RUTHFULLY YOURS

When a Senate committee sought perspectives on the future of multiculturalism I shared the thought that, given some of the odious and appalling customs and beliefs made immune to criticism by official policy, it shouldn’t have a future. Here is what our elected representatives refused to accept.

The recent atrocious behaviour of the Saudi national team at the World Cup football qualifying match in refusing to observe a minute’s silence in remembrance of Australians killed in the London terrorist attack has rightly been criticized in our media. However the issue goes beyond the Saudi team’s insult to innocents who have been killed. During the apartheid era in South Africa, that country was not allowed to participate in international sport because of its racial discrimination. Many Islamic countries practice total gender discrimination — their women are not allowed to participate in international sport, indeed in some of these countries women, particularly in Saudi Arabia, are not allowed to participate even in domestic sport but spend their lives in any public area encased in all-encompassing black burqas.

Why are men’s teams from these countries allowed to participate in international sport? Isn’t gender discrimination as serious as racial discrimination?

International sporting federations need to examine this issue. And that brings me to the issue of multiculturalism and the myths surrounding this latest cult of the Left’s intelligentsia. Yes, I know “Left’s intelligentsia” is an oxymoron, but let it pass for the moment.

Recently, an Australian Senate Committee, dominated by ALP and Greens, called for submissions on strengthening multiculturalism. I put in a submission expressing the view that multiculturalism should not be promoted; rather, it be rejected as it implied promoting a number of obnoxious cultural practices alien to Australia.

My submission was initially accepted, but I was informed it had been rejected as it did not comply with the terms of reference. The rejection is, I suppose, technically correct because the Senate Committee had called for submissions on strengthening Multiculturalism, and my submission rejected the concept.

Now that my submission is rejected, I am free to circulate it so here it is:

To: the Senate Select Committee on Strengthening Multiculturalism

Dear Committee,
This is a submission on behalf of Endeavour Forum Inc. which is a women’s NGO having special consultative status with the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) of the UN. We are opposed to the “strengthening” or promotion of multiculturalism. This does not mean disrespecting ethnic groups other than those of British origin, but it does mean that the unsavoury aspects of some other cultures should be acknowledged.

1/ I was born in India and lived there until my marriage to an Australian, after which I came to live in Australia.

2/ India is a fascinating “laboratory” for multiculturalism because it is probably the most multicultural country in the world. India has 15 main languages, about 150 dialects and several religions. This has not created harmony; and, in fact, led to the Partition of India in 1947 into India and Pakistan, because the Muslim-majority provinces could not tolerate the idea of living in a secular democracy.

Islamic culture does not give priority to democracy, freedom of speech or freedom of religion, with death sentences prescribed for apostates and blasphemers. Currently there are several prisoners, both Muslims and Christians, on death row in Pakistani jails on spurious charges of blasphemy.

3/ Even nearer to home, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, also known as Ahok, the popular former governor of Jakarta in moderate, supposedly secular Indonesia, has just been sentenced to two years in jail on a charge of blasphemy. Similarly in Turkey, a member of NATO and supposedly democratic and moderate, has arrested and jailed hundreds of journalists, generals in the army, and civilians from all walks of life, on charges alleging treason.

4/ All this should enable you to understand that that the culture of Islam is simply incompatible with democracy and basic human rights.

Islam mandates death for infidels, apostates, homosexuals, and for Christians and Jews who will not convert or cannot pay an additional tax. Some of the “multicultural” aspects of Islam include polygamy, child marriage (following the example of their “Prophet”), female genital mutilation, requiring rape victims to produce four pious male witnesses to the assault or if unable to do so, be stoned for adultery, and sex-slave taking by the victors in any tribal war.

Saudi Arabia and Iran are the main examples of Sunni Muslim culture and Shia Muslim culture respectively. In Saudi Arabia women are forbidden from driving cars, and women in Iran are forbidden from cycling in public as these practices will allegedly damage their “virginity”.

Bruce Thornton, professor of classics and humanities at California State University and research fellow at the Hoover Institution, is today one of the most scathing voices in the academic and intellectual American landscape. In various books and essays he has contributed to demystify the myths and fetishes of liberal thought and enabled us to understand better the origin of the crisis which affects Western society.

Among his books we wish to remember: Plagues of the Mind (1997), Decline and Fall: Europe’s Slow Motion Suicide (2007), The Wages of Appeasement: Ancient Athens, Munich, and Obama’s America (2011).

Professor Thornton, let us start from a quotation coming from your last article about Islamic terrorism written for Frontpage Magazine, “Committed only to material goods and pleasures, how can we battle a foe passionately loyal to the spiritual? Despising our own civilization, how can we confront those fanatically assured of the superiority of their own? How can we defeat such an enemy when there is nothing we believe is worth killing and dying for?” These are compelling questions which address dramatically the core of the problem. Let me ask you the first one. How can we battle a foe passionately loyal to the spiritual?

We must fight the battle on two fronts. First, we must recommit our civilization to its spiritual roots, the Classical/Judeo-Christian foundations from which flow our goods such as equality, freedom, tolerance, and human rights. This is a difficult task, but we cannot give up that fight in our work and lives. Second, we must press our leaders to recognize that we are at war, and must fight as fiercely as we did against Nazism. If the jihadists love death more than we love life, then we must give them what they love.

