Part 2 : Tolerating Intolerance:
It’s hard not to see such hands-off attitudes by Westerners as a product of leftist groupthink–of the tendency, that is, to view people as members of groups rather than as individuals, and consequently to place the values of the group above the rights of the individual. If native Europeans and fundamentalist Muslims are to coexist in the West, the Muslims must temper their fundamentalism–period. The alternative is for Europeans to sacrifice the freedom, tolerance, and respect for individual mind and conscience on which Western civilization is founded. That cannot be allowed to happen–not just for Europe’s sake, but for America’s as well.
Situations vary, of course, from one Western European country to another. In Spain, according to a December 4 article in the New York Times, the "Islamic population has exploded" during the last ten years, during which the Muslim community of 500,000 "has become a busy logistical rear guard, apparently humming with Islamic terrorists."
In France, which has the West’s largest Muslim population (five million), there is a man named Soheib Bencheikh who serves as the grand mufti of Marseille and whom the International Herald Tribune calls "the clean-shaven face of progressive Islam in Europe." In a November 30 profile in that newspaper, speaking with an unequivocal clarity that one might wish more Muslim leaders in the West had exhibited after September 11, Bencheikh assailed the rigidity and backwardness of Islamic fundamentalism and insisted on the vital importance of reforming Islam–a project that, he said, would involve "a desacralization of the whole of Islam’s texts, commentaries, and the theological work around the texts." The purpose: to shape an Islam that preaches tolerance, respects diversity, supports the separation of church and state, and embraces integration wholeheartedly and without hesitation.
Bencheikh would seem to be precisely the kind of leader that European Islam so desperately needs. Yet the French government, instead of throwing its support behind him and other reformists, is, he charged, "choosing the most reactionary, the most politicized, and the most fanatic" of Islamic leaders for participation in that country’s new Muslim Council. Why? Because they are viewed as more representative. Indeed, as the Herald Tribune’s John Vinocur noted, "In Europe, where sixteen Islamist organizations with suspected terrorist ties were banned in Britain in the past year, and where Germany has identified twelve extremist Muslim Arab groups within its borders with 3,100 members, Mr. Bencheikh’s views have an uncertain following." Yet as Bencheikh argued, the French government, by confirming and reinforcing the power of extremists, is in effect "legitimiz[ing] the forces we decry in the Muslim world" at a time when the only hope for genuine integration in Europe lies in a rapid and radical reformation of the Muslim faith.
Then there’s the case of Denmark. In Norway, when people dare to discuss the issue of Muslim integration, they sometimes speak ominously of danske tilstander: "Danish conditions." What they are referring to is a state of affairs in which there exists not only de facto segregation between native and Muslim communities but also a routine and open expression of mutual hostility and distrust. Such a situation has existed for some time now in Denmark, where recent years have seen, for example, the movement of children out of integrated public schools and into private "white" and Muslim schools. After September 11, however, the tensions between native Danes and the Muslim community became more heated than ever. In Denmark, as elsewhere, Muslims took to the streets to celebrate the terrorist attacks. A few days later, a thousand Muslims gathered in the Danish town of Nørrebro for a protest against democracy; one speaker called for "holy war" against Danish society. In the run-up to a November parliamentary election, politicians from a range of parties spoke out bluntly on the topic of Islam: one referred to Muslims’ "infiltration" of western countries; another called Islam "not a proper religion" but "a terror organization"; a third offered the staggeringly undemocratic suggestion that, in order to promote integration of Muslims into Danish society, members of the immigrant community be prohibited from marrying people from their ancestral countries. After a new study showed that the persistence of current trends would make Denmark (now about 3 percent Muslim) a majority Muslim nation within sixty years, the small, reactionary Progress Party proposed ejecting "all Mohammedans" from the country.
Immigration was the number-one issue in the campaign. And the election proved historic. It marked the fall from power of the Social Democrats, who since 1920 had been Denmark’s largest political party, and it gave Denmark a new prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, whose campaign posters had featured the slogan "Time for a Change" over a picture of a "second-generation immigrant" who had been convicted of violence. In late November, Rasmussen promised a new policy under which immigration would be reduced and resources focused instead on a vastly improved integration program.
A post-election article in Aftenposten, on November 24, vividly summed up the current state of affairs in Denmark. "Our integration has not gone well," admitted a teacher. "I had a class in which nineteen of thirty-three children couldn’t say anything in Danish, even though they were all born in Denmark. . . . It’s a catastrophe for Denmark, what’s happening." A young Copenhagen woman who had been a gung-ho supporter of "multiculturalism" said that she now felt uncomfortable in her own country: "When someone like me thinks this way, it doesn’t bode well for the society."
