timeimmortal

Kurds and Turks brawl in Edmonton restaurant.

The attack happened around 4 p.m. Thursday when a group of up to 25 armed men stoned the cafe at 15960 109 Ave., breaking its window.

Angry Kurds blamed their fellow Turks for instigating the violence, but Ankara Cafe owner Tugay Doksuz said the fight actually began earlier as a heated discussion between a few people seated inside.

One of them then called his friends, who showed up with metal batons, knives and stones. The violence ended with three men cut and bruised. The assault also left the cafe with broken chairs and tables.

While Doksuz believes the incident was the first of its kind in Edmonton, Tan said growing Turkish and Kurdish Immigration to the city, particularly from Toronto, has led to a number of skirmishes in recent months.

A few weeks ago, he noted, a minor fight broke out during a soccer game in which a Kurdish man insulted a player wearing the jersey of the Turkish national team.

Aggravating the situation is the large number of Turks and Kurds who come to Edmonton for construction work, leading to rivalries between firms bidding for jobs, Tan said.

In Turkey, the two groups have a history of animosity, particularly due to a bloody bid by the (PKK) for self-rule in the country’s southeast.

Canada has designated the PKK a terrorist organization, but Tan said the group has both members and sympathizers in Edmonton, including many who have moved here from Toronto.

Come here to live and work and I have no problem with you.

Come here and cause a ruckus, and I only wish I had the power to personally escort you to an airplane bound for the “old country.”

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.

York University graduate student “did not mean to spark a debate on freedom of expression” when she helped stop (read: censor) an abortion debate on the university’s campus.

With all (un?)due respect to Kelly Holloway: what did you expect, Missy? Precisely how could this young woman have thought that her support of an act of Censorship wouldn’t lead to a debate over the right to speak freely that all people, according to the UN, ostensibly enjoy? Perhaps she thought that the pro-lifers would simply do as they were told and meekly obey the order to keep silent?

“I actually don’t think this is very controversial,” the graduate student at York University said of the decision to cancel a Feb. 28 event that would have shown graphic images of abortion and asked participants whether the procedure should be criminalized.

If the event wasn’t so controversial, why was it cancelled? If the abortion debate isn’t very controversial, why was a debate about abortion not allowed to take place on the campus of York University? If this isn’t that big of a deal, why did Kelly Holloway and others advocate for the cancellation of the event and, by extension, censorship of the pro-life opinion?

“Most people understand that every woman has the right to choose what she does with her own body and that moral considerations about abortion are a very personal matter for individuals to decide,” said Holloway, who helped make the decision as vice-chair of the student centre where the debate was scheduled to be held.

It would be easier to accept the pro-choice talking points if they weren’t so mired in ignorance, half-truths, and outright lies. The fact of the matter is, abortion is not about what a woman does with her own body, because it is not the woman’s body that gets chopped up and vacuumed out of the womb. The fact of the matter is, there is another human being — yes, one that resides, for the time being, within the woman’s body, but nevertheless one which is distinct from the woman at a genetic level and which is, by any metric one might care to employ in a rational and objective way, a distinct being with its own body.

If for no other reason than that abortion involves a minimum of two people — the woman and the unborn child — the question of the Morality of abortion cannot be relegated to the realm of individual choice, because the outcome of the moral decision impacts more than one person (and, indeed, a wholly different human being than the one making the moral decision will be the one to pay with its life if the “right to choose” is exercised). This is to say nothing of the way our post-modern society’s permissive attitudes to abortion have diminished the birthrate to such a low level that only a massive program of Immigration can keep the population at its present level. Abortion may be an individual choice, but the implications and ramifications of the choice affect the lives of others, and impact on society as a whole. For those reasons, the moral issues surrounding abortion cannot be left in the hands of individuals to decide.

“The legal precedent in Canada is that abortion and those women who choose to have the medical procedure will not be criminalized,” said Holloway, who is also president of the York University Graduate Students’ Association. “So every York student has the right to make up their own mind and there is no need for an event, organized by anti-choice campaigners, that is disguised as a debate.”

