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.

Guided Missals

Hannah Shah is an antimatter suicide bomber.

She should get a pension from the Ministry of Defence. And M16. And Special Branch, and the anti-terrorist squad. And the British feminist movement. And every A & E Ward and Social Services department in Britain’s multicultural cities. Strangely enough, I don’t think that she does.

The MoD, MI5, A & E, et al, plus the feminists should seek to protect people from harm (in this case the harm from Islam) and especially the harm done to women for the latter bunch, and all of them are charged, one way or another, with picking up the pieces after violence. Supporting this brave and good woman would be an excellent way of inoculating our people and our country from one particular virus – the many violent aspects of Islam.

Her autobiography, The Imam’s Daughter, should be required reading for all military officers whose duties take them up against Islam as well as for our counter-spies and the other anti-terrorist apparatus of the British state. It should be advertised and reviewed, commented upon, quoted from and chewed over throughout the British feminists’ website The F Word.

I hope that you’ll buy the book and send her lots and lots of money and below I’ll tell you why.

‘You’re too savage in criticising Islam,’ said Mrs. Northwester. ‘You won’t win friends and influence people if you call Islam a death cult,’ she said. ‘You need to look at the small picture,’ she added, ‘and see what the people in it think and feel. Then you might be more persuasive.’’

I paraphrase (badly) her more elegant words. This was after I’d posted something especially virulent against some Islamist/dhimmi twonk over at A Tangled Web late one Sunday night. But it is the female of the species’ mission in life (and often their direst necessity, alas) to gentle the excesses of the male, and so I listened and thought about it, read the review by Granny Weatherwax in The New English Review and bought the book: all Victor Kayam-style Right-wingly.

Maybe by reading something other than Irshad Manjis’s similar-but-different The Trouble With Islam Today and Robert Spencer’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and Islam Unveiled, its predecessor and source-work, and perhaps by reading another personal view - and a British one at that - I might get a bit more perspective on the topic. She got her wish.

Be careful what you wish for, incidentally.

If you do buy the book, and I hope that you will because this young woman has a mission and we can all be a part of it, I suggest for your own peace of mind that you try to think of it not merely as the diary of a young girl, but rather as a home-grown version of the Great Escape. I choose my words carefully here. She lived her early life in the shadow (and the threat of death, reading between the lines and from what her father said) of a life-denying totalitarian ideology that plans to subdue the world, and it is now her mission, despite being on the run, to frustrate that ideology and to bring freedom to Muslims throughout Britain and the world: particularly the women and girls.

Hannah Shah’s huge capacity to love her fellow human beings in general, and her utterly undeserving family in particular, is almost beyond belief. She is still on the run from her vengeful family, whose ‘dishonour’ is still so important to her that she refuses to take the details of the decade-long campaign of incestuous rape by her imam father to the police. Doing so would hurt the mother, brothers and sisters who ignored and left unpunished the multiple sexual assaults that her father inflicted on her throughout what in a parallel universe would be called her ‘childhood.’ So she hasn’t done it.

She was born free: a British subject in a Northern English town and a descendent of Pakistani Muslims and she lived her whole childhood in chains of her family’s making until she finally broke away.

And what chains. Many of the neighbours in her all-but completely Pakistani Muslim terraced street stayed so close to home that they never left it. This was especially true of her father who, once he decided that as an imam he was above working for a living, went on sickness benefits and housing benefits for the rest of his life.

One of the many wonderful things about Hannah Shah’s story is that despite it all she is, delightfully and definitely, English to the core. Her outrage at her father’s fraudulent welfare claim; at his laziness and dishonesty and his contempt for the supporting country and culture off which he sponged and financed his worthless life could come straight from the pages of the Daily Mail, or from the disgusted conversation of my colleagues at the Department for Hurt and Awful Nuisances. Or from BNP campaign literature, come to that.

