In "Us, them, and jihad" in the Toronto Star, Caspar Melville of London's New Humanist magazine tells Canada to commit suicide faster:
In Toronto, the arrests of 17 suspects alleged to have been planning a bomb plot unfold amidst much hand-wringing about "the enemy within" and the putative failure of the Canadian multicultural ideal....Our anxieties about "homegrown" bombers are mixed with worries about civil liberties and the reliability of police intelligence: How much of our "free society" are we prepared to sacrifice to ensure that another tragedy is averted? What can we do to protect ourselves from further attack?
No doubt Toronto is asking itself the same questions....
Those who grew up in, and were committed to, racial intermixture London-style suddenly felt that perhaps they might have been conned, their liberalism used against them, making them vulnerable. It was the time of right-wing "I told you so's" and the emergence of the "realistic" muscular liberal. Time, many argued, for the country and its people to shut up shop, to stop being a soft touch for terror.
Yes indeed, Mr. Melville. But the problem isn't "racial intermixture." It's the short-sighted and naive tolerance of an ideology that would destroy or subjugate all those outside of it. Its spread is abetted by insane immigration policies, but it is not entirely an immigration problem.
But how could you possibly achieve this? Tinkering with the immigration laws is going to have no impact whatsoever on the diversity of polyglot London — and would have had no impact, anyway, on the future actions of British-born lads in Bradford. Diversity is not a policy in London; it's a fact.
Fair enough. So make it clear that the ideology in question is unwelcome, and violators will be prosecuted.
And, individually, how can you protect yourself? By scrutinizing closely anyone who looks different? Everyone seems suspicious if you look hard enough, especially if you think your own life is on the line. In that way lies paranoia....
No, Mr. Melville, not everyone who looks different. Just jihadists and potential jihadists, even if they look the same as I do.
Toronto seems to be in the early stages of this long, confusing process. Of course, you haven't had the deaths (well done, your police), just the potential death of a lovely idea. Torontonians, so used to proudly talking up their multicultural diversity (though, from London, claims that Toronto is the world's most multicultural city always smacked of hyperbole) are asking themselves where it all went wrong, if it was precisely this openness to immigration and diversity that has fostered the growth of this (cue ominous music) "enemy within."
Of course it did. The question is what to do about it.
The homegrown element seems to be especially occupying the Canadian mind. Yes, you seem to be saying, we can understand how filthy foreigners could plot to kill Brits, but jolly old liberal Canucks? Fair enough, but didn't you feel the same when Ben Johnson cheated, or those bikers were gunned down? Guess what — there are bad guys everywhere.
My goodness, this is a high-level analysis.
Having passed through our own version of this anxiety, I would offer two, inevitably contradictory, responses.First, minimization by ridicule.
Very soon after the July bombers were revealed to be young men from Yorkshire, Londoners began to joke that we were indeed under attack — not from global jihad but from bloody northerners. We found comfort in the fact that these guys had come down from the grim North on the train to attack London out of envy. We domesticated the threat.
You might do the same by suggesting that your would-be bombers were in actual fact Mississaugan nationalists.
Oh, no worries, Mr. Melville. Everyone is already well embarked on the path of pretending that the jihadists are other than what they really are.
Secondly, serious.Yes, these were young British men, one an Afro-Caribbean convert, apparently Westernized, one a teacher, for God's sake, apparently Westernized. One spent the evening before the murders playing cricket.
As we have seen again and again -- cf. Hawash and Taheri-azar -- Westernization establishes nothing.
Yes, such attacks reveal some deep social fissures and the emergence of scary new technologies of conspiracy and murder. But then again, young men who are prepared to kill other people are hardly a new phenomenon or a product of multiculturalism. People are killed in the U.K. every year because they are black or gay or support the wrong team or spilled someone's pint.
Yes, but there is no global movement of violent people acting on a centuries-old ideology that they believe orders them to kill blacks or gays or pint-spillers.
Yes, low-tech bomb technology and the support of global jihadis add a frightening new spin. But London has had the IRA and the right-wing nail bomber David Copeland and football hooligans and serial rapists and murderers. To their victims, whatever twisted reason their killers thought they had matters not at all.
Maybe not, but it matters to the survivors, if they are going to find and track those who want to carry out more attacks of the same kind, and stop them.
The stupidest mistake would be to blame diversity. Nothing lays bare the true multiculturalism of London more clearly than the heart-rending biographies of the victims of July 7.
And nothing lays bare the willful blindness and vulnerability of London more clearly than its desperate attachment to multiculturalism despite the opening it gives to those who would transform the U.K. into a monolithic Sharia state.
The 56 dead included several Poles, an Italian, a Vietnamese Australian, a Turk, a young woman called Islam, Black Londoners of African and Caribbean descent, a Welsh musician, a young French Tunisian, an Afghan refugee, a Monserratan policeman living in London because he was scared of the volcano, an Israeli, an Irish lad, an Indian Hindu alongside a Richard, Philip, Colin, Giles, Jessica, Samantha and Elizabeth. If the perpetrators of the attack were a product of cultural diversity, so were the victims.
