* Israel’s Arab citizens (20% of its population; most of whom are Muslim) are much better integrated than French or Belgian Muslims.
* Mondoweiss: Jews and Arabs don’t really mix much in Israel. They attend separate schools from pre-kindergarten age (there are only 5 integrated state schools in the country where Arab and Jewish pupils learn together.) They live in separate cities and towns, with a few exceptions like Haifa and Lod; and even in these mixed municipalities, they tend to live in their ethnically defined neighborhoods. Organizations like Yad L’Achim and Lehava, which receive funding and the tacit approval of the Israeli government, exist in order to combat fraternization between the groups, especially between Jewish women and Arab men. There is no civil marriage option in Israel, which essentially places Jewish-Arab relationships permanently in the realm of the illegitimate.
What can we do to help the Israelis assimilate their Muslims? Insist on a one-state solution that integrates Gaza, Israel and the West Bank?
Yes. Insist that Israel drop the racial and ethnic identification on all ID cards? Yes, that, too. Insist that Israel immediately institute secular/civil marriage and divorce laws? That would also help show goodwill. Withhold all further civil and military assistance until they do? Yes, that is obvious. It is actually a true statement that the problem in Israel is its failure to assimilate its Muslim (and Christian) citizenry. It is also true that the problem in Europe and the United States is Israel’s failure to assimilate its Muslim (and Christian) citizenry.* I am sure that Muslims would be “better integrated” in Europe and America if we returned to the Israeli-style system we used to have a century ago.
In Israel today (as in America a century ago) everybody knows where the lines are drawn and the cost of stepping over them.
Belgians could start by bulldozing houses of collaborators. There must be dozens if not hundreds who looked the other way in Molenbeek.
* Israel hasn’t even tried to integrate West Bank Arabs, Boot wants to continue with that policy, meaning an Apartheid system for settlers and Arabs in the West Bank, which would become ever more evident, as the demographics altered. Boot is mainly interested with his own prestige as an important authority on America’s place in the world, Belgium and Israel effectively ceasing to exist in the foreseeable future is not his primary concern.
* This is actually one of the less stupid things that Boot has said recently. It is true that America has done a better job of assimilating Muslims than Europe has done. And that, in large part, accounts for why there are more attacks there than here. (Other reasons include simple proximity and also closer operational links between Eur0-based radical Muslims and terror groups in the Muslim world).
However, what Boot doesn’t get is that–to quote the Derb quoting Enoch Powell–numbers are of the essence. The larger a Muslim community in a non-Muslim country grows, the more separate it becomes, the more alienated, hostile and prone to radicalism.
America is a sense then just “lucky” that our Muslim population is so much smaller (relatively) and dispersed than Europe’s. But of course if Boot had his way, we’d be taking in a billion more of them.
In my opinion, we don’t need ANY and never did. But if you’re going to have them, fewer is always better than more.
* Forty years ago I saw some fool at the Boston zoo provoke the Baboons, which it seemed was easy to do. Boot is right, the Muslims should not be provoked, but they should also be in a cage or sent back to their natural habitat.
* In the wake of today’s events in Brussels, Hillary and Bernie called for more surveillance. This should be expected as historically the only way to keep the peace in multi ethnic society is to turn it into a police state. I.E. you fear the secret police more then you fear your ethnically different neighbor. But then Max Boot said he’d rather vote for Stalin then Trump so no surprise there either.
To bad Rand Paul couldn’t connect those dot’s, pro liberty, pro rights needs homogeneity to work.
* Muslims are integrating better in America, but the details of why that is makes leftists uncomfortable. They’re integrating here because we enforce minimum wage laws less zealously than the Europeans do. And thus, our Muslims are busy driving taxis 18 hours a day, while in Europe they sit on their butts dreaming of jihad unless they can wangle a corporate-type job.
* How about we send Europe our Latino illegal immigrants? They may not be the sharpest knives in the drawer, but they are not Muslim and they do not blow people up. They work hard and are ready, willing and able to help grow the population there without explosions. Think of it, Mexicans would fit into life in Spain a lot better than Moroccans do.
Send the current, ungrateful migrants back from whence they came. They can transform their Muslim countries into the wonderful nirvanas that we heard they would make Europe. Send Frau Merkel with them.
