The problem of inviting immigrants when you don't know who you are...

BBC News - Hardtalk - Bishop Nazir-Ali: 'Multiculturalism was a mistake'. A friend sends us this link to a video clip of Bishop Nazir-Ali. Short and sweet. However, while appearing to talk tough on "Hardtalk" his may be a charitable interpretation of the mistake of British multiculturalism now that we know it has been a conscious policy of the Labour party to destroy traditional British culture, the culture that is alleged by Labour to be the evil basis of the "right's" electoral support.

Conservatism is a creative renewing of previous covenants and centres of attention

Saturday's National Post profiled Jason Kenney: This man wants to reinvent Canadian multiculturalism:

The higher profile matters - the Galloway issue, the scuffle with Arab groups, the language abilities of immigrants - form the early marks of a pattern of what is to come. Rejecting the [Canadian Arab Federation]'s support for Islamic terrorists and arguably anti-Semitic messages, Mr. Galloway for financially supporting Hamas, calling for newcomers to better integrate: These are of a piece with efforts to fortify what the Conservatives would call The Canadian Identity. It is, Mr. Kenney makes clear, a vision for a country that stands up for its pluralism, but also for its core liberal traditions of tolerance, democracy and secularism. "We can't afford to be complacent about the challenge of integration," he says. "We want to avoid the kind of ethnic enclaves or parallel communities that exist in some European countries. So far, we've been pretty successful at that, but I think it's going to require greater effort in the future to make sure that we have an approach to pluralism and immigration that leads to social cohesion rather than fracturing."
[...]
Liberal MP Jim Karygiannis this week called Mr. Kenney "intolerant" for raising the issue of enhanced language requirements. The Arab Federation has painted him a Zionist lackey.

But there are those, many of them within Canada's ethnic pockets, who support such a muscular approach.

"What is different with him is, with previous [Conservative] immigration ministers, both have been pussycats; this guy is a tiger," says Tarek Fatah, an author, prominent Liberal supporter and founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress. "He's standing up for Canadian values. I would like every politician to stand up for this country the way Jason Kenney has."

Before being elevated to Cabinet last fall, Mr. Kenney spent two years shuttling between community halls, temples and church basements, building support networks in Sikh, Hindu, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Jewish and Arab communities, as Secretary of State for Multiculturalism and Canadian Identity. His mission: to break a near lock his Liberal opponents have had on ethnic support since Trudeaumania.

Come last October's election, the payoff arrived: The Tories upset numerous Liberal strongholds surrounding Vancouver and Toronto by converting Asian, East Asian and Middle Eastern voters from red to blue. Mr. Kenney's predecessors, including Diane Finley and Monte Solberg, were ministers of immigration. When Mr. Kenney got the job in October, the Prime Minister added the "and multiculturalism."
[...]
Multicultural maven is a curious role for a pale, Reform party pioneer raised in Saskatchewan, educated by Jesuits, deeply socially conservative, who came to politics primarily with an agenda for fiscal restraint (Before becoming a Reform MP in 1997, he headed the Canadian Taxpayers Federation). But political opponents looking to brand him as too redneck for the sensitive immigration file find it hard to land a punch. In his diverse Calgary Southeast riding, families speak fondly of Mr. Kenney's efforts, long before he became the minister in charge, in helping them sort out immigration issues; his key staffers, including a Tibetan, a Muslim and an Armenian, resemble the dessert lineup at the UN cafeteria. He spearheaded the government's efforts to recognize the Ukrainian Holdomor, its apology to the East Indian community for the Komagata Maru incident, he has defended Chinese Uyghur Muslims and paid his respects at the Mumbai Jewish centre attacked by terrorists. On his office wall hang portraits of abolitionist heroes William Wilberforce and Abraham Lincoln.
[...]
"The irony is that as a white, Catholic kid, he's very cosmopolitan. Maybe the most cosmopolitan minister we've had," says Mr. Solberg, now an advisor for government relations firm Fleishman-Hillard in Calgary.

That line gave me a chuckle, a reminder that maybe the real provincialism in Canada is that old Protestant sensibility that once openly painted the Papists as unworldly backwoods Irish and French Canadians, even if in the control of some ultramontanist clergy and the big bishop in Rome. Or maybe the implied joke is that curry- and kimchi-chomping Kenney is not even Jewish! In any case, my sources tell me that Canadian Catholicism today, at least in many urban churches, is very cosmopolitan, at least full of immigrants from the global church, giving face to Catholicism's aspiration to a universal anthropology.

But, jokes and innuendo aside, the point is we all still have trouble articulating the basis for the unity that makes whatever pluralism we have in Canada sustainable. And this is what makes Kenney's initiative interesting as it is becomes a direct challenge to the left-Islamist alliance that would represent the likes of Hamas-friendly George Galloway or the Canadian Arab Federation, not as the backwoods bubbas I think they are, but as avatars of some ostensibly global popular movement opposed to some supposed American/Jewish hegemony in the global marketplace. Kenney is challenging Canadians to ask, who do you want to represent your "multiculturalism".

One of the interesting things about representation, no less representations that attempt to appeal to wide swathes of people, is that they depend not simply on abstractions that anyone can learn, but on the potentially iconic integrity of the individual (who is rooted in a particular time and place) producing, sharing, or transforming them. And since the basis of any successful representation is some implied unity that allows the representation to be shared (and transformed), what are representations of Canadian values really? Are they abstract concepts or individually incarnated and exemplified ways of being? Or how are they both? As we become better at answering such anthropological questions we will better realize the conditions of a true "multiculturalism", i.e. one that provides us new ways of understanding what unifies us in a shared national covenant.

To this end, another politician worth watching may be someone I only learned about today, a member of the Ontario Provincial Parliament, Randy Hillier, now running for leadership of the Ontario Conservatives. Here are some excerpts from his leadership candidacy announcement (HT: Catfur):

Every society known to mankind is comprised of individuals.

It’s evident that if individuals are responsible, self-reliant and independent, their society will also be responsible and self-reliant.

But we have strayed from this concept.

We have passed countless laws that diminish the individual’s responsibility, removes their good judgment and places it into the hands of a regulatory body.

We have become a “nanny-state” of dependence.

We are no longer responsible for our actions when we allow ourselves to blame others for our actions.

We now have over half a million provincial regulations.

Many of them diminish individual responsibility.

Many others blur the line between private and public property, and allow government to intrude where it has no business.
[...]
We were a province that was home to the most equal and blind system of justice on Earth, namely, “Common Law”.

It is now just another costly legal system where we let special interest groups hijack our courts and paralyze our legal system.

It has become a legal system that preys on the financial weakness and ignorance or common people.

It’s now a never-ending system of little justice where a guilty plea is less costly than a strong defence of innocence.

We have built a regime of countless review boards and commissions through which faceless bureaucrats dressed in quasi-legal robes hand down “kangaroo” verdicts that suffocate our natural rights as individuals, and extend false privileges to collective bodies.
[...]
Where the Liberals are blind to the future and ignorant of our past, we must show people a defining vision – one seen through the clear lens of hindsight and history.

We must show them that we are not here to manage their affairs, but that they are here to manage the affairs of government.

