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By Lawrence Auster
March 17, 2005

For decades the Dutch people, like other Westerners, shut their eyes to
the mounting challenge posed by the unassimilated Muslim immigrants in
their country. Reality has now painfully intruded, and the Dutch find
themselves in the midst of a national trauma brought on by the jihadist
slaughter of filmmaker Theo van Gogh and the subsequent jihadist
beheading threats against two Dutch politicians.

An e-mail I received recently offers a cogent description of the Dutch
people's troubled mood, as well as of the larger Western suicide attempt
that the Dutch situation exemplifies:

A friend is in Amsterdam now for a 16 day vacation. He speaks Dutch and
knows many Dutch living in the U.S. He says they are waking up, but they
feel EXTREMELY torn inside because everything they have been taught tells
them that they are wrong to feel bad that their country is being overrun
by people who essentially don't want to be Dutch and let it show.

The Dutch feel "torn" --but by what? Not by the threatening presence of
Muslims who openly despise their country, but by their own critical
attitude toward those Muslims, an attitude that violates the Dutch ethos
of tolerance and inclusion. And that is why, as reported recently in the
New York Times, many Dutch have been emigrating from the Netherlands.
They're not so much fleeing the Muslims as fleeing the guilt and inner
conflict they experience as a result of their negative reactions toward
the Muslims. To remain good liberals in their own minds, the
Netherlanders must get rid of such negative feelings --by abandoning the
Netherlands to the enemies who make them feel that way.

However, it does not behoove us to gaze on this spectacle with a superior
attitude, for we are no better than the Dutch, and we are facing the same
ultimate fate as they. Freedom House recently published a report about
the Saudi-funded propagation of virulent anti-American, anti-Christian,
and anti-Jewish exterminationist ideology in thousands of Saudi-funded
Wahhabi mosques throughout the U.S. The Bush administration has done
nothing about this, but continues to admit Saudi immigrants and travelers
into the U.S. and to maintain good relations with the Saudi Kingdom. At
the same time, there has been no elite or popular protest, either over
the Wahhabist fifth column or our government's non-response to it. No
protest --in this country where we self-importantly tell ourselves that
we are at "war" with Islamo-fascism. That's some "war," isn't it? It's a
war that consists of our promoting elections in far-away countries of
which we know nothing, while we permit our mortal enemies to operate at
will inside our country.

For the present, it remains inconceivable that we would oppose, let alone
kick out a significant number of the Muslims whom we have so foolishly
permitted en masse into America. The most we propose doing is to redouble
our efforts to assimilate them --or, since any serious assimilation
efforts have been dead letter for decades, to talk, endlessly and
evasively, about the need to redouble our efforts to assimilate them. But
to recognize the Muslims for the adversaries they are, to state
forthrightly that people who believe in jihad against America do not
belong in America, and to take appropriate action on the basis of that
statement, would be to abandon the non-discriminatory ethos that is the
sacred core of modern America and the modern West. According to this
view, which President Bush has raised to the level of a global crusade,
there is no "we" and there is no "they." There is only humanity,
consisting of individuals, and all individuals are the same because they
all dream of freedom. A belief in the universal sameness of all persons
serves as the basis for Bush's global democratist rhetoric. But by
ignoring cultural particularities and the mutual incompatibility between
different cultures, this belief system precludes any serious defense of
our own civilization.

As an example of this mentality, consider the British conservative
journalist David Pryce-Jones's response to Europe's Islam crisis.
Replying to correspondents in the March Commentary (at p. 12 in the
linked pdf file), he starts out by stating his assimilationist
assumptions. "Settling in their millions in the various countries of
Europe, Muslims immigrants have an identity crisis: whether to accept or
reject assimilation." The first problem here is that Pryce-Jones is
assuming that Europe is already presenting assimilation as a viable
option to the Muslims, which in fact is not the case at all. Far from
trying to integrate Muslims, the Europeans have for decades been
encouraging them to maintain and build up their religion and culture.
Indeed, several European governments even subsidize the construction of
mosques. At the same time, the Europeans keep retreating before the
encroaching Muslim presence, and officially sign on to every plank in the
Islamist agenda, from openness to Muslim immigration to uncritical
embrace of the anti-Israel cause. As Bat Ye'or argues in Eurabia, Europe
has already put itself out of existence as a cultural entity. Its policy,
embodied in such organizations as the Euro-Mediterranean Foundation of
the Dialog of Cultures, is to seek the total economic, political, and
cultural merger of Europe and the Islamic countries. So, since Europe has
no assimilation program for the European Muslims, why should Pryce-Jones
expect these radically alienated Muslims to assimilate?

