The road to Afghanada
David Warren - Monday,24 April 2006
Western Standard
Thanks to a certain large planetary development--a global irruption of Islamic fanaticism--the distinction between domestic and foreign policy has become murky almost everywhere.
As most other countries in the West, Canada has been offering a deadly combination of open borders and fatuous "multicultural" policies to encourage foreign trouble to roost here. We now host, among immigrants who came in hope of diving into our prosperous melting pot, significant numbers of Muslims with no intention to assimilate at all. Also, incidentally, Sikh and Tamil plotters, spies and potential subversives from communist China, miscellaneous gangsters from here and there--each group presenting its credentials as fragments of the Canadian urban multicultural mosaic, while pulling direct lines to political powerbrokers.
We guarantee them the protection of our laws, and often welfare, too. They easily exploit our political correctness, knowing that our media will champion any member of a "visible minority" who claims to be oppressed--even a member of the Khadr family. They know us for dupes, and can afford to be cocky.
I would add that Canada has been blessed overall with much better immigrants than we deserve, and we have so far escaped such consequences as, for instance, the continuing low-level car-torching intifada of Muslim youth in France.
Nevertheless, I've received enough casual threats from Muslim readers, in the time since September 2001, to know "we aren't in Kansas anymore." And when I'm told, anonymously but locally, to remember what happened to Daniel Pearl, or Theo van Gogh, I am reminded that resurgent Islam is no longer "a quarrel in a faraway country." It is something that can come, like a certain Jordanian gentleman a couple of years ago, right to my door.
In Canada, we haven't yet begun to reassess multiculturalism, in anything like the way western European countries are now doing. In the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland and Italy, governments are urgently closing the gates on mass immigration, demanding the assimilation of outsiders, and introducing legislation to make large-scale deportations possible. The lines between left and right on such issues are being erased.
Likewise in the States, where politicians in the Democratic party are now harvesting frustrations with the Republicans' supposedly soft approach to issues of national security. The outcry over the aborted Dubai ports deal showed the left moving sharply to the right of the right.
Our left in Canada remains stuck in another era, when every social problem could be resolved by closing one's eyes tightly, and repeating the word "racism." They have yet to grasp that a religion isn't a race--let alone, that unassimilated immigrants could harbour values, allegiances, and ambitions inimical to the larger society.
But suddenly, everyone else is obliged to think transnationally, even when legislating nationally. Whether or not we look forward to it, we will soon be compelled to spell out our values, and restrict toleration to tolerable behaviour. And we will do this not only in response to events in Canada, but to what is happening in the wide world.
The recent case of Abdul Rahman--the Afghan who was being tried under Sharia statutes in an Afghan civil court for the capital offence of converting to Christianity--helped clarify the matter. I was encouraged by the speed with which western governments, including our own, intervened to win Rahman's release. For the first time, without quite realizing the precedent they were setting, western governments rejected the legitimacy of Sharia, not only in the West, but in a Muslim country where the West had a stake. And they made no concessions to cultural relativism.
On sound, old-fashioned, Lockean liberal principles, complete freedom of religion can never be extended to the practice of a religion that itself denies freedom of religion. Or to put this another way: it is incumbent upon Islam to reform itself, not incumbent upon us to accept it unreformed. This has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with our own survival.
It is odd that we had to go all the way to Afghanistan to relearn this. But sometimes you must go right around the world to get back to where you started.
David Warren - Monday,24 April 2006
Western Standard
Thanks to a certain large planetary development--a global irruption of Islamic fanaticism--the distinction between domestic and foreign policy has become murky almost everywhere.
As most other countries in the West, Canada has been offering a deadly combination of open borders and fatuous "multicultural" policies to encourage foreign trouble to roost here. We now host, among immigrants who came in hope of diving into our prosperous melting pot, significant numbers of Muslims with no intention to assimilate at all. Also, incidentally, Sikh and Tamil plotters, spies and potential subversives from communist China, miscellaneous gangsters from here and there--each group presenting its credentials as fragments of the Canadian urban multicultural mosaic, while pulling direct lines to political powerbrokers.
We guarantee them the protection of our laws, and often welfare, too. They easily exploit our political correctness, knowing that our media will champion any member of a "visible minority" who claims to be oppressed--even a member of the Khadr family. They know us for dupes, and can afford to be cocky.
I would add that Canada has been blessed overall with much better immigrants than we deserve, and we have so far escaped such consequences as, for instance, the continuing low-level car-torching intifada of Muslim youth in France.
Nevertheless, I've received enough casual threats from Muslim readers, in the time since September 2001, to know "we aren't in Kansas anymore." And when I'm told, anonymously but locally, to remember what happened to Daniel Pearl, or Theo van Gogh, I am reminded that resurgent Islam is no longer "a quarrel in a faraway country." It is something that can come, like a certain Jordanian gentleman a couple of years ago, right to my door.
In Canada, we haven't yet begun to reassess multiculturalism, in anything like the way western European countries are now doing. In the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland and Italy, governments are urgently closing the gates on mass immigration, demanding the assimilation of outsiders, and introducing legislation to make large-scale deportations possible. The lines between left and right on such issues are being erased.
Likewise in the States, where politicians in the Democratic party are now harvesting frustrations with the Republicans' supposedly soft approach to issues of national security. The outcry over the aborted Dubai ports deal showed the left moving sharply to the right of the right.
Our left in Canada remains stuck in another era, when every social problem could be resolved by closing one's eyes tightly, and repeating the word "racism." They have yet to grasp that a religion isn't a race--let alone, that unassimilated immigrants could harbour values, allegiances, and ambitions inimical to the larger society.
But suddenly, everyone else is obliged to think transnationally, even when legislating nationally. Whether or not we look forward to it, we will soon be compelled to spell out our values, and restrict toleration to tolerable behaviour. And we will do this not only in response to events in Canada, but to what is happening in the wide world.
The recent case of Abdul Rahman--the Afghan who was being tried under Sharia statutes in an Afghan civil court for the capital offence of converting to Christianity--helped clarify the matter. I was encouraged by the speed with which western governments, including our own, intervened to win Rahman's release. For the first time, without quite realizing the precedent they were setting, western governments rejected the legitimacy of Sharia, not only in the West, but in a Muslim country where the West had a stake. And they made no concessions to cultural relativism.
On sound, old-fashioned, Lockean liberal principles, complete freedom of religion can never be extended to the practice of a religion that itself denies freedom of religion. Or to put this another way: it is incumbent upon Islam to reform itself, not incumbent upon us to accept it unreformed. This has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with our own survival.
It is odd that we had to go all the way to Afghanistan to relearn this. But sometimes you must go right around the world to get back to where you started.