The Meaning of Fundamentalism

I got an email from a guy in Ottawa who provided a link to this impressive and detailed essay. It's not to be missed.

One tends to forget the outright despotism of minorities who are resistant to assimilation if it isn't accompanied by a status of extraterritoriality and special dispensations. The result is that nations are created within nations, which, for example, feel Muslim before they feel English, Canadian or Dutch. Here identity wins out over nationality. Worse yet: under the guise of respecting specificity, individuals are imprisoned in an ethnic or racial definition, and plunged back into the restrictive mould from which they were supposedly in the process of being freed. Black people, Arabs, Pakistanis and Muslims are imprisoned in their history and assigned, as in the colonial era, to residence in their epidermis, their beliefs.

That's sad really. These people or their immediate ancestors left their homeland for the West and yet they're still culturally and psychologically stuck in a cage. Many think that this is to be "celebrated".