Tuesday, October 18, 2005

Salma Hayek does not wear a burka.

If you are a TimesSelect (subscriber and pay NYT/IHT access only) you have to read (Dutch virtue of tolerance under strain) it is very fair and balanced. This is an above the fold, multipage, article. What is the word, expose?

I cannot type all that well, so I am going to just grab some meaty parts for discussion. I will give credit where credit is due. This is a timely article, well written, and as much as I would love a Rightist screed, this is tells both sides with a serious tone. Well done. Let's play.
The Netherlands today can still offer a picturesque tranquility, with its swarms of straight-backed bike riders and its canals reflected in the handsome windows of gabled homes. But cut a keyhole through Dutch decorum and violence appears: a filmmaker shot and stabbed by an Islamic fanatic, politicians in hiding from jihadist threats, a newspaper columnist menaced into silence, people living in fear.

What was once a subject (immigration of Muslims) of worthy debate is now more a matter of survival.
That is because they supported feel-good politicians and policy makers who were more concerned about their self-righteousness and self-esteem than looking after the long term survival of their culture and nation - one that hundreds of thousands of Dutch gave their lives over the years to secure.
Geert Wilders is a rightist member of the Dutch Parliament living in a secret location under police protection because Islamic radicals say they will kill him. That, in what was until recently the placid Western democracy par excellence, is extraordinary. “All non-Western immigration must be stopped,” Wilders said. “Pure Islam is violent.

Other politicians, like Cohen (Jewish mayor of Amsterdam), see the solution more in building bridges than barriers.
Mayor Cohen. Perfect case in point. A man of the Left who believes if he thinks pleasant thoughts the bad things will go away. He wants to keep doing what got them in the pickle they are in right now. Nice guy. Bad ideas. Like many politicians who have their self-worth intertwined with their ideology, he is incapable of seeing where he has gone wrong - because to do so would be to admit that those who he holds in contempt are right.
That Europe needs immigrants, and that they will seek to come from adjacent North Africa and other poor Muslim areas, is evident. It needs them to do jobs, from asparagus picking to care of the elderly, that others do not want to do. It needs them to offset a rapid aging of its societies.
That argument just does not hold water any more. That is the same argument my slave owning ancestors used to justify their Mississippi economy. Anyway, go to rural Europe, or for that matter rural NE or upper Midwest to Great Plains America and you will find plenty of locals and whites doing those jobs. They just get paid more. Ahhhh - see the connection to the two? Email me if you have more questions.
It was this failure (of Muslims to integrate themselves into society) that Fortuyn was first, or at least most forthright, in denouncing, railing against what he called the bigotry of Islam-in-the-Netherlands – its intolerance of homosexuals, its oppression of women – and declaring the country “full.” An animal-rights activist killed him for his frankness in debunking the “multi-culti” dream world of the politically correct.
Another example of the Moonbat Left getting in bed with the Islamofascists. Weird. A perfect example of the-enemy-of-my-enemy. Don't worry Moonbat, they will behead you last.
That fact (conflicted identity of second generation immigrants who were the foot soldiers of the London suicide bombings), insisted Hamid (a second generation Dutch-Moroccan) should not prompt generalizations. “Somebody is crazy,” he said, “OK. But that does not mean the whole Islamic people is.”

Small humiliations now accumulate. The bus driver closes the door on him, he overhears talk of Moroccans being killers. “But it’s the government’s mistake not to have mixed us up more,” he said. “We’ve been here more than 20 years.”

The mistake was well intentioned. Let’s give them a home and welfare and let their culture flower: such was the Dutch approach to immigration. There was a history behind it. Of the 140,000 Jews in The Netherlands at the start of the Nazi occupation, 102,000, or 75 percent, were killed, a larger proportion than in any other West European democracy.

To criticize an immigrant became taboo because racism could lead to the gas chamber. Favoring immigrants, at some level, could be seen as a form of atonement, like elsewhere in Europe.
The government's job. Nice plantation, welfare mentatlity. Only 20 years, and look at the problems. Do you understand why the Dutch fear another 20 years of the same level of non-Western immigration?

