Veil debate poses threat, says British race chief Phillips; but Phillips pleads for honest communication, sort of

Here is a meaningless story from the BBC News. All it adds up to is British liberals and Muslims complaining that Muslims are being unfairly targeted in the debate over the veil, but the complainers (at least as quoted by the BBC) don’t give a single example of such unfair targeting. Even Trevor Phillips, the relatively sensible Negro head of the Commission on Racial Equality, seems uncharacteristically bent out of shape, warning that the debate could lead to the kind of cultural separation that supposedly sparked the riots in France last year. Absurd. The veil critics such as Jack Straw are trying to get the Muslims to be less separate from the rest of society, not more separate.

The real message of Phillips and others is: don’t say anything critical of Muslims. But what else would you expect them to say? That has been the operative orthodoxy in Britain for 40 years.

I repeat my sense of amazement that it was the wormy Jack Straw, the ultimate man without a chest, who set off this debate. It shows that even for a dhimmi leftist, there are human limits to how much one will swallow. For Straw, the limit was the freakish, inhuman, and intimidating sight of women totally covered in black. Too bad, however, that he waited all these years to go public about his feelings.

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However, Trevor Phillips, who I must say seems like a decent guy, at least within the insane terms of contemporary British orthodoxy, has an article in the Times, “Talk now, or reap the whirlwind,” in which he pleads for what he calls honest communication among Britain’s “communities.” He wants people to go beyond political correctness and speak about the things that bother them about other groups; yet at the same time he wants people to avoid verbal attacks that will lead to ill will. He wants mutually incompatible groups to share enough of their negative thoughts about each other to have a genuine dialog, but not to share so much of their negative throughts that they end up hating each other. In short, Phillips says, if whites and Muslims don’t communicate honestly with each other, Britain is heading for disaster. But if whites and Muslims communicate too honestly with each other, Britain is heading for disaster. The British must successfully walk this excruciatingly fine line, he concludes, or face (quoting James Baldwin’s paraphrase of Genesis) “the fire next time.”

So, Britain must pull off a miracle or be destroyed. How did Britain get into this horrible spot? Did it perchance have something to do with admitting millions of unassimilable non-Western and nonwhite immigrants into Britain (and now vast numbers of Eastern Europeans as well)? How about being honest about that?

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Howard Sutherland writes:

Isn’t it indicative of how bad things are that Britons have to rely on a black (Trevor Phillips) to take these baby steps for them? To say even the mild things he does, he needs his protective coloration. Whites must speak up.

LA replies:

This is of course a recurrent theme here: Whites must not depend on (relatively) conservative nonwhites to defend society from Muslim, minority, and multicultural madness. If the white majority does not stand up to defend itself and its civilization, they will not be defended.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 22, 2006 09:48 PM | Send