Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's, Too

by Claire Berlinski

  Dutch Socialist Party leader Jan Marijnissen gave that idea some deep thought and concluded that Hezbollah’s genocidal campaign against the Jews reminded him of the Nazi epoch, although not quite in the way one might imagine. He proposed that Hezbollah might reasonably be equated with the Resistance. “During World War II, Dutch people thwarted Nazi Germany’s destruction machine by blowing up town halls, because this was where the Jews were registered. Things are not all that different in the Middle East. Islamic fundamentalism, including the terrorist wing, is a reaction to Israel’s occupation of Palestine, to America’s presence in the Middle East and to the West’s support of undemocratic regimes in the Middle East,” he said. Let’s leave aside his fantasies about the record of the Dutch Resistance. The key points are these: Lebanon, first of all, is not in Palestine. Israel does not occupy Lebanon and hasn’t for years. Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza, and more than 2,000 U.S. troops have died in Iraq because American policy in the Middle East, for the past five years, has been to replace undemocratic regimes with democratic ones. He must have missed those items in the newspaper, but that’s understandable, since they were probably buried on page 32, after thirty-one pages of cartoons equating Jews and Nazis.

  In Norway, the well-known writer Jostein Gaarder published a gorgeously histrionic editorial, to much general applause, announcing that “Israel is history. We no longer recognize the State of Israel. There is no way back. The State of Israel has raped the world’s recognition and will not receive peace before it lays down its weapons. . . . We laugh at this people’s fancies and weep over their misdeeds. To present themselves as God’s chosen people is not just stupid and arrogant, but a crime against humanity. . . . There are limits to our patience, and there are limits to our tolerance....”4 Echoing this sentiment, Spanish newspapers were suddenly awash with those original, hilarious Jews-dressed-like-Nazis cartoons. Prime Minister “White Flag” Zapatero, who blazed the trail in condemning the publication of the Muhammad cartoons—he wrote in the International Herald Tribune that “the publication of these caricatures may be perfectly legal, but it is not indifferent and thus ought to be rejected from a moral and political standpoint”—had not a word to say about cartoons equating Jews and Nazis, which, I suppose, suggests that he thought they ought not to be rejected from a moral and political standpoint. Zapatero then pitched up in public wearing a Palestinian kaffiyeh. No significance to that, he assured worried Spanish Jews: someone just handed it to him at a public appearance and he put it on to be polite. Forgive me the cynicism of suspecting that had he been handed a T-shirt embossed with a Star of David, he might not have slung it on with such mannerly alacrity.

  But Israeli air strikes in Lebanon killed children. Indeed they did, and let me be the first, or rather the millionth, to say that those deaths were a disaster, monstrous, all the more so since the children seem to have died for nothing—and certainly not for Israel’s greater security or Lebanon’s. But I note that at roughly the same time, the government of Sri Lanka bombed an encampment filled with what they claimed were terrorists, but what UNICEF claimed were orphans. Reportedly, fifty-one schoolchildren were killed on the spot. The Sri Lankan military swiftly agreed that yes, the intended targets were children. “If the children are terrorists, what can we do?” shrugged a Sri Lankan military spokesman.

  Do the experiment yourself: go to Google and see what the European press had to say about this on the day following this gory slaughter in Sri Lanka. Try entering the search term Sri Lanka. You will not, I assure you, find a single editorial declaring that “Sri Lanka is history.” The story of the massacre is not even the highest-ranked news item. That honor belongs to the revelation that the opening match of the Unitech Cup triangular cricket tournament had been called off due to soggy ground conditions.

  While singularly preoccupied with Israeli excesses, Europeans have been oddly quiescent about Iranian ones. The French foreign minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy, at the height of the Lebanon crisis—which was, of course, started by Iran—remarked with a straight face that Iran was “a great country, a great people, and a great civilization which is respected and which plays a stabilizing force in the region.” Beg pardon? Iran’s merry nutball of a leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, breathlessly anticipates the return of the Twelfth Imam, who will be coaxed from his Occultation, the president has hinted, by means of a regional nuclear exchange. His nation is on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons. He has repeatedly threatened his neighbor with annihilation. Iran is the world’s chief sponsor of Islamic terrorism. It harbors al Qaeda terrorists, causes havoc in Iraq, controls Hezbollah in Lebanon, has turned Syria into a client state, pulls Hamas’s puppet strings in the Palestinian Authority, meddles to profoundly evil effect in Afghanistan and Pakistan, denies the Holocaust, and would see the world’s women reduced to the status of cattle. Ahmadinejad contemplates with a visible sensual excitement the prospect of annihilating every last Jew on the planet. Yet Iran, according to official France, is a great stabilizing force in the Middle East. I invite the critics who have called me an alarmist about Europe to consider Douste-Blazy’s comments and their implications and then share with me the secrets of their enviable composure.

