Why Dymphna Is Seriously Mistaken

My previous post was about the Gates of Vienna co-blogger Dymphna, who accepted immigrant Hirsi Ali's comments on the cliched (and self-serving) view that America is an "idea."

It could be that Dymphna just went along with this because she likes Ali, since she starts her post praising Ali and her: "[I]ncisive intelligence [and] her willingness to take politically incorrect positions."

She should read Ali's interview carefully, since there are parts where Ali is tediously conventional and at times incoherent, especially when she critiques Christianity and when she vacillates between radical and moderate Islam.

I won't go into the interview, since I have discussed Ali's mixed messages several times on both this blog and at Camera Lucida. Rather, I would just like to mention Dymphna's (and I assume her co-blogger Baron Bodissey 's) error.

If America is just an idea, devoid of a culture, a history and a specific ethnic people which built and developed it into the America even Ali can identify (she differentiates it easily from France, for example), here is the problem. How can Dymphna and Bodissey believe in Muslims’ peculiarities of religion and culture – which they report daily on their anti-jiahd blog - if they accept that America is none of that, and is merely an abstract idea? Why one set of criteria for Muslims, and another for America? Muslims themselves have rejected that America is cultureless or a mere idea. They must believe in the concreteness of America’s people, religion culture and certainly ethnicity, since they are working so hard to be rid of it.

In a strange way, Dymphna is behaving like the Muslims she daily denounces on her anti-jihad blog. While Muslims want everyone to be Muslim by hook or by crook (often by crook), she also has no qualms about anyone (everyone) being American through immigration. Dymphna’s abstract and idea-based America open to all is a mirror image of the universalist, yet religion-specific, violent ummah of Islam.

There's nothing wrong with bad ideas as long as they don't see the light of day. But Dymphna's convoluted views are commonly held, and their devastating consequence is that they will allow more of these Muslims (like any other immigrants) to enter this "idea-based" America through the generous and open immigration system. These Muslims will then escalate their activity of destroying America they have assessed as being very particular and certainly not an idea (nor Muslim), and engulfing it into their Islamic ummah. The happy universalism that Dymphna may have envisioned then turns rapidly into the Islamic purgatory she never expected.