* Give this crop of immigrants to America a generation or two…
1. Continue to overpromise then to fail to deliver the American Dream to so many… no matter whether immigrant or native born no matter how long or for how many generations they or their families have been in the US
2. Continue to fail to integrate the newcomers by continuing to emphasize divisions and diversity over unity and shared values.
3. Continue to sow discord and hate with identity politics that tell minorities… even if they CHOOSE to come here… that they are victims and suffer the oppression and inequities of racism so they can cultivate their own ressentiment and political loyalty as reliable partisan clientele.
4. Continue to supplicate to the vanguards of these “victim classes” by caving to their every demand and guaranteeing special favored consideration for any and all newcomers to compensate for discrimination
5. To maximize friction and heat, mix well, but not too well
(diversity + proximity = you know what)
We wouldn’t want any of these distinct and incompatible vibrant elements actually blending and losing any of their distinct characteristics as the mainstream Leitkultur rubs off on them.
Then America too can look forward to a bright and bloody future just like Europe already enjoys!
* Imagine a press release in the late 1930′s that read:
The problem in Europe is a failure to assimilate the National Socialist party. Germany has done best job, but the Herschel Grynszpan attack, and French and English resistance alienate Nazis & threaten security.
* There are still right wingers in Israel who want to keep it all. But even beyond that, there’s the fact that the non-Jews in the West Bank are fairly largely integrated into the Israeli controlled power grid, transport infrastructure, water, etc. Yet they have been under a separate set of rules for almost 50 years now. I don’t think that can continue, indefinitely, but the Israeli government doesn’t seem either willing or able to stop the expansion of settlements (although they do uproot some of the smaller ones from time to time.) Not to mention that, for water purposes alone, they will never leave the Jordan River Valley (or Golan) which means that any Palestinian entity will be an enclave in Israel.
It’s a real problem and the only thing that the Israeli government has been doing for the past 30 years (First Intifada) is kick the can down the road.
The conventional wisdom that you’re either going to have one state or two states is belied by the passage of time; if there ever is a separate Palestinian state it will be so closely tied to Israel that one will hardly know the difference. Short of population transfers, which I think are highly doubtful, there will probably be a bi-national state or at least a confederation by the end of the century. And then it will come down to power sharing.
* People always have personal anecdotes about their minority-X friend and how well that friend has assimilated to their cultural norms. So they naively assume that scaling that friend up from him and his family to a few hundred thousand will go just as smoothly.
But they fail to consider that their minority-X friend will acculturate differently when he is relatively unique in a majority culture versus when he and his own are closer to being the majority culture. Scaling up to 5 percent, 15 percent and higher produces much different results than the naive person assumed when his minority-X friend comprised a half a percent of the population.
Whether it is turning a town that was homogeneous into one with a 10 percent foreign population overnight, or doing the same with a school by busing in a diverse bunch of students, those in control rarely take into account what you wrote, “maybe it doesn’t scale. Not everything does.”
* Unlike the West, religious-ethnic communalism has always been the norm in the Levant. That’s still the basic system, though modified somewhat to the needs of the modern nation-state:
Israel’s population registry lists a slew of “nationalities” and ethnicities, among them Jew, Arab, Druse and more. But one word is conspicuously absent from the list: Israeli.
Residents cannot identify themselves as Israelis in the national registry because the move could have far-reaching consequences for the country’s Jewish character, the Israeli Supreme Court wrote in documents obtained Thursday.
The ruling was a response to a demand by 21 Israelis, most of whom are officially registered as Jews, that the court decide whether they can be listed as Israeli in the registry. The group had argued that without a secular Israeli identity, Israeli policies will favor Jews and discriminate against minorities.
* From today’s USAToday editorial:
“It takes Muslims to stand against the tiny minority of savage radicals in the U.S. and other nations, and Muslim forces to stand against ISIL in Syria, Iraq, Libya and everywhere they have gained a foothold. Alienating crucial allies in a shared war against extremists is, quite simply, stupid. Americans should not let it happen.”
What I find mindbogglingly stupid is editorial comment that implies that it is perfectly alright if several score or hundreds of citizens are massacred as long as there is no wish to avoid those who are most likely to kill to them. People like these USAToday editors and the Max Boots of the world are such Magnificent A*sho*es that it his difficult to fathom the world in which they slime-walk.
