Dishonest and Deadly


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Dishonest and Deadly

Why does the West entertain such a wrongheaded notion as multiculturalism?

by Bruce Thornton

The news that the London terrorist attacks were carried out by second-generation Muslim immigrants should not surprise us. For years now we in the West have indulged a whole set of destructive ideas whose bitter fruit we will all continue to harvest, as more and more unassimilated and disaffected immigrant children turn against the countries that welcomed their parents and provided them with a prosperity and freedom unknown in their countries of origin.

This baneful idea goes by the name of multiculturalism. Don't be fooled by marketing: multiculturalism is not simply a call to respect cultures different from one's own. In reality multiculturalism is a therapeutic melodrama of Western crimes against peaceful peoples ?of color? who were subjected to racism, sexism, slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and environmental degradation. Given its record of evil, the West owes reparations to all those victims, especially those who emigrate to the West. There these victims will be given public assistance and soothed with repeated public assertions and recognitions of their culture's superiority, coupled with ritualistic confessions of Western guilt and dysfunction.

Some consider this ?cultural relativism,? but it isn't really. A genuine cultural relativism would hold that there are no universal standards by which to judge any culture. But most of the time, those who claim that cultures can be judged only in their own terms have no compunction in judging and condemning the West. Nor will they accept that Nazi Germany or the antebellum South or apartheid South Africa were just ?different? and so beyond our judgment. And of course, if you pin them down on the standards and values and principles on which they base their condemnations, these will all turn out to be ideals like freedom or human rights or equality that have their origins and most complete development in the West.

This intellectual contradiction suggests that something other than coherent principle lies behind ?Occidentalism,? the multicultural caricature of Western culture. Mythic ideas like the Noble Savage account for some of multiculturalism's allure: ever since the Greeks, visions of peoples living simpler, more spontaneous lives have attracted those living in more complex and sophisticated societies. The Romantic fascination with the exotic explains too the West's relentless appropriation of non-Western cultural artifacts. More important, I think, is the Communist ideology that made colonialism and imperialism into Capitalism's fiendish survival mechanisms. Since the Western proletarians weren't going to play their appointed historical role ? they were too busy improving their standard of living in free market economies ? the Third World became the new proletariat that would rise up and overthrow the evil Capitalist order. Thus anti-colonialism and revolution became the Communist tool for attacking the West and its ideals. That's why the anti-globalization movement ? a species of debased Romantic dissatisfaction with modern civilization ? finds some of its strongest allies among the European communist and socialist parties.

Likewise, the Arab jihad against Israel, having failed to destroy her by military force, has been adept at camouflaging its war of extermination as anti-colonial resistance on the part of dark-skinned ?others? oppressed by an outpost of Western imperialism. So too with the larger jihad against the West, which is explained as a response to continuing neo-colonial incursions against the religion of ?peace and tolerance.? This propaganda gains traction from the readiness of many Westerners to accept a false history that denigrates their own culture and explains away its phenomenal success at providing the most freedom and prosperity for the greatest number of people. This self-loathing has become a banal received idea, visible everywhere in our culture, from movies and Disney cartoons to grade-school history textbooks and university GE courses. Whether people sincerely believe this distortion of history, or adopt it as an intellectual pose they think sophisticated, the net result is to weaken the pride in and love for one's own culture and country necessary for both to survive.

More important, if we Westerners proclaim in both our popular and high culture that our way of life is not the best, that it is tainted by historical crimes, that other ways are in critical respects superior, why then should we be surprised that immigrants agree with what many of our cultural and intellectual elites have been telling the world for decades now? At the same time the West has welcomed immigrants we have abandoned the one thing that can make immigration work: the requirement that the immigrant assimilate to our culture and acknowledge that by virtue of his making it his home he thinks it is superior to the culture he left. In the U.S. this meant learning English, learning American history, American political ideals, American heroes and stories. It meant making America his home, the object of his affection he would fight and die for, as many immigrants have done and continue to do. If the immigrant wanted to keep something of his own culture, he could do that privately, through fraternal organizations or his church. But American public education and culture were not obligated to celebrate the numerous cultures immigrants had abandoned and, by doing so, had proclaimed to be inferior to America at some fundamental level.