  The foreign minister’s remarks, and the mentality they reflect, indicate that there is no political will in Europe to take effective action in the face of the Iranian threat. I don’t expect that the prospect of being hauled before the Security Council much disturbs Ahmadinejad’s rest; after all, Britain, France, and Germany have been threatening Iran with the Security Council since 2003, and what of it? I can’t say I know what to do about Iran any more than anyone else does. But at least I can see that whatever that country is, it is not a stabilizing force in the region. I reckon that puts me well ahead of the game.

  Since the publication of this book, many readers have written to ask me where the solution to Europe’s problem lies. I propose the following. As matters of policy, radical clerics funded by Wahhabi Saudi or subcontinental Deobandi money—any cleric in Europe who incites violence and lawbreaking and who advocates the destruction of Western civilization—must be deported or imprisoned. Start with the Danish imams who began the cartoon wars. Cut off their funding; arrest them. Enforce all European laws pertaining to domestic abuse and violence against women with especial vigor. End all state support for extremist Islamic clubs—or any Islamic club where men and women do anything but pray for peace or play backgammon. At the same time, reward moderate Muslims by respecting and encouraging legitimate religious aspirations and practices. Provide funding and support for groups that promote the reform and liberalization of Islam, and welcome law-abiding, Westernized Muslims with open arms and real economic opportunities.

  Demand that all immigrants learn the language and history of their adoptive countries. Do not cower or capitulate to the threat of violence. Make it perfectly clear that the price of admission to European society is accepting such European practices as the lampooning of religious figures. End the practice of firehosing cash into hermetic immigrant ghettos. Finally, bring back some form of military conscription: A structured military organization is an excellent place for unemployed young men who are prone to radicalism and violence. If the state does not impose this structure on them, they tend to form their own kind of military organization. The Dutch abolished compulsory military service in 1996, shortly before violent extremism in the Netherlands began making headlines. That was obviously a mistake.

  The point of this book, however, is not to propose solutions—all of the measures I’ve stated here are obvious and have been proposed by many others. It is to explain why Europe is incapable of seeing and solving its own problems. The inability to recognize and confront growing Islamic radicalism is only one symptom of a deeper European crisis, and that crisis is the source of the phenomena I have described in this book. Some readers have asked why I devoted so much space to figures such as José Bové and the members of Rammstein. I did so because they are windows throu
gh which we see a broader European mood—a widespread cultural and moral void, the existence of which encourages every species of historically dangerous European lunatic to rise from the dead. In all matters, not just ones pertaining to Islam, Europeans seem increasingly to be acting as slaves to historic forces they do not even recognize.

  If it is pessimistic to observe this, then so be it.

  Istanbul, August 23, 2006

  NOTES

  CHAPTER 1 : EUROPE ON FIVE DOLLARS A DAY AND A FLAMETHROWER

  1. Doug Saunders, “British Bombers Likely Recruited at Government-Funded Centre,” Globe and Mail, July 14, 2005.

  2. The complete poll data, including the methodology and precise wording of the questions, can be consulted at http://www.yougov.com/archives/pdf/TEL050101030_1.pdf

  3. http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/05/20/britain. protest/index.html

  4. “London Bombers Have Ties to United States,” ABC World News Tonight online, July 15, 2005.

  5. Ipsos News Center Poll, Measuring Hope for the Future and Quality of Life: A 12-Country Survey, September 4, 2002.

  6. Michael Ledeen, The War Against the Terror Masters, updated edition (New York: St. Martin’s, 2003), pp. 242–44.

  7. Michael Gonzales, “Vive le Checkbook: How France Bankrolls America’s Enemies,” Wall Street Journal, November 29, 2003.

  8. Report on the Manipulation of the Oil-for-Food Programme, issued by the Independent Inquiry Committee into the United Nations Oil-for-Food Programme, October 27, 2005.