The perpetrators of the attack were in fact a product of a single culture, or at least a single unified ideology. Nattering about how diverse the murdered people were is a groteque case of missing the point. Poles and Irish and Hindus and all the rest do not hold to an ideology of supremacism and subjugation. To claim that those who do hold to it must continue to stream into England because other are streaming in as well defies common sense, prudence, and any developed survival instinct.
Diversity was the context and the target of the attack every bit as much as the cause. What a victory for the medievalist jihadis if we did away with the cultural plurality, which is what they despise the most.
No, it isn't what they despise the most. What they despise the most is jahiliyya, the society of unbelievers, the pre-Islamic period of ignorance, whether that society is "diverse" or "monolithic."
Perhaps it is time for Torontonians, and Londoners, to lose their arrogance and their innocence, to recognize that open-mindedness and fundamental decency will not necessarily be reciprocated. Nothing guarantees that everyone will be good in a good society. Openness implies vulnerability — it's the price we pay for our privilege. The enemy, long before the arrests in Toronto, long before 7/7 or 9/11, was already within....
Indeed. The enemy is already within. And open-mindedness and fundamental decency do not require us to continue to pursue suicidal policies that ignore that.
But, like so much about the city, you put up with it and carry on. You let the World Cup matter more than the possibility of being blown to smithereens. You put your faith in the decency of most people — a decency that cuts across all barriers of race and class and is so often movingly magnified by horrible events — and in the operation of the laws of probability.
I would rather put my faith in a sound and realistic anti-jihadist program, involving sane immigration policies and domestic self-defense measures.
It may not be a consistent philosophical position...
Ain't it the truth!
Apparently Caspar Melville thinks it's appropriate to blather on a bunch of 1960's cliches, while not bothering to do even 5 minutes of research into the nature of the problem. I find him to be reckless. Caspar, start with "sharia" and "demographics." If you want to see what Muslim majorities do, take a look at examples where they are in power. It is probable that the U.K. will be Islamic, simply by demographics alone, by the end of this century. There may be a Muslim majority before that (possibly by mid-century). There is no indication from Caspar's 'eat-drink-and-be-merry' proposal that he has any clue as to what is likely going to happen if present trends are allowed to continue.
P.S. "Medievalist jihadis" have been doing what jihadis do before, during, and after the medieval period. There is no reason to believe that they will stop their use of the terrorism tactic, as long as it is effective in regulating public opinion in western countries such as Canada, U.K., U.S., Spain, etc.
One thing that is interesting to me here is the name of the magazine. In England at the moment "humanist" is often used as a euphemism for "miltant secularist" - what would have been called an "anti-clericalist" in France. Historically, it meant nothing of the kind, of course. Erasmus was a humanist; so were John Colet and Thomas More. A humanist simply meant someone who took part in the revival of "humane learning", and many of these men were clergymen. This is the usage in Literae humaniores.
I don't know the magazine, but I'd bet it is this new usage of the term not the traditional one that the publisher had in mind. If it is, that raises an interesting question, which is why should people who have been somewhat obsessed with attacking the minor manifestations of semi-moribund and inoffensive Christian culture in the UK be concerned to make space for Islam, which is anything but moribund and dictates dogmas that no non-believer (were he not determined, perhaps, to close his eyes) could possibly feel comfortable with?
Come to think of it, even if not the question remains, because you find this attitude among militant "secularists" far more often than you would expect, if you were to look at such stances merely as intellectual positions (which they are not). Here is an example:
The ACLU's hypocrisy
Caspar Melville did a masterful job of beating around the bush, but never directly confronted the source of the problem. While reading his article I was looking for him to bring into focus the specific causations, but this is as close as he came;
"The perpetrators of the attack were in fact a product of a single culture, or at least a single unified ideology"
Such blandness leads me to feel that he has not taken much time to at least take a crash course on the teachings of the quran, and the hadiths.
Trying to compare common and random criminal behavior with a taught Ideology that precipitates militancy towards western values is analogically a false premise for gaining any in roads to an understanding of the problem.
Sorry Mr. Melville but you need to go back to the drawing board.
The Toronto Star continues to publish the words of people who are lighter than air, Diana West writes as if she had been reading Hugh Fitzgerald. From 9 June 2006:
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/dwest.htm
Another wretched rambling by another liberal with no attachment to reality.
Another wretched rambling by another liberal with no attachment to reality.
Another wretched rambling by another liberal with no attachment to reality.
Here is a clearer-eyed view of things.
Mark Steyn on multiculturalism and "the re-primitivization of the world".
http://www.suntimes.com/output/steyn/cst-edt-steyn11.html
People need to be woken up to the very real possibility of their societies being "primitivized". The West has enjoyed some sixty years of peace, prosperity, and security, and people simply do not realize how fragile such things are.
There was no beating around the bush, just a constant flow of piss into my pocket. It's obvious that it's every man and woman for him/herself.
The last time I went to an ACLU event, I noticed a good bit of muslim inflitration. It would be an interesting study to find out what percentage of the ACLU membership/funding is muslim.
