The Incomprehensible Folly of Multiculturalism

In keeping with President Bush's constant, fawning praise of Islam, the Pentagon puts on a spectacle guaranteed to make every member of Al Qaeda double over in laughter.

Navy imam Chaplain Abuhena M. Saifulislam lifted his voice to God as he called to prayer more than 100 Department of Defense employees Monday at a celebration of Ramadan at the Pentagon.

“God is most great,” sang the lieutenant commander and Islamic leader, in Arabic, as iftar — the end of the daily fast began.

Uniformed military personnel, civilians and family members faced Mecca and knelt on adorned prayer rugs chanting their prayers in quiet invocation to Allah.

“We do all we can to help meet the religious needs of our soldiers,” said Deputy Pentagon Chaplain Army Maj. Alan Pomaville, a Christian, who attended the iftar alongside the Muslim chaplains. “The leadership in the [Defense Department] wants to care for the body of the whole soldier.”

As the Pentagon celebrated Ramadan, the White House is in preparations for an iftar feast tomorrow, said Lt. Cmdr. Saifulislam, who will be participating at the White House events.

“President and Mrs. Bush host an iftar dinner every year because they want people around the world to know how much they respect Islam and the many Muslims living in the U.S. who are free to worship as they want, and are an integral part of our society," said Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for the White House National Security Council.

Just over six years ago, Muslims launched the most vicious attack on the U.S. in its history, killing thousands of innocent civilians in New York and Pennsylvania, and scores of American servicemen in the Pentagon itself. The terrorists who attacked America did so explicitly in the name of Islam. Now, at the very building where American soldiers and civilians were burned alive by an airplane-turned-missile by Muslims, the American government prostrates itself toward the enemy religion.

While the American government contorts itself to appease the estimated 2.35 million Muslims living in the U.S. (less than one percent of the U.S. population - though the Bush administration is doing every possible to increase that percentage), Muslims in Toronto are demonstrating that multiculturalism is a one-way street.

TORONTO - A Toronto mosque is telling Muslims not to say "Happy Thanksgiving" or invite friends into their homes for turkey dinner on the holiday weekend.

The Khalid Bin Al-Walid Mosque says to "avoid participating" in dinners, parties or greetings on Thanksgiving because it is a kuffaar, or non-Muslim, celebration.

A two-part article on the mosque Web site says Muslims should also "stay completely away" from "Halloween trick-and treat nonsense," Christmas, New Year's, anniversaries, birthdays and Earth Day.

"How can we bring ourselves to congratulate or wish people well for their disobedience to Allah? Thus expressions such as:Happy Thanksgiving, Happy Birthday, Happy New Year, etc, are completely out," it says.

This is not the first time this mosque has dispensed such advice.

In 2003, the Khalid mosque, which mainly serves the Toronto Somali-Canadian community, apologized for a newsletter that compared wishing someone a Merry Christmas to congratulating a murderer.

At the time, a junior employee was blamed for the slight, but the mosque's Web site has since posted similar edicts covering not only Christmas but also virtually every other Western celebration.

Muslims who participate in the holidays are termed ignorant and hypocritical.

While not all are religious holidays, the Internet site says Muslims are required to be different from non-Muslims "in matters which are representative of them or are characteristic of their identity."

Also banned, it says, are: watching sports or soap operas, walking dogs, family photos, wedding bands, Western hats, mingling and shaking hands with the opposite sex.

"Allah and his messenger have warned us against following or imitating non-Muslims in things which are characteristic of their religion or beliefs. This is more emphasized in the case of their eids [festivals] or occasions, which always hold some religious or ideological non-Islamic meanings, and on which the kuffaar indulge in many evil practices."

The mosque's honesty is refreshing. No ofuscation, no fake appeals to tolerance - a simple and logical statement of truth. Muslims should remain Muslim and not be assimilated by the surrounding culture. There is nothing wrong with this idea. Non-Muslim culture and traditions are alien to the Muslim way of life; so they are rightly to be avoided in order to remain truly Muslim. If Muslims truly value their religion and its traditions - and it is clear that most do - then maintaining that religious and cultural identity is something one can reasonably expect Muslims to do.

