The story of the Fort Hood shooting isn’t all that complicated. Muslim radicalizes and becomes jihadist. Radical jihadist then kills 13 infidels. It’s quickly becoming as common as boy meets girl.
The story of the lead-up to the shooting is far murkier. As the evidence continues to trickle out about the degree to which authorities were aware of Nidal Hasan’s radical beliefs, a single question emerges: just what the hell were they thinking by allowing this jihadist to remain in the military?
Hasan often railed against both U.S. wars in the Middle East and was known to have anti-American views and a propensity for seditious commentary. He also had ties with a radical mosque connected to the 9/11 attacks, and sought to communicate with a terrorist supporting, anti-American imam. Given what the FBI knew of Hasan’s views and actions, it is inexcusable that no action was taken. One can only conclude that excessive multiculturalism contributed to this failure. Questioning or removing a Muslim soldier for radical views would just be too insensitive.
This episode illustrates perfectly our self-imposed incapacity to deal with radical Islamic jihad. Yet we do not learn. Immediately after the attack, as with all radical jihadist attacks, our leaders wring their hands about an “anti-Muslim backlash” that is often predicted but never materializes. Everyone knows this isn’t about Muslims or Islam in general, but a particular and toxic strain that wages war against us. The denialist culture that allowed an outspoken, anti-American jihadist to remain in the US military despite frequent seditious outbursts continues unabated. When will we get serious and treat jihadism as the enemy that it is?
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Britain is a cultural wasteland.
A foster mother has been struck off by a council after a teenage Muslim girl in her care became a Christian.
The carer, who has ten years’ experience and has looked after more than 80 children, said she was ‘devastated’ by the decision.
…The girl is understood to be back with members of her family, who have not been told of her conversion. A second girl the woman was fostering has been moved to another carer.
The woman insisted that, although she was a Christian, she had put no pressure on the Muslim girl, who was 16 at the time, to be baptised.
But council officials allegedly accused her of failing to ‘respect and preserve’ the child’s faith and tried to persuade the girl to reconsider her decision.
The carer, who cannot be named for legal reasons, is now preparing to take legal action against the council with the support of the girl, now 17, who also cannot be named.
Her case follows the controversy over Caroline Petrie, 45, the Christian nurse in Somerset suspended without pay in December for offering to pray for an elderly woman patient. She was reinstated this week.
…‘We had a multicultural household and I had no problems helping the young person maintain her faith of birth,’ she said. ‘I have always prided myself in being very professional in what I do. If something works for a young person, whether I agree with it or not, I am happy to support them in that.’
But the girl, whom the foster mother describes as caring and intelligent, defied expectations by choosing not to wear overtly Muslim clothes or to eat Halal food.
The girl, whose interest in Christianity had begun at school some time before her foster placement, also made it clear that she wanted to go to church.The carer, an Anglican who attends a local evangelical church, said: ‘I did initially try to discourage her.
‘I offered her alternatives. I offered to find places for her to practise her own religion. I offered to take her to friends or family. But she said to me from the word go, “I am interested and I want to come.” She sort of burst in.’
Should we really be so shocked that a girl, who faces abuse and discrimination if she stays in the Muslim fold, would want to convert on her own? The real problem here is the British dhimmi’s trying to force her to stay a Muslim despite her desire to find a new religion.
Hat tip: Moonbattery
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What happens when multiculturalism and the victim culture collide? The end of sanity, that’s what.
For a year, Sarah has been facing financial ruin, due to a compensation claim for £34,000 brought by Bushra, 19, who has maintained she is due that figure after being turned down for a job at the Wedge salon in London’s King’s Cross.
In the event, the tribunal ruled this week that while Bushra’s claim of direct discrimination failed, her claim for indirect discrimination had succeeded.
Sarah has therefore been ordered to pay £4,000 compensation by way of ‘injury to feelings’.
…Since the judgment, Bushra, who is of Syrian descent and has worn a headscarf since she was 13, has, so far at least, chosen not to comment.
But, speaking last year, she admitted she had attended 25 interviews for hairdressing jobs without success.
