Anyone who thinks backlash against political correctness is limited to signs in cheese steak shops should read this:
Muslim women in the USA have been asking the public to accommodate their religious beliefs about modesty, a trend that some Muslims worry will provoke a backlash.
In some recent examples:
• In Lincoln Park, Mich., Fitness USA relented when Muslim women demanded that the gym wall off a co-ed aerobic center from their women-only section because men could see them working out.
• In Bridgeview, Ill., a Muslim school says it wants its girls' basketball team to play road games against non-Muslim schools provided the public schools ban men and teenage boys from the game.
• In North Seattle, Wash., a public pool set up a swim time for Muslim women in which men, even male lifeguards, are banned.
USA Today is hardly Jihad Watch. And they quote Professor Walid Phares's warning that this is an attempt by Wahhabism to tell Americans how to live:
Walid Phares, a professor of Middle East studies at Florida Atlantic University, sees it as an early sign in the USA of a global Islamic movement to pressure Western society into abiding by Islamic laws.
"These demands exist because there is an ideology of a militant movement to slowly but surely demand more," Phares says. "They will be building on it."
Phares says the conservative Saudi branch of Islam, known as Wahhabism, is trying to assert itself as representation all Muslims in the USA and makes demands most Muslims disagree with.
I don't have to abide by other people's religious laws. The idea of the First Amendment is that the government not respect any particular religion. Thus Catholics may not enlist government help to make Baptists follow their rules, or vice versa.
It is one thing to demand that a business comply with religious laws, but quite another for the government to do that. IMO, Seattle schools are violating the First Amendment.
USA Today tries to end its story on a positive note (at least I guess that's what they think they're doing):
. . .Ebrahim Moosa, professor of Islamic studies at Duke University, says the requests are attempts to integrate with U.S. culture. They show "that America can become their home," he says.
Are they requests, or are they demands? And is the goal really to "integrate with U.S. culture" or is it something else? I think professor Moosa has it backwards, perhaps because he wants us to move backwards.
Integration once meant assimilation. With the supremacy of multiculturalism, we increasingly end up with no assimilation, and no integration. (If Wahhabists win their demands for separate Muslim facilities, can racial resegregation be far behind?)
The pathologies of the remotest backwaters now have franchise outlets in every Western city. You don't have to be a loser Ontario welfare recipient like Steven Chand, the 25-year-old Muslim convert named in the thwarted prime ministerial beheading. Omar Sheikh, the man behind the beheading of the Wall Street Journal's Daniel Pearl, was an English "public" (i.e., private) schoolboy and graduate of the London School of Economics.
Whatever you call it, it certainly isn't integration. Steyn sees multiculturalism as undercutting whatever success we might acheive:
This week the jihad lost its top field general, but in Somalia it may have gained a nation -- a new state base after the loss of Afghanistan. And in Toronto and London the picture isn't so clear: The forensic and surveillance successes were almost instantly undercut by the usual multicultural dissembling of the authorities. If you think the idea of some kook beheading prime ministers on video is nutty, maybe you're looking at things back to front. What's nutty is that, half a decade on from Sept. 11, the Saudis are still allowed to bankroll schools and mosques and think tanks and fast-track imam chaplaincy programs in prisons and armed forces around the world. Oil isn't the principal Saudi export, ideology is; petroleum merely bankrolls it. In Britain, Canada, France, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and elsewhere, second- and third-generation Muslims recognize the vapidity of the modern multicultural state for what it is -- a nullity, a national non-identity -- and so, for their own identity, they look elsewhere. To carry on letting Islamism fill it is to invite the re-primitivization of the world.
Not long ago, the idea of deliberately moving humanity backwards would have been funny. Now it's a serious political idea. Something that demands that it be considered worthy of respect.
