The standard liberal way of discussing immigration in Britain is to misrepresent the arguments of those who counsel caution and control, and then triumphantly to denounce the disingenuous caricature of their own devising as bigoted or racist, writes Kevin Myers.
I am therefore intensely grateful to Ronaldo Munck of Dublin City University for providing me with a little jewel of intellectually grubby misrepresentation of a column I wrote a couple of months ago. He replied in this newspaper as follows:
"Kevin Myers writes that: 'The present good relations and general harmony are typical of the early days of immigration', but he sees this as only a 'honeymoon period'. Diversity policies lead to fundamentalism: 'Jews are attacked in the streets of Antwerp by Islamic militants expressing their own form of diversity". Ahead of us lies the spectre of Rotterdam that 'will shortly be the first European city with a racially and culturally non-indigenous majority'. Diversity for him leads to murder and national identity surrender.
"This is reactionary nonsense, but it also reflects the confusion in Ireland today over migration and multiculturalism."
Well, thank you Ronaldo for that intellectual guano, culminating in that classic piece of undergraduate name-calling, the r-word. God, I remember doing that in UCD: categorising an entire argument as "reactionary", and dismissing it as nonsense; and then exiting with a supercilious smirk on my odiously smug little face. To judge from your powers of logic and ratiocination, you are probably in first year Ronaldo; but with time and patience, there might be hope for you yet.
As a matter of interest - though clearly not to you, Ronaldo - I simply didn't say that diversity leads to murder and national identity surrender. I didn't say it because I don't believe it. Nor did I say that diversity policies lead to fundamentalism; indeed, I didn't use the word fundamentalism once in the entire column. Not once. It looks like DCU have got an uphill struggle with you on their hands, young Ronaldo.
But after welcoming immigrants, as I continue to do, what I said last May was - and I say it even more emphatically now, with two score and ten dead bodies in London - that we were in the honeymoon period for immigration in Ireland, and that we had better face reality, because immigrants are here to stay. I wrote then:
"So, we might get some marriage guidance counselling in, nice and early; and the first thing the counsellors - let's make them Dutch - will probably tell you is that you do not emphasise diversity. You do not put up signs in many languages in schools, thereby giving parity of esteem to foreign cultures, foreign norms. Instead, you emphasise and celebrate commonality, within a native culture of tolerance.
"But let's make it clear: our tolerance has limits. . ."
Well, we learned what those limits were on July 7th. Indeed, we could have learnt them long ago, but here in Ireland, with the lessons of virtually every other country in Europe to benefit from, we have chosen triumphantly to embrace the witless mumbo-jumbo of unprincipled, doctrinaire multiculturalism. We are apparently not content for the Dutch and the French and the Spanish and the British to have their own home-grown Islamic jihadists; we've got to have some too. So we'll State-fund some madrassahs, and then studiously ignore what is being taught in them, and who knows, if we're really lucky, in 10 or 15 years' time, we'll have our own home-made martyrs blowing up the Luas and the Dart.
The column that triggered the Munckological essay in witless piety was itself in response to the new multicultural State guidelines for our primary schools. These even include formal proposals for multilingual signs in schools. In explanation, Mary Hanafin said that Auschwitz must never happen again. Well, of course, if we don't have signs for toilet in Arabic and Kurdish, the gas chambers are just round the corner. Ah yes, that one.
Remember, we were told that if we didn't all accept the EU Constitution, the next step would be Auschwitz. The same is probably true if Dingle is allowed to remain Dingle.
Aside from the sheer immorality and intellectual sloppiness of deploying the death camps to stifle discussion on anything, who is the more likely to have an interest in reviving an Auschwitz? Europe's hand-wringing multiculturalists, or Jew-hating Islamo-fascists?
Or put it another way: Would the train-bombers of London not have resorted to an Auschwitz if they could, with the rather idiosyncratic Islamic refinement that this time the guards get into the gas chambers as well? And in Britain they're asking some pretty agonised questions today. How did they allow immigration policies which have resulted in one third of 1.6 million British Muslims - that is, half a million - thinking that the very society they live in is immoral and should be brought to an end? Or that a similar number would not report potential terrorist activity to the police? Or that one quarter of them sympathise with the motives of the London bombers?
Answer: in large part through an ignoble and doctrinaire multiculturalism, as represented most classically by our spotty young undergraduate friend, Ronaldo Munck, first year, Surrender Studies, DCU. So, the next question is - provided we are interested in learning from other people's experiences, and there's absolutely no evidence that we are - how can we prevent the same phenomenon sooner or later occurring here? By compulsory educational assimilation of all immigrants, as has been so successfully achieved in the US? Or by having helpful little signs in Arabic in our schools: suicide-bombing classes this way?