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I was recently called “Islamophobic” on Facebook by a Muslim convert I met once many years ago. The prompt was nothing I said about Islam, but about assimilation being the road to integration for Aboriginal Australians, as it has been for most other individuals and ethnic-religious groups in the West. It was a telling leap to make, given that for twenty-one years my program, The Spirit of Things on ABC RN, featured many Muslims, but perhaps the former community leader and school teacher remembered only the ones who rankled, those who advocated a modern, assimilated version of Islam and denounced some of its belligerent and oppressive expressions.
Marnia Lazreg is a Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and CUNY in New York, and when I went visited her in 2010, I remarked that she was the only faculty member without a photo of herself on her website. She told me that after writing her book Questioning the Veil, it was “dangerous” for her to be recognisable, given the resurgence of Islamist thinking in post-9/11 America. Her own mother took off the veil at the age of fifty after the independence of Algeria, and Marnia’s generation of students never thought of wearing the veil as they contemplated living a new kind of life, reflecting modernity. But Professor Lazreg’s writing about women and their desire to be free from the tyranny of a patriarchal Islamic tradition that confined them to full bodily coverage and the ambit of the home, was ironically problematic in mid-town Manhattan in twenty-first-century America.
This essay appears in our just-released December edition.
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Like Lazreg, a Canadian Muslim, Irshad Manji, was also imperilled by the publication of her book The Trouble with Islam Today, and when I interviewed her during a visit to Sydney in 2004, she had security around her at all times. Her book begins with her experience as a young bright student in a madrassa in Vancouver where she was punished by her teachers for asking questions about the Koran. Expected to recite the sacred text without understanding it, she questioned why Muslims are instructed to avoid Jews and Christians, when to her as a young Canadian they were friends and fellow citizens. As a highly successful young host on TV Ontario, where her boss was Jewish, she spoke and wrote about the irrationality of Muslim anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism. Consequently, her books are banned in many Muslim countries.
In stark contrast to the short-cropped hairstyle of Irshad Manji, whose cheerful and relaxed almost tomboy demeanour does not hide her lesbian sexuality, the be-robed and head-covered Professor of Koranic interpretation Amina Wadud, appears solemn and serious about the theological task of women’s reform in Islam. Like Irshad, who champions the Mutazilite movement of Koranic interpretation that freed it from a literalist reading and joined it to a Hellenistic philosophical revival in the eighth to tenth centuries in Baghdad, so the African-American convert to Islam, Wadud, looks to the past for grounding her theological reading of the Koran from a woman’s perspective. Having read her book Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam (2006), I was keen to speak to Professor Wadud when she visited Sydney and addressed a modest interfaith women’s group in the New South Wales Parliament House. At first she was reluctant to speak to someone from the media, but I reassured her as an academic in religious studies that I was not interested in taking a sensationalist approach to her subject. Nonetheless, she readily divulged how huge was the challenge of translating her academic authority to spiritual authority in the community, when she experienced bomb threats as she was about to lead an Islamic prayer service in New York’s Episcopal Cathedral of St John the Divine.
Just a few streets north of the Cathedral in Harlem, I arranged to meet Mona Eltahawy, the first Egyptian journalist to live and work in Israel for a Western news agency (Reuters). Early in the morning I waited on a corner for an hour, wondering if she had given me the slip. A police car kept watch, circling the block suspiciously. The restaurant where we were to meet was boarded up, abandoned. I realised it was a ploy in case anyone knew of our appointment. When Mona finally appeared, an hour late, we decided to meet in her apartment.
Assaulted and injured in Tahrir Square in Cairo during the protests, Eltahawy, who is now boldly recognisable with her flame-henna-coloured hair, has been among the more outspoken if not extreme anti-patriarchal activists, citing virtually the entire Muslim world as a prison for women.
For all her causes, Eltahawy has managed to keep ahead of her pursuers, but many other women who have attempted to break the rules of confinement and bring Islam into the modern world have ended up with a high price to pay. Mahsa Amini, the twenty-two-year-old who defied Iran’s modesty police in 2022 and was arrested for not wearing her hijab in accordance with government standards, died, according to witnesses, from a severe beating which resulted in a cerebral haemorrhage. The official government explanation cited “fainting and falling into a coma”. Protests followed, larger than the ones initiated by women in 2009, 2017 and 2019. Many died or were injured in those protests at the hands of the state police.
