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January 08, 2007
It's The Values, Stupid
In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Fania Oz-Salzberger writes movingly of her suspicion of Israel's 'newest friends':
These new pro-Israel voices base a love of Jews upon the hatred of Muslims. Last September the European Coalition for Israel convened in Brussels, its most prominent speakers lamenting the loss of European Jewry alongside the rise of European Islam. The tone was belligerent, the linkage crude: "The enemies of Israel are also a threat to Europe," delegates were told. And also: "In only two generations, most parts of Europe will be under Islamic law." Other self-declared friends grimly speak of Londonistan and augur the coming of the European Caliphate. Such statements may reflect genuine concern, but are disconcerting when made on European soil.Unlike the late Oriana Fallaci, whose commitment to the Jews stemmed from her heroic anti-Fascist youth, and whose harsh critique of Islam came from an enraged liberal soul, many of these new friends are Muslim-bashers first and Israel-backers second. Their blanket condemnation of Muslim communities on their continent rings eerily familiar. Their sweeping verdict against a whole civilization has that strange déjà vu feel. And their rather sudden nostalgia for Europe's lost Jews is, I'm sorry to say, far too late and somewhat suspect. As the Mishna wisely warns, "Any love that depends upon some thing, when that thing is no more, the love is no more." You see, we have a very long experience with human relationships.
I, for one Israeli, would be grateful to my newfound buddies if their sympathy for me did not rely on the trashing of another religion. Unlike them, I'm touched by the sight of young Muslim women in European university campuses. They remind my of my own grandmother, a student in Prague who had to flee after the Nazi rise to power, and of all the other young and hopeful Jews whose dreams and lives were shattered by the European culture they so admired. I will therefore not solicit support based on unqualified dislike of other human groups, least of all on the continent that kicked out my grandparents.
I sympathize with her. I, too, have no wish to see an entire religion demonized. But on the other hand I am equally wary of branding anyone impolite enough to notice recent alarming events "Islamophobes". Orianna Fallacci would have been the first to warn Ms. Oz-Salzburger that blind, unreciprocated tolerance based on a foolish refusal to face unpleasant facts is every bit as inimical to the freedoms she loves as bigotry. Just ask the women of Oslo, Norway:
There has been an explosive increase in the number of rape charges in the city of Oslo, but both the media and the authorities consistently refuse to tell us why.Norway’s Minister of Justice from 2001 to 2005, Odd Einar Dørum, mentioned the problem in 2001 but has later gone quiet about the issue. The reported number of rapes in Oslo is now six – 6! – times as high per capita as in New York City, yet the media keeps warning against Islamophobia.
According to Aftenposten, the clinic (voldtektsmottak) at the emergency hospital known as Legevakt has never had so many rape victims to treat. Its ability to care for them all is being severely tested. The number of reported rapes has skyrocketed this year.
Two out of three charged with rape in Norway’s capital are immigrants with a non-western background according to a police study. The number of rape cases is also rising steadily. Unni Wikan, a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo, in 2001 said that “Norwegian women must take their share of responsibility for these rapes” because Muslim men found their manner of dress provocative. The professor’s conclusion was not that Muslim men living in the West needed to adjust to Western norms, but the exact opposite: “Norwegian women must realize that we live in a Multicultural society and adapt themselves to it.”
What kind of culture blames innocent victims of violence for their own suffering? A culture that has lost confidence in its own values. In the United Kingdom, too, blind multiculturalism is producing, not mutual tolerance, but its opposite:
The United Kingdom, along with Scandinavia, Germany, and the Netherlands, has promoted quite different policies toward integration, loosely called "multiculturalism" and involving a refusal to assert the superiority of local values. But authorities in the United Kingdom are discovering that a sizable percentage of their Muslim citizens have become angry, isolated, and dangerous.Unlike the French dilemma that Giry describes, the British problem is not so much economic disparity -- British Muslims have done better economically than their coreligionists elsewhere in Europe -- as rising separatist feelings. In a Pew Research poll of Muslims conducted last spring, 81 percent of British Muslims said they were Muslim first and British second, compared with only 46 percent of French Muslims saying they are Muslim first, French second.
