This week I got really pissed off.
As I was preparing for publication Moses Apostaticus’ masterful essay Diversity Macht Frei, I was introduced to an April 21 article by Ruby Hamad, an Alawite Muslim who resides in Australia. Published in the Sneering Morning Herald, The uncomfortable truth about Australian “diversity” explored an unoriginal idea, which Westerners with any sense, and immigrants to the West who actually share its values, have been arguing for years:
The fetish of “diversity” actually presents an unrealistic idea of who a person from outside the West is, by defining the “other” from a Western perspective, based on what a Westerner is not.
A certain philandering negro from the 60’s would have called this judging someone by the colour of their skin, rather than the content of their character. 20 years ago an academic would have called this Eurocentrism.
Hamad, rather than reaching the logical conclusion that “diversity” is a myth, a tool created by Cultural Marxists to perpetrate white genocide, has eagerly appropriated the idea into another category of “white privilege.” Her turgid conclusion indicates that the “diversity” worshippers of today will become the Mensheviks of tomorrow.:
“A more profound introspection is to admit that those who take it upon themselves to assess Muslims’ cultural authenticity according to how “Other” we present as also belong to this fearful majority. In the name of a version of “diversity” that nevertheless maintains the white status quo, they are unwilling to relinquish their dominance or their certainty that they know us better than we can ever know ourselves.”
(Yes, Im still trying to figure out what that first sentence means.)
She has also written, I didn’t sign the petition against Ayaan Hirsi Ali – I’d prefer to debate her myself and Muslims shouldn’t feel obliged to apologise for terrorist attacks.
Before I get to what got me really hot under the collar, there is much to criticise in this article alone:
“Something is wrong in a society that still cannot seem to comprehend a complex multiculturalism that confounds rather than meets prejudiced expectations. Islam has a rich history of scientific as well as religious inquiry, intellectual interrogation, and dissent, that is at risk of being lost as more and more people seem to accept that only its loudest, most visible forms are authentically Muslim.”
This is pretty stock standard, a veiled (see what I did there) reference to the largely mythical Islamic Golden Age.
“I grew up in a small Muslim community that long ago discarded external rituals in favour of a private spiritual practice that incorporates aspects of Christianity and other faiths. My father insisted we attend the local Sunday School because, “to know Islam you have to know the Bible”.
Blasphemous invocation of Christianity which ignores the fact that if her father really knew the Bible, he would have stopped taking them to the mosque. From John 14:6; “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the father except through me.” Thus, if you incorporate aspects of the Christian faith into your religion, you’re doing Christianity wrong. Still not angry, but it matters.
“These characteristics developed, not in the West, but within Islamic society and are as Muslim as any other. These are Muslim values. To deny this not only promotes an outdated view of Islam as the West’s eternal binary opposite, but also recalls a long traumatic history of persecution in which fundamentalists, scandalised by our syncretism and relative liberalism have marginalised and threatened us with death for “heresy”.
Hamad obfuscates her true Muslim identity – the link she provides regarding her “small Muslim community that long ago discarded external rituals in favour of a private spiritual practice that incorporates aspects of Christianity and other faiths” indicates that she is an Alawite, a Muslim minority sect which is often persecuted. Hamad is engaging in doublespeak: She claims that the version of Islam her “small Muslim community” practices is just as authentically Muslim as mainstream Islam, and she condescends toward Westerners for not getting this, yet she still tries to claim victimhood within the Islamic world itself.
This is intersectionality on a meta-level, but that is not what got to me.
It was these paragraphs which got me going:
“My family were beneficiaries of this sharp turn in policy (end of the Whaite Australia Policy) having fled the Lebanese civil war in 1977. Had we not come here, we may well have left Tripoli for my mother’s homeland of Syria, only to then experience the even more calamitous war engulfing that country. Spared this fate, we settled in Australia where we could safely be ourselves.”
—
“The irony is, of course, that dismissing the perspectives of Muslims if they don’t happen to correspond with the dominant Western viewpoint, is in itself classic Islamophobia. While the term is now (mis)used to indicate any fear of Muslims, Islamophobia has less to do with theology and more to do with the patronising way the West has long regarded the Muslim and Arab world, reducing all its varied communities, its cultural practices and its secular as well as religious tendencies to a collection of static images as far removed from the West as possible.”
—
“It is ironic that my family has escaped this history only to find here, it is in the name of “diversity” that their identity is denied.”
These three paragraphs repeat a fallacy I often hear from migrants to the West:
The idea that they could escape conflicting forces of politics and culture in their own country; such as socialism vs the free market or nationalism; ethnic or religious division; to a country where these conflicts do not exist, is a fallacy because these conflicts are perennial, and universal. Australia and other Western countries have endured years of political, religious and cultural conflict, both violent and non-violent, in order to reach the stability we have, or at least used to have. Ethnic homogeneity, meritocracy, free markets, democracy, and Christian and Enlightenment ethics didn’t happen overnight. And foreigners with different ethnicities, creeds and cultures who want to be themselves upset the balance. If you believe Europeans did precisely this when we colonised other parts of the world, you cannot deny that you are doing the same here.
