The anti-Muslim backlash in the Netherlands

Thank you for the link, interesting article.

Didn’t like: “Nor should we exaggerate the risk: smoking still kills thousands of times more Dutch people than Islamic fundamentalism.” Um yes, but the problem is that because one killing targeting a man who had outspoken views, this one killing has a chilling effect on free and open speech.

Coincidentally the IHT had an article today (by Brian Knowlton) which raised the possibility that Europe could be a target of more terrorism in the future, because some of its people went to Iraq to bring terror down on the Americans and will return to their countries with the same spirit in mind.

Don’t know, but if Europe experiences an economic downturn,things could well turn ugly. So I think my main objective with the FT article is its idea that, by process of elimination, the only way out is more or less the PC solution. I’m not sure this solution is any more viable than the competition, should economic times get any tougher. There just may not be a solution.

Best article, eh? Hmm. The others must have been pretty bad. I’ve only read about a quarter of it so far (so who knows, it may improve dramatically) but already I see one radical flaw: he systematically (i.e. repeatedly) confuses ‘Muslim’ with ‘brown.’

“Six weeks before he was gunned down in the street, the Dutch controversialist Theo van Gogh (pictured) sat on a panel in Amsterdam in a hall full of Dutch Muslims. The panel was organised by a group called “Ben je bang voor mij?” (”Are you afraid of me?”), which tries to bring together white and brown Dutch people.”

“Suddenly many Dutch people see their country as a riven place, where Muslims and white people cannot co-exist, and which may be on the brink of disaster.”

“Most of the 14m inhabitants of Europe’s most densely populated country were then white, but the Muslim population was growing fast.”

Well, the terms are not identical, and the confusion is extremely unhelpful, for reasons that surely have been thoroughly discussed lately. There’s no arguing with ‘brown’ and ‘brown’ is not a system of ideas. Islam is a set of ideas, and there is arguing with it. So the entrenched habit – which may or may not be deliberate – maybe by now people really have lost sight of the fact that there’s a difference – tends to make people think that Islam just must not be disagreed with, that particular tenets of Islam must not be disagreed with, at risk of being racist. But that’s just nonsense, and it’s harmful nonsense. Ask atheist secular women who live under Islamic regimes, for example.

[sigh] How many times does one have to say it? ‘Muslim’ is not a race. ‘Brown’ is not a religion. Race is one thing, religion is another. The terms are not interchangeable. It’s a mistake to pretend they are.

For the record (to be fair, and boring stuff like that): the article does deal with the criticism-of-Islam issue. It doesn’t deal with it very well, but it does deal with it.

“According to multiculturalism, a society consists of blocs of ethnic groups each living happily within their own culture…Today the concept is going out of fashion in much of Europe. Critics say it locks people up in a fixed, imagined idea of what “Moroccan” or “Muslim” is.”

Yeah but that’s not all critics say. The point is that the ‘living happily’ thing is a terrible oversimplification – not to say a falsehood. Many women don’t live all that happily. Cultures are not monolithic. A culture may work (cultures so often do work) so that a dominant group lives happily while everyone else is subordinate and perhaps exploited. Multiculturalism has a bad tendency to skip lightly over that fact. Or rather, to consider it in the case of the dominant, local (Western) culture and skip over it in the case of the Other cultures.

“Many women don’t live all that happily.”

Or many men, for that matter. What’s your point?

A culture may work (cultures so often do work) so that a dominant group lives happily while everyone else is subordinate and perhaps exploited.

Precisely, Ophelia.

More generally, as Katha Pollitt put it (at the time of the Miss World riots in Nigeria): Militant Islam may be the beginning of the end for multiculturalism, the live-and-let-live philosophy that asks, Why can’t we all enjoy our differences? Ethnic food and world music are all very well, but fatwas and amputations and suicide bombings just don’t put a smile on the day.

Trying to make cheese from what got us (the Dutch) where we are today takes volumes.

