timeimmortal

Vox Day points out a trend I admit I never noticed before. But his analysis makes sense.

Isn’t it interesting how the secularists always seem to do whatever they claim to be afraid of conservatives and Christians doing? It looks as if secular Europeans are far more puritanical than the American religious right would ever dream of being. Some time ago I wrote that women’s rights were a disease… it’s clear that cancer would have been the most apt comparison. Perhaps by the time men are banned from smoking, drinking, having sex, playing video games, watching football, or leaving the house without express written consent from a woman, people will begin to realize that my warning was dead-on.

This is in response to news that the EU is considering implementing new guidelines to eliminate sexist content, including portrayals of “gender roles,” from television advertising. Which means: no more Eva Herzigova lingeré commercials, and no more bare-chested male construction workers selling soda pop.

Not that we need such things in advertising, I’ll grant. It’s still a good point: I thought it was supposed to be us uptight, Christian folk that were the prudes and puritans in the world? And yet, more often than not, it seems to be the case that it is secular politicians who are the ones calling for restrictions on television content and the consumption of “vice” products like alcohol and tobacco.

Okay, we can grant the exception of those Christian fringe groups in America that lobby against Grand Theft Auto. They lobby for policy change…but one can’t help but notice that they never really get anywhere. This situation is different.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Vox Day links to an article from the New York Times that discusses new policies being put in place by Italy’s recently-elected government.

Underscoring the new Italian government’s determination to crack down on illegal Immigration and what the government contends is associated crime, Italy’s police arrested hundreds of people this week in a sweep of migrant shantytowns in major urban areas across the country, the police announced Thursday.

Nearly 400 people were arrested, including more than 100 who were immediately expelled. The police said more than 100 of those arrested were suspected of violating immigration laws, 180 of theft or prostitution, and 92 of drug dealing. Those arrested included 50 Moroccans and 32 Romanians.

The widely publicized raids were a strong signal from Italy’s new right-wing government, which is led by Silvio Berlusconi and includes the anti-immigrant Northern League Party, that it will keep its promises to pursue tougher policies toward immigrants.

“The anti-immigrant sweep was a positive thing because that’s what people want,” said Umberto Bossi, the minister of institutional reforms and federalism. “People ask us for safety, and we must give it to them.”

Vox is predicting that Italy will, within a decade or so, withdraw from the EU (given that the Italians seem to dislike most of the rest of Europe, this is probably a good possibility). Whether or not that comes to pass, however, this crackdown is ultimately a bit of a sign of hope for the Italian nation.

Especially in Europe, but over here as well, multiculturalism has become something vastly different than what it began as. The “mosaic/patchwork quilt” I was told about in school was all well and good when it simply meant that people wore different (and often more colourful) styles of clothing on the streets and opened up all manner of tasty restaurants and novelty shops. Now that it means that all manner of frankly ugly ideologies — things like Sharia law — are making inroads into Western democracies, multiculturalism is revealed to be something much less beneficial to those nations which espouse it.

I seem to recall that it was Lenin who remarked that the capitalist West would sell Communism the rope from which the West itself would hang. Lenin, ultimately, turned out to be wrong, but I can’t help but wonder if the sentiment itself had a ring of truth to it. More and more, it seems like multiculturalism is the rope from which the West — or, at least, some Western nations — may end up being hung. And there’s really only one plausible response to that danger: jettison multiculturalism.

Passengers are having to change bus partway through their journeys to comply with an EU directive.

The legislation stops drivers clocking up more than 31 miles behind the wheel without a rest.

…

If a journey is any longer, the driver must pull over and wait for a replacement.To comply with the directive, some operators are dividing routes into two or even three sections.

Drivers are allowed to undertake journeys of more than 31 miles - provided they get two straight days off…This legislation - aimed at lorry drivers - superseded British law limiting drivers to 60 hours a week.

