"I feel like an alien in my home town" By Olga Craig

Dumb, but interesting. Maybe you care. Makes me think I should finally pick up that Tariq Ramadan book I bought last ISNA and try to save the Muslims in the US before it's too late. Help?

Article

Highlights:

What is worrying him is that Britain's increasing espousal of multiculturalism has led not to an integrated society but, instead, to ghettoisation, with white-only and Asian-only communities existing cheek by jowl but with little or no common ground. And that, he believes, could have an ominous outcome.

"This isn't, as the Government would like us to believe, a multicultural society," he says.

"This is pure racial segregation. And it's like this because the Muslim community simply refuses to integrate. So people like me feel like outcasts in our own country."

stupid. Try replacing "Muslim" with any other minority name.

It surprises no one, he says, knowingly, that a recently built massive police station, complete with a 30ft wall and a communications tower, now dominates upper Oak Lane.

Aware that the majority of its schools are exclusively white or Muslim, community leaders held a public meeting last month mooting ideas for community events to encourage more unity among its inhabitants. But while initiatives were discussed, the notion of integrated societies was not.

"The Bishop of Rochester is right to say there is segregation and ghettoisation," concedes Bary Malik, a local imam. "But we all share the blame for that, not one individual community. The Bishop of Rochester supposedly understands both cultures, so he should be trying to foster better relations between these communities, not aggravating them."

whoa:

Another problem, he believes, is that, in the name of multiculturalism, the Labour Government has allowed a dual system of law to exist.

"Sharia law now exists in almost all Islamic communities in the UK," he says. "Not at a penal level, but at a family level. It rules among the Muslim community in marriage and divorce, often at the expense of the vulnerable. To solve this, the Government must say no to Sharia law being practised. There should be no separate legal system in this country."

After the al-Qaeda bombing in Madrid, when Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan police commissioner, suggested that it was a matter of when the terrorist organisation would bomb London, not if, he - along with cross-community leaders - held a series of meetings about how they should react should that happen.

Their aim was to ensure that there was not a repeat of the 2001 race riots if al-Qaeda bombed Britain. It is to their credit that, after the 7/7 London bomb, Bradford remained peaceful.