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National Post
Aug. 22, 2002
Multiculturalists are the real racists

Mark Steyn
National Post

Last Thursday, in Sydney, the pack leader of a group of Lebanese Muslim
gang-rapists was sentenced to 55 years in jail. I suppose I ought to say
"Lebanese-Australian" Muslim gang-rapists, since the accused were
Australian citizens. But, identity-wise, the rambunctious young lads
considered themselves heavy on the Lebanese, light on the Australian.
During their gang rapes, the lucky lady would be told she was about to be
"f---ed Leb style" and that she deserved it because she was an "Australian
pig."

But, inevitably, it's the heavy sentence that's "controversial." After
September 11th, Americans were advised to ask themselves, "Why do they hate
us?" Now Australians need to ask themselves, "Why do they rape us?" As
Monroe Reimers put it on the letters page of The Sydney Morning Herald:

"As terrible as the crime was, we must not confuse justice with revenge. We
need answers. Where has this hatred come from? How have we contributed to
it? Perhaps it's time to take a good hard look at the racism by exclusion
practised with such a vengeance by our community and cultural institutions."

Indeed. Many's the time, labouring under the burden of some or other
ghastly Ottawa policy, I've thought of pinning some gal down and sodomizing
her while 14 of my pals look on and await their turn. But I fear in my case
the Monroe Reimers of the world would be rather less eager to search for
"root causes." Gang rape as a legitimate expression of the campaign for
social justice is a privilege reserved only unto a few.

Mr. Reimers, though, will be happy to know his view is echoed across the
hemispheres. Five days before 9/11, the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet
reported that 65% of the country's rapes were committed by "non-Western"
immigrants -- a category which, in Norway, is almost wholly Muslim. A
professor at the University of Oslo explained that one reason for the
disproportionate Muslim share of the rape market was that in their native
lands "rape is scarcely punished" because it is generally believed that "it
is women who are responsible for rape."

So Muslim immigrants to Norway should be made aware that things are a
little different in Scandinavia? Not at all! Rather, the professor
insisted, "Norwegian women must take their share of responsibility for
these rapes" because their manner of dress would be regarded by Muslim men
as inappropriate. "Norwegian women must realize that we live in a
multicultural society and adapt themselves to it." Or to modify Queen
Victoria's wedding-night advice to her daughter: Lie back and think of Yemen.

France? Well, I can't bring you any ethnic rape statistics from the Fifth
Republic because the authorities go to great lengths not to keep any. But,
even though the phenomenon of immigrant gang rape does not exist, there's
already a word for it: the "tournante" -- or "take your turn." Last year,
11 Muslim men were arrested for enjoying a grand old tournante with a
14-year old girl in a cellar.

Denmark? "Three quarters of rapes are carried out by non-Danes," says Peter
Skaarup, chairman of the People's Party, a member of the governing coalition.

Well, you get the idea. Whether or not Muslim cultures are more prone to
rape is a question we shall explore another day. What's interesting is how
easily even this most extreme manifestation of multiculturalism is subsumed
within the usual pieties. Norwegian women must learn to be, in a very real
sense, less "exclusionary." Lebanese male immigrants, fleeing a war-torn
wasteland and finding refuge in a land of peace, freedom and opportunity,
are inevitably transformed into gang rapists by Australian racism.

After September 11th, a friend in London said to me she couldn't stand all
the America-needs-to-ask-itself stuff because she used to work at a rape
crisis centre and she'd heard this blame-the-victim routine a thousand
times before. America was asking for it: like those Norwegian women, it was
being "provocative." My friend thought the multiculti apologists were
treating America as a metaphorical rape victim. But, even so, it comes as a
surprise to realize they do exactly the same to actual rape victims. After
the O.J. verdict, it was noted by some feminists that "race trumped
gender." What we've seen since September 11th is that multiculturalism
trumps everything. Its grip on the imagination of the Western elites is
unshakeable. Even President Bush, in the month after September 11th, felt
obliged to line up a series of photo-ops so he could declare that "Islam is
peace" while surrounded by representatives of the Council on
American-Islamic Relations, an organization which objected, on the grounds
of "ethnic and religious stereotyping," to the prosecution of two men in
Chicago for the "honour killing" of their female cousin.