Today, however, our public culture and education are supposed not just to acknowledge but to celebrate as superior these cultures the immigrant has abandoned, and to allow him to create a separatist enclave in which that old culture lives on no matter how much it contradicts Western political ideals. In the case of Muslims in England, this process has been allowed to go on for decades, resulting in a widespread distaste, if not hatred, for the country that has given them freedom and opportunity. Huddled in ethnic enclaves, many Muslims indulge and nourish a hatred of the West and its ideals even as these provide them freedom, opportunity, and in many cases social welfare subsidies. And if anyone should protest and suggest that the immigrant should assimilate to the culture that has provided him these goods, he will be accused of xenophobia or jingoism or ethnocentrism or racism or some other heinous crime, not just by the ethnic lobbies but by other Westerners.

We have allowed a dangerous virus to infect the West. No nation, no people can survive if they think their way of life is no better than any other, or if they scorn and slight their national ideals and values. Ultimately, such people will always be vulnerable to those who do think their way is better ? just as we see today with many Muslim immigrants in Europe. Indulging our multicultural fantasies, we have subsidized, coddled, and abased ourselves before people who, as the attacks in London demonstrate, are willing, on behalf of the culture that had failed their parents, to murder and terrorize the culture that has given them a freedom and opportunity that hardly exist in most Islamic countries.

To demand that immigrants assimilate and pledge allegiance to their new homes is not xenophobia or racism; it is rather to demand that those who choose to come to the West and enjoy its political and economic goods respect, honor, and embrace the ideals and principles that created those goods in the first place. And it is to recognize that yes, a price must be paid: the discarding of those old ways and ideals that contradict or compromise the new values. After all, by coming to the West the immigrant has already voted with his feet for the Western way. If he now finds that he made the wrong choice and that he believes the culture he left is in fact superior, then he is free to (Y)es:' />ck.

(Y) :yes:

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BS. I was born in America and i don't pledge allegiance to it. I don't expect anyone else to. Do whatever you want (within reason).

The idea of conformity is not only morally offensive to me, it also goes against the values that conservatives supposedly cherish. Individualism above everything else, they would always say. Collectivism, socialism, communism, those are all evil. Rebel against them. ... Except when it comes to the good ol' USA. Then, by all means, please be a drone.

Unwavering loyalty to the state was offensive and barbaric in the SSSR, but it was OK when the Americans borrowed a socialist pledge of allegiance and applied it to their own country. Worshipping the state as a tool of society was bad, but worshipping the state as a tool of God isn't so terrible. ID papers in East Germany were an example of how little the Communists valued freedom... but a few decades later it's essential to American liberties. Soviet expansion was a threat to all decent people, but it was swell when America decided to stick its nose into the affairs of any nation that got in its way.

Conservatism in America has this terribly paradoxical and hypocritical side to it, and all the bitching about multi-culturalism is just another part of it. It's the one big problem with the whole movement.

Be different, i say. Speak your traditional language, wear your traditional clothes, practise your traditional religion. As long as you obey the law, you're OK.

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That article positively reeks of the fear-stricken night sweats of a terrified, prejudiced white man. From the dawn of civilization, people have made a habit of putting their own culture on a pedistal while fearing and dispising others for theirs. They're generally called racists, or bigots.

As much as some people seem to enjoy believing otherwise, the fact is a very small percentage of Americans arrived here on the Mayflower. The rest of us are descendants of other cultures ? which both enriched and enlightened our own through their contributions, and vice-versa. The U.S. is what it is today because of the blending of cultures throughout its history. At what point is that supposed to have suddenly become unacceptable?Edited on request

Armecki>

Edited by Armeck
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i see nothing wrong with multiculturalism. there's nothing wrong with accepting other cultures and values. you can still appreciate other cultures without denying them. that has nothing to do with one's security or dignity. we deny certain values because they are unjust, not because they are different.

even if we didn't accept them, non-acceptance isn't a call to arms. it's not a justification.

