No Room for Hyphenated Americans

I really don't think this is a political issue - even though we seem divided that way.

All majority Muslim countries marginalize and often brutalize minorities, gays and women - and this way of life is now being held up by many on the American left as a culture we should embrace.

It makes no sense, but this article lays it all out in a thoughtful and nuanced manner, and helps shed light on this extraordinary paradox of values, and the willful blindness of people who identify themselves as champions of human rights.

I agree that the biggest concern about mass immigration from the middle east should not be terrorism, it should be the vilification of assimilation, both by those coming here and those Americans who have discarded the concept.

Assimilation is not a synonym for racism or xenophobia.  Assimilation must be mandatory for all who come here - not because of 'privilege' or some other manufactured conceit by academics and cultural elites - but because American values are the most hopeful and humane on the planet.

We are a culture of kindness, not merely tolerance.

We are a culture of liberty, not merely diversity.

We are a country of freedom, not merely fairness.  

And those who would use the weak and limp standards of  'diversity', 'fairnes' and 'tolerance' as an excuse to permit barbarity, in the form of a backwards and misogynistic culture - are on the wrong side of this fight.

Teddy Roosevelt said it best - his words ring true nearly a hundred years later -

“There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all.”

“This is just as true of the man who puts “native” before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance.”

“But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as any one else.”

“The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English- Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian- Americans, or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality than with the other citizens of the American Republic.”

“The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country. The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart-allegiance, the better it will be for every good American.”