Western weakness; nature abhors a vacuum

The Brussels Journal has a couple of articles about Belgian churches harboring illegal immigrants. Most of the illegal immigrants are Muslim. A few excerpts:

...Most of the immigrant squatters in the churches are Muslims. They display banners in the church showing the name of Allah (picture taken in the church of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, Brussels).

The Belgian Bishops are so ignorant that they do not see what is going on: their churches are being turned into mosques before their very eyes.

The Muslim squatters hold Islamic prayer services in the church. The altar has been moved and the statue of Our Lady covered by a cloth to hide her from the eyes of the Muslim believers.

The squatters are living in the churches. "Church occupations" by illegal immigrants have been going on for a number of years in Belgium. They are not really "occupations" because the Bishops condone the actions and actively support them. Chris Gillibrand visited a number of Brussels churches to take these pictures...

You can can read more, and see more photos and links too, from the source article here:

Allah Takes Over Church

I see some similarities with our own immigration situation, and the granting of amnesty. Something I also found shocking, was the way Belgian Catholics themselves are being treated by their own Bishops:

...However, many Belgians, including many Catholics, do not agree with the “church occupations.” Belgium has one of the most hospitable policies towards immigrants in Europe. Illegal immigrants are hardly ever expelled. Six years ago the government issued a collective amnesty for illegal immigrants, granting everyone who could prove they had lived in the country for five years the right to “regularise” their status and stay. Over 50,000 did so. The 2000 regularisation was a response to a previous series of church occupations, which had shocked many conservative Catholics, such as Father Herwig Arts, an Antwerp Jesuit and well-known author. “Black families entered our chapel and turned it into a dormitory,” Father Arts complained to the press (Gazet van Antwerpen, 21 November 1998). Father Arts saw men and women sharing beds and cooking in Antwerp’s Jesuit chapel. “They removed the tabernacle, installed a television set and radios, depriving us of the opportunity to pray in our own chapel and say Mass. [...]. It has upset me very much. For me the place has been desecrated,” he said. “I feel I cannot enter it anymore.” At the time Father Arts was severely criticised for his comments. Today he remains silent, as do all Catholic priests, given that the Bishops support the church occupations by the illegal immigrants...

...For Catholic believers the situation is all the more painful as the same Bishops have never bothered to take any action to change, let alone, protest Belgium’s legislation regarding abortion, euthanasia, gay marriage and gay adoption. On the contrary, when a Catholic organisation asked for permission to organize a Mass against the impending euthanasia legislation in Brussels Cathedral on 2 March 2002, the use of the Cathedral was prohibited by Cardinal Danneels because it was feared that (Catholic) politicians of the anti-immigration Vlaams Belang party would attend.

(bold emphasis mine). The reference to the Amnesty echos our own situation here in the US. Note how the Belgian amnesty did nothing to solve the problem of church occupations as it was meant to; it perhaps has even increased the problem. Why immigrate leagally when you can just occupy a church instead, until you are given amnesty? You can read more from the source article here:

Belgian Church Organizes Illegal Immigrants



I'm seeing a common thread in western countries; and inability or unwillingness to enforce their own laws. If we do not respect our own laws, we can hardly expect anyone else to respect them, either. If we don't value and respect our own culture, politics and religious background, neither will anyone else.

For all the talk about Muslims and radical Islam, they are only one part of the equation. Islam has been the same for hundreds of years; it hasn't suddenly become agressive. If the Muslims seem more aggressive to us, it's because we have become flabby and weak. They see the west as a bunch of decadent libertines who drink and take drugs, abort our own children, and abandon our own religion; people who are lost in materialism and sensuality, with no will to fight. To the extent that they are right, is the extent they see weakness. Socialist countries with declining populations seem the weakest of all.

I've done a lot of posts about conservative verses liberal politics; many of the posts have been about Islam and Muslim related matters too. I have noticed a common theme that runs through them all; western weakness. I don't necessarily mean a military weakness, but a social-cultural one. A lack of will to fight the war on terror, a lack of will to secure our borders, a lack of will to enforce our own laws, to support our own culture. Nature abhors a vacuum; if we fail to support our culture and values, others will surely rush in to replace them.

Tammy Bruce recently did a post recently called White Guilt and Being Delicate with the Enemy, where she maintains our ability to fight and win the War On Terror is being severely hampered by politically correct multiculturalism and liberal self-loathing of our own culture and values.

Tammy references an article in the Opinion Journal by Shelby Steele called White Guilt and the Western Past: Why is America so delicate with the enemy?, which talks about the white guilt of the west and it's resulting influence of restraint and minimalism on our ability to fight and win a war, or even deal effectively with ANY of our most urgent problems. Some excerpts:

...Anti-Americanism, whether in Europe or on the American left, works by the mechanism of white guilt. It stigmatizes America with all the imperialistic and racist ugliness of the white Western past so that America becomes a kind of straw man, a construct of Western sin. (The Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons were the focus of such stigmatization campaigns.) Once the stigma is in place, one need only be anti-American in order to be "good," in order to have an automatic moral legitimacy and power in relation to America. (People as seemingly disparate as President Jacques Chirac and the Rev. Al Sharpton are devoted pursuers of the moral high ground to be had in anti-Americanism.) This formula is the most dependable source of power for today's international left. Virtue and power by mere anti-Americanism. And it is all the more appealing since, unlike real virtues, it requires no sacrifice or effort--only outrage at every slight echo of the imperialist past.

Today words like "power" and "victory" are so stigmatized with Western sin that, in many quarters, it is politically incorrect even to utter them. For the West, "might" can never be right. And victory, when won by the West against a Third World enemy, is always oppression. But, in reality, military victory is also the victory of one idea and the defeat of another. Only American victory in Iraq defeats the idea of Islamic extremism. But in today's atmosphere of Western contrition, it is impolitic to say so....

This stigmatization by the political left is weakening the western cultures in many areas of public life:

...Whether the problem is race relations, education, immigration or war, white guilt imposes so much minimalism and restraint that our worst problems tend to linger and deepen. Our leaders work within a double bind. If they do what is truly necessary to solve a problem--win a war, fix immigration--they lose legitimacy.

To maintain their legitimacy, they practice the minimalism that makes problems linger. What but minimalism is left when you are running from stigmatization as a "unilateralist cowboy"? And where is the will to truly regulate the southern border when those who ask for this are slimed as bigots? This is how white guilt defines what is possible in America. You go at a problem until you meet stigmatization, then you retreat into minimalism.

Possibly white guilt's worst effect is that it does not permit whites--and nonwhites--to appreciate something extraordinary: the fact that whites in America, and even elsewhere in the West, have achieved a truly remarkable moral transformation. One is forbidden to speak thus, but it is simply true. There are no serious advocates of white supremacy in America today, because whites see this idea as morally repugnant. If there is still the odd white bigot out there surviving past his time, there are millions of whites who only feel goodwill toward minorities....

I can see why Tammy Bruce liked the article; it's a subject she herself has tackled in her books. You can read the whole artilce HERE.