The pattern of risking one’s life for speaking out against the oppressive nature of traditional Islamic practices is nowhere more evident than in the experience of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whom I interviewed before a large audience in the Ros Packer Theatre in 2007. Her story is well known, from her origins in Somalia, attending Koranic schools there and in Saudi Arabia and Kenya, becoming radicalised as a young follower of the Muslim Brotherhood, escaping and becoming a Dutch citizen and later parliamentarian, working among refugees, where she documented the oppressive domestic conditions that Muslim women lived under even while enjoying the welfare and social benefits of Europe’s most free and open society, the Netherlands.
In 2004, Theo van Gogh, her collaborator on a ten-minute film, Submission, about violence towards women, was shot in broad daylight, had his throat slit and a knife plunged into his stomach with a note that said Ayaan Hirsi Ali was next. She went into hiding, and although she is now a more public figure, she has lived with high-level security ever since, much as has Salman Rushdie, the author of The Satanic Verses.
But there was more on that note attached to the knife that was plunged into Theo van Gogh’s belly: there was a threat issued to Western countries and to Jews. During my interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, bodyguards were everywhere, and on stage she was noticeably wired up for her protection. The level of security is not surprising since she openly spoke of the anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism endemic in the Muslim world. A kiosk just outside the theatre had been burned the night before. Was it a warning?
Women are not the gatekeepers in Islam, so it is not surprising that they feel more acutely the need to take control away from men who have dictated how they should live. Yet saying as much has not been for the faint-hearted. The Australian sociology and legal academic Susan Carland, who converted to Islam at nineteen, and wrote a thesis that became a book, Fighting Hislam: Women, Faith and Sexism, undertook a promising investigation into Muslim women’s attitudes. However, as it turned out, the progressive minds were mainly overseas, largely American, while Australian Muslim women preferred to utter their protests under the cloak of anonymity, fearing reprisals.
Assimilation to Australian values and norms of egalitarianism and freedom of conscience is therefore not going to happen smoothly and easily for Muslim Australians as long as they are beholden to the imams and sheiks who hold forth in the mosque and prayer hall, and appear opposed to contemporary interpretations of the Koran, along the lines of the Mutazilites of old.
And if so little has changed in regard to half of the Muslim population, its women, then how much less likely is it to change its attitude towards Jews and Israel, which recent events have shown is brazenly hostile. The day after Hamas stormed Israel, kidnapping, butchering, raping and torturing hundreds of men, women and children, the front page of the Australian Muslim Times was jubilant. That evening the forecourt of the Opera House in Sydney was ablaze with protesters chanting “Gas the Jews” and television footage showed sheiks punching fists in the air, declaiming, “I’m happy, I’m overjoyed” at the atrocities committed by Hamas against Israeli civilians.
Scenes like this would sicken the British Muslim Ed Hussain, who was a guest on The Spirit of Things in 2015. A proud promoter of a modern Islam, and the author of The House of Islam: A Global History, Hussain discovered when he lived and worked in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in 2005, that young Saudis in their twenties cheered the terrorist attacks on innocent civilians in France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Norway, Canada and Denmark, and were also dead-set on the elimination of Israel. They had learned from the Muslim Brotherhood proponent Shaikh Qaradawi in Qatar, whose lectures are broadcast in Arabic on Al Jazeera, that suicide bombings against Israelis are not terrorism but “martyrdom”. Hussain was so appalled by such attitudes, and what he called the default position of hating Jews and Israel in the fifty-nine Muslim-majority nations, that in 2007 he founded Quilliam, “a think-tank led by Muslims to research and renounce radicalism”.
Hussain’s most daring and clearly unachievable objective is to change the 1.7 billion Muslims’ attitudes to Israel: “The Muslim world’s treatment of Israel and the Jews, that beleaguered minority of only 20 million people, is among the greatest of tests for Muslim civilizational coexistence.” I heartily agree, and if that makes me “Islamophobic”, then it is a badge of honour I’m more than happy to wear.
Rachael Kohn AO is a broadcaster and writer on religion and spirituality
There’s nothing irrational about fear of Islam! Indeed, such would be wisdom noting its oppression of 1.8 billion people, both men and women, let alone children and the Koranic imprecationary view of non-Muslims.
Of course fear doesn’t mean inaction. We were afraid of the 3rd Reich too. So we acted.
