Even handedness

Subject: Even-handedness



Red lines are drawn and continually redrawn on the basis that many people with a white skin are now being asked to rehash their opinions regarding race and cultures which were once upon a time foreign to us.

Yorkshire cricket is currently in the firing line with some of our best loved cricketers being accused of crimes that weren’t crimes when comments were first made such as the so called heinous crime of calling a Pakistani cricketer a Paki. According to the man in question he was so distraught he was near to taking his own life because of the debasement he felt as a person and yet it is only years later that he has voiced his anguish. Perhaps I can gain some compensation from Australia where I was often referred to as a “Pommy Bastard”, but I’m not holding my breath.

The Pakistani cricketers family arrived here in 1947 amidst a backdrop of extreme violence in India and Pakistan, which  carries on to this day His parents probably found that in general to enter a society which, though not perfect was governed by law and not the sectarian violence back home, millions having died, was a paradise. Their integration into the society here was held back, not by the resentment of the locals, who were resentful but because they were not informed of the reasons why thousands of immigrants were arriving to displace the local society with a society of their own.  By the arrivees  adherence to maintaining their old cultures and a religious view which was in many ways very alien to our own. The women in each family, (then as now), kept separate and isolated by patriarchy, a  diktat of coded dress and a lack of English. Even today to visit a Muslim house as a male the wife of a Muslim man is not allowed to communicate with you except through their children and the exposure of Pakistani men praying on young white girls in towns and cities in the north was hushed up by the authorities, afraid of upsetting the social balance of a minority now in many instances a majority voice voting themselves into positions of power by the use of a community inspired vote. The insistence of using Shira Law which goes against allowing two legal systems to be accredited and our separation of religion from politics is blatantly ignored and runs counter to our belief in democracy where even the taint of religious cohesion is avoided .

The trauma  of religious reprisals such as honour killing, the awful extremism practiced in Jihadism are at conflict with what we accept as common practice but our inability to offer this unpalatable aspect of Muslim practice whilst making such a fuss over name calling is disturbing. We are castigated by the very people who, if not overtly, tacitly remain largely silent  when atrocities are carried out in the name of Allah. Our media rise as one when decade old accounts of name calling come to light but last nights stoning of a woman in Karachi is not mentioned.

My call is for even-handiness not craven submission to popularism.