By Taweh Beysolow
Monday, October 06, 2014
The Western world is slowly discovering that many of the
Muslim extremists in ISIS were born on its own turf, in countries such as
France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Abdirahmaan Muhumed , an
American Citizen and former Delta Air Lines employee recently died in combat
fighting for ISIS. James Foley’s murderer is a British Born Muslim who leads a
brigade of British jihadists within ISIS comically coined “The Beatles,” and
francophone Abu Shaheed reports that there are 500 other French recruits among
ISIS’ ranks. These disturbing developments leaves one to wonder how someone
with a college education from nations that supposedly embrace tolerance and
freedom would become a militant in a clan of stone age extremists. To me, the
answer lies in the increasing lack of cultural assimilation in their countries
of origin — the very Western world that we cherish so dearly.
Since 2001, the Muslim population in the UK has tripled
from 1.64 million to three million today. This is an unprecedented population
boom largely caused by the country’s relatively open border policy. But, the
Brits aren’t the only actors in the Western world with their arms wide open to
Islamism. In France, there are roughly 6.5 million Muslims, comprising approximately
10 percent of the entire population, and Germany is not far behind with 4.1
million comprising 5 percent of the population. Major European powers are
experiencing a substantial increase in these populations, to the point that the
UK is projected to be a Muslim majority nation by 2050. While increased racial
diversity may seem like an encouraging development at first glance, it has come
with a lack of integration that raises serious concerns about Western culture
becoming fractured.
In 2013, a panel in France was appointed to review the
country’s integration policies as a means of urging the government to implement
a “new form of secularism,” recommending that public school classes be “taught
in Arabic and African languages” rather than in French. Such a gesture seems
quite courteous but has the potentiality of delaying and hampering an immigrant
or first generation Muslim from learning the native language. This, along with
the rising racial tensions, does not help to improve a French Muslim’s condition,
at a time when they are already “2.5 times” less likely than a Christian job
candidate to get a callback.
In the UK, there have been several cases of secular
schools in Birmingham being heavily influence radicalized Muslims to inject
intolerant beliefs into schools with predominantly Muslim student bodies. This
further isolates them from UK culture and making them prone to radicalization.
There are also reports of several other terrible events, such as the rape of
over 1,400 children in Rotterdam that have marred the UK-Muslim relations. The
subsequent cover up is due to what one Labor MP describes as “looking after
your own,” in which many Muslims turned the other way as to not turn fellow
immigrants into the police.
These are just many examples of a growing epidemic in
Western Europe, an epidemic that is being met with an anemic response. The
cause of this anemia, according to one member of British parliament, is the
desire to “not rock the multicultural boat.” The West finds itself wrapped in a
bind by political correctness, a knot which grows so tight as to restrict
movement while being humiliatingly beaten. More Westerners feel as if many
motivations to preserve their own culture are unfair at best, and racist and
xenophobic at worst. The idea of another age of an overbearing Western
nation-state brings distasteful memories of habitual genocide and the racist
ideologies that to this day often poison the minds of many around the word.
Reinforcing Western ideals on a people whose native countries are experiencing
the crushing might of Western military power becomes an uncomfortable quagmire
to be caught in, but one that raises greater concerns about our viability.
While not without some political division, the vast
majority of the West stood proudly against communism, fascism, and other
movements that sought to threaten our way of life. When even discussing early
political movements to end discrimination within a country, such as the Civil
Rights movements and women’s suffrage movements, the West uphold its ideals of
equality and include them. However, the tone today is much different, arguing
for more separation and distinction of groups than unity. People often do not
refer to themselves by nation, state, or province, but by racial, sexual, and
religious distinction increasingly. The end of cultural assimilation signals
more than apathy and more than a generation of rebellious youth; it signals
that we no longer know who we are, what we seek to be, or what the world was
like without freedom and liberty. That is much more dangerous than any
terrorist or any radical religion.
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