That the people are the true guardians of democracy and those of us lucky enough to have been elected to Parliament are their subjects.
[...]
My campaign will be driven by ideas and ideals, while being anchored by the three central principles of Freedom, Justice, and Democracy.

Freedom strengthens commerce, creativity, industry, education, and the most important element of our society – the family.

When the rights of government overtake the rights of the farmer, the worker, the doctor, or the parent, all of society suffers.

As Premier I will immediately introduce the Freedom of Association & Conscience Act, an act to protect the rights of the individual to not be compelled or coerced into actions or associations that that they find objectionable.

We’ve created private monopolized and special interest governments such as the Ontario Medical Association and Law Society of Upper Canada.

We compel people to join business and industry associations that collect dues but do not represent them, and we provide no protection for freedom of conscience.

Justice is only just when it is truly blind.

When the law is applied unequally – and absent of due process – the law can become an instrument of harm rather than justice.

One of the worst examples of this has been the Ontario Human Rights Commission and other quasi-tribunals.

As Premier, I’ll make sure those violating human rights appear before real judges in real courts, where civil rights and due process are not distorted by the balance of probabilities.

The Human Rights Commission and other quasi-tribunals will be rendered redundant under my government.

Such ideas appeal to universal truths that anyone can take up and incarnate. They are the real basis of a pluralistic society, not the claims from the left that "multiculturalism" has to understand itself in opposition to some supposedly invidious hegemony or established centre/covenant (some conspiracy of power) that necessarily excludes the rest of us. It's true that every centre or attention, every institution, every national covenant relies on at least some degree of violent closure: even a maximally free society has to begin by defining what it is not, by giving formal closure to its representations, so that the individual can be a particular someone (e.g. distinctively a Canadian) in relationship to universal values.

The left often implies that all one needs is the abstract universal value, and that we don't need to be someones defined, in our shared freedom, by some "arbitrary" act of closure, or judgment of right and wrong (e.g. that there is no room for friends of Hamas in Canada). But the universal can only really be incarnated from a particular historical position that is potentially exchangeable with other covenanters, and that necessarily excludes some other part of humanity ("brotherhood", or "sisterhood", becomes a meaningless Utopian concept when we try to articulate a universal sibship): a shared contract must set terms, and the personal integrity needed for successful renewal or representation of any contract/covenant means that one can't be all things to all people; one can't be a cipher. And similarly, neither can be the political and secular institutions of a free society: they too must incarnate a distinctive history in their search for universal truths.

This doesn't mean we should choose unnecessarily violent forms of exclusion; indeed, the course of history is one where we tend to move from more to less violent forms of closure, as we Westerners today seek forms of closure in which sundry others can readily share. And if the historically- and culturally-rooted Catholic eucharist, the sharing in the Christian idea of a divine/personal sacrifice to end all human sacrifice, is a meaningful way of learning something of this paradox of a particular/universal personhood, so be it. However, it seems to be teaching Jason Kenney a way of doing politics that is not the same as calling all Canadians to recognize the Christ Jesus.

The unity on which Kenney's secular "Canadian values" are based would seemingly be found at both some more primitive or common level of human cultural history and in the historically modern (and readily exchangeable) incarnations of Canadian secularism. A proper multiculturalism will be an accepting recognition of all that helps individual people bridge the gap between the primitive and modern (e.g., many forms of Christianity), while closing the door on that which does not.

But this means that national renewal will have to entail a new discipline that can truly mediate leftist fears of unfair or violently arbitrary exclusion, while recognizing the conservative truth that there are some things that have to be excluded in order to maintain freedom and order. It seems to me, as an observer of Canadian politics, that despite some pragmatic successes of Canadian society, there remains room for improvement in the forms of "politically correct" closure we impose on ourselves. There are still some unnecessary or ill-conceived intellectual limits/government regulations/kangaroo courts in the way of a freer society, amidst fears that people with power or influence generalize about certain groups or identities too much, or too little, as we measure reality and discuss the paradoxical basis of the closure that allows us to be open and free. Successful politicians and thinkers will be those who learn to stow unruly passions and resentments in measuring and illuminating present realities while showing us a yet better way to mediate the paradox of closure/openness, unity/diversity, Canadian values/multiculturalism, so as to increase our shared freedom and marginalize those who hate it.

Aqsa Parvez memorial to be built in both Canada and Israel

Pamela Geller reports that since the Aqsa Parvez memorial in the Town of Pelham, Ontario, is being erected largely through donated work and materials, the fund Pamela has raised for an Aqsa memorial will be used to plant a grove of trees at the American Independence Park in Jerusalem.

In the second post linked above, Pamela includes a comment from Pelham Fire Chief, Scott McLeod who took the initiative in getting his town to build an Aqsa Parvez memorial, in face of the predictable PC onslaught about "Islamophobia". I think it's worth reproducing McLeod's comment as it shows us what it means for someone to take the initiative and personal risk in renewing our shared public culture, renewing our necessary sense of courage and honour, through a process of measuring, judging, recognizing, and giving names to, our shared reality in ways that illuminate the imperatives we might all need to recognize:

NOT HONOR KILLINGS

I have been giving a lot of thought to the events leading up to and the final resolution of the Aqsa Parvez memorial. I truly believe we need to rethink our comments regarding this and many other similar events.

In my opinion the term honor killing is not appropriate for these tragedies. The reality is they are narcissistic/shame killings and should be referred to as such.

More importantly the conduct of many organizations and individuals after the event certainly does not meet the term honor in any respect. The members of the family, academic organizations, and many others should also hang their head in shame over their conduct.

I have been fortunate that for most of my adult life I have worked with people who understand what honor really is. During my time in the military and my career as a firefighter I have seen on a daily basis, citizens and people in uniform performing honorably.

Honor, is the Soldier who gives up his life for a higher purpose, in defense of citizens of Afghanistan or Iraq. They are there, knowing that when they leave, some small bit of freedom which we hold dear is being left behind.

Honor is the Police Officer who goes to work every day knowing that he may not return to his family, when daily dealing with some of the worst elements of our society. While giving respect and in fact life to the most downtrodden.

Honor is the Paramedic who lay in a pool of gasoline trying to keep a survivor of a car accident alive, long enough to get to a hospital.

Honor is the firefighter who crawls through hell to bring a victim of a fire out of a building.

Honor is the residents of Pelham who have little tolerance for people who are afraid to act as they should, with respect for children like Aqsa.

I have been lucky enough to work with people like this and the truth is, we are surrounded by these heroes every day. If you look around yourself you will see honor and honorable acts.

What happened to Aqsa, was not and never should be considered in any way related to honor. It is shame and narcissism which caused this incident, the narcissism of her father who would not allow a child to become an ordinary teen of her country.

My friend Neo has a posting on his blog in which he describes the event as “Dying to become Canadian”, I can’t really state it any better than that.

The real heroes and the persons of honor in this incident are the Aqsa, who died for her beliefs, Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer who created the fund in her memory.

In addition my friend Norman, a fellow firefighter, who worked so hard to make this happen and was confronted with PC madness. I have to thank my personal heroes, Councilor Sharon Cook and John Durley who ensured that the memorial would be created.