Now that Ayaan Hirsi Ali has said she is a Christian her security detail needs our prayers for her safety. In UnHerd, 11th November 2023 she wrote ‘ … I no longer consider myself a Muslim apostate, but a lapsed atheist. Of course, I still have a great deal to learn about Christianity. I discover a little more at church each Sunday. But I have recognised, in my own long journey through a wilderness of fear and self-doubt, that there is a better way to manage the challenges of existence than either Islam or unbelief had to offer’.
She might read Francis Schaeffer’s trilogy. Old (1980s) but more current than ever, IMO. Places Christianity in a philosophical/history of ideas context.
A stark contrast to Sinéad O’Connor, who announced of her conversion to Islam in 2018 that:
‘This is the natural conclusion of any intelligent theologian’s journey… All scripture study leads to Islam.’
The Salman Rushdie affair, by my recollection, came as a shocker; the “fatwah”, the protesters in front of book shops, etc. That seemed to be the start of what might be seen as a global jihad. What to do? Are there any solutions? Perhaps if the cause can be understood, a rational solution may then be contemplated; but can there be anything as simple as identifying a cause? Is a third world war the solution, as it seems to be suggested in a comment above? What was gained by all the killing and destruction of the 2nd WW? Arguably, WW2 set the stage for what we are experiencing today. WW2 set the world on its head, and the victorious White Western powers were soon given the role, from the vanquished fascist powers, of being the odious oppressive enemy, by the emerging “Third World”. The West, horrified as being perceived as “Nazis” or “Imperialists” soon was on the retreat from the colonies, and embraced the very opposite of Nazi culture, which was to encourage multiculturalism and tolerance, apologies and compensation for past wrong-doing, etc., etc. The “blow-back” from WW2 is arguably still in force.
In my youth the smart young things at my university marched in the street against the government, against the Vietnam War, and for the communist Vietnamese National Liberation Front. Just a few years later those marchers WERE the government and Australia was lost to the Left. Now the smart young things march against the government for Hamas and Palestine. In a few years they WILL BE the government and Australia will be lost to Islam. It’s no longer a question of Muslims assimilating to Australian mainstream cultural values … it’s about Australians assimilating into Islamic cultural values – the same way Australians of fifty years ago had to assimilate into the Left.. The cultural wars are pretty well over – there just needs to be a palace coup to make it official.
Agreed. Islam is an imperialist politico-religion, always has been and always will be. It considers any ‘lost’ Islamic territory to remain rightfully its, no matter that the colonized people have ejected the supremacists. And thus the Israel-Arab conflict.
You may be perceiving things clearly, Alistair. The defeat of the “Voice” may prove only to be a minor stumble on the Left’s “Long March”! Is it not “Liberal Democracy” that facilitates the Left’s inexorable rise? What will the future bring? Perhaps we will be “Aboriginalised” into a myriad of warring tribes?
“the same way Australians of fifty years ago had to assimilate into the Left.. The cultural wars are pretty well over – there just needs to be a palace coup to make it official.”
I don’t think the culture wars are over. The result of the referendum in respect to The Voice showed that.
In respect to the great issues of the day which cause much introspection and dismay, I think most of us reflect the words of Martin Luther:
“Here I stand. I can do no other”.
And yet the Western left champions these barbarians. Both are engaged in a joint campaign to destroy the West and its values. Comrades in arms.
The main problem with feminist Islam, as with feminist Christianity or Judaism is that it tends to severely curtail reproduction, leaving the field clear for more tried and tested, if illberal, social arrangements. Western birth rates are so universally dismal that white Europeans will be a small minority in the Anglosphere and Europe within fifty years or so, UNLESS some imagination is used to change things.
It was pretty stupid to invite all those Muslims into Western nations that were basically Christian / Enlightenment cultures. Since when have large numbers of Muslims been successfully integrated into Western societies? This was the multiculturalists’ dream – or theory – namely, that religion is just a superficial artifact and everyone is basically the same. We’re all human, all peaceful and loving at heart. So the mantra goes. The only problem is that it does not seem to work that way in practice. I had Muslim friends who would wish me a Merry Christmas. But when the planes hit the twin towers they danced for joy.
