Malaysia, A Warning to the West

Multiculturalism is about to tear Malaysian society. The government set up a separate justice system for the Muslim citizens that would administer Sharia law. The civil courts were to work alongside the Sharia courts, but a provision was made in 1988 that made the Sharia court independent of civil law. The results have been an intrusion on non Muslims by the Sharia court coupled with increasingly extreme laws being instituted.

Islam tops Malaysia's long list of "sensitive subjects" that are forbidden from being raised in public. However, it was as if nothing else could be discussed over the past two weeks.

Two dissimilar events coming one after the other in late December have put religion on notice. One was passage of an Islamic family law, opposed by feminists and moderate Muslims. The other was the forced burial, according to Muslim rites, of a Hindu soldier by Islamic authorities who insisted he had converted to Islam.

Since the 1980s, they say, women's position vis-a-vis Muslim men has gradually eroded. The latest is a new Islamic family law that makes divorce and polygamy easy and allows husbands to lay claim to a wife's property, even to the extent of freezing bank accounts of former spouses and their children.

Likewise the forced burial of M Moorthy, a Hindu soldier claimed by the Islamic authorities to have converted to Islam, has sparked a storm among non-Muslims and moderate Muslims alike. They are demanding that the government amend the constitution to make civil law supreme over Sharia law especially in matters where non-Muslims are involved.

Islam, once a taboo subject, is now openly debated by mainstream media, on television and over the Internet

"Unless the deep-seated issues of racism and religious freedom are openly discussed and resolved, Malaysians would continue to live in fear and suspicious of one another," said S Arulchelvam, secretary general of the Socialist Party of Malaysia. "Malaysian unity is a farce unless these issues are met head-on and adequately resolved.

"All discriminatory policies based on race and religion must be outlawed. It is impossible to build unity based merely on slogans and propaganda."

A nightly protest is assembling outside the courts in Malaysia to support the widow of M Moorthy.

Malaysia has tried to placate the Islamists only to find themselves on the defensive against a effort to bring the whole country under the sway of fundamentalist Islam. Tiptoeing around the obvious has bought them only more trouble. It is a warning to Europe and North America to stop the post modern multiculturalist movement and take control of their societies.

Just last September Ontario, Canada declined to institute a Sharia court. They wisely chose to have all citizens ruled by the same law. The fact that there was a consideration at all is disturbing.

The problem with multiculturalism is that it equates all aspects of different cultures with a moral equivalence to western culture. It replaces the melting pot with racial identity. Rather than assimilating the best of each into one dynamic society {E Pluribus Unum) it seeks to produce a rainbow of diversity. The resulting balkanization leaves whole communities cocooned from each other thus stifling opportunity and growth. Addressing this problem by instituting governmental agencies and special courts just exasperates the divisions.

The west's unwillingness to champion its own culture has fostered a movement toward multiculturalism, political correctness and moral relativism. The debate over illegal immigration is just a symptom of the much larger problem. What should be a no brainer has become a divisive issue. A society unwilling to protect its sovereignty is open to the looting of its wealth by its neighbors. An aggressive Islamist movement has revealed the inherent weakness of multicultural society to handle such emergencies.

The most bizarre aspect to this false tolerance is the hostility toward the origins of western culture. People who champion traditional values are demonized. The west hasn't become prosperous by accident or luck. It is precisely those virtues of our past traditions that has brought us this far. Instead of apologizing for it we should be demonstrating their power.

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