2010-08-04 Independent: Christina Patterson

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Olen tyokeikalla Manchesterissa ja hotellin tulee Independent. Viime viikolla liitteessa oli artikkeli josta ajattelin heti etta "tuosta tulee sanomista". Ja on tullutkin.

Viime viikkoinen:

Christina Patterson: The limits of multi-culturalism

When I first moved to Stamford Hill, I didn't realise that goyim were about as welcome in Hasidic Jewish shops as Martin Luther King at a Klu Klux Klan convention

Tamanpaivainen:

Christina Patterson: We need to talk about integration

Never mind the deficit, multiculturalism is the biggest challenge we face. In a globalised world, what kind of society to be? This is not about race but culture

Vaikuttaa muutenkin harvinaisen fiksulta ihmiselta: Men: the latest endangered species.

Nuo kaksi artikkelia kokonaisuudessaan:

Christina Patterson: The limits of multi-culturalism

When I first moved to Stamford Hill, I didn't realise that goyim were about as welcome in Hasidic Jewish shops as Martin Luther King at a Klu Klux Klan convention

I would like to teach some of my neighbours some manners. I would like, for example, to say to the man who drove the wrong way up a one-way street on Sunday night, while chatting away on his mobile phone, and to the man who nearly backed into me yesterday, while also chatting on his mobile phone, and to the man who drove into my friend's van last week, while also chatting on his mobile phone, that while they clearly enjoy the art of conversation, it's one that doesn't combine brilliantly with driving.


And I would like to say to the man who drove the wrong way into the car park at Morrisons, and then hooted me, and who parked in a mother and baby slot when he was on his own, and the car park was practically empty, that it seemed a rather aggressive thing to do, and also rather lazy, and I would like to say to the man from whom I bought some paper cups, and who handled my money as if it had been dipped in anthrax, that it wouldn't kill him to say "please" or "thank you", and I would like to say to the fishmonger who asked my (black) friend whether he really wanted to buy some fish from his shop, that you should probably assume that if someone is asking for fish in your shop, then the answer is in the affirmative.

And I would like to say to the little boy who sat bang in the middle of two seats on the bus and who, when I tried to sit next to him, leapt up as if infection from the ebola virus was imminent, that it does slightly make one feel like a pariah, and I would like to say to the women who roam the streets with double-decker pushchairs and vast armies of children, that it's sometimes nice to allow someone else to get past, and I would like to say to all these people that I don't care if they wear frock-coats, and funny suits and hats covered in plastic bags, and insist on wearing their hair in ringlets (if they're male) or covered up by wigs (if they're female), but I do think they could treat their neighbours with a bit more courtesy and just a little bit more respect.

When I moved to Stamford Hill, 12 years ago, I didn't realise that goyim were about as welcome in the Hasidic Jewish shops as Martin Luther King at a Klu Klux Klan convention. I didn't realise that a purchase by a goy was a crime to be punished with monosyllabic terseness, or that bus seats were a potential source of contamination, or that road signs, and parking restrictions, were for people who hadn't been chosen by God. And while none of this is a source of anything much more than irritation, when I see an eight-year-old boy recoiling from a normal-looking woman (because, presumably, he has been taught that she is dirty or dangerous, or, heaven forbid, dripping with menstrual blood) it makes me sad.

It also makes me sad to see the three-year-olds in hijab, who want, of course, to look like Mummy (all three-year-olds want to look like Mummy) but who, in any case, soon won't have much choice, and who are being taught that their tiny bodies, and their lovely hair, are things to be protected from the male gaze. It makes me sad to see young women in the niqab. I accept that some of them choose to wear it because they, too, have absorbed the message that they are a walking sexual provocation, and that this way they can shield themselves, and preserve themselves "as a precious jewel" for their husband, and maybe reclaim an identity that they don't want to lose, and maybe even stick two fingers up at a country which is, according to new leaks this week, bombing quite a lot of their innocent brothers and sisters, and maybe even, get some (secretly enjoyable) attention. I accept all this, but it still makes me sad.

(The young women, by the way, who were asked to leave that bus last week, might remember that Russell Square isn't a place that has great associations for any bus driver, and that they're living in a country in which covering your face has traditionally been a practice undertaken by criminals and terrorists and people who have something to hide, and that if they choose to dress this way, they might expect to be treated with some suspicion, just as women wearing shorts in a Middle Eastern country might expect to be treated like prostitutes.)

All these things make me sad, but I accept that people should, except in certain professional situations which involve dealing with the public, be allowed to wear whatever they like, and that laws which prevent this are self-defeating, and that you can't stop parents, or rabbis, teaching little boys that adult women shouldn't even be brushed against on a bus, and I accept that some of these things are an inevitable consequence of a modern, and in many ways magnificent, multi-cultural society.