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Comments
There are plenty of nations on this planet that are more than willing to accomodate Muslims. Most of them are freedom loving, tolerant, diversity respecting nations such as Saudi Arabia and Iran. Third World immigrants want all the material benefits of Western Civilization without paying the price of putting up with anything that might offend them. If they suceed in forcing us to adopt their customs in the name of multi-culti tolerance, they will kill the golden goose they came here for in the first place.
I think it's okay if they want to ask for it from a private company, but no one should feel like they have to do it. If there's something they really want, start their business -- women's only gym, or whatever. THAT's the american way. Otherwise, just stop whining...
I think the two largest risks are that, on the one hand, private and government entities that pay attention will think that they have X muslims in the community, and the Wahhabis represent all of them. The second is that these people might be reacting to a fear of a lawsuit.
And, I mean. We live in a country where convicted killers can sue if guards in prison keep them up at night or don't invest their money in a lucrative enough account (sadly, I'm serious).
I can imagine a lawsuit against a gym for not respecting muslim culture.
Jon Thompson · June 14, 2006 08:04 PM
Oh, and, I forgot the convicted killer who sued to get free porn while he was on death row.
If Muslims go to a Western Country by choice, then they should assimilate into that country's culture and society, not try to force their out-moded and ridiculous beliefs on the society that they have adopted.
And I mean ridiculous - for example, the religious clerics in Iran have decreed that women are not allowed to go to a soccer stadium to watch games because the naked legs of the young male players may excite the women too much. Please, is this even logical? This sort of suppression of sexuality does untold harm to the human psyche... no wonder there are so many sexual deviancies in Muslim society you never hear of... they are all kept secret and swept under the carpet of the family. Where in the Qu'ran does it say that male soccer players legs are too exciting for women?
Saudi Arabia bans women from participating in 99% of the running of the country. Saudi Arabia bans women from driving. Saudi Arabia decrees that all women must be fully veiled and covered when in public. Saudi Arabia bans women from going out by themselves - they must always be in twos or threes. Saudi Arabia bans an uncle from sitting alone with his neice in her home. Saudi Arabia bans all other religions from practising in their country (I hold that the Christian West should do likewise and ban the Muslim religion from their countries). The list goes on and on. Where in the Qu'ran does it say that women are banned from all these things?
It is the result of those backward-looking and mired-in-a-primitive-tribal-past clerics that suppress freedom in Saudi Arabia - period. They force the people of Saudi Arabia to live as if they were living 1400 years ago. No wonder nothing innovative or original has come out of the Muslim world for the past 1400 years - innovation and free-thinking and curiosity is banned and suppressed by their stupid and backward clerics who want absolute male power and dominance.
If Muslims in the western world demand such ridiculous things as all males to be banned from a basketball game, or a wall to be built in a gym so that they can workout in private, then I say they are making a laughing stock of the West.
The west should say, "If you want to force your outmoded and psychologically harmful beliefs on us, then leave - go back to Saudi Arabia where you can be repressed to your heart's content."
It is time that Western Governments stopped pandering to the demented and insane religious practices of this suppressive religion, and trying to be "oh so politically correct". It is time for the West to tell them to assimilate in the country of their choice, or just get out... go back to some backwards Muslim country where they can bow obediently to the male phallus.
I am just sick of the backwards, arrogant, stupid, and insane demands of this religion. I am also sick of the West for trying not to "insult" by practising this stupid political correctness. Please, let's call a spade a spade. The Muslim religion is repressive, psycholgically harmful, authoritative, and buried in the long past. If Muslims living in the civilized world cannot adapt to their chosen country, let them go back to their uncivilized and phallic-fearing and phallic-centric and phallic-worshipping countries and leave us alone.
The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler
Don?t bang your head!
There are plenty of nations on this planet that are more than willing to accomodate Muslims. Most of them are freedom loving, tolerant, diversity respecting nations such as Saudi Arabia and Iran. Third World immigrants want all the material benefits of Western Civilization without paying the price of putting up with anything that might offend them. If they suceed in forcing us to adopt their customs in the name of multi-culti tolerance, they will kill the golden goose they came here for in the first place.