Continued Idiocy of Cultural Suicide

The idiocy of cultural suicide continues unabated in the West. There are little surrenders, like the Bishop of Oxford supporting efforts by a mosque to broadcast the call for Muslim prayers via loudspeakers throughout the town five times a day, forcing non-believers to be tacit supporters of Islam. Or the applicant to the Greater Manchester Police who was rejected because he had the word “England” tattooed on his arm. According to Tony Blankley, “He was formally informed that `Home Office policy precludes applications with tattoos ... which may cause offence and/or invite provocation from the public or colleagues.’ Informally he was told, `Unfortunately, some people feel intimidated by the word England.’ And I thought only Nazi swine (and in olden days, the French) were intimidated by the thought of England.” http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/03/more_than_bluebirds_in_the_sky.html (hat tip to www.politicalman.blog-city.com for sending me this article)

A more serious (and more grotesque) cultural surrender is the tacit acceptance of the practice of female genital mutilation on cultural or religious grounds. According to a report in the Daily Mail (3 January 2008), “The Unspeakable Practice of Female Circumcision That's Destroying Young Women's Lives in Britain,” by Jo-Ann Goodwin and David Jones, an estimated 66,000 young women in Britain have been brutalized in this manner. This doesn’t count all the women in the rest of Europe tortured by butchers called “tribal elders.” Some Muslims from Africa and the Middle East “maintain that it is their inalienable right to live according to their traditional beliefs and customs, rather than conform to British values. Indeed, some argue that the freedom to carry out FGM is a fundamental principle of our multi-cultural society.” This is such a problem in Britain that they have had to pass two laws against FGM, the last one being the 2003 Female Genital Mutilation Act – they actually had to pass two laws against this. I’m sorry, but WTF! To add rage to the absurdity, nobody has ever been prosecuted under the 2003 law. The biggest reason for lack of enforcement is that the victims are terrorized into keeping silent – “honor killings” are also part of the multiculturalist and cultural relativistic miasma. Despite the obvious barbarism of this practice, “at least one London council declined to publish material highlighting the suffering and danger the practice causes - for fear of offending ethnic African residents.” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=505796&in_page_id=1879

The latest lunacy revolves around Geert Wilders’ film “Fitna” which is critical of radical Islam. The Dutch authorities prepared for violence before the film was even shown (on the submission of the Dutch to Islamofascists, I highly recommend Bruce Bawer’s book, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within; also see what he has to say about Wilders’ film on his blog, http://memo.brucebawer.com). They realized that radical Muslims, Islamofascists, would riot over what might be in the film. As Peter Hoekstra pointed out in the Wall Street Journal (26 March 2008) in “Islam and Free Speech,” other religious groups in the West, when faced with images or words disrespectful of their religion (like Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ”) resolve the issue peacefully (I would argue that in most cases, anybody who protests against such images is usually dismissed by the mainstream media as a religious nut, but that’s another issue). “Radical jihadists,” as Hoekstra calls them, are granted the right by the political and cultural elites of Europe to riot, burn, and pillage. http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB120649269618764219-lMyQjAxMDI4MDI2NjQyOTYyWj.html (hat tip to www.politicalman.blog-city.com for sending me this article)

Hoekstra opined that Wilders’ film, “Fitna” would not be shown in the West. He was nearly correct. LiveLeak.com, a British video sharing site like Youtube, had “Fitna” on its site for less than a day. It took it down citing death threats to workers at LiveLeak and insinuating that they were pressured by the British government. (http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=334_1206780640 – this is not the original link on LiveLink. After looking for over 30 minutes, I could not find it again). The video, however, is available on Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCrCsTMokTU) but it’s “Mature,” so you’ll have to sign in to view it. Of course, Wilders was roundly criticized by the usual suspects, the EU and the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, among others. The Secretary-General officially declared, “I condemn, in the strongest terms, the airing of Geert Wilders’ offensively anti-Islamic film. There is no justification for hate speech or incitement to violence. The right of free expression is not at stake here.” (http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2008/sgsm11483.doc.htm) If the right of free speech is not at stake here, what is? The logic of his statement is that any radical group can censor by violence or threat of violence.

One of the more disastrous results of the Western political and cultural elites’ desire to appease radical Muslims is the damage they do to other nations, particularly to Israel. As Mortimer B. Zuckerman, Editor-in-Chief of US News & World Report pointed out in “A Moral Outrage” in the 24-31 March issue, “Hamas kills indiscriminately, making no distinction between civilians and combatants. But it is Israel that earns the world’s opprobrium.” He concludes, “The entire Arab world watches to see if Israel can find a way to deter Hamas – or if terrorism, with the acquisition of the hand-wringers, can win.” The first victim of Western multiculturalism and cultural relativism might very well be somebody else.

It’s time that the West starts defending its values instead of meekly succumbing to barbarism. I don’t want my daughters growing up in a culture that favors beatings, rapings, and honor killings as a way of dealing with women. I don’t want to live in a culture where practicing my religion carries a death sentence. Ah, but we can delude ourselves into believing it can’t happen here. If you really believe that, then you need to read “An American-Muslim State of Mind. The Honor Murderer in Texas Did not Pull the Trigger,” by Phyllis Chesler http://pajamasmedia.com/xpress/phyllischesler/2008/03/12/an_americanmuslim_state_of_min.php There is already a sub-culture in this country which believes the same lunacy as those who practice FGM in Britain.

There are a few lonely, often marginalized individuals calling for the defense of Western Civilization. For example, Janet Albrechtsen in “West Awakes From Suicidal Slumber” in the 26 March 2008 edition of the Australian, rightly saluted the British government for sponsoring meaningful reforms to their immigration policies (based on the Australian model) stressing responsible citizenship. http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23431666-7583,00.html (hat tip to www.politicalman.blog-city.com for sending me this article)

Another individual is Pat Condell, an atheist video blogger from England. While I don’t always agree with him (like a reasonable person, I either say something like, “I disagree with you,” or I even turn him off; it never crosses my mind to use violence against his right of free expression), he sometimes makes a great deal of sense. His latest entry, “Appeasing Islam” is particularly good, and I highly recommend it: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=30a_1204991129

Many people want to simply cave to the demands of radical Muslims out of what they see as respect for the Islamic faith and out of self-loathing for Western culture. If I’m offended by something, I simply don’t watch/listen to it in the first place or turn it off. Muslims riot when they think there is something being said or written that they might possibly not like. Many Europeans argue that freedom of speech should be limited to those things that don’t cause a disturbance. This was a proviso of the Meiji Constitution and was used by the militarists in the 1930s to gain control and initiate a fascist regime that took Japan into the war with China and, eventually, the Western Powers. Indeed, both Hitler and Mussolini used similar tactics of deliberately causing violence and chaos in the streets and then selling themselves as the only solution to the chaos. Islamofascists today are employing exactly the same techniques (and why not since many of them are openly fans of Hitler and the Nazis for what they did to the Jews http://www.iranholocaustdenial.com). “Peace at any cost” is not peace – it’s craven cowardice and slavery.