However, even if the Europeans had not surrendered their culture and were
trying to assimilate the Muslims, Pryce-Jones would still be wrong to
suggest that all these Muslims could easily assimilate, if only they
chose to do so. The very idea shows a failure to grasp the profound
differences between Muslims and Westerners, and the inherent dynamic
within Islam that is driving European Muslims to assert their
distinctiveness more and more, rather than to give it up.

Pryce-Jones speaks about the radical Sheikh Omar Bakr Muhammad, who tells
Britain's Muslims that they are at "war" with the West and that an
Islamic state must be created in Britain. At a big conference hosted by
the Sheikh, pictures of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center
were shown and "the rapt watchers thrust their fists in the air and
chanted 'Allahu Akbar!' (God is great!). They then all cheered the name
of bin Laden."

With all due respect to Pryce-Jones, these people hardly seem to be in
the throes of an "identity crisis." They seem to be joyously expressing
their murderous enmity toward Britain and the West. Yet Pryce-Jones's
references to a Muslim "identity crisis" would lead the average reader to
believe that such Muslims are not enemies of Britain, but only
incompletely assimilated individuals who could be led back to the true
path, if Britain would only increase its effort to assimilate them.

Continuing his identity-crisis trope, Pryce-Jones says that Europeans
also have an identity crisis, "as they decide what to make of this large
and growing minority in their midst, particularly the Islamists who
aspire to colonize them." Notice his choice of words: the Europeans are
deciding "what to make of" the Muslims who are seeking to colonize Europe
--not what to do about these Muslims. The implication is that if people
are trying to colonize you, the most you can do is decide what you think
about them. The possibility of deciding to do something about them
doesn't even arise. This is a "conservatism" that consists of endless
kvetching about our approaching civilizational doom, rather than of
trying to forestall it.

Finally, Pryce-Jones refers to the idea, raised by some of his
correspondents, that either Europe will succumb to the Muslims, or there
will be a backlash of the kind that occurred in Holland following the van
Gogh murder (when, for example, some Dutch boys in revenge for the
killing burned down a Muslim school). He remarks: "Down either of these
roads lies every prospect of social disintegration and violence." In
Pryce-Jones's book, the burning of a few Muslim schools would be as bad
for the Netherlands as the wholesale submission of the Netherlands to
Islam.

Which leaves what options? Once again, only further efforts at
assimilation--something which most Muslims have no desire to do, and
which most Europeans have no will to impose on them. For an intelligent
Westerner such as Pryce-Jones to keep repeating --at this very late stage
in the game --the hackneyed call for "more assimilation" is a cowardly
evasion of reality, a formula for unending Western helplessness. Yet this
evasion appears in a neoconservative journal that, because of its loyalty
to Israel, is universally seen as hostile to Muslims. As I wrote at
FrontPage last May, even the most hard-boiled thinkers among us think
that our domestic safety rests on the assimilation of U.S. Muslims, and
security measures against terrorism. Three and a half years after 9/11,
the West still sleeps, managing the jihad threat instead of doing
something about it.

And the West will continue to sleep, so long as it refuses to renounce
the liberal belief that the highest values of our society are tolerance
and inclusion, the liberal belief that all differences can be settled by
reasoned discourse, the liberal belief that we must strive forever to
find common ground with people who are irreconcilably different from us.
So long as liberalism with its non-discriminatory embrace of the Other
remains the core of Western identity, the West will be unable to know
itself, to value itself, and to defend itself. And the Muslim conquest of
the West will continue.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 17, 2005 02:30 PM

--
"Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely
helps them to deceive themselves." Eric Hoffer
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