The Republic of Dissent

Mark Steyn, god of vile things

Mark Steyn shows that ignorance isn't bliss and can be as vile as it is dangerous when it is used to comfort one in his delusion that he is both a visionary and a truth-teller (h/t: David Thompson):

Most times in today’s Europe, the guys beating, burning and killing Jews will be Muslims. Once in a while, it will be somebody else killing the schoolkids. But is it so hard to acknowledge that rapid, transformative, mass Muslim immigration might not be the most obvious aid to social tranquility? That it might possibly pose challenges that would otherwise not have existed — for uncovered women in Oslo, for gays in Amsterdam, for Jews everywhere? Is it so difficult to wonder if, for these and other groups living in a long-shot social experiment devised by their rulers, the price of putting an Islamic crescent in the diversity quilt might be too high? What’s left of Jewish life in Europe is being extinguished remorselessly, one vandalized cemetery, one subway attack at a time. How many Jewish children will be at that school in Toulouse a decade hence? A society that becomes more Muslim eventually becomes less everything else. What is happening on the Continent is tragic, in part because it was entirely unnecessary.

To quote André Breton, l'homme fait un état risible de ce qu'il croit savoir.

Steyn seems not to know(he probably doesn't for reality is meaningless to him) that France has had a president, Sarkozy, for the last five years, who would agree with him and has been ruled by the right since 2002. Of course, as with all fear-mongers and fanatics, the goal is to keep the fear alive because it enables them to remain irrational and hateful.

Illegal immigration and America's interventionism

I agree with Jeremy Harding on this:

The battle against illegal migration is a domestic version of America’s interventions overseas, with many of the same trappings: big manpower commitments, militarisation, pursuit, detection, rendition, loss of life. The Mexican border was already the focus of attention before 9/11; it is now a fixation that shows no signs of abating even as Obama draws down the numbers abroad. Despite war-weariness at home, war has remained the model for curbing illegal immigration; territorial integrity and the preservation of national identity are the goals. Unlike the invasion of Iraq, this is a respectable struggle – all nation states assert the right to secure borders. Yet watertight security is becoming harder to achieve as the global era brings new pressures to bear on the frontier, adding to the older challenge posed by people wishing to move freely. At fortified boundaries, frailty lurks beneath the show of strength.

Most people who are obsessed with illegal immigration want the issue not the solutions for talking about it enables them to talk about an America that either never existed or that is far gone. Illegal immigration is an issue about identity, about the fear of being invaded by others who not only are different, but savages for they don't have any manners or are not cultured for they didn't even have the decency to knock on the door before starting to make themselves at home.

The hot exchange between Perry and Romney (I like Romney, I always have, he reminds me of my sister's dog Blackie which I like as much I can- because it just wants so much to be loved- in spite of the fact that I am not an animal lover.  I just don't want to hear him tell me how I should live my life and that I should keep my baby if I become pregnant) in the Las Vegas Debate last night told us everything: illegal immigration to true believers isn't a law enforcement, but an identity issue.

Gaddafi as the EU's bastard

Interesting point from Nathalie Rothschild,which I admit makes all warm and fuzzy:

In fact, the EU’s fear of unregulated migration has been a trump card for Gaddafi. Assuaging this EU fear has been a way for the Libyan leader to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of the West after years of ostracisation. At the same time, threats to close and open borders have become a way for Gaddafi to hold the West to ransom, as he threatens to block trade deals or relax border controls unless Europe meets his demands. So it is not surprising that Gaddafi gave European nations the ultimatum of distancing themselves from the pro-democracy protesters or facing the supposed opening of the immigration floodgates from Africa. This is a real worry for the EU, which preaches about the virtues of democracy and human rights yet which has no interest in defending freedom of movement.
As we have seen with recent events in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere, when people get a taste for freedom there’s no telling what they’ll do to achieve it.

When I was young, I thought at least that Gaddafi (Gadhafi, Khadafi) had presence, now he is just a caricature of the man he once was, even though it was always a bastard,  but bastards with presence can be inspiring leaders to the blind.

Welcome failure

I agree with Paul Sagar on this:

When Merkel declares that multiculturalism has been a “failure”, she is not only playing to a xenophobic and reactionary gallery, she is also being profoundly short-sighted. Firstly, because she mistakenly focuses only on the day-to-day tensions between different groups that multiculturalism inevitable throws up.

It's incredibly disappointing to realize that Merkel has some Sarkozy within her, which says a lot about the state of the European left for it cannot address issues such as the ones of immigration or law and order without repeating either the errors of Blairism or of Jospinism.

Conditional American citizenship

I'm appalled by this line of argument from Peter Schuck:

Revoking citizenship merely for being a member of al Qaeda or giving it material support (both criminal acts) would present a harder question, as would rendering a person stateless. The Constitution rightly protects the citizenship of law-abiding and criminal citizens alike against a government that seeks to exile them. Although loyalty is basic to citizenship, we don't make native-born citizens affirm it. We do require affirmation of loyalty in the naturalization oath, but that is a different context. Requiring loyalty oaths otherwise may infringe First Amendment rights to dissent or to remain silent.
Drawing these lines will be difficult. Yet public fears of citizen-launched terrorism make this task inescapable and will test our conception of both citizenship and the Constitution.

Just suggesting that people who have acquired American citizenship can lose it if they are terrorists makes naturalized citizens second class citizens who always have to prove that they love America more than born Americans. The fact that the question of stripping the American citizens from born Americans when they do something that shames America or threatens its existence or the lives of its citizens is taken seriously by scholars as renowned as Schuck show that for too many people Americanness is not about nationality, but about some imaginary pure and stagnant identity. In short, Peter Schuck and the others who want to revoke the American citizens of Faisal Shahzad are legitimating the point of view of the birthers and the ones who believe that some people can never become real Americans despite of their citizenship or should away be looked with suspicion because they are potential threat to America.

Kenneth Anderson has another take on the issue so does Kevin Jon Heller.

Cinco de Mayo and the American Flag

Original take from Professor Bainbridge on the controversy about High School Kids who wore American flags on Cinco de Mayo:

(...)When I was growing up, it was generally regarded as a serious social faux pas to wear orange on St Patrick's Day even if you were descended from Ulster Protestants. It was something you just didn't do. Wearing US flag clothing on Cinco de Mayo is the modern equivalent of wearing range on St Patrick's Day. (...)When I was growing up, you treated the US flag with respect. You didn't make clothing out of it.  Indeed, Section 176 of 36 US Code provides rules for respect of the flag, which includes the following: "(d) The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery" and "(j) No part of the flag should ever be used as a costume or athletic uniform." So the kids were not only disrespecting their fellow Hispanic students, they were also disrespecting the flag.

I agree with Bainbridge. Nevertheless, it is my contention that although the whole Cinco de Mayo Flap was much to do about nothing, it is another indication that America just like Europe (as the Brit election showed) no longer knows what to do about Immigration because it is undergoing a identity crisis due to the fact that its politics are relying solely on the erroneous belief that identities and cultures are stable, never evolve and more importantly define a country and its citizens.

Demography and political power

Sunny's advice over at Pickled politics on the ways for minorities to have more power in a liberal democracy:

After a while the race and the religion doesn’t even matter: it comes down to numbers. If your numbers or clout is large enough then the establishment will pay lip service. Perhaps the mistake Latinos in the US made was to tilt too far towards the Democrats… removing the Republican incentive to avoid pissing them off. Although it looks like Republicans are paying the price already.
Perhaps what I’m trying to say is that the only way a minority can get over the bigotry is either by expanding in large numbers, or getting very close to the establishment. 

There are two major implications of Sunny's advice and both of them bug them. The first is of course that it is acceptable to view having children as a means to an end, especially a political end. Children, thus become little things to enlarge a group giving them limited room to acquire an individuality. The second implication is that identity politics is so supreme that women should see as their mission to expand the numbers of their group by having more children. Women who are part of the minority group thus become essentially breeders since the objective is to have little ones to make their 'people' more powerful. How disturbing !

Immigration as a losing political issue

I agree with Bill Richardson, New Mexico Governor on this:

When immigration is an issue, nobody wins. (...) for Democrats to pass immigration reform before November, party leaders would have to force members from conservative-leaning districts to cast yet another tough vote that could raise the ire of swing voters. But Republicans face longer-term peril — if they continue to push aggressive legislation cracking down on illegal immigrants, Hispanic voters are likely to continue their exodus to the Democratic Party. 

The point is that immigration when it is solely a political issue is rarely about realities, but about fantasies and fears that policies can only address by being as radical as the Arizona Immigration bill without resolving the issue, but by being harsh to give the public that their fears are being taken seriously.

