It appears as if this multicultural smack we’re being sold in the U.S. didn’t work out too well in the U.K. Just this past week British Prime Minister David Cameron echoed German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s sentiments from last October that their country’s Pollyanna policy of multicultural yumminess toward Islam’s “way of life” was, in retrospect, really stupid—as in really, really, really stupid.
Yep, England’s giddy naïveté to prove to the thought police that they have evolved into nonjudgmental goo has led our snaggle-toothed cousins to open wide their borders to militant Muslims who hate the very ground that true Brits walk on. Now the Brits have a huge, stonking Muslim mess on their hands. Garsh. Who’d a thunk it?
Who would have imagined that letting religious gangsters immigrate to the U.K. (who happen to loathe British values, have zero desire to assimilate into the mix, and believe England’s laws suck and Sharia is simply fabulous) would have turned out bad? Who saw that coming?
I’ll tell you who saw that coming: Stevie Wonder, all myopic Cyclopes far and wide, and everyone in Europe who has a lick of common sense and a functioning BS detector. However, when these seers began to perceive the erosion of their life and values thirty years ago and when they started speaking out that these Muslims who “long to join” the British melting pot were not, if fact, melting but rather ruining the whole damn stew with their radical nonsense, they were immediately shouted down as xenophobes by the altruistic multiculties.
Yes, though it once seemed cute and cosmopolitan to have people from all over the Middle East speaking different languages, serving different foods, wearing burkas and playing different music, it has now turned ugly with Islamic enclaves completely at odds with British culture. And make no mistake about it: This Islamic hate came right in through the front door riding on the back of Kumbayah multiculturalism, and now merry old England is scary new England, and the U.K.’s become a hotbed for terrorists. Now they have hell to pay.
Yes, thanks to multiculturalism the United Kingdom has become the Divided Kingdom, and Americans should take note; Americans have been told for so long that when Muslims leave the Middle East and move to the U.S. it’s because they love America and that for which it stands and want to enjoy the Judeo-Christian perks that this grand experiment in self government has yielded.
This is the same stuff the multiculties told the formerly great Britain, France, Germany, Spain and Italy. And you know what? I ain’t buying it. And here’s what I propose: I say Muslims trip over themselves and prove they love our country, freedoms and rights. I say they leave all their “unique” customs and laws that don’t coincide with our views of women, liberty, justice and human rights back in the country they left to come here. I say that they adapt to us wholeheartedly and not utter a peep about how they hate America. If they do the aforementioned, great … welcome to our world. If they don’t … we deport them back to whatever Suckistan they came from. God help us to learn the lesson Cameron, Merkel and Sarkozy are now screaming at us and refuse to follow the example of Europe and allow for separate Muslim enclaves in which radical weirdness can fester and turn into a national nightmare.
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Doug Giles’ new book “If You're Going Through Hell, Keep Going!" is now available. Ann Coulter says "Doug Giles is a substantive and funny tour de force for traditional values.” Doug’s talk show and video blog can be seen and heard at www.ClashRadio.com.
Does Religion Oppress Women?
ReplyDeleteA New York Times blog written by Nicholas Kristof recently caught my attention. "Does Religion Oppress Women?" was the question and the title of the article. As someone who speaks and writes on behalf of the Christian faith, I have often heard this asserted as a reason against belief in the Christian faith—or any faith at all. But I am also a woman and I wondered how a secular journalist like Kristof might answer this question. Moreover, I wondered what in his travels and experience he had seen that made him write about this topic in particular.
Kristof has traveled extensively across the African continent and has spent time in some of Africa's poorest communities. In his many essays documenting these experiences, he often talks about the role of faith, acknowledging both its positive role and its negative contribution in the life of African women specifically. He writes, "I've seen people kill in the name of religion... But I've also seen
Catholic nuns showing unbelievable courage and compassion in corners of the world where no other aid workers are around, and mission clinics and church-financed schools too numerous to mention."(1) So, is religion, and Christianity in particular, good for women? Kristof does not offer an easy answer to this question.
And of course, there are not easy answers. As recently as April 2010, as reported in Christianity Today magazine, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that Christians in some countries in Africa still practiced female genital mutilation.(2) For many, and particularly persons of faith, these findings are very troubling.
In fact, these findings take on doleful irony when one looks at the earliest Christian movement and its attraction for women in particular. The world of the Roman Empire, filled with a diverse array of religious options, could not compete with the growing Christian movement in its appeal to women. So many women were becoming
Christians, in fact, that pagan religious leaders used its attraction to women as an argument against Christianity. In his treatise, On True Doctrine, the pagan leader Celsus wrote in alarming terms about the subversive nature of Christianity to the stability of the Empire and regarded the disproportionate number of women among the Christians as evidence of the inherent irrationality and vulgarity of the Christian faith. Historian David Bentley Hart writes of Celsus's alarm: "It is unlikely that Celsus would have thought the Christians worth his notice had he not recognized something uniquely dangerous lurking in their gospel of love and peace... [A]nd his treatise contains a considerable quantity of contempt for the ridiculous rabble and pliable simpletons that Christianity attracted into its fold: the lowborn and uneducated, slaves, women and children."(3) Indeed, Christianity attracted women and others deemed on the bottom rung of society because it elevated their status
from an often oppressive Roman patriarchy.
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ReplyDeleteEven a cursory survey of the historic evidence concerning women and early Christianity demonstrates an ineluctable pull. Rather than being another force for oppression, Christianity drew women into its fold. Hart adds; "There is no doubt for any historian of early Christianity that this was a religion to which women were powerfully drawn, and one that would not have spread nearly so far or so swiftly but for the great number of women in its fold."(4) In a world where women were largely viewed as household property or worse, how could they not be drawn to a figure who elevated their worth and status? Jesus, unlike many in his contemporary world, showed extraordinary kindness and care to women—even women of questionable character. He was often criticized for this by the religious of his day. But he welcomed women into his community of disciples just the same.
At the heart of Christianity is Jesus. Jesus raised people up to the
full-stature of their humanity. And the earliest followers of Jesus, as Hart concludes, "from the first, placed charity at the center of the spiritual life as no pagan cult ever had, and raised the care of widows, orphans, the sick, the imprisoned, and the poor to the level of the highest of religious obligations."(5) Of Jesus it was said, "A battered reed he will not break off, and a smoldering wick he will not put out." In a world where women, among many others, are often battered reeds and smoldering wicks, this is liberating, good news.
Margaret Manning is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Seattle, Washington.
(1) Nicholas Kristof, "Does Religion Oppress Women?" The New York Times, December 15, 2009.
(2) Christianity Today, "Spotlight: What We Learned About Africa," April 2010, vol. 54, no. 6, 11.
(3) David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2009), 115. See also pp. 159-161.
(4) Ibid., 159-160.
(5) Ibid., 164.