Commentary gets together with Geert Wilders

According to the January 11 New York Sun, Commentary hosted a meeting in New York City this week with Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician who is calling for a five-year moratorium on Moslem immigration, the closing of radical mosques, and other minimally commonsense measures that in today’s world get a person labeled as an extremist. The idea of Commentary’s greeting an immigration-restrictionist European leader is certainly unusual and sounds promising. But we must remember that from the point of view of New York-type conservatives, Europe is in terrible shape, while America is in great shape. Europe has a Moslem problem, America doesn’t. Thus City Journal (represented at the Wilders meeting by editor Brian Anderson, who last year lauded the perverted tv program “South Park” as a sign of triumphant conservatism) will publish devastating articles about the growth of anti-Western Islamic populations in Europe, but not (apart from Heather Mac Donald’s important pieces about Hispanic gangs and illegal alien criminals) about similar immigration-related issues in the U.S. Thus Norman Podhoretz, Commentary’s former editor and the god of the New York conservatives, said in an interview at FrontPage Magazine a year ago that Moslem immigrants in the U.S. are successfully assimilating. Apparently Podhoretz reads FrontPage and other media outlets very selectively, or he would have known about such things as, e.g., the U.S. Moslem schools where native born Moslems express their support for bin Laden and their commitment to convert America to sharia. Another New York conservative, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, will one minute express concerns about the effect of immigration on our national unity, and the next minute talk about how great Hispanic immigrants are for America. So, while any signs of awakening among conservative establishment types on the immigration issue should be welcomed, such awakening is sure to be slow and anguished at best.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 12, 2005 02:01 PM | Send