Paul Martin and the Sikhs, cont.

The exchange continues (see below) with the reader who finds fault with me for what I said about Canadian Prime Minister Martin’s obeissances to Canadian Sikhs.

Correspondent to LA:

I don’t give a rat’s arse what Martin did. That’s not the underlying issue. What if he as a Christian put on a yarmulke in a Jewish synagogue—would that offend you as well? If he starts going into mosques and cowtowing to Muslims who want to destroy Canada, then I’ll take notice.

Your analogy between the Bolshevik USSR and Sikhs and the Sikh religion is both ridiculous and offensive. Again, lighten up!

LA to correspondent:

As with most analogies, this analogy is not an analogy in all respects, but in one respect, namely, just as the U.S. uncritically embraced the USSR as our ally against Hitler, you favor the uncritical embrace of Sikhs as our ally against Islam.

You wrote: “I don’t give a rats arse what Martin did…”

I’m shocked that you would say this. The difference between putting on a yarmulke in a synagogue and kowtowing to the Sikh god is the difference between tolerating and respecting a Western religion that is assimilable to a Western country, and surrendering to an Eastern religion that is not.

Your non-judgmental acceptance of Martin’s action, combined with your anger against me for judging it, represents a staggering failure of imagination on your part. You, like me, are appalled at Western surrender to Islam. But don’t you see that the Western surrender to Islam is part of a much larger surrender—the surrender of the West to everything that is non-Western, to all that is the Other? The reason we have all these Moslems in the West is not because our leaders when they changed the immigration laws in 1965 said, “Hey, let’s surrender to Islam.” No. Our leaders weren’t thinking about Islam at all. They were thinking about ending American discrimination against the non-West. And once we had opened our borders to the non-West and non-Westerners began flooding in, we adopted multiculturalism as our national ideology to accommodate all these groups. The expanded Islamic presence and power in the West is just one result (though the most dangerous result) of that Western policy of open borders and multiculturalism.

This is where your exclusive focus on Islam reveals its inadequacy. You only see ONE issue. You only care about that ONE issue. This blinds you to the totality of what is happening. The problem is not Islam. The problem is the Western liberalism and multiculturalism that have made us helpless before Islam. And Martin’s kowtowing to the Sikhs was the most flagrant expression of that liberalism to date.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 28, 2005 11:39 AM | Send