But Sarah, she told the tribunal, had upset her the most.
She said: ‘I felt so down and got so depressed. I thought: “If I am not going to defend myself, who is?” Hairdressing has been what I’ve wanted to do ever since I was at high school.
‘This has ruined my ambitions. Wearing a headscarf is essential to my beliefs.’Bushra had a job in a salon in London, where her tasks included cutting hair, highlighting, tinting and perming, before she left to get married in Syria in 2006.
But on her return to Britain, she was unable to find work.
She has given up her ambitions to become a hairdresser and is studying travel and tourism at Hammersmith and West London College while working part-time in a shop.
At the tribunal, Bushra was asked if Sarah had made derogatory remarks about her headscarf.
She replied: ‘She did not. She just asked me if I wore it all the time, or whether I’d take it off.’
…
‘Her CV didn’t stand out because I was looking for someone who lived locally – something I’d specified in the advert so that I could call them in as and when required – and she lived several miles away in Acton,’ says Sarah.
‘One day she rang up to see if I’d got her CV and begged me for an interview. I told her I had concerns about where she lived, but she sounded so desperate that I agreed she could come in for a chat.’
A few days later, Bushra duly arrived at the salon.
‘I have to say I didn’t take to her,’ says Sarah. ‘She waltzed into the salon and hung up her coat as though she already had the job.
‘Naturally, I noticed her headscarf. But I presumed that, as she’s a hairdresser, she’d take if off when she was working. In 16 years, I’ve never known any stylist cover their hair with a headscarf. And this particular headscarf came all the way down to her eyebrows and covered her entire hairline.’
Sarah broached the subject with Bushra, who said she would not be removing the garment.
After ten minutes, with the interview complete, Sarah said she would come back to Bushra about the vacancy.
‘As she left, Bushra turned to me and said that she’d been turned down for jobs before,’ says Sarah. ‘And I admit I thought: “Well, what do you expect?”
‘It was not a religious matter. If she’d come in wearing a baseball cap and saying she wouldn’t take it off for work, then she wouldn’t have got the job either.’
One morning in the second week of June 2007, an innocuous white envelope landed on Sarah’s doormat. It contained a letter saying that she was being sued for £15,000 for indirect and direct discrimination by Bushra Noah.
This, the letter stated, related to compensation for injury to her feelings and lost earnings. Later, that figure was increased to £34,000.
‘I read it and re-read it and stood there dumbfounded,’ says Sarah.
‘I remembered Bushra, and I guessed straight away that the claim related to the headscarf. In my mind I was saying “But I wasn’t discriminating, it’s just a part of the job”, over and over again.‘I dialled the number at the top of the letter and was told I needed to get a solicitor, but that because I worked, I wasn’t entitled to Legal Aid. I thought: “This is it – my business is over.” I was devastated.’
There are no words.
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Europe Pushes Ahead Plans for Anti-Death Penalty Day
Europe will mark an anti-death penalty day next week, but it won’t be an official European Union initiative. Efforts to involve the E.U. failed when member state Poland refused to go along on the grounds that the death penalty debate ignored broader right-to-life questions.
The conservative Polish government’s objections ruined the E.U. plan, but another European grouping, the 47-nation Council of Europe (CoE), has decided to push ahead with a “European Day against the Death Penalty” on Oct. 10.
The CoE groups most European countries, including those outside of the E.U. It is independent of the 27-member E.U. and has been campaigning for years against capital punishment.
Poland was able to veto the E.U. plan to formally recognize the day, but at the CoE decisions are based on a majority view rather than unanimity.
I foresee a future dilemma for the Euroweenies. What will they do when they realize they are insulting Islam by denying the right of Muslims, who they usually bend over backwards to accommodate, to practice stonings of women for real or imagined social infraction?
If they oppose the death penalty, they get to feel good about themselves for being “compassionate,” plus they get the nice bonus of being able to attack America. On the other hand, they are rendering judgment on a cultural practice of another group, which flies in the face of their cultural relativism. And not they’re not just poo-pooing the behavior of any group, but the newest protected victim group on the block: Muslims. What’s a do-gooder Euroweeny to do?
