Sensitivity training for Muslims

Cheer yourself up a bit.

The vast ship of hypocrisy, double standards, euphemism, and pseudo-understanding that has sailed under the false flag of multi-culturalism in recent decades is springing a leak or two. Even — are you ready for this? — in Europe.

Wesley Pruden, whose biting humor can sometimes go a round or two with Mark Steyn's, notes in his Washington Times column:

… Europeans, usually regarded here as made up in equal parts of mush, cotton, hay and rag, in recent months have stood up to defend the customs that make the West the West. Burqas have been banned in Italy, reluctant German schoolboys are required to attend coed swimming classes and male applicants for Irish citizenship are now required to renounce polygamy. When a visiting Iranian government delegation demanded that a Belgian minister drink no wine at his luncheon for them, the minister promptly canceled the lunch and told them: "You can't force the authorities of Belgium to drink water." …

The international relations minister for Quebec says immigrants who respect neither women nor the rights in the Canadian civil code are not welcome. The prime minister of New South Wales says immigrants who don't want to become Australians first should stay out. Australia's education minister told prospective Islamic immigrants that if they can't commit to Australian rule of law "they can basically clear off."

Some of these politicians may only be doing what they do best: talking in ways calculated to gain approval in whatever residue of popular sovereignty remains in the EU's government by bureaucracy or under Canada's de facto one-party rule. And no doubt, the few vertebrates who are willing to defy the multi-culti establishment are well overmatched by the sort of dopes who recently tried to abolish piggy banks in Britain so as not to upset Muslims who consider pigs to be no better than Jews.

Still, even five years ago, a minister would have been signing his political death warrant by suggesting publicly that immigrants should accept the traditions and laws of their host country instead of demanding that the host country eradicate its own culture to please the immigrants. Even in Britain, where every institution demonstrates its bona fides daily by Great Cultural Revolution–like confessions of institutional racism, Islamophobia, sexism, homophobia, and classism, not to mention once having ruled the waves, there are rumblings of change.

David Cameron, a rising Tory star in Britain, summons the courage to define "Britishness," and says it begins with "freedom under the rule of law," and this "explains almost everything you need to know about our country, our institutions, our history, our culture -- even our economy."

Mr. Cameron rises to bluntness: "The driving force behind today's terrorist threat is Islamist fundamentalism. The struggle we are engaged in is, at root, ideological. Islamist thinking has developed which, like other totalitarianisms, such as Nazi-ism and communism, offers its followers a form of redemption through violence."

Mr. Cameron's idea of Britishness is, I am afraid, a thing of the past.

And, just possibly, of the future.