Except that it was actually going to be a debate — Jose Ruba against a pro-choice student named Michael Payton chosen from the ranks of the Freethinkers, Skeptics, and Atheists at York (a student group). Yes, it was being put on in part by the pro-life group at York, but it was also being put on by the other group as well. Both pro-life and pro-choice people were, in other words, putting on the event.

God forbid, though, that pro-lifers ever get to speak their minds, eh, O Reader? Even in an ecumenical setting, it would be dangerous to let “anti-choice” types speak. Kelly Holloway: censor.

Holloway said banning discussions of the pros and cons of abortion was never the point. Her beef was with inviting the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform, (CCBR) a Calgary-based pro-life group that compares abortion to genocide and pushes to make it illegal.

Holloway remembers the display the group brought to University of Toronto a few years ago when she was an undergraduate bioethics student there and active in the student union.

“They erected huge signs in full colour of fabricated fetuses alongside people dying in the Holocaust and also pictures of people being lynched,” she said. “So we set up a table outside of that display as the student union to encourage students to tell us what their reactions were so we could understand the effect it was having on students. We collected hundreds of statements from students who said they were upset, they were appalled, they were traumatized and they were worried about the fact that the student union hadn’t taken responsibility to actually interfere in the matter.”

Maybe people should be upset about abortion. Maybe people should be confronted with the reality that the unborn child is a human being, and that it is alive. Maybe people should be confronted with the reality that more often than not, what is “aborted” is not an indistinct clump of cells, but something that is very obviously a somewhat smaller version of a human infant. Maybe people should be shown that abortion doesn’t just excise a growth from the uterus, but that it in fact does rip a tiny human being into pieces to be discarded with the trash.

And maybe people should be disgusted by what they see, and disgusted by the practice of abortion, and by the realization that something so brutal is considered both legal and moral by many in Canada (and around the world).

God forbid people should see both sides of the story — even if one side is very traumatizing to behold — and be allowed to decide for themselves what is and is not moral.

She was not about to let that happen again.

Kelly Holloway: censor. Thanks, Ms. Holloway, for violating the right to freedom of expression of pro-life students at York University. How does it feel, Missy, to know that you’ve now contravened the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

When the student centre executive learned about the event — billed as a debate on abortion rights between Jose Ruba from CCBR and Michael Payton from a student group called Freethinkers, Skeptics and Atheists at York — they held an emergency meeting and voted unanimously to cancel it.

Because it’s too dangerous to let students make their own choices after all, isn’t it!

I tend not to believe the label “pro-choice,” because too many self-professed pro-choicers — Kelly Holloway included — actually don’t care about people having the right to exercise “choice” freely. Such people are more accurately described as being pro-abortion, because their concern is that abortion remain legal in Canada. They then dress their opinion up in the pretty language of individual choice, but it’s just a lie.

It is a lie because those same people who call themselves pro-choice don’t believe in allowing other people the freedom to make their choices in a free and open way. Certainly, Kelly Holloway did not respect the right of the pro-life student group to choose to associate themselves with the CCBR, or the choice that both the pro-life students and the Freethinkers. She didn’t think twice about respecting the choices these groups had made to hold a debate. Instead, when she was informed of their decision to hold the event, she acted swiftly and decisively to deny them their right to choose, to deny them the right to hold the debate, and to deny them their right to freedom of expression.

And now she’s shocked that people called her on the carpet for being a censor.

How stupid does one have to be to be a “pro-choicer,” anyhow? I guess, in the specific case of Kelly Holloway, being a Marxist gets you most of the way there.

Update: Welcome, Blazing Cat Fur readers!

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!

Toronto, with its growing immigrant population, will likely see an increase of deadly, contagious tuberculosis.

Seriously, I almost don’t know what’s worse. Toronto is an interesting case study in a lot of trends related to Immigration, and in recent months there have been a number of studies that have demonstrated, among other things, the way increases in the murder rate in Toronto suburbs marches in lockstep with increases in the immigrant populations of those suburbs. The connection between isolated immigrant communities (when the immigrants are from predominantly Muslim nations) and terror plotting has already been demonstrated in numerous European nations, and it would be foolish to think Canada is immune from the same trends.