On this "Islam is peace" business, Bassam Tibi, a Muslim professor at
Goettingen University in Germany, gave a helpful speech a few months back:
"Both sides should acknowledge candidly that although they might use
identical terms these mean different things to each of them," he said. "The
word 'peace,' for example, implies to a Muslim the extension of the Dar
al-Islam -- or 'House of Islam' -- to the entire world. This is completely
different from the Enlightenment concept of eternal peace that dominates
Western thought." Only when the entire world is a Dar al-Islam will it be a
Dar a-Salam, or "House of Peace."

On the face of it, that sounds ridiculous. The "Muslim world" -- the arc
stretching from North Africa through South Asia -- is economically,
militarily, scientifically and artistically irrelevant. But, looked at
through the prism of Norwegian rape or French crime, the idea of a Dar
al-Islam doesn't sound so ridiculous. The "code of silence" that surrounds
rape in tightly knit Muslim families is, so to speak, amplified by the
broader "code of silence" surrounding multicultural issues in the West. If
all cultures are of equal value, how do you point out any defects?

As I understand it, the benefits of multiculturalism are that the sterile
white-bread cultures of Australia, Canada and Britain get some great ethnic
restaurants and a Commonwealth Games opening ceremony that lasts until two
in the morning. But, in the case of those Muslim ghettoes in Sydney, in
Oslo, in Paris, in Copenhagen and in Manchester, multiculturalism means
that the worst attributes of Muslim culture -- the subjugation of women --
combine with the worst attributes of Western culture -- licence and
self-gratification. Tattoed, pierced Pakistani skinhead gangs swaggering
down the streets of Northern England are as much a product of
multiculturalism as the turban-wearing Sikh Mountie in the vice-regal
escort at Rideau Hall. Yet even in the face of the crudest assaults on its
most cherished causes -- women's rights, gay rights -- the political class
turns squeamishly away.

Once upon a time we knew what to do. A British district officer, coming
upon a scene of suttee, was told by the locals that in Hindu culture it was
the custom to cremate a widow on her husband's funeral pyre. He replied
that in British culture it was the custom to hang chaps who did that sort
of thing. There are many great things about India -- curry, pyjamas,
sitars, software engineers -- but suttee was not one of them. What a pity
we're no longer capable of being "judgmental" and "discriminating." We're
told the old-school imperialists were racists, that they thought of the
wogs as inferior. But, if so, they at least considered them capable of
improvement. The multiculturalists are just as racist. The only difference
is that they think the wogs can never reform: Good heavens, you can't
expect a Muslim in Norway not to go about raping the womenfolk! Much better
just to get used to it.

As one is always obliged to explain when tiptoeing around this territory,
I'm not a racist, only a culturist. I believe Western culture -- rule of
law, universal suffrage, etc. -- is preferable to Arab culture: that's why
there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in
Syria. Follow the traffic. I support immigration, but with assimilation.
Without it, like a Hindu widow, we're slowly climbing on the funeral pyre
of our lost empires. You see it in European foreign policy already: they're
scared of their mysterious, swelling, unstoppable Muslim populations.

Islam For All reported the other day that, at present demographic rates, in
20 years' time the majority of Holland's children (the population under 18)
will be Muslim. It will be the first Islamic country in western Europe
since the loss of Spain. Europe is the colony now.

Or as Charles Johnson, whose excellent "Little Green Footballs" Web site
turns up dozens of fascinating Islamic tidbits every day, suggested: "Maybe
we should start a betting pool: Which European country will be the first to
institute shari'a?"

<http://FreeWorldNow.com>Freedom Now World News is a free and independent
rights new service.
Though the views expressed here are not necessary the views of management,
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Plus

Rape: the debate we have to have

From The Age (Melbourne), 24 July 2002

Some Muslim leaders need to realise multiculturalism is a two‑way street, writes Pamela Bone.

 

The New South Wales Director of Public Prosecutions, Nicholas Cowdrey, QC, said on ABC TVs The 7:30 Report last week that race had to be considered as a factor in the recent gang rapes of your ‑7 women in Sydney's western suburbs. Later in the program he said he believed male gang culture was the cause of the crime.

