The Decamping Of The Saints (Or, The Dutch Find The Limits Of Tolerance)

It turns out that when the most tolerant society in Europe imports a million Moroccan and Turkish guest workers, plus refugees from places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia, the result is not all Unicorns and Rainbows. Instead, it's having fellow citizens who applaud the killing of filmmakers who criticize the treatment of women in Islam.



So, now the Dutch government has decided that a multiculti society is fundamentally a bad idea, and it wants to reverse course.



I'm not sure why I didn't see this news before, but back in June the Dutch Interior Minister presented a bill to parliament that would force integration of immigrants to Dutch values, if possible, and remove residence permits from those who refuse to conform. Quite a reversal of policy.



Here's a news story with details and links to the Interior Minister's action plan (in Dutch):

The Dutch government says it will abandon the long-standing model of multiculturalism that has encouraged Muslim immigrants to create a parallel society within the Netherlands.



A new integration bill (covering letter and 15-page action plan), which Dutch Interior Minister Piet Hein Donner presented to parliament on June 16, reads: "The government shares the social dissatisfaction over the multicultural society model and plans to shift priority to the values of the Dutch people. In the new integration system, the values of the Dutch society play a central role. With this change, the government steps away from the model of a multicultural society."



The letter continues: "A more obligatory integration is justified because the government also demands that from its own citizens. It is necessary because otherwise the society gradually grows apart and eventually no one feels at home anymore in the Netherlands. The integration will not be tailored to different groups."



The new integration policy will place more demands on immigrants. For example, immigrants will be required to learn the Dutch language, and the government will take a tougher approach to immigrants to ignore Dutch values or disobey Dutch law.



The government will also stop offering special subsidies for Muslim immigrants because, according to Donner, "it is not the government's job to integrate immigrants." The government will introduce new legislation that outlaws forced marriages and will also impose tougher measures against Muslim immigrants who lower their chances of employment by the way they dress. More specifically, the government will impose a ban on face-covering Islamic burqas as of January 1, 2013.



If necessary, the government will introduce extra measures to allow the removal of residence permits from immigrants who fail their integration course.



The measures are being imposed by the new center-right government of Conservatives (VVD) and Christian Democrats (CDA), with parliamentary support from the anti-Islam Freedom Party (PVV), whose leader, Geert Wilders, is currently on trial in Amsterdam for "inciting hatred" against Muslims.



As expected, Muslim organizations in Holland have been quick to criticize the proposals. The Moroccan-Dutch organization Samenwerkingsverband van Marokkaanse Nederlanders, which advises the government on integration matters, argues that Muslim immigrants need extra support to find a job. The umbrella Muslim group Contactorgaan Moslims en Overheid says that although it agrees that immigrants should be better integrated into Dutch society, it is opposed to a ban on burqas.



But polls show that a majority of Dutch voters support the government's skepticism about multiculturalism. According to a Maurice de Hond poll published by the center-right newspaper Trouw on June 19, 74 percent of Dutch voters say immigrants should conform to Dutch values. Moreover, 83 percent of those polled support a ban on burqas in public spaces.



The proper integration of the more than one million Muslims now living in Holland has been a major political issue ever since 2002, when Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn was assassinated for his views on Muslim immigration, and since 2004, when Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was stabbed to death for producing a movie that criticized Islam.



Muslim immigration to the Netherlands can be traced back to the 1960s and 1970s, when a blue collar labor shortage prompted the Dutch government to conclude recruitment agreements with countries like Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey. In the 1980s and 1990s, Muslims also arrived in the Netherlands as asylum seekers and refugees, mainly from Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and Somalia.



There are now an estimated 1.2 million Muslims in the Netherlands, which is equivalent to about 6 percent of the country's overall population. Moroccans and Turks comprise nearly two-thirds of all Muslims in the Netherlands. Most Muslims live in the four major cities of the country: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht.



As their numbers grow, Muslim immigrants have become increasingly more assertive in carving out a role for Islam within Dutch society. For example, a documentary aired by the television program Netwerk in June 2009 reported that Dutch law was being systematically undermined by the growth of Sharia justice in the Netherlands.



In December 2004, the Dutch Ministry of the Interior published a 60-page report titled From Dawa to Jihad. Prepared by the Dutch intelligence agency AIVD, the report says that the Netherlands is home to up to 50,000 radical Muslims whose key ideological aim is to target the Western way of life and to confront Western political, economic, and cultural domination.



The report concludes that Dutch society is poorly equipped to resist the threat of radical Islam because of "a culture of permissiveness" that has become synonymous with "closing one's eyes" to multiple transgressions of the law.



As for Interior Minister Donner, he has undergone a late-in-life conversion on the issue of Muslim immigration. In September 2006, while serving as justice minister, Donner provoked an outcry after saying that he welcomed the introduction of Islamic Sharia law in the Netherlands if the majority wants it. He also said Holland should give Muslims more freedoms to behave according to their traditions.