The implausibility of Eurabia

Riveting stuff from Eric Kaufmann on Europe and the unlikelihood for it to have a Muslim majority in the next two centuries:

I don’t foresee a Muslim-majority Europe in this century or in the next. Why? Mainly because Muslim birthrates are plunging both in Europe and the Muslim world. Already, Iran, Tunisia, Turkey, Azerbaijan and several other Muslim countries have replacement-level fertility or below. In the UK, Bangladeshi and Pakistani fertility has halved in a generation and is now under 3 children per woman. This means their long-term growth will begin to tail off. The other part of the equation is the rise of non-Muslim immigrant groups (African and West Indian Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and other Eastern faiths) who are also increasing and therefore making Europe more plural and, in the process, rendering it harder for Muslims to increase their share of the population.

I'm not sure that this information will reassure either Mark Steyn or Christopher Caldwell because their belief in Eurabia has become a question of faith and history shows that it is fruitless to reason with the fanatics.

Immigration and prosperity

Interesting point from Alex Massie on the issue of immigration and the British election:

Immigration is one of the reasons why, despite everything, the United States' long-term position is likely to be healthier than, say, Japan's. In the British context this does indeed mean this small island is going to have to become more crowded. And there will be costs associated with that.

This isn't a good argument (it may not be meant to be) for immigration. iI presents it as the sole way to achieve long term prosperity and therefore dehumanizes immigrants by giving them the requirement/the j.o.b to be as useful as cattle. Telling people that they have no alternative than to accept immigrants in their country may be true, but it encourages tensions, clashes and the tendency to judge the value of an immigrant solely in economic terms while requiring her/him to do her/his job and to shut up.

Curry as the positive aspect of immigration

Here is Nick Griffin's answer, the Chief of Britain far right party, the BNP the British National Party)  to put things mildly, to the question put to me by Iain Dale about the positive side of immigration:

Well, a wide range of curries is a plus. But there again, I've got the recipes.

I'm not appalled, just reassured that I'm right not to take Griffin seriously for he reminds me of Ann Coulter. He has a backbone or a little bit of political culture, he would have put things differently, Neither Geert Wilders nor Jean-Marie Le Pen, who are as far right as Nick Griffin, would have given that answer. In short, Nick Griffin is a clown.

Niqab and normality

Telling anecdote from Lysiane Gagnon:

A reporter from La Presse spent two days walking around Montreal dressed like a fundamentalist Muslim, with a long black robe and a niqab that covered everything but her eyes, but in most places – in the Metro, fast-food restaurants or on the streets – she went rather unnoticed and was not subjected to any aggressive reaction, except a few hard glances.

Is it possible that the debate about the niqab/burqa/burka/islamic veil isn't about the niqab/burqa/burka/islamic veil but about something else?

Marshmallow multiculturalism

Sugary excerpt from Les Perraux's essential article on the different perceptions in Québec and the rest of Canada on the burka/burqa/niqab and what it says about Canada's brand of multiculturalism:

Prominent Quebeckers known for promoting equality, including Mr. Taylor, Mr. Bouchard and Ms. McAndrew, argued the gender segregation that comes with the niqab – along the practical barrier of a covered mouth – was too much to expect from a provincial Immigration Ministry class designed to teach spoken French and help integration.
In the rest of Canada, it was often the mainstream view in Quebec that was shunned.
One Toronto television commentator linked Quebec's fertility subsidies to the banishment of Ms. Ahmed – a barely disguised suggestion that Quebec wants women to be uneducated and pregnant.
Ms. McAndrew argues Canadians looking down on Quebec should consider why debate seems impossible outside the province.
“Public debate in Quebec is vigorous, and the level of the debate is complex. On diversity, the debate is very poor in Canada. It's marshmallow multiculturalism. You're okay, I'm okay,” she said.
“It's tolerance, but it's very soft and will face its own challenges at some point.”

Having addressed this issue several times, I have no doubt that it isn't going to go away because Québec is not going to give up its own views of secularism and integration to please the rest of Canada,. However, the key issue is being ignored in this debate and that is the state shouldn't have the right, any more than religious figures or anybody else, to tell women how to dress and to tell them that they defined by their body and how they present it. Anything else about gender discrimination and equality is gibberish designed  to mask a totalitarian view of gender with popular and seemingly modern principles.

Multiculturalism and diversity

Kenan Malik on the differences between multiculturalism and diversity:

The irony of multiculturalism as a political process is that it undermines much of what is valuable about diversity as lived experience. When we talk about diversity, what we mean is that the world is a messy place, full of clashes and conflicts. That's all for the good, for such clashes and conflicts are the stuff of political and cultural engagement.
(...)Multiculturalism, on the other hand, by reposing political problems in terms of culture or faith, transforms political conflicts into a form that makes them neither useful nor resolvable. Rather than ask, for instance, "What are the social roots of racism and what structural changes are required to combat it?" it demands recognition for one's particular identity, public affirmation of one's cultural difference and respect and tolerance for one's cultural and faith beliefs.
Multicultural policies have come to be seen as a means of empowering minority communities and giving them a voice. In reality such policies have empowered not individuals but "community leaders" who owe their position and influence largely to their relationship with the state. Multicultural policies tend to treat minority communities as homogenous wholes, ignoring class, religious, gender and other differences, and leaving many within those communities feeling misrepresented and, indeed, disenfranchised.

Britain's brand of multiculturalism has failed because it placed at its center the cult of diversity and thus sacralized differences in the name of culture and of religion making moral judgments difficult and segregation/sectarianism unavoidable. I'm uncomfortable with drawing sharp distinctions between Britain's multiculturalism and diversity because  in the mind of too many those two concepts have merged. Nowadays, people who argues fanatically for diversity are in fact doing so  by categorizing people, by hierarchizing particularities, and thus deciding which ones ought to more important than others. The trouble with both multiculturalism and diversity as they are commonly understood is that they lead to desindividualization. People are forced to identity with a group of people in order to matter and to avoid marginalization because identity politics is the most potent form of politics.
To put things more simply, the only acceptable multicultural society is one, which sees that people as individuals, not as member of a group/community/whatever else and recognizes that culture and particularities are never legitimate justifications for the erosion of the social compact and the unjustifiable.

Niqab, assimilation, integration, Québec, Canada,

Interesting: explanation of the different visions that Québec and Canada have on the Niqab, and more importantly on integration:

(...) English Canada embraces a multiculturalist ideal: Come to Canada, and bring your differences with you. In French Canada, you can have your differences, “but please do become a Quebecker.”
Quebec's francophone majority identifies itself as a fragile minority that must be ever vigilant against cultural erosion. In that context, collective rights often outweigh individual ones, especially when it comes to language or schooling. Quebec, like France, is also fiercely devoted to secularism. “We've had a long and painful struggle with the place of religion in this society, and a lot of people feel strongly about the separation of church and state,” says Mr. Lagacé.
The Quebec-English differences over immigration and integration echo those between France and Britain. France is contemplating a ban on the burka and niqab. In Britain, any politician who'd dare suggest such a thing would be denounced as a fascist.
In English Canada, provincial government officials are only too eager to distance themselves from intolerant Quebec. “We are an open Ontario,” said a spokeswoman for that province's immigration minister. “In Nova Scotia, people have a right to express themselves any way they wish around their faith,” its immigration minister said.

It makes sense that Québec would want its immigrants to assimilate in order to be Quebeckers first to increase its population and strengthen its special minority status within Canada and  Canadian second. The issue is whether it is framing the issue the right way and fighting the right battles. The problem is that these differences that exist within Canada are going to be increasingly difficult to coexist within the same country because they are based on very different visions of society and hierarchy of fundamentals value. The whole niqab episode has shown that even the politicians of Québec don't fully know how immigrants can become 'good ' Québécois, but they know what their fears are, which explains why the focus has been placed on the usual and weakest subjects: visibly "different" women.

Aura popularis

Quote of the day from Naema Ahmed, the student who was asked to choose between wearing the niqab and going to class to learn French in Quebec:

It wasn't fair for them to ask me to leave the exam. (...) I feel like the government is following me everywhere.(...) I'll just stay in my house. This will solve the problem.

The Islamic republic of Canada ?!

Lysiane Gagnon on the recent expulsion from a French class in Quebec of an Egyptian immigrant who was wearing the Niqab:

In Quebec, most agreed with the decision to expel the niqab-wearing woman, including constitutional lawyer Julius Grey, who has defended the right of inmates to smoke in prison and the right of Sikh students to wear ceremonial daggers in class. “Accommodation should not lead to separation,” he said.
Yolande Geadah, an Egyptian-born writer, said: “There is no possible compromise with people with such inflexible attitudes.” Raheel Raza, a Pakistani-born Muslim women's rights activist, said: “When we come to Canada, we're not coming to the Islamic Republic of Canada.”
The irony is that, last fall, Egypt's top Islamic cleric said students and teachers at Cairo's Al-Azhar University would not be allowed to wear face veils in classrooms and dorms on the grounds they had “nothing to do with Islam.” The education ministry later barred the niqab during exams, to prevent students from sending others to take the tests. Although an Egyptian court subsequently ordered a stay on the Al-Azhar ban and overturned the education ministry's decision, we have to ask ourselves: Should Canadian colleges be more tolerant of Islamic fundamentalism than Cairo's universities?