Wouldn't it be a delicious irony if the muslims take over the ACLU!
Excellent deconstruction Robert...so overpowering in fact that this piece is a candidate for emailing to family and friends...no doubt under the banner "the enemy within."
Mr. Melville has Moby al-Qur'an Dick in his lap, and, instead of noticing it, describes the minnows, carp and eels that are not.
Done well, this kind of 'description by indirection', where you expose the outline of something 'unmentionable' to the audience, can elude [internalized] p.c. censors. 'Showing' the whale in the room obliquely by describing its effects.
But this Melville appears more to be trying to calm a rising Canadian mob- with any scrap of pacifying pablum he can scoop from his bag of soothing platitudes- than seriously analyzing the threat of jihad.
A broom against the tides works about as well.
People are starting to believe their own 'lying eyes'.
And not apologists trying to bail the Koranic Titanic with pet thimbles.
It's exactly what I predicted: The threat of Islamic terrorism, including this Toronto plot, might lead one to question some of the basic assumptions of multiculturalism. But multiculturalism is not to be questioned. Therefore, let's just flush all this evidence about Islamic terrorism down the memory hole.
In science, it takes only one negative result or experimental counterexample to disprove a theory. But the theory of multiculturalism has such political baggage associated with it that no amount of contrary evidence seems to be able to refute it. It seems to resonate with many well-meaning people on some emotional level. (It never resonated with me, even before 9-11.)
You put your faith in the decency of most people — a decency that cuts across all barriers of race and class and is so often movingly magnified by horrible events — and in the operation of the laws of probability.
Yes, put your faith in the decency of all those "moderate" muslims, who in this case knew their co-religionists were preaching hatred and violence, but were willing to sit back and do absolutely nothing to prevent an attack.
Then, after the attack occured, the "moderate" muslims would have first prated and whined about the backlash against "moderate" muslims, and then pretended to be shocked that these men were jihadists.
Funny how muslims whine about people being prejudiced against them for the acts of the so-called "few", when own their religion mandates that they hate and kill entire groups of people, and not for any acts perpetrated by anyone in that group, but because the group merely exists as a free and separate entity.
To borrow an old phrase, this Melville chap seems to be stuck on stupid and is incapable of getting it.
Stephen L.
Could multiculturalism work if Islam was not in the equation? My lifes obsevations and gut feel leans me towards the affirmative. So we need to isolate the deviant variable and then we can get on with building that elusive utopian society we all dream of.
"The perpetrators of the attack were in fact a product of a single culture, or at least a single unified ideology"
Hey Mackie, those are Robert's words, not Melville's, and Robert is exactly right. Melville keeps beating the horse of diversity, willfully ignoring what the group have in common.
I'm going to print this guy's article out and keep it as a sample of the utter mollification and emasculation of the Western spirit. The idiot wants us to believe in the essential decency of all people and pray and do nothing about a clear and present danger, which at the very least requires a new immigration policy?
How stupid can you be? Are we supposed to fold up and do nothing about the terrorist threat just because there are thousands of people dying everyday for reasons other than terrorism?
I've heard this pseudo-argument before: Why are the Americans making such a big deal out of 3000 people dead in one event when thousands more die everyday of famine or AIDS, with the sly implication that it's all the West's/America's fault.
Clueless idiot posing as enlightened expert:
"It may not be a consistent philosophical position..."
Robert:
"Ain't it the truth!"
'nuff said!
Thanks, Yojimbo, the Steyn article is worth reading. The real wonder is that more are not saying the same. How long, oh Lord, how long?
http://www.suntimes.com/output/steyn/cst-edt-steyn11.html
"Yes, these were young British men, one an Afro-Caribbean convert, apparently Westernized, one a teacher, for God's sake, apparently Westernized."--from Caspar Melville.
Westernized? Not much, except in terms of some superficialities (cricket, fish and chips, etc). Not western ideologically, in core beliefs, and that's what matters. They lived geographically in Britain but it is more accurate to say that their national loyalties were with Islam. Melville does not seem to grasp that Islam is among other things a political entity. The goals of those who push for sharia law through political processes and the Islamic terrorist groups are identical: set up sharia law everywhere possible. Multiculturalism is implicated in this because it is precisely that policy, in its strong form, which permits Islam (with its core ideology of hate, supremacism, imperialism, its division of the world into Muslims and infidels, etc., and its approval of terrorism as a tactic) to flourish. It's not so much that multiculturalism provoked jihad--Islam provoked it--but that multiculturalism enabled it. Multiculturalism removes our defences against Islam, and political correctness does double-duty by providing Islam with a shield from criticism while also providing Islamists with a political/social weapon with which to attack non-Muslims.
"People are killed in the U.K. every year because they are black or gay or support the wrong team or spilled someone's pint".
I beg your pardon ???
Take confort folks, the answer to "relativist multiculturalism" is the internet. The internet with websites such as JW/DW and others have begun to open the eyes of non-Muslims to what is really going on. Keep up the good work Robert.
