Some thoughts from Georgie Anne Geyer on the inability of Europe to assimilate its Muslim immigrants:
Western terrorists
The ugly roots of colonialism
Georgie Anne Geyer, a syndicated columnist based in Washington: Universal Press Syndicate
Published July 22, 2005
WASHINGTON -- There is plenty of blame going around these days for the horrific London bombings. A small minority criticizes London authorities for not expecting the attacks. Even many tolerant Brits are saying the British Muslim community should have been more watchful. The vast majority, of course, rightly blames the perpetrators, the young Muslim radicals who refer to London as "Londonistan."
But there is one group that is almost escaping censure--and it was this group that deliberately and self-righteously set the stage for the bombings: the sweet, well-meaning, all-knowing liberal multiculturalists who came out of the 1960s youth rebellion and played upon the goodness of both British and American societies to let just about anybody immigrate into the painfully developed polities of their nations.
The multiculturalists, who came to dominate Anglo universities on both sides of the Atlantic, believed that there were no differences between men. Essentially, they denied culture and memory. Man was a cipher, a creature who could be won over by goodness and live happily ever after.
There had been conservative, loyal Pakistani immigrants living peacefully in England since the 1960s. But it was in the earthshaking '90s--after the fall of the Soviet Union, after the presumed Muslim defeat of the Russians in Afghanistan, and after Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini's "fatwa" to urge Muslims, even in Britain, to kill writer Salman Rushdie--that it became clear that this new generation of Muslims was not flocking to England to become English, but rather to impose their philosophy on England.
Meanwhile, the British government, again in the humane interest of providing exile and asylum for the hunted of the world, allowed Arab dissident groups, many of them radical fundamentalists expelled from their own countries, to set up shop in London. From there, they were free to broadcast and to propagate their radical ideas. Let the Saudis, the Tunisians, the Algerians, the Egyptians complain; England was the home of the free.
One of these cases I know quite well. This is the case of Rachid Ghannouchi, a radical Islamist who burst upon the moderate Tunisian scene in the '80s after traveling to Albania. There he inexplicably fell in love with the vicious and barbaric Albanian communism and formed the fundamentalist Nahda party among the secret Islamist organizations in Tunisia. Among other things, these groups had organized a supersecret "Special Apparatus" of intelligence and assassination that would carry out the coups and killings of heretics.
His group had the right to run for office, but instead they tried to assassinate the president and burned to death several policemen. Nahda was finished in tolerant and progressive Tunisia; so Ghannouchi fled to London, where he lives today, still organizing against his country's rapidly developing people. Curiously, the English have allowed him to have a satellite to broadcast to Tunisia but have denied moderate Tunisians the same right.
But there is more.
I spoke by phone with Karen Armstrong, a brilliant Islamic scholar and author of "Islam: A Short History." From London, she stressed that "all of this should have been expected, but our security people of the '90s were thinking only of the Irish problem. What we are seeing now is the ongoing story of colonialism. These young men are only coming here because of the regimes that we left behind. Colonialism didn't finish when we came home, you see. They are now continuing it here--it is really a new kind of nationalism."
Then take the instructive case of the Netherlands. During the late 1980s and early '90s, there was the wondrous multicultural love story: All the Dutch Antilleans and Middle Easterners who were coming would fit right in, enrich the community, become magically "Dutch." The news media and politicians were socially forbidden from speaking of any problems with immigration or assimilation. The Dutch, now not quite so sure of themselves, have decided that new immigrants must have two months of Dutch language and history training.
None of it worked. Today, the country is filled with young men from the Rif Mountains of Morocco. They are mostly illiterate and, seeing Holland as a decadent society, have formed a hostile "parallel society."
European countries are now clamoring for immigrants to be assimilated. It's too late, and it's their own fault. The Europeans never even asked anything of the immigrants: not personal respect, not reverence for the new country, not promises to fulfill the duties of citizenship.
Europe can still do something about all of this, and attempts to deal more deftly with moderate Muslims in London represent one step. But until the Europeans understand what they did in those years--and why they did it--this sad story will only repeat itself.
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E-mail: gigi(underscore)geyer@juno.com
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