And now this.

Seriously, why can’t Canadians get off their fat, birth-controlled asses and start having their own kids, rather than forcing this nation to rely on violent, disease-ridden countries to make up the population shortfall for us?

As part of a reform of the Czech Republic’s foreigners law, those who apply for Czech citizenship or permanent residence will from next year first have to overcome the hurdle of an examination in the Czech language based on a Europe-wide testing system. Speaking at its launch on Thursday morning, Minister for Human Rights and Minorities Džamila Stehlíková explained the thinking behind the new system:

“Without language integration a migrant or foreigner cannot integrate into Czech social, cultural and working life. In the UK for instance they combine multiculturalism with a demand for a basic standard of English. By contrast, Germany for a long time underestimated the importance of the German language in integration — and the result is the segregation of some social groups, because of a lack of language communication.”

If there’s going to be any end to the immigrant ghettos of Europe, in which radical Islamism can spread like wildfire, it will be in measures like this. One is tempted to view it as a pity that the times require such drastic measures, until one reflects that the actual requirements of the aforementioned examination are a reasonable familiarity with the official language of the country, which is not an unreasonable thing at all to demand from any immigrant.

Around 11am today a bomb exploded in a solarium in Copenhagen. The suntan shop was situated just by the national football stadium in Oesterbro, a peaceful and affluent part of the Danish capital. The explosion completely destroyed the shop and the surrounding flats were also damaged. The police are putting the fact that no one was hurt down to sheer luck; two other bags were found in the area and have been destroyed. Two young men between the ages of 15 and 25 were seen running away from the crime scene; they were described as “foreign-looking” and are now wanted by the police.

The explosion is a drastic escalation of the week-long riots on the streets Denmark where young Muslim men have vented their anger and frustration towards Danish society by setting fire to cars and burning bonfires in the streets. The rioters claim that their action is a protest against the reprinting of the prophet cartoons, which took place last Wednesday when a unified Danish press decided to print/reprint the cartoon depicting the prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban. The decision to reprint was taken when the Danish security service (PET) notified the public that three men had been arrested on suspicion of plotting the murder of the cartoonist, Kurt Westergaard.

However, it is debatable whether the reprinting of the cartoons was the real reason behind the rioting. The night before they were published the air on Oesterbro was thick with the smoke of bonfires and burning rubber, carried by the wind from neighbouring Noerrebro, where much of the rioting has taken place. The cartoons no doubt had an explosive effect on matters, but the fire was already burning.

Denmark, once acknowledged for her liberal stance and social egalitarianism, has over the last years become an increasingly polarised society where the differences between the Danish majority and migrants and especially Muslim migrants have been the dominant political agenda.

…

In certain neighbourhoods the atmosphere is now so tense that I avoid going there when in Copenhagen. Far from the prophet cartoon crisis clearing the air like most good arguments, this argument only led to division. There are countless examples of qualified foreigners who can’t get a job in Denmark simply because of the sound of their surname. On the other hand, many young Muslim migrants have behaved like thugs, vandalising their neighbourhoods. The situation is clearly untenable; the question is: who’s got the remedy to solve it?

Any European government could come up with the remedy to solve the problem — the real question is: would any European government have the necessary stones to implement harsh restrictions on immigration and harsh policing measures in predominantly immigrant communities? Basically, the degree to which a European nation espouses multiculturalism as a virtue is the degree to which that country is imperiled by a surge of radical Islam within its immigrant population; the degree to which a European nation demands that immigrants integrate into the prevailing culture of that nation is the degree to which that nation might have a fighting chance in the years to come.

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: SDA)

I’m dead tired this morning, so this will kind of just be a list of things that I noticed on my morning browse through a few parts of the internet. Regular posting will resume tomorrow, ideally.

