There is something juvenile about multiculturalism. It is a fairytale that a culture that has brought freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, equal rights for women, and free enterprise to the world is of just equal or indeed lesser value than cultures that have done nothing of the kind, or worse.
We live in an era of Western identity decline, a time when cultural relativism has wedged itself between the West and those original and defining beliefs. The multiculti bear hug has left society in a state of moral, cultural, and political paralysis.
Freedom and Heritage has no problem with multi-ethnicity. It is almost uniquely ISLAM which has spoiled what we so happily embraced as the multicultural project. This has nothing to do with race. It is about culture. It is about the complete incompatibility with Western values of the belief system, cultural practices, deliberately not assimilating, and supremacist ideology of Islam. Liberty, prosperity and human rights are not part of Islamic civilization. Despite all the vacuous “universalist” gospel spouted by any number of politicians, we are NOT united by the same values of humanity.
We in the West believe in FREEDOM FROM TYRANNY. But the Islamic community believes in FREEDOM FROM UNBELIEF.
It is profoundly dangerous for Western countries to keep on tolerating and “respecting” Islam’s endlessly creeping and engulfing demands when these are incompatible with the preservation of our own Western freedoms.
Wherever Islam is protected from so-called blasphemy, no such protection is given to Western freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, and certainly women’s rights. Political Correctness, with its limitless tolerance and non-judgmentalism, is a cancer of our civilization’s immune system.
Far too many on the Left, and in the mushy soft-progressive middle (including disgracefully many “conservative” politicians), think that “we are all the same”, part of the same humanity with shared aspirations and values. This is profoundly incorrect.
In 2004, President Bush said in his State of the Union Address: “I believe God has planted in every human heart the desire to live in freedom.” This assertion is based entirely on wishful thinking. It is completely at odds with the historical and theological record.
Memo to our Western politicians: IGNORANCE AND HOPE ARE POOR ADVISERS.
When we accept the narrative of Islamic apologists, including
- the myth of Islamic tolerance,
- the myth of the Islamic “Golden Age” and how Islam “saved” Christian Europe from the Dark Ages, and
- the belief that the Crusades were brutal wars launched by the armies of European Christendom against the Seljuk Turks and other Muslim armies just for sadistic grins –
we are accepting a self-denigrating worldview based on LIES. Look for our separate, detailed posts on these.
Cultural pessimism, so deeply ingrained in our universities and education system generally, saps our ability to affirm and defend WHO WE ARE. It is profoundly dangerous to our whole civilization. Cultural relativism – the assertion that all cultures are equal – is a ruinous delusion.
Arthur Koestler, who died as long ago as 1983, said: “The predicament of Western civilization is that it has ceased to be aware of the values which it is in peril of losing.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote in her second autobiographical book Nomad:
“Here is something I have learned the hard way, but which a lot of well-meaning people in the West have a hard time accepting: All human beings are equal, but all cultures and religions are not. A culture that celebrates femininity and considers women to be the masters of their own lives is better than a culture that mutilates girls’ genitals and confines them behind walls and veils or flogs and stones them for falling in love. The culture of the Western Enlightenment is better.”
Bernard Lewis, foremost scholar and historian of Islam and the Middle East, wrote back in 2006:
“It may be that Western culture will indeed go: The lack of conviction of many of those who should be its defenders and the passionate intensity of its accusers may well join to complete its destruction. But if it does go, the men and women of all the continents will thereby be impoverished and endangered.”