Just incredible. I mean, okay, obviously we don’t want drivers exerting themselves to the breaking point; it’s a good thing that we have laws on the books that prevent companies from forcing drivers to work more than a certain duration of time. But…come on! Thirty-one miles? That’s nothing! That’s…what? A half-hour drive?

How does Europe even have an economy, if this is the way its governments think?

Traditional jihad is waged with scimitars and their contemporary equivalents, e.g., stolen Boeing 767s, which make handy instruments of mass homicide. Soft jihad is a quieter affair: it uses and abuses the language and the principles of democratic liberalism not to secure the institutions and attitudes that make freedom possible but, on the contrary, to undermine that freedom and pave the way for self-righteous, theocratic intolerance. Soft jihad is patient. It can add and multiply as well as Mark Steyn can (and here). It, too, sees the demographic writing on the wall and is content to wait a few years to occupy the West’s real estate — it’s so much easier, when you come right down to it, than blowing the stuff up and then finding yourself with a massive clean-up and rebuilding bill. Just sit tight and watch the infidels tie themselves into knots making excuses for you while, elsewhere in their lives, they embrace barrenness as an “environmentally friendly” alternative to Genesis 1:28.

Speaking as a right-wing, knuckle-dragging Eurocentric infidel, however, I feel it incumbent on me to point out that where traditional jihad is probably best dealt with by talented chaps like General Petraeus, soft jihad might often be more effectively countered by quieter crusades. Clever readers will doubtless have many fertile ideas to contribute to the fulfillment of what I hope will become the West’s new Quiet Crusade to make the World Safe for Christendom (remember that?). Here’s a modest proposal to get the ball rolling. It was suggested to me by another story from the London Times today. Under a headline shouting “Muslims shocked to learn that crisps contain alcohol” is the illuminating news that that Walkers snacks “contain traces of alcohol” and that eating them is therefore prohibited by Islam.

Shuja Shafi, who chairs the food standards committee of the , said that he intended to investigate. “Certainly we would find it very offensive to have eaten food with alcohol.”

Is that so? Well, here’s my modest proposal, which I offer to British Food and Beverage industry free and for nothing: start putting a bit of alcohol in everything edible or potable. There are, of course, other reasons for wishing to increase one’s usual consumption of alcohol, but here is a patriotic imperative to guide you: what if you went into food hall or your local grocery shop and every item had at least some trace amount of alcohol (or, alternatively, pork residue)? I understand that there might be certain logistical difficulties, but if the EU can effectively police the system of mensuration used in its jurisdiction, if it can prohibit certain types of bananas because they deviate too markedly from the perpendicular, then surely they can employ the vast apparatus of their bureaucracy to assure that a drop of alcohol or a dollop of bacon fat is added to any food stuff sold in Britain.

I think the alcohol suggestion is the better one — Jews have no problem with alcohol, and both Jews and Muslims are supposed to avoid bacon (and all pork-related things). We wouldn’t want to unduly penalize Jews, after all.

My agreement with the above is mostly facetious, but I think the point one can derive from it is this: there has emerged in the West a tension between two ideals. One one side, we see arrayed the laws and traditions that have formed, and informed, the various nations of Europe and North America and made them, to one degree or another, free. On the other side, we see arrayed the tenets of Sharia law (a barbaric and misogynistic system dating back to 7th century Araby) and the violence and noise of those who demand that sharia be made into the law of the land in places like Britain. Increasingly, the West — its thinking mired down in the cowardice and confusion of multiculturalism — caves in to the demands of the barbarians.

We don’t give away piggy banks (to say nothing of other “pig related items”) “for fear of offending Muslims.” We don’t draw cartoons of Mohammad “for fear of offending Muslims.” We mustn’t publish articles pointing out the demographic disparity between the Muslims of Canada and Europe and other parts of the population “for fear of offending Muslims.” We mustn’t even publish books saying critical things about “Saudis and terrorists” “for fear of offending Muslims.”

