More than two years after Austria’s so-called burqa ban, the nation has taken another half step to preserve its culture: It has enacted a law designed to stop Muslim girls from wearing Islamic headscarves in primary schools.
As DW.com reports, using the usual propagandistic terms (e.g., “far-right”) to describe conservative parties, “The bill passed with the support of the governing center-right People’s Party (ÖVP) and the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ). Almost all of the opposition voted against it.”
“To avoid the impression that it targets Muslims, the text refers to any ‘ideologically or religiously influenced clothing which is associated with the covering of the head,’” the site continues.
Nonetheless, “Representatives of both parts of the governing coalition … have made it clear that despite its wide description, the law is targeted at the Islamic headscarf,” the Guardian states.
“The FPÖ education spokesman, Wendelin Mölzer, said the law was ‘a signal against political Islam’ while the ÖVP MP Rudolf Taschner said the measure was necessary to free girls from subjugation.”
(Note: Since honest, forthcoming statements about the dangers of certain foreign influences — unless it’s “Trump and Russia!™” — are socially proscribed today, selling a proposal with feminist-crusade talk is common. Hey, Otto Von Bismarck did say, “Politics is the art of the possible.”)
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Of course, the measure is being condemned by the usual suspects. Austria’s official Muslim community organization, IGGÖ, has vowed to challenge the law in Austria’s constitutional court. Liberal Neos party member Irmgard Griss, responding to the feminism justification, said there was no evidence “that girls found it more difficult to learn when wearing a headscarf,” the Guardian also tells us. And Austrian-German novelist Daniel Kehlmann castigated Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, value-signaling and self-righteously asking the leader, rhetorically, if he grasped how history will remember him (in reality, it’s unlikely history will remember Kehlmann and his posturing at all).
Both Kurz’ party, the ÖVP, and the FPÖ “formed a coalition in late 2017 after elections in which both parties took a tough anti-immigration stance,” the Guardian further relates. To the point here, they also have warned of the perils of “parallel societies.”
This refers to the “no-go zones” that have developed in many Western European countries; the Left long claimed their existence was a rightist myth, but the truth is that the New York Times spoke of them, perhaps first, in 2007, and that immigrationist German chancellor Angela Merkel admitted last year that they did in fact exist.
Another measure taken to combat this threat, by authorities in lower Austria earlier this month, was the issuing to migrants of a “Ten Commandments of Immigration.” They are, in part, as DW.com relates:
• Learn German
• Adhere to Austrian laws
• Adopt “Austrian values” and raise children in accordance with them; [sic]
• Resolve conflicts nonviolently
• Respect religious freedom
• Prevent unnecessary suffering to animals
• Show gratitude to Austria
Do note that according to Islam expert Robert Spencer, many Muslims won’t “show gratitude” because their religion teaches that non-Muslims are obliged to serve them. Regardless, consider that “telling” people the truth generally doesn’t alter what since infancy has been inculcated into them and thus infuses their emotional foundation (if only it were that easy).
The point is that these again are half measures, something in which the weak, waning West specializes. They’re shallow prescriptions inadequate to address a deeper problem. (In fact, Westerners are reduced to ideas such as “The Ten Commandments of Immigration” [TCI] because, put simply, they’ve forgotten the actual Ten Commandments, as this article from today discusses.)
Just ponder, for example, the focus on symbols (i.e., Islamic dress), and let’s analogize this by considering a skinhead sporting a forehead Swastika tattoo or a Marxist carrying a hammer-and-sickle banner. While symbolism matters, are the symbols the deepest, most serious problem?
Or is it that they alert to the deeper problem: The individuals’ embrace of the ideas the symbols represent?
Moreover, you could ban such symbols’ public display, but does that change the hearts, minds, and goals of the people in question? Does it change their effect on your nation when they vote and exert social influence?
As to hearts and minds, if a group needs to be told the (mostly) common-sense TCI principles — if they’re alien to the group — doesn’t this reflect the deeper problem? Shouldn’t we perhaps wonder if that group really is a good candidate for immigration and, ultimately, citizenship?
After all, in how many areas in life do we neglect to consider compatibility when contemplating creating ties or taking new people on board? Do workplaces just pick employees out of a hat? There are blind dates, but do you believe in blind marriages? Do you choose a babysitter by lot?
Yet today’s immigration is one area where we check our collective brains, and our discernment, at the door, in the grip as we are of immigrationism: the belief that immigration is always good, always necessary, must never be questioned, and should be the one constant in an ever-changing universe of policy.
Fortunately, at least a few lonely voices are questioning it. Just recently, in fact, U.S. Cardinal Raymond Burke said that to “resist large-scale Muslim immigration in my judgment is to be responsible” and is an “exercise of one’s patriotism.”
Cardinal Burke also recently inveighed against “one-world government.” This is relevant here because some of those encouraging large-scale immigration do so to break down national cohesiveness — and hence the sense of nationhood and sovereignty — in order to facilitate a consolidation of national powers.
But whether or not immigration will mean a given land will no longer be a “nation,” it certainly determines what kind of nation it’s going to be. After all, if people get the government they deserve, doesn’t it matter what kind of people you import into your country?
Put differently, if politics is downstream of culture, wouldn’t it be just a little further downstream of an installed and burgeoning foreign culture?
Image: Ridofranz via iStock / Getty Images Plus
