Spoiled Children

Dilpazier Aslam is an intern at The Guardian, one of the leading newspapers in London. The Guardian unapologetically liberal, as is, I assume, Mr. Aslam.

Mr. Aslam is a Muslim, born and bred in Yorkshire. He damns, faintly, the bombings by other Yorkshire-born Muslim lads in London. He then says, "Second- and third-generation Muslims are without the don't-rock-the-boat attitude that restricted our forefathers."

In other words, his parents were working hard to make a better life for him and his mates in England, and didn't have time to blow up the Underground.

Thomas Sowell, an economist at the Hoover Institute at Stanford, wrote an article (link: http://www.townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/ts20041105.shtml) pointing out that most radical leftists come from affluent families. Many of these children have never had to work for a living, so they have plenty of time on their hands to create "social theories." They also have the means to support efforts to implement these theories, either through violence, politics, or the educational system. Osama bin Laden is a case in point: he comes from an affluent family and was educated in the West. He wasn't getting up every morning and going to a job, trying to raise a family.

Was that the case with the Yorkshire Muslims? Apparently, they had time to go to the mosque and hang out at a youth center, though one of them seemed a little old for that. Their parents had the money to send them to Pakistan to study. And they repay their parents' hard work by blowing themselves up, along with several trains and a bus.

Those who immigrate, especially those who immigrate to a country whose language and customs are totally foreign, do so for many reasons: economic, education, religious and personal freedom. Most parents want their children to have a better life than they had themselves and work hard to establish economic security. Sometimes it's easier to give their children money rather than time. Sometimes, as a parent, what you think is obvious isn't obvious to your children. They don't always see the relationship between freedom and the ability to rise economically. Mr. Aslam doesn't seem to appreciate the fact that, were he in Pakistan or Iran, his freedom to write his opinion would be quite circumscribed. Intellectuals, often the fomenters of revolution, are also often the first victims: France during its revolution, China, Vietnam, the Middle East.

A dose of real life seems to be the answer for Mr. Aslam and his fellow Muslim sympathizers.

(H/T: Michelle Malkin. Link: http://michellemalkin.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2457)

UPDATE I: This was posted on View From The Right:

British Muslims’ anger at Britain

According to a must-read article in the New York Times, many British-born Muslims have a burning hostility against Britain, as shown by their expressed “understanding” of the anger that drove the London suicide bombers. To describe this as assimilation in reverse would be an understatement. Yet it was all completely predictable. The people of the immigrant generation know themselves to be immigrants, not British, and so are not concerned about the question of identity, and in any case are too busy working and making a living in their new country to spend too much time thinking about it. Their children are born and raised in Britain, yet realize that they are not really British but Muslim. In painfully looking for an identity in this land where they were born but don’t belong, they recoil back to Islam and adhere to it more strongly than their parents ever did, even calling for the re-imposition of the Caliphate which will rule the whole world including Britain. Naturally, when any particular difference arises between Britain and Islam, such as the war with Al Qaeda, it only feeds their sense of grievance against their native land.

The only way to have avoided this hideous problem of British Muslims who hate Britain would have been not to admit Muslims into Britain in the first place. The only way to solve the problem now is to return the Muslims from Britain back to their ancestral lands, where the ordeal of identity—and the extremism that often results from that ordeal—will not afflict them.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 12:31 PM (Link: http://www.amnation.com/vfr/)