What Keeps Trump Up at Night - Part II
This is Part II of an article about two huge existential threats to the advanced world: the growing specter of Chinese economic and Iranian cultural hegemony. Sadly, western globalists don’t see the “existential threat” because they don’t live with the consequences up close and personal. Furthermore, they mistakenly attribute the “protectionist” rhetoric of red-state Americans and neoconservative Europeans as economic nostalgia and white supremacism. In fact, cultural nativism is a logical reaction to the very real problems of on-boarding 1.8 billion Muslims into Europe and North America.
Let’s cut to the chase: native-born citizens expect their governments to protect their cultural traditions, which are rooted in the Enlightenment and Reformation, and they are frightened when Islamic immigrants don’t uphold those traditions. These frightened citizens understand why Muslims want to flee war-torn countries for the relative comfort of Germany and the USA, but they don’t understand why they don’t want to assimilate into German society or embrace the American Dream.
Western prosperity is rooted in the English tradition of personal property rights, the Dutch tradition of public-debt markets, the scientific method that emerged from Europe’s religious Reformation (man can challenge conventional wisdom), and the American tradition of democratized information and technology. Furthermore, these four pillars of prosperity have been embraced by the Japanese and Israelis to the benefit of their countries, while Iranians and Afghanis have rejected these keys as part and parcel of their complete rejection of Christianity and western social values.
I would argue the western working-and-middle classes are only trying to preserve the enlightened values they were taught in the public schools of Europe and North America – and suggest their anarcho-globalist leaders have it wrong. The poster boy for anarcho-globalism was President Obama, who apologized in the Middle East for a modern world that was overwhelmingly the creation of western Europeans and North Americans. A true leader would speak the truth: poor countries and oppressive theocracies need to get with the prosperity program.
Western leaders must speak to the truth their citizens see: today’s Islam is not compatible with European-informed civility. Islam has never undergone a political reformation, making it the world’s only major religion to still conflate church and state. Iran and ISIL, both Islamic theocracies, have mistreated their own citizens, killed neighboring Muslims, and sponsored terror attacks throughout the non-Muslim world. A pluralist and tolerant America should not trust a barbaric theocracy that test-fires missiles with Death To America and Death To Israel emblazoned on the side.
Not all Muslims are anti-civilization, and an outright Muslim immigration ban is not compatible with the western constructs of pluralism (diversity) and tolerance. I believe this to be true; but I also believe Muslim assimilation into western civilization has been a catastrophic failure – because it is a clash of values: Western secularism versus Islamic fundamentalism. A crystal-clear example of this clash was televised in France, when French Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy condemned Swiss Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan in a debate - - for supporting the stoning of women.
It is one thing for 77 percent of Egypt’s citizens to favor cutting off the hands of thieves and 82 percent to support the stoning of adulteresses (source: Pew Research). It is quite another to just assume an Egyptian immigrant will regard an American woman’s equality as a cultural construct and accept civil divorce as the legal remedy for adultery. Likewise, after the Islamic terror attack on Charlie Hebdo, the French should worry about the personal safety of journalists and a free press.
Until liberal governments in the West insist every immigrant pledges allegiance to the host country and embraces the mainstream culture, working-and-middle-class citizens will trend toward isolation and preservation. There is a we the people disconnect in the West: institutional elites (such as John Kerry) travel through Islamic countries in motorcades and get their information from foreign-policy briefs or at UN conferences, while working-and-middle-class citizens get their information on a very personal level.
In southwest Virginia, working-and-middle-class voters learn about Islam from sons, daughters, nephews, nieces and friends who have been deployed in Iraq, ISIL and Afghanistan. In the Chapelle-Pajol district in Paris, native-born French voters feel like strangers in their homeland: encountering thousands of niqab-clad women, anti-Semitic graffiti on the Metro walls, and mullahs preaching Jihad in community halls. For one minute, consider Hillary Clinton’s false claim (i.e. encountering sniper fire at the Tuzla airport when she was actually greeted by a Bosnian child with flowers), which she made to advance her political credentials. Do you now understand how she angered main-street Americans by calling them xenophobes and Islamophobes?
I truly believe the arc of history will bend toward western social and governmental values: I just don’t when or how the world will get there. I do know that good and strong leaders speak to the truths their citizens are enduring – and their fellow citizens are getting maimed and killed in the name of Islamic barbarism (which has no chance of replacing the advanced societies in Asia, Europe, North America and South America). It is not racist to uphold Anglo-American justice. It is not anti-Muslim to uphold diversity and democracy. Above all, it is wrong to dishonor one’s fellow citizens when they are frightened by existential threats to the homelands they love – and often die to defend.