I am not articulate enough to tell the story of the honor and shame of this horrible event, but I know what honor looks like, I truly believe it’s easy to see who carries the shame, and who acts with honor

Scott McLeod
Fire Chief, Town of Pelham

Of course, whether we call them shame or honour killings, we can recognize the paradoxical state of being in which a man does something horribly shameful in what he thinks is an act of protecting his and his family's honour, as his mind oscillates back and forth between attention to some pre-figured understanding of honour - perhaps some ritualized orthopraxy, perhaps less formal habits of mind - and a present and conflicting reality towards which he feels shame.

Can ritual- or habit-bound men learn how shameful will be their acting out violently on behalf of pre-figured notions of honour from the tribal past that Canadians who recognize individual freedom cannot respect? Maybe it depends on the rest of us. While recognizing the fundamental paradoxes of being human, while recognizing that there is always more than one imperative in play as our minds race between pre-figured notions and present realities, we need all act in the here and now by modeling and, at least for a time, choosing a truth (e.g. in respect to Aqsa Parvez's story), and acting on the imperatives this truth will ask us to honour, that we may govern ourselves in respect for the inescapable and unrenounceable freedom that comes with being Canadian. When we put memory of Aqsa Parvez at the front of our minds, we should reflect not only on who or what is implicated in the guilt of the murder, but also rework our own understanding of what it means to choose honourable actions.



And that is why the memorials are such a powerful idea, and why it is a shame that the guilt-ridden multicultural relativism of Toronto's (not Pelham's) public life has not allowed itself to embrace more roundly the idea of building an Aqsa Parvez memorial. Arguing whether Islam, properly understood, does or does not give license to kill your rebellious, possibly apostate, daughter, or whether the problem is that Islam simply inculcates some less specific honour/shame mentality that does not adequately prepare its members for living in the complex modern world of free persons, is not going to get us to the point where we can renew or build up our shared reality as we move beyond guilt: the question is how well are we prepared for acting honourably in the here and now as we argue over the need to transcend a certain multiculturalism's attempt to re-ritualize some fixed honour/shame code for governing interactions, and muting criticisms, among duly-sanctioned opinions and identity groups.

In answering that question, we cannot talk seriously of honour and shame unless we make reference not simply to abstract philosophical or religious formulae but to specific events and persons of our times, the confounding events and free people that all ideologies fear. In this contest, let's salute those individuals and nations who ask, how do we recognize the imperative to honour and remember the freedom of every Aqsa Parvez? Aqsa could not avoid a reality that forced on her a choice to remain, or not, open to untold future possibilities. Neither can we.

Aqsa chose an open life and received death. Let us contest honour and shame accordingly, resurrecting her truth and honour when and where we can: we can resurrect something of our fallen victims because we all share in and carry with us a piece of our nation's real victims. That's what a truly liberal nation that strives to interpret its own particular history in relation to universal truths about free human will, and the sacrificial violence that grows out of that contested freedom, comes to understand and redeem. And if someone tells you, non-Muslim, apostate, etc., that you don't have a right to share in a victim like Aqsa Parvez, or if you don't feel any connection to some ideologue's counter-claims about who are the "real" victims in the contests over some "phobic" memory, you know someone somewhere is not being real. Honour, shame and narcissism are about knowing, or not, who is being real.

Liberal Party MP takes stand against responsible government, apparently to curry favour with antisemites

24 Hours Vancouver

OTTAWA — Immigration Minister Jason Kenney is facing a possible investigation by Parliament’s ethics commissioner in the wake of his threat to axe funding to a group whose president called him a “professional whore.”

Liberal MP Jim Karygiannis has filed a complaint against Kenney with Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson, saying he believes the minister violated the parliamentary ethics code.

“I believe for the Minister to use his position and exert undue influence and or in this case instruct his officials to hold funding from such an NGO; this sets a bad precedent which clearly should not be allowed to stand,” according to a copy of the complaint obtained by Sun Media.

“With this move the Minister sends out a signal to community-based NGOs to toe the line or risk losing their funding.”

Karygiannis, whose Toronto riding is served by the federation’s settlement program, said funding for groups should be decided by civil servants based on the group’s performance — not on the basis of partisan politics.

Alykhan Velshi, spokesman for Kenney, described the complaint as “ridiculous” and said it was “disturbing” to see a Liberal MP standing up for a group that has made anti-semitic comments.

The controversy centres on a dispute between Kenney and the Canadian Arab Federation. Earlier this year, federation president Khaled Mouammar called Kenney a “professional whore” for supporting Israel.

Kenney shot back, saying groups like the federation whose leaders say intolerant or hateful things shouldn’t get taxpayer money. Kenney said he has asked his department to weigh public comments made by groups when assessing their funding applications.

Forget about the Canadian Arab Federation for a moment. Here we have a Liberal Party MP talking as if it is in any circumstance illegitimate for our duly constituted government to make political decisions in respect to how state money is spent, if this somehow contravenes some ethic of multicultural relativism in which the various self-appointed ethnic organizations presume a right to their share of government money, whatever their politics and whatever hatreds they promote.

The fundamental principle of Canada's constitutional democracy is that of responsible government: we give significant power to make government decisions to the Prime Minister and his other cabinet ministers, and in turn expect them to carry the full blame for bad decisions made by them or their departments. The great advantage of knowing exactly who is responsible for political decisions is that it allows us to minimize scandal as we isolate responsibility and pass judgment accordingly on our governments, both in Parliament and at the polls. Ideally, in our system where power is centralized in a few hands, decisions can be made that really matter, that make things happen; and then we all develop a better understanding of our stakes in that active reality as we choose whether to support or not the government. It is all too easy in our age when everyone and his dog wants to play the victim of the powers that be, to forget how necessary it is for our shared political freedom to have people who can take on - transparently and with full accountability - the basic need for someone to make decisions that can initiate political events and debates. Without such responsible executive authority initiating events, we cannot all share in an exchange of ideas about our shared reality, that we may take a regular measure of who and what we are, and trade in the political signs that events create as we oppose and ally and shape our shared future.

Yet for some people, the notion of a shared future leads them to imagine only victims of the normal course of decision making in a free society. For them, a shared future can only be a future where nothing happens to anyone that would lead anyone to complain that they are not sharing equally in our shared future: in other words, a future where nothing can happen, where no real political freedom can exist, lest it create winners and losers.

When Jim Karygiannis suggests that some anonymous, publicly-not-accountable bureaucrats be given the job of deciding what kind of politics from ethnic or religious lobbies is acceptable - i.e. whether their politics is getting in the way of the job they are being given money to do - he is suggesting that we don't let things happen in a way that will shake any boats. He is implicitly denying that we all have a stake in the political games a publicly-funded group like the Canadian Arab Federation play. He implicitly denies that we need duly-elected and responsible ministers to make a market in which we can trade our stakes in our system of government. Karygiannis implicitly suggests that the government take the lead in suggesting we all shut up about some group's hate mongering, sweeping it under the rug. I think he should be taking a clear stand on whether he accepts that the CAF is engaging in antisemitic hate mongering, and if so whether he condones it as legitimate criticism (of Israel, or whatever). He should call on all the scared ethnoreligious lobbyists who have maybe been phoning his office, scared that they might be next to be called out publicly for their politics, that instead of thinking they can get government money as if by multicultural right, that they too must make public their stake in the system: they too should be commenting on what the CAF is doing, and they too should realize that in our system of political freedom we we elect a government precisely to make political decisions about what kind of groups we do and do not want to support with public money.

