Multiculturalists can be likened to the hypocritical dilettantes who visit Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, gush over the Amish lifestyle and then return home to their cell phones and hummers.
The Amish are quaint if they can be safely confined to a theme park. But what if they were to multiply a million fold to burst across the land and lever legislatures to impose their ways? One might recall the ordeal of the citizens of Antelope, Oregon in the 1980s when 7,000 cult followers of the “Baghwan”, the Rajneeshees, invaded Wasco County and took over the town council to raise havoc.
In the Vancouver I knew, people of British origin made up 65% of the population, while just 5% were classified as Asian. I recall that those of us who were “British” were rather proud of the 35% who were not. We thought that they added “#” to our lives, and especially to our cuisine. We were, in the 1960s, proto-typical “multiculturalists” before the word was coined. And like the Amish, that 35% was considerate enough, for the most part, to stay out of our neighbourhoods and live in designated parts of town. “Multiculturalism” was envisaged really as just a spectator sport. Drop in and visit somebody exotic, then go home where it is safe and comfortable.
But suddenly, following the policy movement in 1966 toward immigration from “non-traditional” sources, and the looming loss of Hong Kong to the Chinese Communists, Vancouver saw a demographic shift of dramatic proportions. In little over two decades the British share of the city’s population fell from 65% to 25% while the Asian share skyrocketed from 5% to 25%. An ugly nickname emerged for the town: “Hongcouver”. The mayor preferred the politically correct euphemism: “A world within a city.” Now 38% of city residents are foreign-born, second only to Toronto at 44%.
It is one thing to add “#” to your plate. It is another to dump the whole two kilogram bag of pepper on it. As superficial and innocuous as multiculturalism initially appeared to be, it set in motion forces that will be difficult to control. Once the number of foreign-born reaches a critical mass, concessions to them no longer are a matter of generosity and tolerance but necessity. The more Muslims that populate a Western nation, for example, the more difficult it will be to say no to them in questions that matter.
When the Swedes opened up their homogeneous Nordic society to mass immigration from outside Scandinavia, some decades ago, they also let the multicultural genie out of the bottle. Now 17% of the Swedish population have an immigrant background and over half of immigrants come from beyond Europe. This seemingly marginal percentage gave them the leverage to persuade the Swedish government to dis-establish the Lutheran Church, even though 78% follow that denomination. The ethnic tail does not have to be very long to wag the majoritarian dog.
Immigration can accelerate growth at a pace beyond the ability of the host culture to fully comprehend it or react to it in time. In just twenty years the Muslim population in Canada more than doubled to 600,000 in 2001. In the ten years preceding that date, it leapt by 129% so that the number of Muslims surpassed the number of Jews in the country. By 2017 they are projected to reach nearly a million and half in number. What happens when they begin to throw their weight around? What is happening now?
The Iranian Muslims of North Vancouver some years ago were bold enough to ask North Vancouver council to require the local swimming pool to change its dress code to ban bikinis. In another ten years, with another 10,000 Muslims in the district, will council have the will to resist their petition? Why weren’t they willing or able to revoke the taxi-cab licence of the company whose Muslim driver refused a ride to blind man because his guide dog, was, according to the Koran, “unclean”.
One wonders if Anglo-Canadian multiculturalists in Toronto might become a little annoyed if their city succumbed to Islam as a dominant faith. One might find Karachi an interesting place to visit but living out your live there might prove a tad suffocating. By the same token, one can be given to wonder if Vancouver multiculturalists, once “enriched” by one Chinatown and who now see how Chinatown writ large across the whole city, would be similarly thrilled if Cantonese became the working language at City Hall and English absent from commercial signs, as there are from the neighbouring city of Richmond after it became Chinese virtually overnight running up to 1999.
It is one thing to walk along Toronto’s Yonge Street or Vancouver’s Main Street, or Lonsdale in North Vancouver and see turbans and hijabs and road signs in various languages, and it is quite another to have to adapt in a significant way to these cultures, and to wake up and realize that you are an ethnic Robinson Crusoe in a city full of Fridays.
