Calling their bluff, cont.

Last week I challenged and urged others to challenge the leading mainstream Islam critics, some of whom I named, to tell us what they would actually do about the Islamization threat about which they are endlessly warning us. I laid out a minimal set of reforms concerning Muslim immigration, and said, if the Islam critics are not willing to support doing at least this much about the Islamization that they keep describing as a hideous, totally unacceptable danger to our society, then they cannot be taken seriously.

Paul Cella, writing at RedState.com, has issued a similar “put up or shut up” challenge to those who constantly push “assimilation” as the all-purpose solution to our problems, yet who in practice would recoil from the coercive measures that real assimilation requires. Interestingly, Cella begins, not with a discussion of assimilation, but with a clarion call for the isolation of the Islamic world from our world—Paul is definitely a Separationist! Then he continues:

It is something of a mystery to me that many of those who are most energetic about a policy of engagement with Islam, are also those who are least confident about our ability to impose our will at home. We can impose our will upon distant lands and alien peoples, but it is a horror to attempt such a thing upon the aliens in our midst. Now assimilation, as we often talk about it in American history, is just that: the imposition of will upon the alien. I realize it makes men uncomfortable to talk like that, but this is a fact. The neoconservative Norman Podhoretz, perhaps the most energetic of … those who support a policy of democratization of the Islamic world, relates in one of his books how his grammar-school teacher in 1930s Brooklyn took it upon herself, with no consultation with his parents, to eradicate his Yiddish accent: in short to destroy this vestige of his immigrant culture and replace it with something American….

My point is that assimilation … is very often indistinguishable from coercion. In many cases it is a painful dispossession of a cultural inheritance. In some cases it amounts to a kind of despotism. Until this fact is realized—until, in practical terms, we see at least in embryo a movement to require this sort of cultural dispossession from the immigrant communities that, willfully or otherwise, incubate our enemies—we are authorized to doubt the seriousness of those who seek to assuage us with invocations of assimilation.

- end of initial entry -

Edward D. writes:

Happy New Year, Mr. Auster.

I must say, however, that I don’t feel all that happy. I’m just shaking my head in disgust after having read the comments to Paul Cella’s article at Redstate.org and those on Rod Dreher’s blog about the Moslem clerics in Dallas. On Dreher’s page, I believe Franklin Evans (liberal relativist extraordinaire) stated that his mother was a Jew who fled Nazi Germany, and it just reminded me of your criticism of Jews who hold it as their mission, as Jews, to basically destroy this nation through their liberalism. But hardly better than him are Christian “conservatives” who look at Islam as comparable to Christianity. Reading at Redstate, I actually feel sick to my stomach—like I feel awaiting the results of a medical test. If people who are proud to be “Red Staters” are too blind to see the light, what are we going to do about those even further to the left? And if they can’t bring themselves to the right side on Moslems, how the heck are we supposed to deal with the Mestizos?

LA replies:

I agree that the many comments following Cella’s article are appalling, given that RedState.com is supposedly a conservative website. Their main drift is that Islam is not the problem, only a small minority within Islam is, that if we demand real assimilation from Muslims, that will only make otherwise assimilated Muslims turn extremist, and other idiocies of that nature, which Cella strives manfully to correct. However, I’m not discouraged by the comments, precisely because they do sound so stupid. These Red State people are at a kindergarten level of the issue. People who are engaged with the issue even a little bit more would sound different. I think even the commenters at Lucianne.com would be far better than the crop at Red State.

Come to think of it, I don’t remember ever seeing a readers’ discussion at Red State that impressed me. Every time someone has mentioned the commenters at Red State to me, it was to point out how liberal they are. So why go on paying attention to them? When we read a liberal publication, do we get bent out of shape by how liberal the liberals are? Maybe Red State, apart from contributors like Paul Cella, is a site that attracts basically liberal readers and should be seen as such.

So Happy New Year to you. Don’t let the idiots get you down. Truth will win.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 01, 2007 08:34 PM | Send