, but doesn't define the term. Many terms are bandied about, but we can't discuss the piece without first reaching agreement on a "glossary of terms".

No-one is anti-semitic, there is no such problem. Semite has a meaning and it isn't a synonym for Jew.

A Semite is an individual belonging to any of the various ancient and modern peoples originating from the Middle East, migrating to North Africa, including those who speak Semitic languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Amharic. 

"Anti-semitic" can only mean against people from MENA (Middle-East and North Africa) or WANA if you prefer (West Asia and North Africa).

Rather than "anti-Semitic, don't most people really mean "anti-Zionist", possibly "anti-Israeli", but there are many Arab-Israelis. Try "anti the government of Israel's policies".

IDEOLOGY

We are talking an ideology. An ideology is a comprehensive set of beliefs, values, and ideas that outlines how society should work and offers some political and cultural blueprint for a certain social order. It's a system of thought that explains and justifies certain social arrangements, guiding political, economic, and social actions. Ideologies can be broad, encompassing theories about the world and the society we live in, or they can be more focused, dealing with specific issues like environmentalism or feminism.

MULTICULTURISM

Then, there is the failure of "multiculturism". Again, it's missing a definition, so how can there be any discussion? ... Sure enough, there's only misunderstanding, confusion and hate.

Multiculturalism means the co-existence of different cultures. 

CULTURE

Culture is a way of thinking and communicating about self and other - it leads to "identity politics", which is "the politics of hate". In this context, culture is beliefs, values, what you might call  "ritualistic" or customary behaviours, shared within a group and the group itself is largely defined as racial or religious (but includes converts, sympathisers...marchers?).

So this well educated and well-intentioned person Mrs Khan is trying to make multiculturalism work, while others say it is an idea that has failed.

FEAR AND GREED

There are alternatives to multiculturalism. Maybe first of all we should understand why it might have failed and the reason is not to do with the politics of hate, which is just a manifestation of its failure, it is really about the politics of fear and greed, the wellspring of all mammalian instinctive emotions, deep below the civilisation line, seemingly beyond the reach of reason.

GROUP

One group feels threatened by another and this sense of threat or predation is often justifiably and demonstrably true.

ALTERNATIVE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN GROUPS

There are alternatives to multiculturism and the relationship between groups varies in each definition, in terms of how much they emphasise cultural assimilation, integration, segregation, expulsion or genocide. Somewhere in those alternatives are colonisation and apartheid.

POWER STRUCTURES

Equality or dominance? Together or apart?

A SIMPLE PERSPECTIVE

To rehash the above.

For Europe. France is 9% muslim, the UK half that. The least is Spain, maybe 2%, the most Russia, 10%.

Multiculturism is the coexistence of different religious or ethic cultures within one country.

A culture is a set of beliefs, values and behaviours.

The idea of multiculturism is peaceful co-existence within the same country or nation-state. Nationalism.

I don't have any KPIs to measure any of the above !!!

But what is noticeable, according to me, is how well multi-culturism works. It is very successful. There is very little trouble, though what there is fills the broadsheets and some incidents are grave. 

Just like multi-classism works.

It all works, up till now, in spite of everything you read.

Most people only notice the disruptors, the small minorities with big claims. The Islamists. The Dues. The  Extreme Marxists. The Extreme Fascists. The ideologues.

Small minorities making a lot of trouble for Great Silent Majorities.

The alternatives to Multiculturists (multicultural peaceful co-existence is the rainbow nation) are Separatists (apartheid), Deportists (ship them to Rwanda, send back the Illegals), Cleansers (murder them), Melting Pottists ( (Intergrationists, plasticinists).

è

The status quo is Multiculturism.

The response to troublemakers is to beat them.

Listening is too tiresome.

Which is best?

THE ARTICLE

‘We knew radicalisation was going to happen after October 7 – the Government was behind the curve’

Dame Sara Khan, the UK’s adviser for social cohesion, explains how the extremism she witnessed as a child has gone mainstream

Lizzie Dearden

28 March 2024 • 7:13pm

Dame Sara Khan was appointed as the government's Independent Adviser for Social Cohesion and Resilience in 2021

The hatred, extremism and division coursing through the UK as a result of the Israel-Gaza conflict did not come as a shock to Dame Sara Khan, the Government’s independent adviser for social cohesion. She saw the consequences coming as soon as Hamas launched its bloody rampage on October 7, and thinks ministers should have too.

“It was pretty obvious that it would have a radicalising effect, that it would feed hate crime and growing levels of extremism in our society,” she says. “And when it did there was no infrastructure in place to deal with it.”

I meet Khan in a small, glass-walled meeting room inside the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, where, in a wine-coloured trouser suit and pink blouse, she is by far the most colourful person in sight.

