The bill has come due....the free ride is over - Granite Grok

The bill has come due….the free ride is over

Perhaps the slumbering bear is starting to awaken? 

We have seen the uproar of the Muslims over the Mohammed Cartoons in Europe.  We’ve see the resulting parades / riots with Muslims carrying signs threatening violence to those that "insult Islam".  We’ve see the reports of the extremists imams on their Friday sermons exhorting their members to jihad and that infidels are to be killed.  We’ve seen the honor killings of Muslim family members whose only crime was to "shame" the honor of the family.  We’ve seen the murder of Theo Van Gogh. We’ve seen Muslims attacking those ideals of the West that they believe to be wrong, as they conflict with Koranic teachings.

Finally, a tipping point may have been reached in the land where tolerance, pacifism, and multiculturalism are all kings – From the International Herald Tribune:

BRUSSELS Europe appears to be crossing an invisible line regarding its Muslim minorities: More people in the political mainstream are arguing that Islam cannot be reconciled with European values.

"You saw what happened with the pope," said Patrick Goeman, 43, the owner of Raga, a funky wine bar in central Antwerp, half an hour outside Brussels. "He said Islam is an aggressive religion. And the next day they kill a nun somewhere and make his point.

From across the pond, it seems that event after event after event is slowly starting to add up – that there are conflict points and that if not careful, those values that Europeans hold dear may be lost.  Often times, these values of free speech, of tolerace, of religious freedom can hardly be discussed intelligently as they are so ingrained in the West, we can hardly think of not having them.  Hey, we want to be nice, right?  

But it is starting to look like the Europeans are no longer as willing as they were before in turning the other cheek. 

Goeman is hardly an extremist. In fact, he organized a protest last week in which 20 bars and restaurants closed on the night when a far-right party with an anti-Muslim message held a rally nearby.

 

His worry is shared by centrists across Europe disturbed that any criticism of Islam or Muslim immigration provokes threats of violence.

And who can blame them?  Dead words from a dead Western king quoted by the current pope sends the Muslim world into a tizzy?  Even the Australians, God love ’em all, are starting to say " Be here – Be Australian.  Want your culture to be Muslim – go where the Muslim culture is dominant". 

For years, those who raised their voices were mostly on the far right. Now those normally seen as moderates – ordinary people as well as politicians – are asking whether once unquestioned values of tolerance and multiculturalism should have limits.

 And who can blame them?  Ideals and people can only be bent  so far before a pushback occurs.  In this case, society can only accept so much that is diametrically opposed to its fundamental core ideals before it either has to defend those ideals, or give up and snap.

 

 

Jack Straw, the former British foreign secretary and prominent Labour Party politician, seemed to sum up the moment last week when he wrote that he felt uncomfortable addressing women whose faces were covered with a veil.

The veil, he wrote, is a "visible statement of separation and difference." 

 

When Pope Benedict XVI made a speech last month that included a quotation calling aspects of Islam "evil and inhuman," Muslims berated him for stigmatizing their culture, while non-Muslims applauded him for bravely speaking a hard truth.

 

Yet, the Muslims do not condemn those that throw the brickbats the other way – and enough of this has happened so that the scale is now moving to the other side.  The one thing I belive all free people want is for things to be fair.  For a while, people will tolerant unfairness in order to be polite.  However, if the scale keeps moving too far and too fast, the tolerance fades.  And I believe it has now started. 

Whatever the motivations, "the reality is that views on both sides are becoming more extreme," said Imam Wahid Pedersen, a prominent Dane who is a convert to Islam. "It has become politically correct to attack Islam, and this is making it hard for moderates on both sides to remain reasonable."

Notice once again the use of the word: attack.  This is now PC speech – anything at all said or written that is the slightest bit negative of Islam is lumped as an "attack"  Sorry folks, but you yourselves are now helping the scale to move by "crying Wolf" too often.  Reasonable is being able to rationally discuss a whole range of things without the threat of not having your shoulders stay connected to your head.

Pedersen fears that onetime moderates are baiting Muslims, the very people they say should integrate into Europe. 

Notice how that last line is constructed – it is the West that bears the burden of integrating immigrants into their host society.  While I believe that the host culture has some responsibility for doing so, the major peice of work is for the immigrants themselves to do the heavy lifting in this area.  Yet, the Europeans are not seeing this happen.  Again, the scale continues to move. 

There are also starting to be calls, from "right wingers" in a number of countries for 

"repatriation" for immigrants who do not made greater efforts to integrate.

The idea is unthinkable to mainstream leaders, but many Muslims still fear that the day – or at least a debate on the topic – may be one terroristic attack away.