Many of the womenfolk were forced to stay at home, though many also worked. Her own mother was nearly as much of a prisoner as she was – and was beaten savagely in front of Hannah on many occasions for imaginary or exaggerated imperfections in her cooking or housework. Imam Shah loved to inflict pain and to bully anyone around him who he could. Hannah Shah is always keen to give ‘moderate Islam’ the benefit of the doubt, and points out that, despite her never having been bought a single toy in her life, despite her never receiving a single word of praise or affection from her father, other fathers and especially one did play with their daughters and show them affection and give them treats.

Her father was especially cruel, and so her argument goes that there is room in the Pakistani Muslim community - even there - for some forms of love. She also points out that class makes its presence felt – her family and friends were from impoverished farming stock, but other Muslims in the town are city-bred, lovers of education and ambitious, in some ways, even for their daughters. So it’s not Islam’s fault, right?

Up to a point. Because when she finally breaks away and changes her religion and is living in one of a series of safe houses (in England! Safe houses for British subjects to escape the violent ambitions of Islam!) that she has to occupy to evade a vengeful family, then the armed mob of Muslim men who find her, and from whom she barely escapes with her life, then her favourite moderate Muslim neighbour the doting father is right there with the mob supporting the frenzied Imam Shah who has come to claim his property and bring her home, to a certain beating, rape, and possibly murder.

This is honour killing under the Spar shop sign; the Koran to be enforced in its brutal bloody fullness where Walkers Crisps and Mars Bars are for sale along with Coke and Tizer and The Sun and The Mirror. This is England.

When not beating and sexually assaulting his elder daughter and calling her worthless, evil and a temptress, and throwing her to the filthy floor of their coal cellar, her father is a virtual prisoner himself; rarely leaving the street except for his frequent trips to the mosque where he ruled as an absolute monarch. The women were separated from the men in more ways that the Koran prescribes - excluded, ignored, and even kept apart from the men during weddings. Hannah stresses the intellectual sterility of Islam in her background, and its lack of anything like humanity. All passages are read in Arabic, which nobody understands, and learned by rote and repeated by human recording machines.

Her father refuses to have Jesus’ name mentioned in the house, and speaks spitefully of him, though the elder Hannah, the theology graduate, points out that Jesus is named more often in the Koran than Mohammed was.

One of her brothers – hitherto and thereafter treated as a lord of creation for not being a girl and therefore not endlessly called ‘worthless’ – was sent off to Pakistan against his will to learn to memorize the Koran at a madrassah. He returned years later, a beaten and broken young man; prone to mental illness and with much of his childhood affection burned out of him. So much so that he goes along with the family’s persecution of the apostate Hannah. They all do, one way or another.

Forced marriage to cousins, here or back in the old country, is part and parcel of the brutal life of the autocratic Imam Shah and many of his rural peasant neighbours. Hatred of white people is ever-present – ‘gora’ and ‘gori’ are spoken as contemptuously as any skinhead cretin’s ‘Paki’ by her father whenever Hannah’s would-be friends tried to visit, or about the white TEFL teacher who secretly taught English to an earlier, gentler, non child rape-excusing mother.

Anything and everything Western or English is haram -‘forbidden’ - in Imam Shah’s lawless world of unspoken but often broken and always savagely enforced rules. Everything; except from the benefits he receives for pretending to be sick and for having many children. Everything Western is rejected, apart from the technology – cars and television and the air liners which take them home for holidays in Pakistan to be feted as millionaires – and anything else the imam and his male relatives and neighbours want to use and enjoy. The proud elder brothers’ cars are used once to take Hannah out for a ride beyond the street/ghetto/prison of her birth, and never to help the ageing mother carry heavy groceries home form the despised gora supermarkets.

Men and boys are everything, women and girls worthless – to be expensively dowered off and good riddance. Women and girls are seductresses, who inflame men to sexual lust and who tempt them away from worshipping Allah – this is what the rapist imam uses to excuse his frequent violations of his won daughter.

Is it Islamic to do so? And if so is it Koranic, and therefore supposedly immutable as the pure and complete word of God, or merely from the Hadiths, which some Muslims argue are heretical and blasphemous?

If the imam says it’s Islamic - and his authority is unquestioned in these communities - then it is indeed Islamic. And that’s all that the friends and relatives of poor little Hannah Shah cared about when they helped track her down to meet her family’s ‘justice.’

