Is Islam the only problematic aspect of non-Western immigration?

Tommy writes:

In removing a post from his website, Robert Spencer implies once again that race and culture are completely extricable. I object to the fact that Spencer attempts time and again to link issues that are probably best explained as consequences of allowing low IQ, opportunistic immigrants into society to the specter of Islamic supremacism. He works hard to take people’s eyes off the ball.

To the detriment of both truth and action, Spencer and his ilk will strain to make those connections. For example, the radical Islamic angle to the Paris riots is, at most, a side-story. It’s well known that most of the “youths” weren’t devout mosque-attending Muslims—they were the rootless, amoral children of unintelligent Third World immigrants raised in a self-hating Western society. There is a significant problem that France is having with immigrants from the Mahgreb and West Africa and that problem is racial. But to listen to people like Robert Spencer, Hugh Fitzgerald, and Charles Johnson is to believe that all France (and Europe and America) has to do is fight the Islamic scourge and everything will someday be dandy in the Paris suburbs.

The comments in Spencer’s response are quite humorous. Probably the best one comes from this fellow:

Spencer is right on target. Identity-based supremacism as an ideology is inimical to the natural law of equality everywhere, whether it is racial supremacists or Islamic supremacists.

LA replies:

A first principle of rational thought is that each issue needs to be dealt with in its own terms. One-issue writers, such as Spencer, cannot do that. Since the only issue Spencer cares about is Islam, when it comes to any other cultural/demographic threat to the West, either he will not see it, or, as in the linked article, he will denounce as “race-supremacists” those who do see it.

To describe as race-supremacists all people who are concerned about the continuation of their ethnic/racial nation and culture, or of the white-majority character of Western society as a whole, is a quintessentially liberal and tyrannical thing to do. It is saying that there is no moral basis on which people can resist the swamping and transformaton of their land by other peoples—unless (Spencer’s single exception to the principle of non-discrimination) those other peoples are Muslim. By Spencer’s thinking, if you want your people, and the culture and nation that are a product of it, to go on existing, that means that you see your people as “superior” to others, which is racist. And what is racist is morally evil. So, if Englishmen don’t want England to become a nonwhite country, they are evil. If Frenchmen don’t want France to become a nonwhite country, they are evil. Spencer’s approach makes the protection of the existence of a distinct people evil, and thus makes the very existence of that people evil. To say that a man has no right to protect his life, is the same as saying that he has no right to his life. The same applies to nations and cultures.

This is the liberal principle of non-discrimination, by which no particular culture is allowed to continue to exist—with the one exception, in Spencer’s case, that non-Islamic cultures are allowed to continue to exist, as non-Islamic cultures. But insofar as they are white, or Anglo-Celtic, or Dutch, or Polish, they are not allowed to continue to exist, because that is race supremacism which is evil.

Spencer says one correct thing, that the Islam problem is not a racial problem. The Islam problem is the Islam problem. It is sui generis. This by the way shows the inadequacy of another one-issue thinker, Steve Sailer, who looks at everything including Islam through the prism of biology and refuses to consider the doctrines and history of Islam. For Sailer, Islam is a problem because many Muslims practice cousin marriages, which is dysgenic and produces a closed tribal mentality. These are valid points. But Islam is much more than that, and it doesn’t come within Sailer’s ken.

What then is the answer? Each issue must be understood in terms appropriate to itself. In practice this means that we need to approach the Islam problem as a distinct issue from the general problem of unassimilable immigration. Of course there is overlap between the two problem, as you point out. But Islam is such a unique and deadly threat that it must be opposed as Islam, not just as a generically unsssimilable culture. For example, Islam is commanded by its god to subject all non-Muslims to sharia law and thus to destroy our society. Therefore, the case for stopping and reversing Muslim immigration is clear—it’s a matter of life and death. At the same time, I also believe that Hispanic, East Asian, Caribbean and African immigration to the U.S. should be stopped or at least drastically reduced. But the arguments for doing so are different than in the case of Islam. Filipinos and Guatemalans are not followers of a political religion that commands our subjugation and destruction. The reasons for stopping those groups from immigrating are pressing, but they are different from the reasons for stopping the immigration of Muslims.