Karygiannis' instincts are those of a growing class of people who seem to want to replace all forms of constitutional or responsible government with some over-arching law of multicultural political correctness mediated by lawyers, bureaucrats, media, acdemics, and NGOs, according to a ruling ethic of moral and cultural relativism. Apparently, it is those who dream of some kind of end to nation states freely exercising their sovereignty, those who dream that global conflicts can somehow be transcended if only this sovereignty is tightly bound and the right kind of international liberal elites are put in charge, while politicians who would make clear distinctions between good and evil are put out to pasture as an anachronism of some dark age of political simpletons, who have been achieving success in shaping opinion in the Liberal Party of Canada.

But what is lost to this victim-worshiping outlook is the fact that the dream of overcoming conflict is Utopian, and that scapegoating duly-constituted centres of authority is highly dangerous to our shared political freedom. The best way to deal with conflict is not by trying to reduce all conversation to some code of Politically Correct relativism, where anything and hence nothing goes, but rather by allowing, in different ways, both free citizens and duly constituted government leaders to take a lead in initiating public political events that then allow the rest of us to respond, and trade positions and political and economic capital, in continually rediscovering what kind of people we today are and where we want to be heading. But that kind of thing is apparently too scary to a PC brigade leader like Karygiannis. No doubt he is hearing from many other political "players" who who don't want to judge but just want to play along in hopes that somehow the money machine of government will forever continue to work if everyone just shuts up and makes sure everyone is paid off. This is the hubris that, sooner or later, brings an end to each and every multicultural empire history has known. If you deny the need for responsible and accountable decision making at the various centres of a political system, eventually there are no events to attract our shared interest and exchange, and the centre can no longer hold people together. If we are not free to elect and remove governments that take clear stands on who is and is not in favour, it is then that the cheap and easy resentments - that group x is getting away with something and there is nothing anyone can say or do that will make a difference - develop an intensity that can really rip a system apart.

But, a cynic might ask, what else can we expect from a Liberal Party that has recently denied its members a vote on who should be their leader?

Excellent essay on the misconceptions of "tolerance" and "open-mindedness" in today's mulitcultural empire

Do read the whole thing (HT: Dag), but here's an excerpt, from the desk of A. Millar:

From prosecuting people for flying the England flag to kindergarten guidelines suggesting that if a child as young as three says “yuk” at spicy food that this is a sign of racism. From the erosion of free speech to the unwillingness of police to prosecute or even investigate crimes such as burglary. From the attempt to deport Gurkha war heroes that had fought for Britain to the protection of terrorists from deportation in case their human rights might be violated abroad. From the harassment of moderate Muslim and Conservative MP Baroness Warsi for suggesting that parliament discuss the crisis in immigration to then London Mayor Ken Livingstone’s open support of terrorism-supporter Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Or from lower sentences for honor-killing (and thus less protection for Muslim women) to cultural apartheid and the creation of Muslim ghettos. Close-minded “tolerance” has encouraged – even demanded – all of this.

And close-minded tolerance has meant that liberals have protested that sharia is a “right” of Muslims, because, they argue, Jews have their own courts. It is not a question of allowing one group to have their law because another has its law, but rather it is a question of whether these laws are just. Are women given an equal or lower status, for example? From what I know about Jewish law it in no way conflicts with democracy. As we know that women, homosexuals, and non-Muslims are regarded as inferiors in sharia, to defend its use as a right is absurd. How, for example, can it be a right of Muslim women to have less rights? Or for a Muslim man to allow his wife or daughters to have less rights?

Of course, if by “tolerance” we had meant the kind of laissez-faire attitude that underpins mature democracies (such as allowing, and even defending the right of, all sides to speak, regardless of whether we agree with the expressed views or vehemently oppose them) then the worst we could say would be that the term was being used wholly inaccurately. “Tolerance” has undoubtedly been peddled in part in a misguided attempt to make it more like the US, but Britain does not understand the country with which they claim to have a “special relationship.” Britain, EU member states, and their populations have a love-hate relationship with the US. On the one hand they admire it for its “diversity,” modernity, cities, etc. On the other hand they believe that US culture, such as freedom of speech, is the culture of a people with no clear view of right and wrong.

I should like to point out that, on the contrary, freedom of speech only emerges in cultures with a very clear view of right and wrong indeed – and that includes the US. Once, Britain was also known for being one of these countries. Journalist Luigi Albertini, who risked his life to write against Italy’s fascist regime, was inspired by his time in London and at The Times newspaper during the first quarter of the twentieth century. This, according to his brother, “confirmed in him the faith in ideas and in the possibility, in a free country, of promoting the elevation of minds through discussion and objective, unprejudiced criticism.” (Frank Rosengarten, The Italian Anti-fascist Press (1919-1945), p 34.) Today no-one would describe Britain in such terms.
[...]
When I first heard someone say that multiculturalism is natural and that Britain had always been multicultural I was entirely skeptical. If so, I wondered, why have we only recently heard of multiculturalism? On reflection, the speaker appears to have meant that it is natural for societies to be composed of different types of people doing and thinking different things, and in this sense he was undoubtedly correct. It would seem, that whether the speaker knows it or not, he or she is saying that multiculturalism is in accord with natural law. But, if so, they are wrong. Marriage may be natural – or at least in accord with natural law – but an ideology of ‘marriage-ism,’ or laws forcing everyone to marry, would quickly undermine marriage, just as laws that appear to enforce the government’s vision of multicultural Britain have fragmented society, created ghettos, have emboldened extremists at the sake of moderates, and given rise to seething resentment.

The natural can be allowed, but cannot be legislated into existence. Open-mindedness is manifest when people feel that they are in the same boat. When people feel this, racial and religious distinctions either disappear or are actually regarded as interesting. Cultures coexist without animosity in cities such as New York (which is now seen as a model for Britain to copy), not because multiculturalism is enforced by law, but because it is not enforced by law. Because the government seems to stay out of people’s private business, and because the police concern themselves with crime, not thought crime.

Indeed, while the US has had its share of racial troubles – and while there is still a problem with illegal immigration in particular – where it has overcome them, it has done so because of a shared belief in its Constitution. It is the belief in “liberty and justice for all” that supports an American nationalism that crosses racial and religious boundaries.

In other words, America works to the extent it remains a covenantal nation where the constitution is the most sacred of all American things (which might help explain to non-Americans the interest in the little scandal of the Chief Justice and President Obama flubbing the oath of office yesterday.)

Barack Obama: Who let the dogs out?

