End this chorus of intolerance against Muslims

[T_i_B]

Superb article by my fellow Wednesdayite Roy Hattersley.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1547594,00.html

The best thing that can be said for the critics of multiculturalism is that they are confused. Their muddled thinking was perfectly illustrated last week by David Davis, the shadow home secretary, when he denounced the concept and then added that he welcomed "the mainstream version of Islam as part of British society". That is as good a definition of multiculturalism as we are likely to get.

The charitable explanation of the confusion is ignorance - an inability to distinguish between integration and assimilation. The alternative interpretation is more sinister. Muslims are accepted in Britain - but only if they cease to behave like Muslims.

At one level, the attack on multiculturalism is no more than a refined, middle-class version of "Paki-bashing". Yet people who ought to know better have joined in the chorus of intolerance. To demand that Muslims abandon their way of life - what they eat, how they dress, which way they choose their husbands and wives - is to make a frontal assault upon their faith. Islam is a total religion. People who go to church on Christmas Eve and think that makes them Christians may not realise that devout Muslims believe that the Qur'an should inform their whole lives.

Britain has to decide if the freedom that we so value is consistent with attempts to suppress the religious practices of the country's fastest-growing faith. The fact that most of us do not share their beliefs (and some of us have no beliefs at all) is irrelevant. Only primitive people want to destroy everything they do not like or understand. The civilised, and sensible, approach is to welcome diversity as a stimulus to renewed vitality.

[Jamastiene]

1. All Muslims aren't exremists, just like all

Christians aren't extremists. No reason to hate all Muslims nor all Christians. Even I know that and I live in a red state where the types of Christians I've encountered for the most part have been brutal anti everything tolerant you can imagine extremists.