James, your question “What morons have the West turned into that they simply turn a blind eye to such things in the name of keeping up appearances and being dedicated to the idea that all cultures are in fact the opposite of what they actually do?” deserves a fairly careful answer. Besides the merely idiotic multi-culti religion of the sincere useful-idiot liberals who live to be thought of as fair to everyone but their own culture and conservatives, plus the calculations of the stealthy hard left which truly believes of Islam that the idea that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” applies in their effort to bring down truly liberal market economy capitalism, there is another less obvious but tremendously influential factor causing this slide into Sharia acceptance, anti-Semitism and a poor, uneducated, unassimilated Latin-dominated American Southwest.
That factor is what Mark Steyn might call the principle that demography is destiny. The wages of the 1960′s – anti-male work-centered feminism, the “sexual revolution,” the idea that everyone needs at least an extended stay in academia to be truly successful, left wing notions of egalitarianism, group victimhood, socialism-by-any-other-name and other various utopian schemes, calculated ignorance of real world economics and history – all conspired in their own ways to create our current leviathan welfare state and the lack of future populations to support it. The same has been true in Europe, only more so and faster.
When Germans and French, Swedes, Danes, Spaniards and even British looked at their population growth and saw, to their horror, way too few future taxpayers to support the post WWII generation’s promised cradle-to-grave social welfare benefits, they frantically looked to Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan and North Africa, where they were having the opposite problem – too many people being born. A mostly unstated but very well understood deal was struck. Immigration from these Muslim territories was encouraged; these would be the workers who would fill the tax coffers of the European welfare state, despite the native Europeans’ stubborn refusal to reproduce at a rate sufficient to even replace themselves, much less grow their populations. Not very much thought was given to what would happen when these tribal people, with very strong ties to their homelands and almost no desire to fully assimilate into their host country culture, stayed, reproduced at the same very high rates as they had in their native lands and decided that they would not abide by many of their hosts traditions, mores, or even laws, and that they would, in fact, come to feel that they were entitled to do quite the opposite – change all of those things to resemble those they left behind and had escaped from in their emigration to their new European homes. What choice does this now leave Europeans with? When the most popular surname to newborn babies in London, England is Mohammed, just exactly what can ethnic English people do who still believe in their own political culture – free speech, the right to criticize religious intolerance and even religion itself, equal rights for women, equal rights for homosexuals and other less popular minorities, and no special treatment under the law or usurpation of the established law to suit one particular ethnic group? They cowardly huddle under the label of mealy-mouthed multi-culturalism, while meekly accepting their own defenestration and the slow cumulative assertion of dhimmitude, lest the whole welfare state house of cards come tumbling down in catastrophic ruin. Even now, as they are anyway running short of money to feed the maw of the state, and this ruination is happening despite their cultural surrender to Islamic prejudice and its concomitant anti-Semitic tropes, they still cannot bring themselves to fully stand up for the old principles which had led them to all of the successes they had ever garnered as advanced cultures and economies.
As far as someone like the German Benz is concerned, this is merely evidence the age-old progression of tragedy to farce to possible tragedy again, as he apparently prepares the field for some of that good old-timey German Holocaust-enabling anti-Semitic academic theorizing, now so fashionable among the toniest precincts of leftwing (what else is there?) academia all over the Western world. The man’s reasoning lies somewhere between laughably bad and obviously craven; except to condemn the possible effects of his Orwellian pronouncements, he should merely be ignored if at all possible.
This is Europe now. If we do nothing but accept the slow accretion of our own welfare state, the same socialist claptrap peddled by our new would-be community organizing masters, and the fearful, even cowardly, admonitions to avert our eyes at Islamist demands and lawless, borderless immigration from Mexico, we will soon be joining Europe in the same boat. We must start now to battle the demands for us to accept all cultures as equal and to surrender our own liberties and freedoms to calm the fires of those who do not want to share our ideals.
We can welcome all the fine Muslims, Mexicans and whatever other peoples want to immigrate to our great country, if they come here legally and agree to be bound by our culture, our laws, our customs, and we are not afraid to make that demand. People who come here should be able to have pride in their own heritage, but not be able to force the unworkable pathologies of their former lands upon the very place to which they have fled to escape them. We would not be evil or prejudiced to protect our laws, mores and culture, only confident and proud of upholding the best, most free and successful political and economic culture ever to have so far existed on this earth.
We need to shrink the State and reverse its ever-growing demands upon our labor and individual behavior, maintain control of our borders, defend our culture, our unique traditions of individual liberty and our constitution. Looking forward to 2012!
