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Go Home Europe’s Other Crisis

BOOKS AND ARTS MAY 4, 2012

Europe’s Other Crisis

Europe’s Angry Muslims: The Revolt of the Second Generation
By Robert S. Leiken
(Oxford University Press, 354 pp., $27.95) 

After the Fall: The End of the European Dream and the Decline of a Continent
By Walter Laqueur
(Thomas Dunne Books, 322 pp., $26.99) 

In two separate incidents in March, Mohammed Merah, a French-born French citizen who thought he was waging jihad, ambushed four soldiers around Toulouse, killing three of them. A week later, he shot dead three children arriving for morning classes at a nearby Jewish school, along with a young rabbi who was father to two of them. The children were aged eight, six, and three. Merah recorded the killings on a micro-camera mounted around his neck and sent the footage to Al Jazeera, which did not air it. Shortly before he died by gunfire, Merah told the soldiers who had surrounded his apartment that he regretted not having done more of what he did.

These were crazy deeds, and one can argue about what role insanity played in them, but something else needs to be candidly acknowledged: the killer was not a lone wolf. He had a measure of community support and a great deal of family support. His brother Abdelkader professed himself “proud” of his relation to the murderer. His mother refused to convince her son to surrender to police. His father threatened to file a wrongful-death suit against the French state. The contemporary culture of politicized Islam, as deracinated Internet-surfers understand it, is what Merah believed he was fighting for. He was upset about French laws that limit the wearing of the Muslim veil among schoolgirls. Someone had whipped him into a frenzy over Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.

France has been sickened, but not surprised, by the killings. They had an antecedent. In 1995, Khaled Kelkal, an Algerian-born petty criminal in the Lyon suburbs who had discovered radical Islam in jail, murdered a Parisian imam whose positions on the Algerian war were a bit moderate for his taste. Kelkal then set off a bomb in the Saint-Michel RER station, killing eight people. He detonated a car bomb in front of a Jewish school in Villeurbanne, outside Lyon, timed for the moment the children were scheduled to emerge. (A bloodbath was averted only because of a delay in the day’s dismissal.) He planted a bomb on a high-speed rail track that would have killed dozens or hundreds had it detonated. But it did not, and the police got Kelkal’s fingerprints. When he was killed by police in a shoot-out that was partly captured on television, there were riots in several immigrant neighborhoods around Lyon.

 

ALL WESTERN EUROPEAN countries have some version of this problem, which involves immigration, Islam, dissent from established European culture, and organized violence. Although it has been temporarily overshadowed by budgetary and currency woes, it is Europe’s most significant chronic problem. What to do about it depends on where one thinks the problem lies.

Some blame France for having shirked the work of turning foreigners into citizens. If they are right, then all that is now required to put an end to such incidents is that one finally address the problem in good faith. This, broadly speaking, was the reaction of François Hollande, the Socialist candidate for president and favorite to win in France’s two-round elections, which finish in May. Hollande sounded an Obama-esque note after the Ozar Hatorah killings, insisting that the French Republic can be made safe “without losing anything of its values against its worst adversaries.” That is true enough, at the simplest level. And given that the continent has spent the last six or seven decades trying to atone for, and prevent a return of, the sort of hatreds that tore Europe apart in World War II, people are rightly warned against tit-for-tat thinking. But there is a thin line between a refusal to escalate violence and a refusal to face reality. It sounded to many French people like Hollande was scolding them preemptively for merely taking such crimes seriously, rather than placing the blame where it belonged, with Merah and his sympathizers.

There is another way of explaining what went wrong. The grim fact is that no Western European country—not one— has managed even a marginally successful integration of its Muslim immigrants, despite half a century of vast treasury outlays, wholesale constitutional re-workings, and indefatigable excuse-making. One is drawn to the conclusion that no successful integration was ever to be expected. Larger historical currents were at play. Islam was on the rise. Europe had lost its élan vital, or its mojo, or whatever you choose to call it. The idea that Europe could handle a mass immigration of Muslims may have been a momentous historical mistake. As Roy Jenkins, the leader of the Liberal Democrats in Britain, remarked in 1989, “We might have been more cautious about allowing the creation in the 1950s of substantial Muslim communities.”

It ought to go without saying that Jenkins was assailing neither individual migrants seeking to improve their position nor the 1,400-year-old religion they practice. But those who speak this way have been accused of Islamophobia, of racial prejudice, and of ill will. They have even—especially in France—been taken to court. This has had a powerful disciplining effect on public discussion, and it has walled off most European countries’ immigration policies from the faintest breeze of common sense. By the time those Big-Events-of-the-Year-2012 shows get aired next December, French viewers may need their memory jogged about what happened in Toulouse in March.