Apparently, the Milky Way is twice as thick as was previously thought — 12,000 light years, instead of 6,000. That’s kind of interesting, admittedly, although also rather “ho hum” — given the massive distances we’re talking about here, what’s a factor of two? Apparently, the researchers at the University of Sydney were just doing some basic fact-checking on internet-available data and realized the error after a few hours of computation. Guess it just goes to show: science is never 100%.

Moving on to more terrestrial matters, it appears that Danish “youths” — “mainly with immigrant backgrounds” — are burning things again, mainly cars, but also schools and trash bins. Officially, it’s not clear what caused the riots to trigger. Personally, I’m thinking that this is another case where we can strike out the words “immigrant youths” and replace them with “Muslims.” Probable cause? Here’s one guess:

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: RightGirl)

Speaking of Terrorism (since really, what else can we call it when Muslims are rioting and burning things?), the possibility is emerging that those undersea cables that got cut, thereby denying Internet access to millions of users across the Middle East and Africa, may have been destroyed in an act of sabotage, not in an accident as previously thought.

I hope nobody is too surprised by that.

In a follow-up to yesterday’s post about demographic winter, I see that Vox Day has added his own thoughts on the phenomenon to the virtual din.

You can’t completely grasp the extent of Europe’s post-Christian decline until you walk through the ghost towns of Italy, populated by no more a dozen elderly women and one old man sleeping in the sun. It’s not something that any tourist is going to see in Florence, Venice or Rome, much less Milano, but go outside the tourist tombs and the desolation of demographic winter is impossible to miss. And the imported African hookers scattered along the truck routes in the countryside are hardly adequate compensation for what were once famously vibrant family units.

There’s a large and spectacular church on the outskirts of a town near which we like to wander. Its doors are only unlocked for an hour or so every month, because despite its gorgeous interior architecture and painted ceilings, there’s not only no one around to attend it, there’s not even anyone left to visit it.

There is no cause of the demographic decline that is now afflicting much of the West that has done more to exacerbate the problem than secular progressivism and related ideologies. Put plainly, the societies we have built for ourselves (and, indeed, most human societies in general) are predicated on the expectation of a populace that maintains an almost “Catholic” birthrate — an average of 2 to 3 kids per woman. Our present fad of 0 to 1 kids per woman, and then usually one “designer” baby at age 35 (I shamelessly crib Mark Steyn’s phrasing here) is, quite frankly, insufficient to sustain Western society. To keep up our end, we need immigration.

That will, I think, be our untimely end.

Should Canada require its immigrants to “earn” their citizenship?

In the past, simply having lived in Britain for a sufficient length of time was enough to qualify a person for citizenship there. Now, a move is afoot to have immigrants “move on” through a system that encourages citizenship by encouraging the adoption of national traditions and values (possibly at the expense of the traditions and values those immigrants have brought with them from the “old country”), at the end of which they may achieve citizenship…or may be asked to leave, if in fact they do not integrate satisfactorily.

Methinks we need something like that in Canada.

According to the Associated Press, pro-lifers and other ‘domestic’ extremists account for “most of the damage” from terror-type attacks committed on American soil, to a larger degree than even Islamic terror.

As a pro-lifer, I’m pretty accustomed to having all manner of lies told about me and my beliefs — it comes with the territory. But the above assertion is pretty egregious, if somewhat easily refuted. Just for context, Muslim terrorists killed nearly 3,000 people in one day back in 2001, and destroyed two of the tallest skyscrapers in America in the process. Since 1973 (the year of Roe vs. Wade), misguided pro-lifers have killed just seven people in the U.S.

But clearly, those pro-lifers account for “most of the damage” done in acts of terror on American soil. The newsman says so!

Ezra Levant remarks that since it’s clear that Stephen Harper is gunning for an election, the Conservative government might as well try passing a few different pieces of increasingly more ambitious legislation, all via confidence motions, until Stephane Dion finally slips up and stops trying to avoid bringing the government down.

Gun control, the Wheat Board, tax cuts — and how about a gentle amendment to Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act?

