Murphy's letter from Edinburgh

 

I'm fed up walking on eggshells

We have opened our doors to all creeds, colours and religions from the beginning of time and we have tried to accommodate them the best way that we could in our country.  Some of our immigrants and migrants have grasped the hand of friendship and integrated in to our society.  They have accepted the way that we live and have become pillars of the community.

During the war years we took in Pole's, Ukrainians, Jew's and people from many other countries so that they could make their homes here.  Many grasped the opportunity and married the indigenous population.  It was not easy for some them after the war years because we had been at war with some of them.  But over time, the past was forgotten and they are now as British as anyone else who was born here and as loyal to this country as they should be in any country that they decide to call their home and settle down in.

In the 1950s and 1960s we opened our doors to the Jamaican's, West Indies, and other immigrants, and in the 1970's when Idi Amin decided to clear the Asians out of Uganda, Britain again opened its doors hoping for a more diverse population.

Over the years we have had an influx from the Muslim Community, and I have no problems with that either, but I am now fed up walking on eggshells because our government has been telling us how far we should bend backwards for the Muslim community over the past few years by trying to accommodate them.

We have let the Muslim people come into this country so that they could escape the torture, religious wars and tyranny that they were enduring in their own countries. Countries which always seem to be in turmoil because of various Clerics and Mullahs who all seem to have different views on the way that the Koran should be interpreted.

A lot of bigoted views were spouted against the West in the 1960s right up to the late 1990s at Hyde Park Corner which is an area in London that anyone can get on their soapbox and spout pure bile at anything, anyone and everything that they wanted too, and some Muslims have been doing exactly that in the name of free speech for years there.

Many of these speakers were allowed to call for the eradication of the Jews and the turning of the West in to an Islamic State.  This is where the radicals went and they were allowed to denigrate the people of every other country that did not go along with their way of thinking on the streets of the very country that took them in.  Yet no one said a word against it, because of the freedoms of this country and because it might offend the Muslim community.

If anyone else had stood on a soapbox and carried on in the way that these people were speaking they would have been arrested for incitement to cause racial hatred or called bigots by the crowds who gathered to listen to the speakers and rightly so, but because they were Muslims, they were allowed to carry on with no intervention from the authorities at all.  I still can't understand why they were allowed to carry on with their hatred and disgraceful speeches.

We have become a diverse and multi racial society and no one has the right to call for the eradication of the Christians, Jews, Buddhists or any other religion in the name of another belief.  Nor have they any right to go out bombing other people in the belief that what they are doing is in the name of the creator of all life and that they have a right to change that way of life for their own religious beliefs.

Our Prime Minister has called it a perverse ideology, when in fact it is a bigoted belief that we have given in too for far to long.  And this has to stop so that we can bring back some kind of normality to the way of life that we have lived like for years.  We have changed many things over the years to accommodate the Muslim community in this country, but every time there is an interview by a cleric on the television we are being told that we are conspiring against the Muslim community which is a religion.

Nothing could be further from the truth and they need to look at themselves for the answers of integration in to any society.  They can't change a way of life that is ingrained in many countries all over the world.  Nor can they become a separate community within a community which seems to have happened over the years by the creation of religious ghetto's.

Of course we live a different type of lifestyle that is probably alien to many countries.  We meet people in the pubs as a way of life and make friends there, we have a different diet that might offend Muslims and we do many things that they may not agree with.  But this is where tolerance comes in and religion can't be allowed to dictate how anybody lives their lives.

We are now trying to make excuses for the bombings in London by saying the bombers were brainwashed when in fact they were cold blooded killers who carried out this atrocity that killed so many innocent people who couldn't care less about religion, colour or creed.  These were ordinary people going about their everyday life who had no axe to grind with anyone.  So anyone who is trying to defend these bombers by saying they didn't know what they were doing are misguided in every way.

They made a conscious decision to what they did and no excuses can be given for what drove them to this evil act.  We can all say that it was somebody else's fault, but that doesn't work with me.  It was them who did it and the consequences that followed were because of their evil act.

It's now time for the Muslim community who has many genuine people within its religion to start facing up to the facts that to become part of any society they have to integrate more and they have to defend the shores that they live in from any terrorist act, even if it means denouncing the people within their own community.  We all have a duty to make sure that if you believe in the word of the creator that it is not misinterpreted by those who want to cause divides in the world in the name of religion.

If we are get on together as  an integrated community there can be no special treatment for one religion over another because it becomes divisive and serves no purpose to anyone except the terrorist who will use it as weakness and prey on it in any way that they can.

Written by: Andrew Murphy Tuesday 19 July 2005

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