The myth of multiculturalism
March 31, 2007, 7:38 pm |
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An impossible dream now at the crossroads worldwide
By Kenneth T. Tellis
When Amandeep Atwal, a Kitimat, British Columbia teenager was stabbed 17 times by her father Rajinder Atwal on July 30, 2003, could there have been any doubt that the old ways are hard to change? Atwal also slashed his daughter’s face. Is having an old-world mentality an acceptable excuse for such a crime? I think not! When a person who is steeped in another culture immigrates to a new country in the West, that person must realize that the mores of his/her country of origin and racial or religious background have no bearing on the new society. The mores of the new western society are now what he/she will have to live with, and by.
Did Amandeep Atwal disobey her father? No, but her father was trying to impose mores that belonged in his old country on his young teenage daughter, who was a Canadian. Thus when Rajinder Atwal arrived in Canada, he had not left his old baggage behind, but had held on to it. It is like someone who, when leaving their country of origin, wanted to keep one foot in the old country and the other in the new country. That is just not possible. The society that Rajinder Atwal came from seemed to treat children as possessions or chattel, rather than like persons, which they are in Canada.
If Amandeep Atwal wanted a friendship with Todd McIsaac, that should have been a cause for rejoicing, not murder. In punishing his daughter for what he perceived to be dishonouring the family honour, Rajinder Atwal took the law into his own hands and murdered his young daughter Amandeep. Apparently Rajinder Atwal took the position that his daughter’s friendship with Todd McIsaac was a slur because Todd was not of his race, culture and religion. To call Rajinder Atwal a kind, hardworking man who was a good provider is not the issue here. What is at issue was that he attempted to impose rules on Amandeep Atwal that do not support the theory of Canadian multiculturalism. He forgot that in western society each one has certain basic rights and freedoms, unlike the society he had hailed from. There are many countries in Asia and Africa in which basic rights and freedoms do not exist, and parents lay down the law. With these apparent drawbacks, how can someone coming from such a society fit into the so-called multicultural society of Canada? This battle is on-going and it is apparent throughout Australia, Europe and America today.
TRIBUTE COLLECTION 12″ PATCHES WITH FRAMES
As far back as the 1970s, a Muslim father took a Toronto teenager of Albanian origin into the basement of the family home and stabbed her to death for family honour. What was her crime? The fact that she had become friendly with a Christian boy, when her father had promised her in marriage to a very much older Albanian man in New Jersey. Again, we have to realize that her father looked at his daughter as mere chattel, and not as a person, because those were the mores of his Albanian society. That theory may well be acceptable in Albania but has no validity in Canada.
This kind of attitude does not stop in any one place. In Leeds, England the skull of a young woman was found wrapped in a head-shawl (Dupatta). The police attempted to find who she was, to no avail. They even went to housing projects in which Indians and Pakistanis were residents, but no one was able to tell them of a missing teenager. Finally it dawned on the police that the shawl could be the only clue to her identity. They then had the shawl sent to the Punjab, Pakistan, where the shawl was woven and finally located the village that it came from. They pieced together the evidence and managed to locate a Punjabi family that had registered three children in school, but were now only claiming to have two children. Going back to the village in the Punjab, Pakistan where the family had hailed from, police discovered that the family indeed did have three children. When confronting the father with the evidence of the missing teenager, he broke down and admitted that he had killed his teenage daughter in defence of family honour, because she had become friendly with an English boy.
There are of course many murders committed with the excuse of defending family honour in Pakistan, and in some cases India too. So such things are not the exception, but the rule in those countries. This has also happened in Europe, where the brothers of young Kurdish women murdered them for associating with European men. The excuse has always been that they were defending their family honour, and this does not seem to change one whit. Given these circumstances how is it possible to integrate these immigrants into western society when they refuse to become part of it? It is an impossible an onerous task for European societies to integrate such immigrants, because they become a drain on the new society they have entered.
Australia, Great Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy and Sweden are now realizing that multiculturalism is a thankless task and one that may never really succeed. It is therefore time to take a second look at multiculturalism and what it entails. So far, it has proven unworkable, and its success cannot be seen in the very near future. Perhaps it was an impossible dream that was never to be fulfilled. The moral of this story is: one cannot fit a square peg in a round hole, no matter how hard one tries. Multiculturalism has so far amounted to a pipe dream that some idle people thought up to while away their time.
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Categories, Tags: Political Correctness, Canada, Society, Philosophy / Ideology
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April 2nd, 2007 at 2:28 pm
Multiculturalism has not amounted to a pipedream, but rather a nightmare for a great many.
Amandeep Atwal’s murder by the hand and knife of her father Rajinder Atwal on July 30, 2003 is just one of many examples of how many immigrants to the West, who hold onto their non-Western ways, inflict death and misery to others, including their own family members should their victims offend those non-Western ways and beliefs.
Multiculturalism, if it has any logic at all, it is found in theory, but not in reality. There are a number of reasons for that, but perhaps the most telling reason is that as it is practiced in pluralistic Western societies, it falsely assumes that all cultures are equal, all deserve equal respect and tolerance from the other and that all people of different cultures will equally observe and live according to the tenets of multiculturalism.
The whole multicultural ideology has repeatedly been undermined when immigrants to the West have retained their old ways to guide them in their actions that not only contravene multicultural ideology, but as well offend the laws and mores of Western society.
The West is just going to have to recognize that multiculturalism has within it a fatal contradiction.
That is that by Western governments in a non-discriminating fashion, promoting cultural distinctivness within Western society in accord with the tenets of multiculturalism, the government is also is ensuring that those immigrant values and mores that are part of that immigrant culture and which are an anathema to Western culture, will also be retained.
Westerners telling immigrants you can keep and indeed practice your culture for your cultural distinctinveness, but just obey our laws.
May 24th, 2007 at 9:15 am
[…] While pro-Israel activists often face multicultural, PC-motivated double-standards, the lesson here is that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Don’t take any BS from a bunch of apparatchiks (bureaucrats). Get the word out about Israel — and support the good people at Join the Boycott. […]