The worldwide furor unleashed by the cartoons
of the Prophet Mohammed that I published last September in Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper where I work, was both a surprise and a tragedy, especially for those directly affected by it. Lives were lost, buildings were torched, and people were
driven into hiding.
And yet the unbalanced reactions
to the not-so-provocative caricatures
-- loud denunciations and even
death threats toward us, but very little
outrage toward the people who
attacked two Danish Embassies --
unmasked unpleasant realities about
Europe's failed experiment with multiculturalism.
It's time for the Old
Continent to face facts and make
some profound changes in its outlook
on immigration, integration, and the
coming Muslim demographic surge.
After decades of appeasement and
political correctness, combined with
growing fear of a radical minority prepared
to commit serious violence,
Europe's moment of truth is here.
Europe today finds itself trapped in
a posture of moral relativism that is
undermining its liberal values. An
unholy three-cornered alliance
between Middle East dictators, radical
imams who live in Europe, and
Europe's traditional left wing is
enabling a politics of victimology. This
politics drives a culture that resists
integration and adaptation, perpetuates
national and religious differences,
and aggravates such debilitating social
ills as high immigrant crime rates and
entrenched unemployment.
As one who once championed the
utopian state of multicultural bliss, I
think I know what I'm talking about. I
was raised on the ideals of the 1960s, in
the midst of the Cold War. I saw life
through the lens of the countercultural
turmoil, adopting both the hippie pose
and the political superiority complex of
my generation. I and my high school
peers believed that the West was imperialistic
and racist. We analyzed decaying
Western civilization through the
texts of Marx and Engels and lionized
John Lennon's beautiful but stupid
tune about an ideal world without private
property: "Imagine no possessions/
I wonder if you can/ No need for greed
or hunger/ A brotherhood of man/
Imagine all the people/ Sharing all the
world."
It took me only 10 months as a
young student in the Soviet Union in
1980-81 to realize what a world without
private property looks like,
although many years had to pass until
the full implications of the central
Marxist dogma became clear to me.
That experience was the beginning
of a long intellectual journey
that has thus far culminated in the
reactions to the Mohammed cartoons.
Politically, I came of age in the
Soviet Union. I returned there in
1990 to spend 11 years as a foreign
correspondent. Through close contact
with courageous dissidents who
were willing to suffer and go to
prison for their belief in the ideals of
Western democracy, I was cured of
my wooly dreams of idealistic collectivism.
I had a strong sense of the
high price my friends were willing to
pay for the very freedoms that we
had taken for granted in high
school -- but did not grasp as values
inherent in our civilization: freedom
of speech, religion, assembly, and
movement. Justice and equality
implies equal opportunity, I learned,
not equal outcome.
Now, in Europe's failure to grapple
realistically with its dramatically
changing demographic picture, I see a
new parallel to that Cold War journey.
Europe's left is deceiving itself about
immigration, integration, and Islamic
radicalism today the same way we
young hippies deceived ourselves
about Marxism and communism 30
years ago. It is a narrative of confrontation
and hierarchy that claims that the
West exploits, abuses, and marginalizes
the Islamic world. Left-wing intellectuals
have insisted that the Danes
were oppressing and marginalizing
Muslim immigrants. This view comports
precisely with the late Edward
Said's model of Orientalism, which
argues that experts on the Orient and
the Muslim world have not depicted it
as it is but as some dreaded "other," as
exactly the opposite of ourselves -- and
therefore to be rejected. The West, in
this narrative, is democratic, the East
is despotic. We are rational, they are
irrational.
This kind of thinking gave birth to a
distorted approach to immigration in
countries like Denmark. Left-wing
commentators decided that Denmark
was both racist and Islamophobic.
Therefore, the chief obstacle to integration
was not the immigrants' unwillingness
to adapt culturally to their adopted
country (there are 200,000 Danish
Muslims now); it was the country's
inherent racism and anti-Muslim bias.
A cult of victimology arose and was
happily exploited by clever radicals
among Europe's Muslims, especially
certain religious leaders like Imam
Ahmad Abu Laban in Denmark and
Mullah Krekar in Norway. Mullah
Krekar -- a Kurdish founder of Ansar al
Islam who this spring was facing an
expulsion order from Norway -- called
our publication of the cartoons "a declaration
of war against our religion, our
faith, and our civilization. Our way of
thinking is penetrating society and is
stronger than theirs. This causes hate in
the Western way of thinking; as the losing
side, they commit violence."
Inconvenient facts. The role of victim
is very convenient because it frees
the self-declared victim from any
responsibility, while providing a posture
of moral superiority. It also
obscures certain inconvenient facts
that might suggest a different explanation
for the lagging integration of
some immigrant groups -- such as the
relatively high crime rates, the oppression
of women, and a tradition of
forced marriage.
Dictatorships in the Middle East
and radical imams have adopted the
jargon of the European left, calling the
cartoons racist and Islamophobic.
When Westerners criticize their lack of
civil liberties and the oppression
of women, they say we behave
like imperialists. They have
adopted the rhetoric and turned
it against us.