After applauding Queen Beatrix for respecting Islam by not insisting that a Muslim leader shake hands with her during a visit to the Mobarak Mosque in The Hague, Donner said: "A tone that I do not like has crept into the political debate on integration. A tone of: 'Thou shalt assimilate. Thou shalt adopt our values in public. Be reasonable, do it our way.' That is not my approach."



Fast forward to 2011 and Donner now says his government "will distance itself from the relativism contained in the model of a multicultural society." Although society changes, he says, it must not be "interchangeable with any other form of society."

If the Dutch adopt this bill and are serious about enforcing it, they will escape the dilemma that was famously framed by the 1972 novel The Camp of the Saints, which you can read here.



Watch for this backlash to spread to other countries.

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UK Riots Go Into Fourth Night Amid Plastic Bullets And Metal Bats

Four nights of looting and arson is enough, it seems, and tonight the police in London are supposed to take a harder line:

Scotland Yard has ordered its officers to use every available force, including possible use of plastic bullets, to stop Britain's riots as London was flooded with 16,000 officers, the biggest police presence in the capital in history.



With early reports emerging of a fourth night of trouble, involving shops broken into and torched in Greater Manchester and the West Midlands, some urban areas, notably in London, were in virtual lockdown as many businesses closed and shop windows were boarded up.



-- snip --



The public should expect to see "many more" rioters arrested from now on, the prime minister said. Parliament would be recalled on Thursday to debate the trouble, he added. Shortly afterwards Cameron chaired a meeting of the Cobra security committee at which it is understood he and the home secretary, Theresa May, discussed the possible use of plastic bullets, water cannon and other tactics. Following the meeting the Home Office asked the Ministry of Defence to "scope out what low-end" help the armed forces might provide.



Any decision on using plastic bullets will be up to senior police officers. If used, it would be the first time they have been fired at rioters in the UK outside Northern Ireland. It forms part of a wider reversal of tactics by Scotland Yard following criticism of its response so far. Senior police sources told the Guardian on Tuesday that for the first three nights of trouble officers in London were told to stand by, watch and wait rather than actively seek to arrest rioters and looters. But after anger from the public – who witnessed officers seemingly doing little as youths ran unchecked, burning and looting– and Cameron's intervention, those orders were abruptly changed to leave officers free to tackle troublemakers in the act.



-- snip --



In several parts of London local people began the initial clean-up by taking to the streets armed with brooms following appeals on social networking sites. Others were taking matters into their own hands in a different way: Amazon.co.uk's sales charts saw a sudden spike in sales for baseball bats and police-style batons.

Evidently American-style bats are popular in the UK for home defense, and they are selling like mad. This prompted an exchange of comments on the Amazon.Co.UK website, where they sell the Rucanor Aluminium Baseball Bat, between nanny-staters who want to ban the bat and defenders of the traditional right of Free-Born Englishmen to keep and bear sporting equipment.



The thread began with a call for unilateral disarmament:

Patrick Hoelscher says:



call upon amazon.co.uk to ban this item temporarily as it is obviously currently abused as a cheap, quick weapon to be used in the london riots. ban it now!



6000% increase in sales in last 24hours!!!



http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/movers-and-shakers/sports/ref=zg_bs_tab#1





D. Clydesdale says:



but what about those buying it as protection incase rioters attack their home, mindless rioting idiots dont seem like the type to log on to amazon to get a good deal on a baseball bat online.





Dave in Crete says:



Amazon must show some serious maturity by 'delaying' all sales of this item until the riots are long forgotten....

TSB Note: Easy for someone in Crete to say that. Dave is about 1,600 miles away from the rioting.

Dr. J. G. MCCREA says:



Bat hit people good





V. Wevell says:



Even if they are being bought by respectable home and business owners, they should be banned from sale temporarily. Vigilantism is not the answer. Get these items off the shelves, we are all scared and angry in London and need to know that measures are being taken to help us to feel safe in our Cities again.





Z. Johnson says:



Cracking a dude with a bat who's broken into your house trying to steal your stuff is not vigilantism.





arlo says:



"Usually dispatched within 4 to 6 weeks"

Hope Britannia can hold out that long...





Katherine Ross says:



How do we know this is for rioters.. It could be possible the UK has finally realized the superiority of American Baseball over Cricket..





Elmo Smith says:



Us Americans prefer shotguns for riot control, but I admire you Uk-ians for getting up close and personal with your looters.

Watching the coverage of those riots, I'm inclined to take the advise of Dr. J. G. McCrea. Bat hit people real good.