None of this presents any problem for Muslims. The problem is for non-Muslims in non-Muslim nations who have permitted large numbers of Muslims to immigrate into their societies. It is particularly a problem in Western nations, for two reasons. First, Islam and its cultural practices and outlook are diametrically opposed to the central ideas of Western civilization. Islam is alien to the West and is, by necessity of its ideology, antagonistic toward the Western mindset. Placing large numbers of Muslim inside Western nations necessarily sets the stage for cultural conflict, since Muslims, being so different, cannot be expected to assimilate and will only grow more estranged and resentful of the surrounding Western culture. If the numbers of Muslims are relatively small, this might be little more than an irritant. However, as the numbers of Muslims grow, their confidence and willingness to strike back at the surrounding Western culture will only rise. Greater numbers breed increasing boldness. Western Europe now finds itself precisely in this situation, where second and third generation European Muslims in Britain, Germany, Holland, Belgium and France, now feel completely secure in vocally calling for the destruction of the West and the Islamification of the countries in which they reside.

The second danger of permitting Muslims (or other religiously or culturally different aliens) into the West springs from the current intellectual climate existing within the West, specifically that of multiculturalism. The West has lost its civilizational confidence, largely at the hands of leftist intellectuals who have declared the West to be the epicenter of all evil in the world. The same intellectuals, in what may be history's greatest example of an intellectual Trojan Horse, have convinced most of the West's population that the only way they can atone for their civilization's crimes in an unending tolerance of non-Western cultures. To that end, anything that is not Western - and certainly not European - is to be celebrated and endorsed, while traditional Western customs and culture are to be denigrated and redacted in favor of "tolerance" for other (more worthy) cultures. This, of course, is not simply to be applied to Western cultural artifacts, but to the population that created them as well. The deliberate denigration and negation of Western culture and Western peoples is packaged as diversity - an eternal good beyond any questioning - and under this rubric, the doors to Western nations have been flown open to admit tens of millions of non-Westerners, many of whom have no intention of assimilating to the West, and likely could never do so even if they wanted to. Multiculturalism is simply the intellectual sugar-coating of an movement whose primary (and often openly avowed) goal is the end of Western Civilization and the people who created it.

Poisoned by this ideology, the West finds itself unable to respond properly to the alien threats now facing it - and within it. Muslims have perceived this weakness and boldly use it to their advantage.

They are not unclear about their goals, though they recognize the value of disguising them from non-Muslims.

The Web site also has a question-and-answer section, which advises that Muslims can join political parties only if they are "able to exert some influence on the direction of the party so that it will take an Islamic direction."

Elsewhere in the Q&A section, it says that, "with strong determination and patience, the world will God-willing be under the Muslims' control."

Relect on the mosque's honest statement for a minute, then consider the final paragraphs of the Washington Times' account of the Pentagon's Ramadan celebration.

For the Pentagon, as with the rest of the country, the process of mending fences since the September 11 attacks has not always been easy but necessary, he added.

"I think there is a misconception at times," said Cmdr. Saifulislam. "I have attended many funerals of American Muslims who have died in Iraq. If you take the time to get to know somebody, your attitude toward them changes."

The first Muslim U.S. congressman — Rep. Keith Ellison, Minnesota Democrat — also attended the iftar, along with Imam Sheik Rashid Lamptey, executive director of the Muslim Association of Virginia. Sheik Lamptey also served as the deputy imam of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society in Virginia.

As the night's festivities concluded, Col. Oldenburg [a Muslim] presented Sheik Lamptey with an American flag that flew over the Pentagon on Sept. 7.

This is how President Bush and the American government fights "the war on terror" and the ideology that attacked the U.S. on September 11, 2001. This is why neither the president nor the U.S. government is taken seriously by the terrorists, or should be by anyone else.