Roger Cohen on Breivik:
Breivik has many ideological fellow travelers on both sides of the Atlantic. Theirs is the poison in which he refined his murderous resentment. The enablers include Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, who compared the Koran to “Mein Kampf” on his way to 15.5 percent of the vote in the 2010 election; the surging Marine Le Pen in France, who uses Nazi analogies as she pours scorn on devout Muslims; far-rightist parties in Sweden and Denmark and Britain equating every problem with Muslim immigration; Republicans like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Representative Peter King, who have found it politically opportune to target “creeping Shariah in the United States” at a time when the middle name of the president is Hussein; U.S. church pastors using their bully pulpits week after week to say America is a Christian nation under imminent threat from Islam.
Muslims over the past decade have not done enough to denounce those who deformed their religion in the name of jihadist murder. Will the European and U.S. anti-immigrant Islamophobic crowd now denounce what Breivik has done under their ideological banner? I doubt it. We’ll be hearing a lot about what a loner he was.
Huge social problems have accompanied Muslim immigration in Europe in recent decades, much greater than in the more open United States. There is plenty of blame to go around. Immigrants have often faced racism and exclusion. The values of Islam on women, on marriage and on homosexuality, as well as the very vitality of the religion, have grated on a secular Europe. The picture is not uniform — successful integration exists — but it is troubling.
Nothing, however, can excuse the widespread condoning of an anti-Muslim racism once reserved for the Jews of Europe.
I'm rarely convinced by arguments that tie the actions of lone individuals to overheated rhetoric. Every society has a small sub-set of unstable loners who could go off on a homidical rampage, and who are just waiting for some sort of ideological or emotional trigger. This time, it was a weird European right-wing Islamophobia; the next time it might be radical Islam or that perennial candidate, adolescent alienation.
However, I think Cohen has a bit of a point here. There are two strains of the European debate on immigration that go beyond legitimate policy debate. The first is the notion of Islam as a fifth column, waiting patiently to 'out-breed' the Europeans and re-conquer all of Europe for the True Faith. The only proof offered by those who make this argument are generally statements by Islamist rabble-rousers who have marginal influence. The notion that European Muslims, as a whole, are all participating in some sinister plot is, of course, preposterous. Although this argument is wrong (let's not forget that noted fuckwit Mark Steyn has predicted that "more and more Europeans will convert to Islam...[and] Christianity is going to be an underground religion in Europe") it's worse than wrong -- it's the sort of poison that justifies a comparison with European anti-Semitism, since it dehumanizes European Muslims by painting them as a sinister, implacable enemy within. Stretches of the nastiest anti-Islam screeds read like the 'Race and Nation' chapter of Mein Kampf. The second nasty strain of the European debate is the gratuitous insults and scorn, such as Marine Le Pen comparing Muslims praying in the streets in French cities to the Nazi occupation of France, or pork-sausage-and-wine parties being held outside of mosques.
The fifth-column analogies and the scorn and taunting send an unmistakable message to European Muslims: you're not welcome here and will never be welcome. A healthy chunk of the population of the country you live in despises you and wants you gone. And, of course, as Breivik's rampage shows, 'natives' who enable the Muslim hordes are, in a sense, worse than the foreigners themselves. This message is purely destructive and poisonous. Of course, I'm not suggesting that these points of view be banned; that usually backfires. Nor is any critique of immigration policy out-of-bounds. I'm specifically limiting myself here to the 'fifth column' arguments and taunting, which are unnecessary to even the most stringent critique. But if the only choice is between scorn and demonization versus multi-kulti platitudes (and, of course, that isn't the only choice), give me the platitudes anytime. The platitudes lead to lame comedies -- the demonization, as we have seen, to much worse.
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