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If this article were true then Canada would have had many terrorism strikes by now as we are even more eager on multiculturalism than anywhere else.

America certainly does not employ multiculturalism, they use the melting pot strategy. I assume that England is somewhere in between. I know that England does not have the ethnic harmony that Canada has (relatively speaking).

Toronto may have ethnic enclaves but we do not have ethnic ghettos. Educating children about diversity starts in kindergarten.

Toronto schools have altered to suit the needs of the community. Some schools have cricket teams rather than forcing them to play baseball. At my local community centre there are a bunch of muslims that come out to play ball hockey. They wear Toronto Maple Jerseys and are into it. Sure, on Fridays then tend to wear their knitted caps (I don't know the proper name).

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Shameful, to use the attacks in London as a device against multiculturalism.

As Fred pointed out, there is little support for that theory in Canada, and it should be pointed out that the vast majority of the populations of Canada and the USA were once immigrants themselves, sometimes second-generation, and yet, the two countries were not torn apart by an orgy of immigrant-inspired culture wars.

I consider myself a Canadian as way to define my location, not as an identity, and yet, I find myself having no agenda that would be considered even remotely dangerous.

I have always criticized those who endorse their own culture as holy, and believe that those that are imported are destructive to society itself. Did not the North American culture primarily of the European variety arrive in the same manner?

To use the London attacks as an example for the typical behaviour of immigrants is wrong. One has to look at the crimes that happen everyday, not a rare event of terrorism. It is the citizens, not the immigrants, who perform the majority of crime. And it is crime, not culture deviation, that is most harmful to society.

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July 16, 2005

Multiculturalism has fanned the flames of Islamic extremism

by Kenan Malik

ONE was a loving father. Another helped out in his parents? fish and chip shop. All apparently chatted away as if they were going on holiday as they walked through King?s Cross station with their deadly rucksacks. It is the contrast between the ordinariness of the London bombers? lives and the savage barbarism of their actions that is so shocking. But, then, few recent terrorists have resembled the caricatures of mad mullahs, bearded fanatics and foreign zealots that people the press. Many have been Western-born, Western-educated and seemingly ordinary.

The shoe bomber Richard Reid was brought up in South London. His fellow conspirator Sajid Badat was born in Britain and educated at the prestigious Crypt Grammar School in Gloucester. Ahmed Omar Sheikh, convicted in Pakistan of the murder of the American journalist Daniel Pearl, lived in East London and was educated at the London School of Economics. Asif Hanif and Omar Sharif, the two Britons who carried out a suicide bombing mission in Israel, became friends at university. The most detailed study yet of al- Qaeda supporters shows that the majority are middle-class with good jobs. Most are college-educated, usually in the West. Fewer than one in ten have been to religious school.

There was nothing extraordinary, then, about the background of the London bombers. So why are these men, born and brought up in Britain, gripped by such a fanatical zeal for an irrational, murderous dogma, and seemingly possessed with a hatred for democracy and decency?

Muslims have been in Britain in large numbers since the 1950s. Only recently has fanaticism taken hold. The first generation of immigrants faced greater hardships and more intense racism than today?s Muslims do. Yet most thought of themselves as British and were proud to be here.

While that first generation often put up with racism, the second generation ? my generation ? challenged it head on, often leading to fierce confrontations with the police and other authorities. But however fierce those confrontations, we recognised that to fight racism we needed to find a common set of values, hopes and aspirations that united whites and non-whites, Muslims and non- Muslims, and not to separate ourselves from the rest of society.

It has been only over the past decade that radical Islam has found a hearing in Britain. Why? Partly because, in this post-ideological age, the idea that we can change society through politics has taken a battering. And partly because the idea that we should aspire to a common identity and a set of values has been eroded in the name of multiculturalism.

