Multiculturalism’s Volatile Mix              

By       George Jonas              

National Post          21st June 2002

 

The loyalty of immigrants has been remarkable in Western societies. Canada and the United States have both benefited from it. Lately, however, we've been witnessing a new phenomenon: The immigrant of dubious loyalty. We've also begun to see disloyal native-borns, whether of immigrant ancestry or Islamic conversion.

It hasn't happened overnight. To see it in context, it's useful to look at the point of departure.

            During the First World War, with statistically insignificant exceptions, immigrants from enemy countries as well as their children remained loyal to Canada and the United States throughout the hostilities.

            During the Second World War, although we treated German, Italian, or Japanese immigrants and their descendants shabbily, as a rule they responded with unfailing patriotism. For every Tokyo Rose (the American GI's nickname for Ikuko Toguri, a Japanese-American woman, born in Los Angeles, who broadcast Japanese propaganda during the war) there were thousands of Japanese-American soldiers who gave their lives to fight Fascism.

            Some Jews and anti-Fascists who escaped, Germany or occupied Europe ended up in Canada or America. Much as these refugees were on our side in the war against Hitler, technically they were enemy aliens. On arrival, they were often placed in internment camps. Many Canadians and Americans of Japanese, Italian, etc., extraction were interned as well, especially on the West Coast. Decades later Canada apologized, first to the Japanese and eventually to the Italian community. But - and this is the point - even our small-minded conduct failed to alter the fundamental loyalties of these immigrant groups.

            The pattern continued during the Cold War, when former nationals of hostile Communist countries often found refuge in North America. These newcomers of various ethnicity and religion, from Eastern Europe to Vietnam, were at least as supportive of the values and interests of their adopted countries as native-born citizens of western descent. Few Americans opposed the anti-American antics of Fidel Castro as resolutely, for instance, as Florida's ex-Cuban community.

            Over the past 30 years, however, a new type of immigrant emerged. He seemed ready to share the West's wealth but not its values. In many ways he resembled an invader more than a settler or a refugee. In addition to immigrant societies like Canada or the United States, the new type affected homogenous countries such as Britain, France, or Holland as well.

            Most newcomers continued to be loyal, needless to say. Conflicting loyalties influenced only a fraction. Except this fraction was no longer statistically insignificant.

            Instead of making efforts to assimilate - or accept the cultural consequences of not

joining the mainstream, like such previous groups as the Mennonites - the new type of immigrant demanded changes in the host country's culture. He called on society to accommodate his linguistic or religious requirements.

            Sometimes the matter was minor. In 1985, for instance, a Sikh CNR railway worker named Bhinder refused to exchange his turban for a regulation hard hat. Sometimes it wasn't such a minor matter: In 1991, a newly appointed Toronto police board commissioner of Asian extraction, Susan Eng, declined to take the traditional oath to the Queen.

            Minor or not, the host societies' usual response was accommodation. Turbans were substituted for hard hats; the language of the police oath was changed. But accommodation only escalated demands. Requests for cultural exemption were soon followed by openly voiced sentiments of disloyalty. By the late 1990s, a Muslim group in

Britain called al-Muhajroun (Emigres), led by Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, saw fit to express the view that no British Muslim has any obligation to British law when it conflicts with the law of Allah.

            Disturbing as such talk was, it wasn't unlawful. Dissent was within our democratic

tradition, although the tradition presumed that the dissenters would be democrats themselves. Alas, the new dissenters were anything but. Some were terrorists, or their cheerleaders. Eventually their "dissent" culminated in the massacre of 9/11. Most of the Muslim militants who crashed airliners into Washington and New York were legal residents in America.

            How did this come about? Three reasons seem to stand out. The first two have to do with our culture, the third with the culture of militant Islam.

            When we retreated from the principle that immigration should serve the interests of the host country first, our misguided liberalism opened a Pandora's box. Embracing the idea of non-traditional immigration, we seemed to forget that when groups of distant cultural and political traditions arrive in significant numbers, they may establish their own communities not merely as colourful expressions of ethnic diversity - festivals or restaurants - but as separate cultural-political entities.

            Next, we tried to turn this liability into an asset by promoting multiculturalism. We stopped ascribing any value to integration, and

began flirting with the notion that host countries aren't legitimate entities with their own

cultures, only political frameworks for various co-existing cultures. To paraphrase William Blake, instead of trying to build Jerusalem in "England's green and pleasant land," we switched to building Beirut.

            Finally, in fundamentalist Islam, we've come up against a culture for which the very concept of rendering to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's is alien. Puritanical Islam considers that everything belongs to God (or rather, some mullah's idea of God). This concept doesn't allow for a secular or territorial entity, such as a country, to command a higher loyalty than one's faith. If one's religious leader demands the suppression of what he regards as a blasphemous book, the fact that Western constitutions protect free expression is just so much piffle for a true believer. His ultimate goal is a faith-based state, an Islamic theocracy.

            Commenting on non-traditional immigration requires a footnote. The problem doesn't arise when people come to Canada from the Levant; the problem arises when people come to recreate the Levant in Canada. That's where non-traditional immigration and multiculturalism become a volatile mix. Extending our values to others is one thing, but modifying our values to suit the values of others is a vastly different proposition. As the late scholar Ernest van den Haag pointed out in 1965, patriotism is not racism. "The wish to preserve one's identity and the identity of one's nation," he wrote in a prescient piece in The National Review, "requires no justification any more than the wish to have one's own children".

            By now multiculturalism has made it difficult to safeguard our traditions and ideals against a new type of immigrant whose goal is not to fit in, but to carve out a niche for his own tribe, language, customs, or religion in our country - or rather in what we're no longer supposed to view as a country but something between Grand Central Station and an empty space. When Canada is no longer regarded as a culture, with its own traditions and narratives, but a tabula rasa, a clean slate, for anyone to write on what he will, immigrants of the new school will be ready with their own texts, including some that aren't very pleasant. The sound you hear is the sharpening of their chisels.

 

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