And what of the outside world; of school, and friends and the white people: the goray whom her father loathed and despised once again as soon as he’d cashed his Gyro?

Hannah loved them. She loved her school and the knowledge that it sought to impart; heterodox and varied and questionable. She loved her generous friends and the gentle white adults who never beat her or raped her or left her bound and starving in a coal cellar, and who showed her affection, and who saw her as worth talking to, and who were never allowed to visit her and whom she was never allowed to visit. She loved the soap operas and the teenage heart-throbs and the western fashions and the dolls’ houses that her friends owned though she had nothing to show to her friends in return because she owned no toys. She loved the teachers who sought to bring out her writing and story-telling, and who in her teen years tentatively tried to draw her out about her silences and bruises and her many unexplained absences from school…

Hannah loved them even though they failed her.

They didn’t pursue her noteless absences from school as they would have had with white children. Miss Shah is unequivocal in her contempt for the politically correct white society that respects her community’s ‘traditions’ – which means that when girls disappear forever their absenteeism is never followed up to discover they have been sent to rural squalor and even more intense drudgery in Pakistan.

(This has been going on for decades. My mother was a teacher in what was quaintly called a ‘special school’ back in the 1970s and she once described to my horror that a thirteen-year-old girl; bright and funny and learning English at an exponential rate and soon to have a place at the ‘normal’ school and who had once made her beloved schoolteacher and classmates some chapatis (the first I had ever seen) had been sent home to her family’s village to be married. I knew even then as a kid that you had to be sixteen at least to marry. I don’t know what if anything Mum did to chase the ‘truant’ Rani up, but Mum was a giver and a striver in her day. Maybe she had a go but didn’t trouble her young son with the details. Her headmaster was a clock-watcher and a pension-chaser so I doubt that Mum had much official back-up if she did go to Social Services about the poor lass. I wonder whether the political will existed in the 1970’s to confront Muslim or Pakistani child abuse – it’s surely in short supply now, and this book should help to drum up some more backbone – if we can get it publicized. Sometimes I think that Edward Heath’s sacking of Enoch Powell wasn’t entirely a good thing for life in Britain. But only when there’s a ‘y’ in the day. So there you have it; a Northwester family skeleton. I hope you’ll help this book to make some difference to a new generation of Ranis.)

When the school finally brings in Social Services because a Christian teacher follows Hannah’s problems up, then they send her…a Pakistani Muslim social worker who immediately betrays her to her father and gets her a massive and especially foul beating and more rape. It appears that the social worker worm Omar thinks that betraying the ‘community’ to outsiders is worse than raping and beating a little girl year after year.

I’m being judgemental here, I know, but what is judgement for but to tell the difference between cute folk customs like the giving of Eid sweets and morris-dancing on the one hand and child slavery and badger-baiting on the other?

Hannah’s eventual escape (last-minute, potentially deadly and always precarious) is as exciting an adventure story as any I’ve read in fiction given the natural physical and the falsely-induced emotional weaknesses that the Pakistani women in Hanna’s neighbourhood are prone to. In a sense it’s still going on as her family and community have never given up hunting her.

Her triumph is one of love – specifically Christian love as many of her supporters and protectors are Christians – but also of the love that is available when people are allowed to associate with other, different people from other religions or none, in our imperfect, Western, capitalist society.

There is so much material wealth too outside the hate-filled and ignorant world of Hannah’s home that her friends do have available, for example; cars and spare bedrooms in large houses for escape and refuge; and spare cash to clothe and feed Hannah as a free woman. There is also a State education system that is still richly funded enough to give her a second and then a third chance at a degree and qualifications and an escape to work in the south of England where she finds more friendship and still more love.

The second part – the post-escape part is as interesting and is way less harrowing then the sex-slave beginning. Her triumph, love's triumph, and in many ways Britain’s triumph at least reminds us of what is so good and beautiful and worth defending at any cost in our free society, and I recommend that conservatives, liberals, libertarians, nationalists and socialists alike should all read this book before next talking about multicultural society or Islam. All observant Muslims should read it, also, and do some comparisons.