  9. Paul Krugman, “French Family Values,” New York Times, July 29, 2005.

  CHAPTER 2 : SELF-EXTINGUISHING TOLERANCE

  1. Khaled Shawkat, “European Cinema Exposes Anti-Muslim Practices,” Islam Online, February 7, 2005.

  2. Marlise Simons, “Militant Muslims Act to Suppress Dutch Film and Art Show,” New York Times, January 31, 2005.

  3. http://hammorabi.blogspot.com/2005/01/special-sincere-thanks-to-our-friends.html

  4. http://iraqilibe.blogspot.com/2005/01/best-eid-i-ever-had.html

  5. This theory was offered by Juan Cole, a professor of history at the University of Michigan and one of academia’s great comic geniuses. See his blog, “Informed Consent,” http://www.juancole.com/2004/12/ manipulation-of-blogging-world-on-iraq.html

  6. For a full discussion of this point and the new historiography of this period in Dutch history, see Jan Herman Brinks, “The Dutch, the Germans and the Jews,” History Today, 49:6 (June 1999). This chapter draws heavily upon his scholarship.

  7. Report of the Netherlands Minister Relating to Conditions in Petrograd, Publications of the Department of State, Papers relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States. Russia, 1918 (in 3 vols.); here vol. 1, United States Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1931, pp. 675–79; here pp. 678 and 679. Cited in “The Dutch, the Germans and the Jews.”

  8. “The Dutch, the Germans and the Jews.”

  9. Ibid.

  10. Wolfgang zu Putlitz, In Evening Dress Among the Brownshirts: Memories of a German Diplomat, The Hague, 1964, p. 210, cited in “The Dutch, the Germans and the Jews.”

  11. Cited in “The Dutch, the Germans and the Jews.”

  12. See, particularly, Jacob Presser, The Destruction of the Dutch Jews, translated by Arnold Pomerantz (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1969). Historian David G. Dalin considers the record of the Catholic Church in the Netherlands notably honorable, however: Dutch bishops distributed a pastoral letter read in every Catholic church in the Netherlands denouncing “the unmerciful and unjust treatment meted out to Jews by those in power in our country.” The Myth of Hitler’s Pope (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2005), p. 79.

  13. “The Dutch, the Germans and the Jews.”

  14. Ibid.

  15. Anne Frank. Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition, edited by Otto H. Frank and Mirjam Prossler. (New York: Doubleday, 1995), p. 54.

  16. See http://www.cidi.nl/dossiers/ae/ae.html, “The Background of Abou Jahjah” (Achtergronden Abou Jahjah), citing diverse Belgian documents and particularly an article in the French-language Belgian newspaper Le Soir of December 6, 2002.

  17. Abigail R. Esman, “The Arabian Panther,” Salon, June 14, 2004.

  18. According to the NRC Handelsblad, March 1, 2003, she said: “ Dat zijn geen effectieven uitspraken, maar ik keur die ook niet af, ” meaning, “Those are not tactically wise expressions, but I don’t reject them either.”

  19. “The Arabian Panther.” Op. cit., citing the Dutch newspaper Algemeene Dagblad.

  20. Ibid.

  21. “Somali Refugee Follows in Fortuyn’s Footsteps with Attack on Imams,” Telegraph, November 1, 2003.

  22. Address by Mayor Job Cohen to Amsterdam City Council on November 3, 2004, http://www.amsterdam.nl/contents/pages/ 00005460/addressbymayorjobcohentoamsterdamcitycouncil.pdf

  23. “Feestvieren in de bajes,” De Telegraaf, September 13, 2005.

  24. Chantal Delsol, Icarus Fallen: The Search for Meaning in an Uncertain World. Translated by Robin Dick (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2003).

  25. Ibid.

  26. Emma Goldman, Living My Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931), vol. 1, chap. 23.

  27. Twain, Mark. What Is Man and Other Essays. (Fairfield, Iowa: 1st Word Library-Literary Society, 2004), p. 177.

  28. Steve Sailer, “Did Fortuyn Have It Coming?” United Press International, May 8, 2002.

  29. Ibid.

  CHAPTER 3 : WHITE TEETH

  1. ICM Polls, Muslims Poll, December 2002. http://www.icmresearch.co.uk/reviews/2002/bbc-today-muslims-dec- 02.htm. Note the extraordinarily different responses to questions 7 and 10, which are logically the same question but phrased differently.

