Islamophobobia and the Destruction of Hamtramck

Hamtramck, Michigan is a decrepit town of twenty-two thousand enveloped by Detroit. With forty-nine percent of its people below the poverty line, ancient, crumbling housing stock, and a crime rate that puts it at only 12% safer than all U.S. cities, why has it recently made the “We are the World” propagandists and virtue signalers so ecstatic? Here is a clue. Hamtramck in 2013, All the praises and thanks be to Allah, became the first majority Muslim city in the country with a majority Muslim city council. What better occasion for an edifying celebration of diversity (43 percent of residents born outside of the U.S. with twenty-seven languages in the public schools) and a stern rebuke for the naysayers and bigots who might wonder if the reproduction of Bangladesh and Yemen near the Motor City is a such a good idea?

But why not? Illuminati from the likes of The Nation, Politico and other champions of the voiceless and downtrodden over the past year or so have sojourned to this Mecca-in-the-making. They have seen the future, and have put their “diversity” stamp of glowing approval on it. After dispatching a few interviews, they report to their great relief that the locals are telling them that they are thrilled about this. The massive influx of Muslims, the erection of seven mosques (the most per capita in the U.S.)  and the call-to-prayer blasted out into the streets five times a day into what was once a ninety percent Polish Catholic community, is no big deal. 

Lianna Aghajanian of Teen Vogue (that’s right, Teen Vogue) tootled her way through Hamtramck last February and tells us that “[t]he city has been subject to a narrative full of inaccuracies, but the real story is just how quintessentially American it is.” Just when this crazy old world gets way too hard to understand, leave it to a savant from Teen Vogue to let us in on the “real story.” Now, when more of America becomes as “quintessentially American” as the new Hamtramck, Ms Aghajanian might want to pause a moment in her pursuit of the latest beach ware and think carefully about how the standard current fare in the hypersexualized fashion pages of Teen Vogue such as “Rihanna Responds to Fenty Beauty Fan’s Message About Trans Models” and, the monthly “Lovescope” will go down with the ascension of the Imams and the burka trendsetters.

A couple of months after Donald Trump’s inauguration a reporter from NPR interviewed some Hamtramck non-Muslim residents. Not everyone was gushing about the transformation of the city into “Hamtramistan,” the city’s new moniker.  “The Hamtramck they knew had changed. ‘It's now more like a Bangladeshi town, so, that's a different story,’ says [Alek] Fidler [a Polish American immigrant who came ten years ago]. ‘Seems like, you know, they were basically taking over.’ St. Florian's priest, Miroslaw Frankowski, recalls his first impression of this city when he arrived in Hamtramck about 10 years ago. ‘I’m almost like in Cairo,’ he says, ‘because you know, the call for the prayer — and people covered up under clothing typical for Middle East. Yeah, it seemed like I’m working in Middle East.’ In Hamtramck streets, it’s common now to see women fully veiled, with only their eyes exposed. The amplified Muslim call to prayer was a source of controversy here some years back, and still can raise hackles.” Religion invading the public square? Strangely, the lawyers from the ACLU are nowhere to be found. 

Tom Perkins, however, reporting for The Nation tells us that there is nothing much to report. “In reality, there’s not much tension worth mentioning in Hamtramck….  To the contrary, many of the city’s non-Muslim residents are proud to be a part of a historic first, and reports of tension and conflict are the work of those with an agenda or reporters capitalizing on a hostile national discourse.” Perkins, apparently, doesn’t think it is “worth mentioning” just why these non-Muslims are so proud, but we can take his word for it because we know that reporters from The Nation are far removed from “hostile national discourse” and never operate with “an agenda.”

Here, though, is the nub of Perkin’s non-agenda: “The Western world is experiencing a wave of Islamaphobia, and people want to know what life is like in an American city where Muslims are in charge. This is the first time in decades that the Polish Catholics haven’t run Hamtramck.” The Muslims haven’t been in charge here for very long, so let’s not jump to premature conclusions. Perhaps, however, it is not unreasonable to suggest that those inquiring minds who would like to know what life is like in any place where Muslims are in charge should look at what life is like in places like Mogadishu, Aden, and Dhaka where they have been in charge for a long time. These, I suspect, are not the sort of “model home” communities that exude tolerance, inclusivity and equality of women, the norms so prized by our betters at the Washington Post, NYT and Teen Vogue.

