On Sunday, Phil Weiss posted a sympathetic piece on Christopher Caldwell’s new book about Islam in Europe by Scott McConnell, a longtime friend of this site. Here is a response to it by another friend of this site, Muhammad Idrees Ahmad of PULSE and his co-editor Robin Yassin-Kassab:
There are two sets of population statistics about Europe, writes Eliot Weinberger in a post on the London Review Blog: ‘those of the Islamophobes and those of everyone else.’ Weinberger is commenting on the recent of flurry of books trading in the ‘Islamic threat’, among them one by neoconservative writer Christopher Caldwell. In his encomium to Caldwell, Scott McConnell couldn’t possibly have been referring to the statistics of ‘everyone else’. It would be hard otherwise to elevate a minority of 3.6 percent into a civilizational threat. So presumably he accepts the numbers of the Islamophobes. But he does more; he also echoes their assumptions. Small wonder then that he should consider ‘nuanced’ a book that describes Muslims as ‘conquering Europe’s cities, street by street’.
But before we get to Caldwell lets address McConnell’s own assumptions.
McConnell splits ‘the West’ and ‘the Muslims’ into opposing camps, and understands their relationship only in terms of harm. ‘Had I to weigh the extent to which the Islamic world is more victim or victimizer of America and the West’, he opines, ‘the scales would tilt decisively towards America as the more guilty party’. American crimes include the Iraq war and support for Israeli conquest of ‘the Arab sections’ of Jerusalem and the West Bank. Support for dictators, the proponderance of military bases, the exploitation of resources, Somalia, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and support for the Israeli conquest of the ‘Arab sections’ of Tel Abib and Yaffa, clearly do not factor in McConnell’s narrow vision. But it’s fair enough in itself. Where logic fails McConnell entirely, or rather where he fails logic and turns to racism instead, is where he places Muslim immigration into Europe ‘on the other side of the ledger’.
So Muslim immigration–which boosts European economies, provides Europe with doctors, professors and engineers as well as those diligent cleaners, cooks and labourers who do the low-paid, unpleasant jobs that white Europeans often refuse to do–is for McConnell an act of war, a parallel activity to the mass slaughter in Iraq or the continuing ethnic cleansing of Palestine. I presume the couscous or tandoori restaurant, Rai and Bhangra music, and entertaining urban novels written by Muslims are all weapons in this war (Caldwell certainly thinks so. ‘If the spread of Pakistani cuisine is the single greatest improvement in British public life over the past half-century,’ he writes, ‘it is also worth noting that bombs used for the failed London transport attacks of July 21, 2005, were made from a mix of hydrogen peroxide and chapatti flour.’). Since war is an organised activity, McConnell implies that there is a hidden Muslim plan behind the immigration. So those Iranians and Kurds fleeing tyranny, and the war-refugees of Iraq and Sudan, and the economic migrants of Syria and Bangladesh, and the ambitious professionals of Pakistan and Nigeria – all are soldiers in this dastardly assault. (Note that for McConnell it is ‘Islamic’ rather than ‘Muslim’ immigration).
McConnell is a surfer on the current wave of Islamophobia – a process of scapegoating the weakest minority in European societies while Europe wages imperialist wars in the Muslim world. Clear-sighted Europeans remember the scapegoating of the Jews in the early twentieth century, and they worry for the future. Government ministers, TV commentators and editorial writers give the public a constant diet of barbaric-Muslim scare stories. McConnell meanwhile peddles the myth of European elites pussy-footing around the ‘Muslim threat’ in the same way that American elites avoid criticism of Israel (supposedly because those invading European Muslims have a unified, powerful lobby to equal the Israel lobby in the US?)
Anyway, McConnell informs us, the pussyfooting has finally stopped, because European Muslims have been caught engaged in such bad behaviour. In order to prove his point, McConnell takes a page from Cadlwell’s book and invents three out of the five examples he offers as evidence. He talks about “murders and riots over cartoons” – but nobody in Europe was murdered over the Danish cartoons. He talks about “riots of a more mundane nature”, by which one assumes he means the riots of the Parisian banlieu or of northern Britain’s ex-industrial wastelands. But these riots were about poverty, unemployment, poor housing, brutal policing and racism, not about religion. And when McConnell comes to “the murder of a leading anti-immigration politician,” one can only suppose he refers to the assassination of Dutch far-right leader Pim Fortuyn. But Fortuyn was killed by militant animal rights activist Volkert van der Graaf, who is what McConnell would consider “indiginous”, not Muslim. For the revolution, McConnell tells us in Goebbels mode, is “not indiginous to Europe,” but it is “taking place on European territory.”