And so we come to the point of all the above — that it is not the place of those who immigrate to a new country to demand that the new country become more like the old one. But to effectively communicate that truth, the culture of the country to which these immigrants have come must have the courage to hold itself up as (let us be honest) superior to the one that these immigrants have left behind. It must be willing to exert and assert itself in cases where some demand that it be thrown down. And it must be willing to say “to heck with your backwards traditions; this is how we do things here.”

There’s a certain…attractiveness to the idea that every demand for, say, sharia banking be met with, say, an increased prevalence of something considered haram in run-of-the-mill foodstuffs. There’s a certain poetry to the idea that every demand for sharia courts be met with, say, increased restrictions on the production and sale of halal meats.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

As the reader may be aware, Ezra Levant has had a run-in with the Alberta Human Rights Commission over the publication of the Muhammed cartoons, which emerged as a controversy from the moment of their first publication back in Denmark in 2005. Ezra Levant’s now-defunct magazine, the Western Standard, published the cartoons in the interests of…you know…actually showing the Reader just exactly what it was that was causing all the rioting and violent invective overseas.

And so we’re clear, here’s the cartoons themselves:

The publication of these pictures, many of them little more than childish scribbles that are much more pitiable — for the obvious lack of talent behind them — than they are offensive, was legitimate within the rights and freedoms that the UN purportedly grants all people of the world, which the EU supposedly recognizes. One drawing, in particular, is a very accurate commentary on the relationship of European artists and Islam (that would be the picture of the cartoonist drawing a little scribble on his paper whilst fearfully looking over his shoulder). Most of the artists of these Danish cartoons are now in hiding, their fear of ending up like Theo van Gogh very real and very justified.

That’s a huge story, and one would think that the only way to report on it accurately would be to begin by reprinting the cartoons, to provide context for the reader. And this is all the Western Standard did.

For that ‘crime’, a radical, Saudi-trained imam in Calgary — Syed Sohawardy — filed a complaint with the demanding an apology from Levant. (Point of interest: In his complaint, Sohawardy even makes the claim that he is descended directly from Muhammad.)

Of course, these sorts of things take time to happen, and it was only in the last week that Levant had his day before the officer of the AHRC. Ever articulate, and ever in fine form, below is his closing argument.

He says some pretty powerful, and defiant, stuff. It’s hard not to feel proud to be a Canadian standing in solidarity with someone like Levant:

I do not want to be excused from this complaint because I was reasonable, because it was not the government’s authority to tell me whether or not I’m reasonable. If I commit a crime with words, which is possible — fraud, a tort like defamation — then the government has a role. But political and religious debate are not the proper province of human rights commissions. They have exceeded their original mandate, they have strayed far, and they are tampering in illegal ways with fundamental rights. It is my hope that this matter is not dismissed. It is my hope that this complaint is accepted, that it goes to a hearing, and that I happen to appear before the most fascist of the panelists — some thug down in Lethbridge named Lori Andreachuk. I hope I appear in front of her, and I hope she’s having a particularly angry day. I hope she hears every word in this [video], and that I call her a thug. And I hope that she convicts me, and “sentences” me to the apology that this fascist from Saudi Arabia demands of me. Because then I will take this junk out of the human rights commission, and into real courts, where eight hundred years of common law, and the Charter of Rights, and the Bill of Rights will come to my aid, and where we won’t have hearings where reporters are not allowed, and we won’t have hearings where my defence team is limited to one person, and we won’t have hearings before a divorce lawyer like Lori Andreachuk, who knows nothing about constitutional freedoms. I reserve maximum freedom to be maximally offensive, to hurt feelings as I like. I didn’t do that in this case; a few thin-skinned radicals radicals were angry. It was a reasonable publication, but that is not what should exculpate me. My rights as a free man should.

That is, I think, the most important point: his rights as a free man — a Canadian citizen — as outlined and stipulated in the should exculpate him, should set him free from the kangaroo court that is the HRC, is that such a thing as the HRC should not even exist in Canada to begin with. The human rights commissions — at both the federal and provincial levels — are illegal and an affront to the rights of every Canadian citizen, including the right to freedom of expression.

Thus: