Go Back to Where You Came From

by Sasha Polakow-Suransky

  To make matters worse, the debate has largely taken place among secularist intellectuals, who are trying to explain and to grapple with social phenomena that they don’t understand. Holland has plenty of pundits eager to comment on immigration and integration, but few are steeped in the field that matters in a battle against extremist Islam. “The economists look for the economic roots of the problem, sociologists look for social causes, and the anthropologists try to explain jihadist culture, but none of them have any idea about theology,” laments a government official who monitors domestic security threats. And that’s what actually matters if you’re trying to identify people who pose a genuine threat. Even those who study political radicalism tend to look at it through the paradigm of European history and the radical left. But scrutinising extremism through that lens won’t help find the next jihadist terrorist. “It’s easy to be a Marxist,” quips the security official. “It’s fucking hard to be a Salafi.”23

  A lot of key figures in Holland, Marcouch believes, have a traumatic relationship with religion. They want nothing to do with it. “Their mission is to make people separate from their religion.” That won’t work. “We have to create conditions that make them feel secure,” he says. And that means discussing how to make room for some form of Islam in modern society.

  “It’s very difficult to have nuance in this debate; it’s either good or bad,” he says. Dutch society’s problem is its insistence on reducing people to a single identity and seeing those of Turkish or Moroccan origin only as Muslim rather than being Dutch, or a policeman, or an Amsterdammer, or a doctor. “People have lots of roots,” Marcouch argues, likening young second-generation kids as trees blowing in the wind. When you start to make people choose, he says, “that makes people crazy.”24

  The narrowing of people’s identities is dangerous, he argues. “You have a lot of these intellectuals and politicians that want us to have only one identity; to cut these roots.… When you do that with a tree, you know what happens; it becomes weak.” A bit of wind, and it falls. And right now, he says, “the wind in the society is Wilders.”25

  By declaring immigration off limits for many years, elites in many countries let the issue fester. As the Dutch writer Paul Scheffer argues, ignoring the conflicts arising from large-scale change in working-class areas has made things worse. “For far too long, those who didn’t live in the neighborhoods where migrants settled were the warmest advocates of the multicultural society while those who did live in them steadily moved out. Their opinions were ignored, or they were belittled for suddenly giving voice to their own latent xenophobia,” he argues. Now they must pay attention. “The middle classes can no longer escape the changes migration brings—in part because they can no longer fail to notice migrants’ children in the classroom.”26

  For Scheffer, the establishment’s avoidance has been the key to Wilders’s rise. Some of the current Dutch backlash against the establishment also has roots in the country’s history when elite merchants known as regenten struggled against the masses who sided with the monarchy and the Calvinist Church. “The regenten were regarded as haughty, self-interested, and dangerously liberal,” the historian Ian Buruma writes. They still are, and the word is still used to describe a certain type of Dutch politician or business leader not necessarily dripping with wealth or aristocratic like Eton-educated British elites. Instead they are men and women who give off an air of entitlement and ease with power, “ladies and gentlemen in sober suits who regarded it as their God-given duty to take care of the unfortunate, the sick, the asylum-seekers from abroad.”27 And in a time when ideology no longer counts for much, these modern-day regenten have become easy targets, painted as out-of-touch elitists imposing their cosmopolitan pro-European vision on a less willing society.

  Part of the reason is that there have been very real clashes of a sort that rarely happened before. “Old questions about the position of women have suddenly resurfaced and freedom of expression has become controversial,” insists Scheffer, because migrants bring with them traditional beliefs that clash with a modern society. Hearing young Muslim women express fears about sexual purity strikes the carefree Dutch as an echo of a bygone era.28

  “People have started to talk about blasphemy again, even apostasy,” he laments. And like Pim Fortuyn told a journalist before his death, some battles should not have to be refought. “It may all seem familiar from recent history, but having to repeat the emancipation struggles of fifty years ago can hardly be described as progress,” argues Scheffer.29

  More jarring for many Dutch people are the pronouncements of certain extreme religious leaders. A Rotterdam imam shocked the country when he gave a sermon on homosexuality and declared “if this sickness spreads, everyone will be infected and that could lead to us dying out.” It caused cognitive dissonance on the left. Unaccustomed to conflicts between two minority groups, a member of one group the left saw as oppressed was now attacking another.30

  In such an environment, it’s also hard to be a practising Muslim who supports gay rights. The stereotype that observant Muslims hate homosexuals is so entrenched on both sides that neither can believe evidence to the contrary. When Marcouch first joined in Amsterdam’s legendary gay pride parade, which features floats on canal boats, he carried the Amsterdam city flag on the first boat, making him, as he puts it, the “first hetero-active Muslim” to participate. The gay community was worried about violence from extremists; conservative Muslims were baffled and angry. Both groups concluded, “Oh, maybe Marcouch is homosexual, too,” he says with a laugh. Neither group could imagine a straight Muslim doing what he did.

  It wasn’t the only time Marcouch rankled Muslim radicals. His clash with a conservative cleric came into the national spotlight when he went head-to-head with a radical imam on national television in 2008.31 The cleric denounced him and wished death upon Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Marcouch told him he was an irresponsible imam and that Islam is about love, not hate. Conservative Muslims were angry at him for supposedly airing the community’s dirty laundry in public.

