In Reply to: Re: Castlebar Chavs . . . posted by Racist alert on January 04, 2006 at 17:54:44:

An interesting debate on the BBC the other day about a book that blames this kind of over-the-top PC stuff for the recent London bombings!

As I understand it the thesis went something like this: It's racist to stop someone wearing a hoodie because it might offend their religion or something. Therefore you allow communities to develop in isolation untouched by the mores and customs of the larger majority. The isolation breeds contempt, hatred and ignorance and hey presto bombs on buses and tubes and airplanes flying into buildings? Much better to integrate and be a little more upfront about normal everyday things that the majority prefer.

It's a bit far fetched I agree but there is a problem when the majority can't make a reasonable point about people hiding their faces from CCTV with helmets or hoods or can't put a Christmas tree or crib at Christmas Time or they are forced to rename their major religious feast in case it might offend the minority perhaps things are wrong?

It's a question of balance. The people we are trying not to offend who are living in linguistic, religious, ethnic ghettos certainly would not return the compliment and perhaps even see this kind of kid-glove treatment as beneath contempt?

Putting up a crib in the local hospital is quite a different thing to bulldozing peoples houses on the Gaza strip and building walls to keep them under the thumb of one of the world's most powerful war machines. It's not possible to use the slippery slope argument that if the ethnic majority in a town celebrates their traditional local culture today in an unfettered manner that somehow tomorrow we will be bulldozing Palestinian settlements or bombing muslim children in Faluja or locking them up in Guantanamo?