Male student gang raped by muslim youth

[trish]

I think you can rest easy Trish. I don't think we'll e heating from tragicomedy in a while. He was banned after he called the site owner "scum" in a different thread.

Why am I not surprised?

[Stavros]

I know certain monoculturalists here like to throw around the epithet “multiculturalist” as if it were an insult. It’s not. They also assume that it actually applies to everyone who opposes their monochromatic point of view. It doesn’t. When asked, I am more inclined to number myself among those who would encourage immigrants to join the melting pot, add their own unique insights, stir in their beliefs and customs, and imbibe the brew. The melting pot idea is not exactly a favorite among American “multiculturalists.” But how is the melting pot possible when the majority monoculturalists in our society immediately flee to the suburbs as soon as their neighborhood acquires a hint of foreign flavor? How is the melting pot to sustain itself if the majority monoculturalist is bent on demonizing every spice foreign to his palate, accusing every color clashing with his palette and asserting his own moral superiority at every turn. When it comes to immigration I am not a multiculturalist. I would prefer that people not live in isolated ghettos and conclaves. But I am not a monoculturalist either. We should 'schooch' to the side and make a space for others to join us. Share our cultural values and beliefs. It’s natural. It will eventually happen. It has almost always happened in the past when two cultures met. But the majority monoculturalists do not make it easy when they drag their smug version moral supremacy into every conversation and every corner of public life. But in the end, all monocultures (majority or minority) dissolve together into the world around them.

I think the difference in the USA is that first nations aside, everyone has an immigrant heritage, whereas there are people in the UK who claim some sort of kinship with the original inhabitants of this island -ok so they are mostly readers of the Daily Telegraph but I once suggested in a comment in that organ that a poster would not be happy unless everything from the Roman Invasion onwards was reversed, and he agreed!

When I was studying US political history there was a spate of articles that contasted the 'melting pot' with 'Balkanisation' and the tendency of some Americans to emphasise their heritage, by calling themselves Italian-American, Polish-American, and so on. I don't know what happened to that debate, and it probably only has any resonance in regions which were inhabited by immigrants from one part of the world, such as those parts of the mid-west that Scandinavians (perhaps even more specifically, Swedes) went to, as documented with poetic feeling by Willa Cather in O Pioneers! and My Antonia. And of course, neighbourhoods in cities, such as the North End in Boston, or Harlem in New York City. Yet even these change; I understand that parts of Harlem that were exclusively (and proudly) Black have been 'taken over' by non-Black people, and that it is the demand for property that has fuelled these changes. Does Spanish Harlem still exist?

As for multi-culturalism, it is reality and has been for centuries. I once suggested to someone, again in the Daily Telegraph that fish 'n chips was immigrant food and a multicultural phenomenon because potatoes came to us from the New World; ditto tea and coffee -I was ridiculed. But I still like fish 'n chips...can I now rest easy that this thead is well and truly dead?