In Norway, anyone who dares to voice legitimate concerns about the immigrant community’s prejudices and self-segregation risks being branded a racist by the political and media establishment; but in Denmark, it appears, those legitimate concerns have in many cases degenerated into genuine racism. In Denmark, alas, as elsewhere in northern Europe, many natives seem hamstrung by an inability to disentangle ideology from race–and to distinguish their own frankly racist discomforts ("It is simply a little strange to live in Denmark surrounded by so many people from other countries," one woman told Aftenposten) from their entirely justifiable unease over the prejudices and the resistance to integration that accompany fundamentalist Muslim ideology. This is, of course, dangerous: honest critical thinking of the sort proffered by the likes of Shabana Rehman and Hege Storhaug is vitally important if integration is to be made to work in northern Europe. If the only permitted way of talking about the topic is to reiterate insipid clichés in support of "the multicultural society," Europe is doomed.
In English we have a word for fear of foreigners: xenophobia. It is a rare word, seldom seen in print, almost never actually spoken, and probably unfamiliar to most English speakers. Most of the languages of northern Europe have words that mean the same thing. These words are frequently used in conversation and are familiar to virtually every native speaker. In Norwegian, the word in question is fremmedfrykt. And while this word is often used unfairly to label anyone who criticizes any aspect of the immigrant communities, there is in fact a real element of fremmedfrykt among northern Europeans. The notion that a foreigner–especially a dark-skinned foreigner–can become a Norwegian, a Dane, or a Dutchman, quite simply taxes the imaginations of many people in these countries. However liberal they may be, their pre-existing mental categories don’t allow for it. For all the racial and ethnic hatreds that fill the pages of American history, Americans, even bigoted Americans, tend to be better at this than northern Europeans are; we are accustomed to the idea that a person from anywhere can become an American. This is, to be sure, not a virtue on our part, but simply an idea we are used to. For many northern Europeans, it is not: it just doesn’t come naturally. More than half a century after the fall of Nazi Germany, the notion of ethnic purity still lives, unarticulated, often even unconscious, in the minds of people who think of themselves as good Social Democrats. For almost all northern Europeans, national identity continues to be wrapped up in, and equated with, ethnic background.
For this reason, large-scale immigration–of the right kind–could be a very positive thing for northern Europe. Certainly there are some immigrants from Muslim countries, people who have nothing of the fundamentalist about them, who have proven to be excellent entrepreneurs and model individualists in a part of the world where individualism has been traditionally discouraged. (Why? Because it’s viewed as a threat to social democracy.) In the Norwegian class I took last year at the state-run Rosenhof School, I made friends with students from Muslim countries who were easygoing and open-minded. Yet they were the secularized (or, perhaps, semi-secularized) exceptions among the immigrants from their part of the world; that was why they were in a class made up of people from seventeen different countries in Europe and Asia (plus me, the sole American), all of us with educated backgrounds and at least a smattering of English, rather than in one of the many sexually segregated, Muslim-only classes down the hall. In those classrooms, women sat swathed in fabric, with male relatives at their sides, providing the family escort without which they were prohibited from leaving the house. Our class was lively, irreverent, fun; as we learned Norwegian, we also learned about Norwegian folk ways, and gained insights into our own and one another’s native languages and cultures. Our discussions brought into focus previously unexamined attitudes and assumptions that our native cultures had bred into us; and as we recognized in all this the common foibles and follies of the human species, we laughed–laughed in easy self-mockery, and laughed, too, in celebration of the ability and opportunity we had been given to grow beyond the limits of our own native cultures.
From the other classes we never heard the sound of laughter.
"If you’re not with us, you’re against us," said President Bush soberly in the wake of September 11. Some European Muslims made it clear they were with us; some made it clear they were not. Faisal Bodi, the same writer who complained in the Guardian in 1999 about women’s shelters, returned to the pages of that newspaper on October 17, reporting with approval that since September 11 his imam had offered up Friday prayers "imploring God to annihilate Islam’s enemies, to ‘rock the ground underneath their feet.’" Here in Norway, a child counselor talked on national TV about a grade-school class he had visited in order to discuss the atrocities. All the children were upset, he said, except for one little Muslim boy who was sincerely puzzled by his classmates’ reactions–at his home, the boy explained, everybody was celebrating. Aftenposten reported on a Palestinian who stood with his young son outside the U.S. Embassy in Oslo and cheered the attacks–shouting "This is a great day!"–until the police led him off. I wasn’t shocked to read that this Palestinian (even though claiming membership in Hizballah) was not taken into custody, just removed from the Embassy area. Nor did the Norwegian authorities, I’m sure, pay a visit to the celebrating family of that puzzled schoolboy. And has the British immigration service, one wonders, examined Faisal Bodi’s visa status? Or his imam’s? One rather doubts it.