Miss Shah has done her country and our civilization a great patriotic and charitable service in writing this harrowing and enlightening – and often inspiring and also amusing – work of social history.

She specifically and clearly criticises the politically correct white population that will not confront sex slavery and child rape, and particularly the BBC journalist who asks her ‘So what do you hope to achieve by speaking out? Surely, you’ll just cause more trouble?’

Hannah Shah doesn’t believe that the liberal establishment’s policy of silence or ignoring these atrocities will let it all go away. She celebrates and appreciates religious and political choice and freedom of speech in our democracy. She does distinguish her father’s type of Islam from supposedly gentler varieties, and I have to say she doesn’t provide much in the way of examples, though we can infer that, just as only small a minority of our Muslim neighbours are involved in Jihadist activities and maybe a larger minority has jihadist opinions, then perhaps also only a minority of girls are being raped, beaten and surely only a few are murdered by their families.

So how is she an antimatter suicide bomber?

She describes the obscurantist, ignorant, brutal, male-dominated and xenophobic culture from which our home-grown 7/7 suicide-bombers sprang. All were brought up and educated in the north of England, and 3 out of 4 were born here. They attended mosques like Hannah’s father’s and travelled to be further radicalized in Pakistan, and learned as Hannah’s brothers did all about the worthlessness and corruption of Western society (to the point that their ‘community’ holds it wrong to phone the police when a white neighbour is being assaulted) in the febrile atmosphere of Sub-continental Islam.

There is little gentleness there, and what there is dissolves at the first hint of the imam’s disapproval. There is racial and religious hatred of foreigners – imam Shah has a hierarchy of the races from the Arabs down through Pakistani Muslims to other Muslims down to whites and finally down to Jews. I forget exactly where he placed black people, but you get the point.

Women and girls are worthless – expensive to provide with dowry – and sexual temptresses who must be masked and beaten and kept I their place. Is it any surprise that such a mind-set, such a culture isn’t overflowing with raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens?

At the very least, Miss Shah is needed by Britain to expose this foul undercurrent in our ‘diverse’ society.

And she can help soften it; reform it and offer refuge and advice to women and girls on the run from unreformed Islam’s foulest superstitions and nastiest practises, and one great thing that our homeland needs is free, outspoken, inoculated Muslim women to expose and shame the violent, self-centred, secretive corruption that much – though not all – of Islam encourages and allows to occur.

Free, confident, jihad-free Muslim women or ex-Muslim women who can live their lives for themselves according to their own wishes and standards are needed; as examples; as beacons of what freedom and love rather than hatred can achieve in this country, and as antibodies to the hatred.

They might tempt at least some Muslim boys and men away from Islamist brutality on the internet and the bone-dry, savage world of the kaffir-hating mosque, because breeding - all other things being equal – will out.

In that, at least, imam Shah was right.

NNW.

Hannah Shah resources and grumps.

Here’s the book.

Here is Hannah Shah’s website that offers help and advice for Muslim women and girls escaping slavery, rape, and other abuse.

Here’s her interview in The Times.

It’s official.

The Ministry of Defence, M15, Special Branch, the anti-terrorist squad and the British feminist movement are all bollocks.

Hannah Shah should get a pension from the Ministry of Defence. And M16. And Special Branch, and the anti-terrorist squad. And the British feminist movement. And every A & E Ward and Social Services department in Britain’s multicultural cities. I don’t think that she does.

Oddly enough, a site-search for this incestuously raped, countlessly beaten, from-the-cradle enslaved and would-be force-married little girl on the F Word draws a blank. Perhaps it’s a lousy search facility on the site? They do lead today with an approving account of stink-bombing a beauty pageant, so they are - as it were - somewhat on the ball against the Bikini Threat to London’s long-suffering student womanhood. Yey. Go British feminists.

Oh, and if you search our national broadcaster; the one that produces Woman’s Hour and supports and celebrates ‘diversity’ and ‘women’s’ rights’ in all things – guess what you get if you search its website for either her name, or her book?

Did you guess correctly? I suppose there’s not enough room on the site or in the archives for this little tale; what with all the football and the plight of the Palestinians, right?