The despising of our own civilization has gone on for many decades now. The West, according to its western critics, is responsible for every evil in the world. We have been projecting on the so called Third World the myth of pureness and innocence in order for us to feel more guilty for our wrong doings. What are, according to you, the origins of this of this self-flagellation?

I believe it begins in something precious and unique to Western civilization: what I call critical consciousness: the willingness to question received wisdom and dogmas as Socrates did. But for most of Western history, critical consciousness was grounded in the transcendent, a spiritual reality that assured us there was the truth and the good for which we should be striving. Modern secularism destroyed that ground, and reduced critical consciousness to the “hermeneutics of suspicion” that typifies modernity’s trinity of Marx, Darwin, and Freud. Now we furiously attack our beliefs in the name of materialist, contingent ideologies that deny the spiritual reality of the human person, reducing us to mere things in the world driven only by our base appetites and the laws of physics.As for our idealization of the Third World it is a retread of the old Noble Savage myth that compensates psychically for the trade-offs of civilization, even as we have no intention of actually living in such backwards, tyrannical countries. This Disney version of history is then given a spurious political rationale by being cast as “anti-colonialism” or “anti-imperialism.”

Postmodernism, deconstructionism, multiculturalism, have been among the factors which have powerfully contributed to the erosion of our identity and to a long established tradition of values which were able to give us coherence and stability. Are we really destined to succumb to Islam with “smug blindness and arrogant ignorance” as you write at the end of your article?

Contrary to those movements you cite, humans are defined by spiritual freedom and free will, so we are not destined or determined to do anything. If we do succumb, it will be by choice, the same choice Eve and Adam made in Eden: to believe Satan’s lie that we can be gods, answerable to no transcendent power, and governed only by our transient and shifting bodily desires and comforts. Maybe when we are once again cast out of this material paradise will we will turn back to God.

“Health Canada considers sweeping ban on junk food ads aimed at children and teens.” So reads the headline at CBC News. And with that matter-of-fact announcement — just a normal day’s political news in the true north weak and socialist — a nation quietly declares itself lost to freedom forever. D-Day memories of the brave Canadians at Juno Beach washed away in a tide of authoritarian progressivism. Freedom traded for paternalistic social engineering in the name of protecting children from over-salted cheese.

“Most of the foods that are marketed to kids are these ones that are high in fat, high in sugar, high in sodium, so that’s what we’re looking at,” said Hasan Hutchinson, director general at Health Canada, who is overseeing the consultations.

“That would then cut out all of the things like, of course, your regular soda, most cookies, cakes, pies, puddings, ice cream, most cheeses because they are high in fat, they’re high in salt,” he said.

Health Canada would also target foods such as sugar-sweetened yogurt, frozen waffles, fruit juice, granola bars and potato chips.

When Canada elected Justin Trudeau, the foppish son of the foppish Maoist Pierre, I warned that what little was left of Canada as a representative democracy was on the verge of being swept into the ash heap of history by a wave of kneejerk neo-Marxist populism — imagine Barack Obama without any constitutional limits. Many of my fellow Canadians — collectively the most self-righteous “nicest people” in the world — accused me of overreacting to this disturbing new wave of nihilistic Trudeaumania, or of exaggerating the ideological seriousness of “young Trudeau,” as they breathlessly dubbed him.

But there is no way to overreact to the political dangers of a nationwide personality cult. And far from exaggerating Trudeau’s ideological purity, my point was precisely that Canada had fallen to such a level of ethico-political degradation that no ideologue was necessary to tip the scales toward totalitarian government; a vapid, politically correct attention-seeker would do the trick well enough.

And so he has, as his government has aligned itself with that of Kathleen Wynne, the Marxist premier of Ontario — the country’s most populous province — to produce government in a politburo style, with naturally curly hair. From legal preferences for sexual deviancy to legal punishments for emitting carbon, from Castro-loving to Christian-hating, and from outlawing criticism of Islam to normalizing drug abuse, Trudeau’s government is checking all the Euro-socialist boxes, all the while hiding behind the leader’s pretty-boy celebrity and prime ministerial pedigree.

But to remind everyone of that pedigree, Pierre Trudeau was the man who, through his panache and his clever exploitation of social trends of the 1960s and ’70s, shifted Canada irrevocably leftward: a close friend of Fidel Castro, a vocal admirer of Mao Tse-tung, and thus North America’s first openly communist-sympathizing national leader, preceding Obama by forty years.

Beyond all its legislative radicalism, the first Trudeau era was most significant for nudging Canadians into a gradual acceptance of a principle quite out of step with Western classical liberalism, but perfectly in keeping with Eastern collectivist authoritarianism, namely that the state is not a representative of the people whose interests it serves, but rather the rightful micromanager and mother hen of men’s daily lives, determining and enforcing correct attitudes and preferred interest groups with impunity and without restraint. In short, neo-Maoism.

Now “young Trudeau’s” government is proposing a “sweeping ban” on the marketing of legal food products. The absurdity of this proposal is outdone only by its paternalistic offensiveness.