  For some Dutch viewers, it was the first awakening that the Moroccan community in their midst wasn’t monolithic. The well-known investigative journalist Janny Groen from De Volkskrant told Marcouch that it was the first time that some of her colleagues at the prestigious newspaper understood her in-depth articles about divisions among Dutch Muslims and how Salafi thinking had influenced Van Gogh’s killer but was rejected by most others.32

  By 2017, the deradicalization program Marcouch started wasn’t running anymore. “There’s a lot of creating eyes and ears,” he says. But “it’s not enough.” Marcouch is observant but keeps to himself about it. Some of his religious Muslim friends are afraid. They hear debates about banning halal meat or circumcision and worry, telling him, “They’re trying to take this from us. What’s next?”

  Marcouch gave a speech a few years ago in which he argued that fighting radicalism went far beyond the bread and butter issues that politicians talk about. “You can’t emancipate or integrate only in a socioeconomic way,” he argues. The kids at risk were born in Holland. “They are infected with ideas from outside. That means that the ideas from outside had more power than the things that we teach them.” For Marcouch, the reason that jihadist ideas gain sway is because parents and schools have failed to instill a strong alternative identity and non-extremist understanding of Islam. If the message from ISIS is, “You are the one. You are the best. You are the most important,” and these young men have never heard that from anyone before, it is enticing. Meanwhile, if the message in society at large is, “Your religion is bad,” then the choice is clear.33

  His warning brings to mind a little-noticed article in Le Monde that was published amid the mass mourning and obligatory moments of silence following the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Two reporters interviewed teenagers at majority-Muslim schools in Paris’s dreary southeastern suburb of Val-de-Marne. A seventeen-year-old girl told the paper, “I didn’t really want to do the
moment of silence. I didn’t think it was right to pay homage to them because they insulted Islam and other religions too.” A fourteen-year-old boy was more direct: “I did it for those who were killed but not … for the guy who did the drawing. I have no pity for him. He has zero respect for us, for Muslims,” he said. “But it wasn’t worth killing 12 people. They could have just killed him,” he added.34

  Until young Muslims can feel an “inner safety” and a self-confidence that you can be Muslim and Dutch and accepted, Marcouch worries that the terrorism and radicalization problem will only get worse. There are now more than five hundred homegrown Dutch radicals; many have gone to Syria. “We’ve seen it. It’s happened.”35

  That same rejection of a society that rejects them is also plaguing Denmark. It’s primarily second-generation immigrants who are fighting in Syria, the former spy chief Scharf points out: “these are individuals looking for an identity and community.” They are not part of the first-generation community, nor are they accepted as Danish. It is a perfect recipe for anger and disillusionment. Some act it out on Danish streets; others go further afield.36

  It’s a point that the Georgetown University terrorism expert Daniel Byman has warned could plague Europe in the years to come. The problem is not that Syrian refugees will arrive in the West as radical extremists but that they could one day be radicalized if host societies fail to accept them. “If the refugees are treated as a short-term humanitarian problem rather than as a long-term integration challenge, then we are likely to see this problem worsen,” Byman argues. “Despite their current gratitude for sanctuary in Europe, over time the refugees may be disenfranchised and become alienated.”37

  As was the case in the Orlando, Florida, attack on gay clubgoers, “the guy behind the terrorist attack in Copenhagen he was not a very religious guy,” Scharf points out. The same was true of the attackers in Paris and Brussels. Religion was used as an ex post facto rationalization, “a way of explaining … why terrorism is necessary.”38

  Rasmus Brygger, the Danish libertarian, makes a habit of engaging with groups he vehemently disagrees with. In that spirit, he has been attending meetings of the radical Islamist group Hizb-ut-Tahrir. He went to their open general assembly and found people complaining about hypocrisy regarding freedom of speech, arguing that “you would never find anyone talking about these rights for Danes, but Muslims don’t have a right to be extremists.”39

  While freedom of speech in Denmark is formally equal, it is a source of frustration among young minorities. “It may well be that we legally have the same freedom of speech as everyone else, but what is it worth if we are seen as fundamentalists, every time we say we’ve encountered racism,”40 one young man complained. If it were only a matter of private gripes and wounded pride of teenagers, that would be one thing, but the argument of double standards is one that extremist groups are using as a recruiting tool.

  After all, liberal democracies are meant to provide freedom of expression for those with illiberal ideas, so long as they do not incite violence.41 During the Cold War, the West survived with Communist parties that received funding from Moscow. Likewise, today, people in open societies are free to call all soldiers murderers, denounce homosexuality as a sin, or advocate Sharia.42 What’s needed is more speech contradicting and discrediting those illiberal arguments. Instead, far-right parties have pushed for the banning of certain forms of offensive speech and the celebration of others. The cartoon controversy seemed to tell Islamists that “freedom of speech is very important to Danes, just not for Muslims,” and the mosque closure debate, regardless of how vile the imam’s words were, sent the message that absolute freedom of speech was not applicable to them. And so the Islamist recruiters told their audience that double standards are an example of why democracy has failed, a point they tried to hammer into potential new recruits.