The irony is that last bill wouldn’t be controversial at all. Other than a lone Liberal lobbyist who hasn’t been in the party’s good graces for four years, and a fringe ethno-political special interest group, I don’t think anyone in the country would even consider such an amendment controversial.

As they say in the funnies…”it’s just crazy enough to work!”

And speaking of pro-life issues, the ladies of ProWomanProLife are suggesting contacting the Governor General directly to let her know that Henry Morgentaler does not deserve the Order of Canada. Fully 85% of online respondents to the Globe & Mail’s poll on the issue said “no,” and while that can hardly be called a truly “representative” number, I think it does indicate rather clearly that a majority of Canadians think that giving Morgentaler this sort of official recognition is a very bad thing.

The PWPL ladies also provide the names of the various people who sit on the “independent” advisory council that considers nominations for the Order of Canada.

Update: Suzanne Fortin sends in the following additional information by email. Here’s the process one can follow to contact the Governor General’s office:

It’s easy.

First call the Governor-General’s Office. Phone numbers:

Ottawa: 613-993-8200

Rest of Canada: 1-800-465-6890

You will get a receptionist.Ask to speak to Madeleine Proulx (pronounced “Prew”). She deals with the Order of Canada. When I phoned today, I got a voicemail and I have been told by another pro-life caller that calls about Henry Morgentaler are being re-directed to her voicemail. State your name. Tell her that you want to register your objection to Henry Morgentaler receiving the Order of Canada. State the reason why. Please try to be neutral in your tone– calling him a bloodthirsty murderer probably won’t gain us a lot of credibility. I stated that he’s a symbol of inequality as he is the reason that unborn children have no legal status today and that I believe in the equality of all human beings, and that he fought this struggle in my name as a woman, and I resent that.

And that was it.

If you’re a pro-lifer, O Reader, or even if you aren’t but nevertheless think that Henry Morgentaler doesn’t deserve the Order of Canada, I encourage you to follow the steps above. Be civil and be articulate, and choose your words carefully. Calling him a murderer with blood on his hands might seem like a reasonable objection to raise, but it’s also a very good way to ensure that your phone message gets ignored. Present your case fairly and without appeal to emotion or horror, and it will be listened to.

The French police carried out a series of high-profile raids in poor suburbs close to the capital Monday, arresting dozens of people suspected of shooting at police officers and setting fires during three days of unrest in November.

The raids were supported by 1,100 police officers who surrounded buildings, forced open doors and searched homes in towns including Villiers-le-Bel and Sarcelles.

The sweep came less than a month before municipal elections that could deal a further blow to the standing of President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose approval ratings have plunged since his election last year.

Sarkozy vowed to reform France and improve law and order in the restive suburbs during his election campaign.

…

The police took 35 people into custody and were seeking several more on suspicion of arson and attempted murder of police officers during three nights of violence in Villiers-le-Bel in November, a spokesman for the police said.

The November rioting was triggered when two youths on a motorbike died in a collision with a police car. More than 130 police officers were wounded, 75 of them wounded by shotgun fire or pellet guns.

The use of firearms was seen as a dangerous escalation in hard-to-police areas where unemployment is high and many residents, especially those from immigrant backgrounds, live in rundown public housing.

Ultimately, this sort of action is the only one that a country can take against problems of the sort that France is facing. If (predominantly Muslim) immigrants insist on lawlessness, the law of the land must either succumb to their desires or exert itself in ways even stronger than any unrest those immigrants might cause. It’s nice to see that the French are taking a hard stance on this issue (finally).

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: RightGirl)

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Are women in America already on a downward arc because of misogynous immigration and multiculturalism? I think so. But there’s no recognition of the problem, much less help in the offing, either from Washington or from Establishment feminists, who remain strangely attached to multiculturalism in spite of the ideology’s innate conflict with women’s rights.

