Faith schools and social cohesion

From a letter in the Times:-

'Sir, If the community providing a faith school is already well integrated into the host society it should facilitate the integration of its pupils and their parents — immigrants in particular. But faith schools are likely to be damaging to social cohesion in two circumstances. The first is when the faith community is itself badly integrated into the host society.

'The second is when the host society is itself deeply segregated, as in Northern Ireland. There, the solution that I and others first proposed was the establishment of a network (now of 57 schools) where the children of Catholics and Protestants would be educated together on a footing of equality, receiving a religious education that satisfies their parents.'

I agree with the analysis, which makes a refreshing change from the hysterical across-the-board denunciation of faith schools which you're all too likely to read in certain other papers. And I salute the work done in Northern Ireland. The writer goes on to make another good point that is rarely heard:-

'Catholic schools have had an important part to play in integrating into British society the immigrants who have for many years been coming from Italy, Spain and Portugal. And they are now doing the same for Polish, Lithuanian, Slovakian and Ukrainian immigrants. Hampering them would be incredibly foolish.'

Then comes the pay-off: an ambitious proposal for extending the principle developed in Northern Ireland:-

'Helping the Muslim community to integrate is another matter, and the leaders of the Catholic and Islamic communities should discuss the creation of joint or shared schools where the children of Christians and Muslims could be educated on a footing of equality and receive a religious education that satisfies their parents.'

This seems to me to be a tall order. There's no harm in talking, for sure, but I fear he underestimates the differences between the Northern Ireland case and this one. For all the sectarian poison in NI, the people it divides are members of the same faith. Of course there are doctrinal differences, but none of them are anywhere near as fundamental as the Christian values which the sectarian conflict betrays, and therefore none of them are valid arguments for refusing to try to dismantle the barriers.

But how would a joint Christian-Muslim school work? A collective ethos is the whole point of a faith school, as opposed to providing individual pupils with faith experiences tailored to their parents' expectations. Christians worship God incarnate in Christ - that is the irreducible core of our faith. When we do so we blaspheme in Muslim eyes. How do you arrive at a shared ethos without excluding religion altogether? What kind of assemblies would such a school have?

It's good to talk and it's good to find better ways of living together. Pretending we believe the same things when in fact we don't is not a solid foundation for anything.

Custom and practice 2

Following the 'Somali custom' post, another custom in the field of conflict resolution that has been imported with great success. It's rather rare for it to find its way into the pages of the Grauniad, but in this instance there's a twist that makes it even nastier than usual.

Custom and practice

Why did a 12-year-old girl take a razor blade to her school in Sheffield and use it to slash a classmate's face in full view of the teacher? Well, it would seem the victim may have been somewhat less than angelic, and that the perpetrator has had a tough time in more ways than one. The question has been raised as to what kind of school does not take immediate disciplinary action when a teacher spots a pupil repeatedly knocking a classmate's head against a wall. Certainly not the kind to which I would be happy to entrust any putative future Grumplets.

But it was this facet of the case for the defence that particularly caught my eye...

'A psychologist told the court she was likely to have been heavily influenced by a Somali custom in which women routinely settled disputes by inflicting minor scratches on each other's faces.'

(from)

...or as another report says...

'During the trial psychologist Stuart Taylor testified that in Somali culture women routinely solve disputes by scratching each other's faces with their fingernails or sticks.

'But he said such behaviour usually resulted in superficial injuries.'

I just love that 'usually'. And you have to wonder what a boy equally heavily influenced by Somali culture might have done in the circumstances.

I wish the people of Somalia well. I wish them well rid of some of their customs. For it surely cannot be coincidental that one of the most violent socieities on Earth has a culture which institutionalizes violence even in everyday interactions between women (not to mention the popularity of female genital mutilation). So whilst I have absolutely no problem in principle with people from Somalia settling in Britain, in practice it's unrealistic to expect that they will not bring their culture with them, and it has to be said that this is a problem.

Imagine being the parent of a child in this girl's class. Almost certainly you don't have the financial means to consider any alternative educational path for your child. Do you feel that Somali customs are to be affirmed and celebrated? How do you feel about being lectured about the benefits of multiculturalism by politicians and media folk whose kids go to private schools or, at least, to comprehensives in Somali custom-free zones?

Which leads us nicely to a passage from a speech by Roger Scruton, excerpted by Laban Tall:-

"First, the double standard over 'racism': a charge constantly levelled against innocent members of the indigenous majority, and almost never levelled against guilty members of immigrant minorities..."