First, it’s important to understand Dutch culture, which is basically the culture of a small village; a mire of unwritten rules on which Dutch natives were expected to consent or be confronted with social disqualification. Thousands of little silly rules (like “Thou shalleth not do the laundryeth on any other dayeth than Mondayeth”) were what bound us and kept life predictable and boring. Firmly confined by all these rules, Dutch society used to be very restrained; a society in which little happened and little was possible.
The crux of the matter now is that these rules were never publicly discussed, nor formally taught. Most are programmed through parental and social pressure, and they have become a natural part of us, leaving us unaware of their existence, quantity and form.

This is the root of our current confusion and the situation we find ourselves in today. We are only now beginning to question who we really are and where our apparent bounderies reside, if not where they come from.

I’ll leave it at that for now. It’s such a complex issue and there’s so much to write about it, but most of the math can be done from here, I think.

I will add that it has nothing to do with race or xenophobia, and that it has little to do with education either because the only people who actually interface with muslims on a day to day basis are simply those who happen to vacant the same socio-economical class and therefore neighborhoods. Not too surprising, is it?

Ophelia wrote – How many times does one have to say it? ‘Muslim’ is not a race. ‘Brown’ is not a religion. Race is one thing, religion is another. The terms are not interchangeable. It’s a mistake to pretend they are.

Yeah, well, that’s something that badly needs to be taught to the racists in the first place. And no, the racists are not the people who criticise Islam from the political or ideological point of view, but the kind of people who just think in terms of them, foreigners, raus. They don’t bother with political arguments in favour of women’s rights and against repressive cultural practices. No. They just want them all Muslim foreigners out because they soil the nation with their presence. Race, religion, there is no distinction being made when prejudices are extreme. After all, even Judaism is not a race, but that never stopped anyone who hated Jews, did it. That mentality does exist about Muslims too. We can’t pretend it’s not there and that it’s all only political criticism and intellectual debate.

Far right parties and groups in Europe have exploited and fuelled precisely that convergence. (Sometimes, with exactly that double target, Muslims and Jews).

Being muslim is a belief/ideology, and in concordance with any other belief/ideology, this may or may not imply certain ways and perspectives, depending on personal interpretation. It does not imply a particular race, unless you are bent on taking that perspective. It seems that some people are, on both sides of the fence.

If you read the article, it’s clearer. To people used to living in a predominantly white, Christian if secularised, western society, waves of immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries like Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Pakistan, etc. *do* represent both a different religion and culture, and a different “race”, in the way the term “race” is commonly used. Ethnic group, nationality of origin, and religious affiliation do get conflated.

It’s not that hard to understand how that conflation happens in the context the article describes.

If you think there is a difference between criticizing world-religous-belief systems and races — let me suggest you go to any college campus and sit on an “Exposing Islam” type event held by many campus groups. Whether its Islam and Women, or Islam and Whatever. Just sit in and listen. Then you can decide whether these are are critiques of belief-systems or racist demagogues using these events to score political points.

Certainly *not* the best article I have read, and I say that as a Dutchman recently returned to that country and also highly critical of the current anti-islam trend in Europe (the NL is no exception n Europe, nor is it as bad as Kuper makes us believe). Apart from the obvious translation problems (negers, kutmarokkanen), Kuper’s analysis suffers from a biased selection of sources and lacking contextual knowledge. Equating Scheffer with Fortuyn and accusing him (Scheffer, that is) of producing hysteria – I mean, really. As much as I hate the accusatory tone of many politicians, the sensationalist approach of some media, and the us/them dichotomy they help to create – the good thing is that debate on the real issues has started as well now. For the integration problem is real: (Children of) Moroccon and Turkish immigrants *are* lesser educated and more often unemployed. Of the women in Women’s Refuge Centres, 60% *are* of immigrant descent. Gay people in these immigrant families *do* have serious problems. Groups of Moroccon youths *do* terrorise certain city districts. Scheffer merely pointed out that the problems exist. Current rightwing policies certainly will not solve them, but ignoring them does not help either.
I have never seen so many well-spoken immigrants on TV as I do these days, and, unlike the people interviewed by Kuper, they are acknowleding and addressing the problems, instead of denying them or attributing them entirely to discrimination. This is good, not only because it might help to actually solve them, but also for PR reasons (yes, it was a wise decision of muslim organisations to join in the obligatory chorus “rejecting this deed”) and in order to make clear that “us” against “them” is not the issue here.