One official feminist who should know better is Katha Pollitt, an opinion writer at The Nation. On one hand, she wrote a sensible response to Susan Okin’s question (later an anthology), “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” Pollitt directly criticized cultural relativism: “You could say that multiculturalism demands respect for all cultural traditions, while feminism respects only traditions that indeed deserve respect.” Yet Pollitt recently endorsed Obama, giving as one reason being his support for illegal aliens receiving driver’s licenses, and she criticized David Horowitz for his interest in women’s rights in Islamic countries. She dogmatically refused to believe a conservative would care: e.g. “David Horowitz, Feminist?”, The Nation, Nov 1, 2007. (See JihadWatch.org’s Robert Spencer commenting on YouTube about this matter.)

However, given the precious little attention given to the issue of Third World brutality against women in general, why didn’t Pollitt welcome any publicity, no matter the source? (Ask her at kpollitt@thenation.com)

…

Not only is immigration the new way of war, it is also the spearpoint of the attack on Western civilization’s tradition of liberty and individual freedom.

Geography is a lovely antidote to diversity. If members of backward cultures would stay put we would all be better off, but they don’t. The worst of the worst are headed this way due to the multicultural ideology underpinning US Immigration policy as well as the Refugee Industrial Complex maintaining itself.

In fact, diversity is so extreme that Washington doesn’t even bar criminal cultures like that of Somalia, where 98 percent of residents practice a form of child torture which is a crime in this country — female genital mutilation (FGM).

The State Department supposedly endeavors to keep out individual criminal refugees, but entire societies that normally brutalize children are welcomed. Go figure.

One of the most worrying trends is how quickly women’s rights are discarded by host First World societies in the name of multiculturalism. The recent British dust-up when the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams urged implementation of Islamic Sharia law in order to “maintain social cohesion” in Britain’s rapidly diversifying society is a sad example of the willingness of Establishment elites to eliminate western legal protections for women in order to appease Muslim immigrants.

For all the weakness in Britain’s cultural resolve in recent years, however, the reaction to the Archbishop has been surprisingly intense and widespread. Perhaps the slumbering British people have finally awakened to the threat within. We can hope.

…

In 2001, Oslo professor Unni Wikan lectured her fellow Norwegian women that the “Muslim rape wave” against them was their fault. She said that “Norwegian women must take their share of responsibility for these rapes”. The professor did not call for violent criminal aliens to shape up. Instead, she said that “Norwegian women must realize that we live in a Multicultural society and adapt themselves to it”.

(Honest observation reveals the burqa is a cloth prison designed to erase the individual personhood of women. If the all-encompassing garments were designed merely to enforce an extreme level of modesty, burquas would not need to be identical. And the lack of an opening for the mouth suggests disapproval of speech and eating.)

…

And Islamic scripture approves of abusing women. As Jihad Watch’s Robert Spencer observed in his online Blogging the [Koran], “Wife-beating exists in all cultures, but only in Islam does it enjoy divine sanction.”

Add the failure of Muslim societies to achieve anything of value in the modern world — such as the famously sparse level of books published in Arab countries — and social frustration can become personal. Muslim culture around the world may appear pitiful. But in the castle of the home, a Muslim man can beat the tar out of his wives and feel both powerful and virtuous.

Is this the kind of diversity we should welcome?

In a word? No. No, it definitely is not.

When it comes right down to it, Canada needs to take a long, hard look at inbound immigrants and understand that the degree to which those immigrants profess a desire to live according to the tenets of sharia law is the degree to which they are unsuitable candidates for citizenship in this country. People of any culture wanting to live under sharia are more than welcome, I think, to go to a country like Iran or Saudi Arabia (where sharia is law) and live there. The fact that many such countries are Third World hellholes shouldn’t give us pause when we tell such people that they are, simply put, not welcome here. Because it must be made true that they are not welcome here: their barbaric, backward, misogynistic, 7th century system of rules is incompatible with the rights and freedoms that all Canadians have, even (yes) Canadian women.

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

Update: Welcome, Steynians! Binks is too unfortunately correct — in Islam, the women of the conquered people are “gifted” to the “brave” jihadist “warriors”. Is this perhaps what we are now seeing take place in Europe?

The Update Strikes Back: Welcome, Dinosaur fans!

