Multi-Culturalism Is A Bane To The Nation-State

Fire of Liberty
Mark Steyn has a good piece in Sunday's edition of the Chicago Sun Times on how the most recent terror plot in England is one of many problems that its citizens and government will confront as the nation continues to let multi-culturalism run amuck. Here's a brief sample of Steyn's wonderful piece:

Hence that statistic: Seven percent of British Muslims consider their primary identity to be British, 81 percent consider it to be Muslim. By comparison, in the most populous Muslim nation on the planet, 39 percent of Muslim Indonesians consider themselves Indonesian first, 36 percent consider themselves Muslim first. For more than four years now, I've been writing about a phenomenon I first encountered in the Muslim ghettoes of the Netherlands, Belgium and other European countries in the spring of 2002: Second- and third-generation European Muslims feel far more fiercely Islamic than their parents and grandparents.

That's the issue: Pan-Islamism is the profound challenge to conventional ideas of citizenship and nationhood. Of course, if you say that at the average Ivy League college, you'll get a big shrug: Modern multicultural man disdains to be bound by the nation state, too; he prides himself on being un citoyen du monde. The difference is that, for Western do-gooders, it's mostly a pose: They may occasionally swing by some Third World basket-case and condescend to the natives, but for the most part the multiculti set have no wish to live anywhere but an advanced Western democracy. It's a quintessential piece of leftie humbug. They may think globally, but they don't act on it.

The pan-Islamists do act. When they hold hands and sing "We Are The World," they mean it. And we're being very complacent if we think they only take over the husks of "failed states" like Afghanistan, Somalia and Lebanon. The Islamists are very good at using the principal features of the modern multicultural democracy -- legalisms, victimology -- to their own advantage. The United Kingdom is, relatively speaking, a non-failed state, but at a certain level Her Majesty's government shares the same problem as their opposite numbers in Beirut: They don't quite dare to move against the pan-Islamists and they have no idea what possible strategy would enable them to do so.

Here's hoping that a lot more liberal democracies(Canada, Australia, US) look at what has conspired in England and shy away from the mantra of "multi-culturalism" which has been all the rage of late. It's alright for people to want to celebrate their culture and ancestry but they also have to realize that becoming a citizen of a state and accepting the language, laws, and culture of their new home is a far greater priority and a necessity for their own future and the sake of their nation. You'll never achieve a proper functioning society/nation if everyone goes their own way and creates their own mini-state within their government standing by and promoting this for the sake of "multi-culturalism."

*If you want to learn more about the dangers of multi-culturalism, the failure of individuals(Muslims in this instance) to assimilate to their new nations, and their government's feckless response to this problem, then I highly recommend you check out the following books:

Londonistan by Melanie Phillips

Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's, Too by Claire Berlinski

While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within by Bruce Bawer