Cobb: The Beginning of the End of Multiculturalism is an interesting prediction of the collapse of the Democratic party, with the now widespread revelation that the Democrats' multiculturalism has just been a form of subtle racism:

We don't often think of Barack Obama as a creation of the Democrat Machine, and it's really stunning to know that we haven't. But he is indeed the petard upon which Democrats have tried to hoist Republicans since his arrival on the scene. But where did he come from, really? The Democrats have given Obama an inch and he has taken a mile. With his recent four state sweep, the Clintons are really stumbling to keep up. Plus, Obama is pulling in more money. Who let the dogs out? This is the deep trouble in the Left that is forcing them to grapple with two attributes they have invested so much meaning and value in, race and gender. It's going to make their heads explode

RattlerGator has brought to my attention something about the Boomers' inability to get over their own roots, where the most significant moral chit was 'marching with Dr King'. I mean really, how scary is that? It is probably one of the last best significant things your garden variety white person could do of moral significance by virtue of the color of their skin. We, on the other hand, merely had to succeed against the odds - which is a lifetime endeavor. A march some Sunday weekend? Ha! It's like me saying 'I shook Barney Frank's hand!'. That may have been hugely significant in breaking the cultural barriers of the 50s, but then again, the 50s weren't all that retarded and lots and lots of Boomers were doing the same thing. The rewards of doing the adolescent rebellious yet moral thing against a regressive background of racist parenting should only count so much, and yet the Clintons of the world have been banking on it for decades.

This is the origin of multiculturalism. It is rooted in the basic countercultural idea that Boomer parents (and America by extension) were so incredibly wrong about race and war that they couldn't be morally right about anything. And the exploration (some Sunday march) that a generation of white youth had during the Summer of Love to find that blacks and hispanics and all the other 'others' were actually human destroyed their faith in their parents' American culture. The very humanity of 'others' came as a shock to these poor naifs and they haven't been right since. The problem is that such Boomers have been on stage too long, and their basic reversion to their signature memes, without any appreciation for what the Conservative revolution has long stood for, has left them derailed from the real track of liberty.

The Baby Boom is a market phenomenon. I'm one of that minority of Americans who never thought much of Dustin Hoffman or the Rolling Stones. Quite frankly I've never seen The Graduate and I only know three or four songs by the Stones. When Bill Clinton came rolling around in 1992, I didn't trust him, but I was glad to see the torch of the Presidency finally get to someone within 20 years of my age. Bill Clinton spoke my language and recognized the same parts of America I did, like the Arsenio Hall Show. But this was just a market phenomenon. He never got down to Constitutional purity. He never got down to core principles of America and he did nothing to bring me, or anyone, to a truer conscious patriotism as a citizenship. He never demanded sacrifice, instead he just gave us the flavor we desired. He was all about movement, and in 1992 that's what I wanted to see and hear - movement to a new generation, a Pepsi Generation.

Now it's easy for me to see all that movement was just agitation. If it took triangulation strategies, if it took bombing Serbia, then that was the cost. The point was that he could market us a Cabinet 'that looks like America'. What anybody did in those seats was not our concern, we just knew to let multicultural ethics force us not to look past race and gender. As Clinton took a whack at military policy, we knew he was going for the trifecta of sexual preference as well. He consciously politicized and brought front and center something that wasn't broke and should have been left alone.

We tend to forget the fundamental problem with godless communism which is that it sees human beings as getting their meaning from systems. To to the commie, there is no human soul which endows people with their fundamental value, instead, people get all of their meaning from the social contract. Outside of the system, people don't exist. And therefore the shape of the system defines the shape of the human without which we are supposedly all barbarians. It's easy to see the Civil Rights Movement from that perspective. Before it, blacks were not fully human because the system didn't recognize them. And of course it's also easy to see white humanity as augmented and enhanced due to their conformance to a new system recognizing black humanity. The communist, the socialist, the Marxist all see the human experience as not only being enhanced and affirmed by the System but established by it, and that said system is its only defense. In such a scheme, individuals are just like wild free electrons, not the captured flow of electricity - the only use for electrons. Recognition of a god is just a checkbox, a reason to conflict without the order imposed by the system. Race is another checkbox, gender is another checkbox, and so on. All generating 'natural' conflicts, the conflicts of Boomer parents. Multiculturalism is the ethics through which one should contextualize these essential conflicts according to the Left.

The Democrat's investment in the ethics of multiculturalism enables them to put faces in places and exploit the existential insecurities of so-called 'minorities'. It works, not so much because it satisfies the actual needs of various groups but because it satisfies the ideological desire to suggest that race, gender and preference 'gaps' have been bridged.
[...]
There are only two options, none of which is appetizing for that machine.

They will either disabuse their multicultural agenda by tacking towards the premise that Obama's race should not be considered and that where it counts, his skills and experience are most important. Then they go after him on skills and experience - which is an odd tack considering the other Democrats who were originally in the running many possessing much more skill and experience than the front runners. Or they find a way to marginalize his multicultural value by suggesting some equation like women + hispanics > black. Either way, African American and other voters who pay significant attention to this racial traffic are going to be pissed. The mendacity will be transparent, and that will stick to the Clintons and their Party like glue. A possible third way is to split the difference by offering a joint ticket. In that case, Obama becomes party to the old multicultural ethic and the game continues. But that's really just the first option all over again.

The necessary conflict between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is going to fracture the party along the multicultural lines that it drew on itself and on America. This is the beginning of the end of multiculturalism.

The Archbishop of Sharia controversy

Adrian Morgan provides a useful overview of the present storm over the Archbishop of Canterbury's comments, and provides some background to recent developments in Britain.

Of course, despite Archbishop Rowan Williams' general political foolishness, and his unwittingly anti-Christian moral and cultural relativism, the Archbishop is at least correct that Sharia law already exists in some form in Britain as, for example,the reports of Muslim police and government officials helping families track down wives and daughters who have tried to escape to women's shelters testifies. When the state is helping to sustain a culture that still performs honour killings, the outrage over Archbishop Rowan William's testing of the Sharia waters is understandable. According to police, there are up to 17,000 women who are victims of honour crimes each year in Britain.

What is becoming more and more clear is that there is growing a very serious divide between the elites or the bureaucratic-academic-journalistic classes and the bulk of (increasingly internet-informed) public opinion in countries like Britain on the questions of "multiculturalism" and Islam and their place in (British) society. This is a highly dangerous situation that could lead to great violence because it testifies to a collapse of a shared conception of what the national covenant of Britain is. If the elites, full of their vague and fundamentally incoherent half-ideas about cultural and moral relativism, "multiculturalism", "European Union", (anti-)nationalism and democracy, are unable to represent the nation and political citizenship in ways that can be used, exchanged, modified, by the large majority of people, under a national political constitution that provides a people the non-violent means to constitute and renew their political identities, it is only a matter of time before there will be serious disorder.

According to a recent report for one of the world's leading elite-liberal-post-nationalist organizations, Europeans think Islam is dangerous:

An “overwhelming majority” of Europeans believe immigration from Islamic countries is a threat to their traditional way of life, a survey revealed last night.

The poll, carried out across 21 countries, found “widespread anti-immigration sentiment”, but warned Europe’s Muslim population will treble in the next 17 years.

It reported “a severe deficit of trust is found between the Western and Muslim communities”, with most people wanting less interaction with the Muslim world.

Last night an MP warned it showed that political leaders in Britain who preach the benefits of unlimited immigration were dangerously out of touch with the public.

