The End of Dhimmitude?

This Newsweek article reports on the steps that European countries are taking in response to Islamism: Cartoons: The End of Europe’s Tolerance? The writer adopts a hand-wringing tone, but it seems like good news to me.

The world has long looked upon the Dutch as the very model of a modern, multicultural society. Open and liberal, the tiny seagoing nation that invented the globalized economy in the 1600s prided itself on a history of taking in all comers, be they Indonesian or Turkish, African or Chinese.How different things look today. Dutch borders have been virtually shut. New immigration is down to a trickle. The great cosmopolitan port city of Rotterdam just published a code of conduct requiring Dutch be spoken in public. Parliament recently legislated a countrywide ban on wearing the burqa in public. And listen to a prominent Dutch establishment figure describe the new Dutch Way with immigrants. “We demand a new social contract,” says Jan Wolter Wabeke, High Court Judge in The Hague. “We no longer accept that people don’t learn our language, we require that they send their daughters to school, and we demand they stop bringing in young brides from the desert and locking them up in third-floor apartments.”

What’s going on here? Weren’t the Dutch supposed to be the nicest people on earth, the most tolerant nation in Europe, a melting pot for minorities and immigrants since the Renaissance? No longer, and in this the Dutch are once again at the forefront of changes in Europe. This time, the Dutch model for Europe is one of multiculturalism besieged, if not plain defunct.

This helps explain Europe’s unusually robust reaction to the cartoon crisis, which continued last week with riots in Nigeria and Pakistan that have left over 100 dead. There were apologies, to be sure, for causing offense after a small Danish paper published a dozen cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. But on one point European leaders were united and bluntly clear: they would not tolerate any limits on European newspapers’ rights to publish. “Freedom of speech is not up for negotiation,” declared Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, summing up a consensus that has only grown stronger as the cries of outrage from the Muslim world grow louder.

Welcome to the end of tolerance, or at least to the nonnegotiable limits to what Europeans will tolerate.

Maybe Europeans won’t tolerate being bullied and killed for failure to submit to Islam. How very old-fashioned of them.

Comments

  1. Steve wrote:

    What’s going on here? Weren’t the Dutch supposed to be the nicest people on earth, the most tolerant nation in Europe, a melting pot for minorities and immigrants since the Renaissance?

    The author is a complete idiot. Melting pot where immigrants deprive their daughters of an education? What kind of an idiot is this guy.

    In reading the rest of the article, I can only conclude this is an idiot that has been living in a hole in the ground.

    These days, he speaks for most Europeans. Danes, and Dutch, and a few other countries might be well on their way to creating multiethnic societies. But make no mistake: they’re no longer willing to tolerate a European melting pot—a broadly multicultural society—where different cultures live by widely different norms.

    This intellectually and morally bankrupt loon just doesn’t seem to get it that the problem is that the muslims that are rampaging in places like Pakistan and Nigeria don’t want a melting pot “where different cultures live by widely different norms” and are quite willing to kill to achieve their goals. That is what the Mohammmed cartoons have shown the world. While the West is willing to tolerate different religious, political, etc. views there are those in the Islamic world that wont be tolerant and they’ll kill to enforce their world vision.

    Your right though in that there is quite possibly a silver lining to the article. While Theil is a handwringing wuss who would rather capitulate than stand up for his rights, perhaps most Europeans are not and things are maybe going to change.

    Posted 02 Mar 2006 at 2:37 pm

  2. John the Marine wrote:

    Perhaps, Europe is waking up. However, I won’t bet the farm on it yet. Steve, expresses frustration after reading the above article. It seems that there is still a bit of denial of reality in the articles tone. All I can say is that for the most part I agree with steve.

    Steve, you ask what kind of idiot the author is? I would suggest that he is a cowardly idiot who is afraid to go the rest of the way and offend Islam (still trying to compromise with the beast).

    Maybe Western Europe has learned to develope a spine, or is a least heading in that direction.

    Posted 02 Mar 2006 at 4:06 pm

  3. Dee wrote:

    “What’s going on here? Weren’t the Dutch supposed to be the nicest people on earth, the most tolerant nation in Europe, a melting pot for minorities and immigrants since the Renaissance?”

    What’s going on here? We discovered that radical islamists equal “niceness” to “weakness”! As a result we have enclaves of immigrants who continue to live their lives as if they live in a medieval Saudi-Arabia and feel nothing but contempt for a democratic country.

    Many immigrants don’t understand a word of Dutch (even after 40 years!) and they have created a climate in which teachers are afraid to teach about the holocaust, where young Morroccan youths disturb WWII memorial services with anti-semitic songs and where they clamour for the introduction of sharia law, state funded Islamic schools, more female genital mutilation and the right to work in kindergartens dressed in a burqa! But as if that wasn’t enough, it was only after they slaughtered Theo van Gogh, plotting to blow up the parliament building and organizing para-military training camps in local forests most Dutch people stoppped being “nice”…

    Posted 05 Mar 2006 at 2:35 am

  4. Alon Levy wrote:

    Weren’t the Dutch supposed to be the nicest people on earth, the most tolerant nation in Europe, a melting pot for minorities and immigrants since the Renaissance?

    Nope. Western Europe is incredibly racist: discrimination against blacks in the US pales in comparison to discrimination against Muslims in Europe. Whereas the USA and Canada have more than a hundred years’ knowledge of how to integrate immigrants into their societies, and actively promote themselves as immigrant nations, no European country has similar experience except France, which prefers to promote itself as a Gallic country instead of capitalize on its rich immigrant history.

    Europe sure looked nice and tolerant when it smugly opposed any real solutions to immigrant ghettoization, such as letting skilled workers immigrate, cracking down on police racism (the French police’s attitudes toward Muslims make LAPD look like a bastion of racial tolerance), giving immigrants’ children citizenship, and collecting data on workplace and housing discrimination against minorities. It rejected these as American stupidity, as window dressing that didn’t do anything for minorities. Now it doesn’t look very tolerant anymore; but of course it’s easier for the average Frenchman to hate les arabes than to consider that the French government’s social policies are rotten.

    Look at how progressive the non-muslim far east is after rising up from the ashes of World War II (i.e. Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Hong Kong and Singapore). Some muslims tell me that Malaysia is an islamic country…..but do you realize that the non-muslim Chinese makes up 20% of its population? It is also the Chinese (non-muslims) of Malaysia who are captains of industry and do all the work, which made Malaysia somewhat progressive! It certaintly isn’t the lazy backward malaysian muslims!

    Singapore’s about the most conservative, authoritarian modern country in existence. Malaysia may surpass it as soon as it becomes a modern country, which will probably happen very soon. The best response to lumping China among progressive countries is uncontrollable laughter.

    Posted 05 Mar 2006 at 5:05 pm

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