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Summertime

My regular route to work in the morning takes me up South George Mason Drive and then onto Route 50, right past the entrances into National Foreign Affairs Training Center. While getting onto Route 50 this morning, I saw a woman roller skating past the line of cars waiting to turn into NFATC. She was somewhere in her mid-20s, wearing cut-offs and a Tee shirt, and had an employee badge dangling from a lanyard around her neck. I had to drive on before I saw her actually skate into NFATC, but I assume that was where she was going. Where else, with that badge?



Everybody I know complains about their commute to work, and the summer weather, and the lack of parking, but this woman has got it all solved. She's doing alternative commuting, getting aerobic exercise, catching some sun, having casual Friday on Monday, and beating FSI's chronically overfilled parking lots and out-of-control parking enforcement.



She is an inspiration, and I salute her.

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The Voice Of Fiscal Sanity

The day after Standard & Poors downgraded the U.S. government's debt rating, a senior government source has finally given us a stern lecture on fiscal reality.

The American government needs to "cure its addiction to debts" and "learn to live within its means." Damn straight. The USG spends an amount equal to 24 percent of our GNP, but takes in only (only!?) 19 percent.

What's more, it better "address its structural debt problems and ensure the safety" of the dollar if we are to have any hope of economic recovery. I couldn't agree more.

Unfortunately, it was the New China News Agency that delivered that message, but that doesn't make it any less true. I don't normally agree with the ChiComs - indeed, I'll never stop referring to them by that great, semi-offensive, Cold War term "ChiComs" - but when they're right, they're right.

China's own credit rating agency downgraded U.S. sovereign debt instruments two days before S&P did.

I saw this interesting tidbit in the LA Times story about the China's lecture:

In addition to holding about $1.2 trillion in treasuries, an estimated two-thirds of China's $3.2 trillion in foreign exchange reserves is estimated to be in dollars.

So it looks like those wily Chinese have more than one reason to want our government to live within its fiscal means. When they are that dependent on the dollar themselves, we don't just have a creditor, we have a partner.

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Hot Off The Press

Or whatever the term for it is in this digital age. The text of the debt ceiling bill that the House just voted in is here, and its CBO score is here.

The best bottom-line description I've seen tonight is that this is a modest win for conservatives but a major loss for liberals.

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My Summer Tour Of Homes

I took last week off from work to tour a few historic Presidential homes, mainly James Madison's home Montpelier, but also those of Washington, Jefferson, and Jackson. Montpelier is still undergoing historic restoration and archaeological exploration of the building and grounds, but I have to say it's looking like the best instance of historical interpretation of all the American historic sites I've seen.



I immensely enjoy these little road trips. For a week I can wear flip-flops, and everything I need is located in a small duffel bag behind my seat. Fantastic! I'm seriously thinking about getting a VW Passat with a diesel engine - a car that has comfortable seats and can cruise for 800 miles between fill-ups - and doing this all the time after I retire.



One of the many things I enjoy about road trips is that the deeper you go into Beyond The Beltway America the scarcer the Starbucks become, until eventually they can be found only inside a Target or some such retailer, and finally they disappear. But what you lose in Starbucks you gain in Sonic drive-ins, a delightful place that I only see when on vacation in rural areas. I recommend their iced latte with a couple of Sonic Booms (shots of espresso) to counter the sweetness of the whipped cream.



While touring around I strictly avoided the news out of Washington. By which, I mean that I read only USA Today, since every hotel I stayed in slips it under your door in the morning. I don't understand how that curious newspaper acquired its stranglehold on the hotel market. Each morning last week I read the whole thing at breakfast, and yet all I could remember from it afterwards was the national weather map. Those very short stories and colorful news boxes seemed to evaporate as soon as I looked at them.



But I digress. Although I was avoiding the debt crisis news, I still saw it in all the homes I toured.



At the home of James Madison, the Founding Father who imagined and invented the Constitution, I saw this quote from the Federalist Papers on why we need, and should want, partisan conflict between the houses of Congress and between the Legislature and the Executive:

"Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?" - Federalist 51

That's a very Adam Smith-ian insight. In a system of separated government powers, each politician's inherent ambition to gain power for himself serves to check the same inherent tendency in other politicians. So, when you see all the hand wringing about partisan conflict and gridlock, and hear the old oh-why-can't-we-all-just-work-together coming from those in power, know that things are working the way Mr. Madison designed them to work. Because people in power cannot be trusted.



I also saw that Thomas Jefferson would be for a Balanced Budget Amendment.

"I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government to the general principle of the Constitution; I mean an additional article, taking from the federal government their power of borrowing." - Letter to Virginian Senator John Taylor, 1798

George Washington would use public debt as little as possible, mostly for defense expenditures, and wanted it paid off by the same generation that incurred it.