Man, the more and more I pay attention to MSM and Liberals the more I am constantly reminded of what Orwell said. 'In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.'
We have already swallowed the poison when we say things like "Muslim citizens", or "our Muslims", or "Muslim Americans", or "British Muslims" without choking on it. Where is our gag reflex?
Do we allow things like "Nazi citizens" or "our Nazis" or "Nazi Americans" to spill from our mouths so easily? Do we not have something in ourselves which rejects the notion that such persons can be Nazi and citizens at the same time? Are we not aware that citizenship isn't simply a function of place and time, but of sentiment as well? Why then do we work so fervently to include the unincludable? Why don't we gag at words like "Sharia" and "Muslim" and "Islam" in the same way we do with the word "Nazi"?
We should. If we want to save our souls we should.
"Stephen L.
"Could multiculturalism work if Islam was not in the equation? My lifes obsevations and gut feel leans me towards the affirmative"
Don't mistake "Multiculturalism" - all cultures are equal - for the "Melting pot" - all are equal before the law or, the equality and dignity of the human individual. The former is about destroying the latter.
It is NOT, NOT, NOT, affirmative. Get that idea out of your head right now, please.
Right on Redwine. Write on.
redwine, I have to agree with you here. The answer is a resounding, "No". I think Islam shows the problem of this way of thinking up in stark relief, but in truth it would be a problem in any case. Those who shout a lot have been calling for multiculturalism for a long time, but they don't understand what it is they are calling for.
Let's be clear: if it's just food and clothing, culture is unimportant, but cultures also set values. And, if "multiculturalism" means anything it means allowing room for different moral - and hence legal (for what is law but culture in the imperative mood?) - arrangements. Think about this for awhile and one should be able to see there is a problem. Can we have a situation where some citizens of a state are punished for some "crimes" and some are not? Jack would be punished for murdering his sister but Ahmed would not (because "honour" requires it in his culture); Sally cannot be made to marry a man whom she does not love by her family, but Aisha can be.
Who gets to say who belongs to which culture?
And don't think you could choose to leave one or another if it suited if one: if one's membership of a culture is defeasible then in fact there isn't "multiculturalism", because the culture isn't truly independent if something stands over it - namely, personal choice.
But the problems run even deeper than that, because it can be argued that the political order rests on "pre-political loyalties". I can't make the argument here in the detail it deserves, but I suggest anyone who wants to pursue this thought get a copy of Roger Scruton's The Philosopher on Dover Beach and read chapters 26 and 28 in that.
Here is a short extract:
At bottom this is a question of sovereignty. And the spectre of enclaves - and eventual civil war - rears its head here. Here is an article exploring the problem in the US context:
The Islamist Challenge to the U.S. Constitution
Islamist enclaves in the US, the mind boggles at the prospect. I must admit that I worry less about you Yanks than about us Eurotrash; you seem to believe in something, unlike us; you have your (despised here, I should say) gun and vigilante culture; you are aware of being seen as the Great Shaitan by the Mohammedan world, which surely must make it easier to rally to your nation's defense. I don't know about your birth rate compared to that of Europe?
I would feel more comfortable if we had large Catholic communities with high birth rates and a strong belief in their own faith. Anything non-Submissive that does not hate itself and wants to commit collective suicide. Poly-ethnicism, and not multiculturalism, as a bulwark against the Submissive threat?
Enclaves, however frightening this may seem, in a way has the advantage of being more like an enemy that can be isolated and besieged, a less scary spectre than the 'invasion of the body snatchers' scenario of them being intermingled with the surrounding communíty.
Multicultural countries just do not work, when it is tried, it sooner or later it desolves into warring factions. Russia is a classic example. The Austrian Empire dissolved into first the Austro-Hungarian Empire then into half a dozen minor countries lets throw in a few more examples Yugoslavia Cyprus. Multi-ethnic counties can work but you have to have a strong set of common cultural, and morals and ethical values. These are what forged The United States into what it is today when you have a melting pot you can have a strong country but when you have a salad bowl type of country which the countries of Europe have been trying to put together over the last 50 years it is a recipe for disaster. Let me give you an example of Multiculturalism that was tried in my country, England over 1,000 years ago. For 300 years prior to 1066 a date all Englishmen know we had had a large influx of Danish Vikings this lead to nearly 300 years of intermittent warfare it got so bad that the two basic people the Saxons and the Viking divide England up into two parts the Viking part in the North and the Saxon part in the South. When William the Conquer conquered England he took over a divided country. His solution was very simple after he had quelled the Saxon part he used a mixture of Genocide and Ethnic cleansing to quell the northern part of his new Kingdom, and it was bloody. The viking refugees who had fled back to Denmark managed to get the King to raise a fleet of over 1,000 ships to re invade England. Due to quarrelling the re invasion never came off and William and his sons were able to reunite England and forge a country and not a geographical expression which is a good phrase to describe the E.U. When the internal tensions become so great in a Multicultural society it breaks down into civil war as happened in Yugoslavia and I think that that is what we in Europe have to look forward too in the next few years, vicious bloody civil war. I think it was Mark Twain who said history does not repeat itself but it does tend to rhyme, no truer word was spoken in jest.