“A “white” muslim is about as common as an inuit scientologist.”

I don’t know how common Inuit scientologists are, but there are a few white Muslims. But in any case that’s beside the point. I’m not saying that it’s not the case that most Muslims are ‘brown’. I am saying that religion is not the same kind of thing as race, and vice versa. Religion is a system of ideas, and one that tells people what to do, how to live, whom to dominate, whom to obey, and similar items of public concern. As such, religion can and must be open to debate and criticism. That’s not true of race. There’s nothing to argue about in ‘race’; brown skin doesn’t issue encyclicals or fatwas. When the two are conflated, when Islam and ‘brown people’ are treated as identical, it becomes taboo to disagree with Islam, and that’s a bad thing. No religion should have immunity from criticism.

No religion should have immunity from criticism.


Indeed. That is stating the obvious (to non fanatics).

This would make sense, if we argued against belief systems using the same techniques and reasons. But quoting out of context, reasoning from example, and all the other faulty techinques used in many tirades against Islam somehow dont find their way against Christinaity, Judiasm, Atheism, Hindusim, or . I don’t think this point is controversial, you just need to be reading a newspaper recently or some right-leaning media.

Andrew, have you attended any of these events? I’ve attended almost ea. one on my campus this quarter. I’m not seeing it through any pre-conceived meta-narrative, they are outright designed to score political points and bash Islam no matter what. One of the speakers brough to campus, Nonie Darwish. was meant to help the audience understand Islam and its current problems. You can judge for yourself.

Ophelia,

This really is tedious. You have a bee in your bonnet about people who claim that criticism of Islam is ipso facto racist. Fair enough, I’ll concede the point (though not without noting that whilst attacks on religions _can_ be merely the stuff of enlightenment rationalism, they can also be the cover for nasty attempts to marginalise whole groups of people).

Here you accuse Simon Kuper of being conceptually confused and thinking that Islam is a race. I have to say that that’s a spectacularly wilful and boneheaded reading of what he wrote and one that only someone strongly predisposed to see examples of her pet conceptual confusion would have seen. Having read Kuper’s writings on and off over the years, I can tell you with pretty close to 100 per cent certainty that he is _not_ conceptually confused in the way you suggest. It just happens that in the context he’s writing about there’s contingently (and especially in the minds of the Dutch people who are reacting negatively) a strong correlation between being Muslim and being “brown”.

Your failures of comprehension really are pretty serious here. So, for example, Kuper’s “living happily” quote is not an endorsement of multiculturalism but a thumbnail sketch of multicultural utopia in the eyes of its most optimistic advocates (ie not Kuper himself) which then introduces a contrast with what “critics” say. You then attack his account of what “critics” say because he doesn’t go into sufficient detail to encompass explicitly the exact points that you, as a “critic”, would like to make.

Nowhere do you even bother addressing the central point of the article, which is to attack the insistent demand that Muslims identify as Dutch-first/Muslims-second etc. That they “integrate” and “assimilate” as good liberal citizens. And so on. As Kuper makes clear, these demands are (a) highly offensive, as we can see just by recalling the similar questioning of Jews “are they really German?” / “Where is their loyalty?” and (b) totally counterproductive.

Do you think that persistent stigmatization and demanding that a group become more “normal”, identifying them as a “problem” and so on, is likely to (a) make members of that group shrug their shoulders and conform or (b) feel threatened, reinforce their group identity, get massively pissed off etc? Personally, I’m guessing it does the latter.

