The deference between Muslims and other immigrants

Dr Richard North of EU Referendum talks about the differences between growing up in a Jewish ghetto compared with living in a white enclave of a Muslim colony. Yes I use these words, ghetto and colony, deliberately and carefully.

The Jewish community, according to Dr North, while they lived together interacted with the outside community, employing and being employed by, trading and doing business. They lived symbiotically with the host community to both of their mutual advantage.

The Muslim community isolates itself refusing to interact with the host community in as much as it is able.

the Asians not only live together in their own areas, to a greater extent than before, they trade only with each other and exclude the indigenous populations. In the Asian areas, the shops are exclusively and aggressively Asian. The signs are in Urdu script – the labels and advertisements are likewise. And the goods are geared mainly to the Asian community.

Moreover, whole streets are like that. The banks are Asian, the cinemas are likewise, and the areas make no concessions at all to the host country. There are, effectively, huge if invisible signs saying "whites keep out". And if you do not get the message, there are other, more dangerous ways of learning."

also:

"Not only are these areas culturally and economically segregated, the writ of British (and European) law does not run. And it is not only the "high level" offences that are ignored – like the "honour killings", under-age marriages and even female genital mutilation (which are all illegal in this country) but also the administrative laws applying to businesses.

He then goes on to suggest that it is the high burden of regulation that would face any business trying to expand outside of the colony that prevents them from doing so, and the high burden of regulation of the native businesses outside the colony means that businesses inside have such a competitive advantage that they cannot get native companies cannot get in. A plausible explanation, but not one that explains why other immigrant communities that arrived at the same time have managed to integrate despite the same pressures and why it is exclusively the Muslim communities that have formed colonies.

Helen Szamuely, Dr North's co-editor, says that it could be that with these other immigrant communities there was an expectation that they would integrate.

it is important that people should feel that they are expected to become part of the country and its culture. With respect again to some of the commenters, that does not mean adopting every single British custom (and, at least one articel in, I think, The Business, some weeks ago pointed out that many of the second and third generation immigrants do adopt all the worst habits) but being expected to achieve things rather than be handed them. That may be the secret why the more recent Vietnamese immigrants are doing very well and why the older Jewish communities also did well. Nobody was going to make exceptions for them. If they wanted to keep their language and teach their children literature then they had to do it themselves.

But again, why would the natives make an exception especially for the Muslims as to whether we thought they should integrate? The answer to that is we didn't, but it was that the Jewish and Vietnamese communities also felt obliged to form part of our now common culture. The Muslims obviously have not felt this need.

Perhaps this is because of the teachings of Islam that the Ummah, the shared community of Islam, is more important than whatever society they happen to be living in. Possible this is part of Muslim culture because as at the time of the writing of the Koran the Prophet was leading a very successful expansion of the Islamist empire. So if you weren't part of an Islamist country then, well, you soon would be and so it is the natives that would soon have to integrate with your culture. In dealing with this situation of non-Muslims living in a Muslim culture the Koran is extremely generous for the time that it was written, forbidding pressuring people to convert and requiring respect for their beliefs, especially if they where 'people of the book' such as Christians and Jews.

It does not have much in the way of provisions for non-muslims being the dominate force, with no chance of that changing in the near future. This option was simply not thought of as when your winning just about every fight, as the Islamists were, there is not need. And the Islamists did have many victories for a very long time. It was only on 11 September 1683 at the battle of Vienna that the tide of Islamist dominance turned by which time the Koran and Sunna had already been set in stone.