Understanding that separatist beliefs are antithetical to many mainstream European liberal values, the French are wary of political Islam in both its moderate and its radical forms. The British, by contrast, draw a distinction between words and deeds and refuse to prohibit extremist groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir from operating within their borders, despite this group's advocacy of the caliphate, its refusal to recognize the British government, and its espousal of anti-Semitic and homophobic views.
Tolerance cannot long survive in a climate where neither respect for law nor reciprocal respect for the rights of others are affirmed and enforced. Yet in Brussels, Catholic leaders have turned their own churches and cathedrals into sanctuaries for illegal Muslim immigrants, encouraging open defiance of and disrespect for the law - all in the name of 'tolerance':
The Belgian Bishops are so ignorant that they do not see what is going on: their churches are being turned into mosques before their very eyes.The Muslim squatters hold Islamic prayer services in the church. The altar has been moved and the statue of Our Lady covered by a cloth to hide her from the eyes of the Muslim believers.
Two things about this are striking: the Church is encouraging strangers to defy the law and willingly hiding or removing the symbols of its own religion so as not to "offend" those who are mere guests. These actions signal a culture in full retreat. Neither policy is calculated to foster cooperation or a willingness to coexist peacefully with society. Ironically, what is reinforced is the "right" of a vocal minority to disregard the wishes of the majority and force their values on others.
It should come as no surprise then, that the more aggressive Muslim activists take such actions as signs of weakness. A look inside the holy places of the Religion of Peace reveals that the message being preached is one of hatred and violence, not peaceful coexistence and compromise:
An undercover investigation has revealed disturbing evidence of Islamic extremism at a number of Britain's leading mosques and Muslim institutions, including an organisation praised by the Prime Minister.Secret video footage reveals Muslim preachers exhorting followers to prepare for jihad, to hit girls for not wearing the hijab, and to create a 'state within a state'. Many of the preachers are linked to the Wahhabi strain of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia, which funds a number of Britain's leading Islamic institutions.
At the Sparkbrook mosque, run by UK Islamic Mission (UKIM), an organisation that maintains 45 mosques in Britain and which Tony Blair has said 'is extremely valued by the government for its multi-faith and multicultural activities', a preacher is captured on film praising the Taliban. In response to the news that a British Muslim solider was killed fighting the Taliban, the speaker declares: 'The hero of Islam is the one who separated his head from his shoulders.'
Another speaker says Muslims cannot accept the rule of non-Muslims. 'You cannot accept the rule of the kaffir [non-Muslim],' a preacher, Dr Ijaz Mian, tells a meeting held within the mosque. 'We have to rule ourselves and we have to rule the others.'
In Europe, militant Muslims are campaigning for the right to worship in Christian cathedrals that once were Muslim holy places:
The recuperation of places and buildings that were once mosques or sacred Islamic sites is the primary method employed by Muslims to reconquer Al-Ándalus. So-called moderate Muslims are oftentimes more effective than extremists in gaining concessions because of their attempts to portray Western democracies as intolerant if those countries don’t cede to certain demands. This technique has been used repeatedly in the case of the Córdoba Cathedral.Spanish Muslims have for years been petitioning for the right to celebrate Friday prayer in the cathedral. Up until now these requests have been denied, which is a good thing according to Spanish politician Gustavo de Arístegui, the nation’s foremost expert on Islamic terrorism.
Such requests would be more than reasonable, were it not for the lack of reciprocity extended to Christian religious leaders:
Pope Benedict XVI has visited one of Turkey's most famous mosques in what is being seen as an attempt to mend relations with the Muslim community.Earlier, the Pope visited the nearby Hagia Sophia Museum, a site heavy with Christian and Muslim symbolism, drawing protests on the street.
The Pope spent half an hour in Hagia Sophia, a domed complex that was once a Christian centre before becoming a mosque and eventually, a museum.
Hours earlier, protesters linked to an Islamist-nationalist party had demonstrated about a kilometre away, saying the pontiff's tour was an affront to the secularism enshrined in Turkey's constitution, as well as an attempt to stake a Catholic claim to the site.
The demonstrators warned that any hint of a prayer there would be deeply offensive, but the Pope refrained from any religious gesture, such as praying or crossing himself.