The trouble with me writing that last paragraph is that you are probably tempted to process it as “Chris says we shouldn’t criticise Islam”. Well, no, I wasn’t saying that. I was saying that persistent stigmatization and demonization of groups, blaming all members for the actions of extremists etc etc is not a good strategy for anyone who wants to promote the liberal values we both share. Funnily enough, I think that’s what Simon Kuper was saying too. What a pity that you couldn’t hear him.

One of the problems I have with the idea of “criticizing Islam” is that it sets up the critics as arbitrers of what is Islamic. This is especially troubling when there are all kinds of itjehad movements in the Islamic world to open up the questions of what Islam advocates. So while a critic might say Islam sucks for saying women should cover their faces, there are quite a few Muslims who are arguing that Islam says no such thing. What would a critic gain by framing their argument in a way that delegitimizes progressive Muslims?

On the contrary, I’d say that people who are actually interested in whatever kind of feminist change (rather than just having a racist tizzy) take a much more pragmatic view of popularizing critiques, using police power etc.

…in order to make clear that “us” against “them” is not the issue here.

I find it hilarious that the response to an article about white people resorting to “us” and “them” is a heart-warming anecdote about how “well-spoken” (!) immigrants are doing PR to convince white people that it’s not about “us” and “them”.

Speaking of atheist secular women of color who live under European/North American regimes, if you ever wonder why so many of us are multiculturalists, it’s because we’ve met an awful lot of white people who’d read an article about anti-Muslim prejudices and then complain that Islam can’t be criticize — or assure us that some Muslims are doing the necessary to make whites feel better.

(Not that there’s anything wrong with well-spoken immigrants making nice — see under “pragmatic view of”.)

I don’t know how common Inuit scientologists are, but there are a few white Muslims. But in any case that’s beside the point.

Er, no it’s not beside the point at all, in the context which the article refers to, which is not the US, but parts of Europe where immigration in significant numbers has been a recent phenomenon, most of it coming from predominantly Muslim countries from Northern Africa, so that it’s perfectly correct for the author to say “Most of the 14m inhabitants of Europe’s most densely populated country were then white, but the Muslim population was growing fast” . Because that population was not white. It’s not the author arbitarily equating Islam with being not white. It’s the reality of the kind of immigration in Europe that he’s describing.

And that reality includes lots of people for whom racism is indeed the main motive for *bashing*, as the article correctly puts it, Muslims.

We’re not talking theoretical debates between bloggers here, Ophelia. We’re talking daily life in European countries. The racists may be a minority overall but they are still relevant. Who do you think voted for Le Pen, Haider, the BNP, the Northern League, Fortuyn, etc.? Only people who had a principled, sophisticated, well-argued and well-read critique of Islam as a religion and system of ideas? Only people with concerns about women and gay rights? That’s not the refrain we heard during those parties electoral campaigns, I can assure you. The right wing tabloids who exploit those attitudes don’t engage in highly intellectual criticism. They explicitely reflect and incite what can only be called racism and bigotry. There is no distinction being made – they’re foreigners, they’re immigrants, they’re different nationalities, different ethnic groups, different skin colour, different religion, different cultures, it’s all one big “them” thing. The people you hear complaining about those damn Moroccans moping around equally bash feminists and gays. I don’t know in the specifics about the Netherlands as I don’t live in that part of Europe, but many of the things the article mentions are very, very recognisable to me because they’re common throughout the continent (hence the emerging of those far right anti-immigration parties). I know and hear a lot more of those people, than the ones you refer to as calling a racist anyone who criticises anything about Islam. I’d love to trade places, really. Introduce me to your fanatical kneejerk apologists of Islam, please, I’ll introduce you to some fine specimens of bona fide racist scum. Deal?

Ethnic food and world music are all very well, but fatwas and amputations and suicide bombings just don’t put a smile on the day.

Fine phrasemakers are all very well but people who pass remarks on the subject without quite knowing what a fatwa *is* prove nothing so much as the uses of multiculturalism.

