Let me throw these four pebbles out there into the calmness of your Tuesday. Maybe there will be meaningful ripples in your mind.
First, how is it going with Muslims becoming part of Western societies as their numbers increase, as with previous migrants from other countries and cultures?
Take a glance at this piece. The opening sentence hits the point:
The former head of Britain’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), Trevor Phillips, has admitted he “got almost everything wrong” on Muslim immigration in a damning new report on integration, segregation, and how the followers of Islam are creating “nations within nations” in the West.
Add to that this:
Even left-wing columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown told him: “[W]e [liberal Muslims] are a dying breed — in 10 years there will be very few of us left unless something really important is done.”
And finally:
Phillips comments: “Some of my journalist friends imagine that, with time, the Muslims will grow out of it. They won’t.”
Ripple? Ripple?
Second, this explosive piece from Brett Stephens in the Wall Street Journal. Please read the entire article!
Writing of the mindset of homegrown jihadis [like the Brussels crowd,] Stephens writes:
They are also sons of the West—educated in the schools of multiculturalism, reared on the works of Noam Chomsky and perhaps Frantz Fanon, consumers of a news diet heavy with reports of perfidy by American or British or Israeli soldiers. If Islamism is their ideological drug of choice, the political orthodoxies of the modern left are their gateway to it.
He concludes:
We’ve become lazy in our thinking about Islam and the West. Whether the Islam practiced by al Qaeda or ISIS is “radical” or merely traditional isn’t the question. It’s whether the West can recognize that the moral nihilism of today’s Jihadi Johns is the logical outgrowth of the moral relativism that is the default religion of today’s West.
Ripple? Ripple?
Third, put alongside these two pieces, this startling news out of Stanford University.
Students there want traditional western civilization studies [dare I call such “the liberal arts”?] returned to their curriculum. Note my emphasis in the sentence below:
At Stanford, a backlash against this censorious student culture is taking shape in the form of a petition to reinstate the university’s Western Civilization curriculum.
Ripple? Ripple?
Fourth, I am so fed up with the election crap all around us that I have hit on an idea.
A write-in campaign!
Oh that, I hear you mumble. Yes, but this is a campaign with a difference.
Zaphod Beeblbrox 2016.
How about this for a bumper sticker?
“Zaphod: For democracy, for people, and for stuff.” [Oh wait! That’s Bernie’s slogan. Hey, have you ever seen Zaphod and Bernie at the same time and place? Just asking.]
Thanks Douglas Adams: RIP.
clamjamfrey 