The study, whose authors include the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey, was commissioned for leaders at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

This divide between "leaders" and "citizens" is indeed frightening. The basis of all human order, the means by which we defer violent conflict, is through the exchange of signs or representations. These signs must emerge and be exchanged on shared scenes, a requirement that has led us in the West to develop shared national cultures, on the realization that multicultural empires have proven less capable of insuring the democratic exchange of signs. But this is a lesson we are always forgetting, due to the unhappy but inevitable history of conflict within and between nations, and due to the appeal of more simplistic Utopian ideas about imperial control and unified deferral to centralized signs of "multicultural", i.e. extra-cultural, rule. To speak of "extra-cultural" rule is to suggest that the "culture" ruling multicultural empires is parasitic on the subject cultures and does not provide a means for much cultural renewal in the long run. If "multicultural" "unity" comes at the cost of a loss to ordinary people's capacity to engage seriously in the renewal of the culture by which they are led, if unity means that politics becomes a game of horse-trading among demagoguing elites who stir up the mobs they presume to represent, focusing their resentment on the other demagogues and the other mobs-cultures of the multicultural empire, instead of engaging one's constituency in a serious exchange of signs, then it is not a unity that will last long the erosion that human resentment effects on any and every form of political order.

Multiculturalism, as a principle of rule, must be parasitic on all the cultures that constitute the political entity, for it cannot fully provide any one culture the freedom continually to renew the terms by which leaders and led will relate to each other. It robs any one culture of the degrees of freedom necessary to that essential human task. Whatever multicultural flourishing we (Canadians) should allow ourselves in the domestic, strictly (privately) religious, consumer, and economic spheres of life, when it comes to public politics, our ideal should be a universally shared national covenant. If multiculturalism means eating Chinese food, or becoming a Hindu, fine. But if it means that our political leaders speak primarily not to individual Canadians as free individuals, but to Chinese, Hindu, etc. "community leaders", then we are going down a road to a political culture that will rob ourselves of the necessary means for renewing our politics non-violently. Only a political order that has a constitution that allows the people the individual- (not group-)based freedoms to be variously involved in renewing their culture(s) can hope to survive long in history, especially at a time when our means of communications and resentment are so great.

Order is never primarily a question of brute force or power, but of shared opinion about the political and social lines that must be respected and defended. It is once that shared exchange of political representations is lost between putative leaders and led that the attraction of brute force to those seeking power and order becomes fantastically appealing.

But those who want to forestall the coming danger will not simply jump on the popular bandwagon of denouncing both Islam as a violent and supremacist cult, and the elites who insist it is a religion of peace. What Islam is or can be is not half as important as what Western nations understand themselves to be. Will Westerners, currently immersed in the religion of White Guilt, give up on renewing and championing their national cultures, both as the basis for a more transparent and effective inter-national mediation of conflict, and for maximizing our individual potential to live free and meaningful lives within the march of history?

The real leaders of society will take it upon themselves to sit down with their friends, neighbours, internet acquaintances - all fellow citizens of good faith - and start asking how we can start representing our nations in ways that can preserve and renew our traditions of individual freedom and self-ruling democracy. When I hear of covenant zones, or something like them, popping up in the UK, I will worry less that out-of-control street violence, or totalitarian government, is in the future of the land that gave Canada the basis of our constitutional freedoms.

Nigerian Archbishop Ben Kwashi responds to Rowan Williams:

Technorati Tags: Archbishop of Canterbury, Sharia, Rowan Williams, multiculturalism, United Kingdom, covenants, constitutionalism

Young People: time to unplug the ipods in public, lest you be plugged?

As often, last night's Covenant Zone conversation at the Vancouver Public Library turned on the fate of Europe and, somewhat analogously, of the rather nihilistic condition of many of the young people we see slouching about our city, full of dark self-loathing, or of endlessly coy ironies, and often of cannabis. A tour of the blogs today provides some material to bring out these themes.

First, we find Jim Kalb commenting on the New York Times' bemoaning that Young Adults are Giving Newspapers Scant Notice (but not just newspapers: "In fact, most teenagers and adults 30 and younger are not following the news closely at all"). Kalb:

Big changes in popular habits are no doubt part of a whole network of other changes, so it’s hard to point to specific causes and effects, but isn’t there a distinct connection between young adults’ acceptance of multiculturalism and their total lack of interest in public affairs? To me it seems glaringly obvious that multiculturalism makes public life impossible even in concept. There can’t be public life unless there is public discussion and decision. That requires a public that’s coherent enough to have thoughts and reactions and take action, at least to some degree. The point of multiculturalism, though, is that no particular culture—no particular pattern of thoughts and reactions and no particular history of action—is allowed to determine things. If that’s so, though, how can public life exist? Multicultural government is “free to be you and me” turned into universal law. Under such conditions, there can be no politics and we have to be ruled by experts, therapists and money instead. If the only legitimate role for ordinary people in politics is to parrot the line taken by New York Times, because they’re not experts and if they act on their non-expert prejudices they’ll just mess things up, why shouldn’t they concentrate on their personal affairs and ignore things they have nothing to say about anyway?

I like that, though I don't think Kalb, in general, gives enough attention to how multiculturalism has been a dead end, which was not at first predictably a dead-end, in a nonetheless necessary process of cultural evolution and renewal in our Western tradition, an evolution towards greater freedom.

And yes, we live in very complex social systems with countless interactions and relationships leading to unpredictable changes; but historical change, even in face of all the natural calamities and bounties the world has in store for us, is ultimately a question not of biology, geography, economics, technolgy, etc, but of human self-understanding and our response thereto. In other words, the great motor of human history is the ethical, the human necessity to reflect on and change our social relationships in response to the inevitable resentments and limits on freedom that all social orders and differences create.

As such, our understanding of the historical process is usefully reduced to our ethical concerns and all promoters of self-governing societies should be wary of giving the suggestion that the historical process is mystifyingly complex. In retrospect, it is not a great mystery, even if there is much we can never know. It is only the future outcome of human freedom that must remain a great mystery, precisely because we are free to decide and to respond to decisions in infinitely complex, i.e. eternally open-ended, ways.

This blog, Covenant Zone, and its public meetings, are dedicated to the proposition that multiculturalism will have to be replaced as Canada's governing ideology. This is because official multiculturalism limits human freedom by replacing self-governing nations with largely unaccountable elite bureaucracies and judges deciding what rights we, or groups to which we supposedly belong, have and do not have. We feel that our genuine desire to maximize human freedom cannot go in hand with the pretense that everyone can be just "free to be you and me" under the protection of a big multiculti state. Rather we see the need for a new covenantal culture in which those who seriously pretend to be members of our nation, no matter where their ancestors once lived, will sign on to new freedoms and responsibilties in Canadian self-rule, in embrace of the cultural traditions, largely Western, that make a self-governing covenantal culture possible and necesary to the growth, regulation and security of a free-market economic system.

Open-ended national covenants, that construct reality according to the ever-adapting intelligence of the freely participating members, respect, much better than the soft-totalitarianism of today's imperial, post-national political masters, the truly inexhaustible possibilities for human ethical self-organization. Today's masters want to hold on to a fast-fading vision of postmodern reality with its analysis of history as little more than a process of victimization, countered by the victims' redemption according to the dictates of a "human rights" bureaucracy that must always out-rank popular, representative rule and decentralized, locally-organized, forms of redemption.

At the end of the day, when it comes to understanding our personal identities, we have to decide whether we give pride of place to our membership in a free, open-ended, nation, to make of ourselves what we will through unpredictable, though honest, political and intellectual combat, or to some more limited identity that we think the state must help us protect from the waves of history and the "exploitation" of others. In other words, do we believe, as I think we generally should, that calls to membership in free, self-ruling nations, are not, as the multiculti left generally has it, veiled attempts to promote the will of some privileged class? Could the promise of freedom be just that? Can we humans live well without the freedom to promise, and covenant, to make reality as we will?