Wow, in what world do we live in to make the argument that a woman becomes dangerous and infectious because of what she wears? And how convincing is it for Lysiane Gagnon to argue that Canada must be as open on the so-called woman's issues as Egyptians?  Did I miss a big part of this movie not to be able to understand why the body of a woman can never be fully their own, but an instrument to make either a political or a religious point? I'm forced to realize that Islamists and feminists agree on at least a central issue : a woman is what she wears.

Geert Wilders as a freedom fighter

Toby Young, my favorite judge of Top Chef, defends Geert Wilders in the Daily Telegraph by arguing that he is a freedom of speech warrior:

are the Dutch people just fed up with being told they’re not allowed to criticise Muslim extremists because to do so is “Islamophobic”? As a defender of free speech, I don’t believe for one moment that the Koran ought to be banned. But if I was a member of the Dutch electorate I would vote for Geert Wilders’ party nonetheless because I don’t think he deserves to go to jail for 16 months just for arguing that it should.
Wilders doesn’t really want to ban the Koran, of course. It’s a theatrical gesture — a situationist move — designed to underline the absurdity of trying to limit freedom of speech on the grounds that certain words or phrases or images might move people to violence. What Wilders is saying is that if you believe the critics of Muslim extremism should be silenced because their words might incite religious hatred, then, logically, you ought to ban the Koran on the same grounds. It’s not a serious suggestion, so much as a reductio ad absurdum of a completely untenable, illiberal position.

It is for precisely this reason that I have always believed that European countries are wrong to attempt to censor what they consider to be hate speech or speech denying certain historical events such as the Shoah. Hate-speech laws or any other laws that try to limit free speech based on its content always make the extremist the victim. Moreover, they force people such as Toby Young who likes to provoke and who believe that freedom of speech is the most sacred of values to defend Geert Wilders without seeking to see behind the trees. Guided by his orthodoxy about free speech,  Young is convinced that Wilders can only be right because that it is always absolutely unjust to try to shut somebody hate because society doesn't like what he is saying or finds it too distasteful. It isn't an erroneous positon to take, just a limited and an absurd one because the conclusion seems to be that victims of censorship are always and absolutely right or rather they cannot be right or even extremist.

Deconstructing Geert Wilders

The Daily Telegraph has a portrait of Geert Wilders, the Dutch far-right politician whose party is calling for the stop of the Islamization of the Netherlands and increasing its popularity with that message. Sugary excerpt:

Wilders describes his far-Right label as "nonsense".
"My supporters say: 'At last there is someone who dares to say what millions of people think'. That is what I do," Wilders said before the European elections last year, in which the PVV took four of the 25 Dutch seats.
"People are fed up with the government; the leftist elite that has failed them," said Wilders.
(,,,).Arguing that "Islam is the Netherlands' biggest problem," Wilders has urged parliament to ban the Koran, comparing it with Hitler's "Mein Kampf."
He also wants a total ban on the burqa as well as a halt to immigration from Muslim countries and the construction of mosques in the Netherlands.
He is awaiting a hate speech trial trial at home and was barred from entering Britain last year to stop him spreading "hatred and violent messages."
"I want to defend freedom, which I think will disappear into thin air the moment the Islamic ideology gains a stronger foothold on this country," Wilders, who is married to a Hungarian, told AFP.

I'm not alarmed by the ascension of Geert Wilders because his ascension and his views are not new in Europe, Extremism, both on the left and the right, tends to rise everywhere especially in times when there is so economic, social, and political distress, which none of the "legitimate" parties seem to be able to address to the satisfaction of an increasingly impatient and radicalized electorate. One only has to analyze the short, but tumultuous and tragic political career of  Pim Portuyn in the Netherlands or even the long and flashy one of Jean-Marie Le Pen to realize that politicians such as Wilders are always very opportunistic, but that they are rarely able to leave any serious political marks or even to ascend to power without cleaning up their message or at least expanding because soon or later two things happen. The first is that their message is co-opted by other political parties who start to pay attention and to realize that they must find less "intolerant" ways to deal with the concerns of the voters who may be unsavory, but are very real. Sarkozy did it very effectively in 2007 and beat Le Pen at his own. The second thing that happens when politicians such as Geert Wilders are actually very good at politics or very ambitious is that soon or later, they come to the realization that they have to widen their message and that Islamization or any other message exploiting the fear of others and of unwelcome change is not enough to be more than a pestilent gadfly.
For these reasons, what I'm really wonder is whether Wilders is ever going to be willing to form a coalition with other Dutch parties of the right if his party becomes a political force or whether he will be content to remain on the margins believing that the system will collapse. I'm also wondering what is Ayaan Hirsi Ali's opinion of Geert Wilders.

The French's favored fear

I agree with Patrice de Beer this:

(...) the burqa (like the hijab before it) may be less a genuinely important issue in France than a blanket shrouding more fundamental problems - ones that that French society is unable or unwilling to solve.
There are, after all, other ways of addressing the realities of disaffection and refusal of which such Islamic symbols are seen as the expression (...). If, for example, more serious measures were undertaken to ease the integration into French society of young people of non-European origin (many of them Muslim); if an invisible (and often visible) “glass ceiling” that blocks their access to jobs they are qualified for were lifted; if there were more non-white business executives, top civil servants, or MPs elected from within metropolitan France (at present there is just one in this category). So often, politicians (especially but not only from the government side) prefer to pre-empt criticism for their inaction in such areas by projecting blame for France’s defects onto outsiders/immigrants/others (and Muslims above all).

Technology and the immigrant

Aleksandar Hemon's pertinent words on the effects that technology has on immigration and more specifically on the immigrants:

I think technology has a neutral value at best; it could be used for good things or bad things. I think it fundamentally changes the situation of assimilation or participation in society. Because you can stay in touch daily with wherever you came from and you can listen to live broadcasts of radio stations or the prayers from the mosques or read daily newspapers, complete with obituaries online. I met a guy in St. Louis, a city that has the largest Bosnian population [in America], who, when he got nostalgic would get on the Web and watch snow fall in Sarajevo.
Ellis Island immigrants, on the other hand, would come in, work hard, be exploited, make it or not make it but even those who made it would go back thirty to forty years later to the village of their origin and they would find that one or two people remembered them. So it was easy to sever connections, and in some ways it was natural: your life was here, your old life was there. But I know a large number of Bosnians in Chicago who send their kids to Bosnia over the summer—school’s over, they send them to Grandma. These kids are bilingual, bicultural. Displacement is not necessarily political. You can go back and forth. Transportation has become relatively cheap. Masses of people are moving around the world: immigrants, refugees, labor migrants. It’s an entirely different world.

I'm wondering whether technology isn't just a tool that is reflecting that the fact that immigration has changed because the world has gotten smaller and also that at the same time, it has become more fragmented. Immigrants when they move to a new country no longer leave everything behind; to the contrary, they are able more often than not to live within  a community of their compatriots that has recreated its home environment a best as it could. Globalization may have compressed both time and space, it has made people less willing to change their identities or adapt their culture for those have become too sacred to touch.

Europe and the fear of the clash

Great article in the Boston Review from John R. Bowen refuting the arguments of those who argue that Europe is becoming Eurabia and that it has everything to fear from its increasing "Muslim population." It is a must-read; here is a sugary excerpt:

Some Islamophobes claim that differences in civilization and religion between Islam and Europe will last because a fast-growing Muslim population is poised to take over European cities and establish political control in the name of a global ummah. This argument disputes the notion that Muslim immigrants (and, a fortiori, their children) will do what most immigrants do: adapt. To the contrary, the argument says, multiculturalist—as opposed to assimilationist—policies isolated Muslims just as ummah TV was reaching youth with calls for jihad, and the new generations will continue to be motivated by radical Islam in all areas of their lives: as they plan families, build schools, and riot, all with Islamic political victory as their goal.
(...)In creating sharia councils, British Muslims began to look “separatist,” and some do call for greater authority for sharia mediation. Against that British institutional background, a good number of younger Muslims call for governance “by sharia,” whatever that might mean. French Muslims began to look “corporatist,” as national organizations sought control over local mosque financing; everyone—Muslims included—calls for laïcité (secularity) to be applied equally. Throughout Europe, some Muslims developed ties with transnational groups: intellectual ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, spiritual ones with West African Sufi orders, financial ones with Gulf sheikhs.

In other words, these Islamic political actors have adapted to national opportunity structures with more or less success: more in the cases of British, French, and Belgian Muslims, less in the cases of German, Dutch, and Swedish ones. The organizing that ostensibly proves Islamism is on the rise in fact shows that these immigrants are following the examples of their predecessors. Like Catholics and Jews before them, Muslims build religious schools and associations—usually with external financial aid—and get involved in elections. (...)  Muslims are adapting like everyone else and are divided like everyone else.