Melville??
well "Call me Ismail" .
But seriously folks... the looney leftist socialists love to project all social ills onto the entire population to push their agenda for State control to protect everyone , we saw how AIDS was blamed on all the citizens and therefor funding was needed , durg use was so bad we needed "Safe injection" centre's for shooting-up to stop AIDS which is now a rrug related virus now, and when one long Jihadist named gamil Gharbi slaughter 14 female students in Montreal as Jihad for Allah's cause it became a MALE problem and $$billions was spent on making Hunters register their rifles while Toronto's gun problem is a nation wide issue even though about 80% of the victims are Black and the arrested killers are mainly jamaican Blacks or jamaican background Canadians.
If people have no free wills and crime crosses the entire spectrum of society then why have I never seen a Midget rob a bank or be arrested for selling drugs, and why is it people that are 7 foot tall and up don't seem to be wanted for rape or bank robberies .
WHY???????????
Because humans can make free will decisions based of projecting their behaviour into the future and calculate the odds of being punished if caught for a crime, imagine being in a all Black city in Africa and you're either white and average height . a midget of any colour, a 7 foot 8 person of any colour, or over 7 foot and white.
Now ask yourself how hard it would be for Police and citizens to ID you after a crime and how far could you get on public transit as a Giant or Midget.
How many hadicapped or double amputees rob banks or sell drugs, even if many of the immigrants that have come to Canada are confronted by militants wanting them to destroy Canada as a Loyalty to their Country of origin, it appears that only Islam has been powerfull enough to override the free will of some Muslims in Canada.
After 9/11 CAIR gloated over how they weren't American-Muslims and poor security was the cause.
Now that Canada took their advise and stopped the Brampton-17 from slaughtering thousands of civilians in Toronto, CAIR now blames canada for these homegrown jihadists and also claim the RCMP fabricated evidence and islamophobia was behing the arrests.
It's a no-win situation and if Muslims don't like are values and laws then stop coming here and producing children that hate us.
imagine being in a all Black city in Africa and you're either white and average height . a midget of any colour, a 7 foot 8 person of any colour, or over 7 foot and white.
I'm trying, but it's tricky.
How many hadicapped or double amputees rob banks or sell drugs..
They wouldn't have a leg to stand on. Maybe a multicoloured midget could give them a hand.
Yes, but there is no global movement of violent people acting on a centuries-old ideology that they believe orders them to kill blacks or gays or pint-spillers.
Of course there is, it's called Islam. Just ask any Black Sudenese or gay person living in an Islamic infested area. The pint-spillers will probably be killed because they drink that Allah forbidden stuff.
Demon rummers -- midgetry -- double amputees -- giants -- Enough sectors will soon be affected that something will eventually have to be done.
ovidius_naso:
"Hey Mackie, those are Robert's words, not Melville's, and Robert is exactly right. Melville keeps beating the horse of diversity, willfully ignoring what the group have in common".
You are correct indeed, that's what I get for trying to read at 4:30 PST in the morning.
I ended up giving Mr.Melville more credit then he deserved.
Robert Spencer, Hugh Fitzgerald, Lawrence Auster, Dean Esmay, Casper Melville... they all sound like characers in a Wilkie Collins novel.
Wiliam the Conqueror writes: "Could multiculturalism work if Islam was not in the equation?"
Not the modern left-wing form of multiculturalism, no. The modern form considers the whole concept of a nation-state to be passe, just a geographic blob on a map in which all kinds of ethnicities interact with one another, with no common bonds to consider themselves part of a greater whole.
It's not just Muslims, though their jihad ideology is really forcing the issue. It's all ethnicities in a nation being told that they should have no loyalty to the nation as a whole, they get nothing from the nation except cash (a job or welfare), and they should consider themselves as tiny little individual principalities. If you go down that road, you end up with the Balkans, which used to be one nation (Yugoslavia) but with this week's breakup of Montenegro and Serbia, the total disintegration of that region is now complete.
Multiculturalism must necessarily lead to the Balkanization of a nation and the destruction of its culture, under the centrifugal forces of culture differences among ethnicities.
The result of total Balkanization is the end of whatever good has come from the national culture over the centuries. A particular ethnicity can then choose repression and barbarism for itself (such as Muslims choosing Sharia), reversing centuries of social progress, and with the destruction of the national culture there is no barrier to this.
Multiculturalism replaces the hard-won Western concept of universal human rights with situational ethics: Sure, Christian wives shouldn't be beaten by their Christian husbands, but Muslim culture is different; their wives actually ENJOY being beaten by their husbands so let's just allow that to go on! It's moral relativism applied to anthropology.
Islamists are taking full advantage of this mindset to insinuate their barbarisms into Western nations. But with multiculturalism, there's nothing stopping other groups from doing the same.
Holger Dansker writes: "Multicultural countries just do not work, when it is tried, it sooner or later it desolves into warring factions....Multi-ethnic counties can work but you have to have a strong set of common cultural, and morals and ethical values."
