Bruce Thornton writes an excellent must-read article about multiculturism, “Dishonest and Deadly – Why does the West entertain such a wrongheaded notion as multiculturalism?”

“The news that the London terrorist attacks were carried out by second-generation Muslim immigrants should not surprise us. For years now we in the West have indulged a whole set of destructive ideas whose bitter fruit we will all continue to harvest, as more and more unassimilated and disaffected immigrant children turn against the countries that welcomed their parents and provided them with a prosperity and freedom unknown in their countries of origin.

This baneful idea goes by the name of multiculturalism. Don’t be fooled by marketing: multiculturalism is not simply a call to respect cultures different from one’s own. In reality multiculturalism is a therapeutic melodrama of Western crimes against peaceful peoples “of color” who were subjected to racism, sexism, slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and environmental degradation. Given its record of evil, the West owes reparations to all those victims, especially those who emigrate to the West. There these victims will be given public assistance and soothed with repeated public assertions and recognitions of their culture’s superiority, coupled with ritualistic confessions of Western guilt and dysfunction.

Some consider this “cultural relativism,” but it isn’t really. A genuine cultural relativism would hold that there are no universal standards by which to judge any culture. But most of the time, those who claim that cultures can be judged only in their own terms have no compunction in judging and condemning the West. Nor will they accept that Nazi Germany or the antebellum South or apartheid South Africa were just “different” and so beyond our judgment. And of course, if you pin them down on the standards and values and principles on which they base their condemnations, these will all turn out to be ideals like freedom or human rights or equality that have their origins and most complete development in the West.”

More….

He concludes with:

“To demand that immigrants assimilate and pledge allegiance to their new homes is not xenophobia or racism; it is rather to demand that those who choose to come to the West and enjoy its political and economic goods respect, honor, and embrace the ideals and principles that created those goods in the first place. And it is to recognize that yes, a price must be paid: the discarding of those old ways and ideals that contradict or compromise the new values. After all, by coming to the West the immigrant has already voted with his feet for the Western way. If he now finds that he made the wrong choice and that he believes the culture he left is in fact superior, then he is free to go back.”

Before multiculturism became popular in the 1960’s, the objective of schools was to cause everyone to assimilate into the American culture. Children pledged allegiance to the Flag, sang America the Beautiful and the Star Spangled Banner, learned that the Founders of our country were ordinary men with extraordinary ideas, and were taught that America provides freedom and opportunity that isn’t available elsewhere. Children were taught what it was to be an American and to be glad that they were part of this great country. It was considered important to make sure that children, regardless of where they came from, or what race they were, became assimilated so that they were able to take advantage of the opportunities available to them.

Since “Multiculturism” became fashionable, schools, rather than assimilating children into the American mainstream, have been causing children to celebrate their differences. Celebrating differences has the opposite effect. Children feel alienated from the main culture, and feel more of an attachment to their ethnic or racial group. Rather than assimilating children into the American culture, multiculturism has caused them to feel apart from the American culture. That is particularly true among the Muslim community, but extends to the Latino and African-American communities as well.

Celebrating ethnic differences should be reserved to the home and the ethnic community. American schools should abandon the failed multiculturism system and go back to making children become American, teach them to be proud of their country and to feel that they are a part of the American culture.

Update: For more on the lethal results of multiculturism, see Melanie Phillips article (Hat Tip: Israpundit)

According to Phillips:

This moral inversion is the result of the cultural brainwashing that has been going on in Britain for years in the pursuit of the disastrous doctrine of multiculturalism. This has refused to teach Muslims — along with other minorities — the core of British culture and values. Instead, it has promoted a lethally divisive culture of separateness, in which minority cultures are held to be equal if not superior to the values and traditions of the indigenous majority.

Even worse, multiculturalism causes the moral paralysis of ‘victim culture’, whereby to say an ethnic minority is at fault is to invite immediate accusations of racism. When Lord Ouseley reported on the 1999 race riots in Bradford, he concluded that many local people did not dare challenge wrongdoing among young ethnic minority people because they feared being labelled ‘racist’.

When Ray Honeyford, the Bradford headmaster, warned strongly against multiculturalism in the schools in the eighties, he was branded a racist and hounded from his job. Now those Yorkshire chickens have lethally come home to roost.

The moral bankruptcy of this victim culture is all around us. Thus the BBC instructed its journalists not to refer to the London bombings as ‘terrorism’ because this was a subjective value judgment. And yet it allowed John Simpson, its World Affairs editor, to call these terrorists ‘misguided criminals’ an astounding value judgment which diminished the nature of the atrocity.

The problem is that this inversion of morality can be lethal. Such is the ethos of political correctness in our public services that librarians who want to complain about the potential danger of young Muslims logging onto websites instructing them in making bombs or nerve gas are told to say nothing for fear of being accused of prejudice.”