But let’s imagine that McConnell is the kind of writer to whom facts matter, and let’s say for the sake of argument that all five of his examples are pristine instances of unadulterated Muslim savagery. OK. Would these crimes and idiocies therefore implicate all European Muslims? Only according to the same logic by which all Americans are “crusaders” guilty of assaulting the Muslim heartland, and thus legitimate targets. Only according to a logic which notes the contribution of poor white racists to rioting in northern Britain, and then declares these white people to be unacceptably alien, a demographic problem and a civilisational threat.
But comparing logics won’t get through to McConnell, because his assumptions are racist. They don’t require definition or context. He thinks that honour killing is “Islamist political activity.” Like elections for Muslims, presumably? There are Christian families in the Middle East who kill for ‘honour’. And one of the leading causes of death among women under the age of 35 in Britain is domestic violence, a.k.a ‘honour killing’. But never mind all that; why allow facts get in the way of inflamed prejudice? McConnell tells us he would mourn the loss of Europe’s social liberalism, and he asks, “Which is more troublesome, Amsterdam’s window displays of naked prostitutes, or the burka?” Well, to us, both are equally troublesome, yet less troublesome than invading American Islamophobes. But the point here is that McConnell’s question is deeply illiberal. It’s like, “Which is the bigger problem? Metalheads or hip hop fans?” To a liberal, neither is a problem. Of course, the editor of The American Conservative is no liberal, even if he shares his disdain for Muslims with his liberal counterparts. This was evident in who he chose to review Caldwell’s book. If the New York Times had the book reviewed by Caldwell’s fellow neoconservative Fouad Ajami, The American Conservative had it reviewed by Caldwell’s fellow Islamophobe Rod Liddle. This Murdoch scrivener competes with Caldwell in what McConnell would call ‘nuance’. He makes documentaries with titles such as ‘Immigration Is A Time Bomb’ (which he also used to mainstream the views of Nick Griffin of the fascist BNP), and statements such as
Islam is the real problem — the ideology rather than simply facets of the ideology or rogue individual adherents. And further, that there is no great philosophical divide between those whom our governments delineate as ‘moderate’ and those whom they consider ‘extremist’…the totalitarian nature of the ideology does not differ very much; the motor for each transgression of human rights, major or minor, comes from within Islam itself.
So much for the reviewer; lets now turn to the reviewee. It is clear from Caldwell’s book that his problem is not just with Islam, but Muslims in general. He freely pronounces on ‘the penury, servitude, violence, and mediocrity of Muslim societies worldwide’. The Islamic world for Caldwell is ‘an economic and intellectual basket case, the part of the potentially civilised world most left behind by progress’ (emphasis added).
So what if Muslims constitute 3.6 percent of the population? ‘Of course minorities can shape countries’, Caldwell retorts, ‘They can conquer countries. There were probably fewer Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917 than there are Islamists in Europe today’. Next he attempts something even more daring; he tries to resurrect disgraced Tory politician Enoch Powell — he of the ‘rivers of blood’ fame — as a prophet, a tribune of the people, for having anticipated Cadlwell’s arguments by four decades. Caldwell would have likely had more success varnishing a turd. His ire isn’t reserved for Muslims alone, he also chastises Europeans for opposing American wars. Even in countries that did support the war, he accuses Europeans of encouraging Muslims to be anti-American:’When Muslims marched in anti-war demonstrations, after all, their secular and Christian fellow citizens marched alongside them’. Imagine that!