The proposed European (EU) Constitution for the European Union does have a big chapter on Fundamental Rights of the Union. And so you could easily prove that what the Islamists are doing is in direct violation of the European Constitution. Unfortunately, the European Constitution is so big and so complex that it can't be wielded effectively to combat the tendencies you describe. It reminds me of a big Brontosaurus--it knocks down trees just by its sheer weight so most Europeans are probably going to just keep out of its way!
I think the folks here have a good grasp of multiculturalism; it is essentially the triumph of the tribe over the individual.
I happen to think cultural diversity is a beautiful thing; African rythms, Chinese food and Latin women are all to be savored. It is the political construct of multiculturalism that is so repugnant; speech codes and the insidious threat of the accusation of racism hanging over anyone who violates them, the academic sanitizing or demonizing of the cultures of the world (depending on which one is being studied), the national security implications of opposition to border security and religious profiling, etc.
Interestingly, with all our worship of the concept (actually, the word) DIVERSITY, no one has stopped to point out that individualism reaps the ultimate diversity.
Found some more gems in the Toronto Star site, about some dhimmi lawyer:
""She never forgets that it's about the people. There's no ego there."
The Suresh case, as it's known, was a landmark Supreme Court case. Also involved in the hearing was Mansour Ahani, a suspected Iranian secret service assassin.
The court ruled that Canada could deport in the face of torture only in "exceptional" cases of "extraordinary circumstances.""
See http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1149976210209&call_pageid=968332188492&col=968793972154&t=TS_Home
Okay, the liberal version of multiculturalism is utterly failing, what is wrong with it?
Someone offer a version of multiculturalism that you think is workable...
Why?
Wouldn't it be a delicious irony if the muslims take over the ACLU!
Posted by: Pediomelum at June 11, 2006 10:12 AM
CAIR National Board chairman Parvez Ahmed is a member of the Board of the ACLU Florida. CAIR and the ACLU have been like Siamese twins for years, true soulmates. Both the ACLU and CAIR want to create a very different America and while their paradigms might differ, they realize the advantages of combining forces to accomplish their goals. Their primary goal is to remove Christianity from the public square and once they accomplish that, it remains to be seen if they will remain allies, considering their very disparate visions of America.
Okay, the liberal version of multiculturalism is utterly failing, what is wrong with it?
Someone offer a version of multiculturalism that you think is workable...
Posted by: skald at June 12, 2006 12:51 AM
Who the hell needs multiculturalism?! It is an anomaly, a perversion, a FARCE! Multiculturalism is doomed to eventually fail wherever it is practiced. A modern, progressive, Western nation cannot sustain dozens of disparate, third-world, primitive cultures under a free, democratic form of government where everyone is guaranteed equal rights. It is IMPOSSIBLE! As I'm sure everyone has noticed, only liberal, Western nations have been stupid enough to even attempt such a ludicrous folly and for the life of me, I will never understand why. Why do social engineers and "intellectuals" persist in fixing things that aren't broken?
Why do people believe that all Western nations are obligated to open their doors to every primitive savage in the world and tolerate their heathen practices and attitudes?! Why????? Japan doesn't have a multicultural society and does not want one; the Japanese are proud of their heritage and intend to preserve it. Saudi ARabia, that bastion of Medieval barbarity, goes to great lengths to ensure that its anachronistic, primitive, repulsive society remains unscathed by the influence of other religions, cultures, and modern forms of government. I don't see anyone demanding that it become pluralistic and modern, or that the savage Sharia practices of chopping off heads and other body parts immediately cease.
Why must we inconvenience and endanger ourselves just to prove how tolerant we are? Tolerance doesn't flow from a bottomless pit. I've just about exhausted my supply of tolerance, but I'm an impatient sort of person and I don't plan to lie down and play dead. America was created to be ONE NATION, not a hodgepodge of sectarian ethnic/religious/cultural divisions and special interest groups. Multiculturalism is anathema to civilized society and liberal democracy. People who cannot accept Western cultures, legal systems, and governments should not immigrate to the West.
Multiculturalism is NOT the natural, normal, condition of a sovereign nation. It is an engineered, contrived, contorted aberration that is doomed to failure.
Liberals have gotten to the point that they would defend a Muslim who murdered his sister out of honor, out of 'respect' for his 'cultural', 'religious' and 'ethnic' heritage...
It sickens me.
However, I will stick with the American ideal of the Melting Pot. American to me, is less about being whitey, or a speaker of English, or Christian (which I am not) and more about living upto the Principles on which America was built...
"Interestingly, with all our worship of the concept (actually, the word) DIVERSITY, no one has stopped to point out that individualism reaps the ultimate diversity."
Actually, plenty have, with, Ayn Rand, having been one of the greatest exponents of that. Have a read of Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead.
