AREN’T OBESITY AND DRUG ABUSE ENOUGH, WHY DO WE ALSO NEED RELIGIOUS WARS?
My main reaction to the recent attack on Salman Rushdie was similar to that of a suburban housewife peeping out of her kitchen window to horrifically discover black delinquents graffitiing her street. “What on earth are they doing here?”
You see, Rushdie is a Muslim or an ex-Muslim from India. His family is Sunni, which is one of the main two denominations of the Muslim world. Back in the day, he published a novel titled The Satanic Verses which has pissed off all Muslims ever since, but especially Muslims of the Shia confession, the other Muslim denomination.
So the leaders of Iran, which is a Shia theocracy, issued something called a fatwa against him. A kind of Muslim religious command promising money and eternal glory in the afterlife to him who manages to take Rushdie’s life.
Rushdie has been around. He is an Indian national, a British subject, and as of 2016 also an American citizen. And so in America of all places, in bucolic upstate New York, the Iranian fatwa has finally reached him – somebody named Hadi Matar has made an attempt on his life.
Rushdie, thankfully, is due to make a recovery. But his injury symbolizes a deeper injury that may not be recoverable – the injury against America’s traditional demography.
Why, by Hades, does our Anglo-Western nation import the alien conflicts of the Middle East and the Deep Congo? Why do the rivers of Pakistan and Eritrea flow into the Mississippi?
Rushdie’s case is hardly isolated.
Hispanic gangs, clearly not of Mayflower origins, such as MS-13 and the Latin Kings, terrorize neighborhoods and re-enact whichever tribal conflicts they bring with them from the goat-herding ravines of Sinaloa and the bug-infested jungles of Honduras.
All sorts of Arabs and Muslims, recent arrivals, riot, burn things and stab people whenever they are displeased with the remote actions of the State of Israel. For instance, here (“Faisal”) and here (“Shaukat”).
We now have honor killings and female genital mutilation (more than 500,000 American girls have experienced it or are at risk of experiencing it).
And there are many more such cases. Normally they involve very little media coverage – who cares really about the inner workings of the Haitian or the Eritrean community?
So the question again is why exactly are those people here? Am I missing a sort of immense and magical contribution that necessitates the importation of Palestinians and Somalis into the idyllic landscapes of New England and Minnesota? Do we not have enough internal conflicts of our own that we need to import every tam-tam-echoing conflict from the Dark depths of Burkina Faso?
Can we limit ourselves to OUR sort of crimes of drug abuse and mass murder without also importing female genital mutilation and honor killings?
The suburban mother, be she an upstanding citizen or a pill-addicted train-wreck, has moved to suburbia to AVOID graffiti and rudeness. Like her, we all live in the West hoping to avoid the shrieking howls of sectarian violence from earth’s God-forsaken corners. By living in what used to be the world’s best gated community, our intent is to fence ourselves off from Shia fanatics and their ilk from the moon-cursed deserts of the world.
And so I wish Rushdie nothing but the best and really have nothing against him. And maybe as the ex-husband of an American or even as a humanitarian case (ironically, since he was attacked here) he falls under the category of sensible immigration. But in general, and beyond the occasional Einstein, let’s keep the Rushdies and Hadis of the world in Rushdieland. Or Hadiland. But not in Connecticut.
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