Time Immortal

Interesting observations:

Health promoter Pallavi Kashyap echoes this observation. The Kashyaps migrated from India to Canada 18 years ago and have a teenaged daughter. “We have to accept that our children, who are either born or raised here, will be influenced by the society they are living in. The key is to be totally clued into what is happening in their lives. We have to know them, their friends, what their interests are and talk to them about everything under the sun. It has to be an open relationship,” she says.

While there is a consensus on the need for open communication, there is no formula on how to bridge the gap between the culture that parents have grown up in and the one in which they are raising their children. “The main problem,” says Anumita Sharma, 18, who studies at York University, “is that our parents continue to live mentally in the country of their origin, whether it is India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka or Bangladesh. They expect us to behave and dress like our cousins back home. But they do not understand that things have changed there, too, and our cousins are not as traditional as our parents think.”

She also highlights the contradiction that marks the behaviour of many first-generation immigrants. Most want their children to excel in academics and integrate/assimilate into the society but are not willing to accept the western influences.

ANGER AND DISAPPOINTMENT

Ashima Kaul, 22, recalls the anger and disappointment she felt at being unable to attend birthday parties or go for sleepovers. She fumes at the preferential treatment accorded to boys over girls, citing various examples of gender-based division of labour at home and also a stricter conduct code for girls.

“I think our parents carry their fears from back home and that is what dictates their behaviour, especially towards girls,” says Ashima.

Example:

The task of balancing the East and West is understandably an onerous one. Krishnan Swaminathan, IT professional and a father of two girls, says his challenge is to ensure that “our (Indian) culture is retained at least to some extent without conflicting with our life here”.

His comment is representative of many first-generation immigrants: “As an Indian living in Canada, I still have my values and need to fulfil my duty and bring up my daughters, get them married to an Indian boy within our culture. I don’t want my daughters to deviate and go out of our culture.” He wants his daughters to integrate well into the Canadian society and “behave like them” when they are in Canadian spaces - but within “Indian cultural limits”. He believes that is possible because the country offers an opportunity for people to occupy different spaces.

“It all boils down to what kind of person you are and I believe that children can be moulded. But communication channels have to be open. Even if it is something against my own beliefs I should be willing to listen and reason with them.” This position may be fraught with contradictions but is the predominant one.

Unfortunately, this is one of those “you can’t have it both ways” situations. Either the daughters of parents of Arab and Indian immigrants will not deviate from the culture of their parents’ homeland, or they will integrate well into Canadian society. Oh, I’ll grant that there is plenty of room for crossover…but there are also plenty of mutually exclusive ideals that exist in one, and not in the other, as well. The issue of whom to marry is a particularly good one — above, Mr. Swaminathan is quite open about the fact that he insists that his daughters not marry outside their culture, that they settle down with “an Indian boy.” You can’t impress that belief upon someone and still expect them to “behave like” Canadians, because that’s just not how Canadians look at the issue of marriage.

(It’s probably true that a majority of people marry someone who is culturally and racially similar to them, but as a general rule the “Canadian way” is that you marry the person you fall in love with and feel called to be wedded to, regardless of what country they or their parents came from, and regardless of what particular shade their skin might have.)

The issue of how to dress is similar, with approximately the same considerations and ramifications. But the really important consideration in all of this is what happens when, in keeping with the values of Canadian society, a child — especially a daughter — decides to “go Canuck” and start dressing in jeans and t-shirts (and not in dresses and hijab), exercising her free right to attire herself. What is the reaction of the parents then? If the parents are still living “mentally in the country of their origin,” to what extent will they object when one of their kids does just that? To what extent will they respect Canadian values? To what extent will they attempt to impose the values of the “old country?” Will violence or murder be the result of that? Which culture takes precedence — the one left behind, or the one now all around? If the former, why was that culture left behind in the first place?

We should be asking these sorts of pointed questions of potential immigrants.

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: Kathy Shaidle)

David Warren provides a quick, three-paragraph summation of the challenges that the Western world is facing today. In what can’t really be called a surprise (except perhaps by a progressive mind to crippled by multicultural pieties), Islam takes the lead role:

We (the U.S. and allies) are winning in Iraq, and Afghanistan, and losing everywhere else. The Syrians are now murdering independent Lebanese politicians with impunity. The pressure on Iran has been relieved. Pakistan is teetering towards a civil and military collapse from which only the Islamists can gain. Islamist demands for the imposition of Shariah, and for the legal persecution of religious minorities, have entered the mainstream of political life in countries that were once free of religious zealotry — Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia. Islamist terrorists are winning effective control over the remoter Muslim-settled regions in many countries of Asia and Africa, creating streams of Christian refugees from the southern Philippines, of Buddhist refugees from southern Thailand, of Christians and Animists fleeing south across the breadth of Africa.