But there's one thing I will never accept. In the next few weeks, between 500 and 2,000 British schoolgirls – yes, British schoolgirls – will be sent abroad, ostensibly on holiday, and taken to the home of a woman who will, using an often dirty razor, and no anaesthetic, slice off their labia, and clitoris, and then, using sewing thread or horse-hair and an often dirty needle, stitch their vaginas closed. Sometimes, the girls faint. Sometimes, they die. But the people who do this to them (in East Africa and India and Pakistan and the Middle East) believe that it's what God wants. They believe that it promotes "cleanliness" and "chastity". Oh, and men's sexual pleasure. But not, for obvious reasons, women's.

Female circumcision has been illegal in Britain since 1985. Since 2003, it has also been illegal to take girls out of the country to have them "cut" abroad. The maximum penalty is 14 years. So far, there have been no prosecutions. Not a single one. I don't care if evidence is difficult to get, and I don't care if parents think they're doing the right thing for their children, and I don't care if it's a "sensitive" issue. This is a total and utter disgrace. Parents are being allowed to mutilate their children, and the institutions in this country are doing sweet FA.

There is, I'm sure, nothing in the Koran to indicate that hacking off a girl's labia is an all-round great idea, just as there's nothing in the Torah to say that Volvos should always be driven with a mobile phone in hand, and goyim should be treated with contempt. People will believe what they believe, but a civilised society will have laws to indicate what is acceptable in that society and what isn't, and it will act on those laws. A properly civilised society would also ensure that children are not subject to the crazed whims of their parents, and hived off into "faith schools" where they're taught that the world was created in seven days, or that they need special gadgets to switch on the lights on a Saturday, or that women who show their face are sluts.

A properly civilised society would accept that while lovely little C of E schools were once an excellent place for children to learn about the religion that shaped their culture, art and laws, you can't have them without having the madrassa run by the mad mullah next door, and therefore, sadly, you can't have either, but have, instead, a system of compulsory state secular education, in which children learn to get on with people from all religious backgrounds and none, and are taught about all religions, but also that the culture of the country they're living in was, for 2,000 years, largely based on one.

But we, alas, are living in a country whose government believes that schools should be "free" – free to abandon the national curriculum, free to adopt any damned framework they fancy – and that parents should be free, with no state intervention at all, to teach their children whatever sexist, racist, dangerous, violent and yes, ill-mannered, nonsense that they like.

Christina Patterson: We need to talk about integration

Never mind the deficit, multiculturalism is the biggest challenge we face. In a globalised world, what kind of society to be? This is not about race but culture

Call me Hitler. Call me Joan of Arc. But you probably won't, to echo Melville in Moby-Dick, want to call me Ishmael. In the week since I wrote a column about "the limits of multiculturalism", I've been called an awful lot of things. A "stupid, vile bitch", "a bigoted toe-rag", a racist and an anti-Semite. The blogosphere, according to colleagues, has gone mad, and so has the twittersphere, and so has the nuttersphere, or whatever it is you call the message boards.


Since I don't spend my days prowling the internet for mentions of my name, I missed most of it, which is probably just as well. But I didn't miss my inbox. I have never known anything like it. All week, the emails have poured in. A (from his punctuation) young (and from his name) Muslim man accused me of "Muzzie-bashing". An older (or more literate) one plumped for its politer sister, "Islamophobia". Two Pakistani doctors, in impeccably courteous prose, expressed their outrage that I mentioned Pakistan in relation to female genital mutilation. (They're right that it's not widespread there, but it does take place.)

One man, with what a social worker would call "anger-management issues", and what my mother would call a very limited vocabulary, demanded proof that some of the people I'd mentioned were Jewish. The frock-coats, hats and ringlets were, I told him, a bit of a clue, though they could, it's true, be a clever red herring. But why not call me a liar, too? And, indeed, the many residents, and former residents, of Stamford Hill, who added their stories to my own? (There was the woman who was told, in a well-stocked butcher, that there wasn't any meat. There was the journalist who was knocked off his bike by a Hasid in a Volvo, who then drove over it and away. And there was the young council worker who tried, every morning, to greet her neighbours, but in the end gave up. "I just don't understand," she wrote sadly, "why saying 'good morning' to someone who is a neighbour can be so wrong".)

Call them all liars. Particularly the ones who said they were Jews. The one, for example, who said his Hasidic "brethren" drove him "crazy"; the one who grew up in there in the Thirties, and no longer felt welcome, and the one who wrote that he was "raised Hasidic" and still dressed in "the full garb" but that he "agreed" with my "article". "Hasidim do lack a basic education in manners," he said. "They have many archaic beliefs about Goyim... the worst one of which is the Talmudic statement that every Goy wants to kill you... We are," he said, "actively taught in Cheder that Goyim hate us." He hoped, he added, that I would not "report" on him. Don't kvetch, Lev! Your secret is safe with me.

