Ok so in this view we can blame Campbell then for 'adjusting' the dossier and misleading good old Tony! ]Xest wrote:Again I'm not saying I beleive the goverments spin in the slightest, I am however saying I don't totally beleive the medias spin also, I've said numerous times already we'll never know how much Tony really did and didn't know but I have said that IF he didn't know then you can't really blame Tony himself.
Honestly, with regards to the bombers coming from the UK, I pretty much guessed - I live in Yorkshire myself, about 20mins from Leeds and about 30mins from Bradford, I've seen first hand how many Pakistanis and Arabs there are in Yorkshire that hate England and hate the English and various other parts of Western life, because of this Yorkshire is rife with racism and it's no suprise that hatred grows for each other on both sides here such that it could breed such extremists. What does bother me is that one of the bombers went to Afghanistan last year for a few months with some friends, now I have to question, if someone went to a place like Afghanistan, not as media, not as an aid worker then there has to be some suspicion, without meaning to sound racist (even though I guess it is to be fair), but, especially if they're a muslim Arab/Pakistani. It's a hard issue to discuss, purely because I'll no doubt get branded racist, however the fact is that the biggest real threat right now is from Pakistani/Arab muslims and as racist as it sounds it IS undeniably the truth - of course that's definetely not to say we can't trust all of them, please don't take it that way in the slightest. I think what bothers me most though is that we were told the bomber went to Afghanistan with some friends - it does kinda leave me wondering, who/where these friends are now.[/QUOTE]
Actually the question about allowing your son to go to Afganistan for religious lessons is a very fair one. Why not Mecca or any other country? Surely there are good Mosques in the Middle East? I am not sure when Afganistan became the centre of the Islamic faith... I would also question anyone's judgement for not being worried about someone going there.
Yes it is true that democracy should allow open discussion and freedom of speech. So we might want people to vent their feelings and frustrations in public - it looks like we are going to remove that privilage now though! So given the direction we seem to be heading there is going to be less communication rather than more and that is a concern.Xest wrote: Our Arab/Asian communities in England are just too segregated from the rest of the UK that's the problem, I think both sides are equally to blame, but the problem just gets worse and worse and it's hard to see how those societies will ever integrate in with the rest of us and if they don't it's hard to see how everyone will ever trust them, after all pretty much everyone is naturally racist to some extent - it's a fear of the unknown and that's what makes it so hard for the seperate communities to integrate in the first place, before any of the more concious racism began. In this respect, whilst wrong of a lot of people to think we should "just kick them all out" there has to be some understanding as to why they say it and many more people seem to think it than they'll publicly admit - you can't just ignore that feeling and say "stop being racist" as our overly politically correct society does today, you have to look at why that feeling is there and try and resolve it.
As for integrating would you say the Irish never integrated because they tended to live in communities? Are the Irish equally as problematic. Many of us have experienced some racist attitudes at some point living in England but just because we have does not make the whole society bad. I am not so positive about this because basically when you use the term 'they' you 'other' these communities and turn them into something that is outside of our society. That is kind of dangerous. The term community is often used to ghettoise people this use of the term should really be avoided.
The whole project of multiculturalism is that people should be allowed to maintain their identities in the way they choose and they should be welcomed because they bring something new to the country. To say that the problem of extremism is one particular community's problem kind of risks absolving the wider society of its blame. I know not many have said it for fear of being censored but we have to agree that the war itself has certainly made this sort of attack more probable. The fact that one of the bombers went to Afganistan one year ago whilst the war in Iraq is in full swing should tell us that the war may well have precipitated this whole tragedy. What astounds me is the vilification that was directed at Galloway for saying what many many people are privately feeling.
What would New Labour have us do now - put up or get out like the left wing of the party has been forced to do?
kind regards
Sharkith
p.s.
Yes it won't go away. The best way to get rid of Iraqi hardships was to lift UN embargo's not go bomb the shit out of them...Lairiodd wrote:He probably looked at all the hardships the people of Iraq were facing and figured it was worth helping. Also, even if Iraq didn't have WMD (which they weren't sure one way or another), some country in the region might have/be developing them. This is not a problem that will just go away.