French Halal Burgers

Charles Bremner analyzes the polemic created by the decision of Quick, a chain of fast-food in France, to sell Halal burgers in order to cater to observant Muslims:

The burger fuss is of course just the latest manifestation of anxiety over what is perceived to be an assertive Muslim population. The sense of threat lies behind the popular steps to outlaw the full Muslim veil on transport, universities and other state-run services. It also fuelled Sarkozy's four-month great national debate on the nature of French identity. The exercise was called off this month after focusing only the six-million Muslims in France's midst.
(...) The opponents of Quick fastfood and Muslim veils draw on high-minded principles which go back to the equality of the 1789 Revolution and the Republic's more recent principle of laicité, the strict separation of religion from public life.

These "valeurs de la République" are cited by leftists and intellectuals as well as rightwing politicians to deplore the more visible practices of Islam. The argument is that religious behaviour outside the mainstream culture amounts to an act of separateness and should be discouraged (For the ideal of the mainstream, see yesterday's post on white Marianne, symbol of the Revolution). By setting themselves apart from traditional French life, Muslims are being "identitaire" and committing "communautarisme". Equivalent to sectarianism, this means putting one's ethnic or religious identity ahead of Frenchness.
Britain and the United States, with their supposed ghettos, are seen as examples of the ill. Anne Fulda commenting in today's Le Figaro, complained that France has imported communautarisme from the United States along with hamburgers and now it is too late to stop it. 
The problem is that the sin of communautarisme has a flexible definition. That is what makes it dubious when applied to Muslims. With France's record in world war two, no-one would publicly accuse the Jewish population of communautarisme, let alone complain to prosecutors. No-one protests against kosher restaurants -- or says Chinese or Italian ones discriminate because they do not offer French cuisine. Try substituting kosher for halal in the complaints over Quick burgers and the effect is offensive.

One of the problems is that France has already americanized on the question of race, religion, and society for it is indeed ghettorized. There are parts of Paris, Marseilles, or Lyon where only members of a "community" and where they do so trying to recreate not only the atmosphere, but the norms of the place that they or their parents left behind. At the crux of the issue is that France no longer has a workable integration model and that instead of accepting and creating a new one, the French elites and bien pensants are improvising according to their ideology, which means either importing parts of the American/British model or trying the impossible by reverting to the "assimilating" one that worked when there were no visible differences between new and old France. It is for that reason that I am one of the very few people who regret that the debate on French identity was a failure. I had believed that it could have been useful not in defining what it means to be French, but to find common ground on the limits of tolerance and at the very least to make once again essential the principle that not citizenship is about both rights and inescapable obligations.

Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, and a piece of clothing

I have been waiting impatiently for Ian Buruma’s take on the French and the burqa. Here it is:

One could take the view that national governments should enforce laws, but not values. But, whereas most democracies are less prone than the French Republic is to impose "national values" on their citizens, the law cannot be totally divorced from shared values either. The fact that Europeans can marry only one spouse is both a legal and a cultural norm. And views on sexual, gender, and racial discrimination, which change with time, are reflected in the laws as well.

On the whole, individual practices, as long as they do no harm to others, should be allowed, even if many people don't particularly like them. It may be undesirable to have people who carry out public functions judges, teachers, or policewomen, for example cover up their faces. But one can impose dress codes for certain jobs, without banning a type of clothing for everyone. After all, we don't have judges and teachers wearing bikinis on the job, either.

There is another, practical, reason why the burqa ban is a bad idea. If we are serious about integrating immigrants into western societies, they should be encouraged to move around in public as much as possible. Banning the burqa would force this tiny minority of women to stay at home, and be even more dependent on their men to deal with the outside world.

So what should be done about practices that are judged to be illiberal, if we don't ban them? Sometimes it is better to do nothing. Living with values that one does not share is a price to be paid for living in a pluralist society.   

I have to say that I'm a bit disappointed with Buruma's take for he uses a lot of mambo jumbo when he should be saying that a society whose slogan is Liberté, Egalité et Fraternité cannot focus on the burqa and ban it especially when wearing it can be a choice, one made knowingly by somebody comfortable with submission or whatever else. In other words,  picking on the way women dress is a reinforcement of the view that they are not  equals to men for afterwards, is there any men’s wear that any government on earth would even entertaining banning by arguing that it symbolizes something? There is none and that is simply because it is accepted that men are individuals and that how they dress  is their business as long as they don’t expose their “best friend.”

America, Canada and melting pots

Sugary excerpt of the day from Nav Purewal's fascinating article in the Walrus:

Canada’s kaleidoscopic shards form a culture more overtly variegated than America’s comparatively homogeneous stew, but they also elide both nations’ colonial pasts, a history that has particularly important implications for Canada’s complicated approaches to assimilation. The truism that everyone here came from somewhere else obliquely acknowledges that English and French imperialism supplanted existing cultures.
Modern Canada is as much a palimpsest as a mosaic, a truth perhaps engrained somewhere in our national consciousness — and one that manifests itself in two divergent traditions of immigrant assimilation. In English Canada, the fraught legacy of cultural imperialism — whether the slaughter of native tribes or the injustice of residential schools — results in a reluctance to impose a uniform Canadian culture on newcomers; whereas Quebec, ever afraid of diluting its francophone heritage, demands that immigrants conform to an atavistic conception of French-Canadian culture.

I am wondering whether both America and Canada integration's models are adaptable and suitable for any other country. I have the suspicion that that the answer is no and these variation of the melting pot model, which in fact lead to fractured societies made of communities (which can cohabit without "mixing" given the size of those countries),but which are in fact legitimated and thus, reinforced by the State (s). The most interesting question has to be whether those  models are sustainable. At the time, when analysts such as Bruce Bawer, Christophe Caldwell and Mark Steyn are making loud (and disturbing) noises about the end of Europe as we know to put things more tastefully, I wonder if they should look at America and Canada and wonder what might happen if the communities that form their societies stop having common interest and a share of the apple pie. In other words, what happens when American and Canada become even more unequal, and more "varied societies." Implicitly, I'm suggesting here that identity matters less in wealthy and prospering countries where the poor, and minorities feel that they have a shoot to reach the mountain top. This might suggest that Canada because it is a "fairer" society (one where welfare  and universal healthcare are not fighting words) might face great of an identity crisis than America. Unfortunately, literature doesn't have the answer to that question. 

The perpetual identity question

Agnès Poirier on what it means to French:

Eric Cantona didn't pull his punches when asked about the national debate: "They talk of the Marseillaise, of the French language, but politicians are asses. To be French is to be revolutionary and refusing all this politicking crap."
Precisely. Historical events have shaped the French mindset more than any debates will. The struggle of the French revolutionaries and the first republic up in arms against all the monarchies of the continent was the start of a profound shake-up and national identity construction. The Napoleonic setback and royalist restorations throughout the 19th century sharpened the minds, created deep national divisions, but also prepared for the glorious revolutionary episodes of the second republic (1848-1852) and the Commune (1870). The Franco-Prussian war, the Dreyfus affair, the Third Republic, the law of separation of church and state, followed by the two world wars, Vichy, the Résistance, the Algerian war and decolonisation at large made France as we have known it to be: confrontational, contradictory, unruly, restless, but also profoundly republican and secular.
And let's remember that, according to the National Institute for Demographic Studies, a quarter of the French have at least one grandparent born outside France.

The end of American exceptionalism

I would like to be able to disagree vehemently with Nick Cohen on this, but I cannot because experience has shown me that he is, alas, in part right when he makes the following point although it takes him to another direction than I because I don't make the mistake of confusing a symptom with the disease:

Pride in American exceptionalism ran through Obama's Nobel peace prize acceptance speech. "In many countries, there is a deep ambivalence about military action today," he told his doubtless deeply ambivalent Norwegian audience. "At times, this is joined by a reflexive suspicion of America." He would take no notice of it. "Make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaida's leaders to lay down their arms." Obama drew a map of a pacifist Europe, unwilling to face reality, and a tough-minded but idealist America ready to defend civilisation with "the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms".
Nowhere has American satisfaction with its uniqueness been more noticeable than in the applause it awards itself for its treatment of immigrants. Articles contrasting the success of the US in integrating Muslims against the failures of Britain have been a regular feature of the American press. Liberals emphasised that immigrants who wanted to leave their old identities behind were helped by a constitution and bill of rights that accepted them as equal citizens.
Conservatives claimed that immigrants could not sit resentfully at home living on welfare payments and developing sectarian grievances, as they could in corrupt Europe, but had to find jobs that inevitably brought them into contact with Americans from other cultures.
(...) Depressingly, Americans seem to be as bad as the British are at recognising the differences between Islam and Islamism. They can no longer, however, get away with pretending that Islamism is an un-American disease. Trying to explain the rise of religious hatreds and identity politics, Obama said in Oslo that "given the dizzying pace of globalisation, and the cultural levelling of modernity, it should come as no surprise that people fear the loss of what they cherish about their particular identities", which was true enough in a platitudinous way.
I wonder if he yet understands that Americans are not exempt from the manias of our time and that his formerly special country is not looking so exceptional any more.

