Sixteen Volts

To continue with the topic of my previous post, I noticed that Jussi Halla-Aho has already written an essay about it, "Suvaitsevaisuuden umpikuja" ("The Dead End of Tolerance"). This essay first discusses the incident where two Somali men living in Finland used iron bars to beat up their sister because she didn't agree to an arranged marriage with a relative. After this discussion comes the meaty stuff which I shall again take the liberty to translate for the international readers:

The majority of Muslims, at least the ones I have seen in person or depicted in media, support values that the Western society has, under the leadership of leftists, tried to abolish since the Second World War. These values include e.g. tight entanglement of religious leadership and government, man's patriarchal position as the head of the family, the woman's subordinate position as a servant of men who gives birth to children, considering the community instead of an individual as the principal subject and actor, the position of men as rulers of nature, and extremely negative attitudes towards homosexuals. Not all Muslims are ready to blow up and mutilate for these values, but the vast majority of them supports these values. Even if the social order in multicultural Europe were maintained, at some point Muslims comprise such a large percentage of population that they will organize politically and start advancing their agenda in democratic means.

During the past few decades, the Western leftists have managed to create a situation in which all criticism against women or sexual minorities is a political suicide. The fact that gays and feminists can push though their occasionally absurd demands doesn't follow from any kind of well-reasoned arguments but from preventing all discussion and debate with a hysterically controlled system of taboos. (In fact, my main problem with gay rights and women's issues is the very totalitarian nature of the debate, not as much those issues themselves.)

As I was translating these last lines, I think I just read some news from America about that topic... I wonder what it was... Oh, damn it. Let's get back to the article.

The "cultural sensitivity", which euphemistically refers to the mainstream culture gradually giving up its rights so that it wouldn't offend the fanatical, reactionary and thin-skinned minority, when added to the growth of the Muslim population, will lead to a result in which the political system will soon include people who are able to start smashing the existing taboos, since they are themselves protected by another even stronger taboo. I am talking about the fact that imams can in their taxpayer-funded mosques proclaim without any legal consequences that the holiest of all holies of the European neomythology, the Holocaust, is a fairy tale. Muslims get to deny the untouchable since they are themselves untouchable. (It was just today that an Austrian court slapped David Irving with a three-year jail term for questioning the Holocaust in a speech 17 years ago.)

And just so that everybody is clear on this: the word "mythology" refers here to the special unique position that the Holocaust has in our culture, and is most certainly not any kind of denial of its historical reality.

Since the Western society is chained by its "tolerance" and cannot force Muslims to change, Muslims will not change. The only thing that changes is their political weight. European parliaments will soon have representatives who believe that gays must be, if not impaled, at least sent to forced treatment. The Western left will then either have to break their taboo that protects Muslims and enter a direct conflict with their protectees, or give up their other taboos that Muslims have no intention of respecting. Once the pump has been primed, the holocaust, women's issues, gay rights etc. will again become hot button issues after years of silence, and the Western extreme right will happily use this possibility. If Muslims are allowed to criticize gays, then why can't the others?

European Muslims have demanded that their host societies should establish laws that forbid drawing pictures of Mohammed. I believe that sane Europeans should, despite the superficial absurdity of this situation, support these demands, since reaching this goal would force the "tolerant" elite into a stalemate. According to their official liturgy, Islam is not a priviledged religion, but these laws would restrict offending the religious sensibilities of other people on a general level. Therefore nobody could support Lex Muhammed which forbids only offending Muslims without losing their political credibility. This law would have to forbid drawing caricatures of anything that is holy for any religious group. After several decades long pause, courts would again have to try blasphemers, and paradigm deconstructions such as "Pig Messiah" would disappear from museums. I would really love to see how the Socialist League and other defenders of the sacred values of Muslims would react to Christian God returning to enjoy the protection of government and courts.

