The loony left's assault on culture

Liberal fears realized: Boston Marathon terrorists were foreign-born Muslims motivated by Islam

Police are on the hunt for the second living Boston Marathon terror suspect after a shootout that left one policeman dead along with one of the pair of brothers believed to have carried out the bombings.

In a realized nightmare scenario for cultural-relativists, the suspects are apparently motivated by Islamist ideology.

They arrived as refugees from the war in Chechnya, where Muslim separatists are in a fight against the Russian Federation, in which brutal tactics and terror are routine facets of the conflict.

But why take it out against innocents at the Boston Marathon? Because for Islamists, America, The Great Satan, is the enemy of Allah.

On the surface, the Tsamaev brothers should have been exemplary immigrants. Tamerlan, who died in the shootout,  was a Golden Gloves winner with a beautiful American girlfriend; his younger brother Dzhokhar was the recipient of a scholarship in 2011 to pursue higher education.

But the elder Tamerlan had a keen interest in the form of Islam that despises the west and all it stands for, as can be seen by his statements and the types of videos he favored on his YouTube channel.

The hypocrisy of cultural relativists regarding this tragedy has already become apparent. They have already tried to portray much of the concern as "Islamophobia" and bigotry. That would be true if the perpetrators happened to be Muslims motivated by a hatred of high taxes, or that they just find marathoners irritating. But all indications are that the motive was Islamist ideology and to bury one's head in the sane to ignore that is the same as asking for more such attacks.

In the coming days and weeks, there will be passionate arguments about what this all means. The usual suspects from all sides will be making familiar arguments. Cultural relativists will say these are  anomalies who in no way reflect the feelings of Muslims or represent Islam. On the other side, xenophobes and anti-Islam activists will use this as further proof of the allegedly monstrous nature of a tribal, desert religion which is incompatible with modernity and will call for a halt to all Muslim immigration.

And as usual, the best course lies somewhere in between.

Most Muslims are appalled at this development and despise terror of the kind perpetrated in Boston this week.

But Islam is a religion that has not undergone a reformation, and its preachers frequently adulate Jihad and violence against infidels. What makes maters worse is that some Muslim leaders lie outright about the type of preaching that goes on in many mosques. Obfuscation by groups like CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relation) with their My Jihad campaign designed to soft-peddle a pillar of Islamic faith that directs followers to kill in the name of their religion.

So how to reconcile western democracies with a majority of Muslims who are personally moderate, honest and reasonable with a religion which frequently manifests as viciously murderous?

It doesn't appear that anyone has yet come up with a working solution to this dilemma. While Muslim immigrants integrate well, many Muslim do not. They isolate themselves from the culture of their adopted homelands and encourage their co-religionists to do the same.

And for this, the real blame lies with mushy-headed, politically correct, multicultural western governments that do everything they can to facilitate Islamist isolation through "accommodation"  policies. Making matters worse, politicians covetous of ethnic votes will even kow-tow to Islamists who extol Jihad.

The fists step is for our leaders to start acting like leaders and tell the truth. It's not just terror that needs to be condemned but Islamism and what goes on in mosques that breeds a hatred that results in shredded flesh on our streets.

We should continue to offer the benefits of western society to those who come here to be a part of it. But that comes with a significant caveat. We must also need to make sure that immigrants come here to be like us, and not to make us like them. Or to kill us when they can't. If that means curtailing immigration from lands where our culture and beliefs are reviled, then it is something we should consider as a way of avoiding conflict. Because fueling the causes for conflict only increases the likelihood of more of them.

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This video was one favored by Boston Marathon terror suspect Tamerlan Tsamaev:



More on the Islamic preacher admired by Tsamaev

Is London, Ontario becoming Canada's Mecca for terrorists?

al Starzeera's resident Islamist apologist wants police to stop "hounding" the breeding grounds for terrorism. Haroon Siddiqui is correct that most tips police and CSIS receive about terrorist plots do come from fellow Muslims. Most Canadian Muslims are appalled by terrorism. But Siddiqui seems to have cognitive dissonance in recognizing that the reason those tips come from Muslims is because terrorism is being planned by other Muslims.

And it is in the Mosques, with the hateful preaching that goes on in many of them, where the seeds of that murderous violence is planted.

Blogwrath among the Khadrites

From experience, I warned Blogwrath that a night with the asinine moral and cultural relativists who advocate for convicted terrorist Omar Khadr would be inane and boring.

An apology is owed.

I grossly understated the risks. Sorry Blogwrath. I should have warned you enduring the tedium of a Rick Salutin lecture falls somewhere between water-boarding and having your fingernails pulled in terms of cruel and unusual punishment.