  2. “London-Based Radical Salutes Bombs ‘Victory,’” Times (London), July 17, 2005.

  3. “The Men Who Blame Britain,” Telegraph, July 20, 2005.

  4. Dilpazier Aslam, “We Rock the Boat: Today’s Muslims Aren’t Prepared to Ignore Injustice,” Guardian, July 13, 2005. Shortly afterward, in response to widespread outrage that Aslam’s political affiliations were not revealed in this article or his byline, his editors asked him to renounce his associations with Hizb ut-Tahrir. He refused and resigned instead.

  5. The film can be viewed at http://johnathangaltfilms.com/.

  6. “Poison Warfare Suits Found in Mosque Raid,” Herald Sun, January 27, 2003.

  7. The Muslim News Online, http://www.muslimnews.co.uk/yoursay/ index.php?ysc_id=3.

  8. Mohammed Abdul Aziz, “Understanding British Muslim Alienation and Exclusion: Exploring the Challenges and Developing Working Solutions” (2004, unpublished draft document), and Humayun Ansari, Muslims in Britain (Minority Rights Group International, August 2002), http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/mnp/ijgr/2003/ 00000010/00000004/art00006

  9. Zadie Smith, White Teeth (London: Penguin, 2001).

  10. Personal correspondence, October 15, 2005.

  11. Tariq Modood, Sharon Beishon, and Satnam Virdee, Changing Ethnic Identities, London, Policy Studies Institute Report 794. Statistics on Muslim intermarriage in the United States vary so greatly that I am reluctant to assert a concrete figure. By law, the official U.S. census does not gather information about religious practice, so that’s no help. Two-thirds is my best guess, averaging several different sources. See, for example, Yvonne H. Haddad, “The Muslim Experience in the United States,” The Link, 12:4. One simple reason for higher rates of intermarriage among Muslim immigrants in America may be that they are so much more geographically dispersed. If you don’t meet as many other recent immigrants, you are less likely to marry them. (http:// www.psi.org.uk/publications/publication.asp?publication_id=19)

  12. Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), p. 40.

  13. Marina Gask, “Editor’s Introduction,” Top Santé, November 2004.

  14. I am indebted to my good friend Damian Counsell—another immigrant in Britain—for this thought.

  1
5. Bernard Lewis, “Islam and Liberal Democracy,” Atlantic Monthly, February 1993.

  16. The insightful Brazilian poet Nelson Ascher offered these reflections on Lewis and Said to me in personal correspondence, for which I thank him.

  17. Report of the High Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora, Ministry of External Affairs, New Delhi, 2002.

  18. The Education and Child Poverty Report, End Child Poverty group, March 25, 2003, http://www.ecpc.org.uk/downloads/ Education%20and%20Child%20Poverty.pdf

  19. I thank Damian Counsell for this observation.

  20. A full and excellent description of queuing theory and its applicability to immigrants in the United States and Britain can be found in Susan Model, “Non-White Origins, Anglo Destinations: Immigrants in the US and Britain,” in G. Loury, T. Modood, and S. M. Teles, eds., Ethnicity, Social Policy and Social Mobility in the United States and the United Kingdom (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002). This theory provides an intriguing explanation of the comparative success of Muslim Asian immigrants in America.

  Let us imagine a queue such that the ethnic group viewed most favorably by employers (yellows) is at the head, and the group members viewed least favorably (greens) are at the tail. Purples are somewhere in the middle. Suppose we have two labor markets, market A and market B. Assume that market A contains only yellows and purples. Market B contains all three groups. According to the theory, purples will do better, ceteris paribus, in market B than market A, because the presence of greens benefits purples. Purples will accrue advantage if the yellow group shrinks or the green group grows. About 27 percent of the U.S. labor force consists of immigrants and ethnic minorities, compared with 10 percent of the British labor force. Assuming most employers in both countries prefer whites to other ethnicities, the theory predicts that Asian minorities in the United States will fare better than their compatriots in Britain, because the United States contains two large, low-ranking groups—blacks and Hispanics—who are less well represented in Britain. This increases the chances that Asian minorities will be at the top of the U.S. labor queue. As long as these large groups hold a lower position on the American ladder of discrimination, Asian immigrants will be more successful in the United States than in Britain.