Entitlements, Islamist and Otherwise

The Dutch politician, Geert Wilders has the well-deserved reputation of bluntly speaking his mind. And his mind has been lingering over the transformation that has taken place in his country, in tandem with the rest of Europe, as a result of immigrants from Muslim countries continuing to practise religious and cultural customs that often run counter to the values, religious, social, secular and lawful of their adopted country.

The solution of this disparity in values and priorities has not been to have the immigrant population shed their deep-seated and socially-, culturally-engrained traditions, but rather to witness as they insist that the laws and customs of their adopted country should be altered to reflect their needs. This is not the manner in which people have traditionally integrated into receiving societies in a world of migrating groups through the millennia.

But this is the manner in which immigrants from Muslim-majority countries have been treating the societies of their adopted countries. Despite that they have fled often enough from repressive societies and exploitative governments to find greater opportunities to fit their aspirations for the future, they still cling to the traditional ways of life that give them comfort in their new homes, choosing to eschew those of their new home.

Making a clean break from all that is familiar is not possible overnight. And accommodating one's ethnic and heritage traditions to a new social contract, a new system of justice in a pluralist society is difficult, but it can be accomplished. It can be accomplished with a sense of goodwill and a realization that some things must be sacrificed for the greater good. Entitlements must be earned, and not demanded.

Instead a general thought process appears to have evolved, where imposing a foreign and alien way of life onto an entirely different kind of society with its own traditions and values upsetting the natural order of social life, has evolved. Where countries which absorb immigrants with the expectation that the newcomers are willing to adapt to their values, find instead that immigrants insist the welcoming societies turn their values inside out and upside down to accommodate them.

It is precisely because Islam, the religion, also carefully instructs its faithful to live Islamic principles and values in every aspect of their lives, transforming the religious/spiritual, to a social, judicial, political, all-consuming and overwhelming surrender to an implacable template impervious to inviting any changes for accommodation purposes, that a conflict has arisen.

Geert Wilders states unequivocally, based on the record of what has occurred throughout Europe, his unassailable argument that Islam is rigidly indisposed to being transported to Western-value countries because of its demands. He claims also that the Islamic holy book encourages violence, and as a result moderate Islam is a figment of the imagination of the deluded. Spiritual jihad has succumbed to violent jihad fairly generally.

The logic is there in the various displays of Muslim and Islamist behaviours as fanatics impress the West with their lack of reason and utterances of impassioned belligerence to any and all questioning of Islam. From chaotic, violent displays of incendiary anger resulting in mob-murders, to well-conceived and carried-out jihadist attacks against Western targets and populations.

Supported by a silent, simmering, resentful Muslim ummah, which has never invested itself in making any effort to restrain the fanatics among them; deny that their mission of upheaval reflects their own vision; never wholesale condemned the atrocities committed on behalf of Islam; never admitted that Muslims commit unspeakable acts of violence against other Muslims, let alone infidels and Jews.

So the argument that a Netherlands politician who points out simply what is occurring on the international scene proves in and of itself what he claims, represents a goad and a spur to violence for his confrontational style in a last desperate act to counteract the effects of Islam fully infiltrating the culture and society that he holds dear, holds no water.

It is not a matter of isolating or marginalizing, or threatening or attacking minority group rights. This is a matter of clearly and resolutely pointing out that the receiving society and culture has its inalienable rights, and those rights, to honour and retain their origins and values - trump those of an alien ethnic, cultural, religious group determined to impose theirs on the indigenous society.

It's as simple as that. The need to stop radicalization in its tracks; that of an Islamist belligerent group insistent on its entitlements, and that of a beleaguered indigenous society which has no wish to see its laws, values and culture undermined in favour of honouring one that cannot give due honour to those who have generously opted to share their future.

One group of beings cannot exercise freedom and entitlements at the intolerable expense of despising and refusing to tolerate the identity and values of another. But it is not Western society that claims its superior religion and values must be paramount to all; it is fanatic Islamists quietly watched and supported by a majority insisting that all that is non-Muslim be subordinate to Islam.

The violence that emanates from Islam, both verbal and physical, has its carefully laid-out agenda in the Koran and the history of Islamist conquests.