Is there a method to our elites' madness?
0 comment Sunday, May 25, 2014 |
Or are they all just crazy, with their multicultural mania?
Over at Refugee Resettlement Watch, (H/T John S Bolton at The Open City and its Natural Enemies)
there is a linked story from the Shelbyville, Tennessee paper about how the Somalis who have been resettled there as 'refugees' have reacted to the hospitality shown them.
Somalians respond poorly to hospitality
Brian Mosely
Over the past few years, this community has given a helping hand and opened their arms to the new arrivals from Somalia.
In return, many of these refugees have given Shelbyville the finger.
When I began researching this story about the Somalis, I knew it would be controversial. We were aware that many in Shelbyville were having serious concerns about hundreds of Sunni Muslims moving here.
But as I began to talk with officials and others about our new neighbors, I was stunned by the reaction. Practically every person I spoke with locally said they had done everything possible to help out the refugees in adjusting to their new home and were treated very badly in return.
On the other hand, some I contacted for background on this story seemed to be so blinded by political correctness that they would excuse any behavior, no matter how upsetting or disruptive, as "part of their culture."
Did anyone involved in integrating these folks into American society stop to think that many in the heartland of America might not share this overly optimistic and myopic view of cultural diversity?
Unfortunately, the feelings and views of the communities the Somalis move to are almost never taken into account. Indeed, they are expected to simply keep their mouths shut and accept the newcomers without question. Those who protest are labeled racists by the various groups involved in resettling the refugees.''
Wow. I am stunned to find such an honest story in any newspaper; I commend the writer, Brian Mosely, for his honesty. How does it happen that a newspaper dares to deviate from the approved PC template? It's unheard of.
I've read countless stories about refugees who are dropped down in some hapless American heartland city or town, usually one which is conspicuously non-diverse, and the focus is always on the trials and travails of the poor suffering refugee. No newspaper in my recollection has ever reported on the difficulties the town experiences with suddenly having whole groups of people from an alien culture thrust on them, usually without their consent. If such difficulties are touched on at all, it is only in reference to the refugees' experience. The emphasis will be on the 'xenophobia' of the local people, and their reluctance to adjust to the refugees. The story then becomes the 'racism' of heartland America, with predictable moralizing from the liberals who are advocating for the refugees. Nobody tells of the troubles experienced by the local people. Until this article.
Suddenly introducing a society that is literally hundreds of years behind the times in the ways of hygiene, mannerisms, culture and the treatment of women into 21st Century America is a recipe for sociological disaster. It is a massive shock to the Somalis and doesn't do the local communities any favors either.
Indeed, if this was Star Trek, this action would be considered a major violation of the Prime Directive.''
I like the reference to Star Trek; it's appropriate. Why don't we, with our supposed reverence for 'diversity', try to leave people and their cultures intact, instead of trying to mix everybody together in some mad experiment? The fictional 'Federation' at least tried to practice non-interference with alien cultures.
It also doesn't help that the most common image of Somalis in American popular culture is from the Ridley Scott film "Black Hawk Down," which depicts them as brutal, wild-eyed fanatics slaughtering U.S. troops in the name of Allah and barbaric warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid.''
Well, I would say that the movie depiction has a basis in reality; I remember too vividly the TV news images of Somalis dishonoring the half-dressed corpses of the troops who were shot down by those warlords. At the time I was still quite a liberal, but I experienced a visceral response to the sight of American boys' remains being trampled and dragged by these savages. And savages is the appropriate word. If we can't apply the term 'savage' to them and their behavior, we may as well drop the word from our lexicon.
So those people I saw on TV, jumping up and down on the bodies of dead Americans, are the kin of the people we are now having to welcome into our communities. Oh, but we mustn't stereotype or generalize; it was just a small minority of extremists who actually did that, you see, even though it looked like a whole crowd of people rejoicing over our dead sons and brothers in their streets.
But the Somalis who come here are different kinds of people, surely. Aren't they?
There are also the stories that come from other communities that have many locals nervous. For example, in October of last year, Said Biyad, a Bantu refugee from Somalia, killed his four children in Louisville, Ky., and attacked his estranged wife with a blunt object, turning himself into police afterward. He slashed the throats of the children, aged 2 to 8, because his wife "disrespected" him, he said.
A difference in culture, no doubt.''
The word seems to be out that Americans are all stupidly soft and deferential, and that demanding things is the appropriate way to deal with us.
If Shelbyville's Somali community really wishes to "integrate into different societies to live together and to make our future here," as Imam Haji Yousuf told me, that process must work both ways. The arrogant sense of entitlement demonstrated by these new additions to Shelbyville must stop.
One can not expect a community to keep bending over backwards to help folks, only to treated with rudeness, disrespect and hostility. At some point, our welcoming attitude and southern hospitality will turn into resentment and distrust.
And as the comments posted on our website demonstrates, that is already occurring, in far greater numbers than we ever imagined.''
I didn't read the comments on the website, but the above gives me hope that there are some people, somewhere, in this country, who are not content for America to be the doormat of the world, and for Americans to be viewed as everybody's sugar daddies and servants.
John S. Bolton, at his above-linked blog Open City always has a unique take on these things, and he asks whether there is not some method to this madness of our country being forced to receive the most unassimilable and often hostile groups of people. I have given a lot of thought to this situation, too, and it seems so counterintuitive, so completely contrary to all common sense, that I sometimes conclude that our elites have all gone quite insane, seized with some kind of communicable madness. However that is not a useful explanation; John S. Bolton believes that there is a purpose to the elites' seeming irrationality:
This is how the power-greedy operate now: they find a way to bring in ill-behaved, highly objectionable people, enemies even, then try to worsen the misbehavior, and when they succeed in provoking a response, they smear the opposition as racism, fascism, xenophobia, discrimination, etc.
With opponents on the defensive, no one remembers to say that the use of smearing and other fallacies indicates that there is no rational argument for giving more power to the power-greedy.
This way the power-greedy control the issues; they bring in the people who cause public outrage, and the issues are already set up for officials and others to respond with their accustomed replies (which are mainly smears). They are prepared, but those who value freedom-from-aggression appear to be always caught off balance.
[...]
Now we have two closely inter-related motives. The power-greedy can win if they provoke smearable opposition to the aggrandizement of their power, and they can win the dictatorship itself, if they can get full-scale insurgency going.
The same methods can be used in complementary manner for both objectives. These two methods have the valuing of objectionable diversity in common; they fit together rhetorically as well as pragmatically.
Now does it make sense why, the worse trouble we can expect from a foreigner, the more those who wish for more power, would prefer for that foreigner to be brought here, and close to your relatives?''
It seems to be as plausible an explanation as any that I have heard; otherwise it makes absolutely no sense.
It does appear that the idea is to provoke discord and possibly open conflict. How else do we explain it?

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