Rob: For example, there has been some support on the left in the UK to make incitement to religious hatred a criminal offence, which could well be used to suppress religious criticism, and some aspects of Islamic practice are protected under existing race relations legislation. I’m not sure whether either of these things are good or bad ideas, but they do look like treating religion as analogous to race.

I’m no big fan of those proposals, but I see it as a far simpler matter: the purpose is to treat incitement to hatred and violence as different from *criticism*.

There is a big difference there. Besides, at European level there are already measures against incitement to violence and hatred. In several EU countries, there are also national laws against neofascist and neonazi propaganda. Antisemitic propaganda web sites or publications by far right groups, for instance, are monitored and closed down by police. Only the neofascists themselves complain that’s a form of stifling “criticism”.
Everyone else knows the difference.

The right wing tabloids that exploit and incite the same kind of mentality about Muslims publish pages and pages of bigoted generalisations, only to complain that those leftists and liberals are making it taboo for them to express their “criticism”. Then, they take it as their mission to break that taboo, and so on, braver and braver in their “criticism” mission. I do not advocate legal measures against these hypocrites, unless of course, they do break already existing laws, but it’s just absurd to ignore them or blame their behaviour on “the left”. Give me a break. These people, these mentalities always existed. Jews, gypsies, blacks, gays, now Muslims, they found a new toy to play with.

Besides, on all other media, from moderate right to centre right to centre left to left and you name it, there is actually a lot of what is more properly called criticism, so that’s just another straw man.

This may be a political mistake, because the left accepting the equivalence of race and culture so often posited by the racist right makes it much easier for the racist right to use that equivalence for its own ends.

Yeah, yeah, it’s always the fault of “the left”, even far right racism. Come on. They don’t need no such excuses. First of all, there is no single “the left” that does and thinks the very same thing, as we’ve seen on Iraq; second, no one is suggesting “accepting” that equivalence, the point is that *there is* real racism that targets entire groups (sometimes also physically, as you’ve seen most recently and obviously in the Dutch case, but not only there) and it does use that “but Islam is not a religion, so we can’t be racists, you’re only stifling debate” as a fig leaf to hide behind. It’s a *reality*, in this case, specifically in Europe, and that’s what the article also refers to, it’s completely disingenous to pretend it does not exist.

Maybe you’re just not as familiar with it. Lucky you.

Institutional survival strategies become like football teams, with identifying names and team colors and fan bases whose emotional well-being fluctuates with the win-loss record. No one in this argument speaks from outside a survival strategy, whether it’s traditional or contemporary, repressive or tolerant. It’s a consistent feature of these institutions that their goals are never named, exactly. Though some of the most successful have managed to create undisprovable ostensible goals that are excellent p.r. and involve an afterlife from which no one emerges to testify.
Islam was born in the harshest environment in the world, where there was no room for soft-edged tolerance, where accepting softness meant death. Just because most Muslims now live in modern technologically-enhanced urban cultures doesn’t change the original ferocity of their religion, whose goal, as with the other Abramic institutions, is its own survival. Modern democracies have essentially the same goal and offer essentially the same tangible rewards – survival of the obedient general population, but especially of the governing institution itself.
The conflict is not one of mis-interpretation, it’s primal; Cain and Abel, Godzilla and Mothra, Hatfields and McCoys; in order to ameliorate it one or the other or both sides have to submit, to become watered-down, to change what they are into something softer, to compromise. Or be beaten into harmlessness.
From within my cultural institutions Islam looks threatening and implacably uncompromising, as I’m sure the “Christian” Americans must look to the Arab Muslims in Iraq. Though all these conflicts drown the voices of their moderates, it’s also true that moderation is not a strengthening virtue, in the short run. Moderation’s pay-off is long-term.
Looking at it dispassionately, from within no social or cultural context – as an alien objective observer – none of these strategies seems better or worse than any other. The tolerant open societies of the West are more benign, now, but they’re also decadent and increasingly, corruptly, impotent. The repressive societies of religious fanaticism aren’t appealing to me, personally, in truth they’re scarily threatening, but they may well offer the only long-term survival benefits to be had – getting through the abrupt and violent changes we’re headed into now.
That’s ignored in all this discussion of human rights and political correctness, that these religions were once and may be again like tidepools – microcosmic shelters for the animal we are, when the tide of easy living has washed back out to sea.
We’re going there, open society or racist mob, compassionate or bigoted, tolerant or dogmatic. And the goal is always survival, getting through – of who or what is where the conflict begins.
My point is that the most human position will come from the most accurate understanding, the rest is partial and secondary, or misleading entirely. Obviously we can’t understand everything that’s going on and remain human, it’s too big, but not lying to ourselves about where we are and what we’re doing is possible, and important. And not lying about where we’re going is absolutely vital.

