Fr. Schall on The Paris Statement

Fr. Schall writing today at Crisis Magazine on The Paris Statement.  The first link is to Fr. Schall's piece; the second is to The Paris Statement.

http://www.crisismagazine.com/2017/paris-statement-defends-old-europe-values?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CrisisMagazine+%28Crisis+Magazine%29

https://thetrueeurope.eu/a-europe-we-can-believe-in/

17. The false Europe also boasts of an unprecedented commitment to equality. It claims to promote non-discrimination and the inclusion of all races, religions and identities. Here, genuine progress has been made, but a utopian detachment from reality has taken hold. Over the past generation, Europe has pursued a grand project of multiculturalism. To demand or even promote the assimilation of Muslim newcomers to our manners and mores, much less to our religion, has been thought a gross injustice. A commitment to equality, we have been told, demands that we abjure any hint that we believe our culture superior. Paradoxically, Europe’s multicultural enterprise, which denies the Christian roots of Europe, trades on the Christian ideal of universal charity in an exaggerated and unsustainable form. It requires from the European peoples a saintly degree of self-abnegation. We are to affirm the very colonization of our homelands and the demise of our culture as Europe’s great twenty-first century glory—a collective act of self-sacrifice for the sake of some new global community of peace and prosperity that is being born.

Words of Relevance: Bishop Emil Shimoun Nona on Muslim Immigration

Bishop Emil Shimoun Nona is the Chaldean Catholic Archbishop of Mosul in the northern part of Iraq.  He was mentioned this week in a piece at Crisis magazine by William Kilpatrick, entitled: Islam, Immigration and the Importance of Culture.

Kilpatrick opens his essay by referring to recent remarks by the Catholic Archbishop of Brisbane, Mark Coleridge, condemning the barbarism of the Islamic State.  Kilpatrick noted that Coleridge "for some reason felt compelled to add: It has nothing to do with real Islam….”  He then provides an insightful quote from someone much closer to the evil: Bishop Emil Shimoun Nona, the Chaldean Catholic Archbishop of Mosul.  

The Bishop of Mosul warned European and Western Christians that they “will also suffer in the near future” because…

Here's the quote:

"you are welcoming in your countries an ever-growing number of Muslims…. You think all men are created equal, but that is not true: Islam does not say that all men are created equal. Your values are not their values. If you do not understand this soon enough, you will become the victims of the enemy you have welcomed in your home."

Theodore Dalrymple on Degeneracy in Britain

Theodore Dalrymple, a retired prison doctor and psychiatrist who has been writing about cultural decay in Britain for 20 years, has written the clearest piece on the current rioting there in City Journal. Click below to read the very succinct summary of the cause of the riots.

http://www.city-journal.org/2011/eon0810td.html

Diversity vs Assimilation

That's Bruce S. Thornton. He's a professor in the classical studies program at California State University Fresno. His latest book is The Wages of Appeasement: Ancient Athens, Munich, and Obama’s America.

In a recent article (below) he wrote for City Journal, he shows how the lack of assimilation (a by-product of multiculturalism) has wrecked the state of California where he is a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Professor of Classics and Humanities at California State University Fresno. Of course California is not the only state that has been hurt badly by a lack of assimilation encouraged by those among us who rank "diversity" above performance. Remember Army Chief of Staff George Casey after the Ft. Hood massacre during which a lone radical Muslim Army Major (Nidal Malik Hasan) killed 12 and wounded 31? "Our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that's worse." One wonders whether General Casey ever considered the possibility that had "our diversity" become a "casualty" prior to November 5, 2009, the 43 casualties that actually took place that day at Ft. Hood might have been averted.

Imagine if we had a department of education (which we did not) when this country was being built by immigrants who were coming here for a better life from all points of the globe. By now we would make the Balkans look like Mister Rogers' neighborhood in comparison. Fortunately for us, those early immigrants counted themselves lucky to be able to assimilate, and the first order of priority for them was to learn our language while they worked hard to provide a better life for their progeny, and the government, rather than assist them in maintaining their "cultural identity," encouraged them to assimilate as quickly as possible.

