Der Chef der britischen Konservativen, David Cameron, hat zwei Tage mit einer muslimischen Familie in Birmingham verbracht.
David Cameron
Dabei konnte er erstaunliche Dinge feststellen:
Spent the night staying with Abdullah and his family in Birmingham. His children are a lot better behaved than mine (and older) so my sleep was blissfully uninterrupted.
Breakfast with the family, before taking the children to school. Here’s the interesting part – his three Muslim children go to a local faith school – a Jewish faith school. King David Primary school, which is massively oversubscribed, has a mixed roll with some 60 per cent of pupils from Muslim families, around a third from Birmingham’s Jewish community and the rest a mixture of Christians and Sikhs. The day starts with some prayers in Hebrew, led by the head of Jewish religious studies.
My obvious question to Abdullah – why do you, a practising Muslim, send your kids to a Jewish school? – does not get just the obvious answer: good discipline and good results. On top of that, the very fact that the school has a faith and a strong ethos is seen, at least by Abdullah and his family, as a positive advantage.
(Aus Camerons Webtagebuch, da gibt es sogar Videos)
Im Guardian legt Cameron sogar noch einen drauf:
And the third step in promoting integration is to ensure there’s something worth integrating into. ‚To make men love their country,‘ said Edmund Burke, ‚their country ought to be lovable.‘ Integration has to be about more than immigrant communities, ‚their‘ responsibilities and ‚their‘ duties. It has to be about ‚us‘ too – the quality of life that we offer, our society and our values.
Here the picture is bleak: family breakdown, drugs, crime and incivility are part of the normal experience of modern Britain. Many British Asians see a society that hardly inspires them to integrate. Indeed, they see aspects of modern Britain which are a threat to the values they hold dear – values which we should all hold dear. Asian families and communities are incredibly strong and cohesive, and have a sense of civic responsibility which puts the rest of us to shame. Not for the first time, I found myself thinking that it is mainstream Britain which needs to integrate more with the British Asian way of life, not the other way around.
Saying goodbye to Abdullah I was given gifts of T-shirts, shoes and a traditional robe which he said would be perfect for any visit to Pakistan. It’s another reminder that integration is a two-way street. If we want to remind ourselves of British values – hospitality, tolerance and generosity to name just three – there are plenty of British Muslims ready to show us what those things really mean.
Nun ja, der Wahlkampf ist eröffnet. Man merkt die Absicht. Cameron hofft, die von Labour enttäuschten Muslime einsammeln zu können. Aber verkehrt ist es darum ja trotzdem nicht.
Eigentlich ist das eine natürliche Sache: Ein wertkonservativer Politiker buhlt um die Stimmen wertkonservativer Einwanderer (s. Bush und die Latinos). Nur aus deutscher Perspektive kommt einem das noch merkwürdig vor. (Aus dem Tagebuch von Roland Koch: „Habe die Nacht mit Achmed und seiner Familie verbracht…“)