Racial and Religious Hatred Bill

My Lords, I should say at the outset that it is pointless to say that the Bill will not affect freedom of speech, that it will not affect frank and full discussion between peoples of different ideas, and that it will not affect the telling of jokes. I do not believe that and I would be surprised if any of your Lordships firmly believed that. Very soon, people will become afraid that it might lead to something. Where is the objective standard for these matters? Only the Attorney-General will tell us what is right and what is wrong. I take issue with the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, who said that not many of us have had experience of being shouted at, vilified and having things thrown at them. I have been a victim of all those things. I can tell the noble Baroness that Bangladeshi women in east London were also victims of that sort of behaviour before they started wearing the hijab. The hijab has not been with us for ever. The mothers of these girls now wearing the hijab did not wear it; nor did their grandmothers—to whose generation I belong—wear the hijab. It is a new development. The wearing of long beards and white caps are also new developments in the community. I suggest that 9/11 made Muslims much more empowered, perhaps in the wrong way. We have seen a moving of the goalposts within the Muslim community since 9/11. It is all around us and we see it every day. Let me say something about my personal upbringing. I was born and brought up in Lahore with two boys—brothers—of my age. Their grandmother was the nearest thing I had to a grandmother; I believed that their mother was my real aunt and I went to the place of worship with her—she went to the Imambara; she was a Shia Muslim—and my mother said nothing. My mother took me to the temple and she took me to the Imambara. I did not realise until I was much older that she was not my real aunt. Today, a girl who sometimes comes to help me with the cooking—a very good cook—will not drink water in my house because, she says, we are unclean as we are not Muslims. Things have changed so much. Things which we never thought we would see in our lives have come about. People talk about Islamophobia; I call it victim culture. The more you say that you are the victim of Islamophobia, the more it takes the burden from you to do something about your own condition—somebody else is responsible; somebody else is making you underachieve. There is great underachievement in the Muslim community, and that is a key issue. If the Government want to do something for the Muslim community, they should help the Muslims—young Muslims—to achieve; to become part of society as a whole and to feel empowered by that involvement. That is what we should be aiming at, not the separation being proposed. Professor Ishtiaq Ahmed has recently written a book in which he shows how pandering to group rights leads to more and more separateness. This is exactly what we are doing today. We are saying to groups, ““You have special rights. You are special people””. That not only upsets the majority but says to them, ““Right, we will live in our house, you will live in yours. We do not want to be bothered with you””. This is not my vision of society. My vision of society is that we are one people; that we come together. I cannot see any way in which the Bill will help us to achieve that. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, referred to the bombings and the fact that we have all been subjected to them in recent times. The landscape is changing day by day. Every arrest for terrorism happens to be of a Muslim. The four boys who committed suicide detonated bombs against Londoners—the same Londoners who marched against the Iraq war; who did everything possible to stop the Iraq war. How could they justify that? Will it not incite the families of those who died against Muslims? We are told that all terrorists happen to be Muslim but that all Muslims are not terrorists. That is true—all Muslims are not terrorists—but we need to know who supports the terrorists and who does not. I am the chairman of a radio station in east London which has had no end of calls from young people who support the suicide bombers. That is very frightening. We should be directing our resources at ensuring that young people, especially those from the Muslim community, have all the opportunities that can be given to them so that they feel a part of our society and not of some kind of separate cabal which says to them, ““Kill yourselves and kill innocent people and it will take you straight to heaven””. Religion has caused more bloodshed than anything else in the world. Does anyone really believe that this piddling little effort will do anything other than separate us all? It will not stop anyone hating anyone else. The only message it will send to all of us is, ““Stay among your own kind. Do not bother with the others””. On a previous occasion I spoke about my vision of society and how strange it was that the Sikhs were treated as another ethnic group. They are converted from the Hindus—there is no question of that; it is an historical fact—but I have received a very nasty piece of information from the Sikh Federation. It said that Sikhs are not Hindus—I know that—and Sikhs do not worship idols as Hindus do. Actually, we are not idol worshippers; we worship images of deities. It stated that Sikhs believe in one God; Hindus also believe in one God, and if anyone would like a lecture on that I would be very happy to give one. Brahman is the one God—there cannot be more than one God—and the others are all aspects of that one true God. Meister Eckhart called it ““The One””, and we believe in that. They said that we practise a caste system and that they do not. How untrue is that? Ask any Sikh whether or not they practise a caste system. We are already starting along the road of vilifying one another and separating ourselves. I see this as an example. I am not sure that the Muslims need protecting. Would we not say at this stage that we need protecting from them?