Tracy, you must have missed the part where the article also mentions the arsons of mosques as well as less severe attacks and general _bashing_. That’s what he suggests is best _not_ doing. It’s not, “don’t do anything at all”. The article is focusing on some of the reactions among non-Muslim Dutch people. It’s not encompassing the greater scope of problems within the Muslim communities, or the responsibilities for the murder of Van Gogh, or the causes of terrorism. Integration has to do with daily life, not exceptional events. In daily life, the vast majority of Dutch non-Muslim people are not arsonists and the vast majority of Dutch Muslims are not murderers. The idea that it’s best not to _bash_ anyone is not a recommendation of passive indifference – unless you think the only form of critical action is _bashing_ – it’s got to do with a very precise context in which sentiments have become inflamed. The “order to integrate” is referring to the instances the article cited, about things like those proposals, later discarded, from the Dutch immigration minister.

I wonder, all the people who find this account of the situation in a European country so faulty, what do they know about it? Where do you people live? And where do you get your information about it that you trust is so much more reliable than the accounts of people living there?

It may be that in other works of his Kuper is a brilliant political thinker.

Not at all. I mentioned before that I particularly don’t like his writings when they are not about football.

But there are many in the Netherlands that agree with a conlusion that sounds like his.

Start acting sane and normal again. Let the government take some measures to help the integration of immigrants. Take some counter terrorism action.

That is all there is to do.

Simon Kuper ended with The Dutch are fighting over their identity, and it isn’t a pretty sight. I don’t know about the identity thing, but it sure isn’t a pretty sight over here.

So the first thing to do is end the fighting.

You can think you act with bravery and fight like Don Quixote, attacking the minarets to bring enlightment to the Muslims. But this isn’t a novel, and the results have turned out pretty ugly.

oops, sorry, Tracy, hadn’t read the rest of your comment yet, should never post in a hurry –

to respond to that part, in the article, the part about government proposals is this:

Dutch politicians have also grown even tougher on Muslims. Already the consensus had been that immigrants must be forced to “integrate”. Rita Verdonk, the immigration minister, had suggested immigrants be given “vignettes” to gauge how well they had integrated. It was not clear what she meant by this – that there be a physical mark, such as a tag or passport stamp, or some kind of invisible grading system. She did not initially clarify, and dropped the idea after Hans Dijkstal, former leader of her “liberal” VVD party, said he was curiously reminded of the Nazis’ yellow star for Jews. Since then Verdonk has focused on developing compulsory language and citizenship courses for those born outside the Netherlands. One retired professor of foreign origin, receiving a letter telling him to take such a course, corrected the spelling mistakes and posted it back. Nor would the courses have helped Bouyeri, who allegedly composed a poem in rhyming Dutch to mark van Gogh’s death.

Now, I don’t know if *the author* himself considers those things too as “bashing”. He only calls it “tough”. I think they’re significant examples of the whole context of inflamed reactions, not just in themselves, but precisely because of that *context*. The examples I would more clearly identify as “bashing” are:

bq. In the past month, there have been several arsons of mosques and churches, a Muslim school has burned down, and many Muslims have been insulted or attacked on the street. Women report having had their headscarves yanked off.

