Christopher Hitchens asks in Vanity Fair : “How did a nation move from cricket and fish-and-chips to burkas and shoe-bombers in a single generation?”

The question isn’t answered in the article. Nor do we get to learn anything at all about why young Brits with more melanin in their skin than Hitchens find it easy to respond to the abominable views of the fundamentalist imam of Finsbury Park. Hitchens finds the easy way out by citing the anti-fundamentalist views of two brown writers, both of whom we like a great deal, Hanif Kureishi and Monica Ali. We hear something about the limits of British multiculturalism, and sure, it has to be blamed for the ways in which it has pandered to extremists of all faiths. But such a strain of multiculturalism is a part of the system of racist practice, not an exception to it, and the same can be said of fundamentalism too, united at birth with the racist system it purportedly opposes. There is a strong whiff of racism in the Hitchens piece; it would appear that anything that is resistant to assimilation merits being banished from the West. But my main objection to the article is its remarkable blindness to the way in which brown or black youth are automatically seen as outlaws. Because, sadly, religion is the modality in which race is lived, I’d like to recommend to Hitchens recent films like “Bradford Riots” and “The Road to Guantanamo.” (And, by the way, is Hitchens the only person on this planet to want fish and chips over seekh kebab or that particularly British-Asian concoction called chicken-tikka-masala?)

(Via Arts and Letters Daily)

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