Dhimmitude and Dismissal

At Robert Spencer's Dhimmi Watch website, a discussion of the decision by West Yorkshire Transport Service to dismiss a Bradford bus driver because he is a member of the BNP, and the children and adults with special needs who are his passengers are mainly from Bradford's Asian community - "West Yorkshire Transport Service said it was 'incompatible' for a BNP member to transport the mainly Asian passengers every day. " (Thanks to Colt at Eurabian Times for drawing my attention to this.)

In his presentation of this item, Spencer admits that he is not English, "and I don't know if the BNP is actually racist or not. I do know that that word is slung around in a lot of contexts in which it doesn't belong, and that American and British Muslim advocates use it to smear and discredit people who dare to speak the truth about the global jihad." He goes on: "But anyway, whether the BNP is really racist or not, this bus driver has been fired because his route had him carrying mostly disabled Muslims ('Asians' in this article) whom he had to make sure were seated properly, etc.  Was he yelling racist epithets at them? Mocking the Prophet? Filling his bus with anti-Muslim literature? Nope: there were no complaints about him. None. His employers just thought that his beliefs, rolling around in his mind up there in the driver's seat, might offend his passengers.  It just gets crazier and crazier. "
 
My initial response to this is that I'm not sure that those who don't live in the UK and are unfamiliar with the inflections of British politics are really best qualified to judge on an issue like this. To be fair, Spencer adds an update:  "Some people have filled me in on the BNP, and I want to emphasize that I do not support them." But he adds: "However, I also do not support victimizing people for wrongdoing that they actually haven't committed."
 
I have a great deal of respect for Robert Spencer: his dissection of Islam - especially in Islam Unveiled and Onward Muslim Soldiers - and of the ways in which Western societies have been duped and misled by apologists for militant Islam, is masterly and informed by a deep level of scholarship and careful research. But, like another US commentator, Daniel Pipes, when he turns his attention to societies beyond the continent of North America, he sometimes fails to take into account the tensions and structural peculiarities of the local conditions he is observing. In one recent article, Pipes even singled out the extreme right wing and racist politician Enoch Powell as having predicted, in his "Rivers of Blood" speech of 1968, the social and inter-communal problems that now exist in Northern England. I documented this in an earlier post. Likewise, in casting doubt on whether the BNP is a racist organization, Spencer not only fails to perceive the social reality of Britain - he also comes dangerously close to helping to further destabilize the already precarious state of British inter-communal politics.

While it's perfectly possible to agree that no one should be dismissed from a job because of what they might be thinking, what ideas and policies or what political party they might support, it also needs to be pointed out that the BNP is not just any political party. To make a comparison that is perhaps too simple but is still, I believe, a valid one: if it was acceptable to ban Communists from entering the United States during the Cold War, it is surely acceptable to ban extreme British nationalists from holding public office in positions where they come into contact with the very people they despise and wish to harm.

As I've pointed out elsewhere, the real source of the problem is the current British government's unwillingness or inability to separate the concepts of race, ethnicity and religion from one another. Because of the confusion induced by this, the proposed law on religious intolerance will not succeed.