Actually, for some of those reactions like arsons, clearly “bashing” would be a huge euphemism.

The author himself explicitely refers to the tactics of Fortuyin and his party as bashing:

bq. Then came Fortuyn, just as September 11 made his Muslim-bashing acceptable.

bq. By then his rivals were copying him to appeal to his largely lesser-educated supporters. Rob Oudkerk, a Socialist alderman, was caught on video using the phrase kutmarokkanen (literally, “cunt Moroccans”). He wasn’t made to resign.

etc.

You write, I agree that bashing people is not the only form of critical action

What I meant is, bashing is *no form of criticism at all*, they are completely different things.

The article is actually being rather fair to the complexities of Fortuyn’s character and background, by citing his dislike for religion being rammed down people’s throats. I think it’s being overall rather fair to the complexities of the reactions among Dutch people in general, too. I don’t think it’s branding them as a lot of racists. The conclusion simply says it’s best, maybe, not to brand Muslims as a lot of cunts, criminals, murderers and terrorists. Because that’s “bashing”. It’s not “criticism”.

I don’t see how hoping for less violence, less racism, less populism is a pitiful recommendation or a call for inaction.

In the conclusion, the author is not laying down a specific point-by-point political programme. It’s just general conclusions drawn from the Dutch case on how best to approach the “integration” issue. It does sound pretty obvious to say that integration has better chances of success when there is no climate of alienation and exacerbated feelings, but “obvious” doesn’t mean stupid. I mean, there are examples in other countries where there haven’t been as dramatic events as in Holland.

The author himself says, “PC as this may sound, tone does matter”. Because the very same measures for language competency as a requirement for citizenship are for instance adopted by other countries, but in a context that may be less inflamed than this one, they may be more neutral, not provoke such criticism, not propagandised by populist politicians as some kind of magic solution (which they aren’t).

You need to take in the *context*.

The suggestion that terrorism is not such a big risk is also in the context of that kind of extreme paranoias fuelled by populists. It may sound flippant to say smoking kills more people. But that’s what I’d also tell to someone who insists on bashing all Muslims as terrorists. And, again, that mentality does exist and that is what the article is addressing.

attempt to suggest moral equivalency between the treatment of women in Islam and Christianity is preposterous

Why is it preposterous?

George,

Just noticed this thread…

You’re right, of course. There have been suggestions recently that the key issue for militant Islamism is the (subservient) role of women under Islam. The men are loathe to give it up. As Katha Pollitt wrote in the article that Peter T linked to above [http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20021223&s=pollitt], “The war between religious fanaticism and secular modernity is fought over women’s bodies…”

Tracy, I don’t know what to add. Aside from the specific points, there’s something I find odd about criticising a journalist for not giving a complete set of solutions for a political problem. You guys make it sound as if Kuper was the Dutch interior minister, instead of a journalist who wrote not even a book but just one article that is inevitably going to be short, incomplete, not encompassing the by and all of the Dutch reality. I had the impression it was focusing on the nastiest aspects of that inflamed climate in the Netherlands simply because, you know, that’s been a topic of interest in the European media, what with murders and violent reactions and so on. If you want to get a fuller picture that includes criticisms and not just bashing and violence, well, people, I guess you’ve got to start reading more, including the non-English language press in Europe. To pick one instance, have you already forgotten the public debate in France regarding the ban on scarves? there were many interesting points of view there, not only bashing, certainly. I would guess recent events in Holland, though far more dramatic, also sparked a debate that wasn’t exclusively anti-Muslim backlash, but that was the main topic of this article, because it has been the most prominent aspect in recent weeks there. There has been a murder of a prominent figure, there have been arsons, there have been insults and attacks, there have been inflamed reactions. There’s been a lot of talk about it in the media all over Europe, and anyone from the (non-extreme) right wing to the left wing to in-between has wished for a normalisation of the situation. That’s simply what the author of this article is also doing, in general terms, in the closing paragraphs. Wishing for a more normal climate with less violence and extremisation, which are definitely neither the only nor the best forms of “action”! I don’t see what’s passive about that wish.