Defining national identities

I would like to say amen to these words from Jim Wolfreys on the debate on the definition of Francité (Frenchness) that is occurring in France, but a part of me is resisting it:

At one extreme those who find themselves concentrated in the poorest areas of France do so not out of choice, but through ethnicity and income. Neither Islam nor "ethnic communitarianism" are responsible for such divisions: they are the product of social deprivation and racism. At the other extreme, however, is a section of society that wilfully separates itself from the rest of France. The top 10% of earners choose to live in the most segregated areas of the country, well-heeled districts like Neuilly and St-Cloud on the outskirts of Paris. It is they who have created what Maurin calls "the bourgeois ghetto".
If the present debate is to reassert the historic republican values of liberty, equality and fraternity then government priorities will need to be overturned. The targeting of "illegal" immigrants – Besson aims to deport 27,000 people this year, more than double 2002 levels – focuses attention on a tiny proportion of the population. Likewise, high-profile campaigns to impose a republican dress code on Muslims are a distraction from more fundamental divisions shaping French society, divisions determined less by religion than by poverty, racism and inequality. In France, as in Britain, if debates on citizenship are to involve denouncing the extreme right while pandering to its bugbears, they will only obscure the real issues – and in so doing become part of the problem.

I believe that the trap of any debate on national identity, whether it be French, British, Moroccan, or Nigerian, is to cast it in the terms  Wolfreys is choosing to frame by emphasizing the risks as if nationals of a country should be afraid to define/decide who they are or who they would to be.There is this morbid and unhealthy connection between patriotism, any attempt to show national price and fascism and there is one between any admission that national identity can grow, change or even be redefined drastically with self-hatred, deculturation, Arabization, de-europeanization, and dewesternization.

Cultural cloning

Hum, I'm tempted to agree with Samir Shah on this ( I think his main point can be made about the US, France or any other country dealing with a population, which is diverse and mixed), but it would be too easy and moreover, I have the feeling that he is only offering part of the picture even though it is one, which I find both uplifting and depressing because it leaves open the possibility that race doesn't have to doom the future of a country and to pollute its politics:

The plain truth is that Britain is developing an underclass who share more in common with each other than they do with other members of their own ethnic group. What are these traits? Everyone will have their own theories. But here are mine.
The first impediment to progress is a community’s determination to cling on to elements of their own cultural traditions and ways of life. Parents from certain Muslim groups, for example, have a tendency to bring up their children in such a way that they never interact with members of other cultures — restricting the ability of their children to get ahead. Then take the ‘babyfather’ phenomenon. David Cameron has urged Afro-Caribbean fathers to attend to their parental duties — an issue because half of black children live in lone-parent households, double the ratio of whites. Jack Straw made this point rather well with the surprisingly pithy ‘Lads need Dads’. The need for a father is not specific to children of any race.
If we are to hunt for discrimination in 21st-century Britain, then we should look at other factors that make us different. Each distinguishing feature — class, culture, accent, being Northern — plays a part. For example, in some liberal industries such as the media, being right-wing doesn’t help. But why should this surprise us? The kind of people who make decisions — white, middle-class, metropolitan, liberal, male — all think that the best people for the job are, er, white, liberal, metropolitan, middle-class and male. To describe this phenomenon as ‘institutional racism’ (as many are inclined to do) misses the problem by a country mile.
The real problem is what I call ‘cultural cloning’ — the human tendency to recruit in one’s own image. Recruitment, instead of being about picking the best people, becomes a process of finding people like the ones already there. The overwhelming need for a kind of cultural comfort blanket takes precedence over every other consideration — and rules out those whose backgrounds don’t quite fit. This is what a 21st-century Equalities Commission should have in its sights. Cultural cloning is, in my opinion, the main source of discrimination in Britain today.

It's always about exploitation

Sometimes, in spite of himself and I would say by pure luck if I wanted to be needlessly mean, Nick Cohen gets things almost just right:

According to the received wisdom of our times, we are living through a phenomenal feminist advance. Women have stormed the bastions of male privilege and cracked, if not smashed, the glass ceiling.
But the success of women is based on exploitation of women. The households of privileged families and a large proportion of the middle class could not function without the labour of servants fleeing the Brezhnevian tower blocks of eastern Europe, Asian slums and poverty and oppression the world over. Our social structure would collapse were it not sustained by shadowy legions of women, living outside the law as illegal immigrants or living outside the welfare state in the black economy.
Stern left-wing writers in the 20th century told their readers that their wealth depended on the exploitation of far-flung colonies. Lectures on how our clothes and trainers come from the sweatshops of the east remain a standard of liberal journalism today. But the line between the rich and the poor worlds does not run between north and south or east and west but through British homes, touching the most intimate aspects of family life – the care of children and the happiness of marriages. Small wonder there is a gap between public pronouncements and private behaviour.

Redefining assimilation

I don't fully agree with this, but it just shows that too many feel that integration isn't working, I'm wondering if that perception isn't just based on the sense that there isn't enough pie left to share:

The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argues that the "agony and splendour" of assimilation has come to an end in Europe, both for Jews and other groups. The life and death pressures to homogenise are no longer there. The means of reshaping our identities – through cosmetic surgery, dress, internet personas, photoshop – are accessible to millions. At the same time, as Gabriel Sheffer's work shows, such processes can also be used to maintain the distinctiveness of Diaspora groups, which are not disappearing as many have predicted, again reducing the need to fear cultural oblivion.
We would all be far better off if we took a more relaxed attitude to assimilation. A strong society can accommodate fundamentalist religious groups that want to keep themselves apart from society, as long as they accept the fundamental principle that "the law of the land is the law". And if, for example, Muslim or Jewish groups wish to mitigate the effect of assimilation on the identities of their youth in non-coercive, voluntary ways which are compatible with common values, this too poses no danger to society and can be of mutual positive benefit.

Defining explosive terms

I almost agree totally with this:

I guess what it all comes down to is that when we say we are multicultural, we exaggerate. What does a multicultural country look like? It looks like India -- there are many different languages there spoken by millions and millions of people generation after generation. Different religions practice their creeds without restraint. It doesn't mean they all get along peacefully all the time -- on the contrary, Pakistan exists because they don't. But here's an example of real multiculturalism -- an old man stark naked walking down a sidewalk thronged with people not taking the slightest notice of him. It turns out he was a monk in a small religious sect that does not allow its monks to wear any clothes at all. What would happen if he were walking down a busy street in Toronto? He would be arrested. And he might say to the policeman: "But my culture requires this and Canada is multicultural." The policeman would answer: "Yes we are multicultural and isn't it wonderful. And you're still under arrest."

Integration in Canada and the US

Fascinating...:

The reality is that Canadians talk about multiculturalism but don't practise it. That does not mean we don't embrace diversity. Both Canada and the United States, because of high levels of immigration, are diverse societies, but diversity and multiculturalism are not synonyms. Diversity encompasses a variety of characteristics that differentiate people, including dress, culinary and musical styles. An example is Toronto's hugely successful Caribana festival. Such events are hardly unique to Canada; several major U.S. cities have Caribbean festivals too.
Diversity is not divisive in secular democracies that respect individual freedom, such as Canada and the United States. On the other hand, culture is not just about superficial differences but also about core values. The people who were attending cock fights in Cloverdale simply don't understand our tender feelings toward animals. This is a difference in values and there is no room for compromise.
The notion that Canada is a mosaic while the United States is a melting pot does not survive scrutiny. In 1994, a study by two University of Toronto sociologists, Jeffrey Reitz and Raymond Breton, found that language retention of third-generation immigrants was less than 1 per cent in both countries. This was significant. One would expect foreign languages to dissolve into the American melting pot. But Canada is supposed to be a mosaic: a set of separate and distinct cultural entities. If it really were a mosaic, ancestral languages would survive through the generations. But they don't, because the offspring of immigrants are quickly absorbed into the dominant language milieux of North America.

Distracting fixations

I agree with this:

(...) fixating on conspicuous religious symbols like the turban or burqa does not feel like an effective way to preserve French traditions and identity, especially when it keeps people out of state schools or other public institutions — just the kind of places where I imagine they have opportunities to study and participate in the culture and traditions that are part of a nation’s heritage.

