The Template
Wednesday, November 9, 2005 at 02:48AM For several weeks now, Rush Limbaugh has been railing against the "template:" the MSM's persistent point of view that has come to dictate the facts reported, even if those "facts" are made up of whole cloth. You don't need any examples, do you? Joe Wilson? OK.
Paul Belein, a Belgian economist and outspoken conservative, has written an excellent post about why the "disaffected youth" in the French suburbs are rioting . I am very happy to say that this piece was picked up by James Taranto and unhappy to say that I had thought of putting it in yesterday's post about France and just didn't. But because Best of the Web picked it up, at least the alternative press is getting the word out, so that we don't have to take the insipid analysis of the MSM for granted. It is terribly easy to look at young black people burning cars and destroying property and fit the scene neatly into the "American Riots of the Sixties" template. So we hear alot of the no opportunities, racism, alienation pablum: typical Leftist talking points. It's the paradigm. If the youth are angry and violent, it's because of the way others have treated them. By implication, of course, their lawlessness is understandable and therefore excused.
Mr. Belein tells us right where all of this started and what triggered this anarchy:
In the “Resolution of Strasbourg,” passed unanimously by the general assembly of the Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation on June 7-8, 1975, more than 200 Members of Parliament from Western European countries, representing all shades of the political spectrum (except the far right), unanimously agreed to allow Arab immigrants to bring their culture and religion to Europe, to promote it and spread it. The parliamentarians stressed “the contribution that the European countries can still expect from Arab culture, notably in the area of human values” and asked the European governments “to accord the greatest priority to spreading Arab culture in Europe.” Today the forests of satellite dishes on the apartment blocks in the suburbs of Western European cities link the immigrants to the culture of their countries of origin, whose television programmes they watch day after day.
Dyab Abou Jahjah, the young and charismatic Brussels-based leader of the Arab European League, rejects assimilation and demands segregated schools and self-governing, Arab-speaking ghettos. “We reject integration when it leads to assimilation,” Jahjah says: “I don’t believe in a host country. We are at home here and whatever we consider our culture to be also belongs to our chosen country. I’m in my country, not the country of the [Westerners].”
The Western authorities quietly accepted this when they abandoned the suburbs to the immigrants a decade ago. The attempt by the French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, a second-generation immigrant himself (though not from a Muslim country), to assert the authority of the French Republic over its lost territory has triggered the current civil warfare in France. For the “youths” this is a declaration of war. They are not in Sarkozy’s country but in their own country, where the West promised they could retain their own cultural values and spread them.
Which begs the question: what is Europe going to do about it?
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Reader Comments (4)
What made the United States so important in the world? It was the fact that you could come from abroad and adopt a culture and become one of them and with them. It was required of them to understand our nation, its' history and culture.
Europe, on the other hand, allowed the people of Muslim countries to enter any country and begin to establish their own colonies which were essentially a reservation of Algierians, Libyans, etc. They did not require assimilation, nor were (are) these immigrants willing to assimilate. Always assuming that everyone else has good intentions, and if they don't, that they will be reasonable if approached with hat in hand, is a flaw in the Liberal philosophy.
A most interesting quote just came in by email to me today, and here it is for all to read:
Theodore Roosevelt on Immigrants and being an AMERICAN
"In the first place we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the man's becoming in very fact an American, and nothing but an American...There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag, and this excludes the red flag, which symbolizes all wars against liberty and civilization, just as much as it excludes any foreign flag of a nation to which we are hostile...We have room for bu t one language here, and that is the English language...and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people."
Theodore Roosevelt 1907
That's the only way we can maintain our own culture, our Constitution and our values. To do less is to surrender them, along with our history. France has lost so much already that she did not dare to call up her Armed Forces to put down what is a full blown insurrection. Thousands of French citizens are angered that their cars are torched every night, and each one that burns makes another French family think hard-line thoughts. But French leaders now lack the courage to engage the enemy.
When the Muslim fanatics begin visiting French Catholic and Protestant homes in the middle of the night and slitting throats, as they did in Algiers and Tunisia, the hand-writing on the wall will be in blood, the victims blood.
That, you can bet your bottom dollar on! Look what they do to their own people in Iraq, Jordan, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia if you need examples. There is no other way but to face them and defeat them, no negotiations because if you make peace with one group, another cleric rises up with a new group of assassins. There is no one voice in the Muslim world. When we (as a nation) missed the chance to take out Osama bin Laden, we allowed this world-wide revolution against democracies to get a good foot-hold.
Two thousand deaths in Iraq? I mourn every single American who has died there, but those brave men are keeping us in freedom and safety. France's citizens will see her Liberalism destroy their heritage, and every convert to the Muslim faith becomes suspect if the fighting becomes widespread.