“My grandmother speaks atrocious English, eats only Chinese food, has only Chinese friends and has been a Canadian citizen for nearly 50 years.

“She’s citizen of a country where she can’t read the local newspaper, can’t order pizza, and has no desire to do so.

“Can she truly be considered a Canadian citizen?”

Not an invalid point. Should a nation impose a set of minimum standards and expectations on people who immigrate to it? (Answer: yes) And if so, what should some of those standards be? (One answer: high school-level* grasp of at least one official language of the country would be a great start)

* like…1950s high school, back when they still taught the classics and graded on performance and levels of achievement.

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)

How can the ordinary British citizen be expected to distinguish between the law-abiding Muslim and the extremist? In these circumstances it is easiest, and safest, to assume the worst and to take refuge in whatever form of defence comes readily to hand — even foul language.

As an asylum-seeker myself, albeit of many decades ago from Nazi Germany, I can only draw Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s attention to the distinction between assimilation and conformity. Nobody is asking Muslims to assimilate, but it behoves immigrants, of whatever religion, to conform to the norms of the society in which they have chosen to live.

When we read (as we have just done) of Muslims seeking to behead another human being, or to commit other appalling atrocities, then it is reasonable for ordinary folk to ask — what are these people doing here anyway and why do they choose to behave in ways which appall us?

My generation of immigrants conformed. We retain and value features of our origins, but we do not demand privileges or special treatment and we contribute to the life of the nation as best as we can. Ten thousand of us fought for Britain in the Second World War — a small expression of gratitude to the country which gave us refuge.

I’m surprised that the writer of that particular letter to the editor decided to publish his name and locale; the above is the sort of thing that could get you arrested in England. Even though it is so shatteringly true.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Toronto police are investigating the city’s latest homicide after an innocent bystander was shot and killed outside a grocery store in the city’s east-end Chinatown area.

Police were called to the Fu Yao supermarket around 6 p.m. Thursday after witnesses reported hearing a number of gunshots, a Toronto police press release said Friday.

When they arrived, they found a man, who had been working outside the Chinese grocery store, suffering from gunshot wounds.

The 47-year-old man, who has not been identified by police, is believed to have been a bystander.

“He wasn’t the target, obviously,” Toronto police Const. Isabelle Cotton said Friday. “He was a victim.”

Police said “several shots were fired” when an argument broke out between several people outside the grocery store, resulting in “guns being drawn,” a news release said.

The man was taken to hospital where he was pronounced dead.

This is Toronto’s third homicide and the second innocent bystander killed by gunfire this year.

This is very likely an issue of immigrant-related crime, either Chinese gangs or Jamaican gangs. Most likely, the guns used in the crime weren’t registered anyhow, and I’d be dollars to doughnuts that they were illegally obtained as well. A handgun ban will do nothing to arrest the flow of illegal arms being used by criminal elements within society. Stricter Immigration controls and more aggressive policing of even small misdemeanors (a tactic which was proven effective in New York) would do way more to produce a noticeable drop in the crime rate.

But of course, it would be called racist to suggest as much.

Religious groups have demanded the resignation of the Bishop of Rochester after he claimed that Islamic radicals had turned parts of Britain into “no-go” areas for non-Muslims.

The Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali wrote in The Sunday Telegraph that fundamentalism had made some communities hostile to Christians and those from other faiths.

But Mohammed Shafiq, from the Ramadhan Foundation, said: “Mr Nazir-Ali is promoting hatred towards Muslims and should resign.”

Ajmal Masroor, of the Islamic Society of Great Britain, said: “It’s a distortion of reality. Our communities are far more integrated than they were 10 years ago.

“If the Church of England had an iota of fairness they would take serious action.”

But senior figures from the Church of England have backed the Bishop of Rochester’s remarks about faith and said Christians in predominantly Muslim areas could feel isolated and nervous about how to express their belief.

