A little while back, leaving the local “swimming hole” frequented by residents and summer tourists, I noticed a large group of dark-clad visitors sitting in a circle and solemnly keeping what appeared to be a meditative vigil. They had occupied a considerable space where others would normally pass on their way to one of the promontories leading to the river. They were obviously Muslims, probably an extended family, conspicuously observing the traditions of their native culture and, oblivious to their surroundings and the people who had to detour by an arduous route around them, preparing no doubt to face the Qiblah (direction to Mecca) and to devote themselves to prayer.
Just the other day, I had a similar experience. Since there are no facilities at the beach, swimmers often change out of their bathing suits into street clothes beside their cars, shielded by towels held by friends and intimates or strung between the open doors of their vehicles, an operation conducted in an atmosphere of courtesy defined by a mutual and studied disregard. I was assisting my wife in this delicate maneuver when three Muslim men emerged from the trail giving onto the parking lot. Soon they were trying to stare over and between the towels, mesmerized by the partially hidden lure of a woman in semi-undress. My wife had to enter the car and slide low into the front seat while I glared indignantly at the intruders. Then, as I was about to confront them — the odds were not in my favor, but so be it — they moved aside and, after a few moments, spread carpets on the grass margin a few yards away and ritually prostrated themselves in prayer — close enough that I had to be careful when backing the car out.
It was not violence, but it was a violation, a transgression of the norm, remarked by several others in the parking lot who were struck by so blatant an infringement of both common decency and shared space. These men clearly did not realize or, more likely, did not care that they were contravening the tacit agreement of reciprocal discretion that prevailed among us, whether friend or stranger. They were animated by a robust and incontestable sense of their own priority, a conviction of privilege that need not take into consideration the cultural usages and social expectations of those they had come to live among. The same goes for the band of votaries blocking a public route, heedless of the inconvenience caused.
Such behavior is patently different from the Muslim-inspired havoc and thuggery erupting in Canadian cities like Calgary, Toronto and Montreal, or in the municipal war zones of many European cities with sizeable Muslim populations. But it was nevertheless a visible presumption of specialness and of indifference to the conventions of ordinary civility.
Every immigrant group in this country has variously adapted to the heritage culture, integrating more or less seamlessly by the second generation. However, second-generation Muslims are increasingly being radicalized, some going off to fight with jihadist militias in the Middle East and Africa, others plotting terror attacks on the very country that has offered them freedom, health care, education and the opportunity to prosper.
The common denominator along this spectrum of cultural invasiveness is the sentiment of vested ascendancy and pre-eminence minus the obligation of having to earn them. It bespeaks the spirit of natural entitlement that goes hand in hand with Islam, and which is instinct throughout the Muslim holy book, in which the true believer is exalted as superior to all other people (see, e.g., Koran 3:110) and enjoined to conquer, enslave, tax and slay the kafir, or infidel, who rejects the dominion of the Prophet (see, e.g., Koran 4:89, 9:29, 33:50, 47:4, among numberless other ayat). The violence we have seen both everywhere in the Muslim world and everywhere immigrant Muslims reach a certain critical census in their host societies is the inevitable consequence of the inherent conviction of higher status and mandated predominance — even in comparatively innocuous situations like a ring of Muslims commandeering a public venue or three obtrusive men breaching without the slightest compunction or embarrassment a local standard of behavioral propriety.
“They feel entitled,” writes Daniel Greenfield, “that everything be done according to their cultural expectations.” Greenfield is referring to a group of Muslim asylum-seekers in the Italian hamlet of La Secca who have staged a demonstration, replete with flying furniture and slashed tires, to protest the cultural trauma of having to eat “monotonous” Italian food, a culinary insult of pasta with tomato sauce, bread and eggs, instead of being served the food of their own countries. A police official was not impressed. “There are thousands of Italians living in poverty and who aren’t even eating one meal a day, let alone two or three,” he said. The Muslim migrants were not impressed either; they demanded their due, a right pertaining to their faith and very being. Greenfield’s conclusion is apt: “They aren’t immigrating. They’re colonizing.” This is not only Italy’s problem. Think Norway, Sweden, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and the UK.
“They feel entitled,” writes Daniel Greenfield, “that everything be done according to their cultural expectations.” Greenfield is referring to a group of Muslim asylum-seekers in the Italian hamlet of La Secca who have staged a demonstration, replete with flying furniture and slashed tires, to protest the cultural trauma of having to eat “monotonous” Italian food, a culinary insult of pasta with tomato sauce, bread and eggs, instead of being served the food of their own countries. A police official was not impressed. “There are thousands of Italians living in poverty and who aren’t even eating one meal a day, let alone two or three,” he said. The Muslim migrants were not impressed either; they demanded their due, a right pertaining to their faith and very being. Greenfield’s conclusion is apt: “They aren’t immigrating. They’re colonizing.” This is not only Italy’s problem. Think Norway, Sweden, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and the UK.
How, some of us on this side of the Atlantic have begun to ask, have these people with their baggage of noisome and culturally vetted proclivities come to be among us? For years we have taken no notice, content to embrace the sedatives and platitudes of multiculturalism, until a moment comes when we are abruptly made aware and taken aback by an alien and unaccommodating presence, one that has been metastasizing for decades while we voluntarily turned a blind eye.