In Professor Thornton's article, he relates how his own family's ancestors assimilated into the American culture (yes, we do have one), and how difficult it was for them at times:

The choice was hard, at times even brutal. Racism, ethnocentrism, and prejudice could make the work of becoming American notoriously difficult. But people understood that to have a nation composed of immigrants, there had to be a unifying common culture in the public sphere. Transmitting that common culture was the job of the schools. My mother’s mother came from Maschito, an Albanian village in southern Italy. Many Maschitans settled in Fresno, where every year they celebrated the feast of their ancestral village’s patron saint, Santa Elia. But I never heard a word about any of this in school. We were busy learning about George Washington and the Constitution, Valley Forge and the Gettysburg Address, the nation’s history and heroes, its virtues and ideals—and, crucially, those core American principles. It was at school that the immigrant learned American history and celebrated the leaders who had created the country, fought in its defense, and embodied its most cherished values. In short, he learned how to be what he or his parents had freely chosen to become: American.


Click on the link below to read the whole article.
How Assimilation Works by Bruce S. Thornton - City Journal

Final Remarks by Geert Wilders at his trial today

Today in The Netherlands, Geert Wilders, the leader of a growing political party in that country, addressed the court that is trying him on several charges, all of which relate to his exercise of freedom of speech in regard to radical Islam. Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch posted Wilder's final remarks to the court which, profound as they are, will probably not keep him from being found guilty of at least some of the charges.

For previous posts on Geert Wilders, click Here, Here, and Here.

Andrew Klavan: How to Behave During an Islamic Massacre

Andrew Klavan of PJTV and City Journal loves to use satire to make his points, and he's good at it. His target in the below linked video is moral relativism, which just happens to be the thing against which Pope Benedict XVI has been preaching since he succeeded Pope John Paul II. Our current Pontiff has made it his primary battle, and often refers to the problem as "The Dictatorship of Relativism."

http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=mpg&mpid=80&load=5298

Bruce Thornton: Preserving American Exceptionalism

Bruce Thornton, whose five part interview with Peter Robinson was featured earlier on this Blog (you can find all five parts by typing his name in the "Search This Blog" box on the right), has written an essay for The Heritage Foundation on Political Thought. The title of his essay is: America the Delusional? Overcoming Our European Temptation, and it is adapted from his book: Decline and Fall: Europe’s Slow-Motion Suicide.
Reproduced here is the final section of his essay:

Preserving American Exceptionalism

All of these American ideals––political freedom and autonomy, citizen independence and self-reliance, limited government, religion, patriotism, and nationalist autonomy backed up by vigorous military power—comprise American exceptionalism. These ideals that define our nation would have to be weakened or discarded if America were to follow the EU road to utopia.

Regrettably, we have already been travelling down that road for decades. By the early 20th century, the rise of Progressivism had established in the public discourse the doctrine of social, economic, and political change controlled and directed by technical elites. This class, backed by government power, would work to improve and perfect life and solve problems based on what Bradley C. S. Watson describes as a “faith in intelligence and expertise translated into support for a vast state mechanism that would be confidently dedicated to ensuring growth—by means of progressive education, the administrative state, and redistribution of capital.”[38]

The expansion of the federal government that commenced under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, was furthered by Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, and has intensified under Barack Obama is continuing this process. The result is increased entitlement spending and government intrusion into the economy, education, and social life. Consequently, the U.S. is now facing many of the same fiscal problems that afflict Europe, with entitlement spending projected to double by 2050 and public debt slated to rise to 180 percent of GDP by 2035.[39] And let us not forget the erosion of traditional independence and self-reliance, the constriction of freedoms, and the infantilizing of Americans that follow the greater intrusion of government power into our daily lives and business.

Such policies and the philosophy behind them require that the ideals of American exceptionalism be discarded if the U.S. is to follow the path of the EU, as many liberals believe we should. The cost of abandoning those ideals would be larger and more expensive government and increasing encroachments on the quintessential American political goods of individual freedom and self-reliance. Without a political sea change in the next few years, the United States will continue to head down the road to nowhere.


You can read Dr. Thornton's entire essay by clicking here.

