"Crisis in Europe"

By Bruce Bawer at The Hudson Review:

My learning curve was steep. When I look back, it’s as if one day the whole business wasn’t even on my radar screen, and the next day I understood that it was the most important issue of our time.

It happened in Amsterdam, a city I flipped for in 1997 and moved to a year later. But it wasn’t till 1999, when I lived briefly in a predominantly Muslim neighborhood, that I took in the fact that the city was divided into two radically different and almost entirely separate communities. One of them, composed mostly of ethnic Dutchmen, was secular, liberal, and (owing to a very low birthrate) dwindling steadily; the other, composed of immigrant Muslims, lived in tradition-bound, self-segregating enclaves whose autocratic leaders despised democracy and whose population (thanks to high birth and immigration rates) was climbing rapidly. This division, I soon realized, was replicated across Western Europe. Clearly, major social friction — and more — lay down the line.

Yet nobody talked about it. Or wanted to. And when I went to the Amsterdam library in search of information about this subject (the Internet then being far less fecund a resource than it has since become), I found little other than books like The Islamic Threat (1992) — in which the American scholar John L. Esposito insisted that there was no such threat, period — and A Heart Turned East (1997), in which the British writer Adam LeBor celebrated Muslims for bringing to Europe something “intangible, but nonetheless vital,” namely “God and spirituality.”

To be sure, a few thoughtful observers had made public their concern about Europe’s ongoing transformation — but I didn’t find this out until later, after I’d moved to Oslo. In the 1996 memoir Min Tro, Din Myte (My Faith, Your Myth), Iraqi immigrant Walid al-Kubaisi depicted a Norwegian elite that not only failed to encourage integration but, motivated by a misguided, condescending romanticism about exotic foreigners, actively discouraged it to the point of chiding freethinkers (like al-Kubaisi) for whom part of the appeal of living in the West was its democracy. Then there was Unni Wikan, a social anthropologist who, it turned out, had been calling for stronger integration efforts for years. Invited by the Norwegian government to propose a plan for immigrant families, Wikan urged authorities to attend to the civil rights of Muslim women and children, many of whom, she knew, suffered severe abuse in patriarchal homes; yet her recommendations were rejected on the grounds that it would be disrespectful for the government to challenge the authority of Muslim husbands and fathers. And of course there was the Dutch sociologist turned politician Pim Fortuyn, whose book Tegen de islamitisering van onze cultuur (Against the Islamicization of Our Culture) took a position opposed to Esposito’s, arguing that the rise of an illiberal Muslim subculture in his country did indeed threaten democratic values and that the Netherlands was doomed unless it seriously addressed this threat. Though Fortuyn’s book had appeared in 1997, I didn’t hear about it, either, until much later.

These were strong voices; but they were also voices in the wilderness, taking on a political, academic, and media establishment that refused to listen. If al-Kubaisi’s arguments were virtually ignored by that establishment, and if Wikan’s proposals were dismissed out of hand, Fortuyn — while finding a receptive audience among ordinary Dutchmen — was demonized by the Dutch elite. Though he was a liberal, committed to freedom and sexual equality, politicians and journalists labeled him a fascist. This systematic misrepresentation led directly to his murder on May 6, 2002, by a Green Party activist whose account of his motives read like a précis of the establishment line on Fortuyn....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 04/21/06 07:45:32 PM
Categorized as More Than Readworthy.