It's The Immigration, Stupid
The international extent of Muslim mob violence over the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed can distract from its roots: Muslim immigration into Denmark.
When a reporter for the Jyllands-Posten newspaper discovered that Danish illustrators were refusing the innocent job of drawing the pictures for a Danish children's book on the history of Islam because of a fear (quite reasonable, as we now see) of violent retribution by Muslims living in Denmark, the newspaper's cultural editor, Flemming Rose, became interested in a the topic of self-censorship within the Danish media. As an experiment, he invited 40 illustrators to draw pictures of Mohammed. Twelve complied.
Publication of the Danish Dozen last September set off the usual outrage. But the true ratcheting up was due to a delegation of Muslim imams living in Denmark. They took a junket to the Middle East with a portfolio that included, not just the twelve cartoons, but three more offensive fabrications. As Michelle Malkin has reported, one of the pictures these "Danish" imams flogged as supposedly a Jyllands-Posten cartoon of the Prophet with the face of a pig (an unclean animal in Islam) was actually a forgery based on a newsphoto from a French pig-calling contest that had nothing to do with Islam.
The Relative Courage of the Danish Government Was No Accident
By informing Muslims that Danish newspapers are free to print what they want, the government of Denmark has shown more backbone than we are accustomed to seeing in European governments. In contrast, last week the Swedish government shut down a private website for posting a mild drawing chiding Muslims for lack of introspection.
[Vdare.com note: This article about the censorship says that the website belongs to the Swedish Democrats, considered by Sweden's media to be a "far-right" party. The Swedish Democrat website sverigedemokraterna.se seems to be down, and so is sd-kuriren.info, which in English would be "Swedish Democrat-Courier" but sverigedemokraterna.net is still up, and here's their political program in English. Not "far-right" by American standards—the Swedes would consider many centrist Democrats "far-right."]
The Danish politicians' moral fiber was not a fluke. Since 2001, Denmark has had a coalition government dependent upon the support of the immigration restrictionist Danish People's Party. In the 2005 election, it won 24 of the 179 parliamentary seats, making it the third largest party. The DPP website staunchly states:
"Denmark is not an immigrant-country and has never been so. Therefore, we will not accept a transformation to a multiethnic society."
In return for DPP support, Denmark's government has sharply reduced immigration. This has had salutary psychological effects. As I've long pointed out, politicians' normal terror of the immigrant vote is seldom based on its current size, which is usually limited, but on its seemingly limitless future expansion. Merely bringing the rate of immigration under control changes the political psychology immediately. Defying political correctness no longer seems quite so unthinkable to politicians.
Surprise! Multiculturalism Means...Multiple Cultures
Guess what? Danes and Muslims don't agree on the basics of social organization and don't want to live under the same rules. That shouldn't be a severe problem. It's what separate countries are for. But due to mass immigration, it is in fact becoming a huge stumbling block.
To know them is not necessarily to love them
One of the dominant myths of our age is that any hostility among people is caused by a lack of mutual familiarity. Of course, it's reassuring to think that anybody who doesn't like you just doesn't know you well enough. But you may be just kidding yourself.
Unfortunately, this form of self-delusion is the reigning mindset among Western ruling classes.
For example, last year the Supreme Court outlawed the state of California's prudent practice of segregating inmates by race during the first 60 days of their prison terms while checking if they had tendencies toward racist violence. Sandra Day O'Connor wrote for the majority that this entirely reasonable attempt to prevent felons from maiming and raping fellow prisoners of other races might "breed further hostility among prisoners and reinforce racial and ethnic divisions."
Last week, after race riots broke out between Mexicans and black gang members in the unsegregated LA County jails, Sheriff Lee Baca pleaded with the ACLU to let him separate the races permanently. .But the ACLU was unsympathetic. Ideology 1. Facts 0.
