the “reasonable”…

1) Learn the language.
2) Support yourself.
3) Obey the law.

Is it really expected to be any different in the UK or other western democracies?

“So you say it is your accepted, established and morally proper cultural custom for a Father to be authorized to discipline his daughter by severely beating her with a stick, to the point of breaking the bones in her face, should she bring “dishonor” upon your family, by say – being seen holding hands with a Jewish boy. Or for leaving the house while not fully covered head to toe in order to hide all of her skin.”

Very well. You are residing, volunarily mind you – (and be sure to notice that our borders are not closed for anyone wishing to leave) – in our country.

And we too have a custom. We arrest men who commit what we refer to here as “domestic violence,” and we charge them with what we call a “felony,” of “assault with a deadly weapon”, and “aggravated battery.” If convicted, you will reside for several years in what we call in our culture, a “penitentary.” If you happen to murder her in the course of upholding your “family honor” you will spend the rest of your life in said “penitentary.” Protests from your local Iman, nothwithstanding.

So. You may follow your custom. And then we shall follow ours.”

THAT firm, line in the cultural sand, attitude, is what is being lost, in Great Britain. To bemoan its loss is what is labeled as “xenophobic” and “racist.”

Shut up and pretend Sharia is not growing and expanding with each and every year. Or we’ll shame you into shutting up by calling you a racist.

You know where you can stick those labels. Hint: The sun doesn’t shine there.

There was, however, a sense in which the charge of “decadence” could be justified [in Eliot’s poems]. Clearly these poems were an end-product, the last gasp of a cultural tradition, poems which spoke only for the cultivated third-generation rentier, for people able to feel and criticize but no longer able to act. E. M. Forster praised “Prufrock” on its first appearance because “it sang of people who were ineffectual and weak” and because it was “innocent of public spirit” (this was during the other war, when public spirit was a good deal more rampant than it is now). The qualities by which any society which is to last longer than a generation actually has to be sustained — industry, courage, patriotism, frugality, philoprogenitiveness — obviously could not find any place in Eliot’s early poems. There was only room for rentier values, the values of people too civilized to work, fight or even reproduce themselves.

— George Orwell, “Review: Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages by T. S. Eliot” 1942

I love “Burnt Norton” but Orwell sure nails a strain of effete fecklessness that has long bothered me about Eliot — even though Eliot became a reactionary and tried, in his way, to hold the line on cultural values.

Almost seventy years later and here we are. Orwell saw the writing, not on the wall, but in the highest of high canon modern poetry.

If you are English and you aren’t okay with ever growing Sharia being imposed in your country; along with the cultural changes (like family honor killings, forced wearing of burkas along with other revocations of women’s rights, etc.) that come with it – you are a xenophobic racist.

Okay.

But hey – I’m all for being sensitive and accepting ‘multi-cultural diversity’, no matter how allegedly “barbaric” it may appear to our dead white men Western Civ eyes….

….Just like Sir Charles Napier was when sensitively dealing with the customs of Indian locals, a long long time ago.

“You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks, and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”

Much the same may be happening among our own aptly named “greatest generation” vets here in the U.S. — at least, if this moving letter to Obama from 95-year-old WWII veteran Harold Estes is the real deal. Heartbreaking stuff, to me.

Wish I had time for more. I’ll have to leave it at “thanks!” for now.