Ask Lemmygrad

Why do we always have to put ourselves and our cultures last by not serving pork in school canteens because of muslims

First of all, is eating pork really that much of a central pillar of your culture? Somehow i doubt it. I grew up in a culture with a lot of traditional pork dishes, much more so than the average Western European country, but i'm not going to throw a hissy fit just because i can't have it every day.

Secondly, what's wrong with offering options? We do it for vegetarians all the time and we don't (and shouldn't) pay attention to the crazies screaming that offering a vegetarian option is cultural genocide of meat eaters. And yes, it is very much possible to offer non-pork options in every canteen even if you are a culture that consumes a lot of pork: just look at China!

China is huge on pork consumption, more so than most Western countries are, and yet they still find ways to accommodate their very sizable Muslim population when it comes to food options. I am willing to bet you will be hard pressed to find a single Chinese canteen without either halal or vegetarian options.

or allowing underage girls to wear a hijab in school, to let their families oppress them?

The question already gives it away: "why do we allow them to wear a hijab?". Because forbidding it is literally more restricting and repressive than allowing it. When you have to speak of "allowing" that shows that you are preventing someone from doing something they want to do. You are literally the one doing the oppressing once you start banning it. You're not liberating, you're just satisfying your own islamophobia.

Also, your own culture pressures people to dress a certain way in public. When you forbid people from going out in public naked, are you also "oppressing" them? There are some cultures where they have lower standards of modesty than we in the West do. Imagine you lived in one of those cultures and they forbid you from wearing pants or a shirt, and they tell you they are liberating you from the "oppression" of your clothes. Would you be ok with that?

Why do we let people immigrants live off our government benefits when they haven't paid a single euro in taxes before they came here?

This question proceeds from the false premise that immigrants just live off benefits and don't work. This is overwhelmingly not true. Most immigrants do in fact work. And in a very large number of the minority of cases where it is true, such as for newly arrived refugees in some European countries, it is literally because they are forbidden by law in those countries from working! It is common in many countries to need a work visa to be allowed to work there.

Secondly, many people benefit from social programs more than they put into them. What about children who have never paid taxes? What about disabled people? That is the whole point of having a social insurance system: to make sure people don't fall through the cracks and end up homeless and starving. Not just because that is the humanitarian thing to do but also because desperate and destitute people are more likely to resort to crime! By taking care of people you make the entire society better.

And if you don't like people being unemployed - and whether or not they are immigrants doesn't even matter, i'm just speaking generally now - here's an idea: why don't we have a national jobs program that guarantees a job to everyone who wants one?