Another example of this elite hallucination came in the conclusion of New York Times reporter Craig S. Smith's jaw-droppingly naive article on the Danish Dozen:
"But whether [Flemming Rose's] exercise had achieved his stated goal—of forcing citizens to think about their submission to someone else's taboos—it was clear that it had helped extremists on both sides who would keep Europe and the Muslim world from understanding each other." [Adding Newsprint to the Fire, February 5, 2006]
Uh, Craig, actually this exercise has enabled Europeans and Muslims to understand each other much better.
They just don't agree.
A more pressing question than whether or not Muslims understand Western values (long answer: no) is: do elite Westerners still understand Western liberties?
What this pathetic New York Times article suggests is that Muslims understand the new and improved Western values perfectly. They know that the highest prize in the contemporary West is to be considered an official minority, which then gives you that ultimate value: victim status.
Importing Muslims Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, But…
Many Americans are currently congratulating themselves for their brilliance in choosing to locate the U.S. north of a huge supply of unskilled Latin Americans, rather than north of a huge supply of unskilled Muslims, like those idiot Europeans.
But it ain't over till the fat…whatever. Forty years ago when Europe opened the floodgates to Muslim workers, Islam looked like a spent force. Similarly, anti-white populism seemed like a relic of the past in Latin America just 15 years ago, but today it's the hottest trend once again. And it may well spill over into Hispanic communities in the U.S.—which would give us no end of trouble.
The point is that we don't know which groups will become actively aggrieved when. So it pays to be prudent and limit immigration carefully.
Sending Muslims Home Is a Better Idea Now
Many European countries already have underfunded programs to pay immigrants to leave. It's time for them to get serious about a push-pull program to persuade a large number of Muslims to exit Europe.
Diversity and Freedom of Expression Conflict
Although VDARE.COM has run scores of articles under the title "Diversity vs. Freedom" over the years, almost nobody else has gotten the message….yet.
Self-Censorship Is Bad Even When Muslims Aren't Involved
It's wonderful that the Danish Cartoon Crisis is causing some people in the West to wake up to the problem of self-censorship.
Yet the truth is that the Islamic taboo on visually depicting the Prophet is one of the least onerous forms Western media self-censorship. Did you ever feel a desperate urge to see an artist's conception of Mohammed's face?
Me, neither.
I could list any number of examples of major topics that VDARE.COM covers while the Main Stream Media won't.
But let me remind you of just one: the 2002 book IQ and the Wealth of Nations by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen.
The content is irresistible—it synthesizes the best information available from 168 published academic studies to come up with estimates of the average IQ of 81 countries. Further, the book delivers perhaps the most important finding in the history of developmental economics: national average IQ and GDP per capita correlate at the extraordinarily high level of r = 0.73.
Obviously, this book would be valuable for international investors and aid agencies. Lynn and Vanhanen's suggestion that lack of micronutrient fortification of staple foods is costing Third World countries crucial IQ points was recently endorsed by the government of Ghana.
It also has crucial political implications. For example, back before the Iraq invasion in 2003, physicist Gregory Cochran repeatedly pointed out that Iraq (average IQ = 87 according to Lynn and Vanhanen) didn't have enough smart engineers to make nuclear weapons with the limited amount of money available to the regime. He turned out to be right.
In contrast to Cochran's insight, our intelligence services weren't allowed by the reigning mindset to consider Iraq's average IQ.
Yet, over the last four years, mention of this book's existence has only once appeared in a newspaper or magazine widely distributed in the United States.
And, hilariously, that was when The Economist fell hook, line, and sinker for the ludicrous Blue States Have Higher IQs than Red States Hoax in 2004. The magazine attributed the wholly phony data to IQ and the Wealth of Nations!
Lynn now has a sequel out, Racial Differences in Intelligence. It summarizes 600 different IQ studies by racial group. I haven't seen it yet, but Jason Malloy has provided a 13,000 word review on GNXP.com.
VDARE.COM will be covering it—but don't expect to see any mention in the Main Stream Media.
[Steve Sailer [email him] is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and movie critic for The American Conservative. His website www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily blog.]