Saudi-sponsored Wahabi Islam is consolidating its hold over the mosques of the West, and radicalizing the huge Muslim immigrant communities that have congregated in almost every major European city. Across Europe, and increasingly in North America (and as we’ve seen in Canada in the obscene “human rights” trials of Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant), the most radical Muslims are exploiting state multiculturalism, to score victories over free speech and win pathetic apologies from anyone accused of the thought crime of “Islamophobia.”

Islam is a broad and ancient religion — we are not discussing that, today. We are discussing instead the contemporary reality. For internationally, Islam has been morphing into a violent and puritanical cult. Yet this very large and very hard fact is being rendered undiscussable, in historical or any other terms.

And a quick note on the current state of affairs in Egypt, a concept which is broadly applicable to the whole of the Muslim world at present:

In Egypt as elsewhere, to say that “the great majority of Muslims are peaceful, unaggressive people, just trying to get on with their lives” is to utter something deeply fatuous. The great majority of Germans were likewise, in the 1930s.

As Kathy Shaidle is fond of pointing out, Paul Revere was not credited with shouting “Some of the British are coming!” And that is because he did not need to, nor did the Minutemen need to be alerted to the impending onslaught with a wordy explanation that the Redcoats about to descend upon them were not representative of the wider majority of British folk world-wide. Likewise, in World War II, we didn’t go to war against some of the Germans, or some of the Japanese.

The common thread between those two examples, which is unfortunately missing from many peoples’ analysis of the current situation of the West vs. the Islamic world, is the concept of war. Whether a war for independence, or a globe-spanning war against fascism, it’s easier to look at the historical examples above and note that while it may be true that while our forebears weren’t so careful as to classify the enemy beyond using broad cultural categories, that is explicable because of the urgency of the conflict taking place at the time. The extension of such an argument, then, is that we in the West today are not currently embroiled in a war with Islam.

Which is true, in a sense…that is, in the sense that no war has formally been declared by means of the normal diplomatic channels. But in a more important sense — objective reality — the war is already on, and has been for some time. If, under Sharia, the average Muslim (even though s/he might otherwise be a decent sort, and quite personable), regards the world as divided into two realms — that of Islam and that of harb (War) — then whether or not any Islamic nation or group has formally issued a declaration of war is irrelevant. If in fact it is the religious obligation of Muslims everywhere to “fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Messenger have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection,” (Sura 9:29), then whether or not any war has been formally declared is irrelevant. Under Sharia, it is the religious duty of every Muslim to strive to bring about the day when Islam rules over all other faiths and demands their submission.

And even the rather typical sidestep that some will attempt to do in regard to the opening like of the passage above — that is, make the argument that the Muslim Allah and the Judeo-Christian God are the same being, so the above passage does not apply to other monotheistic religions — is, at best, a half truth. Even if it were completely true, and even if Christians and Jews get a pass (and if one believes the rhetoric coming out of the two major players on the global Islamic scene, Iran and Saudi Arabia, there is no way that Jews will get a pass), that still wouldn’t bode well for many people in Western society, and so is still an idea which cannot be tolerated.

But here’s the thing: the Muslim Allah and the Judeo-Christian God are, theologically, not the same being. Oh, I’m willing to grant that in the final summation, they may well be the same, but unfortunately that is beyond the scope of human knowledge. And if one looks at the revelation that has come to Christianity (which inherits directly from Judaism), and if one then looks at the teachings that purportedly came to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel, there is no way to reconcile the Judeo-Christian conception of who and what God is with the Islamic one.

So even Jews and Christians aren’t exempt from Sura 9:29, if in fact they, and Muslims, stick to their theological traditions and exegesis.

War may not have been declared, but there is a war going on, pitting the ideals of the West — which, unfortunately, few enough people in the West have the necessary courage to defend — against those of the jihad. Already, this war has claimed many lives. But mere exchanges of casualties are but a small part of any war. Territory is what matters. And, as has been pointed out on this blog and elsewhere, in many parts of the West, the West is losing ground to radicalized forms of Islam, especially in Europe. That trend may already be irreversible, as well as the trends being seen in places like Pakistan, which even now teeters on the brink of falling into Islamist hands. When nuclear-armed nations like Pakistan fall into the hands of the jihad, and when nations like France begin to adopt an ever more Islamic character — and then of a decidedly Islamist bent — what will that do for the safety and security of the rest of the Western world?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!