Related:

“It is Muslims who need to be told, or need to be shown, that this lost-dog sign, while hardly a brilliant sally of wit, is neither prosecutable as a crime nor, in the civil law, actionable. And that the hysteria that they are showing is designed of course to force everyone to go after anyone who dares to display an attitude other than one of respect, or even reverence. It is designed, that is, to force non-Muslims in a non-Muslim land to behave as circumspectly, or deferentially, toward Islam in all of its aspects, as possible. Yet when such deference and such circumspection is not demanded of us, we do not demand it of ourselves, in regard to any non-Muslim faith.

“The transparent attempt to manipulate non-Muslims is aided and abetted by the moral-preeners who choose never to quite come to grips with the collectivism and the aggressive nature of Islam.

The Reverend isn’t the only man currently in trouble in England for speaking out against the many and varied injustices that are taking place in Islamic immigrant communities in England at the moment. One blogger has even been told that he will be arrested for “stirring up racial hatred” when he returns home to Britain.

It’s sad that it has come to this, but in a way it isn’t exactly surprising. Sorry to put it so bluntly, but many Muslim immigrants — especially to European nations — come from nations that do not have the same concepts of human rights and freedoms that most Western nations do. Moreover, they come from nations where Islam is not only the majority demographic group, but is also very often the mode of governance. In “the old country”, any affront to Islam — even an imagined affront — would be met not only with the outrage of the populace, but with the full power of the law. The person giving the affront could expect to be harshly fined, whipped, or killed for the affront given.

And it would seem that many of these Muslim immigrants to Western nations come here expecting that the government will act in the same way as the one “back home” would when a perceived affront to Islam emerges from the (non-Muslim) people of the nation these immigrants have come to. Unfortunately, more often than not, Britain’s police and courts are only too happy to treat every perceived slight against Islam as a hate crime, probably because they fear the loss of their right to speak their mind freely less than they fear the murderous outcomes of protests and riots by enraged members of the immigrant communities.

In reality, the opposite approach needs to be taken, with that stereotypical British “stiff upper lip” firmly fixed in place. Every Western government must stand ready to tell those people who immigrate to a Western nation from some backwards little hellhole of a country that Western society very rightly neither recognizes nor practices government crackdowns on free speech, even free speech which is either truly insulting to some people, or else is deemed as insulting by some people (whether it actually is or not). If any immigrants to any Western nation demand that the government of that Western nation step in and control the speech of its population and regulate the open exchange of ideas, the only acceptable response by that Western government is to offer to buy the complaining immigrants plane tickets back to where they came from; such attitudes, and the people who articulate them, have no place in Western society, and quite frankly should not be allowed to remain in Western society.

What’s really tragic is that — just as is the case with Mark Steyn — the Bishop of Rochester didn’t actually say anything hateful. He did not promote hatred against Muslims. He did not demean Muslims. He simply pointed out that Muslim immigrants to Britain have created several communities which are, in essence, closed-off and unsafe for non-Muslims to enter. This is a truthful statement.

But to such people as are complaining against the Bishop, truth is itself a forbidden thing; it is the enemy of their system of power and control, and the enemy of the system of power and control under which they lived before moving to Britain. And so it is their enemy, and they decry it when they hear it.

That’s not something that can be tolerated.

Speaking of tolerance…the news article about the Bishop has some very excellent comments, including:

Along with the other atheists who have commented on this story, I stand full square with bishop.
Irrespective of any belief in a God we can have respect for the humanitarian value of the church. The relationship between church and state was settled hundreds of years ago, which is what defines this as a “Christian” country.
Newcomers may be tolerated today but they can’t expect to rewrite history.

And as refreshing as that was, here’s one better:

Well done the Bishop of Rochester for daring to put your head above the parapet. You are spot on in what you say, & it should have been said long ago. Now perhaps the No Go areas can be dealt with.
And if the Muslims who live there don’t like it they have the option of leaving the country which they so obviously despise.
It is obvious and has been for a long time that Islam & democracy are not comfortable bedfellows.

But I think Kathy found the best one (speaking of tolerance and all):

My tolerance of Islam is proportional to the number of Christian churches in Saudi Arabia.

I can get behind that kind of attitude.

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: SDA)