I received an email from E.S. regarding my letter to The Honourable Gordon O’Connor, Minister of National Defence, Ottawa, on the occasion of his concern about caricatures of Mohammed increasing the dangers to Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan. It included this thought:
I am really wrestling with my feelings about this group of people and I’ve spent a lifetime living/breathing/working at eliminating bias based on group identity. Never have I had such a personal challenge as with the followers of Islam. Is there any other group so intolerant of the differences of others? And I’m very tired of hearing that there is a difference between “secular” Muslims and that the Q’uran does NOT preach violence. Where is the outrage (and the media, of course) from those Muslims? Must EVERY denouncement of violence be equivocal? And why do we let them get away with that!
More importantly, how do we begin to break down such hate at worst and disdain at best when they insist this is … rooted in the word of God. Throughout history so much evil has been done in His name — but this seems insurmountable.
My response:
In this country we have group identity issues. For example, the Bloods and the Crips. At least those groups are mindful of the 21st century.
Until a vocal Islamic plurality minimally accepts a 19th century reality the problem is insurmountable. Otherwise, we are dealing with a 14th century mind-set. It is so foreign that it is like a first contact with aliens (from space). The cartoon-jihad has made this starkly visible. Thanks to Jyllands-Posten.
It is no different for those Islamists now rioting and threatening. How can they understand us? Witness the (milder) demonstration placards saying “To Hell with your Freedom!” and “Freedom of speech is terrorism!” Unlike Reuters or the Associated Press, they need no qualifying quotes around the word freedom. Nobody in the West, except the likes of Noam Chomsky and Ward Churchill, give this the slightest credence.
These differences are the whole fellafel. There is a there there, and it is exactly where they say it is. I cannot fathom why we do not accept their insistence that their meaning of “group identity” is that all other groups are subhuman and subject to death upon convenience.
How can this tribal imperative be assimilated by Western minds, given the Enlightenment? Why do we pretend it should be? We pretend because moral and cultural relativism have been ascendent: all groups have equal claim to moral authority. How Liberals apply this to Islam, despite their claimed disdain for religion in general, I will never understand.
It follows that every Islamic denouncement of violence MUST be equivocal for the same reason the Democrats “filibustered” the Alito SCOTUS nomination – “appeal to the base.”
Muslim immigrants are told it is OK to lie, cheat, and intimidate to obtain welfare from the dhimmi. See Daniel Pipes here. If 5% of the Danish immigrant population consume 40% of the welfare then the experiment in encouraging immigration is not working to mitigate the Ponzi scheme that is the Danish welfare state.
And when you combine the demands of the Danish welfare state with Danish birth rates, then new workers have to come from outside, though they have to have high skills.
Therefore, the Danes require a higher birth rate of people philosophically commited to “Danishness”, skilled immigrants willing to assimilate Western values, or a huge reduction in welfare state expenditures. So far, the choice has been unassimilated, low-skill immigration – i.e., none of the above.