If a renewal of national covenants doesn't happen in the short term, so that we may defend without victimary guilt, and without unnecessary violence, some realistic terms of membership in a free society, calmly and rationally excluding, through popular debate and rule, that which we find to be inimicable to our shared freedom, I imagine we will be left with the question of which of the alternative, all-too-limited scenarios is more likely to unfold. Do you see the future like:

1) Flanders' great patriot, the somewhat dour Paul Belien:

The Dutch Labor Party did everything in its power to undermine Judeo-Christian religions, but it is today the vehicle of the most radical Islamization. This has nothing to do with appreciation for yet another religion, but rather with the fact that, like secularism, Islamism is an enemy of Judeo-Christian values.

The European left appreciates Islamism not because it is a religion, but because it is a totalitarian political ideology. The Dutch Labor Party is catering to Islamist extremists even to the point of silencing party members like the Muslim apostate Ehsan Jami.

The same hypocrisy is displayed by Mr. Amato. He says that Europe will benefit from what religious Muslims can offer. However, Mr. Amato was the vice president of the European Convention, which vetoed any reference to God in the preamble to the EU Constitution. Sadly, there are more politicians like Mr. Amato and Mrs. Vogelaar. Take Patrick Janssens, the Socialist mayor of Antwerp, a city just south of the Dutch border. His administration sacks civil servants who warn about a takeover of Antwerp’s mosques by Islamist groups, and has them replaced by members of these very Islamist groups. Last week, Mr. Janssens welcomed international homosexual activists to Antwerp, which he likes to style the “gay capital of Europe.”

Does it make sense to cater simultaneously to radical homosexuals and Islamists? It does not, unless Europe's Christian heritage is your enemy.

Meanwhile, a German appeals court convicted a man for calling abortion “murder.” Klaus Günter Annen, a father of two, runs a Web site where he asks people to pray for “doctors planning an abortion murder.” On a separate Web page he lists German gynecologists who perform abortions. Last Thursday, the Oberlandesgericht in Karlsruhe stated that since abortionists do nothing illegal, no one is allowed — not even in an indirect way — to call them murderers.

It is often argued that Adolf Hitler was only able to grab power in Germany in 1933 because freedom and democracy were already dead. Soon, the secularist totalitarianism in contemporary Europe will be replaced by an Islamist totalitarianism. The Islamists will not need to kill freedom and democracy. The latter have already been murdered.

Or do you see the future like 2)America's great Europhobe, Ralph Peters:

the notion that Europe, the continent that's exported more death and destruction than any other, is going to just shuffle wimpily to its doom is crazy. The Europeans have been playing pacifist dress-up while we protected them, but, sufficiently threatened, they'll revert to their historical pattern--which is to over-react. Europe's Muslims may prove to be the real endangered species; after all, Europe's history of dealing with rejected minorities veers between genocide and, for the lucky, ethnic cleansing. For me, the question isn't whether Muslims will take over Europe, but whether Europe will simply expel them or kill any number of them first. Sound far-fetched? How would the Holocaust have sounded to an educated German (or Brit, or American) in 1932? Europe is a killer continent. When the chips are down, it will kill again.

Meanwhile, Europe's Muslims are behaving so stupidly that their folly can't be measured with any tools at our disposal. Even as British pols pander to radical clerics, the average Brit has had enough of coddling mullahs who preach the destruction of all non-Muslims (and closing the pubs). In mid-July, in Germany, the major organizations representing the millions of Turkish residents refused to come to a conference held by the chancellor to address integration. The Turkish leaders demanded--demanded--that the German parliament first rescind a new immigration law that would have prevented Turks from importing child-brides, isolating them as virtual prisoners and beating them to death. Oh, and the Germans also wanted new immigrants to have a vocabulary of 300 German words upon arrival--just enough to say, "Help, husband killing me." No self-respecting Turk was going to stand for that.

You get the point. Europe has never had a model for integrating non-white immigrants, and they don't really want one. Meanwhile, from Denmark to Marseilles, Muslim residents make outrageous demands that only anger the average voter. Eurabia? You have a better chance of finding honest lobbyists in Washington than you do of seeing the crescent over the spires of Notre Dame.

Come to the Covenant Zone and grow a little

On a day when we mourn more fallen Canadian soldiers, those brave souls struggling against great forces to make this a freer world, we need to rededicate ourselves to this shared cause.

Let us remind that the Covenant Zone bloggers and friends meet every Thursday, 7-9 pm, in the atrium of the central branch of the Vancouver Public Library (in front of Blenz Coffee - look for the blue scarves). All those interested in renewing a national culture founded on citizen self-rule through a discipline conducive to freedom, and not through submission to any form of totalitarian political religion or phony expertise, are welcome and encouraged to join us. This week I will just give you a few links to help do that job of encouraging.

Concluding a speech to a European audience, Gil Bailie notes (as he might well if he were in Canada):

The history of this century and beyond will be very largely determined by whether the West finds a way to reclaim and reaffirm its spiritual inheritance and thereby reenergize a culture that fosters the genuine flourishing of its people and to which others – whatever their race, creed, ethnicity, or background – will want to transfer their national allegiance, culturally assimilate, and contribute their part.

On Canada Day, David Warren gave a useful update of the "two nations" interpretation of Canadian history:

Canada today is “deux nations.” There are the people who speak and think in French; and the people who speak and think in English. Together they make up one nation, with a continuous history, of more than five centuries. And then there are the people who speak, effectively, no language; who are deracinated, who have no history. That is the other nation. There is very little communication between these two nations -- the “old” Canada, and the “new” Canada -- because little communication is possible between two such groups. The one is aging and shrinking, the other expanding while growing ever younger. (Yet all trends are reversible.)

Demographically, but also spiritually. Those who have no language, no culture, no religion, no sense of past, and therefore of destiny, remain ever young. Outwardly they may become old and wrinkly, but inwardly they retain the mind of the pre-school child, unformed and cloudless. Yet they fulfil the requirements for citizenship set out in John Lennon’s famous hymn to emptiness, “Imagine”:

“Imagine there's no heaven, it's easy if you try. No hell below us, above us only sky. Imagine all the people, living for today. Imagine there's no countries: it isn't hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for; and no religion, too. Imagine all the people, living life in peace.”

This is the postmodern dream, of perfect vacuity -- of the serenity we imagine will sweep over us like sleep. All we need do is abandon everything of value in our heritage, everything for which so many of our ancestors actually fought and died. In this great zero, everyone will be equal, and no person will be better than another. The heroine and the harlot will be one and the same, great saints and great monsters indistinguishable. “Judgementalism” -- the aversion that one individual has behaved better than another -- is, among the vacuous today, the only crime remaining to be punished. And likewise, under the doctrine of “multiculturalism,” there is nothing to choose between one culture and another. They are all just fine, and so far as any particularity can still be distinguished, “everything is beautiful in its own way.”

