UK: 'I feel like an alien in my home town'

14/01/2008, Telegraph:

It has been more than 40 years since Tim Carbin walked the length of Oak Lane, the Bradford backstreet of his boyhood. Then, when he lived with his grandmother Florence Pawson, a matriarch within the community, his task after school was to run errands ...

"I feel like an alien, like I'm on a street in Karachi," Mr Carbin says, awkwardly.

"I don't feel I have anything in common with this area. It's like I've never been here before. I knew it would be different but I knew, too, that I would feel uncomfortably like I don't belong."

He now lives just 10 miles away, in the north of Bradford. He hasn't returned because Oak Lane, like so many similar areas of so many northern cities, is now an almost exclusive Asian Muslim community.

Mr Carbin is far from a racist, however. Well educated and widely travelled in Muslim countries, he has the utmost respect for the Islamic religion. What is worrying him is that Britain's increasing espousal of multiculturalism has led not to an integrated society but, instead, to ghettoisation, with white-only and Asian-only communities existing cheek by jowl but with little or no common ground. And that, he believes, could have an ominous outcome ...

Britain's "novel philosophy" of multiculturalism, he [Rev Michael] believes, has caused Muslims to lead separate lives, in separate areas, speaking their native languages.

His views have angered many in Muslim communities but, equally, they have struck a chord with many like Mr Corbin.

"This isn't, as the Government would like us to believe, a multicultural society," he says.

"This is pure racial segregation. And it's like this because the Muslim community simply refuses to integrate. So people like me feel like outcasts in our own country."

As Mr Corbin trudges farther along Oak Lane, he passes the tumble-down Anglican church where many of his former neighbours worshipped. Amid the mound of bricks, Sunday school hymn books are strewn ...

"I wish the Muslim community had integrated more, but they didn't. I haven't even been able to get them to join Neighbourhood Watch."

In the surrounding streets, the few white residents willing to talk speak of isolation rather than intimidation. One said he had had several members of the Asian community knocking on his door, asking if he wanted to sell his home.

"At face value, that seems innocuous," he says. "But others believe it was a message saying I should get out."

Another tells of how his father, an electrician, parked his van in the area only to have it rocked and thumped by a group of Asian youths telling him: "This is our area now. You are not welcome here." ...

In the nearby town of Dewsbury, which was once, like Bradford, a thriving mill area, similar enclaves exist. Local people were outraged recently to read that busy nurses at their local hospital had to allocate time to turning the beds of Muslim patients towards Mecca five times a day so that they could pray.

And last year, the discovery of an al-Qaeda propaganda DVD, which was handed out at the local mosque, increased tensions and further encouraged segregation among the communities. That, in turn, was capitalised on by the British National Party, which gained its highest numbers of voters in the city ...

"Sharia law now exists in almost all Islamic communities in the UK," he says. "Not at a penal level, but at a family level. It rules among the Muslim community in marriage and divorce, often at the expense of the vulnerable. To solve this, the Government must say no to Sharia law being practised. There should be no separate legal system in this country." ...

Muslims must do more to integrate, says poll:

A majoirty of Britons believe that Muslims need to do more to integrate into society and want tighter restrictions on immigration, an opinion poll commissioned by The Sunday Telegraph shows.

... comments have been backed by church leaders in majority Muslim areas who have disclosed that their congregations have been targeted by militant Islamists in a campaign of intimidation which has seen churches vandalised and converts to Christianity attacked.

They say that extremists are determined to make non-Muslim residents feel unwelcome, with the ultimate aim of driving them out ...

Church leaders in communities with large concentrations of Muslims said that Christians were being targeted. An east London vicar who had delivered Christmas leaflets in his parish said he was told to stay away from "Muslim areas".

He said: "Despite this being a mixed area, where Muslims make up only about 15 per cent of the population, I was told that the leaflets were offensive and could make people angry."

Another churchman said his path had been blocked by Muslim youths as he drove through a district of Oldham, Lancashire, last year. "They wanted to know why I was coming into 'their' area," he said.

A priest ministering in the Manchester district of Rusholme said he knew of "dozens of cases" in which Muslim converts to Christianity had been attacked.

Another church leader said that Asian Christians in Leicester feared being identified when leaving churches.

"They are scared of being stopped and beaten up if they are found carrying Bibles," he said.

None of the church leaders we spoke to wished to be identified for fear of retaliation, but Don Horrocks, of the Evangelical Alliance, said: "It's increasingly difficult for non-Muslims to live in areas of high Muslim density, especially if they are practising Christians." ...

Was Bishop Nazir-Ali right to speak out?

Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader:

"In 1987 I stood in Bradford West as the Conservative candidate, an election characterised by some violence and death threats. My experiences at that election left me worried that we had a growing problem with a community reluctant to integrate. This debate should have taken place a long time ago."

Ann Cryer, the Labour MP for Keighley, near Bradford:

"I've been told about men and women of my age who don't like to go into local parks because they've been told by Pakistani lads to stay out. There are almost entirely Muslim areas where it would be difficult for a white to live in the same way that it would be hard for a Muslim to live in some of the all-white areas."

Prof Anthony Glees, of the Brunel Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies:

"We have now got Islamic enclaves where a self-selecting apartheid system is emerging under the banner of 'celebrating diversity'.

That's dangerous from a security point of view because it allows the threat of terror and subversion to emerge, as it did with the July 7 London bombings, which were carried out by young men born and raised in Britain, but who looked to Islam." ...

'say no to Sharia law being practised': Woo, they'll be shakin in their boots. Baby boom, burka, and intimidation are unstoppable with regulations. Separation, segregation, deportation are the only options.

Via Jihad Watch