Muslims Will Not Be Melted

From Jihad Watch:

Muslims will not be "Melted"


Robert Spencer picked up a provocative column by Kevin Myers yesterday, whose thesis is "there is no society that has received large numbers of Muslims that has not soon been confronted by an Islamic defiance of existing societal norms." This is an indisputable fact. Muslims are the real "unmeltable ethnics," to lift a term used by Michael Novak to describe Catholic immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and Eastern Europe to the United States. Novak's use of the term in the late 1960s was, as history has proved, mere wishful thinking. These ethnic Catholics have indeed melted; the political views and social attitudes of these groups have changed with chameleon speed--to a degree that distresses their co-religionists like me and the leaders of their Church. Ted Kennedy's ideology and personal priorities were in fact indistinguishable from those of his liberal WASP and Jewish classmates at Harvard. Mario (and now Andrew) Cuomo did not bring into New York politics the mores of their ethnic subcultures; rather, they served as frontmen for promoting the "mainstream" views of liberal elites within the communities they had come from. The same can be said for Joseph Biden, Nancy Pelosi... the list goes on and on.



The "melting" to which these Catholics succumbed was far too extreme--especially since they assimilated to elites whose ideology was degenerate and self-destructive. (Remember that it was Teddy Kennedy who wrote and sponsored the 1965 immigration "reform" which opened the gates to millions of Muslim immigrants, since his bill was skewed not toward accepting migrants with skills and talents beneficial to the nation, but rather toward taking in large extended families in the name of "family reunification.") Indeed, one of the few things that Irish immigrants never surrendered was their nourished sense of grievance and exclusion, which led too many of them to embrace the political Left, to see themselves (even once they'd gone to Harvard and joined the upper middle class) as eternal victims, who should mindlessly side with other "victim" groups against the great enemy: the tolerant Protestant America which had admitted their desperate ancestors.



But there were subtler ways in which the melting of Catholics proved beneficial both for America and for the Church; the victory at Vatican II of John Courtenay Murray's ideas on religious liberty marked a historic advance for the cause of freedom in the West, as the largest Christian church renounced forever the use of political coercion in religion. The only reason the Vatican today can speak without blushing about the abuse of religious minorities in Pakistan and Iraq is because it no longer makes room for the repression of Protestants in Columbia and the Philippines.



Another group that proved remarkably "meltable" in America were the German immigrants. This group, which poured into America beginning in 1848 in the wake of failed revolutions across the still disunited German nation, was composed largely of prosperous farmers and educated tradesmen. Upon arrival, the Germans set about creating a vast network of community organizations--charities, music societies, schools, and civic improvement groups that became major social forces in the American Midwest. As Allan Carlson documents in his fascinating study The American Way, these German-American organizations at once promoted ethnic pride and dogged American patriotism. When World War I erupted, few among these groups proved disloyal to their new country; nevertheless, a frightened American mainstream turned against them. The teaching of the German language was outlawed in many states, and harmless groups like German singing societies were suddenly under suspicion. How did the Germans react? Mostly they dissolved their organizations, eager to dispel the fears of their new countrymen. Anti-German hysteria was one of the causes of Prohibition, which closed down the beer halls and breweries German-Americans frequented, along with the wineries and taverns preferred by other unruly ethnic groups like the Irish and Italians. The network of German civic groups never recovered, and within 15 years their old Vaterland was ruled by a regime infinitely more evil and aggressive than Kaiser Wilhelm's. As World War II approached, very few German-Americans threw in their lot with the loathsome anti-Semites of the German-American Bund; most were grateful that their ancestors had found a land of prosperity and freedom. Likewise, Mussolini's attempts to mobilize Italian-Americans to support his brutal, farcical fascist regime proved largely futile. If any group let the politics of the Old Country influence them unduly, it was Irish-Americans, whose hostility to Great Britain led many to sympathize with the Jew-baiting isolationism of Fr. Coughlin. But even this group quickly rallied around the flag in the wake of Pearl Harbor.



One reason for the loyalty these groups displayed was the much more powerful assimilationist force exerted by a still self-confident Anglo-American mainstream--which had not yet been infected by the virus of multiculturalism. Migrants in the early 20th century willingly took part in "Americanization" courses offered by their churches and employers. (Can you imagine mosques offering such courses in Detroit or New York City in our day?) In other places where these groups were in the minority, they did not show nearly the same malleability; Italians in Yugoslav Istria and Germans in the Sudetenland acted much more like Muslims in modern America; they actively engaged in separatist, identity politics, and in many cases colluded with the government of their "fatherland" to foment sedition. That is how Muslims act today--like the Sudeten Germans who conspired with Adolf Hitler. Those who renounce such collusion with foreign mullahs and terrorists are either lying, or else they're backing away from essential tenets of their faith. If the latter, then good for them! But is it safe to bet that millions of their co-religionists will follow in their footsteps? Where is the mighty Muslim-American heresy of "Americanism," which renounces sharia and insists that even Saudis accept the separation of mosque and state? If it's out there, I haven't heard about it.



This comparison of immigrant experiences tells us that context matters; migrant groups that face, as the price of their ongoing presence in a country, enormous pressure from a healthy dominant culture to conform, will generally do so--or they will go home. No doubt, a more self-assertive American mainstream would do something to coax individual peaceful Muslims to weaken their sense of separateness and ghetto identity. That is why foes of jihad in the West should align themselves with patriotic and even nationalistic movements, to help shore up the immune systems of the relevant countries against the claims of aggressive, self-seeking aliens.



Would this be enough to render Muslim migrants harmless, to make it safe for Western countries to accept more immigrants from Islamic countries? The answer is no. Religious identity is far more powerful than ethnic memories carried across the seas. The missionary efforts of cash-swamped Saudi Arabia to stoke Wahabi orthodoxy in mosques around the world are far more effective and insidious than the amateurish attempts of German or Italian fascist spies to suborn the loyalties of migrants in America. What is more, there was nothing essentially "Nazi" in German identity, or intrinsically fascist about being Italian. Each was a recent totalitarian tumor on the body of a once-healthy country and culture.



Islam, on the other hand, is nonsense without sharia--akin to Catholicism without the seven sacraments, or a Judaism that honored the god Ganesh. Asking knowledgeable Muslims to renounce intolerance and supremacism amounts to demanding that they apostasize. Unlike the Mormons, who renounced polygamy in return for political tolerance, Islam has no central authority which could accept and impose religious revisions of this profundity. Nor are the foreign schools of Islamic jurisprudence remotely likely to make any such concessions. Why should they bother, when Western countries lull themselves to sleep with a chorus of platitudes, and pretend that all human beings are interchangeable consumers, equally prone to abandon their ancestral faiths when faced with shopping malls, iPads, and Hollywood?



All of which argues that Islamic immigrants are, and should be, unwelcome in Western countries. If we cannot fashion policies that keep them out in particular (and this would prove devilishly hard) then civilizational patriots have no other choice: We must oppose immigration in general, and keep the total number of migrants accepted to a minimum. We must fight "diversity" initiatives and multicultural policies that weaken the engines of assimilation and undermine national pride. Faced with an aggressive pathogen like Islam, we must build up our civic immune systems. The price might be high, but the alternative is death.

Posted by Roland Shirk on January 6, 2011 10:24 PM