Traveling with a Nigerian passport

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in the Financial Times on the difficulties of Traveling with a Nigerian passport and getting an American visa:

I have many stories of travel on my own Nigerian passport. The immigration official in Copenhagen was convinced I was a prostitute, for example, because there had been a recent influx of Nigerian sex workers into Denmark and I was travelling alone on a Nigerian passport. I have learned to laugh at these stories, and to use them as dinner party anecdotes. Of the people who will potentially interview me at embassies and airports, I always hope that they haven’t fought with their lover that morning, that they don’t have a headache or a bad back or PMS, and that they have never received one of those poorly-spelled bank advance e-mails from a Nigerian pretending to be a government official because in my experience these, even more than whether I have the proper documents, will determine my luck.
Years ago, my mother, who had visited the US in the past, was inexplicably refused an American visa to attend my sister’s wedding; it was not at all likely that the mother of the bride would become a dependant of the American state as she had a good, long-term university job in Nigeria and her daughter worked as a physician in America. Her mouth still tightens whenever she looks at photographs from the wedding.
It is no doubt a difficult job to have to deal with so many visa applicants, some of whom must be obnoxious, but that a person can, by doing their job so poorly, cause the kind of aching sadness that has great emotional significance in people’s lives requires a greater sense of responsibility in some visa interviewers.
In the endless American public debates on how to handle illegal immigration, much has been made – and rightly so – about how important it is for immigrants to apply the right way and “get in line.” Perhaps immigration reform should also involve looking at the realities of that line, and should ensure that visa issues to people from countries on the economic periphery of the world are not based on the caprices of the visa officer but instead follow clear rules. Talk about one way to bolster America’s soft power.

The same eternal struggle

Another one of Bruce Bawer's alarmist and ridiculous assertion on Europe, Islamofascism, Muslim Immigration, and Pim Fortuyn's heirs who are  battling courageously for its soul:

Who will win the war for the soul of Western Europe? The Islamofascists and their multiculturalist appeasers, many of whom seem to believe that their job is not to defend democracy but to help make the transition to sharia as smooth as possible? The nativist cryptofascists? Or Pim Fortuyn’s freedom-loving heirs? Interestingly, while Western Europeans have been heading in one direction, Americans have chosen to go the other way, replacing a president more loathed by the European elite than any in history with a man whom the same elite has celebrated to an unprecedented degree, often depicting his election as a mystical act of atonement for all of America’s past sins, real or imagined. The final question, then, is whether the Western European Left’s condescension toward America, and the American Left’s habit of holding Western Europe up as a socialist paradise, can survive the combination of Europe’s right turn and the elevation of Barack Obama.

Secularization, Christianity, and Europe

Terry Sanderson on Secularization, Christianity, and the future of Europe:

A Eurobarometer poll (pdf) reveals that when asked about what they value most, only 7% of Europeans nominated religion. That same poll tells us that about half of Europeans think that religion is afforded too much importance. When asked about what values the European Union represents, the ranking starts with human rights (37%), then peace (35%), democracy (34%) and way down last again is religion with only 3%.
So, if Christianity is not the future of Europe, will the continent become Islamic?
The answer is again, no. The capitulation of western governments to the violence of Islamic jihadists and the subsequent channelling of all discourse about Muslims through religious representatives has created the impression that all Muslims are deeply pious and inimical to western values. They are not.
We have been bamboozled by the term "Islamophobia", which suggests that Islam is under systematic persecution in the west. But new research by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (pdf) shows clearly that while people who identify themselves as Muslims are, indeed, victims of much discrimination, by their own account hardly any of it is because of their religion. Another poll showed that young Muslims have a strong desire for westernisation, which again contradicts those who have been appointed to speak for them from the pulpits.

Twitter and race

Interesting stuff from  Caitlin Moran:

(...) my biggest discovery has been on the subject of race. An internet facility that allows connection with the whole world gives you a deeper and a richer understanding of different people and their problems. It makes you rethink things you had blithely taken for granted.
The big revelation I have had is that the phrase “mixed-race African-American” takes up 26 letters, from the available Twit-posting-limit of 140. The descriptor for a white American, meanwhile, would be simply “American”, a mere eight letters.This glaring disparity gives a Twittering advantage to white Americans — they have an extra 18 letters to communicate with. Mixed-race Americans, however, have to spend so many letters simply defining themselves that their actual announcements, jokes and links to duff YouTube clips are brutally curtailed. We can’t shillyshally around this — that is a racial disadvantage. In the interests of an equal and happy world, we have to find a snappier way to describe people’s ethnic heritage or Twitter will turn into a ghastly WASPy golf club and die of whiteness.
This is given added impetus because we now live in a post-Obama world. Obama is the most famous mixed-race African-American in history. Given how many times a day Obama is written about, discussed or name-checked, if we don’t tackle this “mixed-race African-American” problem soon, millions of people are going to be crippled by RSI. As the world is an increasingly mixed-race, mixed-nationality place — because of the unstoppable forces of a) increasingly cheap international travel and b) hot lust — it behoves us all, in our global brotherhood, to chip in with suggestions on this pressing linguistic problem.

I have to say that the fact that  Moran's observations about the linguistic and racial problems of twittering are interesting, they don't make me want to care because she is addressing mundane, pc, and fluffy issues, which come to the center just because they are modern even though they should force the technically aware crowd to the realization that some worldviews and categorizations are just too old and too odd for the new world.

The dangers of mediocrity

Tim Rutten reviews Bruce Bawer's new book on his favorite topic of the West, Immigration, Islam, Dechristianization, De-westernization, and terrorism, Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom:

A mediocre book on an important topic always is disappointing.
When the treatment also is shallow and vulgarly argued -- as is the case with Bruce Bawer's "Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom" -- this reader is inclined to get up with a sour sense of resentment over time wasted, the sort of feeling that comes from being seated next to a garrulous bore at a dinner party.
A literary critic and writer for various neoconservative cultural and political journals, Bawer is also openly homosexual and has written extensively for a number of gay publications. He and his partner have lived in Europe for some time, and since moving there, Bawer has become one of those writers alarmed by what he sees as a cultural fifth column of Islamic immigrants gnawing at Europe's traditions of tolerance and democracy.
There certainly are dangerous, intolerant Islamists among Europe's immigrants, and their allies, he argues (not always inaccurately), are the dogmatic multiculturalists who find cultural equivalency between Magna Carta and sharia. The problem is that Bawer spins glancingly off that interesting, rather important point into descriptions of a vast, interlocking conspiracy of cultural, literary, journalistic and even entertainment elites he believes want to appease fundamentalist Islam and sell out the West's tradition of individual and civil liberties.
Why they're engaged in this betrayal is anybody's guess. That doesn't stop Bawer from enveloping one alleged case in point after another, rather like the rhetorical equivalent of a kudzu vine -- and with about the same logical structure.
Too often Bawer simply gets things wrong, both factually and by degree. For all his academic prominence, the late Edward Said never enjoyed anything close to the influence Bawer imagines for him; the notion that his debated book "Orientalism" changed the way the majority of Western writers and intellectuals perceived Islam simply is preposterous.

Beef and fluff

The Guardian on the fall from grace of Rachida Dati, France Sarkozy's justice minister who, no so long ago, was celebrated as a successful example of integration à la française only to be dismissed from the Sun king's court for her exuberance and luxurious taste:

Rachida Dati, the beleaguered French justice minister, may have been lampooned for her devotion to wearing ostentatious catwalk fashion at inappropriate moments, but having been forced by Nicolas Sarkozy to run in the European elections as a way of sacking her from government, she remains defiant in her choice of footwear.
Once she was Sarkozy's handpicked symbol of change, hugely popular with the public as the first Muslim woman to hold a major government post. Now, after a spectacular fall from grace, Dati is using the European election campaign to fight back.
Despite trying to prove her commitment by returning to work five days after giving birth by caesarian section, Sarkozy ordered her to run in order to sack her after the 7 June vote. She felt "humiliated", according to the former prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin.(....) Dati wants to repair her own personal standing in order to be able to pursue her ambitions to become Paris mayor at a later date.
But even her symbolism as a hero of France's new ethnic minorities has taken a dent. "With her tenacity, she's a total inspiration," said Madad Zineb, 25, a student at the meeting. "But I think after Dati it now might be even harder for the young generation of ethnic minorities to break through in politics. There is now so much focus on personal history and all the tiny details of your private life. France has gained new ­hunger for that."

The problem for Dati is that she is no longer useful to Sarkozy precisely because she was solely a symbol. In politics, as anywhere else in life, it is always possible to replace symbols where they are no able to become gain some substance and gravitas by proving that they are about more than their gender, their beauty, their race or their religion . In Dati's case, she remained the glamorous and ambitious woman of Algerian and Moroccan origin, with a admirable life story, but never became fully a political woman with ideas and indispensable skills. In other words, she is just a celebrity and people don't take her seriously because she is perceived as one of Sarkozy's creatures who needs to accept her bannishment because she didn't seize the chance of a lifetime. Most people want her, especially her peers who are competing with her for the king's attention,  to fade in the background or to just die of boredom in Strasbourg. The saddest thing about Dati is that she is worth more than her caricature even though she was content with being fluffy because she thought probably that her status as a symbol would protect her from political and public attacks and would stop the French from viewing her as a cold calculating woman who did everything to succeed except studying her craft to become competent. Rachida Dati suffers from the same ill that plagues Sarah Palin, the airhead syndrome except that in her case her minority status and the fact that she does have a compelling rise from poverty to riches immigrant story makes her more sympathetic  and less contemptible because some fills that she had/has no control over her political fate and that she had/had few choices in life.