Yet since September 11, the winds seem to have begun to shift–in some places, anyway. In the Netherlands, it wasn’t just the horrors of the terrorist attacks on the U.S. that caused the blinders to fall from many people’s eyes. In early 2001, the imam of Rotterdam had made antigay remarks whose viciousness stunned the Dutch. (Most Dutchmen had fooled themselves into thinking their country was past such ugliness.) On the day the World Trade Center fell, the Dutch populace learned that Moroccan immigrants in the town of Ede were rejoicing in the streets. That Friday, a TV report on Nederland 1 commemorating the victims in the U.S. was followed immediately by a Koran reading, supplied by the Dutch Muslim Broadcasting System, stating that "unbelievers were fuel for the fire." Finally, in a post-attack survey of Moroccan immigrants in the Netherlands, 21 percent openly admitted their support for an anti-American holy war. (A similar Sunday Times poll, reported in early November, revealed that 11 percent of British Muslims considered the attack on the World Trade Center justified.)
None of this surprised me. What did make me sit up and take notice was a poll by De Volkskrant showing that more than 60 percent of Dutch citizens believed that Muslim immigrants who approved of anti-American terrorism should be ejected from the Netherlands. In an editorial, the newspaper’s editors spelled the message out bluntly: "The Netherlands doesn’t accept anti-Western fundamentalistic attitudes from Muslims. In the eyes of most Dutch people, integration means adapting to a humanistic tradition, to the separation between church and state, and distancing oneself from the norms and values of one’s motherland."
It was, at long last, a stunning–and welcome–affirmation of the Dutch people’s basic commitment to democratic values and to true integration. And it signaled that the Dutch, perhaps the most liberal people on the planet, have finally faced a crucially important fact: that there is nothing at all liberal about allowing one’s reluctance to criticize another person’s religion to trump one’s dedication to individual liberty, human dignity, and equal rights. Tolerance for intolerance is not tolerance at all.
As the International Herald Tribune noted, the De Volkskrant poll marked "an end to the avoidance of talking openly about elements of conflict in Dutch life that have accompanied the presence of Muslim immigrants. . . . The Dutch are treading these days in an area where most of Europe does not want to go." Indeed, here in Norway there were, in the weeks after September 11, no dramatic signs of turnaround to compare with the De Volkskrant poll. Yet there were stirrings. A November 20 Dagbladet article quoted a college president as saying that "powerful people in the immigrant community are the most important obstacle to integration"; if Norway wished "to avoid the same conditions as in Denmark," he cautioned, "it doesn’t help to be politically correct and to overlook the weak points." The article caused a stir. That evening, on the current affairs program "Tabloid," a longtime teacher at the Rosenhof school described the contempt for democracy and the active resistance to integration that he had observed for years among his Muslim students. (Seething with anger, the Muslim community spokesman sitting across the discussion table charged the teacher with racism.) The next day, Norwegian newspapers reported on Egil Straume, a radio evangelist and local Christian People’s Party leader who, citing Muslim demands for "their own meeting houses, schools, and laws," predicted that "in ten to fifteen years we’ll have civil war—like conditions between Muslims and Christians in Norway."
Yet these remained isolated voices. The consensus among Norwegian officials and intellectuals was plainly in agreement with the diagnosis by the head of Norway’s Anti-Racism Center, who (despite Straume’s insistence that his concern was with "Islamic ideology," not race) called his remarks "mentally deranged." Even the national leadership of Straume’s own party distanced itself from his comments. Indeed, a few days later it was reported that the Christian People’s Party was in the process of reaching out to Muslim voters, who, a Party official noted proudly, shared many of the Party’s core values in regard to "family and morals." Muslims, he said, were streaming to the Party in impressive numbers, even though, as non-Christians, they were barred from holding Party positions.
Then in January came a news story that shook up all of Scandinavia. In Uppsala, Sweden, Fadime Sahindal, a young woman whose estrangement from her Muslim family and refusal to submit to forced marriage had made her a well-known media presence–and whose ethnically Swedish boyfriend had died under mysterious circumstances in 1998–was murdered by her father. Upon his arrest, he readily admitted to the crime and called his daughter a whore. The murder was hardly unique; several such "honor slayings" take place every year in Scandinavia. For Norwegians, the story’s most striking aspect was the number of Norwegian Muslims who, when asked by the media for their comments, did not condemn the murder outright. More than one interviewee was of the opinion that the father had done what he had to do. "I can’t say it was right and I can’t say it was wrong," said an Oslo merchant. When several public figures–including a former prime minister and Oslo’s police chief–turned up on the Norwegian TV program "Holmgang" to discuss the murder, it felt as if the worm was perhaps finally turning in Norway. Rarely, if ever, before in a Norwegian public forum had the problems of Muslim integration been discussed so frankly. The slippery rhetoric served up on the program by the Muslim community spokesman was, for once, strongly rejected–and the person who took the lead was (yet again) a brave young woman of Muslim background, who repeatedly interrupted the spokesman’s boilerplate to demand that he stop lying and tell the truth. It was stirring to watch.
