[blather-fest] The uncomfortable politics of identity 19Oct2006 The Economist

http://economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8057611

.../...In another sign of the times, an education department document, leaked to the Guardian newspaper, warned that universities had become fertile recruiting grounds for extreme Islamic groups and proposed that academic staff should keep a close eye on their Muslim students (see article).

The trigger for much of this is not the London bombings [blamed-upon w/scant proof] carried out by British-born Muslims on July 7th last year, shocking though they were, but an allegedly much more extensive plot to blow up airliners flying to America that was [an asinine and impossible concept, an absoulte crock, far beyond credulity and horrifying to moohead that this damned journal fails to explicitly or feebly state such/js] foiled in August. Since then, the security services have reached alarming conclusions [how could they FAIL to, when such 'Trith OR Fiction'  is vital to budget expansions....grr] about the number of young British Muslims who have been radicalised and their potential to become terrorists. Increasingly, ministers believe that the willingness of successive governments to tolerate and, in some ways, encourage the separateness of Muslim communities in the name of multiculturalism has been a colossal error.

The result is that the government has started to ask itself some profound questions. How far is a liberal society obliged to go in defending attitudes and behaviour that are hostile to it? Is it reasonable to demand that members of all minority communities integrate, at least to some degree, with the majority? [like Latinos learning English perhaps/js]

This has traditionally been difficult territory for many on the left. Partly it is lingering colonial guilt [speculation? or fact? or smarmy hoaxed piety?] , but mainly it is because the left is uneasy with notions that appear to claim superiority for majority cultural norms or which confuse the duties of citizenship with loyalty to the symbols of nationalism. In the search for a fairer society, the concept of national identity seemed either irrelevant or unhelpful. [yes: we are all clones, sheeple and automatons of hijacked obsequiance already]

...  as the author Salman Rushdie observed: “No society, no matter how tolerant, can expect to thrive if its citizens don't prize what their citizenship means.”  [well, let's FIRST articulate what IS the prize of being a 'citizen' versus a taxpaying 'resident' of xyz nation-states... hmm /js]
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