Henry North London on immigrant life

Here’s a comment that I was glad to receive from Henry North London, who is a libertarian, concerning my post about the autobiography of ‘Hannah Shah’: a Pakistani Muslim whose father’s enslavement, torture, and decade-long serial rape of her eventually drove her to escape (barely) from an oppressive and brutal ‘family’ background.

I’m just going to pose some questions in and amongst the statements that he’s made, to illustrate, I hope, a conservative outsider’s view of a serious problem in this country in which we live. I have no suggestions and no solutions, but Henry’s views are new to me, so here goes…

I have the experience of growing up an Indian/Kenyan Asian, in Yorkshire and being the only brown face in the town. I know intimately what my parents’ prejudices are, and what the wider Asian community are like..

I’m inferring from the Wikipedia entry that says most Kenyan Indians aren’t Muslim, then neither is Henry. My own reason for reading the book was fear of the existential threat of Islam that I believe is aimed at our country and our civilization. The personal touch of the autobiography was intended to contextualize the horrors that we read of in such websites as The Religion of Peace. News and comment from immigrants largely of Hindu and Sikh stock has opened up a different issue: immigration and integration in general.

As for the Muslim community I despair. Despite living in Britain they are living in the late 50s with the same moralities they had then in Pakistan. Bradford being a prime example of the Mirpuri exodus following the Dam and the flooding of their town.

This refers to this, and I quote from it:

The Mangla Dam project in the early sixties resulted in the displacement of a large number of people, who under an agreement between the Pakistan government and the British government, were allowed to settle in the UK, where they are usually known as Mirpuri and play a role in the British society, economy, and politics.

So there’s a whole part of our country’s history that I’d never heard of before. A whole population transported voluntarily around the world by governmental agreement.

Note: ‘voluntarily’ does not include the indigenous Britons who received them. Any arguments about ‘white racism’ (and I know for a fact that in Yorkshire at least, their welcome was far from warm) should include consideration for the perceptions and feelings of the settled-amongst natives.

(Not that the colonial British thought much about such things at first when it was their turn to settle elsewhere, be it said.)

I happen to call Bradford Little Pakistan.

Sadly, I suspect that Henry’s freedom of speech on such matters would be freer than mine if we tried to express them on the television – all thanks to our shared foe and assailant: political correctness.

I had a Great-Aunt in Bradford who supported the National Front back in the 1970s because her lifelong home street had come to resemble Hannah Shah’s almost wholly Pakistani terrace. This was a feeble, scared old widow who years later had nothing but praise for the kindly ‘Indian girl’: (a married neighbour of about fifty) who used to take her food and popped to the shops for Auntie V.

People. Go figure.

The women haven’t bothered to learn English…

Mrs. Northwester points out that Child Tax Credit and Working Tax Credit have stymied much linguistic and moral integration of Asian women as their men folk now have less need to send them out to work for cash if they themselves can claim tax credits. At work they not only used to learn English, but also they used to get advice from their white colleagues, such as that it wasn’t okay for their husbands to beat them up or their fathers to send them abroad to be married to strangers. Hannah Shah’s mother had a TEFL teacher in her home while her brutish husband was at the mosque, but he beat her savagely after he came home early to discover the gora teacher there, and so she remained largely ignorant of English’ apart from what she picked up from the uncensored parts of Coronation Street and Eastenders she was allowed to watch.

So here we are: a conservative, a Leftish-feminist and a libertarian side-by-side and all no doubt wanting to stick it to Gordon ‘Golden’ Brown for his ignorance of the Law of Unintended Consequences.

… and the state of affairs there is terrible. 3 generations have grown up there since the late sixties and they are so entrenched and some of them are so well how shall I put it? Back in the dark ages.

Back in the day when I was a full-blooded libertarian all full of Ayn Rand, Robert Nozick and Friedrich Hayek I wouldn’t have expected this kind of thing to matter much to prospects for the good life here in Britain. When you take individual liberty as your goal, any active coercive measures to, say, integrate legal immigrants into the mainstream by language teaching or the intervention of social workers might be neither desirable nor legitimate – look, it’s their lives, innit?

