High Rollers in the Council Winners

 
The voting was black and white for the final week of March. Two definitive winners with wide margins of victory.

In the Council section, Rightwing Nuthouse came out on top with three votes for “A Slap in the Face”:

What is happening with this flexing of muscles by illegal immigrants is the beginning of a struggle for the soul of this country. Unless something is done to stem the tide now, the kind of rhetoric coming from those who carry signs claiming that California is not United States territory anymore will continue to escalate. And once it goes mainstream, the diversity nuts, the multicultural tyrants, the starry-eyed open borders loons, and guilt-ridden left will coalesce to make that nightmare a reality.

Laugh if you feel the need. But anyone who missed the message at those demonstrations from people who celebrated their separateness from America rather than their solidarity with it should have a bucket of cold water thrown on their pretentious heads. Maybe then they’ll wake up and realize that this battle is not about race, or creed, or ethnicity. It is about the essence of America and whether the country we have known and loved in the past is going to survive another generation.

He’s right, too. We cannot permit the balkanization of our country. The immigration issue is one thing. The failure to assimilate is another. And it is much more pernicious and dangerous than who we let in and who we don’t.

Ali Eteraz won the non-council section handily with his "Open Letter To Reformist Muslims".

Eteraz warns:

I believe that some Western antipathy towards Islam is due to decency. It is quite plausible that a generation that faced off against two totalitarianisms might be right about a third. It is also plausible that for every Westerner who calls for the destruction of Islam in order to defend the Western status-quo, there is another Westerner who agitates for change in Islam because has a Muslim friend who has been hurt by what passes for Islam, or has a glimpse (in Hafiz, perhaps in Ibn Rushd), of what Islam could be; and as such, is upset by what Islam today is not. I believe that there are many in the West capable of recognizing beauty — and they have recognized the beauty that Islam was in the hands of Rumi, and also have recognized the potential of that beauty in Islam today, in Muslims today. This is another way of saying that I believe there are many in the West who are driven by the humanity of the Muslim, who faces daily in Iraq, in Punjab, in subversive mosques in Europe, the inhumanity of a utilitarian death theology.

Note the similar theme underneath these posts. They are about the peaceful integration of dissimilar cultures and how painful and chaotic it can be. Eteraz puts it this way, for all of us:

The task ahead will be difficult enough. If, then, there are those who will link their arms with us, we must not hesitate. When the moment of reckoning comes — and there is no reason to believe that time is not now — we will be in need of every able mind, profligate pen, and nervous smile. Do it out of pragmatism, or do it out of love, but do it you must.

The rest is over at The Watcher's Place. Give him a visit and see what the motley crew has to say.