"As a very important source of strength and security, cherish public credit. One method of preserving it is, to use it as sparingly as possible; avoiding occasions of expense by cultivating peace, but remembering also that timely disbursements to prepare for danger frequently prevent much greater disbursements to repel it; avoiding likewise the accumulation of debt, not only by shunning occasions of expense, but by vigorous exertions in time of peace to discharge the debts, which unavoidable wars may have occasioned, not ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burthen, which we ourselves ought to bear." - Farewell Address, 1796

Lastly, Andrew Jackson actually eliminated the public debt. Gone. Zero. The USG operated in the black at the end of his second term. It has not done so since.

"Free from public debt, at peace with all the world, and with no complicated interests to consult in our intercourse with foreign powers, the present may be hailed as the epoch in our history the most favorable for the settlement of those principles in our domestic policy which shall be best calculated to give stability to our Republic and secure the blessings of freedom to our citizens." - Sixth annual message to Congress, December 1, 1834.

God only knows how Jackson would react to the idea of a government having fun, fun, fun until our Daddy takes our T-Bills away.

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A Plague On Both Your Houses

The New York Times had a story from Afghanistan a couple days ago that should make even the most optimist nation-builder give up on the place. It's just too foreign to succumb to our Three Cups of Tea blandishments.

The story is a standard Romeo and Juliet tale, except it happened in Herat rather than Verona, and it has a couple of plot twists that Shakespeare couldn't have imagined.

In Afghanistan, Rage at Young Lovers:

HERAT, Afghanistan — The two teenagers met inside an ice cream factory through darting glances before roll call, murmured hellos as supervisors looked away and, finally, a phone number folded up and tossed discreetly onto the workroom floor.

It was the beginning of an Afghan love story that flouted dominant traditions of arranged marriages and close family scrutiny, a romance between two teenagers of different ethnicities that tested a village’s tolerance for more modern whims of the heart. The results were delivered with brutal speed.

This month, a group of men spotted the couple riding together in a car, yanked them into the road and began to interrogate the boy and girl. Why were they together? What right had they? An angry crowd of 300 surged around them, calling them adulterers and demanding that they be stoned to death or hanged.

When security forces swooped in and rescued the couple, the mob’s anger exploded. They overwhelmed the local police, set fire to cars and stormed a police station six miles from the center of Herat, raising questions about the strength of law in a corner of western Afghanistan and in one of the first cities that has made the formal transition to Afghan-led security.

-- snip --

Ms. Mohammedi’s uncle visited her in jail to say she had shamed the family, and promised that they would kill her once she was released. Her father, an illiterate laborer who works in Iran, sorrowfully concurred. He cried during two visits to the jail, saying almost nothing to his daughter. Blood, he said, was perhaps the only way out.

“What we would ask is that the government should kill both of them,” said the father, Kher Mohammed.

-- snip --

The case has resonated in Herat, in part because it stirred memories of a brutal stoning ordered by the Taliban last summer in northern Afghanistan.

A young couple in Kunduz was stoned to death by scores of people — including family members — after they eloped. The stoning marked a brutal application of Shariah law, captured on a video recording released online months later. Afghan officials promised to investigate after an international outcry, but no one has faced criminal charges.

The NYT makes the point that the legal system in Herat, and officialdom there generally, is treating the star crossed lovers pretty leniently. Even the clergy is not the problem, since "top clerics" have not condemned them. Rather, it's the Capulets and the Montegues themselves - well, the Tajiks and the Hazaras, but you have to dig down to paragraph 21 of 30 before the story reveals the identities of the parties - who want to kill their own children.

Suraya Pakzad [director of Voices of Women Organization, which operates the only women’s shelter in the Herat province] said most of the women and girls in the shelters of western Afghanistan had fled forced or abusive marriages, or had been ostracized from their communities for dating young men without their families’ approval. Male relatives often punish such transgressions with beatings or death.

But in separate interviews at the juvenile jail, Ms. Mohammedi and Mr. Mohammed said they had not worried about such things.

He did not think about the rage that would erupt if a young Tajik man picked up a Hazara girl in a neighborhood dominated by conservative Hazaras, members of one of Afghanistan’s many ethnic minorities. “It’s the heart,” Mr. Mohammed said. “When you love somebody, you don’t ask who she is or what she is. You just go for it.”

-- snip --

They now spend the days at opposite ends of the same juvenile jail, out of each other’s sight. Mr. Mohammed nurses the wounds still visible in his swollen face and blood-laced eyes, and Ms. Mohammedi has been going to classes and learning to tailor clothes.

Both say they want to be together, but there are complications. Family members of the man killed in the riot sent word to Ms. Mohammedi that she bears the blame for his death. But they offered her an out: Marry one of their other sons, and her debt would be paid.

Even assuming that nation-building is possible in a multinational state like Afghanistan, which I don't, it would still not change the deep cultural beliefs and practices that are on display here.

Romeo and Juliet always die in the end, which is the point of the play.

"These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which as they kiss consume." - Romeo and Juliet, 2.3

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