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Just when you thought British dhimmitude couldn’t get any more ridiculous. Trevor Phillips, the head of some silly “human rights and equality commission” has decided that British history just isn’t inclusive enough.
He said Muslims were also part of the national story and “sometimes we have to go back into the tapestry and insert some threads that were lost”.
He quoted the example of the Spanish Armada, which was held up by the Turks at the request of Queen Elizabeth I.
“It was the Turks who saved us,” Mr Phillips told a Labour fringe meeting.
Dhimmi Watch asks if Mr. Phillips is planning to include the slave raids carried out by Turkish clients against British ships and towns in his new tapestry? Somehow I doubt it.
Mr Phillips thinks that bending over backwards, destroying his national identity and rewriting one more suitable for Muslims will reduce their aggressive posture and ambition. He couldn’t be more wrong. Cultural concessions are to the culturally aggressive Islamists what military concessions were to Hitler. All Mr. Phillips is doing is proving how weak British culture is, that nothing in the country is worth standing up for. Anything and everything can be compromised. He might as well have already converted to Islam for all the good that will do.
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My colleagues here at the C-C have quite capably shown why the multiculturalist behaviors of Europe and some of the more liberal parts of America are damaging in a fundamental, real-world way to the liberties and rights we have come to expect from society. I, however, hold the title of ‘ivory tower idealist,’ and am therefore concerned with the absolutes of things.
Unfortunately for multiculturalists, not even in purely absolute terms is ‘diversity’ necessarily a good thing.
Multiculturalism stems from an intellectually bankrupt system of ethics called ‘cultural relativism,’ which, in short, states that an individual person’s moral actions should be judged based on the culture he is surrounded by. Thus, a cultural relativist, looking at the beheadings and suicide bombings in the Middle East and the culture from which the perpetrators come from, would be forced to concede that they were not behaving in a manner that violated the moral tenets of their culture – indeed, that the Islamic focus on martyrdom and fighting the infidel would praise such behavior – and that thusly we could not, having not been raised in that culture, judge the moral correctness of such actions.
Most of you can see how ludicrous this mindset is, and how thoroughly damaging to Liberal democracy it can easily become. Because we deny ourselves the right to take umbrage at suicide bombings, we deny ourselves the ability to call them precisely what they are: immoral. Indeed, I would venture to say ‘evil.’
Not all cultures are equally moral. Not all viewpoints are equally valid. This is a difficult fact for those steeped in ‘diversity’ to accept. If I assert the viewpoint that murder is not immoral, I would have an overwhelmingly difficult time convincing anyone – if I could at all – simply because we are all well aware that there is something fundamentally incorrect and undesirable about murder. It is no different to look at the actions of a given culture and sometimes glean the moral truth of it prima facie. The barbaric practices inherent in Islamic shari’a and east African tribalism are without doubt some of the most absurd, anti-civil and cruel behaviors humans have perpetrated upon one another in the modern world, backed by the flimsiest, most irrational justifications present in any widely accepted worldview.
Yet it is difficult, if not impossible, to motivate some multiculturalists to oppose them as vehemently as they deserve.
It is time people started realizing that some cultures and viewpoints are intrinsically better than others. Multiculturalists desire a world where diversity is the rule. But they’re going to find out very quickly that the low-minded practices of the truly savage leave no room for their egalitarianism.
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There’s an excellent Australian op-ed that addresses the predicament Europe finds itself in, The author concludes that a strong rise of right-wing European nationalism is almost an inevitable response to the failures resulting from years of extreme multiculturalism.
Elsewhere in the West, a renewed clamour for national identity is a predictable and overdue response to the permissive extremes of the decades-long embrace of no-rules multiculturalism. The trend has been provoked by the rise of militant Islam, with its own competitive identity that transcends national borders.