But if you can't judge and discriminate, e.g. identify how Islam is different from all other "religions", you can never hope to grow up and truly become humble in service to a decent human cause or nation. The contemporary left, in denying our need to validate meaningful differences, around which a free human exchange of differences may be organized, makes all important human differences either into a scandal for some abstract notion of "equality", or occasion for a phony celebration. In either case, it becomes the responsibility of some bureaucrat to smooth over the differences, with whatever force necessary. The left today intends to impose a cult of victims and "equality" that will require a managerial priesthood constantly to determine who is a victim of a lack of proper equality of outcome, to seek redress (since any freedom generally permitted people will not lead to equal outcomes, at any one point in time), and hence to restrict the freedom that inevitably leads people to create, affirm, and exchange, differences.

It is in the affirmation of what makes us a new race of free Canadians - entirely unlike, say, those who take advantage of a chance to come to the West to become well-paid doctors, only to then attempt to kill as many Westerners as they can - that we discover the need to renew and recreate the old and new covenants of the West that can make this nation a true unity in diversity. It is time to decide whether you are on the side of freedom or of the totalitarian management of "diversity".

Only people with constitutional or covenantal guarantees that they, as free persons, can take the lead in negotiating and trading their differences, and not have to rely on expert bureaucrats (or thugs with religious books) to do more than what is the expert's proper job - to help us recognize and institutionalize, not initiate or control, the fruits of a free national discourse - can be considered mature, fully-realized, human beings. Those who best understand our common human origin are today rightly arguing that we are meant by the original events of human creation (or by our Creator, if you prefer) to negotiate and perform our history in freedom, to continually seek for the truth.

And if we don't encourage each other to become fully human, each in our own way, by meeting and talking on a regular basis to this end, how are we going to be able to negotiate with the aliens if they return? Must we again behave like children who only know how to dominate or be dominated? Or can we show the aliens we are up to the possibilities of a truly free political and economic exchange? Or, as the liberal mainstream would today seemingly have it, must we convince the humanoid aliens that we are all just the same, or that our differences are all equal in importance, which is to say nothing that distinguishes us from them is really important, and certainly not to be discussed in public? Just a friendly thought -:)

Feminism vs multiculturalism

I am a Feminist.

I'm a happily-married man, having successfully courted a strong woman who struggled through tremendous adversity in order to succeed in a traditionally male-dominated field; she didn't ask for special favors, just a regular chance, and with forbearance and determination, she set an example that anyone could be proud of (and, in my case, was attracted to).

I try to be a devoted son to a wonderful mother, a son grateful for the accumulated sacrifices made over a lifetime that have taught this male what is necessary to Grow Up and become a Man; no lesson more precious than the belief that children were a blessing, not a burden, and that motherhood was a status to be cherished, not a curse to be suffered through.

I'm a brother, who keeps a watchful eye on his sister's growing family and admires the careful balance she maintains between her chosen roles of supervisor at work, mother at home. I would sooner cut off my right arm than lift a finger to hurt her, her many kindnesses having been such a precious gift to my life.

Aunts, grandmothers, cousins, the women I've worked with and studied alongside, all have contributed to my present declaration: I like women. I have been so very lucky to have had many glorious women in my life, and I take great pride in considering myself a Feminist, willing to fight for their rights as equal human beings, wanting to protect them from depredations at the hands of brutish males, admiring the mysterious contradiction of strength and compassion that is the essence of the "feminine" side of the human experience. These women have all contributed to my present understanding of being "masculine", how it too must reconcile a balance of its own between strength and compassion, different yet similar enough from that of the feminine that one side can learn from the other; not by copying, but by comparing.
Seeing the differences, and celebrating them.

My definition of "Feminism", however, and my admiration for the feminine, both seem a bit out of step with that of others, especially women, who label themselves "feminists" these days.

For instance, I read the following horror story out of Saudi Arabia, and as a Feminist who likes women, I am outraged by its account of a 19-year Saudi woman, raped 14 times, being sentenced to no less than 90 lashes by a judge following the "justice" of Sharia Law:

Saudi gang rape victim faces 90 lashes

…

[The 19-year-old] said she was blackmailed a year ago into meeting a man who threatened to tell her family they were having a relationship outside wedlock, which is illegal in the ultra-conservative desert kingdom.
After driving off together from a shopping mall near her home, the woman and the man were stopped and abducted by a gang of men wielding kitchen knives who took them to a farm where she was raped 14 times by her captors.
…
But the judges also decided to sentence the woman, identified by the newspaper only as "G," and the man to lashing for being alone together in the car. Unrelated men and women are forbidden from interacting in public in Saudi Arabia, which strictly enforces Islamic Sharia law.

"G" said one of the judges told she was lucky not to have been given jail time.
…

The woman also told the paper she tried to commit suicide because of her ordeal and was beaten by her younger brother because the rape had brought shame on their family.
…
There are severe legal restrictions on women in Saudi Arabia, including a strict dress code required outside the home and a ban on driving.
~~~

As a husband who loves his wife, as a son who loves his mother, as a brother who loves his sister, as a man who loves women, I decry the injustice of sharia law for its misogyny and its barbaric inequality between the sexes. What "feminist" can read of this horror story, knowing as they do how common such stories are in our modern world, knowing how routine such stories are in the culture of modern islam, and not become outraged by its medieval backwardness? In the shadow of "International Women's Day", what noise is made by "feminists" about the modern status of women in islam? Why the silent acceptance of every single double-standard that the REAL feminists struggled so hard to eliminate?

This column by Diana West, published this week at TownHall, contains the answer we all know, yet so few have the courage to say out loud:

Burnt offerings on the altar of multiculturalism

Only one faith on Earth may be more messianic than Islam: multiculturalism. Without it -- without its fanatics who believe all civilizations are the same -- the engine that projects Islam into the unprotected heart of Western civilization would stall and fail. It's as simple as that.

To live among the believers -- the multiculturalists -- is to watch the assault, the jihad, take place un-repulsed by our suicidal societies. These societies are not doomed to submit; rather, they are eager to do so in the name of a masochistic brand of tolerance that, short of drastic measures, is surely terminal.

I'm not talking about our soldiers, policemen, rescue workers and, now, even train conductors, who bravely and steadfastly risk their lives for civilization abroad and at home. Instead, I'm thinking about who we are as a society at this somewhat advanced stage of war. It is a strange, tentative civilization we have become, with leaders who strut their promises of "no surrender" even as they flinch at identifying the foe.
…

Body bags, burn masks and prosthetics are no better protections than make-believe. But these are our weapons, according to the powers that be. These, and an array of high-tech scopes and scanners designed to identify retinas and fingerprints, to detect explosives and metals -- ultimately, I presume, as we whisk through the automatic supermarket door. How strange, though, that even as we devise new ways to see inside ourselves to our most elemental components, we also prevent ourselves from looking full-face at the danger to our way of life posed by Islam.
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In not discussing the roots of terror in Islam itself, in not learning about them, the multicultural clergy that shepherds our elites prevents us from having to do anything about them. This is key, because any serious action -- stopping immigration from jihad-sponsoring nations, shutting down mosques that preach violence and expelling their imams, just for starters -- means to renounce the multicultural creed. In the West, that's the greatest apostasy. And while the penalty is not death -- as it is for leaving Islam under Islamic law -- the existential crisis is to be avoided at all costs. Including extinction.
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