I’d have reasoned that, as long as the State didn’t support their self-imposed isolation at public expense, then immigrant women should be allowed to stay separate and live their lives according to their own judgment. In some ways I still do, and inasmuch that it is the Muslim communities from which jihadist sentiment springs – and from nowhere else – I don’t lose as much sleep over Hindu or Sikh women not getting out here and mixing it up with the rest of us. I mean, it’s only they who are missing out on the fun of western life, right? …

Except they are human beings and they are still missing out on the fun and they are now British subjects, so that’s their loss, I suppose. Mrs. Northwester doesn’t just suppose, and is frankly angry about it…

I’ve no idea how often honour killing and forced marriages occur in non-Muslim Sub-Continent immigrant life in Britain, but I’ll say here that one of either of them would be one too much.

From a conservative perspective which values freedom as only one of the many conveniences of civilized life, how and to what extent would I want, say, teachers or other authorities to bust into legal immigrants’ lives pursuing some feminist or integrationist goal?

Tricky…

Social engineering is a pretty awful tool to use and has helped to create more problems here than it solved. The ‘welcome’ from many indigenous whites for Pakistan and New Commonwealth immigrants (as they used to be called) was not at all warm, but is there an actual ‘race problem’ in Britain that threatens anyone outside the immigrant groups apart from the ideological hostility from Islamists to the host culture? In London, where most of the illegal immigrants and asylum seekers concentrate, there does seem to be a bit of one, to say the least.

Not all mind you as I am prone to sweeping generalizations but Hannah’s book basically demonstrates something that no political party is willing to broach and therefore it is not something that will get publicised. It’s sad really.

There we go again. Edward Heath sacked Enoch Powell for something that he never said and that he never meant to imply, and conservatives and anyone associated with them such as libertarians have ever since been constrained and slandered and libeled as out-and-out race baiters whenever they discuss nationality and race. And when it’s an ideology that threatens us all…

In South Yorkshire unless you live in Clegg’s constituency nothing has changed constituency wide for over 60 years.

Does this mean that there’s STILL a lot of resentful whites staring hostilely at their Sub-Continent neighbours and thinking their mill jobs have been taken away from them, or does it also mean that the ‘natives’ have somehow moved on and the three generations are still stuck to dreams of the old country and doing things that way? Both, probably, I’d guess given the utter insensitivity and cluelessness of the politically-correct multi-culti goons who misrule us and their PR tools that misguide us. I’m thinking of the BBC’s White Week here, with all its PC and one-sidedness and Olympian disdain for the white English. See the comments to this piece of journalism here…

Not being raped is a rule of law question; she should be afforded the protection of the law.

You know, I thought of that at first but the book clearly shows that despite everything, Hannah Shah is lovingly concerned with the harm that public exposure of her vile father’s incest would do to her poor, beaten doormat mother and to her other relatives…And I have to say that the abused often carry with them internal brakes that prevent them doing what is right even if ‘innocent’ third partied would not be hurt. She’s got huge heart, but ruthlessness enough to emotionally grenade her whole neighbourhood? And in this climate, I wonder what the politically-correct police would do – are they so dhimmified that they’d be afraid of Islamic violence or ‘community violence’ if they ever tried to arrest a man who is, in the touchy-feely jargon of multi-culti a ‘community leader?’

Despite her family's shame the law comes first.

Yes. And yet… As a barking-mad, shoot-on-sight, don’t even bother trying to negotiate and kill the women first law-and-order conservative, I still can’t bring myself to believe that forcing her to go to the law would serve the peace of the country now, or in the future. If that’s what Henry meant, that is. She has chosen to fight the good fight to save future Hannahs amongst Muslim girls but not to avenge her own hurts. Maybe that’s a right thing to do.

The social worker who shopped her to her family is a first class schmuck.

And he should be an unemployed schmuck and quite possibly a jailbird as this was a massive betrayal of client confidentiality.

If someone did that to me I would be furious and I would have run off.

And that may be because Henry and I are men and we’re more likely to be able to contemplate independent action and even temporary homelessness, whereas this was a beaten and scared girl, who had no background in asserting herself openly. I know an abuse ‘survivor’ as they’re called and she says that victims often blame themselves for allowing themselves to be abused – and therefore feel unworthy of rescue or escape…

Thanks again Henry for your comment and your time and letting me use it as a springboard for thinking aloud in print…

As I said at the top, this is a think piece and apart from buy the book, I still have no advice or solutions for you, dear readers.