Stephen Due says “It was pretty stupid to invite all those Muslims into Western nations that were basically Christian / Enlightenment cultures. Since when have large numbers of Muslims been successfully integrated into Western societies? ”
Since when have Muslim societies contributed anything of value? No amount of assimilation will make Muslims better in any sense of the word. The only thing that will happen is to make a good Western societies worse, much worse.
Thanks, Rachael, for bravely describing the situation as it truly is. Yesterday’s Australian (30 November, 2023) carried a chilling article, “Islamist terrorists have won the war for hearts and minds”, by Jason Thomas, Director, Frontier Assessments. It’s paywalled, so I’ve taken the liberty of including an abridged version here.
“Islamist terrorism now is mainstreamed into Western society, including right here in Australia . . . coinciding with the denigration of everything that made the West strong since the Enlightenment. The October 7 attack on Israel was one of the most successful psychological operations against the West at the height of its weakness.
I witnessed Islamic State in Syria and northern Iraq, the Taliban in Afghanistan, the New People’s Army in The Philippines and the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, as well as other rebel movements such as the Mai-Mai in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. One thing they all have in common is that their mission reaches beyond a physical dimension. They have a cognitive network that is borderless. And when combined with a well-supplied sanctuary supported by a big brother, then they are hard to defeat. This is made even harder when they are allowed to swim in what Mao Zedong called the warm waters of the population.
In Australia and across the West, we have large pools of disgruntled, impressionable, narcissistic communities nurtured on identity politics, envy and hate, a generation reared on fear, except the fear of losing the soul of the West. This is being legitimised by leading global organisations, such as the UN. I recall, when in northern Iraq, describing to a UN security meeting in Erbil that ISIS was coming across from the east into Sinjar, and they needed to be prepared. The response was, ‘We don’t call them ISIS’. I then was proudly informed that UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon had sent a strongly worded letter to ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The Kurds couldn’t believe it.
The fact is, the war on Islamist terrorism never ended with the demise of ISIS. Instead, the Islamist global insurgency manoeuvred into the next phase of its plan. A climate was created for hundreds of thousands of young, fit, Western-hating, fighting-aged males to cross freely into Europe and other Western countries during the civil war in Syria. All the insurgency had to do was wait patiently for the right moment, using the sanctuaries secured in generous Western countries, to drive its campaign into the heart of all facets of our Judaeo-Christian society. The plan has been evolutionary, with moments of revolutionary fever, as we are now witnessing. In the history of guerrilla warfare, insurgents are rarely defeated when they have sanctuary. Now that sanctuary is here.
Saudi-born Shaykh Youssef al-Ayyiri, who was killed in mid-2003, was one of al-Qa’ida’s key strategists and best communicators. He said: ‘The entire world has become a battlefield, and not in theory.’ It is a fight beyond time and geography. Don’t be foolish to believe this is only about the Palestinian territories and Israel.
The Islamist insurgency’s strategy also involves deploying our own principles against us. The success of this strategy is now evident. The sight of many Western women celebrating, or offering excuses for, a movement that rapes, mutilates and kills women is an example.
Before our mind’s eye, the people and institutions we looked to for guidance and leadership turned the terrorists into the victims, and the victims into the terrorists. The strategy has been so successful that not even many of our politicians can make a distinction between the evil acts of the terrorists, and the desperate plight of the people in the Palestinian territories. Right now, the West’s enemies are co-ordinating a network of state and non-state actors, criminals, terrorists and international cartels, while inspiring sympathisers at home to launch a perpetual multipolar conflict in which Australia is also a target. The aim is to break the US-led Western resolve by targeting our centres of gravity, belief in ourselves, driving splinters of hot dissent among Western populations who are now less sure of themselves and more divided – populations losing faith in everything that has made us strong since the Enlightenment.
The Iranian-funded and co-ordinated attack on Israel, and its multifaceted, hybrid nature, is fourth-generational guerrilla warfare deployed against the West. This is the world we must now be prepared to face.”
What more needs to be said? Where are our political leaders when we need them?
pmprociv: It is probably unlikely that there is a well coordinated plan to destroy the West, as you are suggesting/declaring, but, in effect, that is what is happening!
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I remember seeing Chinese workers (from “Red China”) in Zambia and Tanzania in the early 70’s, constructing a new railway to export copper from Zambia through Tanzania to the sea at Dar es Salaam, thus avoiding the existing links set up in the colonial period that railed copper from Northern Rhodesia through Southern Rhodesia to the coast at Portuguese Mozambique as well as South Africa, or westward through Portuguese Angola to the Atlantic. Possibly there was a tenuous link to the Atlantic via the Belgian Congo.