These events are occurring
against the disturbing backdrop
of increasingly radicalized Muslims
in Europe. Mohammed Atta,
the 9/11 ringleader, became a
born-again Muslim after he
moved to Europe. So did the perpetrators
behind the bombings in
Madrid and London. The same
goes for Mohammed Bouyeri, the
young Muslim who slaughtered
filmmaker Theo van Gogh in
Amsterdam. Europe, not the
Middle East, may now be the
main breeding ground for Islamic
terrorism.
What's wrong with Europe? For
one thing, Europe's approach to
immigration and integration is
rooted in its historic experience with
relatively homogeneous cultures. In
the United States one's definition of
nationality is essentially political; in
Europe it is historically cultural. I
am a Dane because I look
European, speak Danish, descend
from centuries of other Scandinavians.
But what about the dark,
bearded new Danes who speak
Arabic at home and poor Danish in
the streets? We Europeans must
make a profound cultural adjustment
to understand that they, too,
can be Danes.
Another great impediment to
integration is the European welfare
state. Because Europe's highly
developed, but increasingly unaffordable,
safety nets provide such
strong unemployment insurance
and not enough incentive to work,
many new immigrants go straight
onto the dole.
While it can be argued that the
fast-growing community of about 20
million Muslim immigrants in Europe
is the equivalent of America's new
Hispanic immigrants, the difference in
their productivity and prosperity is
staggering. An Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development
study in 1999 showed that
while immigrants in the United States
are almost equal to native-born workers
as taxpayers and contributors
to American prosperity, in
Denmark there is a glaring gap
of 41 percent between the contributions
of the native-born and
of the immigrants. In the United
States, a laid-off worker gets an
average of 32 percent compensation
for his former wages in welfare
services; in Denmark the
figure is 81 percent. A culture of
welfare dependency is rife
among immigrants, and taken
for granted.
What to do? Obviously, we
can never return to the comfortable
monocultures of old. A
demographic revolution is
changing the face, and look, of
Europe. In an age of mass migration
and the Internet, cheap air
fares and cell phones everywhere,
cultural pluralism is an
irreversible fact, like it or not. A
nostalgic longing for cultural purity --
racial purity, religious purity -- easily
descends into ethnic cleansing.
Yet multiculturalism that has all too
often become mere cultural relativism
is an indefensible proposition that
often justifies reactionary and oppressive
practices. Giving the same weight
to the illiberal values of conservative
Islam as to the liberal traditions of the
European Enlightenment will, in
time, destroy the very things that
make Europe such a desirable target
for migration.
Europe must shed the straitjacket of
political correctness, which makes it
impossible to criticize minorities for
anything -- including violations of laws,
traditional mores, and values that are
central to the European experience. Two
experiences tell the tale for me.
Shortly after the horrific 2002
Moscow musical theater siege by
Chechen terrorists that left 130 dead,
I met with one of my old dissident
friends, Sergei Kovalev. A hero of the
human rights movement in the old
Soviet Union, Kovalev had long been a
defender of the Chechens and a critic
of the Russian attacks on Chechnya. But after the theater massacre he refused, as always, to indulge in politically correct drivel about the Chechens' just fight for secession and decolonization. He unhesitatingly denounced the terrorists, and insisted that a nation's right to self-determination did not imply a free ticket to kill and violate basic individual rights. For me, it was a clarifying moment on
the dishonesty of identity politics and
the sometime tyranny of elevating
group rights above those of individuals
-- of justifying the killing of innocents
in the name of some higher
cause.
The other experience was a trip I
made in the 1990s, when I was a correspondent
based in the United States, to
the Brighton Beach neighborhood of
Brooklyn, N.Y. There I wrote a story
about the burgeoning, bustling, altogether
vibrant Russian immigrant community
that had arisen there -- a perfect
example of people retaining some of
their old cultural identity (drinking
samovars of tea, playing hours of chess,
and attending church) while quickly
taking advantage of America's free
and open capitalism to establish an
economic foothold. I marveled at
America's ability to absorb newcomers.
It was another clarifying moment.
An act of inclusion. Equal treatment
is the democratic way to overcome traditional
barriers of blood and soil for
newcomers. To me, that means treating
immigrants just as I would any
other Danes. And that's what I felt I
was doing in publishing the 12 cartoons
of Mohammed last year. Those
images in no way exceeded the bounds
of taste, satire, and humor to which I
would subject any other Dane,
whether the queen, the head of the
church, or the prime minister. By
treating a Muslim figure the same way
I would a Christian or Jewish icon, I
was sending an important message:
You are not strangers, you are here to
stay, and we accept you as an integrated
part of our life. And we will satirize
you, too. It was an act of inclusion,
not exclusion; an act of respect and
recognition.
Alas, some Muslims did not take it
that way -- though it required a highly
organized campaign, several falsified
(and very nasty) cartoons, and several
months of overseas travel for the
aggrieved imams to stir up an international
reaction.
Maybe Europe needs to take a
leaf -- or a whole book -- from the
American experience. For a new
Europe of many cultures that is somehow
a single entity to emerge, as it has
in the United States, will take effort
from both sides -- the native-born and
the newly arrived.
For the immigrants, the expectation
that they not only learn the host
language but also respect their new
countries' political and cultural traditions
is not too much to demand, and
some stringent (maybe too stringent)
new laws are being passed to force
that. At the same time, Europeans
must show a willingness to jettison
entrenched notions of blood and soil
and accept people from foreign countries
and cultures as just what they are,
the new Europeans.
