Saturday 19 October 2013

When will HnH point their fingers and call Cllr Hiqab Jama racist?

There was an interesting story on the Bristol 247 news site yesterday - Immigrants ‘can do more to integrate into British culture’

It carried the news that "Bristol’s first Somali councillor has said immigrant families could do more to integrate themselves into British culture to help the battle against racism". The article went on to say:

Cllr Hibaq Jama -
Lucky not to have been called
'racist' by HnH
"Bristol’s first Somali councillor has said immigrant families could do more to integrate themselves into British culture to help the battle against racism.

Cllr Hibaq Jama, who came to Britain with her family when she was two years old as a refugee fleeing civil war in her country, said immigration was a threat to British culture if it was “a threat in the minds of British people”.

She said she had found real fears over immigration while campaigning in her Lawrence Hill ward, one of the poorest areas in the South West and with a large, white, working class community.

The debate over immigration needed to be broader, she added, to ask how immigrants and refugees could accommodate themselves more into the communities they enter."

This was just the day after Hope not Hate featured UKIP Croydon leader Peter Staveley in an article reprinted from the Croydon Advertiser which could barely contain its contempt in reporting Mr Staveley as saying:

UKIP's Peter Staveley - not allowed
to say what Cllr Jama does
""I'm not particularly uncomfortable but what I am uncomfortable about is when immigrants come into the country and do not properly integrate themselves into the community....

"By definition those people who have come to this country to better themselves are not integrating properly with the community because they can't speak the language.

"If too many people come from the same country too quickly then quite naturally they would tend to live and work with their colleagues rather than getting to know the people who were there before.


Now, I don't know about you, but to us, it would appear that Mr Staveley and Cllr Jama are saying exactly the same thing, particularly when you read Cllr Jama's full comments in the article linked above.

Meanwhile, in Croydon,

"Nero Ughwujabo, chief executive of Croydon Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) Forum, accused him of "talking rubbish""

What is doubly remarkable is that Councillor Jama was speaking at an event in Bristol commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Bristol Bus Boycott, where the general public boycotted Bristol's buses in protest at the bus company's refusal to hire black or Asian crews. It is revealing that not only did Hope not Hate fail to even mention such a landmark event in race relations on their web- or Facebook pages, but they were also conspicuously not invited to attend the event and had no official presence there. Is there any clearer proof of their slide into irrelevancy? Or will they, in the interests of anti-racism, point there fingers at Cllr Jama tomorrow and demand she apologise for her racism?

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