The National Post`s Jonathan Kay wrote about Salutin before the latter was dismissed from the Globe and Mail, ``After 17 years as a Globe columnist, one suspects, Salutin apparently has gotten to the stage where he simply throws a bunch of buzz phrases in the air — imperialism, Guantanamo, oil, Omar Khadr, "honest broker" — and lets his readers write their own column``

Evidently not much has changed.  The rest of the panel didn`t sound any more interesting, but Blogwrath`s colorful account is excellent and will make you grateful he attended on your behalf. 

Salman Rushdie: Multiculturalism "has decayed to something much less than multiculturalism; which is cultural relativism"

A fascinating discussion between Salman Rushdie and Irshad Manji:

Why is the Toronto District School Board promoting a fixation on race?

In contrast to prevalent attitudes of just a couple of generations ago, no one now could express the idea that a person should be judged on the basis of their skin color or ethnicity without annihilating their credibility.  While racism continues to be a pernicious blight in some quarters, most of us understand that viewing people within the framework as members of a racial group rather than simply as individuals is an unintelligent misconception that has been responsible for some of the worst crimes and tragedies of the last 200 years. 

Unfortunately, that lesson appears to be lost on the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), which, at great taxpayer expense, is importing an American author who believes we do not focus enough on race, to be the keynote speaker at an upcoming teachers’ conference.  

Tim Wise is one of the confirmed speakers at the TDSB’s Equity in Education conference to be held in May, who in his book Color Blind, argues that in order to combat racism, we need ..more racism! 

Sadly, that kind of destructive, irrational methodology is completely in line with the type of thinking that saturates educational approaches in Ontario.

Wise and his followers apparently believe that it is completely acceptable to discriminate against one group of people based on nothing other than their skin color. He is a purveyor of “white privilege”  and whiteness theories that infect Equity programs and do nothing but perpetuate racism. Because it follows to reason that as long as you can stigmatize one group because of their pigmentation, regardless of the motive, racism is an acceptable value.

Wise is right about one thing. He has pointed out that there’s no such thing as a “White race” or for that matter a “Black race”; a concept that is merely a construct and outgrowth of colonial slavery.  But rather than refute discrimination on the basis of pigmentation, which should have no more importance than hair or eye color, Wise makes a good living as an apostle in the anti-racism industry, which requires the perpetuation of racism and race-based policies for Equity Studies teachers and consultants to continue to rake in cash. And they make easy prey of the gullible, obtuse leadership at the TDSB which appears willing to try out any faddish social experiment, using your children as its lab rats. 

Racists are idiots and when racism manifests itself, those who practice it should be identified, ostracised and ridiculed. Skin color and ethnicity have nothing to do with a person’s intellectual abilities or moral behaviour. Culture however does affect people’s behaviour and judgement. Skin color doesn’t make a person violent, but the culture of a certain tropical island, for example, may implicitly teach violence and perpetuate it among adherents to that culture. Ethnicity doesn’t make a person misogynistic, but the culture of certain Middle Eastern countries teach that women are of a lesser value than men, and as long as that culture is allowed to be revered, the subjugation of women will continue among many who are raised with such beliefs. 

In multicultural Canada, which has enshrined a facile cultural relativism that says that all cultures are equally valid, it’s forbidden to condemn another culture or say that Canadian values are superior. That sort of shallow thinking paradoxically leads to racism, because when we see differences in people’s behaviour, and we are forbidden from attributing it to culture, other answers are sought. And when operating from the false premise that discounts culture, consciously or not, race is sometimes the erroneous conclusion that some people draw. 

How else to explain the reasoning behind Toronto’s Afro-centric schools, which sees students' problems in skin color rather than culture? Geoffrey Canada, who was featured in the documentary Waiting for Superman (and who, despite his name, is unfortunately not Canadian), was able to accomplish improved performance for underprivileged students in urban African American neighbourhoods with Charter Schools that emphasized discipline and performance in core subjects, not segregation by pigmentation.

Despite preposterous TDSB edicts that say only white people can be racist, racism is not the sole province of any one group.  When looking at the make-up of Equity Studies programs, or as is more strikingly evidenced by the like minded characters in the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, their homogeneous racial composition suggests that people who believe in such things don’t know many people who aren’t Caucasian, and are easy victims for the myths that the “white privilege” snake oil salesmen are selling. 

US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” The sooner the TDSB absorbs that simple lesson instead of spreading Tim Wise’s, the sooner we can move to being a society that recognizes individuals as individuals instead of stereotypes.

h/t Sassy Wire

UPDATE: Here's how things went down at the FUTURES conference where Wise spoke

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