THE CULTURE OF XENOPHILIA AND ITS ORIGINS
How Love of the Stranger is Killing Us
By Tim Murray
The argument that self-destructive hospitality to third world immigrants issues from a self-loathing for Western civilization is commonplace. In his “Closing of the American Mind”, Alan Bloom described how European nihilism became rooted in American colleges, giving birth to cultural relativism and a contempt for western values that is now manifest in multiculturalism and mass immigration from non-traditional quarters. Everywhere, courses are designed to induce shame rather than pride in our forefathers so that we may become self-flagellating penitents willing to regard high immigration from aggrieved cultures as redress for our past crimes.
But surely there is another half to the equation: that Anglo-European suicide emerges not out of hatred turned inward but love turned outward—a perverse love for strangers that exceeds or replaces the love that is due to ones own. Novelist Jean Raspails description of pro-immigrationists bears closer scrutiny. They are, he said, righteous in their loathing of anything and everything that smacks of present day Western society, and boundless in their love of what might destroy it.
That kind of love can be found by a selective interpretation of scriptures, and in a political movement born in the nineteenth century that shook the twentieth and still permeates thought today. The open-borders mentality that is rife in Britain, North America and Australia is largely the unhappy confluence of two philosophical traditions, Judaeo-Christianity and socialism.
In this weeks installment, we will examine the Judaeo-Christian strand of xenophilia.
The parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-37) is one of the most famous and influential of the New Testament. In showing that a Samaritan could recognize a stricken Jew not as a member of a hostile culture but rather as a human being needing assistance, Christ established that the Samaritan had acted properly. Both Matthew 22:39 and Leviticus 19:18 instruct us to love our neighbour as we love ourselves. And who is the neighbour we are to love? According to Christian ethicist Dana Wilbanks, it is often the stranger. In fact, right at the centre of Christian faithfulness is the challenge and the opportunity to love the stranger as ourselves, to love the stranger as God loves the stranger, to love the stranger as one with whom Jesus explicitly identifies.
Kathleen Tomlin, the Director for the (Catholic) Office for Social Justice asked, How do you love your neighbour, and also describe them as illegal? She argued that the common good cant be defined by national borders and that a sense of solidarity is required to understand the predicament of immigrants. Curiously, she didnt speak of any solidarity with resident American workers whose jobs are displaced by immigrants. According to Harvard economist Dr. George Borjas, American-born workers lose $152 billion annually from the job displacement and wage depression caused by immigration. Couldnt they, one might ask, use some of the boundless Christian love earmarked for aliens who knowingly break the law upon entry, but whose plight makes better news copy than the plight of the hard-working low-income American whose job they threaten?
Tomlins attitude was better captured by someone on an Internet forum out of London, Ontario who contested my arguments (in the tradition Of Garrett Hardin) for population stabilization and zero-net immigration for Canada. Closing borders is morally the same as refusing help to a dying person. It is quite literally putting the concerns of oneself and ones nation above the concerns of others based on the human concept of country. Remember here, that terms like country, nation, race and the like are just words that we have made up. People are people and we are all part of the human raceChoosing to ignore a cry for help makes me a barbarian and a heartless worm. Morality should be, and needs to be, based on LoveI do not have the right not to love everyone equally, ever. (Londoncommons.net Feb.5/07)
Historically, American Jews have taken an even more strident stand for large immigration intakes, particularly from outside traditional Northern European sources, for reasons both strategic and theological. Strategically it was thought that safety lay in diversity, that is, a culturally homogeneous society dominated by Anglo-Saxons would pose more of a threat than one fragmented by immigration from a variety of countries. In fact, a multicultural state that sanctioned ethnocentrism by constituent subcultures would allow them to flourish as a separatist force and employ a divide and conquer strategy on the rest by entering into clever coalitions with other minorities.
More favourable to immigration to America than any other religious or ethnic group, Jews have taken a leadership role in changing the Northern European tilt of US immigration. The American Jewish Committee boasts that from its founding the AJC has been a strong voice in support of immigration, participating actively in many of the major immigration debates of our time, opposing reductions in the flows of immigrants For the Jewish lobby then, mass immigration is a wrecking ball that they can swing to shatter the ethnic homogeneity of Anglo-European America, and from the rubble of cultural balkanization emerge a power-broker. What is interesting is that while the Jewish prescription for Anglo-European America is more cultural pluralism and disintegration, its prescription for Israel continues to be for a racist, apartheid, theocratic state guided by Judaism with a Jewish-only immigration policy!