Imposing guilt on the good to make the bad get away with wrong. The Jewish nightmare of 60 years ago has nothing to do with the Islamists issue today. Ziltch. The Left's tools are truly trans-national.
Certainly, at the Future Café, Dutch identity seemed murky. The air was thick with hash smoke. An immigrant from Suriname rolled a joint; he said he received 800 Euros, or $967, a month in various benefits and worked part time for 8 Euros an hour.
Welfare reform anyone? We have welfare moms, they have welfare hash addicts.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somalian-born member of Parliament from Verdonk’s VVD party, used to be a Muslim. After 9/11, however, she renounced a religion (I blame Bush…) from which she was already estranged, and now has become one of its most uncompromising critics., In return, Islamic fanatics want her dear.
Like Wilders, she is in hiding/protective custody. Would you let her hide in your attic?
”All of Europe is in a state of denial,” she argued. “It thinks these killings (of Pim, Van Gogh, Madrid, London, and others) will go away, but they will not. The Holy Book says infidels must be destroyed.”

She continued: “Osama bin Laden is a puritan Muslim. That is why he keeps insisting on the Koran. Islam is not a religion of peace, or only a peace with other Muslims.

We should acknowledge that it’s a very violent religion, say, yes, you are right, instead of pretending, like Bush, that this violence is not true Islam. And then we should encourage Muslims to say that they will remain Muslims, but reject those verses incompatible with human rights, with a decent coexistence between men and women. We should demand and Islamic Reformation.”
She must drive them nuts. She spent some time in Saudi Arabia, went to a Wahabi high school, ran away from an arranged marriage. Why isn't Hollywood making a movie of her life? Oh, that's right, it won't make Bush look bad.
Aboutaleb, the city councilor who works for Cohen, the Amsterdam mayor, forming an unusual Muslim-Jewish team, thinks Hirsi Ali, Wilders, Verdonk and the country’s center-right government are wrong. A Social Democrat, he is alarmed by The Netherlands’ hardening. “Their direction is setting groups against each other, “ he said, . “But we need what I call ‘The Big We’ community, where our one million Muslims feel members of society.”

Islam, for Aboutaleb, is less the problem than European culture. On television, he spends 40 percent of his time explaining his religion, because Europe shuns Islam. “Why,” he asked,. “is Cohen never questioned on being a Jew?”
The big we. The summer of love is over mayor. Your 1 mil Muslims need to come to the society, not the other way around.

Why is Cohen never questioned? No one with curly side-burns dressed like one of the Blues Brothers is trying to kill your politicians and Mau Mau your nation into Dhimmitude, that's why.

Europe should look to America and accept that a major presence of immigrants is now part of their makeup,” said Demetrios Papademetriou, the president of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington. “In the U.S., one in nine are foreign-born; in Europe, perhaps one in 10. But in Europe, a real change in mentality is needed to see immigrants more as opportunity, less as problem. And for that, Europe may have to adjust the full-plated set of benefits it has offered to all at the outset.”
You can't compare the two. The overwhelming majority of American immigrants, legal and otherwise, are from Latin America. Not an Anglo-Saxon Western culture, but a Latin Western culture that is close enough. And Christian. Not even close to the same problem. Salma Hayek does not wear a burka.
In railway stations today, big orange and black posters are everywhere. Put up by the country’s main Jewish organization, one declares: “In 1940-45, most of the Jews had to get lost. Who’s next? Don’t let hate come back.” The second says: “From here the trains departed to Auschwitz. When will the world get wiser?”
They should be ashamed of themselves. Prior to the Nazi invasion, The Netherlands was a haven for German Jews. Like the rest of Europe, the Nazis did what they wanted when they took over. The locals weren't all perfect, but really - what would you do when the Gestapo has your wife in custody and your children in the back of a truck? To compare what is going on now with that is a tragedy to a nightmare. Shame on them.
UPDATE: You should be able to download the whole thing here.

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