"... It is in the light of these double standards that the charge of 'racism and xenophobia' should be assessed. It is a charge almost invariably levelled at members of the indigenous communities of Europe, and in particular against those at the bottom of the social scale, for whom mass immigration is a cost that they have not been schooled (and through no fault of their own) to bear. It is levelled too at political parties that attempt to represent those people, and who promise them some relief from a problem that no other party seems willing to address."

The penultimate sentence encapsulates the issues raised by Somali customs in inner-city Sheffield rather well. But the last sentence worries me. Scruton was speaking as a guest of Vlaams Belang, the Flemish separatist party in Belgium. I don't know a lot about this organization, but here is one reason why I hope Scruton supped with a long spoon. And the project of persuading Flemish-speaking Belgians that it is intolerable for them to carry on living in the same state as people who speak French is not one that I find particularly admirable. Especially since there is hypocrisy built into it: they talk self-determination, but deny precisely that to the people of Brussels, who are to be incorporated willy-nilly into the Flemish statelet even though they are overwhelmingly French-speaking.

And what about Britain? Is he thinking of any party in particular? There's certainly one that springs to mind, but the problem is that its attachment to racism and xenophobia is not a hysterical liberal slander but a deeply unpleasant reality. And there's the rub. It takes something pretty compelling to motivate a politician to break free of the herd on these issues. That something doesn't have to be racism - I think in Enoch Powell's case it probably genuinely wasn't - but in practice, away from the heady intellectual heights which Powell, Scruton and their like inhabit, it's predictable that the people most willing to shrug off the charge of racism turn out to be racists indeed.

Nevertheless, the political space to which Scruton refers needs to be filled by somebody, and even lefties should prefer to see it filled by the Tories rather than the BNP, by a healthy sense of the abiding strengths of British culture rather than by malignant bigotry. The danger is that a Conservative Party which, in its desperation to appropriate New Labour's winning formula for itself, no longer believes there is anything to conserve is leaving a vacuum for others to fill.

PS Mick Hartley has news of a robust approach to Pakistani customs taken by a court in Denmark. Full marks to the Danes - in Berlin there's been a similar honour killing case where the victim's brother was convicted of carrying out the murder, but the rest of the clan not only got off scot free but were in line to gain custody of her orphaned child (details in German).

PPS Eternal fourteen-year-old department: sorry, but I can't resist passing on the information that the Blogger spellchecker suggested 'scrotum' as an alternative for 'Scruton', 'labium' for 'Laban' and 'bowels' for 'Powell's'. More material for the feminist critique of the blogosphere...

Number crunching

“I don’t believe that I have to justify everything I write, line by line and word by word.

“It may offend people sometimes but I will speak from the heart and speak the truth. And if speaking the truth is upsetting community relations, then I hold my hands up to that."

The fighting words of Sayeeda Warsi, in response to the charge that she has been upsetting community relations by feeding her fellow Muslims with inflammatory, er, lies about the detention of terror subjects.

Who she? Someone whom Dave Cameron is very keen to get into Parliament.

'She had believed that her detention statistics were correct at the time she wrote the Awaaz article, she said'.

And let's face it, getting 'nine hundred' confused with 'zero' is the kind of mistake anyone can make. This lady has a glittering political career ahead of her.

(hat tip: Stephen Pollard)

Loving the stranger

As a postscript to the last-but-one post, a little scriptural wisdom for any Christians who did succumb to the blandishments of the BNP on Thursday:-

[The LORD] doth execute the judgment of the fatherless and widow, and loveth the stranger, in giving him food and raiment.
Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.

(Deuteronomy ch. 10, vv. 18-19)

And here's how Grumpy's padre has been tackling the sometimes challenging business of loving the stranger; I can reveal that the final score was Priests 12, Imams 1. Not exactly a nail-biter, but the captain of the imams says 'we are all winners'.

Tough love from Madeleine

Who'd'a' thought it? Madeleine Bunting lecturing young Muslims on 'tough love' under the headline 'Why Muslims must guard against the satisfactions of complaint'.

But don't worry, our Madeleine of the Sorrows (Norman Geras, not me) hasn't moved too far out of character. This is a gem:-

'As alcohol consumption has soared in the past two decades, Muslims have been left to negotiate its centrality in British social life - at work, school or university, or as neighbours - with great difficulty. Alcohol is probably now one of the most effective and unquestioned forms of exclusion practised in the UK, affecting every kind of social network.'

Speaking personally, I find a little pub culture goes a long way, so I do have a degree of sympathy. But it has never before occurred to me to complain of exclusion. And I have no idea what the best guess for Alcoholics Anonymous's UK membership is, but they certainly make up a substantial constituency of the 'socially excluded'.

It really isn't a problem to go to the pub and not drink, is it? But maybe it gets more difficult if your beliefs confer moral superiority over the drinkers. And could it be that part of the real problem with pub culture lies elsewhere - in the unregulated mixing of the sexes, say?

