Top Cop Says ‘Muslims Shouldn’t Assimilate’

The UK’s highest-ranking Asian police chief Neil Basu has said that Muslims should not be forced to “assimilate” with other sections of the general population. 

Mr Basu who is one of Britain’s most senior anti-terror officers admitted that Prevent, which is the Government’s flagship counter-terrorism strategy, had been “badly handled” and warned it needed to be more community-led if it was to be successful. Some may accuse Neil Basu of an abdication of responsibility. Neil Basu’s stance of being against assimilation is only likely to further the perception by some in Britain that see Islam as an uncompromising ideology.

Mr Basu pulled no punches whilst rejecting the idea that British Muslims needed to assimilate. Mr Basu said: “Assimilation implies that I have to hide myself in order to get on.

"We should not be a society that accepts that. You should be able to practise your culture or religion openly and still be accepting of others, and others be accepting of you. That is a socially inclusive society.” Whilst many will agree that freedom of expression is, without doubt, a liberty that Britain’s should be afforded, many extremists could interpret these comments as an excuse not to abide by British laws and constitutions."

Basu added: “These are wider societal problems. They are not paying more police and more security services to stop more terrorist attacks. That’s not the cure for this. Like every other aspect of law enforcement, we [counter-terrorism policing] are a suppression tool for a problem. We are dealing with the symptom and we do need to deal with the root causes of it.”

While the majority of the terrorism threat was from Islamist extremists, far-right propaganda could help create a permissive environment for some to commit violence, he said, and society needed to determine how much of that rhetoric was acceptable.

“At the moment, we seem to be accepting a level which I think is potentially breeding some intolerance,” he said. “That intolerance, for a small number of people, can spin up very quickly to a violent act, and we have some examples of that. We have some very awful examples of that.”

I thought that the whole purpose of immigration was to start a new life in another country, which means assimilating, and accepting the laws and culture of the host nation? Looks like we were mistaken!