Can It Happen Here?

I was just reading the column by Charles Krauthammer at Town Hall where he talks about how, in his opinion, what happened in London can't happen here. He believes that America has done a much better job of assimilating racial, religious and ethnic groups. Great Britain, on the other hand, and Europe in general, hasn't really made an effort towards assimilation.

In the 1950's or 1960's I might have agreed with him, but not now - and not for the last 30 or 40 years. The general viewpoint of this country was that you can keep your culture and language in your home and neighborhood, but once you left that group you'd better know some English. To this day you can go to just about any major U.S. city and find neighborhoods where the local shop signs are in Greek or Hebrew.

Slowly over the last several decades, groups coming to America have been pretty much encouraged to ignore our way of life and just to continue to do what they did back in their home country - particularly if their heritage is Hispanic. I can remember when the public phones started giving instructions in Spanish as well as English, and it stunned me. Even back in my 20's I couldn't understand why they did that.

From that point forward, the Hispanic community has had no real incentive to meld their culture into ours and others coming here have taken their cue from this. Particularly those with an axe to grind, like the Serbs.

As a result of this we end up with the Whabbi madrasses paid for and nurtured by the Saudi royal family which teach that all who are not of their religion are infidels who have no right to life. While our general population has been unaware of this, our government has indeed known and done nothing, for fear of being seen as discriminating against them.

Can anyone else out there remember when having discriminating tastes was a good thing? Another word we've lost.

In the meantime, I agree with what Mr Krauthammer has to say about our security checks. Unless every person is strip searched every time they leave the house we will never catch every possible terrorist, but that doesn't mean you can't target those most likely to nurse a grudge against our way of life.

Otherwise you're just pissing your money away for no result - and you'd better believe our enemies know this and are gladly taking advantage of it.