 

PEOPLE WHO ASK whether better government policies could have made Muslim immigration to Europe less of a debacle tend to look at Britain and France as two ends of a spectrum of approaches. Britain has let immigrants go their own way. It has been multiculturalist, laissez-faire, tolerant of partial allegiances and unintegrated identities. If you are a Sikh policeman, you can wear your turban on duty. In immigration as in other matters, the United Kingdom is unusually disorderly and willing to run the risk that “parallel societies” will form; but it does offer immigrants more self-respect and freedom of religion. France, by contrast, favors the assimilatory pressures of the melting pot. It wants immigrants to embrace a single model of republican citizenship. France’s model may sound condescending and hypocritical, but at its best it can convince a newcomer that the country’s thousand-year-old history belongs to him as much as anyone. It is a fool’s errand to call either the French or the British approach “better.” Each is built out of thousand-year-old habits of political culture. But immigration experts tend to laud whichever of the two has led to riots less recently.

In his important book, Robert Leiken comes down decisively in favor of the French system (which he sees as only a partial failure) and against the British one (which he regards as an outright catastrophe). His bar for success is heartrendingly low: Leiken finds it encouraging that, in contrast to Britain, where 56 percent of Muslims believe the CIA or Mossad or someone other than Arab terrorists carried out the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, the corresponding figure for France is only 46 percent. Leiken’s book saw print before the Merah killings. Readers might question certain of his judgments in light of them. But it has a wealth of on-the-ground reporting and many virtues, particularly when it moves beyond France.

Subtlety is not just this book’s virtue but also its calling card, its analytical objective. Leiken bills the whole effort as a call for “nuance, specificity and complexity.” Razor-thin distinctions preoccupy him. He cares whether it was pietism or quietism that turned a ghetto kid into a suicide bomber. Such distinctions can sometimes be useful. It makes sense that the “portability” of a Koran-based fundamentalism should appeal more to second-generation migrants than a “folk” religion based on shrines, family ties and landscapes a continent or an ocean away.

But often these are distinctions without a difference. Leiken insists, for instance, that we differentiate between “political Islamists” who want reform, and “jihadis” who want to overturn the order by violence, but he adds that political Islamists “have endorsed ‘resistance’ in Soviet Afghanistan and in ‘occupied’ countries such as Iraq, Chechnya, and Kashmir and in Israel’s ‘occupied territories.’” That is a lot of exceptions. Political Islam, apparently, is non-violent, except in the five most important areas of conflict you can think of. A terrorist is just a Tablighi Jama’at Islamist in a hurry.

An undue fussiness about distinctions leads Leiken to follow the lead of the International Crisis Group (ICG), which, in its much-cited report on the causes of the French riots of 2005, found only a minimal role for political Islamism. Instead it was “‘sheikhist’ Salafism” that lit the spark—a current of purely religious fundamentalism. Salafists, the ICG found, did not care much about French laws on the veil or about rallying behind the Muslim Brotherhood’s Union of Islamic Organizations of France. That would be political Islamism. What the rioters were up in arms about, and cared enough about to throw rocks and burn cars for the better part of a month, was seeing their religious community dissed, whether on the battlefields of Israel, Afghanistan, or Iraq or on the editorial pages of Danish newspapers. And that is merely Salafism. (Phew!) The effect of these distinctions—and in debaters less honorable than Leiken, their intention—is to paralyze discussion.

Leiken believes that two French government reports on young women wearing the headscarf blew the controversy out of proportion, that a book compiling incidents of Islamist and especially anti-Semitic bullying in schools in 2002 was too narrowly focused, that descriptions of French unrest as a “low-level intifada” by such commentators as Mark Steyn cheapen the discussion, and that descriptions of the riots as a “civilizational struggle” are overreactions. All the same, two and a half weeks of nationwide riots by ethnic minorities is really something. It got the attention of a nation that has had centuries of experience with day-in, day-out political demonstrations.

Leiken himself is aware that Muslim immigrants often set little store by the distinctions that he so prizes. For instance, when British Pakistanis refer to Deobandi fundamentalists as “Wahhabis,” they are using shorthand. The Deobandi movement began in nineteenth-century India and now commands the allegiance of a majority of Pakistanis. Wahhabis follow an eighteenth-century Arabian school. It is true, though, that the proselytizers bankrolled by the Saudi royal family have given a Wahhabi cast to many Muslim organizations, including Deobandi ones. Europe’s countries are diverse, and its immigrant populations are diverse; but its immigrant problems are fairly uniform from country to country. None of them is managing to absorb the second generation.

