This week on Mere Fidelity, Derek, Matt, and I are joined by Dr. Matthew Kaemingk, the author of the recent Christian Hospitality and Muslim Immigration in an Age of Fear, to discuss his book.
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Alastair's Adversaria 
Unfortunately, too irritating to listen to because one of the guest’s voice keeps fading, almost to an inaudible level.
I bought the Kindle version of Dr Kaemingk’s book and am still digesting it. There is much real food for thought within it. And there are real problems which he fails to address, partly because so much of the book is focussed on the Netherlands experience and leaves out lessons which are only too obvious from the German, British, Belgian and French perspectives.
The phrase “Amsterdam and Mecca” recurs like a tiresome mantra throughout the book – it is repeated dozens of times. The most obvious contrasts between these two cities are accessibility and tolerance. Anyone, of any religion or none, can enter Amsterdam. Only the faithful can enter Mecca and those outsiders who have entered had to pretend to be Muslim.
Dr Kaemingk mentions dress and terrorism as two points inspiring distrust among Western societies. The niquab issue is almost insurmountable. The only people who conceal their faces in Western countries are bandits, terrorists and our Robocop style police – a major reason to automatically distrust the last named.
The other massive problem is sexuality. The German open door welcome in the autumn of 2015 fizzled out with an obviously coordinated nationwide mass molestation of German women on New Years Eve, most infamously the huge assault outside Germany’s largest Church, Cologne Cathedral. A plain direct mockery of both the host country’s religion and the native population’s liberal attitudes. The dozens of Muslim pimp gangs across England must derive some of their inspiration from their religion’s attitude to non-Muslim women, underage or not. Many of the thousands of victims have been underage. And the luckless British taxpayer is picking up the bill for maintaing thousands of polygamous marriages on social security.
Indeed, the issue of state expenditure exposes the one-eyed nature of “Christian” hospitality when it comes to Muslim immigration. You can exercise Christian hospitality with regard to a small number of Muslims. The wider society, Christian and non-Christian, is stuck with the tab. I had a volcanic row with other members of my parish in 2015 over Pope Francis proposal that every Catholic parish in Europe sponsor a refugee family (a proposal that has since vanished down the memory hole). Among the countless problems was that our parish’s scheme would sponsor a family for a year. What happened next? Well, after 12 months, if they were still unemployed, social security stepped in….
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