Dear Editor,

I am concerned about the growing rise of Islam globally and locally — the modern kind which takes on a socialist/communist “freedom fighter” slant, thus hiding its true, oppressive, and insidious motives and fruits.

Since the welcomed departure of our home-grown jihadist ISIS activist and recruiter, Sheikh Abdullah el-Faisal, I’ve often mulled over the growth of hard-line Islamic fundamentalism within our local Muslim community — increasingly of the foreign variety.

Considering modern events and the global climate of wars within Islamist societies, it is my hope and impassioned appeal to our local immigration and foreign policy regulators and policymakers that urgent steps be taken to prevent the export of foreign wars to Jamaica.

At the close of wars and religious conflict comes immigration of the involved populations to more peaceful pastures, often bringing with them the conflicts and worldviews that led to instability within their countries of origin.

It would do Jamaica well to avoid the mistakes of Europe and the USA by implementing a thoughtful restrictive immigration policy which prioritises the reception of individuals as lawful immigrants and/or refugees who share similar cultural and religious values of Jamaica.

Jamaica is a small country founded on Judeo-Christian principles which have served us well and to which we would do well to return in earnest. The negative experiences of countries/regions who experimented with multicultural immigration, owing to our sheer size, would be catastrophic.

We cannot afford to import the conflicts of other people to our region or become, as Islamists have begun doing within our prisons and universities, a recruiting ground for jihad. This strategy sees lonely, gullible women and our vulnerable, marginalised black men with a history of violence being sent to foreign countries to slaughter infidels and die for a strange god under the guise of anti-colonialism and the establishing of a modern caliphate governed by sharia law. Or worse, trying to establish one here. All this whilst conveniently omitting the truth that the largest, longest, and most brutal slave trade was the Arab-Islamic slave trade, which continues today.

As developing countries, we have the benefit of the hindsight of the developed world, and have the privilege of observing the pitfalls of our neighbours to the north and west, with a view to avoiding similar mistakes. One of these gaping pitfalls is multiculturalism.

The hard truth is that multiculturalism does not work. Having more than one contradicting macrocultures and competing worldviews occupying a State or community, vying for dominance whilst pretending that all cultures are equal, leads to the eventual erosion of agreement and unity within the host State/community. In short – a failed State.

Jamaica is proof of the beauty of the fact that many ethnicities can, under the agreed umbrella of one overriding culture to which all subcultures submit, create the result of our motto, ‘Out of many, one people’, if it is that we stick to it.

We have gone this far without a coup or bloody revolution. Please, let’s not devolve into one.

Finally, revolutions, violent or otherwise, are not usually undertaken by the majority, but by a vocal, committed, persistent minority who hoodwink the majority culture into not taking them seriously.

In the words of esteemed black economist Thomas Sowell, “Freedom is unlikely to be lost all at once and openly. It is far more likely to be eroded away, bit by bit, amid glittering promises and expressions of noble ideals.”

Jillian Forbes

Jillianforbes21@gmail.com