. . .The new reality sits uncomfortably with the so-called progressive view that favours unbridled tolerance for the minority and a loathing for the dominant culture or conventional view. These themes are explored by Francis Fukuyama, professor of international political economy at Johns Hopkins School of International Studies, who says that if existing citizens do not sufficiently value their national citizenship, they can scarcely expect newcomers to value it. The potential cost of inaction is evident in comments by Middle East Forum director Daniel Pipes in The Australian today that opinion surveys in Britain consistently show 50 per cent of British Muslims would like to see the introduction of sharia Islamic law. This is akin to exchanging the constitution for the Koran.
Professor Fukuyama hits the nail square on the head. Modern Europe is so disgusted by its own existence and overwhelmed with Western guilt that it’s practically inviting a cultural invasion. How can people be expected to care for their countries existence when nations are evil constructs to be scorned because they cause war, when values are to be dismissed because the adoption of certain beliefs itself represents a rejection of others, when you can’t be proud of who you are because that means you think you are better than others. The problem comes in, of course, when a strong transnational ethos such as Islamism moves in and takes advantage of the identity void created by the self-hatred that comes from excessive multiculturalism.
. . .Unfortunately for the West, the liberal tolerance shown by the Left to minority groups has not always come with reciprocal obligations. Professor Fukuyama argues that Europe’s failure to better integrate its Muslim population is a ticking time bomb that has already contributed to terrorism. It is bound to provoke a sharper backlash from populist groups, and may even threaten European democracy itself.
At this point I’d have to say we’re well beyond “may…threaten”.
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Ok, maybe the title is a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s not hard to guess where this view is coming from.
Britain’s relationship with America is “one-sided” and Tony Blair is routinely ignored by President George Bush, a senior US official has said.
. . .Mr Myers reportedly said he felt “a little ashamed” at Mr Bush’s treatment of the prime minister.
. . .The official – a specialist in British politics – made the comments at an academic forum at Washington DC’s School of Advanced International Studies on Tuesday.
He reportedly said that despite Mr Blair’s attempts to influence the Bush administration’s policy, “we typically ignore them and take no notice – it’s a sad business”.
The State Department has got to be the most worthless bunch on Capital Hill, which is saying something. Most State Department diplopukes tend to think that, gosh darnit, if we would just be more socialist and try to solve everything through appeasement like everyone else there would be no fighting in the world and we could all frolic through the fields having a gay ol’ time. I feel sorry for Condoleeza Rice. She’s far too smart a woman to have to spend her time keeping a bunch of spoiled diplomats out of trouble.
The fact of the matter is, a bridge with Europe is the last thing we need right now. I have much respect for Tony Blair – in the war against global jihad he is a true visionary – but he’s a man of his environment. If he’s offering a connection to Europe, it would unfortunately be more accurately described as an anchor. America can’t afford to be pulled down into the depths of irrelevance with them.
Post-Christian, indulgently multicultural Europe needs direction, not partners in its despair. Bush understands this.
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It’s quite obvious that many haven’t the foggiest idea of what’s really going on in the world today. They are still operating under some mistaken notion that all these regional conflicts currently underway have little relation to each other; that the factors contributing to these fights are local, and can be solved independently in each case though some sort of diplomacy or other kind of capitulation. Oh, you’re upset about land in Gaza? We’ll pull back. You can’t find jobs in France? We’ll expand the nanny state. You can’t preach your intolerance in Britain? We’ll go ahead and let you do it anyway. This approach is fundamentally flawed, as each and every situation has shown. Almost every conflict the Western world is engaged in right now has one thing in common, the clash between Islamic expansionism and the ideals of Western Liberalism. Local conditions and complaints are coopted by the Jihadists for convenience, they are not the cause of this global strife.
Some seem to think that, whatever happens, it’s guaranteed the world will be basically the same tomorrow as it is today. That’s wrong. They think we have somehow been anointed the worlds one true society, that Western values and tolerance and all that wonderful jazz will perpetuate itself forever, without any effort from us. In short, they think we can’t lose. They’re wrong; we can. And we are.