When a guest arrives at your home, but keeps complaining, and pushing at this and pushing at that, and trying to impose their will on your home (think wicked Mother-in-laws), at some point, the host is going to say "enough – this is my house.  Act nicely according to my conventions or leave".

Many experts note the centuries of bloodily defining the boundaries of Christianity and Islam, including the Muslim conquest of Palestine in 635 and the subsequent Crusades, and the Moors’ conquest of Spain and Portugal in the eighth century and the Christians’ victory in 1492.

 

A sense of guilt over Europe’s colonial past and then World War II, when intolerance exploded into mass murder, allowed a large migration to occur without any uncomfortable debates over the real differences between migrant and host.

 

Then the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, jolted Europe into new awareness and worry. 

 

No, it wasn’t 9/11 that was seminal event….

The subsequent Madrid and London transit bombings and the murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Dutch-born Muslim stand as examples of the extreme. But many Europeans – even those who generally support immigration – have begun talking more bluntly about cultural differences, specifically about Muslims’ deep religious beliefs and social values, which are far more conservative than those of most Europeans on issues like women’s rights and homosexuality.

 

"A lot of people, progressive ones – we are not talking about nationalists or the extreme right – are saying, ‘Now we have this religion, it plays a role and it challenges our assumptions about what we learned in the ’60s and ’70s,’" said Joost Lagendik, a Dutch member of the European Parliament for the Green Left Party who is active on Muslim issues.

 

"So there is this fear," he said, "that we are being transported back in a time machine where we have to explain to our immigrants that there is equality between men and women, and gays should be treated properly. Now there is the idea we have to do it again.

 

And not only having to explain these things, but having them become second nature by those who these things are anathema?

So strong is the fear that Dutch values of tolerance are under siege that the government introduced a primer on those values last winter for prospective newcomers to Dutch life: a DVD briefly showing topless women and two men kissing. The film does not explicitly mention Muslims, but its target audience is as clear as its message: Embrace our culture or leave

 

It really is starting to become easier and easier to see that the welcome mat is being rolled up.  Nice to see ya, now go home.  Don’t like it here – go back where your social norms are the norms, and stop trying to enforce them upon our culture. 

 

Perhaps most wrenching has been the issue of free speech and expression, and the growing fear that any criticism of Islam could provoke violence.

In France last month, a secondary school teacher went into hiding after receiving death threats for writing an article calling the Prophet Muhammad "a merciless warlord, a looter, a mass murderer of Jews and a polygamist." In Germany, a Mozart opera with an additional scene showing the severed heads of Muhammad, Jesus, Buddha and Poseidon was canceled because of security fears.

 

And this is now becoming a major issue – the issue.  Why should we, who do not hold to your religious tenents, be forced to uphold them?  Why are we castigated when we try to exercise ours, in our own country?    Without free speech, what would the West be?

 

"Self-censorship does not help us against people who want to practice violence in the name of Islam," Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said in criticizing the opera’s cancellation. "It makes no sense to retreat."

The backlash is showing itself in other ways. Last month, the British home secretary, John Reid, called on Muslim parents to keep a close watch on their children. "There’s no nice way of saying this," he told a Muslim group in East London. "These fanatics are looking to groom and brainwash children, including your children, for suicide bombing, grooming them to kill themselves to murder others."

Many Muslims say this new mood is suddenly imposing expectations that Muslims be exactly like their European hosts

 

And I believe this to be exactly the point.  The time of Islamic push in t
he West against Western culture without a corressponding push back has ended. The West, in the form of the Europeans, are getting tired of being told that they are the oppressors and the guilty ones in their own culture. The Europeans are finally showing signs that they are tired of having their ideals used against them in the very process of having them taken away.  

The time of tolerance for the intolerant may now be fading. 

Dyab Abou Jahjah, a Lebanese-born activist in Belgium, said that for years Europeans had emphasized "citizenship and human rights," the notion that Muslim immigrants had the responsibility to obey the law but could otherwise live with their traditions. 

Ah yes, a social engineering philosophy gone bad – its name was multiculturalism.  The one unsaid thing about this philosophy is that it depends greatly on real dirty little secret – that those being hosted would make nice, be nice, and then slowly integrating into the larger host culture anyways.  But with everyone making it too easy not to integrate, and the immigrants "not getting" the dirty little secret, this philosophy has no more chance of success than communism or socialism (yet, people keep trying, no matter the empirical evidence to the contrary).

"Then someone comes and says it’s different than that," said Jahjah, who opposes assimilation. "You have to dump your culture and religion. It’s a different deal now."

 

It never was a different deal….you fell for the lie of multiculturalism.  And in setting up the trap, the West has put itself at risk too.

 

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