Multiculturalism isn't about diversity, it's about a fear and hatred of reality, or rather, of the discipline that reality demands. Multiculturalism asserts that all cultures are equal, meaning, all values are equal, or, no one thing can be superior to any other thing, which would mean, if true, there are no values. Why assert that? Because if some things can be superior to other things, then it's a reminder that, in order to rise, certain standards must be met. The multiculturalist loathes and hates that - the standards that must be met - so they set out to destroy all reminders of it, which necessitates destroying all values. What leads to a value? Human thought, judgement, and then action, applied in accordance with the standards that reality demands. So, in order to destroy values, they have to undercut human thought and judgement, which is why multiculturalists denounce anyone who judges one thing to be superior to another. They denounce and attack anyone who thinks and seeks the facts of reality. The thinker becomes an anthropocentrist, or a specieist, or a lookist, or an ageist, or whatever other non-concept the multiculturalists have dreamt up in order to attack those who think. They seek to undercut the very foundations of civilisation.
One of the best essays I have read on the subject is "Multicultural Nihilism" by Peter Schartwz, which you can find in the expanded edition of Ayn Rands "The New Left - Return of the Primitive - The Anti-Industrial Revolution".
"Multiculturalism is doomed to eventually fail wherever it is practiced."
The breakdown of social order would not be a failure of multiculturalism; in fact, it would mean a roaring success.
I think there could be a workable multiculturalism, and in fact, I think the USA has been closest to concretizing such a model.
One must remember that in real life, no system can be perfect; so the condemnation of a system cannot be based on the sheer fact that it has flaws, but rather on whether its flaws remain under a certain threshhold of unacceptability.
A workable multiculturalism would balance two things:
1) freedom and respect for any cultural group to carve out little islands of cultural self-expression for itself
and
2) a reciprocal respect and subservience, on the part of all members of any cultural group, for not only the laws of the land but also for an overall single culture of the nation -- an overall culture that may not be tangibly nailed down but which is nevertheless real and to a great extent uniform: uniformity can be a virtue insofar as it provides the cohesive matrix for different people and different groups to live and prosper together in more, rather than less, peace and mutual respect.
America, concretely, of all nations provides an overarching paradigm that affords the most security, freedoms and respect for a variety of cultures. And it is precisely that genius of working out such a paradigm that should be appreciated by members of any culture transplanted here -- and appreciation should be shown by respect, admiration and subservience to the laws of the land and to the overall, relatively uniform culture that gave birth to those laws and nutritiously, organically, and dynamically continues to sustain them.
Muslims, insofar as they follow the fundamental tenets of their culture (Islam), fail this test.
There may be other cultural groups that strain the American model and cause problems, but no cultural group comes close to presenting the threat and intolerance posed by Islam with its fundamental tenets of a militantly trans-national supremacism powered by a deranged eschatological entelechy.
a deranged eschatological entelechy
And Islam is a veritable suppository of deranged eschatological entelechies.
The biggest problem with multiculturalism, is that the doctrine is incapable of creating a cultural identiy (whether it be at the village level or the level of a nation). And as cultural identity is very closely, even today with liberalism, associated with national identity, it is incapable of creating a nation that is capable of defending itself. A nation built on multiculturalism is more apt to fight amongst itself then to fight against violent and virulent outside forces....
America, it isn't so much as multiculturalism as throwing all the cultures into the mix, adding a bit of heat, and seeing if what has been brewed is edible. And I must say, from Chinatown in San Francisco, to Little Italy in New York, down to New Orleans, the American way of culural assimilation works...
skald writes: "Someone offer a version of multiculturalism that you think is workable."
Skald,
America has the most successful track record of welcoming immigrants of any nation on earth, long before anyone ever heard the word "multiculturalism." How did we do it? Here's what Theodore Roosevelt said in 1915 about immigration, ethnicity, and what we today call "multiculturalism":
After nearly 100 years, that still works for me.
skald -- the picture seems confusing, so I understand your confusing "multicultural" with "melting pot" -- One is based on assimilatin, as you indicate, and one is not.
While it's fine and quaint, I suppose, to have the China Towns and Little Italys, I find little in the historical record to indicate that any of these ethnic, racial, or religious minorities came to America with the overarching intent of subverting our Constitution, and eventually dominating us with their ideology (Ok -- the mafia tried to spread the Italian vengeance based culture onto the American pageant, and largely failed -- not least because good Americans of Italian descent refused to play along, but also because their goal wasn't to eventually turn us all into vengeful corrupt Italians)
Muslims and Islam are an altogether different kettle of fish. They put a lie to the multicultural approach, a lie that stood out less starkly before, but was always there. They expose the weaknesses and dangers of such an ideology.
One could even understand the Civil War in America through the lense of multiculturalism. The North correctly understood that the South was being selective about which portions of Federal authority they were willing to accept, and which cultural norms they were willing to accept. They were rejectionists of the US Constitutional Project. The North waged a war to defeat this early experiment at balkanizing the American Nation by the South. Now we have growing enclaves of non-participants, many of whom deliberately opt out of the American Project.
Must it come again to Civil War to sort out these differences? I fervently hope not. By allowing Muslims into our midst who have no intention of mixing with us, or worse, are actually bent on subverting our system and replacing it with their own is a calamity that we either deal with now, or later once it's become far more horrific.