Over the past week, much has been said about the strength of London as a multicultural city. What makes London great, Ken Livingstone pointed out, was what the bombers most fear ? a city full of people from across the globe, free to pursue their own lives. I agree, and that?s why I choose to live in this city. Multiculturalism as a lived experience enriches our lives. But multiculturalism as a political ideology has helped to create a tribal Britain with no political or moral centre.

For an earlier generation of Muslims their religion was not so strong that it prevented them from identifying with Britain. Today many young British Muslims identify more with Islam than Britain primarily because there no longer seems much that is compelling about being British. Of course, there is little to romanticise about in old-style Britishness with its often racist vision of belonging. Back in the 1950s policy-makers feared that, in the words of a Colonial Office report, ?a large coloured community would weaken . . . the concept of England or Britain?.

That old racist notion of identity has thankfully crumbled. But nothing new has come to replace it. The very notion of creating common values has been abandoned except at a most minimal level. Britishness has come to be defined simply as a toleration of difference. The politics of ideology has given way to the politics of identity, creating a more fragmented Britain, and one where many groups assert their identity through a sense of victimhood and grievance.

This has been particularly true of Muslim communities. Muslims have certainly suffered from racism and discrimination. But many Muslim leaders have nurtured an exaggerated sense of victimhood for their own political purposes. The result has been to stoke up anger and resentment, creating a siege mentality that makes Muslim communities more inward-looking and more open to religious extremism ? and that has helped to transform a small number of young men into savage terrorists.

There is nothing new, of course, in the use of terror tactics. What is new is the arbitrary, nihilistic brutality. In the past, whether we are talking about Palestinians hijacking aircraft or the IRA bombing British shopping centres, terror was always in pursuit of political or strategic aims. No longer.

The London terrorists ? like those in Madrid, Bali and New York before them ? issued no warnings, made no demands, left no list of grievances. Four men simply sneaked on to three Tube trains and a bus and without a word created carnage. For them, terror was an end in itself, not a means to an end. In this post-ideological age, few believe in political ends or have a vision of political change. Few actually believe in anything or can articulate what they believe in political terms.

All they feel is a sense of anger or resentment or rage. So terrorists just lash out. And without anything to believe in, without the moral restraints imposed by political activism, or the sense of responsibility to a cause or to a people, the unthinkable becomes possible. As in London nine days ago.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1072-1695604,00.html

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BS. I was born in America and i don't pledge allegiance to it. I don't expect anyone else to. Do whatever you want (within reason).

The idea of conformity is not only morally offensive to me, it also goes against the values that conservatives supposedly cherish. Individualism above everything else, they would always say. Collectivism, socialism, communism, those are all evil. Rebel against them. ... Except when it comes to the good ol' USA. Then, by all means, please be a drone.

Unwavering loyalty to the state was offensive and barbaric in the SSSR, but it was OK when the Americans borrowed a socialist pledge of allegiance and applied it to their own country. Worshipping the state as a tool of society was bad, but worshipping the state as a tool of God isn't so terrible. ID papers in East Germany were an example of how little the Communists valued freedom... but a few decades later it's essential to American liberties. Soviet expansion was a threat to all decent people, but it was swell when America decided to stick its nose into the affairs of any nation that got in its way.

Conservatism in America has this terribly paradoxical and hypocritical side to it, and all the bitching about multi-culturalism is just another part of it. It's the one big problem with the whole movement.

Be different, i say. Speak your traditional language, wear your traditional clothes, practise your traditional religion. As long as you obey the law, you're OK.

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bingo, hit the nail on the head. our sense of individualism is what makes this country great. conformaty is the end of society, it harks the predictions in 1984. when we throw away our sense of self identity, then you destroy the foundation that this country was built on. mulit-culturalism is a wonderful thing, it is what makes up the liberty and freedom that our "leaders" today love to preach. you take that away and you destroy the country.

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