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Sunday, July 17, 2005

From an emailer: "Read the lead editorial in today's Globe, it will blow your mind."

I'd like to say I'm surprised, but I'm not. The Boston Globe has a solution for Europe's Islam problem: Meet the Islamists half way. I believe that's also known as the surrender and appease solution.

Boston Globe: Europe's culture clash

MOHAMMED Bouyeri stunned the courtroom in Amsterdam Tuesday when he declared that he had murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh ''out of conviction." The Dutch-born son of Moroccan immigrants, who had received a first-class secular education in the Netherlands, told the court, ''If I ever get free, I would do it again." Then the radicalized Islamist turned around and spoke to his victim's mother, Anneke van Gogh, saying: ''I don't feel your pain. I have to admit I don't have any sympathy for you. I can't feel for you because I think you're an infidel."

Because the perpetrators of last week's London bombings will remain forever mute, they cannot offer what Bouyeri's statement did -- a glimpse into the chasm that is opening up between the graying, secular, permissive societies of Europe and the predominantly young, unassimilated children and grandchildren of Muslim immigrants. This chasm is becoming a defining challenge for Europe's future. All Europeans, including Muslims who abhor Islamist terrorism and the ideology that spawns it, are affected by clashing expectations about the proper roles of religion and the state, equality between men and women, freedom of expression, and the community to which citizens should give their primary allegiance.

If Europe is to weather the challenge of accommodating an ever greater proportion of Muslims, many of whom do not want to abandon their distinct values and traditions, majorities and minorities will both have to change their ways. European societies will have to abandon a concept of assimilation that requires non-European immigrants and their descendants to replicate the mores and value systems of their French, German, or British neighbors...

French, German and British "neighbors"? Immigrants should most certainly be expected to replicate and make themselves compatible with the value systems of the nations of France, Germany and the United Kingdom -- the countries they wish to be a part of and clearly felt had something more to offer than where they came from. That's hardly an unreasonable expectation, considering the alternative.

The editorial goes on to excoriate France for their ban on the headscarf and prescribe that Europe will just have to accommodate itself -- get this -- to the Islamist concept of Religion/State overlap. Astounding! None other than Mohammed Bouyeri is their plot device, their MacGuffin to push this idea forward.

In this face of Bouyeri's evil, and the Islamist scourge and the inability to maintain a civil society independent of a violent and medieval religious philosophy that has kept the Middle East mired in backwardness and is now threatening to drag Europe down with it, the Boston Globe's solution is to meet evil half way.

This from a paper that holds it as bigotry to doubt the wisdom of same-sex marriage, and editorializes constantly against their fellow long-time Americans on "the religious right."

Thus the Globe, rather than advocating for the Right and the Good, winds up being the Islamist's best friend.

...Even if those trends are altered, European Muslims and non-Muslims must learn to live together. Each will have to practice the tolerance that the assassin Bouyeri proudly scorned. European states will have to honor the Islamic ideal of religion as a way of life unifying the private and communal realms. Europe's Muslims will have to recognize that gender equality, secular law, and the right to believe in any faith or to be an unbeliever are hard-won European achievements that need not threaten a separate Islamic identity.

How you are expected to mesh that square peg with a round hole The Globe does not explain. The Islamists are not well-known for compromise. Meanwhile, those in Europe desperately trying to hold on to their cultural values and stem a rising tide of illiberalism that threatens to overwhelm them find they have one less ally -- one more voice to appease and surrender.

[Edit: This includes, of course, those Muslims trying to mold their religion into one compatible with Western ways. It is to the eternal shame of large sectors of the so-called liberal press that they continuously align themselves with the very worst elements instead of holding out a hand to the best.]

Update: A reader has written a letter to the Globe in response, re-printed here.

1 Comment

So wrong on so many counts!!! Why shouldn't immigrants adopt the mores of the French, Germans or British?

Re: the ban on veils, no mention that in France's slum, gangs of Muslim males rape Muslim girls who go out without veils. The government is trying to make public schools a safe, neutral place.

As you mentioned, the Globe gets apoplectic about the Christian religious right, but the same Globe thinks that letting Muslims cross the lines between church and state is NO PROBLEM. Idjits!

I sent a link to Robert Spencer, I hope he also has a field day with this one.

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