Even our officials in sensitive positions of power have surrendered their faculties of judgment and acuity to the subtle techniques of disinformation plied by Islamic propagandists. Of course, many, if not most, of our authorities are unforgivably ignorant about the movement they are dealing with, never having delved into the relevant texts, documents and scriptures, an intellectual crater that goes some way to explaining how the piquantly named “intelligence community” — CSIS, for example, the Canadian version of the CIA, and no less inept — could partner with Islamic organizations to promote current shibboleths like “understanding” and “good will” — euphemisms for appeasement and expressions of the social gospel of moral equivalence. Islamic colonization proceeds at all levels of national existence, from the domestic and parochial to the administrative and ministerial.
As Melanie Phillips in a recent talk pointed out, recycling a friend’s analogy, there is a tunneling factor at work on the model of Hamas. The tunnels stretch under the soil of another country and, suddenly, the terrorists “pop up,” seemingly out of nowhere. Phillips is scrupulous to clarify that she is not alluding to Muslim immigration as an overt military scheme carried out by bloodthirsty extremists, but the metaphor of Islam tunneling its way surreptitiously into and under the cultural terrain of Western civilization holds. In the words of Swiss parliamentarian Oskar Freysinger, Islam is “a dogma that is gnawing away at the pillars of our system of laws” — laws, we might add, both written and unspoken.
The two episodes with which I began this article may be regarded by many as trivial or minor; after all, coarse, aggressive or antisocial behavior is by no means exclusive to any single category of people. Still, during the three summers I have been visiting this stretch of the St. Lawrence, before eventually deciding to move here, these were the only times I have met with such assured intrusiveness — as if blithely incommoding others by occupying a communal space, or engaging in a show of public lasciviousness, were an unquestioned right, as if, in other words, the rights or prerogatives of others simply did not count.
I cite these occasions chiefly because they are of recent vintage, because they occurred in a rural area with little (though growing) experience of Islamic immigration, and because they are indicative phenomena, handsels of a future whose ramifications are starkly disquieting. Plainly, the events I recount are not in the same class of atrocities as having your head sawed off in the suburbs of London by a fanatic Muslim, as recently happened to an 82-year old woman tending her garden, and earlier to off-duty soldier Lee Rigby, but they are harbingers of an ideological and theological mindset that will inescapably manifest itself in this and other socially virulent forms. Indeed, I have had innumerable brushes over time, both personally and as a witness, with instances of Islamic cultural expropriation, far too many to relate here. Some of these occasions were relatively serious: menacing phone calls following selected articles I wrote for this site as well as others, unsavory emails, and a physical assault by a traveling Palestinian who discovered that I was Jewish. I consider these incidents as merely part of my trade or, for that matter, as a function of my ethnic identity in a hostile and irrational world.
Nonetheless, what I find truly offensive as a citizen of a Western democratic state is the unwillingness of a substantial immigrant cohort to assimilate into the modes, manners and practices of the country that has graciously received it, but rather to insist that the host conform to the guest and accept his established views and rooted premises. Such people, fixed in their chronic orthodoxies, will not abandon their imported attitudes and presuppositions where these conflict with the staple usages of the majority. They refuse to monitor their fractious offspring seduced by the temptation of jihad (and to cease feigning astonishment when their treasonable acts come to light), to repudiate entirely the fraudulent and lethal notion of collective “honor” that bleeds into violence and guilty concealment, to stop treating women as servants and sexual commodities validated by the prescriptions of scripture or the assumptions of a primitive ethnology, and in general to respect the values of everyday conduct, legitimate assembly and consensual decency that enable a society to preserve its settled way of life.
Anyone with a modicum of perceptiveness must be cognizant by now that Islam is advancing its millennial agenda in two ways, that is, via a classic pincer movement: the tactic of terrorism, and the strategy of immigration as elaborated by the Muslim Brotherhood, the latter project an immensely powerful force owing to its stealthy and insidious nature, abetted by leftist and liberal sympathies and policies. By this time its cover should have been blown, and we must begin to speak out, to agitate for legislation to revise our immigration protocols, to reject outright the social camouflage of political correctness, to expose “outreach” and “interfaith” programs for the confidence games they are, to investigate the hotbed mosquesspreading like bunkers throughout the land, and to lobby our congressional and parliamentary representatives to pass laws militating against the depletion of our welfare resources, the exploitation of our legal system to silence critics of Islam (known as “lawfare”), and the use of our human rights tribunals that deprive us of our…human rights.
It is obviously an uphill battle, not less because our politicians and political parties, themselves responsible for the immigration debacle, are deliberately trawling for votes among the burgeoning Muslim enclaves and boroughs. Yet it is equally obvious that failing such a reformation — or revolution — in our concessionary attitudes, the result will be that what we once took for granted as a social habitus founded on mutual recognition and a civic arena accessible to all will shrink to an uneasy and perhaps soon intolerable confinement in our own domain.
There is no longer any excuse for apathy, distraction or ignorance, for the evidence of our approaching dispossession is all around us. It is equally an affront and a tragedy to find ourselves colonized in our own land. To paraphrase the prophet Ezekiel (33: 2-6), those who hear the sound of the warning trumpet and do not take the warning, their blood shall be upon them. Regrettably, far too many of us still cannot or do not or will not hear the trumpet.
David Solway is a Canadian poet and essayist. He is the author of The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and Identity, and is currently working on a sequel, Living in the Valley of Shmoon. His new book on Jewish and Israeli themes, Hear, O Israel!, was released by Mantua Books. His latest book is The Boxthorn Tree, published in December 2012. Visit his Website at www.davidsolway.com.
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