Muslims, Immigration, China, Etc.

Reader Charles Steele sent me this link to an article written by someone named Helen Dale (who seems to have problems with plagiarism, but never mind). In her article she makes a number of points that I found interesting and to some extent reassuring.

(1) She suggests that Muslim countries are not raising much of a fuss about the Chinese treatment of Uighurs because they know that China would obliterate them if they needed to. Yes, exactly. She doesn’t say it, but Muslims have been raising a fuss here in the West because they know that we won’t obliterate them. We won’t hit back at all, or at least we will hit back very little. This is because of the cultural revolution of the 1960s; our will has been weakened. Plus, we “needed” their oil. That is, our environmentalists insisted on curtailing our ability to drill for our own oil, so we had to fight wars in the Middle East to keep their oil coming our way. Things are changing as fracking has made us much less dependent on them. Our wills, however, are still very weak because so many of our elites are clueless, and they have more control over immigration and responses to terrorism than the rest of us do.

(2) She mentions that both Britain and Australia have been happy to welcome immigrants from Hong Kong, because they are the sort of immigrants that both countries want. I hadn’t known this.

(3) “Last month, I found myself unable to convince a single gay friend to sign a petition opposing China’s Uyghur genocide (‘Muslims are all take and no give’ was the most common response).” It’s unclear if she’s talking about Britain or Australia, but maybe things are changing. It never made any sense for either feminists or gays to support reactionary Muslims who obviously hated them.

(4) “The spectacle of Islamic countries berating Emmanuel Macron and France while not raising a whimper about China is now fuel for endless black humour.” Heh.

(5) “It’s people talking to each other in private and quietly but inexorably turning their backs on an entire religion and, more importantly, its adherents. ‘Let the Chinese do them over’ is a common sentiment.” I’ve seen a lot of that here, but I assume it’s just people on the right. Is this spreading to the left?

(6) Apparently the French believe that the state is allowed to interfere in people’s lives in order to achieve what it believes is an objective good. With respect to religion, this entails that it “is simply banished from the public square.” By contrast, here in America rabid secularists fooled me. They were adamant that Christmas trees be banished from the town square, so I assumed they would treat Muslims the same way. But instead they seem to have no problems with Muslims invading that same area. And secularists in Europe seemed to think the same way. But maybe all that is changing.

(7) She quotes a French friend: “It’s going to be a shock for American leftists who think France is singling out Muslims for particularly bad treatment when they open a history book for the first time and find out what the republic did to Catholics.” I’ve got news for that French friend. Our leftists will never open any history books that talk about such things. They will simply write their own history books based on what they think happened, and what the republic did to Catholics won’t be in them. It will be all about how racist the French are.

(8) Macron’s government has deported 231 “radicalised foreigners.” I hadn’t known, but good. Deportations are what is needed. This is what I wanted back in 1989 after the fatwa against Salman Rushdie was issued. She also writes:

Deconstructing the community networks protecting and nurturing the views that give rise to terrorism is one of the better options we have available to us. When you have poison in a wound, you draw it. When you have people determined to provoke conflict between groups, you should expel them. Deportations are a legitimate and necessary tool for dealing with networks of extremists. [my emphasis]

Yup. Exactly.

(9) There are very few Islamists in Australia because they have no interest in importing them. The only ones they have are from an earlier period, all from Lebanon, apparently, before Australia set up a rational immigration system. It is called “points-based,” with the idea being that not anyone can come in, but that the country gets to restrict who can come in based on whether they can speak the language, have a certain level of education, have the right job skills, and so on. All of these are assigned points, and those with too few points don’t get to come in. Unfortunately, our elites would think such a system to be horribly racist.

(10) “And it is Chinese friends who’ve argued France is the only European country defending the Enlightenment: ‘something all of you should be doing.’” Exactly. I have always thought that Enlightenment values pushed us to reject traditionalist-oriented religion, not just of Christianity, but of any religion. Sure, we want to be tolerant and accepting of the “Other,” but accepting the Other shouldn’t be a suicide pact. If I accept most of those who count as the Other, why must I accept all lest I be thought of as a xenophobe? If I accept most, that should be enough. I should be allowed to pick and choose which ones I like, and if certain Others seem likely to oppress me or even kill me, I am well within my rights to hate them and to want to keep them out.

(11) “The Chinese word for ‘wokies’ (báizu) is brutally uncomplimentary in a way even an infantilising English diminutive is not.” If only our woke idiots here in America could feel their scorn.

(12) “The alternative to Emmanuel Macron’s approach (or Australia’s even harsher policies) is to accept the end of liberalism.” This is why I’ve said that we are faced with either Islamo-fascism or ordinary fascism, since everywhere in the West the only people resisting Islamo-fascism have been those on the far right. When you give people the choice between two types of fascism, don’t be surprised if they choose fascism.

(13) “People will not stand to see their cathedrals burned, their teachers beheaded, and their journalists massacred rather than accept that failures of integration require active intervention.” Hmm. I think I understand what she’s trying to say here, though I think a word is missing or something. I think she’s trying to say that things have gotten to the point where people are not interested in the old system of multiculturalism, in which failures of integration were ignored. They want active intervention. If that is what she is trying to say, then she should have said “... do not require active intervention.” Taken as it stands, it might mean that people do not want even active intervention to deal with failures of integration. They just want them expelled. As I said, that is what it might mean. It just isn’t clear.

(14) “It’s not the public la France abandonnée from officials in thrall to what French journalist Anne-Elisabeth Moutet calls the ‘newly-Wokeified American quality press’ or what ordinary Frenchmen in the street dismiss as la presse anglo-saxonne.” Sorry, I really don’t understand this sentence.

(15) “on their uppers.” I have never heard this expression before. It means to be short of money, something I never would have guessed from the words used.

Anyway, the gist of the article seems to be that things are happening under the radar in France and maybe also Britain.

We shall see. Meanwhile, I’m waiting for a group of leftists to march to the Chinese embassy. If those who are so concerned about Islamophobia don’t care enough to do that, why should I care about the plight of the Uighurs?

Comments

[Charles N. Steele]

Regarding your point 14, I couldn’t make sense of it either. The linked article was interesting but didn’t help. But it made clear that “la Fance abandonnée” is the feeling in France that elites outside of France - e.g. officials of European states, the E.U., and the American mainstream media - are condemning France as “racist” for starting to get tough with Muslim terrorists.

I suspect we will soon be “les Américains abandonnés” if the crooked vote count stands and we complain about anything the left does.