And who are these cultures essentially? The ones that supposedly are to be accorded equivalent respect to our own because they are of equal merit? They are cultures whose core principle is male supremacy, where the rights of women are few or non-existent, where women are men’s disposable property. Immigrants from Sudan, home of genital mutilation, Laos, arranged marriages for pre-adolescent girls, Saudi Arabia, where women can’t vote or drive, and India where sex selection abortion, infanticide and bride murder have claimed 22 million females---are welcome in North America. As if homegrown sexism wasn’t enough, we’re importing it.
In the ethnic enclaves of the UK, Western Europe, the United States and Canada, the immigrant men of traditional societies are asserting their “cultural’ right to beat and murder their wives in the name of diversity. And the politically correct establishment have been turning a blind eye. In her book “Infidel”, Ayaan Hirsi Ali speaks of honor killings and abuses of women in Holland, glossed over in the name of tolerance. Asian women in Britain are three times more likely to commit suicide their white friends. Der Spiegel has documented a great number of lenient verdicts handed down to Muslim perpetrators of horrific crimes against wives because they were acting according to the precepts of their “culture”. These judgments have made Muslim women third class citizens without the protection of German law.
A CBC documentary reported that “Last October (2006) was a particularly cruel month for Indo-Canadian women in B.C.’s Lower Mainland. Navreet Kaur Warichi was stabbed to death in her home in Surrey, B.C. Her husband was charged with second degree murder. A few days later, pregnant Surrey school teacher Manjit Panghali was found in nearby Delta. She had been killed and her body set on fire. Her husband and brother-in-law have been charged with her murder. Not long after Gurjeet Gurman was shot in the face by her estranged husband who then killed himself.”
The Indo-Canadian Attorney-General of British Columbia, Wally Oppal, has welcomed attention to the issue of domestic violence in the Indo-Canadian community. Until now, those outside the community dared not raise a peep about what has been an open secret for decades.
Journalist Johann Itari summarized this trend when he observed that “multiculturalists believe that they are defending immigrants. But in reality, they are betraying 55% of them---the women and the gays.”
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Of course, male supremacy was and still is a feature of native Christian tradition. One need only consult Timothy 2:11 and Ephesians 5:22 where wives are counseled to submit in silence to their husbands as head of the family. But that is tempered by Ephesians 25-30 where husbands are told to love their wives as Christ loved the Church and as they love their own bodies. Christianity has evolved and the struggle for women’s rights has been a long one. Now a massive demographic shift where 75% of all population growth will come from the immigrants of traditional societies (and their children) will threaten to undo those gains. The clash between feminism and multiculturalism was defined by feminist Katha Pollitt in her remark that “…multiculturalism demands respect for all cultural traditions, while feminism respects only traditions that indeed deserve respect.”
When English and French Canada were respected as founding cultures to be preserved under Trudeau’s initial vision of a “bicultural” nation, immigrant cultures drawn from “non-traditional” sources could theoretically be integrated cohesively into the framework of established Canadian core values. Provided of course, that their numbers were of sufficient modesty to permit integration.
Now English and French have been relegated in status from founding cultures to mere fragments in the mosaic, and thanks to mass immigration, they no longer have the demographic muscle to shape society as a whole. Currently the country is up for grabs. But a tipping point will be reached, as it has in two or three major cities, where new ethnic power blocs will coalesce to seize control of all vital political and media institutions. A glance at CBC TV personnel suggests that may have begun to happen.
We are frequently admonished to be careful about what we wish for because we just might get it. Forty years ago English Canadians wished for more ethnic flavour to enliven their “boring” cities. Now most of them wished that could return to some of that down home cooking. They’d like to visit the Amish, but they don’t won’t to live among them or drive horse-drawn buggies. But to their horror they’ve learned that there is no turning back. Multiculturalism is no longer a spectator sport. It is our life sentence.