We aren’t losing because Rumsfield screwed up and disbanded the Iraqi army, multiplying the pool of potential insurgents by tens, if not hundreds, of degrees. We aren’t losing because he okayed an American administration over Iraq instead of immediately turning it over to Iraqi’s, even if it were just exiles who hadn’t been there in years. These mistakes were costly. They are setbacks – albeit major ones – but not the kind of mistakes that bring civilizations down.
No, we are losing for a much simpler, and yet much more devastating reason. We are losing because our ideology has turned on itself and is paralyzed into inaction. Europe as it exists today, or as we conceive it to exist, as a bastion of Western Liberalism founded on the basis of Judeo-Christian beliefs, is done. It is unsustainable. Too many in the West don’t even believe in the righteousness of their own side. How can a people survive that way? They can’t. They say, “why not something else? What right have we to assert our beliefs?” And so they tolerate intolerance, their multiculturalism compels them to unquestionably accept uniculturalists. Europeans no longer have a solid conceptualization of their own existence. They don’t know who they are, nor how they got there. This is a recipe for disaster. Now they are being taken over by the beliefs of others, swept aside into the historical trash bin.
The transformation is already underway. Many European locations are already seeing near as much emigration as they are immigration. Those that see the writing on the wall are leaving. The world of government dependence was unsustainable from the get go. The promise of American military protection bred a European society unconcerned about first order problems. Protection? Leave that to America. Health care? Leave that to the government, just so long as I can party in Amsterdam. Mass immigration was sold as the solution to the overgrown welfare state, but it turns out no one ever told them they had to accept a radical transformation of their society as a consequence. And now many are starting to realize that is exactly the price they are paying.
Nonmuslim women in many British neighborhoods will only go out wearing veils because it’s unsafe not to. 2,500 French police have been injured in the last year fighting roving bands of “youths”. Frenchmen are as frightened of using their own public transportation system as if they were in Baghdad. As the demographic gap closes, it will only get worse. Those that don’t outright convert to the new dominant belief system, one whose followers actually are convinced of their own superiority and carry a desire for self perpetuation, will flee. Western Liberalism is crumbling, and soon it will only be found in America, if even here.
Iraq was an opportunity at a back door solution. A chance to temper the new and reformed Islam. Many promote “moderate” Muslims and the chance at “reforming” Islam as a viable solution. But they missed the boat, Islam has already reformed. The Jihadists are it. These aren’t first generation immigrants signing up en masse to join the Jihadists, these are second or even third generation Frenchmen, English, Canadian, Dutch and American citizens. But they hold little loyalty to their native countries. That comes second, a very distant second, to the new pan-Islamic Jihadism sweeping the globe. Iraq, or someplace like it, was our hope; a chance to draw potential Jihadists away from expansionism and encourage more desirable and tolerant governments, ones that could live together with the West, even with their differences. It was, and still is, worth the price to try, even if it doesn’t work. But we can’t keep worrying about the little stuff, all the while ignoring the tidal wave of history that’s moving to sweep us aside like yesterdays dirty dishes.
It’s time to make decisions. The “blame America first” crowd that thinks America is the principle agent behind all the world’s ills and the European worshippers of multiculturalism who refuse to condemn even those views that threaten to destroy their own need to decide whether they want to fight or not. Is Western Liberalism worth fighting for, or is it not? Decide. Because if they don’t want to defend their own ideological core – the principles that have allowed Western civilization to soar to unprecedented heights – they might as well go get fitted for their burqas.
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The rise of Western Liberalism is not often contemplated by those who most enjoy its benefits. Few in the West are inclined to compare the presently favorable circumstances of their lives to those who have come before. They blithely assume that the freedoms and rights shared today by “civilized society” will continue on into perpetuity. Reasoning that no people would choose to deviate from that course once set on it, they are smug in their assumption that their world cannot be transformed from within. The reality of the situation is unfortunately much bleaker.
In his new book, America Alone, Mark Steyn lays out the shocking facts on the future of the West. In short, there isn’t one. More accurately, whatever emerges from the rubble will be unrecognizable by modern Liberals. The citizens of the developed world have inexplicably given up. They don’t want to play anymore, and the world will be left for someone else to deal with.
