Telling the truth about multiculturalism

The British home secretary is a Braverman than you or me.

AP reported, “Britain’s immigration minister argued Tuesday that international refugee rules must be rewritten to reduce the number of people entitled to protection, as the Conservative government seeks international support for its tough stance on unauthorized migration.”

By unauthorized immigration, AP meant lawbreaking invaders. And by tough stance, AP meant enforcing the law. And by minister, AP meant Suella Braverman, the home secretary. She spoke at the American Enterprise Institute in DC and called for pushing back on multiculturalism.

AP ignored that and went with her call to rein in people who seek asylum because Britain has too many asylum seekers.

She said, “Let me be clear, there are vast swathes of the world where it is extremely difficult to be gay, or to be a woman. Where individuals are being persecuted, it is right that we offer sanctuary.

“But we will not be able to sustain an asylum system if in effect, simply being gay, or a woman, and fearful of discrimination in your country of origin, is sufficient to qualify for protection.”

Braverman makes sense and the UN’s rules do not. Britain should just ignore the UN.

She is a conservative. AP called her a figurehead. Imagine them doing that to Hillary when she was secretary of state.

The wire service also said, “Britain’s government has adopted an increasingly punitive approach to people who arrive by unauthorized means such as small boats across the English Channel. More than 45,000 people arrived in Britain by boat from northern France in 2022, up from 28,000 in 2021 and 8,500 in 2020.”

You know who else arrived by small boats 957 years ago? William the Conqueror. He invaded England for the same reason these guys enter the nation: to take over. The difference is the English fought him.

Reaction to Braverman’s remarks was as one would expect. Wattles quivered.

The Guardian reported, “The UN’s refugee agency has rebuked Suella Braverman after she claimed that world leaders had failed to make wholesale reform of human rights laws because of fears of being branded racist or illiberal.

“The UNHCR issued a highly unusual statement on Tuesday defending the 1951 refugee convention and highlighting the UK’s record asylum claim backlog.

“It came after the home secretary refused to rule out leaving the convention and said the international community had ‘collectively failed’ to modernize international laws.

“She also claimed that women and gay people must face more than discrimination if they are to qualify as a refugee — a statement that has been challenged by refugee charities.”

Of course the refugee industry objects. Braverman is threatening their livelihoods. If gay people and women have to obey immigration laws instead of being automatically entitled to asylum status, there will be fewer refugees.

While the press and the open borders profiteers focused on those poor LGBT souls, Braverman’s real target was multiculturalism. The left keeps preaching that diversity is our strength. They are 100% wrong. United we stand, divided we fall.

Multiculturalism is a poison because it turns people against one another. The recent cavalier talk of a civil war is the aim of those promoting this daft idea of multiculturalism.

Braverman said, “Uncontrolled immigration, inadequate integration and a misguided dogma of multiculturalism have proven a toxic combination for Europe over the last few decades.

“Multiculturalism makes no demands of the incomer to integrate. It has failed because it allowed people to come to our society and live parallel lives in it. They could be in the society but not of the society.

“And, in extreme cases, they could pursue lives aimed at undermining the stability and threatening the security of society.”

Now then, I suppose this would be a good place to mention just who Braverman is. Her parents emigrated to England from India, a Hindu nation. She is a Buddhist. Her husband is Jewish. She lives in a Christian country.

But she shares and promotes British values, which is what matters. She and her family assimilated. Her parents traveled nearly halfway across the world to become British — and not to turn Britain into India.

The asylum seekers don’t want to assimilate. They want the benefits of being in Britain without being British. They want to continue their old ways — you know, the ways that made them want to leave their homelands.

A year ago, New York Times food writer Ligaya Mishan set down to scold whites for being multicultural. It is OK for every other race to enjoy white inventions such as trains, planes and automobiles, but white people must know their place.

She wrote of the ’60s hit The Lion Sleeps Tonight by the Tokens. It is the English version of a South African Mbube, a song written and recorded by Solomon Linda in 1939.

Well, there’s your multiculturalism, right?

Wrong. When white people do it, that is cultural appropriation. And being an NYT writer, Mishan wants something harsher. She wrote, “Cultural appropriation is one of the most misunderstood and abused phrases of our tortured age. Such a slippery verb, ‘appropriate,’ from the Latin ad propriare, ‘to make one’s own.’ It doesn’t carry the forthrightly criminal aura of ‘steal.’”

She lives in a city where thieves so routinely loot stores that ice cream is under lock-and-key. Cops don’t stop them and the New York Times acts as if the theft is OK. But a white person covering a song that a black person recoded is criminal in la-la-la liberal land.

Her lecture unwittingly exposed today’s multiculturalism for the evil it is. The purpose is not to bring people together but to weaken society by turning people into little tribes of entitled victims.

Mishan wrote, “Some argue that cultural appropriation is good — that it’s just another name for borrowing or taking inspiration from other cultures, which has happened throughout history and without which civilization would wither and die.

“But cultural appropriation is not the freewheeling cross-pollination that for millenniums has made the world a more interesting place (and which, it’s worth remembering, was often a byproduct of conquest and violence). It is not a lateral exchange between groups of equal status in which both sides emerge better off. Notably, champions of cultural appropriation tend to point triumphantly to hip-hop sampling as an exemplar — never mentioning the white bands and performers who in the ’50s and ’60s made it big by co-opting rhythm and blues, while black musicians still lived under segregation and, not unlike Solomon Linda, received dramatically less recognition and income than their white counterparts and sometimes had to give up credit and revenue just to get their music heard.”

History shows conquest and violence traditionally are how we spread culture. Much of it is good. For example, Europeans spread the invention of the wheel and written language to the primitives of continent after continent in the Age of Sailing.

The left’s demand for its version of authenticity is rejected time and again. Audiences loved Natalie Wood as Maria, the Puerto Rican heroine in the first West Side Story movie. It box office was 7 times its production costs.

60 years later, audiences hated the Hispanic Rachel Zegler as Maria and the box office for the remake of the film failed to cover its production costs.

Maybe it is her. Audiences also didn’t like her in Shazam! Fury of the Gods, which bombed at the box office and people already dislike her in a yet-to-be-released remake of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which was completed last year and Disney has yet to release.

Mishan rolled out the lefty myth that black people got ripped off by whites and really invented rock ’n’ roll. The myth falsely accuses Elvis of culturally appropriating Big Mama Thornton’s hit Hound Dog. The two versions are different. She recorded hers first.

But the song was written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who produced Thornton’s recording. They were two Jewish teens who produced one of the biggest selling R&B records of its time. That was a good thing.

But that was back in the days when we wanted to unite, when we wanted racial equality, and when we wanted a song that had a good beat that you can dance to.

Now we open our borders to people who reject all that. They just want our land and our money.

A reader said in an email, “Braverman says what most know but will not admit. Multiculturalism is in most parts a failure.”

I replied, “Multiculturalism isn’t a failure. It is doing what it was designed to do —divide us.”