The point of this rant is that the Chinese, being the champion of the emerging “Third World”, were not only assisting the newly liberated people with transportation projects, but I am assuming they were supporting Mugabe’s Zanu Popular Front which had training camps in Zambia, and it was from Zambia that guerrilla raids were launched into Rhodesia. Meanwhile in the West, we were active in the liberation struggle with ever increasing demonstrations and economic embargoes, sanctions and boycotts.
What I’m suggesting is that the West has had an active role in creating the world situation that we are complaining of today. Inadvertently, the USA had a powerful role in this, by its pressure on the European nations to divest itself of colonies after WW2, and the other victors of WW2, the Soviet Union and Communist China, were wholeheartedly willing to materially assist in the anti-Western de-colonisation process.
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As a result of the West winning the “Cold War”, Soviet backed dictators in the Middle East, have either diminished in power or been overthrown in the “Arab Spring” wave of “Democracy”! Let us not forget the 1980’s US-backed victory in Afghanistan, which saw the defeat of the Soviet-backed secular regime in Kabul. It took a while, but the seeds of “freedom” that were sown in Afghanistan in the 80’s germinated, grew and bore fruit in 9/11!
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Now, we are wound up in this Israel/Palestine, Zionist/Hamas-Hezbollah struggle. Can we learn anything from the past that will help us today? Should we continue to plod on following the same path? Is “Armageddon” nigh upon us?
OBTW, I just remembered that Israel was the only “Western”-style democracy that gave assistance to or collaborated with South Africa in the 70’s, and presumably by extension to/with Rhodesia. I believe the development of nuclear weapons was part of that collaboration. So, which side are we on?
At the time, the oil embargo reduced trading partners for Israel, so they traded with any country available. You should also remember that no Arab/Muslim country joined the boycott of South Africa. Oil flowed to South Africa without a hitch.
Presumably the abridged version has the points you wanted to get over, but in case someone wants the full article:
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https://todayspaper.theaustralian.com.au/infinity/article_popover_share.aspx?guid=5e6f5197-7c97-444d-9a19-f0a2639a5b1a
There are some positives in this development: first, people are starting to discuss the invasion of millions of Muslims into the western countries a bit more honestly. Secondly, the Muslim presence has revealed itself as a fifth column within our midst.
I am irritated however, by the lack of true accountability and the tendency to handwringing and obfuscation. And I second pmprociv in despairing of our politicians.
The constant decrying of ‘anti-semitism’ as a general sweeping wail is reminiscent of the puzzlement exhibited by every single main stream media commentator and every politician ever, when faced with an incident of Islamic terrorism and violence. (What could be their motive? Goodness me…) That is, it is the use of words, not to reveal, but to cover up. (And, to attribute blame generally, to ordinary people-never those, the behaviour and identity of whom is never mentioned).
That is, to call a demonstration in which calls are made to ‘gas the Jews’ anti-Semitic is to avoid the truth rather than decry an unfortunate development. Similarly, to wish for ‘assimilation’ is weak, effete and ineffective-and also serves the nefarious purpose of obscuring the reality that Islam does not assimilate, has no intention of assimilation and that those who do will be termed ‘apostates’ and will put their lives at risk. That is, there is a complete reluctance to acknowledge, first, the identity of the ‘anti-Semites’ and, secondly, that there is a malign force within our midst that does not adhere to ‘Church of Nice’- Jesus as hippy Christian values, but has, as its objective, the destruction of Christian civilisation (and the Jews), and complete dominance.
The absence of honesty on the part of those privileged with a public platform indicates either a leadership vacuum, compromise, or cowardice of an outstanding degree. However, I accept that we should not be looking for a ‘saviour’ in the guise of a politician (‘do not put your trust in princes’- that is from a well-known book).
Which book brings me to GK Chesterton’s observation that communism/socialism is a heresy – that is, it takes some aspects of Christianity – ‘all men are equal’ and hammers these while violently disavowing the other, balancing facets of the faith.
