There has been widespread reporting in the media of comments made by the Rt. Rev Michael Nazir-Ali warning of no-go areas being created and maintained in parts of England by Islamic extremists. (boo hiss!)
Is it just me or does anyone else feel that the Reverend seems to have it in for Muslims? Every couple of months he’ll be blaming something or another on Muslims, and this time even politicians have been distancing themselves from his comments.
It would be one thing if he was discussing issues honestly, but this is a real twisting of the facts.
Perhaps he hasn’t been in the country very long.
Back in 2001 England experienced its worst race rioting for twenty years in some towns in the north, and anyone who knows anything about them understands that these towns are split along race lines not religious lines. It was asians versus whites, and not Islamic Extremists versus the rest, or however else he wants to frame the problem.
Another thing that Nazir-Ali neglects to mention is that these towns actually have two types of no-go areas, asian areas which are no-go for whites, and white areas which are no-go for asians.
In Dr. Robert Beckford’s excellent documentary “Ghetto Britain” he spoke to people from all asian faiths in one northern town (Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims) about their impressions of black people from the West Indies, and the responses they gave were uniform (and also quite racist). A quite clear example that segregation in this country is more likely to occur along race lines and not religious lines (and that its not always whites who are involved!)
Perhaps his grief over the death of his “personal friend” Ms Bhutto is colouring his judgment. (Though if i had a close personal friend as corrupt as she was, i wouldn’t be announcing it). I think Inayat Bunglawala from the MCB was spot on saying “Bishop Nazir-Ali appears to be exercised by what he perceives as the decline in the influence of Christianity upon this country. But trying to frantically scaremonger about Islam and Muslims seems to us to be a rather unethical way of trying to reverse this.”
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January 8, 2008 at 11:03 pm
Why Rochester is not a no-go area for Michael Nazir-Ali
Michael Nazir-Ali, bishop of Rochester (previously: [1], [2], [3]), has been given another bit of space in the Sunday Telegraph to write an Islamophobic article (also see front-page feature here). This time, he’s alleging that Muslims have set out “…
January 11, 2008 at 11:30 pm
[...] Peace, Bruv This entry was written by irfghan, posted on January 11, 2008 at 11:30 pm, filed under Michael Nazir-Ali, Telegraph. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL. « Why Rochester is not a no-go area for Michael Nazir-Ali [...]