Let's be honest: Multiculturalism can kill a nation

By James P. Pinkerton, Newsday.com

February 7, 2006

http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-oppin074616604feb07%2C0%2C687588.column

The lesson of the Muhammad cartoon controversy is: Multiculturalism between nations is inevitable, but multiculturalism within nations is disastrous.

Protests, many of them violent, have erupted across the world - including Europe, Australia and New Zealand - after the appearance of cartoons depicting the Muslim prophet Muhammad in unflattering ways.

It's time for all of us to recognize that different cultures have different values. For the West, broadly speaking, the highest value is freedom, including freedom of religious expression. But for the Muslim world, the highest value seems to be Islamic piety. To draw such a distinction between West and East is not to endorse cultural relativism; it's simply to take note of cultural reality.

Not everyone thirsts for liberty. Plenty of people around the world, maybe most, thirst instead to restrict liberty. And so, if Muslim crowds can't kill the Muhammad-mocking Danish cartoonists for "blasphemy," they will settle for burning Western embassies, at least for now....

It should be obvious that our effort to influence Muslim public opinion in a positive way has reached a dead end. That is, we advocate democratization but get Islamization. That process empowers the likes of Hamas in Palestine and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran....

Differences between the West and the Muslim world can be chalked up to just that - differences. That's the truth about world ethnicity, and no amount of politically correct wishful thinking will change that truth. Countries that ignore that basic lesson of history and political science put themselves at grave risk of internal discord, subversion and civil war. Either a country is united in its common culture or it becomes disunited in its multiculturalism....

Short of worldwide war, followed by occupation, there's not much the West can do about Muslim culture in Muslim lands. That's international multiculturalism, alas. But on the issue of intra-national multiculturalism, there's plenty we can do. We can monitor, we can insist upon political and cultural assimilation and we can impose strict controls on immigration and travel visas - down to zero if need be.

We might not be able to change them, but we can keep them from changing us.

Read the complete article.