Christian Broadcasting Network: France in Civil War

Multiculturalism, Political Correctness & Radical Islam

So, what do we get when we combine multiculturalism, political correctness and radical Islam? See above: that's U. S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a psychiatrist of sorts, a bottom-feeder in his class, who never should have graduated - and wouldn't have had his name been Flynn.

Hasan is awaiting trial due to his starring role in the Ft. Hood massacre in November 2009, when, as we all remember, he opened fire, killing 12 fellow soldiers and a civilian employee, and wounding 32 others while shouting "Allahu Akbar!" His actions that day should not have surprised anyone who knew him - especially his military superiors.

Dorothy Rabinowitz discussed the obvious causes of the Ft. Hood tragedy as well as the total failure of the department of defense, in its investigative report, to acknowledge the problem in her Wall Street Journal column yesterday. This administration, as the one preceding it, seems determined not to identify the enemy that is waging war against us, and, of course, it's necessary to identify the enemy, before we can properly engage him.

Here are some clips from the WSJ article:

In a month of momentous change, it was easy to overlook the significance of another revolutionary event. Who would have believed that in the space of a few weeks the leaders of the three major European powers would publicly denounce multiculturalism and declare, in so many words, that it was a proven disaster and a threat to society?

One after another they announced their findings—Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel, Great Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron, and France's President Nicolas Sarkozy. Multicultural values had not only led to segregated communities: They had, Mr. Cameron noted, imposed policies of blind toleration that had helped nurture radical Islam's terrorist cells.

They (the words of foreign leaders) came at a fitting moment, just as Americans had been handed a report providing the fullest disclosures so far about the multiculturalist zeal that had driven Army and medical school superiors to smooth Nidal Malik Hasan's rocky way through training, promote him, and, despite blatant evidence of his unfitness, raise not a single concern. Maj. Hasan, U.S. Army psychiatrist, would be assigned to Fort Hood...

In this report, titled "A Ticking Time Bomb" and put out by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, there is a detail as dazzling in its bleak way as all the glowing misrepresentations of Dr. Hasan's skills and character, which his superiors poured into their evaluations of him. It concerns the Department of Defense's official report on the Fort Hood killings—a study whose recital of fact made no mention of Hasan's well-documented jihadist sympathies. Subsequent DoD memoranda portray the bloodbath—which began with Hasan shouting "Allahu Akbar!"—as a kind of undefined extremism, something on the order, perhaps, of work-place violence.

This avoidance of specifics was apparently contagious—or, more precisely, policy. In November 2010, each branch of the military issued a final report on the Fort Hood shooting. Not one mentioned the perpetrator's ties to radical Islam. Even today, "A Ticking Time Bomb," co-authored by Sen. Joe Lieberman (I., Conn.) and Susan Collins (R., Maine), reminds us that DoD still hasn't specifically named the threat represented by the Fort Hood attack—a signal to the entire Defense bureaucracy that the subject is taboo.

You can read the whole Rabinowitz article by clicking here.

Geert Wilders: "The Lights are going out all over Europe."

The speech given by Geert Wilders, at the resumption of his trial in Amsterdam today, was posted by Robert Spencer on his website: Jihad Watch.

Be sure to review some of the comments concerning the lack of courage on the part of some Conservative champions here at home.

Thomas Sowell: The Cult of Multiculturalism

Dr. Thomas Sowell, writing today, on National Review Online, discusses the remarks made on the subject of multiculturalism by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and adds his own views (which he has not been shy about sharing over the years) on the subject.

The Cult of Multiculturalism - Thomas Sowell - National Review Online

Some clips:
"We kidded ourselves for a while,” Chancellor Merkel said, but now it was clear that the attempt to build a society where people of very different languages and cultures could “live side by side” and “enjoy each other” has “failed, utterly failed.”

This is not a lesson for Germany alone. In countries around the world, and over the centuries, peoples with jarring differences in language, culture, and values have been a major problem and, too often, sources of major disasters for the societies in which they coexist.

The absorption of millions of immigrants from Europe into American society may be cited as an example of the success of multiculturalism. But, in fact, they were absorbed in ways that were the direct opposite of what the multicultural cult is recommending today.