And this is one dimension of the war in which we are currently engaged that is completely unacknowledged. Flaky sentiments will never overcome Islamic violence, sentiments such as ‘tolerance ‘ ‘diversity’ (ie., love all men/humanity as made in the image of God/as in whom Christ dwells), that have been appropriated from Christianity and presented without the steely balancing aspects of the faith. Abandonment of the truth of Christianity results in a population of doormats whose governing principle is to be seen to be ‘nice.’
If the western nations cannot acknowledge their Christian values and the fact that these values directly arise from the Christian faith, then they will never be able to discern their enemy. They will play at ‘nice’ and be manipulated by every faddish sentiment that is pushed on them.
The majority of people- beneficiaries of Christian moral parameters and freedoms, have no idea of the realities of Islam. They are completely taken in when Islam is described as a religion of peace. That is, they see all religions as Christianity-and they interpret what they say as if it were a Christian saying it. They have, in fact, been inundated by thousands of members of a religion whose tenet is to subjugate all to their faith and which condones the killing of those who are unbelievers. This religion, in its book, tells its adherents that heaven will not be attained until all the Jews are killed. The ‘peace’ of which Islam speaks is a peace where all are under Allah. The word ‘Islam’ means ‘subjugation’ and that subjugation is to Allah. It is a subjugation justifying the use of the sword.
I need not refer to their view of women, articulated comprehensively by Ms Kohn above, and in respect of which the feminists have been completely silent (so much for standing up for women’s rights). And, we won’t mention what they think should happen to gays…
And we have allowed millions into every western country in a movement that was not asked for by any voting person in any country, not acknowledged by any western leader and completely silenced by every main stream media commentator.
The west (Christian Europe) fought to regain itself for hundreds of years from Islam. Now, someone, or some entity, has enabled invasion of those very same countries, together with a complete silencing of objections.
So, who was it who promoted and facilitated the overwhelming of European countries with masses of Moslem men of fighting age under the guise of ‘refugees’? What was his name? (I’ll give a hint – George Soros). What did he hope to gain? Was he working alone? Is he doing it at the behest of a political movement which has aims to take over – that is, Is it a political destabilisation? Did that same person fund organisations that engaged in riots that were so violent as to destabilise the US? And did the main stream media call them riots – or were they called ‘peaceful protests’? So, who funds the main stream media?
And why did the EU push an invasion of people whose aim is the destruction of Christian culture?
And why did this invasion extend here? Who facilitated it? And why does not a single media entity say a word about this obvious subversion of our countries? Why does not a single politician mention any of this? Oh, except those termed ‘far right’ by the media…
It is becoming more apparent that it is a socialist initiative. Anybody who has read Vladimir Bhukovsky or listened to Yuri Besmenov would recognise that people such as Soros are acting with the aim of subverting the west. Socialism does not give up – they act by subversion, demoralisation and chaos and destabilisation.
The BLM/Antifa riots in the US and UK point to socialism. Germany was engulfed in socialist revolutions from 1919, to the degree that it was completely destabilised and which led to the rise of Hitler and the anti-Semitism, not only in Germany but throughout Europe in the years immediately following the Russian Revolution and the assassination of the Tsar.
Yuri Besmenov was a KGB agent who outlined socialist modus operandi and who told us plainly that we are the subjects of just such tactics.
Vladimir Bukovsky a Soviet dissident, had access to KGB files which he has published which revealed that under an agreement between Francois Mitterrand (socialist),, and Gorbachev, at the fall of communism, KGB agents were given positions in the EU. So, examination of the EU policies after 1990 will give an indication of the tactics employed. It will also explain the big change in character from the previous European Economic Community. It is the EU which employs the acceptance of these unacceptable numbers of so-called ‘refugees’.
I do not have answers, but I do advocate Solzhenitsyn’s dictum – speak the truth- do not tell lies. And lies entail adhering to these platitudinous sentiments, in engaging in faux wonderment, in pondering the methods of ‘assimilation’. The reality is, if imported in small enough numbers, they will assimilate. If in large numbers, they will take over – and it will not be nice.
Do not sign up for the socialist undermining of our culture by agreeing to the thousands of attacks on the family, our children, our religious origins. Speak up. Write to your member – not about vague ‘anti-Semitism’ but about why there is anti-Semitism.
That is, if people of a religious persuasion that calls for the annihilation of the Jews say things that may fit within a description of ‘anti-Semitism’ – then speak out about what is going on and ask ‘Why are they here?’