People, a GREAT article by Slavoj Zizek on the refugees. In brief, Zizek argues that the Left should get over many of its ridiculous hangups because they are boring and counterproductive. Examples:
1. Abandon the idiotic idea of “freedom of movement” for refugees.
2. Drop the ridiculous anti-Eurocentrism. What we need is more Eurocentrism, not less.
3. Stop blabbing stupidly about how “the West is to blame for ISIS.”
4. Criticizing Muslim fundamentalists is a noble endeavor. Stop using the bugbear of Islamophobia to shut down any discussion of the evilness of these fundamentalists.
5. If people want to come to Europe, they should be forced, yes, forced, by law if necessary, to accept the European norms and freedoms such as women’s rights and gay rights.
6. Drop the obnoxious S&M dynamic that Westerners so love and that Zizek describes as follows:
The more Western Europe will be open to [the refugees], the more it will be made to feel guilty that it did not accept even more of them. There will never be enough of them. And with those who are here, the more tolerance one displays towards their way of life, the more one will be made guilty for not practicing enough tolerance.
7. Stop treating immigrants as subhuman and hence immune from legal and moral norms being applied to them. This insanity was manifested, for instance, in the Left’s incapacity even to verbalize what happened in Rotherham:
What is not acknowledged is that such anti-racism is in effect a form of covert racism since it condescendingly treats Pakistanis as morally inferior beings who should not be held to normal human standards.
In short: yes, OF COURSE, Western value of women’s rights, sexual freedom, representative democracy and welfare state are vastly superior to anything that exists anywhere in the world. They are not superior in the sense of “Let’s go kill someone to make them happy against their will” but they are superior in the sense of “Can’t respect and uphold our Enlightened values? Proceed to the exit immediately.”
Clarissa's Blog 
Agreed. Syria ranks 4th worst among Arab states when it comes to treatment of women. In Syrian refugee camps girls as young as 12 have been forced to marry. http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/12/us-arab-women-factbox-idUSBRE9AB00I20131112 / Will these attitudes be changed once the refugee population is settled in liberal, pro-feminist nations? I hope so. I wonder.
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Experience shows that these attitudes get more entrenched in immigrants because that’s their way of resisting being overpowered by a foreign culture. Just like Russian – speaking immigrants who become ultra-Putinoid and pro-Soviet even though they might have has very different opinions before emigrating.
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And now I am ready to argue with my gauche-caviar colleagues who unamimously rejected Zizek’s views on the refugees. Really a great article indeed.
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Gauche-caviar. :-))))) This is the best.
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You have never heard that expression? Or les bobos (bourgeois bohèmes)? En Chile se usa el término RED-SET, que a mí me parece igual de genial.
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Never heard either bobos or red-set, but these are great expressions. Thank you for enriching my vocabulary with them!
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My favorite is still a friend’s description of Latin American leftist intellectuals: Marxists who beat their maids. “I’m working to free you from structural oppression (whack!) Now mop that floor again and do it right!”
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Also “psico-bolche”
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I’d add:
Stop making the argument that you had some nice muslims friends once and so therefore these people arriving now will be just as nice.
Seriously, you have no idea people put forward this silly argument.
But guess what, I’ve had and have muslim friends and co-workers who are mostly wonderful people. They’re also highly educated and even those that describe themselves as believers are very secular oriented and don’t mind my pork gobbling alcohol guzzling ways and don’t freak out at the idea of a man and woman working alone in an office together.
They also despair of the backwardness in their cultures (and are very frank about criticizing it even while pointing out the parts they like).
But there’s no indication that the majority of muslims who make their way to Europe fit this profile at all.
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Accepting people’s badic humanity means acknowledging that they can be horrible, wonderful, and every shade in between. “All refugees are evil” is exactly the same as “all refugees are meek, child – like victims.” There is no real difference between these positions.
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Exactly. It also means accepting they might be wonderful in some area and not so nice in another. People are complicated.
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I’m sure you noticed how the narrative of the refugees is often reduced to “widows and orphans”, even though it is obvious that the majority of the refugees are not women or children. What lies at the basis of this creative editing of the story is fear. These refugees men are so scary that they are neatly edited out of the narrative. It’s the same as saying, “If I close my eyes, it will be as if the scare creature never existed.”
This is why I laugh at the attempts to sell this sort of editing as compassionate or tolerant. Either be compassionate to the real refugees, that is, young men, or drop the weird efforts to feminize and infantilize them by turning them into “widows and orphans.”
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Holding Islamic laws in abeyance until the magical declaration of a True Caliphate does not mean this gives you the right to behave horribly in the meantime — it certainly didn’t give Jihadi John the Drunken Dead Terrorist the right to behave in the ways he behaved.
[… and I’m waiting on Jeff Dunham to turn Achmed into a Drunken Dead Terrorist during his next tour, BTW] 🙂
I am thankful for the Muslim-operated restaurants near me because I am deathly allergic to seafood and shellfish, to the point that I have had to be rushed to A&E in the past, and that I don’t have to deal with these things when there’s a strict interpretation of Sura 5 (al-Ma’idah).
I wish I had something more encouraging to offer here than mentions of positive “restaurant diversity”, but today I don’t apparently …
[besides, I have a museum to visit today, and NO, I am not going there to buy it …] 🙂
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Avast Antivirus has blocked access to this page.
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My page or the linked page?
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