Back in the old days (ask your parents or grandparents), immigrants adjusted to the culture they were migrating to. But that's a rather fuddy-duddy way of looking at things, as Kofi Annan explains:

The offensive caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad were first published in a European country which has recently acquired a significant Muslim population, and is not yet sure how to adjust to it.

I don't know if there is a more fuddy-duddy publication than Newsweek (unless it's Time). Now they are tut-tutting those Europeans who have the temerity - in the post-cartoon riot world - to be concerned with protecting free speech and other Enlightenment values through new immigration standards that encourage assimilation. Not surprisingly the Newsweekies title their article The End of Tolerance, meaning Europe's, of course, not those Sharia-bound Muslims whose tolerance is legendary. Here's how the authors (there are three) sum it up near the end:

Until such double standards can be abolished and a new equality established, Europe's new toughness will feel like forced integration. "It's a form of creating a second-class citizenship," says Tariq Modood, director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship in Bristol. "All the burden of change is placed on the immigrant."

Oh, I get it. It's time for those atheistic Dutch and Danish to meet their Islamic guests mid-way. They should be half-misogynist and half-homophobic. Is that the kind of culture Newsweek really wants? Of course not. They're just lying phonies and poseurs. They continue, slightly further on:

It's an open question whether Germans, Dutch, or Danes will ever truly accept a multiethnic, multireligious "Germanness," "Dutchness" or "Danishness."

Open question? Maybe so, but I'll tell you a closed question - whether Saudi Arabia could ever accept Germans, Dutch or Danes living among them. Or sanctimonious Newsweek writers, for that matter. Enough already.

Bruce Bawer's new book, While Europe Slept, is an instructive read in that regard: he's a gay American who moved to Holland because it was more open and tolerant than his repressed uptight theocratic native land yet in the end he was driven out of the Netherlands by a--what's the phrase? --"rising tide" of gay bashing and other forms of homophobia from the ever more culturally confident young Muslim men who now dominate urban life up the European coast from France through Belgium to Scandinavia. It's not a good time to be a gay man in Europe.

The question is whether Canada will prove more like the Continent and succumb to creeping Islamification or more like America and resistant to would-be encroachments? Which would you bet on?

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