The problem is that one can’t just dismiss these views as eccentric any more. This type of alarmism has already contributed to the rise of fascism across Europe. ‘The primary threat to democracy in Europe is not “Islamofascism”…but plain old fascism’, journalist Gary Younge observes. Fascism, he notes, has returned to Europe ‘as a mainstream ideology’. This has consequences for the lives of the Muslim minority which has been the target of bomb threats, assassination attempts, vandalism and other forms of hate crime for the past several years. Before he pronounces on this subject, McConnell could at least do his readers the courtesy of getting his facts right. As regards who is threatening whom, he could begin by watching this Channel 4 documentary.
The Jewish convert, Mohammad Assad wrote in “Islam on the Cross Road” that every western is born in hatred toward Islam”. However, I tends to disagree with his assertion. But there is no denying the fact that even the born Muslims in France, Germany, Denmark, and other Estern European countries are persecuted due to false impression of Islam created by the local Zionist-controlled mainstrean media – from publication of Danish Cartoons to making anti-Islam movies. The new immigrants and the second and third generation Muslims are demanded to integrate – leaving Hijab, denouncing military resistance (Jihad), and “modernizing” Islam in the western anti-religion image. While Muslims are asked to renounce their religious values – the Christians and Jewish communities are not required to do so.
The main fear created among the native population is the propaganda that within a few decades – the Muslims will become a majority in the West – due to their higher birth rate and new immigrants (which are needed for cheap labour force). Pro-Israel lobbies are spending millions of dollars to keep this ‘Islamophobia’ alive for the benefit of the Zionist entity.
Last month I posted an article titled “Islam doesn’t need Enlightenment” – which would answer many of questions raised in discussion.
link to rehmat1.wordpress.com
Great stuff, Phil. Islamophobe neocons are making a worse mistake than ‘When they [the fascists] came for …, I did nothing’, they are outright encouraging the fascists! Where is that going to end?
I wonder if they are consciously undermining the security of non-Israeli Jews (and everyone else) in a futile effort to staunch the rise of American and European disenchantment with Israeli ethnic cleansing and colonization. How much of their rhetoric is simple career opportunism? I think neocons are a fairly bright bunch; are they too ideologically blinkered to know what they are doing? If they realize what collateral damage might result from their hate-mongering, then there is no better archetype than they for the notion of ‘bitter-enders’.
Great stuff, Phil. My apologies, credit to Idrees for the excellent analysis, and kudos to Phil and Adam for posting it.
Rod Liddle is an intellectual midget. He once made a documentary that concluded that Atheism is a faith too: it has temples (where Big Science is conducted!) and a Bible (Darwin’s Origins of Species!). A simpleton, really…
It should come as no surprise to find Liddle dabbling in bizarre theories about Islam.
RE: ‘The primary threat to democracy in Europe is not “Islamofascism”…but plain old fascism’
FROM YNET – “France: 4 Jews suspected of attacking Palestinian store”, by Miri Chason, 07/09/09
Paris: Four youths connected to ‘Jewish Defense League’ arrested on suspicion they vandalized book store owned by pro-Palestinian couple.
PARIS – Some 300 people participated Wednesday evening in a show of support in front of a pro-Palestinian bookstore that was vandalized last week in France. The demonstrators called to dismantle the Jewish Defense League, whose members were allegedly involved in the attack on the store. Four young Jews were arrested Wednesday on suspicions of carrying out the attack….
ENTIRE ARTICLE – link to ynetnews.com
RE: “France: 4 Jews suspected of attacking Palestinian store”
SEE ALSO – link to fuckfrance.com
(EXCERPTS) “…According to Rachida Dati (our ex-minister of Justice) more than 70% of inmates in franch jails are from arabic origins. Being a raghead herself and having 2 brothers more or less in jail, she should know. But, needless to say, my sympathy goes to the JDL, a decent organization…”
“…That racist bookstore encouraged boycott of Israeli firms, supports Arab terrorists etc…it is not a simple bookstore.Well done to the JDL…”
I didn’t much like McConnell’s piece, but this one is a screed and a caricature, not a response. Europeans have every right to control their borders. If mass immigration “boosts European economies,” Idrees should have no problem convincing Europeans of that. The palpable concern in Europe, including BNP’s recent success, suggests otherwise, and Europe can also provide its own doctors. All that being said, what’s important here is that nobody on the right delude himself into thinking they can make common cause with the neocons on Islam in Europe. The neocons took the side of Kosovar Muslims and supported the destruction of Serbia, and they’re the ones pushing hardest for Israel’s ally Turkey to join the EU.
