While the world speculates about what the Middle East will evolve into during this brave new post-Twelve-Day-War era, let’s turn our attention to another battlefront that is, believe it or not, even bigger and more destructive, and needs to be urgently addressed.
This insidious phenomenon has brought as much misery and imposed as much economic and social hardship as all the wars in the Middle East during our lifetime combined.
In his Truth Social post declaring that a “CEASEFIRE” had been reached between Israel and Iran yesterday, Donald Trump himself threw in a subtle and significant contribution towards a peaceful resolution on this other larger front.
Here’s what he said: “God bless Israel, God bless Iran, God bless the Middle East, God bless the United States of America, and GOD BLESS THE WORLD!”
God bless Iran? The mullahs had declined Trump’s invitation to negotiate with Israel, so he bombed their precious nuclear facilities and exposed their flaccid impotence to everyone in Iran and around the world. Far lesser Trump adversaries have had their humiliating defeat subsequently mocked in social media posts in the past. (In fact, today he called the relatively harmless Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “one of the dumbest people in Congress” and advised her to take a cognitive test, for having said he should be impeached.)
So why not the mullahs? Trump restrained himself from cracking the usual gags to instead make a more noble and productive point: let’s agree to disagree, because all nations are different; they have their own cultures, flaws, qualities and potential. And God should bless them all.
By listing Iran alongside Israel and the United States, Trump was implying, as all good Christians do, that an Iranian’s life is equal to an American’s. Just because they have different cultures doesn’t necessarily make one better than the other, or that peaceful relations can’t be established.
Well, hallelujah to that.
If this idea catches on, then we might soon also agree to end or at least severely reduce the phenomenon to which I referred earlier, which is causing so much damage around the world: immigration.
This phenomenon has always been an unavoidable part of life on Earth, but has become more toxic and widespread than ever in the 21st century. For a start, it mostly goes only one way, from economic basketcases to comfortably advanced economies. This wouldn’t be such a problem if the migrants abandoned the dysfunctional culture they left behind. But most of them don’t, and everyone suffers incalculably and interminably as a result. Migrants form ghettos in a foreign land, thereby alienating themselves; and the host country is diminished economically and socially as a result. We now know that nothing good comes from this.
Australia’s political elite, like their counterparts everywhere, keep reminding us that “diversity is our strength” but the evidence proves otherwise. I’m not only referring to African thugs running around stabbing each other with machetes, Muslims raping white girls (although thankfully not yet on the industrial scale that they do in Britain), mobs chanting genocidal slogans on the steps of the Sydney Opera House, or Chinese-Australians excluding whites from a town hall meeting in Melbourne involving the nation’s Foreign Minister. I’m also referring to the more subtle experiences that occur every day: not being able to talk to an Uber driver because he’s muttering quietly in Hindi to someone else on the phone instead; failing to understand a public announcement at an airport because the speaker’s accent is too thick; and the disconcerting feeling of being outnumbered by ethnic “minorities” on most days in the Sydney CBD.
For decades we’ve been told that such despondency is felt only by bigots, whose xenophobia would be dispelled if they simply forwent a meat pie for a lamb kebab or chicken samosa occasionally.
But Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone (2000), says it’s not that easy. The greater the ethnic diversity, the lower the levels of mutual trust and social engagement. He calls it “hunkering down”.
I can explain it another way: don’t expect the bloke behind the counter at the 7-11 to laugh and nod agreeably when you tell him that the Wagon Wheels he’s selling were once twice the size and half the price. All you will get is a blank stare and a sad feeling that something fundamental has changed in this country since you were a kid. Call me racist if you must, but I’d rather live in a society where collective memories and experiences make spontaneous banter with strangers a normal part of daily life.
To make matters worse, anti-hate-speech laws have criminalised criticism of ethnic groups, effectively preventing us from debating what sort of country we want to live in. Multiculturalism is the new religion, and will tolerate no dissent. Well, if that’s illegal, come and get me, Thought Police. I once would have died defending this country, but that was before our own self-appointed multicultural mullahs started ruining the place from within. Now, I’d happily be locked up for saying things would be better if we dialled back the diversity a notch.
By saying “God bless Iran”, Trump was essentially agreeing with the thousands of people who marched in western cities around the world on the weekend waving Iranian flags and declaring their loyalty to its theocratic dictators. How these people tolerate living in a Christian democracy is beyond me. We would be doing them an enormous favour by flying them back to the country to which they are so attached. No hard feelings and all that, me old China, but it’s best for both of us.
The idea that we must care for every migrant, legal or otherwise, who seeks refuge on our shores is a deliberate distortion of the Good Samaritan fable. In fact, Catholic theology is clear about the balance that needs to be struck between charity and preservation of one’s own culture.
“The Church has always recognised that a special attachment to one’s nation and its culture is by no means an irrational prejudice,” Catholic academic Edward Feser says in All One In Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory (2022). He quotes from the Catechism that migrants have a duty to assimilate: “Immigrants are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them”. And adds that the host nation is obliged to welcome foreigners only “to the extent they are able”. I’m no immigration minister, but I think we might have reached that point some years ago.
The Catholic strategy of balancing charity with national security makes sense to most people. But it is anathema to globalists. The preoccupation with maximising migration into western democracies suits the globalist objective of emasculating the west culturally and economically, and ushering in a single international government.
This is being enabled in part by what the late Roger Scruton called oikophobia, a pathological rejection of one’s own culture and uncritical embrace of foreign ones, which is commonly held by academics and other elites.
I’d happily put them on a one-way flight to Iran too, just quietly.