The theological underpinnings for their agenda of burying Nordic Christian America under a demographic avalanche are found of course in the Old Testament. As Jews were once strangers in the land of Egypt, strangers are to be valued and welcomed. You shall love the foreigner as you love yourself, for you were once aliens in Egypt (Leviticus 19:33-34) Hospitality to strangers, without any distinction made between legal and illegal strangers, is a consistent Biblical theme. When a foreigner resides with you, he shall be to you as the citizen among you. (Leviticus 19:33-34) Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers. (Hebrews 13:2) Rabbi Morris Allen of Mendola Hts., Minnesota incarnates these injunctions by complaining that classifying immigrant workers as guests would send out the message that they werent family. Such is love for the outsider in this logical continuum that a stranger not only becomes a neighbour , then a guest, but a member of immediate family. In this moral universe, everyone residing in the country or hoping to, by hook or by crook, is deserving of equal consideration. Just get your foot in the door and you get a full Club membership.
Does this formidable scriptural litany constitute the last word on the Judaeo-Christian position toward immigration policy? Or is there an alternative interpretation? Since our obligations to our neighbour, who is said to be equated with the stranger, seem to be the linchpin of Christian rationale for out-of-control immigration, lets examine the meaning of neighbour, as in love your neighbour as yourself (Leviticus 19:18). The term surely doesnt suggest universality since not everyone is my neighbour and not everyone is near me. Given that Judaism is a tribal religion,neigbhour must refer to fellow Jews. It is an injunction to practice national solidarity as evidenced by an examination of all of Leviticus 19:18. Take no revenge and cherish no grudge against your fellow countrymen. You shall love your neighbour as yourself. I am the Lord. Your fellow countrymen does not obviously mean all of humanity. Neighbour cannot be linked to stranger.
Returning to the parable of the Good Samaritan, cursory research would dispute the interpretation that many Christians give to scriptural commands to love strangers. The notion that someone in Darfur is as much my neighbour as someone in Winnipeg, Manitoba or the man down the street who lost his family in a house fire is not illustrated by Luke 10: 25-36. For a Samaritan who was intensely disliked by Israelites was not, in our sense, a foreigner. John 4:7-22 clearly defines Samaritans as a religious group, albeit corrupt, ritually impure and sexually permissive. Nonetheless they believed in One God, One Prophet (Moses), The Torah, and in the Day of Judgment. They were not a regional or ethnic group. They were not black. They did not speak Chinese or Swahili. In fact, they spoke a dialect of western Aramaic largely peculiar to Palestine, much like that of the Jews. The common ancestry of both Jews and Samaritans has been established by modern genetic studies.
Therefore, to use the Good Samaritan as an example of a foreigner, of the “stranger” who loves unreservedly, and takes others (a Jewish cousin) in is a poor example. The Samaritan was not a foreigner, and he was not really a stranger. He was a close geographical neighbour (and a relative of the Jews) who belonged to a group that the Jews didn't like, but whose kindness, Christ said, we should imitate and whom we should care about. (Luke 10:25-36 and Matthew 22: 39)
But should we care about him as much as we do our own family? In a burning building full of children, do we bypass our own children to rescue other children first? 1st Timothy 5:8 trumps Luke and Matthew. If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.
In other words, you take care of your family first. You love your own first. Then your neighbour. Then your community. Then your nation. Then humanity. And in deference to Paul Watson, you apportion some of your love to the animal kingdom, and to the animal kingdom's habitat which is being destroyed by the mass immigration policies favoured by anthropocentric Jews, Christians and the secular part of society.
There is a hierarchy of affection. Only God applies Love evenly, for only God can. Man has never, and can never, in Burkes words, love mankind all in one piece. Love of family, love of country, love of those like ourselves is what comes natural. It is what we are, and social psychology and socio-biology are continuing to re-inforce Burkean insight and the wisdom of 1 Timothy 5:8.