At the same time, the immigration of both Muslims and of other culturally/racially unassimilable groups come under a single rubric—unassimilable immigration that threatens the identity, culture, and existence of the West. So we need to look at the threat to the West as a whole, and we also need to understand and respond appropriately to the particular threats within that larger threat.

I agree with you that many of the problems associated with Muslim immigrants are not Islamic problems per se, but racial/cultural problems, and that we should be free to talk about them. But, again, the case for stopping and reversing Muslim immigration is so much more urgent than the case for stopping the immigration of low IQ Third-Worlders generally, that I think we would have more success in stopping the immigration of the people you’re concerned about if we spoke about them as Muslims than if we spoke about them as low-IQ or otherwise culturally unassimilable nonwhites.

As for the Jihad Watch commenter you quote, he says that defenders of the historic Western peoples are as inimical and dangerous as Muslims. There you see the radical liberal nature of the prevailing mindset at Spencer’s website. Of course, in this respect, Jihad Watch is no different from the prevailing liberal ideology of America and the West as a whole.

LA continues:

For more insights into Robert Spencer’s orthodox liberal anti-racism which would preclude any practical defense of Europe from being engulfed by Third-World peoples, see my article, “Spencer: ally of Charles Johnson.”

—end of initial entry—

Tommy replies:

Thanks for the reply.

I agree that Islam is a unique threat and I don’t mind Spencer’s focus on Islam. I appreciate both the work of Spencer and Sailer in their respective domains. Spencer is better informed than any other individual we have on the subject of Islam. It is when such thinkers cannot admit to an explanation outside of their fields of interest that they become obnoxious. Sailer has at least been more honest in this regard. He has stated that he simply prefers to comment on the biological because that is where his interests lie and so few others are willing to comment on the topic. [LA replies: Fair enough. I’m glad to hear that he has at least addressed the issue of why he hasn’t addressed the issue.] I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I think there may be some truth to the problems inherent to endogamous tribal cultures, but I also suspect we would witness plenty of jihadism we were to invade a Muslim nation like Indonesia where endogamy is rare.

My feeling is that culture is important, but it cannot be entirely separated from race. Race defines limits to culture and produces tendencies toward default behavior of individuals in any given culture.

LA replies:

Well put. And that’s why any ideology that says that race is off the table, it cannot be discussed, and you’re a bad person if you discuss it, is as anti-reality as any other left-wing or utopian ideology.

September 14

Ralph P. writes:

I agree with your assessment that Islam as a threat of a specific nature should be separated out from the general problem of Third-World colonization, but ultimately it is a matter of degree not kind. Mexicans, for example, may not have a religious motive sanctioned by a scripture, but as an irridentist movement they pose an equal danger to us. It’s just a different kind, more easily dismissed by Spencer. In the mind of the typical Third-Worlder it all comes down to territory, mindless pride and the promise of unlimited consumption. In this I have seen no difference between the average Muslim, and the average Asian/African/Latin American.

Fortunately, a similar conflation seem to occur in the minds of whites concerning their attitudes toward non-whites. In particular, working-class whites rightly do not care to make any fussy distinctions. Since I come from such a background and I know and speak to people all the time, I can attest to this. I can also attest to the attitudes of the non-whites, since for ten years I lived in a colonized neighborhood and saw up close what they are like. Muslims and Mexicans glower at you in the street in pretty much the same way.

The fussy distinctions are necessary, of course. But only up until their limit, which is to influence policy coming from the top. I find reading Spencer, Steyn et. al. endlessly frustrating because of the constant misapplication of analyses without regard for factors that most of us can see just walking in our old neighborhoods. As such they are useless to the conversation, even at the fussy distinction level, and absolutely counterproductive when it comes to the actual defense of the Western world, “conservative” bonafides notwithstanding. Honestly, where are these guys really coming from?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 13, 2008 06:39 PM | Send