I don't know if VDARE.com readers have seen this August 20, 2011 essay in The Wall Street Journal by Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, about the causes of the London riots and how to prevent their recurrence. [Reversing the Decay of London Undone | Britain's chief rabbi on the moral disintegration since the 1960s and how to rebuild] I only saw it today, and only because I get uplifting e-mail bulletins from Rabbi Daniel Lapin—and Mrs. Lapin was impressed enough by Rabbi Sacks's WSJ essay to link to it.
 
In his essay, Rabbi Sacks offers an eloquent and seemingly well-argued explanation of the social breakdowns that led to the London riots of 2011, and offers hopeful and seemingly plausible suggestions about how to restore social health based on a revival of religious charity and aid societies, Victorian-style.  It is a powerful analysis and well-argued.  Rabbi Sacks is a very intelligent and articulate man who plainly gives these problems a lot of thought.

But the Chief Rabbi's thinking appears fatally incomplete, on the evidence of this essay. It's an impressive essay indeed, until one notices that?even though he is discussing riots carried out overwhelmingly by blacks of immigrant origin?Rabbi Sacks has managed not to mention even once the indiscriminate immigration and socially destructive diversity that British governments have been imposing on Great Britain ever since 1948. Immigration appears neither in his diagnosis of the riots' causes nor in his evaluation of how likely a revival of private charity actually is in a multiculturalized social welfare state!  Rabbi Sacks, in fact, does not even acknowledge that imported diversity and official multiculturalism exist in today's ever less-United Kingdom?although surely he is well aware of both.

Looking across the Atlantic for inspiration, Rabbi Sacks mentions Alexis de Tocqueville and that French visitor's surprise that the America of 1831, despite its founding as a secular republic, was in truth a deeply religious society. 

But what have mass immigration, imported diversity and imposed multiculturalism done to that America?  Would any Founding Father?Christian, deist or agnostic?recognize what Barack Hussein Obama presides over as a legitimate successor of the American republic he helped found?

Rabbi Sacks also, and rather misleadlingly, cites Robert Putnam of Harvard, who came?very reluctantly, good Harvard liberal that he strives to be?to the answer to the first question in his book Bowling Alone.  Instead of citing Putnam's Bowling Alone conclusion?that diversity destroys social trust and makes the very institutions whose revival Rabbi Sacks calls for all but impossible?Rabbi Sacks focuses on Putnam's hopeful report in American Grace that social capital exists in "churches, synagogues and other places of worship."  ("Other"? What might those be?) 

But doesn't this emphasis on religion only strengthen the conclusion that diversity is divisive and multiculturalism socially isolating?  For most individual churches and synagogues are spiritual and social oases of homogeneity, refuges for their congregants against the deracinated and deliberately disunited society that now surrounds them.
 
This kind of sage counsel is no help at all.  Indeed, in its accidental or designed misdirection it is positively harmful.  One wonders if Rabbi Sacks is being deliberately disingenuous or if he is in fact utterly clueless.

In either case, he is doing Britons no service. 

Especially, Rabbi Sacks is doing the people whom he most owes a duty of care, the Jews of the Commonwealth, no service.  Much, if not most, of the mass immigration into the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand is of Muslims.  Try as we might to ignore it, Islam is supremely hostile to Jews and has been from the beginning of Muhammad's career.  In Muslim eyes, Jews are the very worst of enemies, commonly and openly vilified in Muslim scriptures and media with a vitriol most Nazis failed to achieve.  A Chief Rabbi who really put his people's interests first would be calling as forcefully as he could for an immediate end to Muslim immigration and the prompt repatriation of as many Muslims as possible! 

Rabbi Sacks is, of course, doing no such thing.  And, of course, the Wall Street Journal wouldn't lend him any column-inches for that.