A stable population requires 2.1 births per woman. The United States has a rate of 2.11. Canada’s is 1.5. Europe, as a whole, has a rate of 1.38, with Spain leading the way to the grave with a fertility rate of 1.1, half replacement level. That means that every generation – approximately 35 years – the population of Spain will halve.
Obviously, societies that do not produce enough children will have to import labor from somewhere else. In short, they have to outsource their future. What’s wrong with that, many ask? Nothing need necessarily be wrong with it. Yet, in practice, if those that are imported do not share the values that make up the foundation of Western Liberalism, then it’s little more than willful self-destruction – suicide by contraception.
There is no single cause to explain this behavior. Over generations, an increasingly prominent school of thought has emerged that is inherently self destructive. This school of thought holds that we are to blame for all the troubles of the world, whatever the crisis of the time happens to be. Whether it’s the “population boom” of the 70’s – my how wrong that turned out to be – the diminishing resources of the world, global cooling, global warming, and on and on. With every generation this indoctrination of self-loathing has further permeated Western society, growing in influence to the point that reproduction is no longer seen as desirable, but instead as part of the problem. If you’ve ever had someone tell you that they don’t want to have children because it would be “cruel”, you know what I mean. And I’ll take any odds that person is a leftist.
At the same time, the West’s aging population has grown increasingly dependent upon its children. Government entitlement programs are making the demands for new labor, to support those on the public dole, ever more pressing. When none is to be found, it must be imported. These immigrants naturally come from those places that are producing the most human capital. But who are they? According to the CIA World Factbook, five of the top ten countries by fertility rate have populations that are 90% Muslim or more. That includes Niger, Mali, Somalia, Afghanistan and Yemen. The populations of Muslim countries are growing by leaps and bounds, what better place for them to expand to then an increasingly abandoned Europe? In 2005, Mohammed was the fifth most popular boys name given to newborns in the UK.
So what, the multiculturalists insist. There’s nothing wrong with being Muslim. On that they are right, there is nothing necessarily wrong with an individual of the Islamic faith any more so than an individual believer in Christianity or Buddhism, but what is the track record of government by Islamic societies? Can these soon-to-be Europeans be counted on to accept the tenets of Western Liberalism? After all, there’s no golden rule of existence that declares that Europe will stay free and embrace Western Liberal values for all time whether we fight to keep it that way or not. If they don’t accept these values, they will replace them with something else. A list of the world’s least free countries reads like a who’s who of Islamic society. Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, Iran, Pakistan, Oman, Qatar…etc. etc. But we are not allowed, the multiculturalists insist, to question whether or not these new generations of Europeans will accept the traditions which have made the West so free.
It seems to me a prudent question to ask just who it is we are handing the reigns to and whether or not they accept our values and the best traditions of free society, but multiculturalists are incapable of posing this question. They are paralyzed by their own ideological dissonance. On the one hand they face an ideology that threatens their freedoms, and on the other they must follow their core belief that all cultures are equal, leaving them incapable of even considering newcomers as potentially threatening. But Western Liberalism has not been anointed the one true system of the Earth. It can be defeated. Quite easily, apparently, as modern liberals – conditioned to accept all cultures – largely welcome with open arms even those who mean their destruction.
In one of his many speeches following the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden listed the 1492 expulsion of Muslim conquerers from Spain as one of the many supposed Western grievances he uses to justify jihad. Islam has a very long memory. Spain, apparently, does not. Thanks to Spain’s incredible disappearing populace, Osama bin Laden’s successor will one day be able to cross that particular complaint off the list; Spain will be Muslim once again.
Europe is nearly beyond the point of no return. It will either have to accept its gradual Islamic conversion or suffer the destruction of its economies under the unsustainable stresses of bulging government entitlements. Neither is particularly comforting for those concerned about the future of Western civilization.
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I am a libertarian-conservative blogger living in the DC area. I have a Master's degree in Political Science, but please don't hold that against me.
