Spencer on Muslim polygamy

Robert Spencer at FrontPage Magazine expatiates on the human cost of polygamy under Islam. This horrible custom is a major instance of how the personal vices of the M man became an unchanging model of life—and a curse—for untold millions over the centuries.

Spencer concludes by saying that the West needs to uphold the moral superiority of Christian and Western ways over those of Islam in order to give people “the will to resist Sharia and Islamization initiatives.” The “I” word—immigration—doesn’t appear in the piece. How many times has Spencer talked about, say, the non-existence of moderate Islam? Thousands of times. How many times has he urged a halt of immigration from Muslim countries? Just once. He wrote two months ago at Jihad Watch:

Officials should proclaim a moratorium on all visa applications from Muslim countries, since there is no reliable way for American authorities to distinguish jihadists and potential jihadists from peaceful Muslims.

I made a big deal about this at the time, because Spencer, after years of coy silence on the issue, had finally issued an unambiguous call for serious Muslim immigration restrictions. But he hasn’t revisited the issue since then. If Spencer is truly to be a leader in protecting America and the West from Islamization, he must keep driving home the need to stop Muslim immigration. He should end every one of his FP articles by repeating the call—like Cato the Elder closing every speech by saying that Carthage must be destroyed. Only constant repetition can move the mind of a society in new directions.

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Alex K. writes:

It’s amazing to me that he’s willing to say something as politically incorrect as that the West should hold up Christianity as morally superior to Islam, that, as his new book says, Christianity is a religion of peace and Islam isn’t, and yet he’s so reticent about even broaching immigration. It’s hard to believe the latter is so much more dangerous to say than the former. I expect if he hit on immigration regularly he wouldnt be considered much more racist or receive much more vitriol from liberals and the left than he already does (and will now continue to do by saying in a book title that Christianity is morally superior to Islam). Liberals don’t pay much attention to him anyway, he already seems beyond the pale to them, i guess.

Same with Steyn—when liberals deign to notice him they consider him monstrous for discussing the need to pump up white birthrates in the face of nonwhite birthrates—his desperate attempts to blur what he’s talking about by referring to cultural transmission and downplaying race don’t work; leftist racebaiters have a keener sense of race’s importance than the neocons who want to ignore it. So would Steyn really be in more trouble if talked about immigration more than birthrates?

I suspect in both cases it has something to do not with liberals or the left but with the right-liberals, the neocons. They seem to love the birthrate talk and have an overall tolerance for Spencer’s hardcore anti-Islam thing. But immigration…Spencer and Steyn may have gotten the impression, or share it, that free migration must trump all else. Well, we saw some things change on that front this summer so we’ll see…

LA replies:

Open immigration expresses the sacred core of liberalism more than any other policy. To call for excluding certain groups from immigration is thus to transgress the sacred core of liberalism. That’s why it’s the one issue that everyone stays away from, or approaches only with extreme reluctance.

Also, we need to understand that the fear that stops people is not a fear of what the liberals or the neoconservatives will say. It is a genuine fear a person feels that he is violating the most fundamental moral principle. That is why only a moral code that transcends liberal anti-discriminationism can defeat liberal anti-discriminationism. Conservatives who lack a non-liberal moral code will always end up in going along with liberalism.

Paleocons and far whites who, in equating the prevailing morality with political correctness, equate all morality with political correctness and thus end up rejecting the need for any morality, cannot effectively oppose liberalism. Western people and particularly Americans require a moral code to justify themselves. If the only available moral code is liberalism, then people will stay with liberalism no matter how destructive it is (while they make occasional unprincipled exceptions to the liberalism in order to avoid complete catastrophe). Therefore liberalism can be defeated only by our upholding an alternative moral code, not by our rejecting all morality as mere “political correctness.”

As an example of what I mean, many on the right reject the very idea of immoral racism. They say that the idea of racism is just PC and should be ignored. But in denying that there might be race-conscious or culturally exclusionary positions that are immoral, they also deny the possibility of race-conscious or culturally exclusionary positions that can be morally justified. They have removed morality from the equation altogether, and in so doing, have rendered themselves politically ineffectual and irrelevant. By contrast, the kind of discussion I engage in here, where I argue that human beings have a natural right to live in a culturally specific society, offers a moral alternative to liberalism with which liberalism can be confronted and challenged.

Jeff in England writes:

As you know I’ve made a similar point. Several Suspects seem to be mentioning the R word (“Restriction”) once or maybe even twice. But as they don’t really believe in it fully, they soon go back to NOT mentioning it. Plus it’s less political trouble for them as well.

These Suspects sit and write their columns or host their radio shows shouting about the dangers of Islam and Muslims. They leave the hard work (and the subsequent flak) of actually solving the problem to the likes of Lawrence Auster and his VFR readers.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 13, 2007 09:00 AM | Send