It's tempting to think the harbingers of cultural retreat are confined to the EU, but here in the United States it's not hard to find signs of the same creeping malaise. At the College of William and Mary, the cross was recently deemed "insufficiently inclusive" for display at the Wren Chapel:
“I have been saddened to learn of potential students and their families who have been escorted into the chapel on campus tours and chosen to depart immediately thereafter. And to read of a Jewish student, required to participate in an honor council program in the chapel during his first week of classes, vowing never to return to the Wren. Or to hear of students, whose a capella groups are invited to perform there, being discomfited by the display of the cross. Or of students being told in times of tragedy of the special opening of the chapel for solace — to discover that it was only available as a Christian space. Or to hear from a campus counselor that Muslim students don’t take advantage of the chapel in times of spiritual or emotional crisis. Or to learn of the concerns of parents, immensely proud for the celebration of a senior’s initiation into Phi Beta Kappa, but unable to understand why, at a public university, the ceremony should occur in the presence of a cross.”
Unexplained was why, in a majority Christian nation, it is reasonable for anyone to be discomfited, much less offended, at the sight of a religious symbol; nor why other icons could not have been added rather than removing the only sign of God from an historically Christian place of worship, this rendering it meaningless.
How long will it be before even satire is off limits? After all, such insensitive hate speech bespeaks a certain refusal to treat people of all faiths with respect and dignity.
We live in a nation which considers unfettered speech so sacred a right that we allow our citizens to desecrate the living symbol of their freedom: the American flag. Why, then, should we need special resolutions to prevent them from disrespecting Islam? Do we really want to create a special protected status for Islam when we refuse to do so for Christianity, Judaism (after the Holocaust, no less) or our own flag?
The answer is not to create new laws, but to enforce the ones already have on the books. Our Constitution contains adequate protection for all religions without the introduction of spurious resolutions calling on state and federal governments to prevent "bias-motivated" crimes. Such measures can only lead to ill-considered legislation that is unevenly applied and unfairly enforced.
As Canada's Jews recently discovered, hate speech laws are all too easily turned into political cover for groups who are themselves intolerant:
In the end, the sharper edge... belongs to the more belligerent, or the more popular, not the more tolerant or the more civil. The popular have sympathy. The belligerent have force.The tolerant, and civil, have only words. By legitimating hate censorship, Jews have robbed themselves of rights to their own words and armed those of their intolerant adversaries. Jewish students on Canadian campuses find themselves neither with equal freedom to speak nor equal freedom from hate. The message is clear: if you are visibly Jewish you do not equally belong, even as every other historically vulnerable community – blacks, gays, Asians, transsexuals, Arabs, and Muslims – does.
There is a lesson in all this. Jewish faith in hate censorship and campus speech codes was a mistake to begin with. Rights to silence weaken, rather than strengthen, the Jewish voice. To be sure, freedom of speech carries risks. But for the tolerant, a political culture built on censorship might at the cost of talk is, in the end, riskier still. Inclusion by silencing is tolerance built on quicksand.
Our own Supreme Court has found few occasions in our history for limiting speech. Words calculated to lead to the incitement of violence are among these rare exceptions. As Justice Jackson remarked, the Constitution was never meant to be a suicide pact. If the values of tolerance are to be upheld for all Americans, Christian, Jewish, atheist, and Muslim alike, we must not scruple to insist on adherence to the rule of law. Neither must we shrink from intelligent recognition and even sanction of those who actively incite others to violence. To do otherwise is will not lead to increased tolerance, but to the accession of those who will not grant anyone the rights we cherish.
Our Constitution was never meant to protect us from hurt feelings, to foster feelings of inclusiveness, nor to guarantee that we could voice our opinions in a climate free from controversy or discord. What it was meant to do was protect our rights to life and liberty. It is respect for the basic values in our Constitution - values which know no religion or skin color, not oversensitivity and pandering to identity politics, that is the best guarantor of tolerance in a free society.
Posted by Cassandra at January 8, 2007 12:20 PM
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Comments
Not to wax apocalyptic, but I think much of Europe is already lost for the most part...at least for the time being.
Posted by: camojack at January 8, 2007 04:35 PM
Anything that hints of tollerance to Muslims and their demands is a suicide pact. We allowed then ridiculed and laughed at the Illinois Nazis. But that was the later half of the 20th Century well after the Klan's power years. At the end of each day white supremacists are more marginalized and ridiculed. Muslims however continue to make progress and demands and grow in strenth and political stature. Our culture and peace is the price we will pay.
