The Problem With Multiculturalism

Thousands of people gather for March of Unity in France

Jews are being urged to flee France, and head to Israel as Islamic totalitarianism gains a stronger footing in France, and elsewhere — with the leaders seemingly helpless to do anything about it.

Under the reigning ideology of multiculturalism, it never was supposed to come to this.

To some people, it’s unthinkable and racist to question the premises or attitudes of multiculturalism. In their minds, “multiculturalism” and “diversity” refer to equal regard and dignity towards all races, cultural groups or societies.

What could be wrong with that?

There’s a dangerous vagueness in such an attitude. Left unclarified — and sometimes deliberately unspecified — is the idea that all cultures, attitudes and belief systems are morally equal in stature, rationality and justice.

But the problems exploding in Europe and Canada (and not far beneath the surface in the United States) present a particular challenge: If all cultures, attitudes and beliefs are morally equal, what are we to do with fundamentalist Islam? Fundamentalist Islam advocates Sharia Law, a belief system which espouses that it’s immoral to separate church and state. It’s literal religious theocracy, and in fact dictatorship.

“Liberals” in the United States and elsewhere in the Western world are in a dilemma of their own making. On the one hand, they insist that all cultures are morally equal. They also tend to claim that the more oppressed or victimized (actually or allegedly) a society has been by the United States or Western Europe, the more we must feel sympathy for them.

Enter radical Islam. They gleefully cash in on the victim status. “Look at us. You’re the big mean Satan infidels, imperialists who run all over us. And we’re the victims.”

Multiculturalism claims that we must feel their pain and even feel sorry for them. No, we can’t condone terrorism, but … they’re not entirely wrong, either. Who’s to say what’s right or wrong anyway? That’s the whole point of multiculturalism: You cannot say any set of attitudes or beliefs is wrong. Unless it’s racist, of course.

What about the racism against the Jews? Why is that more tolerable than other forms of racism, under multiculturalism? Could it be that there’s a hierarchy of values or judgment in an ideological system that claims there are no standards of value? Interesting.

Advocates of militant Islam also gleefully cash in on the idea that it’s harsh, mean and judgmental to evaluate any cultural system or ideology as rotten, dangerous or evil. They harbor no such delusions themselves. In their words and deeds, they are unequivocally committed to the idea that there is a right and wrong; there is a good and a bad. They — the followers of Islam — are right and good, and the rest of us (civilians and the politically indifferent as well as officials) are bad and evil. Death to us all, unless or until we do things (culturally, politically and militarily) precisely their way.

Multiculturalists make it hard to argue with them. To disagree with them, they say, means that you’re racist. But what about the racism of the people they’re aiding and abetting with their claim that there are no wrong or bad ways of doing things?

Consider the recent developments in France with regard to the Jews:

This week’s deadly jihadist attacks have again set off a competition between the French and Israeli governments to reassure and secure the affection of France’s increasingly nervous Jewish population.

Not for the first time, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used an attack by Islamic extremists in France to urge the country’s Jews to relocate.

“To all the Jews of France, all the Jews of Europe, I would like to say that Israel is not just the place in whose direction you pray, the state of Israel is your home,” he said in a statement on Saturday.

Responding from outside the Jewish supermarket in Paris where four hostages died on Friday, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls sought to counter Netanyahu’s words.

“France, without its Jews, is not France,” he said. [reported at Newsmax.com and AFP]

It increasingly seems as if we have traveled backwards in time, via an H.G. Wells time machine. We might as well be in the 1930s when Hitler is gaining his anti-Semitic hold on Western Europe with worldwide intentions. Of course, Hitler was obsessed with the Jews. Islamic terrorists hate the Jews with (if anything) more ferocity and fury than Hitler, but their hatred is wider than that. It’s hatred for all things Western. Their war isn’t one of self-defense, although they claim it is. Their war is an attack on anything smacking of separation of church and state. Why do you think they choose the targets they do?

You may be politically indifferent or you may choose to believe, as our President insists, that it has nothing whatsoever to do with religion or culture. Of course he’d say that. He’s a multiculturalist, and he’s trying to preserve the illusion for himself (and impose on the rest of us) the idea that no cultures or societies — with the possible exception of the United States — are ever bad or wrong about anything. The truth hurts, from a multiculturalist point-of-view, when Islamic states go out into the world seeking to impose their Sharia Law on everyone else, by force.

Not only is it not racist to oppose multiculturalism — it’s racist to support it. Because in so doing, you make the world safe not only for reasonable individuals and cultures who don’t seek to harm anyone else. You also make it safe for people who advocate things like Sharia Law, the most brutal, unjust and irrational form of psychologically abusive totalitarianism anyone (Hitler included) could ever have conceived. You’re basically telling such people, “We have no right to judge your beliefs, even if you’re prepared to kill everyone who doesn’t follow them.”

You might feel good about yourself by thinking such things as, “I tolerate and accept everyone.” Political liberalism (in its classical, original sense) was, after all, supposed to mean leaving everyone alone, except those who impose force on others.  Yet what are you supposed to do with people who not only advocate the use of brutal force on a practically daily basis, and do so in the name of an ideological and philosophical-theological belief system that nobody is willing to even name, much less condemn, for fear of offending?

Imagine trying to deal with a physically abusive family member or a common criminal that way, by saying, “I know you’re good, I’m not judging, but you must stop, I tell you, you must stop.” How far do you think you’d get?

When you insist that all beliefs and actions are morally equivalent, you set the stage for the truly evil to put your tolerance to the test. “You really think we’re all the same? OK, let’s see how you like this.” That’s precisely what’s happening now with terrorism, on a worldwide scale. It’s not difficult to understand. The problem is getting our military and political leaders to face it. Right now, they simply will not.

In that respect, we are living in a period of denial and evasion on the scale leading up to the Nazi era. It’s ironic, but somehow logically fitting, that Jews now contemplate fleeing previously friendly countries just as they did in the past. The pseudo-benevolent “tolerance” and fawning of multiculturalism hasn’t helped them a bit.

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