It is just days after the release of her official report – Threats to Social Cohesion and Democratic Resilience – the 150-page culmination of three years of work, and she says her “brain is mush”.

But Khan is clear and unflinching in her assessment of the toxic soup of issues causing what she fears is the “internal fragmentation” of democracy, not just in Britain but around the world. She found the dangerous climate of threats and intimidation towards MPs to be part of a wider picture of harassment affecting local councils, academics, journalists and even artists.

The Israel-Gaza conflict is assessed to be just one contributing factor, alongside anger over the cost-of-living crisis, polarisation on social media, disinformation, conspiracy theories and the “mainstreaming of extremism”.

This is not the first time conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has reverberated on Britain’s streets. Weeks after Khan took up her role as social cohesion adviser in early 2021, tasked with examining extremism across the UK and drawing up plans to combat it, violence broke out in Jerusalem and spiralled into a war between Israel and Hamas.

In under two weeks, monitoring groups had recorded a 500 per cent increase in anti-Semitic incidents and a 430 per cent rise in reports of anti-Muslim hatred in Britain.

The UK has seen a significant spike in anti-Semitic incidents, such as these defaced flyers of Israeli hostages in Waterloo

The UK has seen a significant spike in anti-Semitic incidents, such as these defaced flyers of Israeli hostages in Waterloo CREDIT: Richard Baker

When Khan spoke to Jewish and Muslim groups at that time, she recalls that “everyone was saying that it was inevitable”. They had seen it before time and time again, with every outbreak of conflict in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories directly causing waves of hate crime and spiking tensions in the UK.

The current war is longer, bloodier and more destructive than ever before, making the international consequences more severe and threatening to become what counter-terror police call a “generational radicalising moment”.

Khan says the Government should have learned from the fallout of these previous conflicts, and is now battling to put “sticking plasters” on worsening hatred and radicalisation as a result.

“We knew these tensions were there, we knew something like this was going to happen and the Government was behind the curve,” she says.

“They should have got ahead of this, thinking: ‘What can we do now to ensure that we can mitigate against a potential conflict that is going to cause serious disruption on our own streets?’ There is no adequate infrastructure to really deal with this issue.”

While ministers have called for police to crack down on pro-Palestinian protests which have seen small numbers of participants accused of hate crimes and terror offences, Khan says they should instead be looking “upstream” and trying to bring different sides together.

Khan defends the pro-Palestinian regular demonstrations as 'largely peaceful'

Khan defends the pro-Palestinian regular demonstrations as 'largely peaceful' 

She rejects former home secretary Suella Braverman’s labelling of regular demonstrations demanding a ceasefire as “hate marches”, saying the characterisation “flies in the face of the evidence”.

“It’s just not true,” says Khan. “Overwhelmingly, these are largely peaceful marches that are being attended by a whole range of different people from different backgrounds, different faiths, and for all kinds of different reasons.”

While Khan agrees that “of course the police should step in” where there is anti-Semitic chanting, incitement of hatred or other criminal offences being committed, she believes it is “simplistic” to tar thousands of demonstrators with the same brush.

“There’s got to be a space where we can allow people to come together and find a constructive way of coming to some kind of common ground,” she says. “That requires leadership from all sides, and I think we need to see more of that.”

But the issue currently giving her sleepless nights is the worsening “serious disillusionment with democracy amongst the British people”, with polling showing trust in the Government and core institutions plummeting, as fewer people participate in elections and wider politics.

'We're a diverse democracy, there are going to be tensions across all backgrounds'

Khan: 'We're a diverse democracy, there are going to be tensions across all backgrounds' 

Research shows that such trends make people “more likely to turn to authoritarian or anti-democratic worldviews”, Khan says. “It means that extremists are able to infiltrate the mainstream a lot more, and we could lose precious democratic rights and freedoms.

“That’s something that I really worry about, especially when I see that there isn’t a strategic approach to deal with it. It just seems like we can see it all happening – we can see the car crash, but we’re not putting our foot down on the brake and doing something about it.”

Khan has been trying to put the brakes on hatred and division within British society for a long time. As a young Muslim, growing up in Bradford, she was shocked by the way the recently-banned Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir tried to radicalise girls and boys as young as 13.

“My father used to come back with leaflets from the mosque from Hizb ut-Tahrir, saying ‘This is a really toxic organisation – they’re completely the opposite of everything I’ve taught you about being patriotic and contributing positively to this country’,” she recalls.

Hizb ut-Tahir organised a protest outside the Egyptian Embassy in London calling on Muslim armies to defend Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem

Hizb ut-Tahir protested outside the Egyptian Embassy in London, November 2023, calling on Muslim armies to defend Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem 

Khan’s father had emigrated to the UK from Pakistan in the 1960s, initially working in a grocery shop before moving into insurance, and instilled in his four children “a real opposition to Islamist extremism and the dangers that it posed”. 

