One of the more disturbing developments in recent years has been the concretization of an alliance between the multiculturalist left and reactionary Islam that has existed in one form or another for decades. Perhaps the ground zero of this phenomenon is the snowbound state of Minnesota.
So it should come as no surprise that local administrators of a cherished Great Society program, Head Start, in that state recently decided to impose a unilateral ban upon Santa Claus. This decision has, not surprisingly, led to a backlash against the politically correct bureaucrats who reversed years of local tradition and, perhaps somewhat shockingly, an equally vehement denunciation of that decision by the Moslem Somali community, which has, predictably, experienced blowback from the departure of St. Nick.
Although the propensity of Somali-Americans to turn their backs on their adopted country and inability to assimilate has been well-documented, I find myself compelled to take the side of the people whose immigration to this country I would have more than likely opposed. The denial of Santa Claus seems to have been a misguided attempt by the multicultural bureaucrats who run this local Head Start program to ingratiate themselves with a benighted community of exotic foreigners who occupy the top rung of adulation in the hierarchy of liberal empathy.
The problem is that encouraging the large scale immigration of a religious minority that sees its faith as inherently superior to those of its neighbors, while simultaneously maintaining a post-Western, multicultural society that eschews the “melting pot” and cultural assimilation, leads to inevitable conflict. The Somali immigrants who are returning to their homeland to fight under the banner of al-Shabaab-an Al Qaeda affiliate seeking to oust the Western-backed transitional government in Somalia-and the furor surrounding what would have been an innocuous Christmas visit by Santa Claus even a decade ago, are merely two manifestations of a much deeper, more troubling problem.
There is a clash of civilizations that is taking place in America’s heartland, and no amount of Midwestern politeness or attempts to ignore the obvious will change that fact. We can either discard generations of multicultural thinking and attempt to integrate these Somalis into the fabric of American life, or we can start to impose reasonable limitations on the amount of intake from a country whose values are worlds apart from those of ordinary Americans. Either way, this problem needs to be addressed before it’s too late. Otherwise, we will have even more disturbing Christmases to look forward to in the future.
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