  Brygger also attended meetings of the Press Freedom Association, an anti-Islam group founded by one of the Mohammed cartoon artists that has united Marxists with hard-right Christian nationalists. A former Islamist and purported Danish spy, Morten Storm, came to address the group and advocated banning the Koran in a speech. That line, says Brygger, “got a lot of applause at the Press Freedom Association.”43

  For all their understandable anger toward Islamists, anti-immigrant groups across Europe are employing rhetoric, and logic, very similar to the religious fundamentalists they so despise. What they present as a defence of liberal values is in fact an attack on those values from the other side.

  Despite the populist right and religious Islamists seeing one another as sworn enemies, they actually share a worldview premised on the idea of an irreconcilable clash of civilizations. And when tensions explode, as they did during the mosque closure or the cartoon crisis, this logic is taken to an extreme. Offended Muslim clerics claim that they speak on behalf of all Muslims, and the Islamophobic right points to the angry crowds and says all Muslims are dangerous potential terrorists. The fact that many Muslims did not condone the violence or agree with the imams is lost. “The two sides feed off each other,” argues Kenan Malik, “creating ever more exaggerated fears.… It helps create a siege mentality, stoking up anger and resentment, and making communities, both Muslim and non-Muslim … more open to extremism.”44

  Brygger’s conversations at both ends of the political extremist spectrum led him to conclude that “they are definitely fueling each other—the extremist right and extremist Islam.”45

  Just like the self-proclaimed free speech advocates who proudly advocate banning the Koran in Denmark, the debate over secularism in France has made for strange bedfellows and shifting alliances. As the French political scientist Olivier Roy argues, today’s clashes over laïcité have blurred old battle lines and brought together those who were once viciously opposed. French secularists had always fought against the Catholic Church. These days, the enemy is Islam. It was, Roy writes, “as if the old structure of conflict were inherent to French identity and all that had changed was the religious actor.”46 And old leftists and Catholic conservatives are happy to join forces in the name of defending their narrow notion of secularism, even if it means trampling Muslims’ freedom of religion along the way.

  Today, those claiming to defend French secularism are more united by what they oppose—Muslims—than what they stand for. It is not just about any religion, Roy argues. “There is, in French laïcité, a specific fear of Islam” to the point that France seeks to “de-Islamize immigration or … reject immigration and the generations of French people descended from it in the name of a supposed incompatibility between Islam and Western values.”47

  This leads to bizarre self-justifications. Young women wearing veils are assumed to be forcibly manipulated—the veil being a symbol of servitude that a woman couldn’t possibly choose to wear. According to this line of reasoning, the new defenders of secularism have no choice but to choose repression in order to liberate her.48

  The greater tragedy of this form of state secularism that explicitly views Islam as its target and enemy is that it makes Islam an even more appealing identity for those seeking to rebel. When secularism becomes repressive, “we contribute both to putting religion at the centre of the debate and presenting it as an alternative,” Roy contends. It’s no surprise, then, when Islam becomes the primary cultural marker among angry young men with immigrant roots.49

  The Vatican didn’t come around easily to accepting the French state’s secularism after 1905, and when it did, it wasn’t because of some religious epiphany; it was because the Vatican was forced to adapt itself to the inescapable fact that the French secular republic was there to stay. The path to a truce with fundamentalist Muslim believers is similar, Roy insists. Just as no one asks a Catholic cardinal “to declare that abortion is not a crime, but simply that he not incite fundamentalists to attack clinics that offer abortions.” It is enough to demand adherence to the law.50 Liberal societies all have members with certain illiberal beliefs or religious values t
hat clash with those of the secular state. They do not need and cannot demand absolute conformity of belief among all citizens. If they did, they would cease to be liberal.51 What they need is neutrality and equal protection under the law.

  The burkini debate has exposed the fallacy of neutrality at the heart of the French model of laïcité as it is currently practised. At the height of the scandal, Kenneth Roth, the global head of Human Rights Watch, published a photograph of a group of French nuns, covered head to toe, enjoying themselves at the beach without being told to leave or pay a fine. Similarly, no orthodox Jewish women, who generally cover themselves from shoulder to ankle and wear wigs to cover their hair, have been targeted by municipal laws banning their modest attire.

  A supposedly neutral brand of secularism is being aggressively deployed against one group and celebrated by public officials who denounce religious women wearing modest swimwear in one breath and celebrate Catholic holidays in another. France’s see-no-evil secularists often sound a bit like liberal Zionists in Israel, stubbornly beholden to an ideology that has an illustrious intellectual pedigree and sounds nice in theory but has become something altogether different in practice.

  If the law is about defending secularism, then, like the school veil law, it must be enforced broadly and without preference or discrimination. Sikhs with turbans, Jews with kippahs, and Christians wearing large crucifixes were all, in theory, prohibited from doing so on school grounds. Whatever one thinks of that law and the fact that most of those disciplined under it were Muslim women, it was written in an eminently neutral way.