European cowardice

Ayaan Hirsi Ali on what she believes to be an identity crisis in Europe, which makes Europeans unwilling to die for their values such as free speech and willing to tolerate the intolerable from Muslims :

Europe has become a place for new religions, new creeds, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, transnationalism. Everything is thus relative. This is an uncertainty that the Muslim does not share. The Muslim ethic and tribal spirit are far more resilient and fierce in war than the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism.
(...)Take the debate on freedom of expression. In 1989 and afterwards, the provocations in the name of Islam were greeted with a confident, "No way! This is Europe, and you can say what you like, write what you like," and so on.
Two decades later, Europeans are not so sure about the values of freedom of expression. Most members of the media engage in self-censorship. Textbooks in schools and universities have been adapted in such a way as not to offend Muslim sentiment. And legislation to punish 'blasphemy', if not passed, has been considered in most countries - or old laws that were never used are being revived.
(...) Muslims try to abolish freedom of expression using the vocabulary of freedom
The terrifying paradox about these developments is that Muslim immigrants were admitted into European borders on the basis of universal rights and freedoms that a large number of them now trample on, while others perhaps watch passively, or seek to defend only the image of Islam.
(...)In reality, if Europe falls, it's not because of Islam. It is because the Europeans of today - unlike their forbears in the Second World War - will not die to defend the values or the future of Europe. Even if they were asked to make the final sacrifice, many a post-modern lily-livered European would escape into an obscure mesh of conscientious objection. All that Islam has to do is walk into the vacuum.

I don't know, but there is something is this Ali's arguments that seems artificial and even insincere. I think that Glenn Greenwald is right to assert that people such Ayaan Hirsi Ali go out of their way to clash with Islam because they believe in global clashes and that there is indeed a clash of civilizations, which must be won by the West by taking the fight to the barbarians. However,  it is difficult to deny that there is a malaise within Europe caused not solely by Muslim immigration, but also by the critical debate, which has yet to happen or to least lead to some decisive political action about what it means to be European and whether nationality and citizenship can be about something other than culture especially when the later clashes with the present social compact.

To count, to categorize and to discriminate

I agree with the sentiments expressed by Kenan Malik, but disagree with the substance of his arguments and his conclusion:

The foundation stone of the secular French republic is that all citizens should be equal and free from distinctions of race or religion. But senior politicians have begun to recognise that France remains deeply disfigured by racism. To combat this, Sarkozy argues, it is necessary to collect ethnically based data. The British experience suggests that such policies often do more harm than good.
Two assumptions underlie the argument for ethnic monitoring: first, that ethnicity and culture are the most important labels we can place on people; and second, that there is a causal relationship between membership of such a group and disproportional outcomes between groups.
(...) A system obsessed by ethnic categories, however, is rarely able to make those kinds of connections.
Ethnic monitoring does not just produce misleading data. The process of classification often creates the very problems it is supposed to solve. Local authorities have used ethnic categories not just as a means of collecting data but also as a way of distributing political power — by promoting certain “community leaders” – and of disbursing public funds through ethnically based projects. Once the allocation of power, resources and opportunities become linked to membership of particular groups, then people inevitably begin to identify themselves in terms of those ethnicities, and only those ethnicities.

If collecting ethnic/racial stats is to categorize and to force people to identity with an ethnic group, then why keep any kind of statistics at all, why count the numbers of men and women, of adults and children, of single and married people if the presumption is that they identify people according to certain traits, which shouldn't define them and thus fragment a society by encouraging discrimination and ghettoisation. I may be naive, but I don't think that stats lie and create different realities rather they just reflect what is happening because they are a tool. As all instruments, they become dangerous when people are allowed.able to use them to discriminate, which means that it is narrow-minded to argue that they are intrinsically bad and should be used. The point is that modern societies have never, for long, forbidden themselves from using informative tools as ethnic/racial stats based on what may happen, based on the possibility of mischief and of terrible wrongs happening. The sad fact is that we use tools  in our societies, which we wished we didn't have to use and which we know can have disastrous effects such as judging the accused and putting them to jail when they are found guilt. We do so even though we know that there are risks that innocent people can end up in jail or that punishment may never lead to rehabilitation, but an aggravation and a multiplication of dangerous behaviors. We do these things because they are necessary for the health of society, its stability and its evolution. We do them while taking all the necessary precautions to avoid wrongs. It is true that ethnic/racial stats are not a panacea and can lead to problems, but it isn't true that societies, which use them don't have choices and can't avoid the wrongs, which may ensue by utilizing them. There is no determinism here and more importantly, no fatality. I'm not going to say that there is no alternative to ethnic/racial stats, but rather that they are a tool not an end. What matters is the how, the hard work of creating policies, which make them use. Everything else, all the bad tings, which may happen depend on our ethics and our willingness to accept that policy still matters.

Data is king !

Arthur Goldhammer on Racial stats and France:

(...) what we don't know in the French case, precisely because we lack adequate statistics, is the degree to which high observed unemployment rates are distributed among different groups issus de l'immigration: Is high unemployment primarily a phenomenon of the first generation? To what extent do the second and third and fourth generations also exhibit differential unemployment and education rates when compared with les Français de souche? How do neighborhood patterns vary with assimilation? None of these questions can be answered by inference from data on last names and parental origin alone. That is why better data are needed.

To put it simply, data is king especially if the goal is to have policies that aren't about fear and fantasies, but that actually try to address problems by being in touch with reality. The issue might be that in France as in most Western countries, immigration policy is about everything else but facts and data.

Counting the Blacks, the Arabs, and the Others

France has had a remarkable tradition (remarkable in every sense of the word) of not counting its minorities. This reluctance to use statistics to identify its minorities has made it harder for the State to fight discrimination or to even fight the increasing accepted idea that there are too many people from the wrong kind of minority groups in France. The problem is that there is no other to even start to deal with minorities and the problem, which they face without using statistics, which actually inform the country about its ethnic, racial make up or whatever else you want to use to acknowledge the fact that France in 2009 is very different from France in 1909. A sugary excerpt from Charles Bremner on this issue:

The idea has split the country -- and not always along the usual lines. Some anti-racism groups are heavily against it while others support it. Fadela Amara, the feminist activist of Algerian background who is Sarkozy's Minister for the Inner City, said: "Our country must not become a mosaic of communities. No-one must ever wear the Star of David again" -- a reference to the war.(...)Louis Schweitzer, head of the High Authority for the Struggle against Discriminations and Equality (Halde) is strongly opposed to ethnic statistics. "There is only one human race," he says in today's Libération. "In creating ethno-racial statistics you create a reality. You risk turning these categories into reality." 

It is very romantic and idealistic to believe that France is one republic, which shouldn't be divided by numbers even though those numbers reflect only a reality that is irrefutable. The trouble is that even in France, romance doesn't erase human prejudices, doesn't fight discrimination or facilitate integration. France has been increasingly divided by the fact that visible differences are still equated to foreignness and  have become the fantasies not only of the extreme right, but of those who believe that it is hard, not to say impossible, to be /to become a normal (read acceptable) French citizen when one looks a certain way, has a certain religion or comes from particular places in the world. It isn't pleasant to count the Blacks, the Arabs, and the others, but until Earth becomes a magical land where ethnicity, race, and all the other categories, which too many love to taut or to decry, don't matter, it is an act, which countries are going to have to do. 

Foreign legion

Jeremy Harding in the London Review of Books on the French Foreign Legion:

Francophone to the last, the Legion is praised for being monocultural despite the diversity of volunteers. But the core of the organisation is French: about half, according to Tony Geraghty’s rollicking history, March or Die (1986). That figure has remained more or less steady since the 1980s, despite the recent appeal of the Legion to Latin Americans and Eastern Europeans like Svarusko.

I've always found the Foreign Legion fascinating because it embodied for a long time the idea that nationality could be earned by fighting for France. I think that it isn't what it once was because France has changed and because the French have become ambiguous, not to say reluctant, to have certain groups of people earned citizenship.

Islam, values and integration

Interesting and incredibly insightful sugary excerpt on Muslims immigrants in the West and integration : (hat tip: Daniel Finkelstein):

A new Harvard Kennedy School Working Paper by Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris demonstrates that Muslim migrants do not simply reflect the traditional cultural attitudes and conservative social values which are commonly found in their countries of origin; instead the basic values of Muslims living in Western societies fall roughly half-way between the dominant culture prevailing within their countries of destination and origin. (...) across all the scales there is a sizeable and significant gap between the publics living in Islamic societies of origin and Western societies of destination; Muslims living in Islamic societies proved far more religious, and far more traditional in tolerance of gays, women and sexual issues, as well as slightly less supportive of democratic values. By contrast, Western societies were far more secular in orientation as well as liberal on the social value scales. But, equally importantly, Western Muslims were not as conservative as their compatriots in their countries of origin; instead Western Muslims were consistently located roughly half-way between their countries of origin and destination. (...) one reason why Muslim migrants express values located between their countries of origin and destination may be self-selection: people already sympathetic towards Western cultures, as well as those with the higher skills and status which facilitate mobility, are more likely to relocate to live in affluent post-industrial societies. Nevertheless in the long-term, there is probably a reciprocal process at work, especially for the second and third generations of migrant families.