If criticising some of the social skills of a group of people who bear as much relation to mainstream Judaism as the Amish do to mainstream Christianity is anti-Semitic, then yes, absolutely, call me anti-Semitic. Three people who emailed me didn't use the word, but implied it. (Many in the nuttersphere used much worse.) But of the literally hundreds of emails I've received, only about a dozen have been negative. Two young Moroccan men were keen to express their gratitude. So was a man who signed off his email by saying "in case you're wondering, I ain't Brit n' ain't white either".

The vast majority, as far as I could tell from their names, were British-born and, as far as I could tell from their anguish, the kind of liberal lefties you'd expect to read The Independent, the kind who, if they were unfortunate enough to glimpse a headline of the swan-stealing-immigrant-scrounger variety, would empty their pockets for the Romanian beggar at the ATM.

And they were all practically weeping with relief. One man asked me to marry him. (Sure, but can he afford the dowry?) One woman said she wanted to hug me. Another spoke, a little worryingly, of Joan of Arc. A retired vicar said that he "would be sad" to see the popular C of E primary school in his village go, but that "if that is the price to be paid for preventing the educational segregation of our children, so be it". One woman spoke for nearly all of them when she said: "We are beginning to feel that if we express opposition to any of the views/ideologies/cultures/philosophies of any group from which we differ, we will be branded racist, or anti-religious, and therefore open to be abused." Take it from me, honey: you will.

Never mind the deficit (which won't go on for ever), this is the biggest challenge we face. In a globalised world, with often porous borders, in which our economic good fortune will always be a magnet to those who lack it, and with birth rates in immigrant communities considerably higher than our own, what kind of society are we to be? This is not about race, but culture. If, in a few years, we were all brown, it wouldn't bother me at all. But it would bother me a great deal if a significant proportion of the female population felt they couldn't leave the house without covering their face, or if more young women were being murdered by their relatives for sullying the "honour" of their family, or if more young men were married to young women from another country they've never met.

What we're talking about, of course, is fundamentalism. Which, under the laissez-faire Labour years, has flourished. And so, at a time when mainstream British society has passed laws to ensure that homosexuals have the same rights as heterosexuals, and women have the same rights as men, and freedom of speech is a basic human right, bigger and bigger swathes of that society are being indoctrinated with the view that homosexuality is a sinful aberration, women can't function without the protection of a man, and plays and novels (and columns and cartoons) must not offend.

This is an impossible intellectual balancing act, and it's going to trip us up. If it's "judgemental" to say that some beliefs are better than others, then let's, please, judge away. Why else did the Almighty/Jehovah/Allah/the-monkeys-from-which-we-evolved give us our brains? I can, as I wrote last week, certainly "tolerate" my neighbours' dress sense and their manners. I will never tolerate their mutilation of their eight-year-old daughter's genitals or their 16-year-old daughter's forced marriage.

Many of our immigrant neighbours could, of course, teach us a thing or two about the importance of community, and of the extended family, hospitality and self-control. (If you want lessons in deferred gratification, talk to a Muslim during Ramadan.) We can always learn from other cultures. Every day (in spite of apparently being Nick Griffin's secret twin) I bless the fortune that allows me to live in the most interesting city in the world. For those who've suggested that I move, I'm sorry, but I won't budge. If the Hasids are sometimes a bit irritating, and the soy-latte-sipping, farmers'-market-frequenting chatterati (of which, no doubt, I'm one) so sanctimonious that it makes you want to slap them, the Africans, Pakistanis, Caribbeans and Kurds make up for it.

Where our "multicultural" society works, it works because people from different ethnic groups live, work and socialise together, and because they fall in love, marry and produce brown Britons. Where it doesn't work is where individual cultures cut themselves off from their neighbours, and insist on interacting only with their own. It's in these cultures that people learn to be suspicious of everything that's different. And it isn't a long journey from suspicion to hate to attack.

We have to work out what kind of society we want, and the most effective way of getting it. To do this, we have to talk about it. If that means we're branded as racists, and bigots, or Islamophobes, or anti-Semites, or even just stupid, vile bitches, then so be it. You can call me what you like. But don't let's call the Brits a bunch of cowards.

[Oluttikka]

Maailma olisi hieno paikka ilman islamia.

Herää kysymys minkä verran Suomesta lähetetään tyttöjä lomamatkalle leikattaviksi ja umpeen ommeltaviksi, noin vaikkapa vuositasolla?