Why would anyone want to ban this?
There’s been some serious self-introspection by both elites and wanna-bes over Europe’s growing burqa ban. The usual argument against the ban runs something like this: It’s a violation of both religious freedom and civil liberties. Oh, kind of like banning pedophiles from serving as priests so they can’t molest alter boys? While we worry about “alienating” or “radicalizing” Muslims over banning these cotton prisons, Muslims throughout the world are killing and oppressing non-Muslims. How about this, if they let Christians build a church in Mecca, then we’ll let Muslims build minarets in Switzerland. If Islam allows Muslims to convert to Christianity without penalty of death, then we can allow “modest” Muslim women to wear this abomination. Personally, just like purging the Catholic Church of pedophiles, I think the burqa ban is merely a good start.
Part of the problem is that most people in the West – influenced by their intellectual class’ Marxism, self-loathing, and post-colonial guilt – become somewhat self-righteous and pretentious themselves in regards to “accepting” different cultures. It’s axiomatic in nations founded predominately by immigrants, such as the United States, that assimilation is gradual and inevitable. But what happens when assimilation never occurs due to the resistance exhibited by militantly unassimilable cultures such as Islam, especially when such resistance is justified by liberal multiculturalism?
This multicultural “tolerance” willfully ignores the fact that in Islam’s growing confrontation with the West, EVERYTHING is a political declaration and manifesto because unlike Christianity, Islam is inherently political. There is no separation between State and Mosque as there is between Church and State; and every “successful” Islamic state imposes upon its citizens some form of sharia, to the detriment of everyone living in that country. For Islam in its desire to literally conquer the West, the burqa is less a garment of “modesty and humility” and more a political and religious statement: A statement of hatred for the “other,” a statement of cultural exclusion, and a statement of Islamic exceptionalism in the form of jihadi couture. The idea that the burqa represents anything remotely “civil,” “libertarian,” or “free” is risible. Rather the burqa is the outward manifestation of a totalitarian religious-political-economic-cultural system that seeks to subordinate all other systems to it.
Also, the belief that we need to “desperately” acculturate Muslims is insulting to those non-Muslims, including my mother who immigrated to America from Brazil in 1970, who have never had a problem with assimilating into American culture. The problem isn’t America, the problem is Islam. What we “desperately” need to do instead is limit Islamic immigration and de-Islamify those who wish to remain in the West as assimilating Muslims necessarily requires that they no longer be Muslim. It is impossible for Muslims to not be violent, misogynistic, intolerant, imperialistic, homophobic, etc. because that is the innate nature of Islam, which has qualitatively and quantifiably manifested those characteristics over the entire span of its 1400 year history. The problem with banning burqas and minarets is not the “danger” of “antagonizing” and “alienating” Muslims, but in dhimmiing them into…what? Socialists? Democrats? Republicans? Free Market Capitalists?
Both Europe’s existential crisis and its civilizational clash with Islam has proven that the left’s shibboleths of secularism and multiculturalism are absurd intellectual fantasies. And unless Europe re-connects with its Christian heritage and tradition, re-discovers its Enlightenment principles of governing, and continues to intensify its pressure on Muslims to either emigrate or assimilate by resolutely implementing its own form of sharia-based discrimination against Muslims – i.e. by classifying them as third-class citizens, requiring them to wear specific clothing and colors, dictating specific size and height limitations on mosques, imposing an onerous jizya for remaining Muslim, applying political and economic disenfranchisement, etc. – then the entire attempt will go nowhere.
Man is a complex being and finds his greatest happiness when all the various spheres that comprise his existence – spiritual, physical, intellectual, emotional, etc. – are in harmony and balance. Even now, such militant anti-theists as Dawkins and Hitchens acknowledge that there is something in man – a genetic code even – that practically compels him to “have religion.” For them, it’s Darwinism; for me, it’s Orthodoxy; for others, it’s Communism, Socialism, Liberalism, Fascism, Islam, or some other political ersatz-religion.
An ideology so malignant, aggressive, pathologically violent, and intolerant that it can inspire 19 men to fly airplanes into the World Trade Center and then, with $100 million dollars of Saudi funding, demand to build a mega-mosque and Islamic Center complex practically at Ground Zero in an imperialistic statement of subjugation can only be dealt with as it has dealt with others. Banning burqas and burkhinis is only a start.