Desperately seeking a French Obama

The Guardian has a worth reading article on Rachida Dati,Sarkozy’s Minister of Justice, whom had become last year the symbol of a new France because of her Moroccan and Algerian origins. The article is titled “the rise and the fall of Dati” which I think is misleading because Dati’s popularity was always in limbo; it was based on the French hopes and dreams that she could prove to them that integration doesn’t have to painful and doesn't require more efforts on their part. The fact that Dati was a newcomer meant that it was always going to be difficult for her to live up to the hype. She had never dealt with people from her new milieu. It is always harder for symbols to last when they make mistakes, which reinforce the fact that their particularities make them neither particular nor extraordinary. That is at the crux of the matter because it seems that France’s Obama obsession is like its obsession with Zidane because it shows that it wants its immigrants and minorities to be special, to be extraordinary before it accepts them. What is interesting is that Angelique Chrisafis, the author of the article, deals with this new, obsessive, and desperate quest of French to find their Obama. She shows that Dati that it has both helped and handicapped by the French obsession to find or to grow little Obamas in their banlieues. Sugary excerpt:

Dati has been hailed as the nearest thing France's fractured society has to Barack Obama. The French justice minister was raised in poverty on a housing estate in deepest Burgundy. Sarkozy said appointing her sent a message "to all the children of France that with merit and effort everything becomes possible". He also hoped it would neutralise the bad feeling after the riots on the run-down housing estates and his comment likening the wayward youths to scum.

Despite scepticism that this "window-dressing" at the top did little to change the discrimination poisoning French society, Dati immediately became one of the most popular figures in France. The speed of her rise has been staggering. But that of her fall could be too. The Dati fairytale has started to go spectacularly wrong.

[…] Mainland France currently has only one non-white MP and, in a recent poll, 80% of French people said they might vote for a black person at president, but only 58% could bring themselves to vote for one of millions of the French citizens of Algerian, Moroccan or Tunisian descent. As a role model, Dati is perhaps not the easiest person to warm to. But her appointment under the patronage of Sarkozy, and more importantly her survival, which now rests entirely on his whim, shows the real depths of the problem for minorities in France, who feel they are not being allowed to rise of their own accord. Fadela Amara, another woman of Algerian parentage whom Sarkozy appointed as a junior minister, says an Obama would have got nowhere in France. "It couldn't happen in France unless Sarkozy turned emperor and appointed a black president himself," she says.

There is something morbid and self-derogating about the French obsession with Obama because it is a way to look for quick answers to complex issues, which cannot be resolved by finding perfect people who make perfect speeches about hope and its audacity. Rachida Dati shows that Sarkozy may love America, but that he doesn’t get it and more gravely doesn’t have an intimate connection to France to understand that fundamental and existential reasons explain why the United States is the country of Walt Disney and France the one of Charles de Gaulle. In other words, America not only has a different history and views of race, but it also is more willing to believe in Fairy tales. America is still an adolescent country, which believes that both childhood and adolescence are the best periods in one’s life. France doesn’t have the same history and views of race and cannot therefore look to America for solutions even though it may look to it for inspiration. France is an old country. The French are less willing to accept political experimentation even though they may long for it. They always convince themselves that they want political experimentation, American-like hopeful politics because it is new and hip when it is happening in America and because it is always hard and melancholic for grownups to realize that they have lost their innocence and have become cynical. It is as dreaming of marrying Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, but in real life, knowing that a former prostitute cannot become the housewife of a billionaire. It is hard to be an adult in front of an adolescent who still believes s/he can fly.

In any case, there is already a French Obama, but the only trouble is that she is a white woman, which means that she has no excuse for being naively hopeful, she was born in Dakar, she has four kids, and her hopeful speeches sound menacing and Forrest Gump-like to the French ear. She isn’t as popular as Obama in France because she is more French that he is (which makes her better and more political in my opinion) and thus more provencal and more difficult to be idolized by those who have given to Obama God-like Status in a country that he doesn’t know.

 

 

Hidden Identities

Reverse Colonization and indigenous rights

From the Brussels Journals, this sugary excerpt on the supposedly increased urgency for true Europeans to create an indigenous people movement:

Genetically speaking, native Europeans have thus lived longer on the same continent than have Native Americans. […] Yet a Scottish councillor, Sandy Aitchison, was chastised for using the term "indigenous" about native Brits. Why is it considered ridiculous or evil if Europeans assert our rights? Is it because we are white? Everybody's supposed to keep their culture, except people of European origins? Is that it? Why is colonialism bad, except when my country, which has no colonial history, gets colonized by Third World peoples?

Western Europeans have in recent years accepted more immigration in a shorter period of time than any society has ever done peacefully in human history. If we want a break we have the right to do so. What we are dealing with is not "immigration" but colonization, and in the case of Muslims, internationally organized attempts to conquer of our countries. If non-Europeans have the right to resist colonization then so do Europeans. Switzerland, Sweden, Finland and Norway hardly have any colonial history at all. The Germans had a colony in Namibia. Why should they accept millions of Turkish Muslims, who have a thousand years of brutal colonial history of their own, because of this? There are hardly any Britons in Pakistan today, so why should the Brits allow huge numbers of Pakistanis to settle in Britain? And if the Algerians can demand independence from France, why can't the French demand independence from Algerians?

I like cultural diversity and would hope this could be extended to include my culture, too. Or is Multiculturalism simply a hate ideology designed to unilaterally dismantle European culture and the peoples who created it? If people in Cameroon or Cambodia can keep their culture, why can't the peoples who produced Beethoven, Newton, Copernicus, Michelangelo and Louis Pasteur do the same? As Rabbi Aryeh Spero points out, European elites insist "on the primacy of indigenous cultures and religions when speaking of other faraway regions, yet find such insistence arrogant when it concerns the indigenous culture of its own lands."

My first reaction when reading these arguments is to be astonished by the fact that it is being made seriously without the person making realizing their stupidity and irrationality. Then, of course there is the question of how would indigenous Europeans would be determined, what criteria would be used, genetics, race, or something else? I wonder if for example, if somebody who, as Alexandre Dumas, has some non-European blood in her/his ancestry would be considered indigenous or if someone who looks “un-European” but who can trace her/his roots in Europe would be considered Europeans. The idea is so ridiculous because it is a gimmick created to make cheap points about European identity and immigration. What it shows that implicit within the concept of reverse colonization is the idea that assertion that the ideals behind colonialism are righteous for after all, blood, genes are everything, one has the right blood or does not, and there can be any mixing and everyone, everything must remain at their place. I think those who believe that the true Europeans, the pure bloods should start an indigenous movement to stop the so-called colonization of their continent should instead invest their time and energy in creating a time machine. This would give them a better chance to change history, to pre-empt any attempts by their ancestors to go outside of Europe, to mix with the wrong people, to civilize “Europeanize” them and to initiate what is called, today, globalization.

Behind Geert Wilders's veil

Spiegel has an interview with Ian Buruma in which he discusses the latest controversy surrounding Dutch politician Geert Wilders and his anti-Islam movie. It was an instructive read. The most interesting part of the interview is Burama answers when asked whether Wilders should be compared to Jean-Marie Le Pen (the French Far Right leader) and Jörg Harder (the Austrian Far-Right leader) and whether the Netherland’s guilt over its brush with Fascism made it a liberal and tolerant society for decade:

I would compare him in the sense that he taps into the same feelings of resentment and fear. The common man feels the threat of Muslims moving into his neighborhood, whereas the elite live in leafy suburbs and don't have to confront these issues. Immigration and the Muslim issue in particular has become the focal point of a much larger sense of anxiety which has to do with the European Union, globalization, erosion of the authority of the nation-state and economic uncertainty. That general sense of insecurity and resentment makes a country very vulnerable to the kind of populist demagoguery that you get from people like Wilders and Pim Fortuyn before him.

Still, while Holland may have had a National Socialist Party in the 1930s, there has never been a true right-wing tradition and people are very suspicious of it today -- and the fascist tradition seen in right-wing movements in Austria or Germany has not been apparent in the politics of Wilders or Fortuyn. Their demagoguery is based on the idea that we live in a free country and our liberties are being threatened by foreigners.

[…] It [the guilt of the Dutch’s brush with Fascism) did a lot to drive tolerance, but it also stifled necessary debate -- and in that regard people like Theo van Gogh had a point. As soon as people started talking about the potential problems of integrating large numbers of non-Western immigrants in Europe in the 1990s, they were quickly denounced as racists, with people evoking the war in a knee-jerk reaction. By the same token, other people, including van Gogh, suggest that anybody who makes accommodations to Muslims in Europe (who these detractors call the "Islamofascists") is tantamount to a Nazi collaborator. This kind of response also silences the debate.