![\"migrant](\"http:\/\/www.hannaharendtcenter.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/132.jpg\")
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(This posting is a reprint from my original blog entry on the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College’s web site<\/a>, published on September 20, 2015)<\/p>\n \u201cThe calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion, but that they no longer belonged to any community whatsoever.\u201d<\/p>\n — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism<\/em><\/p>\n For the past few weeks, I have been in Birmingham UK, home to one of the most diverse communities in England, including many Muslims from India, Pakistan, and the Middle East who constitute more than 20% of the population of this city. The area where I reside has a decidedly \u201clive and let live\u201d attitude. In the morning, groups of women and men in various forms of hijab<\/em> or niqab<\/em> take their children to school, some heading for one of the Islamic schools, others to the nearby Catholic primary or another Church-affiliated school, and still others to the state-run local primary, where they mix together with \u201cwhite British,\u201d Caribbeans, and a range of other ethnicities. A nearby Italian restaurant assures its customers who inquire that its meat is halal<\/em>. The stores are filled with sales personnel of all ethnicities, genders, and types. A colorfully tattooed man collects his morning coffee from a woman in an equally colorful headscarf. A young Muslim woman selling electronics in a large department store becomes positively giddy when she learns I am from California. \u201cI so want to go there; I love America!\u201d she tells me. And yet, as the 2011 census reported, nearly 90% of the population, regardless of their ethnicity, consider themselves British.<\/p>\n It\u2019s from this standpoint, observing a very fluid plurality of people mixing and mingling with one another, enjoying each other\u2019s company, being unmoved by the visible differences on display, that I view with alarm the violent tear gas and water cannon crackdown by Hungary against desperate refugees selling everything they have in a last ditch effort to make it out of Syria. After the Hungarian border was closed, more than 6000 refugees entered Croatia in the last 24 hours alone. And, as I write, The Guardian<\/em><\/a> reports that the Croatian Minister of the Interior has just declared Croatia \u201cabsolutely full,\u201d telling the UNHRC that the problem belongs to the UN.<\/p>\n Equally troubling is the report today on the Cameron government\u2019s effort to pass a \u201ccounter-extremism bill,\u201d including measures more restrictive of speech and other political activities than current anti-terrorism measures. An independent reviewer of anti-terrorism laws, David Anderson QC, contended the legislation, if adopted, is likely to \u201cprovok[e] a backlash in affected communities, harden perceptions of an illiberal or Islamophobic approach<\/a>, alienating those whose integration into British society is already fragile, and playing into the hands of those who, by peddling a grievance agenda, seek to drive people further towards extremism and terrorism.\u201d<\/p>\n The bill defines extremism as \u201cvocal or active opposition to fundamental British values.\u201d But what are fundamental British values? Who defines those? And what border protections will be erected around them to prevent their being affected by the multiplicity of peoples who now constitute Britain?<\/p>\n Discussing the \u201cmany perplexities\u201d inherent in the concept of human rights, Arendt noted that \u201cno one seems able to define with any assurance what these general human rights, as distinguished from the rights of citizens, really are.\u201d Yet, the situation of superfluous people who had been driven out of their homes and made stateless demonstrated to Arendt that \u201c[t]he calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion, but that they no longer belonged to any community whatsoever.\u201d The situation of the superfluous made evident \u201cthe existence of a right to have rights (and that means to live in a framework where one is judged by one\u2019s actions and opinions) and a right to belong to some kind of organized community.\u201d<\/p>\n\n![\"birmingham](\"http:\/\/www.hannaharendtcenter.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/130.jpg\")
<\/a>East meets West: A pair of women walk down the high street in Birmingham, UK in full Muslim dress (Source: The Daily Mail UK<\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n![\"david](\"http:\/\/www.hannaharendtcenter.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/131-1024x576.jpg\")
<\/a>UK’s Cameron Offers Plan to Counter Attraction of Extremism (Source: VoA News<\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n