contexploration

This false version of multiculturalism will be defeated in Europe. Cultures do not have rights. Individuals do. And when this insight dawns on people, why should one accept the current nation state model of Europe founded on the exact same principles - principles that have created such havoc inside each state?

The debate could foster an antidote to the attempts to close down Europe in segregated "national parks," national ghettos, and it could enhance both individual freedom and uncover the need for more supranational democracy in Europe.

Thus, all pro-European internationalists should cease this opportunity and engage in the debate on multiculturalism. This is a starting point of crucial importance for a show-down with populist nationalism, for a true commitment to secularism and for a revitalisation of the principles of the Enlightenment. This war of ideas must play itself out in Europe, but it could also serve as an inspiration for a new, global, liberal alliance.

Yesterday, I posted a translation of an interview with Mullah Krekar, an Islamist who served as the leader of Ansar al-Islam in North Iraq. In the interview, he makes use of the language of the ultra-right fascists when he talks, with great pride, on how European Muslims “breed like mosquitoes.” This will ensure Islam's victory, he says. To him, and other islamists, being a Muslim is not a only a belief, but is more like belonging to a separate race of humanity. Good luck with that Muslim Supremacy ideology! Too bad for Mullah Krekar, then, that Children of Muslim Europeans might grow up with a different outlook than his Euro-Taliban vision, a conclusion that also can be drawn from Johann Hari's excellent book review.

Here are some quotes from the debate so far:

“However it is one thing to recognise the convictions and rites of fellow citizens of different origins, and another to give one's blessing to hostile insular communities that throw up ramparts between themselves and the rest of society. […] The Enlightenment belongs to the entire human race, not just to a few privileged individuals in Europe or North America who have taken it upon themselves to kick it to bits like spoiled brats, to prevent others from having a go.”

- Pascal Bruckner

“[Fadela Amara shows us] an authentic Islamic Enlightenment occurring on the streets of Europe. Here is the development of a strain of Islam fiercely committed to democratic values. Yet those who suggest the birth of every new European Muslim is a problem – another tick from the time-bomb – treat Amara as akin to Osama. This mindset is (at best) a distraction from the real fight: across the continent, groups of Muslim women are rebelling in the same way against the literalist, quasi-fascist interpretation of the Koran popularised by the Mullahs. Tired of being its first victims, they are creating their own liberal lived Islams as an alternative – and if this rebellion is completed, European jihadism will be left literally unable to reproduce itself. Ayaan Hirsi Ali – the brave Somalian refugee to the Netherlands who has become a dissident against jihadism – astutely argues, ‘If the West wants to help modernize Islam, it should invest in women because they educate the children.’”
- Johann Hari

“These islands of corporatism where European states continue to officially recognise communal rights were not controversial prior to the arrival of large Muslim communities. Most European societies had become thoroughly secular, so these religious holdovers seemed quite harmless. But they set important precedents for the Muslim communities, and they are obstacles to the maintenance of a wall of separation between religion and state. If Europe is to establish the liberal principle of a pluralism based on individuals rather than groups, then it must address these corporatist institutions inherited from the past.”
- Francis Fukuyama

“The main problem in Europe in this context is that many deracinated young Muslim men, inflamed by Internet propaganda from Chechnya or Iraq and aware of their own distance from ‘the struggle,’ now regard the jihadist version of their religion as the ‘authentic’ one. Compounding the problem, Europe’s multicultural authorities, many of its welfare agencies, and many of its churches treat the most militant Muslims as the minority’s ‘real’ spokesmen.”
- Christopher Hitchens

“Europeans across the political spectrum share a belief that their comfortable lives have been jeopardized by an American-imposed "war on terror" that has radicalized their Muslim populations. Khosrokhavar's research suggests exactly the opposite conclusion: It is the failure of European societies to assimilate their Muslim migrants that creates a security threat for America. [Frum quotes Rosenthal:] ‘Could not, then, the entry of French Islamists into jihad — not against France, but against precisely America — be rather a last desperate attempt to prove their worthiness of the affections and respect of French society: to prove, in effect, that they, the Islamists, are the better Frenchmen?’”
- David Frum

“I propose that our new story [of who we Europeans are] should be woven from six strands, each of which represents a shared European goal. The strands are freedom, peace, law, prosperity, diversity and solidarity. None of these goals is unique to Europe, but most Europeans would agree that it is characteristic of contemporary Europe to aspire to them. [...] In this proposal, our identity will not be constructed in the fashion of the historic European nation, once humorously defined as a group of people united by a common hatred of their neighbours and a shared misunderstanding of their past.” - Timothy Garton Ash

Other perspectives:

“Now [India is] the elephant in the room when Western commentators invoke the Free World or reach once more for that mythical beast, the Judaeo-Christian past of democratic peoples. It’s not merely that we’re free and not Western, democratic and conspicuously not Judaeo-Christian, though both these things are important in a world made claustrophobic by the self-congratulatory narcissism of the Anglo-American West. It is also that we are these things without being occupied by MacArthur, protected by CENTO or bailed out by the Marshall Plan. And what’s more, we’ve taken the West’s largest claim to political liberalism, the separation of church and state, or secularism, and turned it into a many-petalled pluralist flower.”

- Mulkul Kesavan [India]

“It was important that we regard modernity as a universal value and that we boldly take its side. The fact that it emerged in the West hardly implies their ownership by white European peoples, or even that those peoples are better prepared to put them into practice or development.”
- Caetano Veloso [Brazil]

Norwegian discussion:

Heidi Norbye Lunde: Feilslått multikulturalisme?

Olav Kobbeltveit: Muslimsk middelalder.