Writing about the problem of assimilating illegal immigrants earlier this year I said:
…this is exactly what assimilation demands – the cutting of ties with the former mother country and the leaving behind of other loyalties. Immigrants who come to this country and then actively seek to change the laws, values, and norms of their new host country are not participating in that country. Instead, they are subverting it.
Now someone important – William F. Buckley – has come to the same conclusion. More importantly he’s written a column about it that, unlike the Opus cartons, could not be censored. With regard to the British way of life Buckley writes:
But the threat to it is not, this time around, in the shape of a continental army threatening invasion or Nazi bombers darkening the sky. The threat now is the Muslim immigration. There are fewer Muslims in Britain than in France — 2 million — but that’s still a lot. For many years Britain faced the problem of its commitment to members of its empire: Any citizen could leave Malaysia or Pakistan or India or Jamaica and simply show up, declaring himself a British resident. That problem was hotly debated in the days of Enoch Powell, when he insisted, departing England for a constituency in Northern Ireland, that some limits had to be observed or the British way of life would disappear.
The crisis is focusing now on the schools. The Muslim community has demanded its own schools. Wherein what, exactly, will be taught?
There are many interpreters of the true meaning of the commandments of the Quran. But among them are men and women who are prepared to end their own lives for the satisfaction of defying the British way of life. Four such persons, in the summer of 2005, attached themselves to bombs and blew up handy British targets, including three Underground trains.
What one got then from assorted imams, and continues to get now, is reverent disapprovals of incidental killings as contrary to the faith. But in the name of jihad — holy war — such homilies against murder and arson are satellized by the dominant commands of the Quran to make war against infidels.
Infidels = non-muslims, natch.
Buckley concludes:
Still, when the United States was seriously inconvenienced by our commitment to freedom of religion, we found means to handle Mormon polygamy. All the world waits to see how Parliament handles this threat to the British way of life.
In principle the comparison of Muslims to Mormons may be something of a parallel. However, it has been quite a long time indeed since Mormons partook of any religiously-oriented killing. In fact, the number of people killed by Mormon radicals in all of their history is probably far less than were killed by Islamic terrorists in Iraq last week alone.
But Buckley’s main point is quite right. The entire world, excepting those whose heads are firmly buried in the sand, is watching Britain and the rest of Europe to see how these democracies will deal with the threat that is embedded within them.
“No more” sounds like a good place to start.
Cross-posted at The Van Der Galiën Gazette.