We have a right to defend our culture.

By Ted Belman

JoshuaPundit has been around a long time and is highly regarded. He commented on my “disputed territory” article and I learned we were on the same page.

Now he has written Freedom, Jihad And Racism in which he advocates stopping Sharia in Europe and America. It is exactly this topic we have been discussing this past week here.

[..] The question is, how exactly should the majority populations of the West react to such blatant assaults on their culture? Do they not have every right to insist on respect for their culture and the right to promulgate and preserve it from what amounts to an attack? I neither consider such efforts to be xenophobic, racist or anti-Semitic…up until the point where people are targeted with concrete actions specifically for their race, religion or nationality, rather than their individual actions.

All people may be equally worthy of respect, but all cultures aren’t, frankly. And the native populations of the west have the right and the duty to protect and pass on their cultures to their posterity without `patriotism’ or `nativism’ becoming dirty words.

I have often expressed the same ideas when I defend Zionism. People have a right to defend their culture.

They also have the right to insist that immigrants to their countries, attracted by the freedom and prosperity western civilization affords respect the majority culture and assimilate to a degree.

Increasingly, more and more Europeans are embracing this view of things, and as they find leaders like Wilders and Germany’s Thilo Sarrazin, this realization is causing political upheavals in Europe. And America is not far behind in a new, unapologetic embrace of Western freedom and culture in as well.

Nor does this mean that minority cultures have no place in our Western society. Oddly enough, the Jews, with a history of being attacked as the Eternal Stranger, the Other, provide a perfect example of how people can practice their own culture while respecting the majority culture of the countries they’ve lived in. And while it hasn’t helped the Jews overly much in most of Europe for a variety of reasons, it’s been a successful model in places like America, Canada and Australia, among others.

I doubt that this has occurred to either many Muslims or their apologists, but if more Muslims followed that model, and if Islam in general `played nicely with others’ without insisting on its inherent superiority, none of this would even be an issue.

But that would change Islam into something it unfortunately has not become yet, if it ever will.

Of course, that’s not really the point. The members of the Muslim umma who embrace Islamism are in fact being true to their culture. It’s not their fault if we in the West allow them to attack ours and refuse to defend our own.

But if we refuse to , we simply sabotage ourselves and our liberty. People defend what’s theirs because they believe in something, and undermining our culture cedes victory to people who mean us no good, but who have a deep seated belief in something very different.

Unpleasant as it may be, we’re in a war for our survival, and that becomes increasingly evident as time goes by. And culture is a potent weapon in war, perhaps one of the most potent.

The Islamists understand that. It’s time we did.