Are you suggesting that Europe is now represented by the BNP? Europeans have no problem with me, or the doctors. Scotland in fact welcomes us, for its own benefit. Its underfunded universities would be long out of businesses were it not for the mass of Asian students who pay the exorbitant international fees, ensuring employment in its otherwise decrepit education system. But I digress. Europe has as much right to control its borders as Iraq or Afghanistan. Except, unlike the Europeans few of the Muslim emigres — and they are few — arrive riding tanks. Unlike the 60s most of the people coming into UK today are either extremely wealthy, or highly skilled (ever seen the point-based visa requirements?). At the risk of repeating myself, let me offer you the same advice that I did McConnell: get your facts right.
Europe definitely does not need immigration:
link to adnkronos.com
The US was wrong to invade Iraq and Afghanistan (at the behest of the Zionists), and European governments were and are wrong to flood their own countries with immigrants.
Do we know that high unemployment in Europe is linked to excessive immigration numbers? If we don’t have any proof of direct correlation then your unemployment numbers are just an exercise in “post hoc ergo propter hoc”.
And you are suggesting the unemployment has to do with immigrants?
So, the invasion and murder of more than a million foreigners is the same as the arrival of a Pakistani doctor whose skills and taxes the British state benefits from without having invested a penny in his education and training?
You’re the one who threw the wars in. I’m saying immigrants are not needed or beneficial and the popular success of BNP and similar parties on the continent suggests that lost of people agree with me. The Pakistani doctor should stay in Pakistan. I’m sure there are lots of sick people there who need his help.
So apart from being xenophobic you also don’t read too well. McConnell had put US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on par with Muslim immigration to EU, as you did. Now that you are weasling out, you are going to blame that on the ‘immigrant’ too? Americans (i.e., the natives of America, not the European invading genocidaires) might also have thought that your ancestors best stayed in Europe. But they didn’t, listen, now did they? Except, unlike them, the asian immigrants to europe come bearing medicine, not small pox blankets.
Name calling and lying about my posts tell me you’re getting nervous about the justifiable anti-immigrant backlash in Europe. I suggest the immigrants bear their medicine and whatever else they bear back in Pakistan.
Name calling and lying? Are you sure you are posting in the right thread. Which is the lie and what name did I call you?
Am1st your anti-immigration bias is well noted. But you over look a major factor in Moslem immigration into Europe after WWII. Beginning in the 1950s and accerlating in the sixties, the first arrivals were workers from Turkey who provided the industrial work force that restored Germany as the world’s largesst exporter of manufactured goods. It is one of the ironies of the Aryan superiority movement that led Germany to its crushing defeat in 1945 and the death of 5.5 million able bodied German males, that they had to rely on immigrant labor to rebuild their work force. Basically, not enough aryans to man the work force so they had to be imported. These Turkish workers should be credited with supporting Germany’s rebuilding — they were not taking jobs from anyone, Hitler had succeeded in killing off that work force. The descendents of that first wave of Moslem workers are now 3rd and 4th generation Germans. They certainly have more rights to citizenship and jobs than does the latest immigration of impoverished workers from the former Soviet ruled lands.
We should just face the fact that a major demographic change has occurred but one that Europe will survive. I believe multiculturalism in Europe will be as healthy and robust as the one that has defined America over the last 250 years.
Is it reasonable to tell women not to wear the veil as people link it to terrorism and they may experience intimidation? Perhaps we should tell Jews not to wear wooly saucers on their heads because there are some neoNazi’s out there? Should we warn girls not to wear short skirts as they are inviting the attention of rapists? Does all political verbiage
depend on such associations? It seems so; I’m just asking.
This commentary is worthless; it’s little more than a disconnected mass of ad-hominem attacks. I am not even sure if it is about McConnell’s review, Caldwell’s book, or what the author doesn’t like about Europe.
Mr. Idrees seems to have completely missed McConnell’s irony in his comparison of traditional Muslim values to secular European decadence.
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