Let us grant for the moment that this wave of Islamophobia is washing over us (more on that in a bit), but does Mr. Perkins ever wonder, given this tsunami of fear and loathing experienced by Muslims in the Western world, why so many of them (by the millions) continue flocking to it? But let’s first get to the heart of his non-agenda, which is – a city in America, at last, “where Muslims are in charge.”   

Here exposed is the foundational premise of the cultural Marxism which is, of course, all about who should be in power (“in charge”) and who should not. The Polish Catholics, Perkins gloats, don’t get to “run Hamtramck” anymore. They might be unhappy about it, but who cares? Get over it! As Chuck Berry would put it: “Roll over Beethoven, and tell Tchaikovsky the news.” Out with the old; in with the new. Polish Catholics were part of the problem – the old, oppressive, white, Eurocentric, Christian order – and the historically oppressed Muslims, so stylishly multi-cultural, now in charge, are the solution, the future. Diversity has arrived in rustbelt America, and it is where there is a mosque on every street corner, and all you are allowed to see of the ladies are their eyes.

Hamtramck is the picture of what today’s proud progressives call progress. Presumably, they would be happy to see America increasingly resemble Hamtramck and eager to celebrate the disappearance of an America that took its cultural heritage from Europe and worshipped at Christian altars. A couple of more Hamtramcks in Michigan would likely have put the state in Hillary’s electoral column last November.

As we are now supposed to understand, one form of resistance to “progress” is a pathology known as “Islamophobia” discovered by newspaper columnists, cable-TV talking heads, sociology professors, and Democrat politicians. Phobias, as we know, are diseases of the psyche, irrational thoughts, fears and impulses that turn those who harbor them into disordered and dysfunctional personalities. The consensus of the cognoscenti that “Islamophobia” is now a great affliction of the Western world would suggest that we all now must admit that the West itself is a diseased, pathological entity, and that the only acceptable moral future for West must be a surrender to the “Other,” the East, a Hegelian sort of historical moment. Hamtramck would seem to be a surrender in the miniature, but, certainly emblematic of Der Untergang des Abendlandes, portending the triumph of the crescent over the cross.

But not so fast. We are grappling with agitprop, not psychology. “Islamophobia” does not refer to a real disease or anything real for that matter, but is just a word with a clinical ring to it, contrived by the traducing ideologues firmly entrenched in our opinion-shaping institutions. It is a Shimpfwort, a word of abuse. Its purpose is to rationalize and dramatize their moral outrage and to demonize the subjects of that outrage. After a period of sufficient repetition by the right people, it firmly entrenches itself in the expanding vocabulary of victimhood (“transphobia” has recently made its debut) and sustains the orthodoxy of egalitarian politics with its relentless aggression against hierarchy and Christianity.  

How, in general terms, this “wave of Islamophobia” game of pin the bigot’s tail on the white Christian donkey is played was brilliantly described by the political philosopher, the late Kenneth Minogue over thirty years ago. “In ideological criticism … [there is] a kind of perverse-reverse logic, i.e., condemnation goes before explanation, or, rather the moral precedes the factual. A sort of intellectual show trial. Censure leads to theory rather than theory to censure. But then, of course this is problematic because it is better to discover something that brings condemnation, than to shop around for a theory to support your moral outrage.” (Kenneth Minogue: Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology, St. Martin’s Press, 1985, 58) Stalin’s chief hit-man, Lavrenti Beria, put this concept in the most succinct of terms: “show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.” Tell Beria who you want to be put in the dock, and he invents the charges. “Islamophobia” is another invention of our contemporary Berias, the “theory” they shopped around for that bolsters their moral outrage with the sins of the West, condemns the unrepentant (the “unredeemables”) and seeks their extinction.

The response to the Islamization of once Polish Catholic Hamtramck – ho-hum by much of America and hip-hip-hooray by the Social Justice Mafioso.  It is a very bad omen.