Politicians, media commentators and thousands of callers to Sydney talkback radio programs have referred to the rapes as "racially" motivated. The word race is often .used when what is meant is culture or religion.

What the NSW Supreme Court has been told is that seven teenage girls, all of whom were non‑Mushm Anglo‑Australians, were subject to hours of frightening and demeaning sexual attacks by a group of young men, all of whom were Muslim Lebanese‑Australians. The court also heard that during the assaults the young men identified themselves as Muslim or Leban­ese, and made it clear the girls were being targeted because they were "Aussie pigs" or .sluts". According to media reports, the mother of one of the accused men made a spitting noise at one of the victims in the court.

Racially motivated rape, the intention of which is to defile the women of the enemy, is as old as warfare, but it is devastating to think this could be happening in Australia today.

Nicholas Cowdrey is right in blaming gang culture for these crimes, and you could add to that low socio‑economic status, unemployment, frustration and alienation.

 

Yet the fact remains that

someone has taught each of

these young rapists that white,

non‑Muslim women are to be

despised.,

 

The Lebanese‑Christian who owns the fruit shop I go to does not think Australian women are sluts. The few Muslim‑Australians I know well enough to think of as friends do not, I am fairly sure, believe this either. But as one who is subjected to self‑righteous lectures from Muslim women ‑educated, well‑off Muslim women ‑ whenever I write about the human rights abuses of women in the name of Islam, it is possible for me to conclude that if they do not believe we are immoral, they do think we are less virtuous than they are.

It is you (non‑Muslim women) who are oppressed because you are slaves to fashion and because you expose your bodies, while we, in our modest dresses and with our heads covered, are protected from "men's glances", they write.

The decadence and materialism of Western society is frequently pointed out, as is the prevalence of sexual violence here compared with Muslim countries. (I can imagine there would not be many reports of rape in countries where four male witnesses are needed to prove the rape happened, and where if rape cannot be proved the complainant is punished for adultery.)

But a letter in The Sunday Age last week makes me wonder just how deep the divide is between secular Australian culture and some Muslims' beliefs.

Dr Amirudin Ahamed, writing about the alleged incompatibility between feminism and the family, states that Islam assigns a single leader to the family ‑ "usually the husband", who needs to "ensure discipline by following a hierarchy of steps" outlined in a verse of the Koran.

The verse to which he refers says in part: "As for those (women) from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat thern.'

The principle contained in this vem is odious enough . If Ahamed is talking about its practice, he should know that under Austral­ian law, beating women is a crime. And while some socially conservative Christians might half agree with him about women's more submissive role, under Australian law women and men are equal ‑ whether he likes it or not.

The vast majority of Muslims ‑ including Lebanese Muslims ‑ who are decent and law‑abiding should not be smeared by the behaviour of the Sydney gang rapists. But those parents and community leaders who have taught their children that the dominant society is contaminating, that because young women might drink alcohol or dress in tight­fitting clothes they are undeserving of respect, have much to answer for.

It is attitudes like these that build up resen­tments and prejudice in the wider society. And it is this built‑up prejudice and resent­ment that allows the Federal Government to get away with the repressive and inhumane asylum‑seeker policies that shame us all.

Since 11 September, Muslim women have been abused and had their headscarves torn off in the street. This, like rape, is based on the idea that it is acceptable to project what­ever hatred you might be feeling on to the bodies of women.

Prejudice against Muslims is now apparent­ly so bad that in a survey taken in Sydney and released last week, more than 50 per cent of respondents said they would be concerned if a close relative married a Muslim. And judg­ing by the common practice of Lebanese­born Muslim men going back to Lebanon to get a bride, bigotry is not confined to Anglo­Australians.

Do we need to talk about this? The media have been accused of breeding hatred by identifying the ethnicity and religion of the rapists. But the rapists themselves identified these as the motivating factor. In such a serious circumstance the media would not be fulfilling their purpose if they covered up this fact for fear of offending some communities.

A country that locks up children is not the kind of Australia I recognise. A country in which fear of the "other" is as prevalent as now is not the Australia I recognise either.

I want to live in a tolerant, multicultural society. But for it to work, multiculturalism requires the goodwill not only of the domin­ant culture but of all cultures. Tolerance of difference is a two‑way street.