Nic, wishing for something does strike me as remarkably passive in itself. I wish to win the lottery, but don’t actually go and buy any tickets, therefore I am passive about lotteries. I wish for a clean house, but it’s cleaning that gets it clean, not wishing.

Yes, Kuper is free to express his opinions about what should be done. I would not lift a finger to deny him such a right, but I also reserve for myself the right to say that his conclusions are calls for non-action or missing in logic. If he can criticise the Dutch authorities, I can criticise him.

And indeed I did not call for his head to be served to me on a platter or in other way say that him expressing his opinions was ‘unthinkable’, I instead called most of his recommendations ‘non-actions’ and ‘pitiful’, and implicitly expressed my amazement at the divergence between the scale of the problem the Dutch authorities were facing and his recommendations. I also said that he’d failed to provide a causal link between his recommendation that politicians should find policies for the problems of recent immigrants doing worse at school and in the job market and the problem of terrorism, I provided some evidence that there wasn’t a link, and also critised his recommended action on the basis that it was likely to waste government money.

Yes, he did not write a book, and I did not expect the detail you would get from a book, but he could have kept well within his word limit by finishing the article with a recommendation to refrain from sounding like you’re ordering people to integrate and given an example of language he’d approved of. He could have diverted a paragraph to the question of whether there is a causal link between immigrants doing worse at school/jobs and terrorism, or he could have left that bit out completely. He could have finished with “It’s a serious problem and I don’t know what the solutions are” rather than proposing that people accept some statements. I’ve written documents covering complex problems against a strict word limit without resulting in conclusions that don’t actually address the problem, or skip providing some evidence for the causal link. (Although editors have picked up a number of times when I have been lazy, and criticised me for it). I’ve used “don’t know” statements when I’ve been ignorant – they don’t do much for your rep but they’re better than saying something wrong. And they’re short.

My disgust with calls to “accept” etc-etc or “recognise” is general. They leave the obvious question of “Okay, I’ve accepted your statement, now what?”. In Kuper’s case, the “now what” could lead to nearly anything. I do think that one can propose compulsory language courses without wanting to burn down mosques or rip headscarfs off women in the street. But one can perfectly well accept that the world is not perfectable and still, without contradiction, want to burn down a mosque or insult a Muslim or commit pretty much any crime I can think of. The criminal’s logic could go something like “Yes, the world is not a perfect place and we can never reduce the risk of terrorism to zero, but the terrorists don’t seem to care about their own lives, but do about their religion, so for every person they kill we’ll burn down a mosque and hopefully this will deter Muslim terrorists.” Or, maybe “I’m hurting, so let’s hurt the terrorists”. Such logic may be wrong, but not on the basis that there’s a contradiction between the premise that the world is not perfectable and the conclusion. Calls to ‘accept’ something are frequently the result of lazy thinking, and I think Kuper’s calls is one of these cases. Again, if he couldn’t think of anything better, he should have left them out. Luc has convinced me that his first conclusion is better than I first thought, but it alone still strikes me as a very inadequate and passive response to the problems the Netherlands faces.

I had better make clear I think burning down mosques is wrong in all but extreme circumstances (e.g. you are trying to create a fireblock to stop a far larger fire from overwhelming the city and killing thousands of people). Ripping head scarves off women in the street is also bad. I am not advocating either practice.

Hey Nic:

I only read your first post after mine, and not your ongoing dialog with tracy, but I get your point. And it’s a fair point — this is only a short article, not a book. My only point is that Chris set this up as “the best article (by far)” that he’s seen on the topic, which led me to expect something balanced and contextualized. Instead, seems like Kuper’s account is just as one-sided and unbalanced as any other articles; its biases are just different ones.