Posted by: Bam Bam at January 8, 2007 05:59 PM
One does not need to ba an islamophobe to be concerned about the state of affairs in the world regarding Islam, the religion of peace. One has no need to be bigoted ,nor hysterical, to see the actions and effects of islam as practiced in much of the world today. One needn't be small or narrow minded to note the silence of those who purport to be "moderate " muslims. One would be truely uninformed and ignorant to not know that it wasn't catholics whom crashed the towers, it isn't methodists whom murder victims of rape, nor , lutherens or baptists whom murder apostates. It hasn't been the jews who have decreed that the holocaust is fiction and Israel must be stricken from the planet. It is not evangelicals whom send suicide bombers into shopping malls and onto school buses to murder the innocent, and, then revel in the aftermath. It isn't even aetheists who treat women and non-muslims as second class citizens little better than cattle. All of these horrific behaviours are perpetrated daily by those whom purport to follow the religion of peace with nary a squeak from those depicted as moderate. One would have to be blind to not see that the religion of peace is neither peaceful nor tolerant, but, in fact, violent ,hateful ,and unabashedly evil. No, there is no need to be an islamophobe ,because muslims provide more and more evidence ,and demonstrate daily as to what islam is really about. And no "moderates" speak in opposition to those behaviours and actions.
Posted by: Edward Lunny at January 8, 2007 06:13 PM
I simply can not understand the European (non-) response to what amounts to a direct takeover of THEIR society; it's almost as if they are zombies walkin'. What will it take to snap them (and US) out of the p.c. reverie of "multiculturalism-is-a-good-thing"?
Posted by: Frank Morris at January 8, 2007 06:41 PM
"Such requests would be more than reasonable, were it not for the lack of reciprocity extended to Christian religious leaders:"
One would think that reasonableness would involve reason. And what could the reasoning be behind holding a muslim in spain captive to what muslims in turkey do?
Posted by: actus at January 8, 2007 06:43 PM
Re the points made about the Constitution and free speech -- so few understand that the opportunity to have a voice is guaranteed. The requirement that anyone lend an ear is not.
Posted by: Annlee at January 8, 2007 09:08 PM
I have been hoping that we could avoid a wide-scale Western vs. Muslim war, and restrict the war to the West vs. radical Islam. Because, although I think the West would win in the end, we will win by genocide.
Eventually something is going to trigger a rather severe Jacksonian response by the American people, and the gloves will come off. And the death toll for World War II will pale beside it.
Posted by: yak at January 9, 2007 01:44 AM
Well, if the Muslim is Spain is part of a ring that committed atrocities in Turkey, the reasoning goes that extradition to stand trial could be made, unless the same group in Turkey also planned and carried out atrocities in Spain.
Or so it goes.
Genocide is not an option, but if that becomes the only way, there is an Old Testament precedent for wiping out one or two cities, even down to the animals.
Or so I've heard.
Then again, now that the Dems are in power, it isn't as simple as it seems.
Or so we've been told.
Posted by: Cricket at January 9, 2007 02:25 PM
Amazing, but the British seem particularly intent on committing cultural suicide. So sad, but even scarier for what that means to the rest of Europe and America. A new dark ages.
Posted by: scott at January 9, 2007 07:17 PM
"Eventually something is going to trigger a rather severe Jacksonian response by the American people, and the gloves will come off. And the death toll for World War II will pale beside it."
Are Americans that sort?
Posted by: actus at January 9, 2007 07:36 PM
"Are Americans that sort?"
What an odd question.
As much as anybody. At anyrate, 'Jacksonian' refers to an American. But I suppose you knew that.:) So why ask?
Posted by: Kevin L at January 9, 2007 11:05 PM
'Cause he's a prick.
Posted by: MlR at January 10, 2007 01:02 AM
"As much as anybody. "
I guess we are all genociders.
Posted by: actus at January 12, 2007 01:22 AM
I think Actus is a troll, mon.
Either that, or he's a teenager who gets his kicks making folks annoyed... did I just repeat myself?
Posted by: Sailorette at January 15, 2007 03:13 AM
nah. Trolls are usually trolls for life. Teenagers eventually grow up and grow out of it.
"When I was a child, I spake as a child."
Posted by: Cricket at January 15, 2007 09:17 AM