No, Ruby Hamad, you do not get to lecture me about the correct way to view Islam. You are in my country, and you were able to come here because my country has a history and a culture which you clearly do not understand. Let me educate you, Ruby Hamad, about why you are so hideously, arrogantly, wrong.
Two millennia ago, the land of my ancestors, Europe, and more specifically, Britannia was ruled by the Roman Empire. This empire ruled from Britannia to Syria, and ruled the whole of the Mediterranean Basin including North Africa. This empire was weakened by bureaucracy and socialism, and collapsed, at least in the West, in the fifth century AD due to barbarian invasion. These barbarians however maintained the ways of the old Roman Empire, (which itself survived and thrived in the East, under the Byzantine Empire) and became a part of Christendom – thus they did not destroy Europe. The real damage was done in seventh century AD when Islamic hordes smashed their way out of the Arabian Peninsula and conquered all of the former Roman Empire’s territory in North Africa and the Middle East.
The West, from the very birth of Islam “regarded the Muslim and Arab world, reducing all its varied communities, its cultural practices and its secular as well as religious tendencies to a collection of static images as far removed from the West as possible”, precisely because from the birth of Islam, the Muslim and Arab world constituted an existential threat to Christendom, to Europe, to the West. Muslim pirates raided the coasts of Europe so badly that many coastal regions of Europe remained uninhabited until the 19th century. Muslim armies nearly made it to Paris in the 8th century, and it took until the 15th century to drive them out of Spain. Europa counterattacked briefly during the Middle Ages with a series of Crusades which retook the Holy Land and bought Europe time and space. Muslim armies threatened the gates of Vienna as late as 1683, but the real turning point came in 1453 when the Ottoman Turks took Constantinople, the Rome of the East.
Besides losing one of the most important bastions in Christendom to the barbarian Turks, the route to China and India was blocked. Thus, It was the Muslim invasion of the West which spurred Europeans to find another way to the Orient, which spurred them to take to the high seas, which in turn led to their discovery of the New World and the establishment of colonies and empires throughout the world.
This is where my country comes in. Australia was discovered, colonised and conquered by my ancestors, the British, because your ancestors, Muslims, invaded the lands of my kin. Unlike your ancestors, who remained on lands stolen from my kin, the Romans/Byzantines, my ancestors were enterprising and industrious enough to build one of the most prosperous countries in the history of the human race.
Europeans reconquered their North African territories in the 19th century to end the millennia-long piracy which had plagued us. It is ironic that my British ancestors in the 19th century actually shed their own blood to keep the Ottoman Empire, which ruled the territory your ancestors came from, intact.
But eventually we defeated the last of the Caliphates at the end of World War One, and the West was finally safe from the Islamic scourge. For some insane reason, rather than reclaiming much of the former Roman Empire’s territories in North Africa and the Middle East and expelling the infidel, the leaders of the time divided up the territory for the Arabs and Muslims living on this stolen land, to govern themselves.
This is where it gets really important. Your former country, Lebanon, was a majority Christian country before Muslim refugees from the former Roman province of Palestine fled, after being kicked out by its former inhabitants who returned, and made their home in Lebanon. They quickly out-populated the Christian population, and started a brutal civil war which forced many of your compatriots, both Muslim and Christian, to come to my country.
So, get this:
You, a Muslim, came to this country; a country founded in the process of European efforts to find another way to China and India due to the Muslim invasion of the formerly Roman/Byzantine Anatolian Peninsula; because Muslim refugees from the former Roman province of Palestine turned your homeland, Lebanon, from a Christian country into a Muslim country, which caused civil war which forced your own family to flee.
So, after everything my ancestors have done to try to get as far away from your godforsaken cult as we possibly could, but we have been betrayed by Marxists who hate our civilisation so much that they are determined to import as many Muslims into this country as possible; you think you have the right to lecture us on the proper way to see Islam.
Seriously. Piss off.
Piss off back to Lebanon, Syria, anywhere you want to go in the Muslim world. If you want to live in peace, help your people conquer a slice of land you can live in, just like my ancestors did, or die trying. You do not belong here. This is Christian land. This is European land. This is the West, and you have no bloody right to change it.
We are sick of “diversity”, however you choose to define it, and we know what you are trying to do. You want to change Australia. We will not let you change Australia.
—
I used to think the arguments I heard from older, wiser people than I back in the 80’s and 90’s when I was growing up, that if we import people from other parts of the world, they will just bring their problems here, was simplistic. Now I realise that it was good old common sense, based on a sound historical knowledge.
People who come to this country have to understand that when they come here, they are not escaping the ideological, political, cultural and religious conflicts of their homelands to a place where they can do whatever they want. Australia is a very specific product of a very specific history. It is the way it is because our European ancestors were the way they were, and because they were different from the Islamic world.
Every decision we make about the future of this country must be based on this understanding.