When Khan was growing up, she saw teenage girls in her community being forced into marriage. “That just does something to you,” she says.

Together with her sister and two brothers, she attended a private secondary school and she went on to complete a pharmacy degree at the University of Manchester, before gaining a master’s in human rights from the Institute of Commonwealth Studies.

She was working as a hospital pharmacist when London was bombed by al-Qaeda-inspired terrorists on July 7 2005. That attack – the deadliest Jihadist assault in British history – was a “defining moment” and she pledged, from that moment, to dedicate herself to countering Islamist extremism.

“The idea of young British Muslims carrying out a domestic attack and murdering fellow citizens was just absolutely horrific,” she says. “My professional life in this type of work started from that point.”

Now 44, she has been fighting extremism for almost two decades, having co-founded the women-led charity Inspire in 2008. Its mission, to combat Islamist radicalisation and gender inequality, appeared uncontroversial but drew hostility from extremists. 

“We got an incredible amount of abuse,” she recalls. “I was living with daily threats and it was predominantly coming from Islamist extremists in this country, and people who are sympathetic to those narratives.”

Khan faced continual threats from extremist groups who tried to 'cancel' her 

Khan faced continual threats from extremist groups who tried to 'cancel' her for her anti-radicalisation activism 

Khan, who had two young children at the time, was advised by police on security measures including changing her routes to work and school and coming off social media.

“There were Islamist extremist groups portraying me as a traitor to Islam,” she says. “People would spread crazy, ridiculous conspiracy theories just to try and damage my reputation and smear me to such an extent that nobody would listen to anything I said.”

The abuse hit a peak when the Islamic State was at its zenith a decade ago, drawing hundreds of Brits to its self-declared caliphate in Syria and Iraq. Few would return.

Khan says it felt “totally insane” to receive threats for trying to stop young people being brainwashed by a terrorist group, but that extremists continued trying to “cancel” her.

Asked if she considered stopping her work, she says the “Yorkshire stubborn lass part of me” would not let her, adding: “I just thought ‘No one is going to tell me what to do. I’m not going to have anyone dictate to me. I’m not going to let those guys try and stop me from playing my part for our country’.”

With the support of her husband, who is a lawyer, she kept going, being appointed as the government’s new Commissioner for Countering Extremism in 2018 and awarded a damehood for her services in the 2022 New Year Honours list.

Over her three-year tenure, the commission released a wave of reports examining different threats and calling for structural and legal changes to stop extremists of all kinds “operating with impunity”. The Government did not respond to any of those reports, including a core 2019 review that formulated a new definition of “hateful extremism”, and Khan is frustrated that she has never been given an explanation for the silence.

She accuses the Government of having a “wider cultural problem”, where it repeatedly commissions independent reviews but then “leaves them to just gather dust on a shelf”. 

“I don’t think that’s acceptable at all,” Khan says. “That’s not treating the British public with the respect that they deserve, where the Government is paying independent figures to deliver a piece of work and then ignoring all their recommendations.”

The controversial definition of extremism unveiled by Communities Secretary Michael Gove this month was markedly different to Khan’s recommendations, and she claims that she has not been consulted on the wider work the Communities Secretary promised would “marginalise extremist groups and to support and strengthen the communities where extremists are most active and spreading division”.

Speaking to the Telegraph, Gove said he fears that some people with extremist outlooks have used links to state institutions 'both to gain legitimacy, but also to influence the way in which we operate'

As a general election approaches and political tensions rise, Khan is pleading for MPs not to do extremists’ work for them by engaging in “culture wars” and using inflammatory and divisive language.

“Politicians have the power to bring people together, but they also have the power to inflame and divide people,” she warns. “I think we’ve got to be very careful that certain extremist narratives and ideologies don’t infiltrate the mainstream. We’ve got to be better than that.”

Khan strongly disagrees with the former home secretary’s claim that multiculturalism has failed, after Braverman used a speech in the US in September to label migration as “too much, too quick, with too little thought given to integration and the impact on social cohesion”.

She dismisses multiculturalism as a dated concept and argues that the divisions currently dominating British society are “not because of migrants”. “We’re a diverse democracy, there are going to be tensions across all backgrounds,” Khan says. “There are tensions between people of different political opinions, there are people who have different opinions on a class basis. There are so many fault lines now.”

What we don’t need, she says, is politicians stirring things up for their own ends. 

“They’re looking at it in terms of gaining power in the short term, but it has long term consequences in the rest of society,” she warns. “This is not just about the election and who wins power. It has long term ramifications on the rest of society.”