A Viral Plight

Is it true that it is never too late to recognize a problem and take effective, determined steps to track the problem, identify its source and devise a remedy? Perhaps sometimes, and perhaps not. In the West where enlightenment and the philosophy of living in peace with one's neighbours, and accepting diversity and recognizing the fair and just need for social neutrality and the exercise of law and order to everyone's equal benefit, there is a collective bid for fairness. And there is social conscience.

Looking elsewhere around the world where people live without the assurances of a just and fair society, and where wealth never trickles down to those in need, and where laws are administered unequally, and where some governments tend to prey on their vulnerable populations, and where wars between neighbouring countries seem to be stubbornly prevalent, open, liberal democratic societies have developed a tendency to be generous and open their borders to desperate migrants.

Over a period of time migrants from elsewhere have made themselves comfortable in these societies, found a place for themselves and their offspring, far from the life-situations borne by their forbears, and consider themselves fully citizens of their adopted countries. This, at a time when it was expected that emigrants from countries where people fled poverty and insecurity would be eager and willing to adapt to the values and the culture of receiving countries. Those pluralist societies gained from the immigrants they accepted and the immigrants gained equally, becoming an integral part of society.

That is no longer the case when it comes to people transferring their physical presence from a tribal society mired in the heritage of suspicion and grievance, rage and war, complicated by a religion that sternly instructs its faithful that every aspect of life is attributable to the generous spirit of their god, and that the faithful must remind themselves multiple times daily in giving effusive thanks to that god, the while spurning the contaminating presence of those not of their religion.

And these are the people who have latterly migrated to Europe and to North America in their suffocating numbers, transforming the societies in which they find themselves to accept them as they are with no expectations that they will be prepared to surrender their customs, their religious laws and their cultural heritage to absorb the values and social covenants of the receiving countries' indigenous way of life. As their numbers grew to represent an ever greater proportion of a country's population, their clerics and spokespeople increasingly asserted their entitlement to overturn the social order and prevailing laws to subordinate them to their own.

An nonrepresentationally-higher proportions of Muslim immigrants perpetrate acts of crime in the public sphere wherever they settle. A disproportionate number of the population seems content to be unemployed and living off social welfare. And a significant portion of their numbers are resentful of other social and religious groups, particularly so of other ethnic groups whom they have traditionally been at war with, and bring their attitudes and their biases and slanders with them. While a yet even smaller number succumb to the belief that political, violent jihad is an absolute obligation.

Welcome to a new world order. Where western Europe, Canada, the United States and Australia among other first-world countries of the world, have found themselves the recipient of immigrants who have no interest whatever in integrating into their all-embracing social, cultural and value systems, preferring to set themselves studiously apart, while insisting that their own social, cultural and value systems must be respected, their religious laws maintained in parallel with the countries' own.

The absorption of tens of millions of worshippers of Islam with its rigid interpretation of obligations of the faith has slowly transformed the culture and the social values of countries that have always taken pride in their own, but whose own have now been shunted aside. Moreover, because the majority of the indigenous populations have subscribed to a pathology of guilt for having so much, and perceived expiation in the need to share, unreasonable demands have been met with the acceptance of reasonable accommodation.

The greater the accommodation granted, the more accelerated the growing demands and expectations. And we are left with stark divisions within society. The indigenous heritage and culture living in a psychological fortress of burgeoning resentment and fear of offending, and the invited immigrant heritage and culture living in an equally burgeoning scene of resentment, and anger at offences. Offences deliberate and offences delivered with no malign intention.

Are there solutions to this overwhelmingly international babel of voices, aggregate entitlements, profound dissatisfactions, and inherent threats?