Raheem Kassam's Warning

Fri, May 14, 2021 8:34 p.m.

Raheem Kassam's Warning

Kassam must have an illuminating personal history, but I'm not aware that he's written about himself.  Here's my Amazon review of his book Enoch Was Right: "Rivers of Blood" 50 Years On (about Enoch Powell):

 An important book about an important public figure, by an important writer

Reviewed in the United States on June 30, 2019

Verified Purchase

Author Raheem Kassam thinks it was a tragedy of the first magnitude that Enoch Powell never became British prime minister. After reading Kassam's account of Powell's thinking, I agree. Indeed, it was a tragedy for the entire Western world that, already by 1968, Western political "leadership" -- or more accurately: power -- was in the hands of spineless lightweights such as Edward Heath.

If you'd like a sort of slim version of Kassam's book, find online John Derbyshire's classic article from May 2001, "The Island Race…Riots." While he only briefly mentions Powell himself, Derbyshire eloquently lays out the state of affairs that Powell was warning about.

So what's actually in Kassam's book? He examines in great detail the ideas that Powell dealt with in his "Rivers of Blood" speech (which didn't actually contain that phrase). He establishes how substantial and far-seeing Powell was -- the very opposite of the 'xenophobe, racist, blah-blah-blah' that Powell is typically smeared as.

Particularly interesting features:

- Kassam's observations of the state-of-life in Britain's immigration-blitzed cities, reinforcing (17 years on) what Derbyshire had to say.

- The chapter that's an interview of Nigel Farage, who can be considered a political heir of Powell.

- The section on Trevor Phillips (son of immigrants from British Guiana), past head of Britain's Equality and Human Rights Commission, who apparently agrees with much of what Powell said in the "Rivers of Blood" speech (and consistently thereafter) but nevertheless decries the speech because its notoriety made it impossible to talk in public about racial subjects. (But isn't this a statement about the fecklessness of political "leadership," not a legitimate charge against Powell?)

- Kassam's own back story. Son of Muslim Indian immigrants from East Africa.

I give the book 4 stars instead of 5 because it could have used polishing. There are lots of typos, and Appendix A has the peculiarity that the final line of each paragraph gets spread across the entire page width (i.e. it's both right **and** left justified!). Since the book is self-published (thus maybe print-on-demand), perhaps Kassam or a friend could go back through and clean it up.

It also could use a lot more on Kassam's own back story, because this must surely be interesting and pertinent to Kassam becoming an acolyte of Powell. How did a young Muslim man in increasingly-Islam-impacted England become an atheist and apparent great skeptic of Islam? But maybe that's grist for another book. (There's a wikipedia entry on Kassam.)