Some guy at the Spectator pens a would-be Swiftian bit about how ‘moral panics’ about immigration are nothing new and what about the Irish? and everyone but him is a nasty old racist and whatnot.
(To which I say, well, what ABOUT the Irish. They were so bad that when they moved into to Five Points, the blacks moved out…)
Anyway, he gets a lashing in the comments from ordinary people who aren’t professional journalists and therefore don’t have to worry where their next cocktail party invitation is coming from:
The Irish and the Scots were ethnic caucasian relatives and Christians with long historical associations – in spite of the racissm and fear-mongering they were subjected to, there was no great impediment to integration with British society, which they managed to do pretty well.
Fast forward to THIS century – there are a huge percentage of non-anglo Muslim immigrants who have shown little or no desire to integrate into the host society or, if they do, on their own terms – with such delights as the introduction of Sharia law. Unfortunately their religious bigotry makes it easy for British bigots and racists to prove their point – they don’t want to be a part of the host society, by the tenets of their religion, they want to take it over and will not cease their efforts until all either convert or submit. Liberal apologists like you mate are a part of the problem with your ill-thought out and wrongly directed commentary. You describe the symptoms, not the disease and in doing so offer no prospect of a cure.
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Your point is a good one but only up to a point. The big difference though is that the Catholic church did not go round saying that non-Catholics should be killed nor did Catholics or the Irish demand that they be allowed to obey some different legal system or that no-one should be allowed to say offensive things about Catholics nor did they go around burning books which said rude things about Catholics or Irishmen.
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I wonder if he’s like so many other right on types I know: all full of “vibrancy” when they’re young only to discover they have to move to white areas when their children need schooling. Naturally, this is for “air quality”, “house prices”, “only place there are jobs” never the dreaded “racism”. (These are all direct examples of lefties I know who all moved to live in white areas when their first-born reached 5 or 6 years of age.)In fact, as their own unwillingness to let daftly-named hippy kids learn alongside “the other” manifests itself, their “commitment” to multi-culturalism becomes more vehement.
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Ah yes, older readers will never forget the fateful day when Al-Eire terrorists, yelling “The Pope is great”, flew their hijacked Sopwith Camels into Holyrood House.
The trouble with Brits is: their fury always stays in these comments. A hundred of them will tsk “somebody ought to DO something….” And no one ever does.