With the Mafia, it was business. They just wanted to get rich. With Islam, entirely different can of worms, with entirely different worms and an entirely different way of opening the said can of said worms...
I think the best hope we got, is if political conservativism continues its rise here in America. Other then that, I don't see hope. Liberalism is utterly unequipped and unable to counter this threat (except with a few liberals out there who I hope can reform liberalism from within)...
Why all the concern for a "workable multiculturalism"? None is needed. All that is needed is a respect for the individual, pretty much what America was founded on. Upholding the sovereignty of the individual, steadfast with a constitution, allows for the most diversity. You can set up a cultural practice of wearing pink polka dot pantaloons while reciting Shakespeare backwards, if you like, and people are free to respect that culture or disrespect it as they will. Toss away any notions of "multiculturalism" and just let people live unmolested, and diversity will flourish.
"pink polka dot pantaloons while reciting Shakespeare backwards"
I saw that guy just the other day.
Redwine, I know what you are saying. But think for a minute. Multiculturalism is not about "all cultures being equal". You say that the notion that one culture is better than another is anathema to multiculturalists. That is not true.
Multiculturalism would never denounce for example, someone claiming that an African culture was superior to western culture. I can guarantee you that they will NOT denounce that. Or substitute African for any other culture. They only denounce pronouncements that western culture with its science and technology, law, and civil rights, is better than any culture. That freaks them out. All the evidence notwithstanding. So claiming that all cultures are equal is NOT the policy of multiculturalists. If that was the case, at least you could say they have principle, even if misplaced.
But that is not the case at all. So what is it then? Simple. Multiculturalism is just another left-wing platform. As such, it aims to diminish the value of our western, Christian culture, in favor of anything else - what else, it matters not. Anything else will do, even some animist African tribe is equal to, or superior to, the western world. Multiculturalism is about promoting anything that is non-western.
The Left loves to trash our culture. And in doing so, it seeks to replace it with anything. The ACLU, the vanguard of the Left, has been in a war with our western Christian culture since day one. They are not about secularism, anymore than multiculturalists are about culture. The ACLU actually promotes religion when it is a non-western religion, especially when it is an anti-western religion. For them, that is even better. Simialarily, multiculturalist will support claims of cultural supremacy as long as the culture is non-western.
Multiculturalism is the Left in another guise.
"You say that the notion that one culture is better than another is anathema to multiculturalists. That is not true."
Not that one culture is better than another, but, one 'value'. It is not really about culture, it's about the destruction of values, and raising "culture", regardless of content, to the height of a pedestal for its own sake, is their means for destroying values.
"Multiculturalism would never denounce for example, someone claiming that an African culture was superior to western culture."
But it would denounce someone claiming that African culture was superior to say "Deaf Culture", or to "Gay Culture", or "Black Culture" or to anything that was not actually superior to African culture. They want to raise a non-value to be equal, or superior to, an actual value.
" I can guarantee you that they will NOT denounce that."
Yes, because it makes the 'actual value' worthless. That doesn't mean that they don't dress their philosophy up with the idea that all cultures are equal. They do, and you can see the product of that everywhere if you look for it.
"The biggest problem with multiculturalism, is that the doctrine is incapable of creating a cultural identity"
That would be a problem if that was the business of a beneficent multiculturalism. Multiculturalism should not be trying to create a cultural identity: its sole role should be in terms of an overarching umbrella, to legally ensure and culturally encourage freedom, equality and respect among all cultures whose members return the favor with the appropriate degree of gratitude. The "umbrella" is not itself a culture: it is simply one feature among many of the national culture.
But it would denounce someone claiming that African culture was superior to say "Deaf Culture", or to "Gay Culture",
I don't think multiculturalism deals with "gay culture" or "deaf culture". In Canada, multiculturalism deals with only with racial/ethnic diversity. And in that diversity, western culture would never be defended as equal to anything. Indeed, western culture is often chided by comparing it to any other ethnic group. "The white man made the space shuttle, but so what? The aborigines have beautiful stone carvings and their dances celebrate their union with nature. If only the white man was as wise as the native indian culture." This is the mantra of multiculturalism -at least in Canada. Equality is not the point at all. Denouncing western culture is the point.
As far as destroying our values, well that is the job of the Left. Those values they want to destroy or our Judeo-Christian western values.
So in walks islam onto the stage. There they have not only a non-western culture, but a hostile anti-western culture with a totally perturbed sense of values. Values that are not even human. They, the Left, are in love.
"I don't think multiculturalism deals with "gay culture" or "deaf culture"."
SomethingaboutIslam, you are wrong. It very much does deal with those cultures. I don't have time to debate this in depth with you, but I urge you to get hold and have a read of, Peter Schwartz, essay "Multicultural Nihilism". It will blow your assumptions right out of the water and broaden your view of something that's very important to understand.
http://www.aynrandbookstore2.com/prodinfo.asp?number=AR54B
Yours in common defence against that which would destroy our civilisation.