At this point I should perhaps note to my American readers that the Finnish law does nominally carry a law against blasphemy, originating from an era when people were actually worried about God getting angry and punishing the whole God-fearing nation of Finland for the sins of the few. However, these days this law is a completely dead letter and I don't think that anyone has been charged with it in my lifetime. Several atheists and satanists have in fact actively tried to get charged with blasphemy, with zero success. But I would also like to point out that the Finnish anti-blasphemy law should not be confused with another law that forbids harassment of any religious ceremony or event, and this law is still very much in full effect.

Being aware of the danger of offending some of my female readers, I'd like to discuss the sexual aspect of this issue, since for the past few decades, the most ardent defenders of diversity have been women. As is typical for people who were born to wealth and freedom, many Western women don't understand how well off they are as women when viewed from the global perspective. A woman as a free agent who is in control of her mind and body is both a diachronic and a synchronic anomaly. Feminists have developed as feverish vision of the Western male plotting and scheming to throw women back to kitchen barefoot and pregnant (and the negro back to the cotton fields). Drunk of their own power, feminists have become blind to a certain historical fact. The European woman is not free since she is strong. She is not free since she decided to be free. She is free for the simple reason that the European male wants her to be free. The physical strength and all organizations that dispense force are (and have always been) the male dominion. If he wanted to, the Western man could at any time turn this continent into the patriarchal-despotic hell that most sisters of the Western woman live. The very best proof of the fact that the Western man wants equality is the fact that there is equality in the West. The greatest victim of Islam is the Muslim woman. The greatest victim of islamization of Europe is the Western woman. The only thing that stands between the Western woman and the Islamic order is the Western man. The best and only friend that the Western woman has on this globe is the Western man.

The facts, as I see them, are the following: the Muslim cultures are violent according to both objective facts and their own definitions. Sensitive attitudes towards the culture of the Muslim immigrants the way it is prevents this culture from changing. Since the Muslim culture will not change, Muslims have no means of integrating to the productive society. Since Muslims will not integrate, they form and will form the lowest socioeconomic strata of the Western society. In this situation they will insulate themselves even tighter inside their own violent culture, grow embittered towards the mainstream culture that they envy and become even more violent not towards just their own but also the surrounding society. This isn't even a prediction any more, but a description of the modern-day Europe.

The sensitive attitude that the "tolerant" display against Islamic barbarism, "acknowledging the inviolability of the other" as writer Johannes Ojansuu phrases it in Helsingin Sanomat 3/10, naturally encourages Muslims to demand more. Sensitivity will force Europeans to retreat one step at the time, and at some point we will face a choice: since Muslims are untouchable, either we change and adapt, or the whole society will be segregated so that one part obeys one set of rules and the other part obeys another set. If we continue adapting, our society will gradually give up its achievements such as the present rights of women and children. If we segregate, society will no longer be multicultural, but two societies, one wealthy and the other poor, reside within the same borders. The task of the central authority will be to prevent an open conflict between the two societies. Unless segregation and complete judicial autonomy of both societies is implemented, Muslims can within the next hundred years, using just the democracy that they so despise, submit the original population under their set of values.

All options are bad. The saddest part in this development which France and Sweden perhaps are currently deepest in, is that the advantages and protections of law are no longer enjoyed by individuals but by communities. "Tolerance" is targeted towards the Muslim community and its culture, as voiced by an imam, instead of the individuals living inside that community, such as the Somali woman who got beat up with iron bars. This message was loud and clear to Somalis: the two men [who were charged with the iron bars assault] knew that if they said they acted according to their culture, mainstream Finns will like the Somali culture even less than now. But they said it anyway, since having learned from their past experiences these men assumed that appealing to culture works, that is, lets them beat the criminal charges. How can we, even in theory, simultaneously "respect" a culture that allows beating and killing women and children, if at the same time we have to grant the women and children who live under this culture the same rights that the members of the majority take for granted?

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Wednesday, February 22, 2006 at 1:03 PM