'Birmingham – best place in Europe to be pure Muslim'

Standpoint magazine carries an interesting first-person piece by an unnamed vicar’s wife who has been living away from home:

I have just returned to London, where I have lived since I was 11. I have been away for four years, living as an ethnic minority in a monocultural part of the world, amassing a host of stories to tell to disbelieving friends. On the whole, I am glad to return. I shan’t miss some locals’ assumptions that, being a white woman, if I was outside after dark, as I occasionally was, usually to walk the few metres between my house and the church, I must be a prostitute eager to give them a blow job. I shan’t miss the abuse my priest husband received: the daubing of “Dirty white dogs” in red paint on the church door, the barrage of stones thrown at him by children shouting “Satan”. He was called a “f***ing white bastard” more than once, though, notably, never when in a cassock. I will also not miss the way our garden acted as the local rubbish dump, with items ranging from duvets and TV sets, to rats (dead or twitching) glued to cardboard strips, a popular local method of vermin control to stem the large numbers of them which scuttled between the rubbish piled in gardens and on pavements. Yes, I am very glad to have left Britain’s second city.

 

The full article is worth reading, but here are a couple of excerpts that paint a truly depressing picture, compared to which Theodore Dalrymple’s accounts of the city seem like HE Bates novels:

To a London reader, born and bred with multiculturalism, I know that my stories may come across as outlandish and exaggerated, and that I must surely be a BNP voter – I have observed people’s expressions as they have listened to my tales of life in Brum. When I recently told a friend how a large Taliban flag fluttered gaily on a house near St Andrew’s football stadium for some months, her cry of “Can’t you tell the police?” made me reflect how far many of our inner cities have been abandoned by our key workers: our doctors and nurses drive in from afar, the police, as mentioned before, have shut down their stations and never venture in unless in extremis – they and ambulance crews have been known to be attacked – even the local Imam lives in a leafier area.

 

Only the priest remains, if you can get one – the thriving but clerically-vacant church down the road has had no applicant in two years. In their absence, we get stabbings that never make the news, dog- and cock-fighting rings, cars torched as pranks and cars used for peddling heroin. (One of the more amusing moments of our time came when a local lad provided one reason people often gave us stares when we drove past such deals: “Two white people wearing seatbelts – you’ve got to be cops.”) In their absence, we simply have the witness of those who are unlikely to be heard, who, through a variety of unfortunate circumstances, have not been able to move out: the elderly, the infirm, the illiterate, the chronically poor. Indeed, some of the Muslim residents deeply regret the flight of the non-Muslim population. It is they who now have to live in a crime-ridden ghetto.

 

Laban Tall, to whom I owe this hat-tip, suggests it’s probably Small Heath or Sparsbrook. Perhaps the most telling moment comes when the author’s husband asks a man why he had moved from Belgium to Birmingham: “Everybody know. Birmingham – best place in Europe to be pure Muslim.”

Well, there must be many places in Europe where Muslims are entirely free to practise their faith, but I suspect there are few in which they can have so little contact with the civic and legal structure of a Western state if they choose.