This gloomy conclusion ought to be tempered, however, by our research findings, which demonstrate that multicultural conflicts are only a very modest part of the resonant controversies over immigration and ethnic relations politics. In addition, concerning the conflicts over Islam, it is still better to have conflicts regarding being part of a national community than to have resident migrants who see themselves apart from the native civil society. There are also historical precedents. For example, most of Britain’s Jewish population is descended from Eastern European Jews who immigrated between 1880 and 1910. Upon arrival, these groups were visibly different with their own religions and practices, yet now several generations on, they are deeply assimilated into the British way of life. What is needed in response to conflicts over Islam are pragmatic, practical policy discourses of accommodation that are based on factual understandings of the scale, type, and nature of the actual problems, away from distortions of public debate. Too often in current debates, liberal intellectuals defend a “myth” of unitary national citizenship, which in post-immigration Europe is an historical anachronism, or is simply based on nostalgia for the nation’s past. In cases such as that of Rushdie and of the headscarf, the facts of the actual problems have often been distorted under a barrage of rhetoric about national values and identity, and the nature of their threat to cohesion overblown in the public imagination.