Since then, the intensification of the conflict in the Mideast has muddied the waters to some extent–not only in Norway but throughout much of Western Europe, where the intellectual and media establishment have long proffered a black-and-white image of Palestinians as victims and Israelis as aggressors. Yet at the same time Mideast tensions have, if anything, heightened Western Europeans’ consciousness of Islam. In February 2002 (the same month in which a British Labour MP demanded official action against a London imam and other Muslim leaders who were inciting the murder of non-believers), it was reported that anti-Jewish violence by French Muslims was skyrocketing. In April, Danish Prime Minister Rasmussen condemned a Muslim group, Hizb-ut-Tahrir, for calling for the murder of Danish Jews; later that month, a front-page headline on the Norwegian tabloid VG called attention to Hizb-ut-Tahrir’s plans to "turn Norway into an Islamic state." (Only two days later came the news that yet another immigrant had perished in an apparent "honor slaying"–this time just outside the police station in Kristiansand.)
The disinclination of social-democratic leaders to properly address such matters has doubtless contributed to the recent growth of conservative parties in many European countries. In the Netherlands, where gay bashings by Moroccan and Turkish youths have been on the rise, and where the government cracked down in February on the teaching of anti-Western hate in state-supported Muslim schools (one of which was raising money by selling calendars featuring a photo of the New York skyline ablaze), a Rotterdam politician named Pim Fortuyn gained widespread support by speaking frankly about the threat that fundamentalist Islam poses to Western liberties. It was a threat of which he, as an openly gay man, was acutely aware. ("In Rotterdam," he told the New York Times in March, "we have third generation Moroccans who still don’t speak Dutch, oppress women and won’t live by our values.") Fortuyn’s brutal assassination on May 6, 2002, deprived European politics of a brave and articulate voice for change.
Of course, not all politicians who dare to raise the issues of immigration, Islam, and integration are necessarily admirable. As Anne Applebaum noted in Slate in April, the lesson of the unsavory Jean-Marie Le Pen’s electoral success "is that if French politicians make it unacceptable to discuss such things in the mainstream, then the discussion will take place on the far-right fringes." Indeed, it is dismaying that while many leaders on the European Left continue to do their best to avoid criticizing fundamentalist Islam–which is, after all, among the most reactionary forces on the planet–they persist in attaching the label "racist" or "right-wing extremist" to any politician, such as Fortuyn, who makes bold to raise it as an issue. The longer the Left keeps trying to stifle discussion in this manner, the higher the chances of a rise to power of genuine racists and right-wing extremists.
The good news is that ordinary Western Europeans are beginning to recognize all this. They are also coming to realize some crucial truths. Fundamentalist Islam is not a race or an ethnicity; it is an ideology. Its critics are not racists, any more than critics of Nazi or Stalinist ideology are racists. And as an ideology, furthermore, Islamic fundamentalism is something that people can be drawn away from. Some of those who arrive in Europe as fundamentalist Muslims do indeed change their stripes, shedding narrow dogma and dangerous prejudices and learning to value tolerance and practice pluralism. It does not seem excessive to suggest that Western European immigration authorities (who have a superfluity of potential immigrants to choose from, and who are already in the habit of weeding out candidates on economic and other grounds) should begin to concentrate on screening for adaptability, accepting only those who seem likely to make an effort to fit in–and admitting them only tentatively, on the condition that they indeed adapt to democratic ways both outwardly and inwardly.
This adaptation should be encouraged in every way possible. Muslim immigrants should not only be taught the language of their adopted country; they should be comprehensively educated in the ways of democracy. They must learn–no small order–to think for themselves, to read critically, to question. Most important, they must learn to question those things they have been taught to regard as most sacred. And they must be encouraged to see themselves as free individuals in a free land rather than as members of a straitjacketing subculture whose religion obliges them to take their marching orders from autocratic community leaders.
Finally, these immigrants must be thought of–and must be encouraged to think of themselves–as full and equal members of the societies in which they live. European natives must appreciate what an accomplishment it is for people to become functioning members of societies radically different from the ones in which they were born. Those who do make the adjustment successfully deserve the utmost respect. To persist in calling them immigrants after they have been living and working in a country for years (and, even more outrageously, to use the same word to describe their European-born children and grandchildren) is not only offensive and insulting but staggeringly counterproductive.
As for those who, after a period in the West, make it obvious that they are unwilling or unable to adapt, they must be sent home and replaced by deserving individuals who can adapt. This may appear extreme, but there is no reasonable alternative. For at stake in all this, ultimately, are the basic freedoms of all Westerners–not only women and homosexuals, but everyone, including Muslims and former Muslims who wish to live in a place where they can be themselves. At stake, indeed, is Western civilization.
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