Bell tolls for multiculturalism. By Kerry Wakefield.

With the Hamas atrocities exposing a deep social divide across the West, everyone suddenly sees the problem with multiculturalism. Increasingly the ‘D’ word, deportation, is on politicians’ lips, from Germany to the Nordic countries to the US. Decades of multiculturalism and mass migration have laid the tinder, with the Hamas-Israeli flashpoint now fuelling civic protests and violence across the globe.

The long-held Western assumption that all of the globe’s different cultures can live together amiably may turn out to have been naive, if one group continues to deny another group basic human rights – such as existence. …

 

 

Academics such as Robert Putnam have long argued that multiple ethnicities decrease social trust, forcing a retreat from the public space into tribes. This was supported in 2020 by a Copenhagen University meta-analysis of 87 studies which found ‘a statistically significant negative relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust across all studies’. This is, in other words, Balkanisation, a society of tribes.

Bipartisanship has for decades muted any criticism of multiculturalism, and many are the politicans who followed in Enoch Powell’s path and were flayed for doubting some cultures’ adaptability to Western values.

Too early

Eminent voices are now being raised, however, as doors are closing all across Europe.

• Elder statesman Henry Kissinger lashed Germany’s ‘grave mistake’ of letting in ‘so many people of totally different culture and religion and concepts’.
• Former UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman, herself of Indian descent, labelled multiculturalism a failure.
• German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has vowed to toughen migration laws and increase ‘large-scale’ deportations.
• Crime-hit Sweden’s Prime Minister recently denounced the country’s ‘irresponsible immigration policy and failed integration’.
• Hungary’s Orbán has predicted that the next European elections would focus on migration and terrorism.
• Five Nordic nations agreed in October to collaborate on tighter migration controls, including paying migrants to go home.

Too late:

These issues are arising as the Albanese government is bringing in an extraordinary flood of migrants — a new Canberra every year — when infrastructure, particularly housing, is already failing our young people, especially in our capital cities. …

The question is, can the West’s multiculturalism survive the conflict with radical Islamists? Or is it out of date, a policy for a different era? These radicals don’t accept Australian values, instead preaching jihad and displaying contempt for our laws. Supporters of the status quo would argue this is simply the difference between terrorists and otherwise peaceful Muslims, and leave multiculturalism out of it please. …

Tear down the culture that made it all possible:

Meanwhile, it sometimes feels as if, in a world where culture is increasingly significant, the only culture that is not respected is the host Judaeo-Christian one. Just as anti-white racism is dismissed in some quarters as a definitional impossibility, since whites are the colonising oppressors, so the traditions of Western host nations can be disrespected. Did London’s big pro-Palestine march have to be on Remembrance Day? Did pro-Palestinian slogans have to desecrate Melbourne war memorials, of all places? Did the Caulfield protesters have to choose a synagogue to assemble outside? Where is any respect? …

But a more basic cleft between Judaeo-Christian values and Islamic ones may be emerging. Pundit Douglas Murray recently pointed out that Nazi soldiers had to get drunk to deal with the horrors of the gas chambers they administered. Hamas fighters, by contrast, rang home to celebrate, gleeful at how many Jews they had killed. Donald Trump Jnr recently shared a video of a German Islamist asserting that as soon as they outnumbered the locals, Sharia law would come in. ‘Once Muslims are in the majority, it is our duty to conquer Germany’. He then cited taqiya, the doctrine of lying in a pious cause, when asked if ‘normal’ Islam agreed with such approaches. Most Muslims in the West have been peaceful, but judging from the 300,000-strong pro-Palestinian march in London, the radical fringe is not tiny. And it has few qualms about asserting itself.

Yes, obviously, but how does saying any of this increase one’s virtue? I want to be invited to lots of dinner parties with people who’ve made oodles of money. Kerry’s just not trying.