Posted on 07/21/2005 3:27:46 PM PDT by F14 Pilot
WASHINGTON -- There is plenty of blame going around these days for the horrific London bombings. A small minority criticizes London authorities for not expecting the attacks. Even many tolerant Brits are saying that the British Muslim community should have been more watchful. The vast majority, of course, rightly blames the perpetrators themselves, the young Muslim radicals who refer to London as "Londonistan."
But there is one group that is almost escaping censure -- and it was this group that deliberately and self-righteously set the stage for what happened nearly two weeks ago: the sweet, well-meaning, all-knowing liberal multiculturalists who came out of the 1960s youth rebellion and played upon the goodness of both British and American societies to let just about anybody immigrate into the painfully developed polities of their nations.
Their arguments were oh-so-chock-full of humanness! The multiculturalists, who came to dominate Anglo universities on both sides of the Atlantic, believed that there were no differences between men. Essentially, they denied culture and memory. Man was a cipher, a creature who could be won over by goodness and live happily ever after. And why not right there in England itself?
There had been conservative, loyal Pakistani immigrants living peacefully in England since the 1960s. But it was in the earthshaking '90s -- after the fall of the Soviet Union, after the presumed Muslim defeat of the Russians in Afghanistan, and after Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini's "fatwa" to urge Muslims, even in Britain, to kill writer Salman Rushdie -- that it became clear that this new generation of Muslims were not flocking to England to become English, but rather to impose their philosophy on England. London soon began to be called "Londonistan," not without reason.
Meanwhile, the British government, again in the humane interest of providing exile and asylum for the hunted of the world, allowed Arab dissident groups, many of them radical fundamentalists expelled from their own countries, to set up shop in London. From there, they were free to broadcast and to propagate their radical ideas. Let the Saudis, the Tunisians, the Algerians, the Egyptians complain; England was the home of the free.
One of these cases I know quite well. This is the case of Rached Ghannouchi, a radical Islamist who burst upon the moderate Tunisian scene in the '80s after traveling to Albania. There he inexplicably fell in love with the vicious and barbaric Albanian communism, let his beard grow "like Castro's," and finally formed a fundamentalist An-Nahda party among the secret Islamist organizations in Tunisia. Among other things, these groups had organized a super-secret "Special Apparatus" of intelligence and assassination that would carry out the coups and killings of heretics.
His group had the right to run for office, but instead they tried to assassinate the president and burned to death several policemen. An-Nahda was finished in tolerant and progressive Tunisia; so Ghannouchi fled to London, where he lives today, still organizing against his country's rapidly developing people. The curious thing is the English have allowed him to have a satellite to broadcast to Tunisia but have denied moderate Tunisians the same right.
But there is more.
I just spoke by phone with Karen Armstrong, the brilliant Islamic scholar and author of "Islam: A Short History." From London, she stressed that "all of this should have been expected, but our security people of the '90s were thinking only of the Irish problem. What we are seeing now is the ongoing story of colonialism. These young men are only coming here because of the regimes that we left behind. Colonialism didn't finish when we came home, you see. They are now continuing it here -- it is really a new kind of nationalism."
Then take the instructive case of The Netherlands, Holland. During the late 1980s and early '90s, I used to make a point of stopping there every couple of years on my reporting trips.
First, I heard the wondrous multicultural love story: All the Dutch Antilleans and Middle Easterners who were coming would fit right in, enrich the community, become magically "Dutch." The news media and politicians were socially forbidden from speaking of any problems with immigration or assimilation. I went back again, and the Dutch, now not quite so sure of themselves, had decided that new immigrants must have two months of Dutch language and history training.
None of it worked. Today, the country is filled with young men from the Rif Mountains of Morocco. They are mostly illiterate and, seeing Holland as a decadent society, have formed a hostile "parallel society." The brutal murder of Dutch artist Theo van Gogh by a Muslim fanatic was the final nail in the multicultural coffin. The idea was dead, but the problem caused by it was a Gargantua in their midst.
European countries are now clamoring for immigrants to be assimilated. It's too late, and it's their own fault. They were blase about the realities of human nature and the profundities of human culture when they let so many from clearly antithetical societies enter on their own terms. The Europeans never even asked anything of the immigrants: not personal respect, not reverence for the new country, not promises to fulfill the duties of citizenship.
And on top of that, they brought all the worst fundamentalist leaders of the Middle East right into their capital cities, where they could live freely and propagate their archaic beliefs, further inspiring the isolated and angry immigrant youth.
Europe can still do something about all of this, and attempts to deal more deftly with moderate Muslims in London represent one step. But really, until the Europeans understand what they did in those years -- and why they did it -- this sad story will only repeat itself.
Wow, somebody actually used the word "censure" correctly.
United Kingdom has been a "nation of immigration" for a number of centuries anyway, and there was an earnest, and highly praiseworthy, effort on the part of UK universities to pick up the world's smartest guys.
I think this latest problem is directly the result of failing to force cultural assimilation on immigrants who've arrived in the last 50 years ~ most likely it's some sort of misplaced guilt over what the Germans did to the Jews.
Brits shoulda' noticed that Islamofascists and their running dog lackeys in the media are NOT Jews, and they should have pulled out that state church of theirs and forced these guys into Christianity, or at least Anglicanism ~ or GO BACK HOME.
2. Why Western governments haven't recognized islam isn't a religion but actually a cult of personality with political aims of world subjugation and as such deserves none of the protections afforded to actual religious organizations.
3. To a degree, islamic zealotry is a result of colonization. It's difficult generation after generation to see someone use a toilet, while you are wiping your ass with hand. There was no motivation for the natives of the colonized lands to learn the good habits, perhaps they should have done with their conquered races with what we did with ours, who also incidentally refused to assimilate; let them open casinos.
Religious Tolerance prevent us from being like them
See bullet point #2.
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Is she writing about Mexifornia?
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