Then there's this:-

'And then there are the thinly concealed intentions; for example, the government's current proposals to regulate "places of worship" aimed at mosques is an unprecedented intrusion of the state into the affairs of a religious institution that could take Muslim alienation to a whole new level. '

Well, I think you'll find that state interference in religion has plenty of precedent in British history - the terms 'Dissenter' and 'Nonconformist' reflect some pretty hefty levels of social and political exclusion, after all. But I grant that the phenomenon of place of worship as terrorist recruitment office doesn't have too many recent precedents as an argument for interference.

Name and Seumas

Well, I'm disappointed. OK, full marks to Seumas for signing up one of his Respect chums to comment on Lozells. And well done, Salma Yaqoob, for making it clear that it if young blacks riot against Asians it can only be the fault of rich whites. But come on, comrades, what about the Iraq connection? Why are you letting Blair off the hook? Is Respect going soft?

Name and Shame

Can't wait for tomorrow's Guardian. Who will be the first to explain that the race riot in Birmingham would never have happened if Blair hadn't invaded Iraq?

"Study examines hate crime effect"

Great news for those bereaved, maimed or traumatized by the hate criminals of 7 July. £100,000 is going to be spent on finding out exactly how bad you feel! So long as you belong to an ethnic minority.

And you never know, a couple of quid may be left over to study the effects of verbal abuse and minor assaults.

Or am I missing something here?

Frontlash

As part of its drive to assimilate yesterday’s events into its readers’ worldview, the Guardian is already fretting about a backlash against the British Muslim community, and quoting various Muslim spokespersons who seem determined to get their victimhood in first. Of course nobody ought to face abuse, let alone violence, because of their religion following the attacks, and I can understand Muslims fearing that the next few days are not going to be easy for them. But let’s just put things into perspective.

Obviously there are no figures yet, but it is virtually inevitable that significant numbers of Muslims are among the dead and injured. I don’t see the slightest grounds for fearing that British Muslims will suffer anything in the coming days and weeks remotely comparable with what they suffered yesterday.

Let’s also remember the true story of the 9/11 backlash. Muslims killed in the WTC: hundreds. Murders in America suspected of being motivated by hostility towards Muslims: three (one of the victims was a Sikh). Murders in Britain: nil. Mosque burnings in New York: nil. Mosque burnings in America: nil (here are some American Muslims whining regardless instead of celebrating American tolerance). Mosque burnings anywhere: nil.

Then the Americans went into Afghanistan to remove the regime that had played open house to al-Qaeda. That’s when the real backlash began. In a series of attacks on churches in 2002 more than 40 mostly poor and marginalized Pakistanis paid the ultimate price for sharing George Bush’s religion. And then there was Bali…

I don’t believe more than a tiny minority of British Muslims are potential terrorists. But I do know that 15,801 East Enders made it possible for George Galloway to re-enter Parliament on a platform of open support for the people who are orchestrating bomb attacks in Iraq on a daily basis. I think they need to be asked whether yesterday made them more or less sure that they did the right thing. And let’s not have fainting fits over the news that people have been rattling the railings of Finsbury Park Mosque. True, the mosque has been under new management since February and should be given a chance to make a fresh start, but before then it was al-Qaeda’s London chaplaincy, where bombers made contacts and Abu Hamza al-Masri preached the sermons which led to his appearance in court on Tuesday facing 10 criminal charges. The Guardian may feel it is holy ground, but personally I think I can understand people feeling just a little peeved.

OK, I've said my piece. For more, read Norman Geras.

PC Plod

Today Mr G turns his ire on the writer of a letter in the Independent...

"Sir: So Graeme McLagan ("Shootings at record levels as teenagers turn to guns", 11 May) tells us "It is incredibly hard for the police to predict when, and under what circumstances, black gunmen will use their firearms". Worrying as this prospect is, I am at least slightly reassured by the knowledge that white gunmen are so safe and predictable."

Actually it's not really fair to single out someone who has made what actually is a neat point given the mindset he shares with most Indie and Guardian readers. But let's look at that story again. There were 49 shotings in London in April alone - compared with 12 in April last year. 35 were "black on black", including two of the three deaths.

What this means is that for young black males in London other young black males are a far more deadly threat than neo-Nazis and racist coppers put together.

As George Orwell wrote about Stalin's crimes, it's true even though the Daily Mail says it's true. Unlike, say, the murder of Stephen Lawrence, it's not a truth that lends itself to easy liberal moral posturing. But come on, these are young lives being meaninglessly thrown away. There's no simple solution, but there's no solution at all so long as we keep our heads buried in the sand for fear of infringing PC etiquette.