 

LEIKEN’S CHAPTERS ON Britain—specifically on the four young men from the region of Leeds who set off bombs in London’s transport system in 2005—account for about half of his narrative and all of its most original thinking. Here the result of Leiken’s insistence on subtlety is not a slotting of the various actors into faddish theological categories but a rich, even novelistic history of English race relations and labor economics, in the context of which the terrorists’ own estimates of the costs and benefits of radicalization become crystal-clear. These pages are extraordinary. Leiken’s account of the “noble, gentle, kind, honorable” drug counselor and child-minder, Mohammed Sidique Khan who became the bombers’ heartless ringleader, is the match of any in-depth account that has so far appeared. Next to this remarkable narrative, his chapters on France read as a throat-clearing preamble and his later chapters on Germany look perfunctory.

Never before has a book conveyed more hard-headedly how unwanted the Muslim migration to Britain was—and remains—by almost all parties, the newcomers not excepted. The roots of the massive immigration that brought tens of millions of foreigners to Europe lay in an innocent-looking scam of industrialists to cut labor costs, which soon escaped their—or anybody’s—control. In the 1960s, Leeds made half the men’s suits in Britain, but its antiquated factories, staffed with the offspring of Irish migrants, found themselves in competition with firms from the European common market, which was the precursor of the European Union. This was a time when labor was thought to be inherently more mobile than capital. Rather than automate and fire people, the factories sought what Leiken calls “cheaper men.”

They drew them from Mirpur, a corner of Pakistan that had for generations provided British merchant ships with engine-room stokers. These workers were meant to be temporary, but it did not work out that way. “By the recession of the mid-1970s,” Leiken writes, “it had become clear that what was temporary was not the worker but the workplace. The migrant worker would stay; his factory went off to East Asia.”

It did not matter whether there were jobs to come to or not. The torrent of migration into Britain—and elsewhere in Europe—never ceased. Millions more South Asians have arrived, claiming family relations or political persecution. The poignant consequences for the typical immigrant’s children are laid out by Leiken with literary skill. “In Anatolia or Kabilya or the Rif, they can’t hold down the food,” he writes. “In Brussels, Paris, and Rotterdam, these young European Muslims can’t get past the bouncer at the nightclub entrance.” But the consequences were even worse for those who had inhabited Leeds before the influx of Third World labor. Leiken describes a graveyard in what was, as recently as the 1960s, a tight-knit Irish neighborhood of “back-to-back” houses:

The cemetery sits in disrepair, weeds having overgrown every plot without exception. Gravestones lie like fallen soldiers.... In their hundreds, not a single one marks a death after 1974. The graveyard is itself dead. The untended plots and the overturned headstones mark a demise and an exodus, signs that a community once inhabiting Beeston moved out as another, of a different faith, moved in. 

Civilizations get richer and they get poorer. But for many European communities, immigration meant disbandment.

You could even say it meant colonization. Taboos have long confined that word and its cognates to the vocabulary of extremist politicians. But the essayist Hans-Magnus Enzensberger has used it, and so, increasingly, have sociologists, starting with the religious scholar Rauf Ceylan, whose fascinating book on the Turkish “ethnic colonies” of Germany’s Rhine and Ruhr valleysappeared in 2006. When Leiken says that northwest Europe has “something like a Muslim internal colony,” and alleges that the migrant in Britain “becomes not so much a member of British society as a colonial of his clan and village,” one suspects that it is good manners, not accuracy, that requires him to couch it in a simile.

 

“COLONIZATION” really is a good word to describe what has been taking place in Britain’s cities, for two reasons. First is the scope of the change, measured demographically or institutionally. In 2009, one-quarter of British babies were born to foreign mothers. A study released last month by the British Department for Education showed that one-sixth of British schoolchildren did not speak English as a first language. A minority of students in inner London (just 79,000 of 177,000) are native English speakers. But there is a more important reason why “colonization” well describes the influx of the past half-century. It is that the terms governing this transformation are set by the immigrants and not by the natives, who started off not caring, and wound up not daring, to impose too many rules on their new neighbors.

By means of the welfare state, the host countries have even gone to some lengths to protect newcomers from some of the hard choices and rough lessons that come with life in an open economy. Leiken notes that the Iqra radical bookstore established by Sidique Khan and his accomplices as a meeting place, along with the closed-to-the-public “al-Qaeda gym” that they set up in the basement of a local mosque, owed their existence to taxpayer-provided development funding from the European Union and the Leeds City Council. The relative comfort in which Mohammed Bouyeri plotted the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam in 2004 was also provided by the state.

Immigrant assimilation tends to work through emulation, through keeping up with the Joneses. Leiken speaks often of izzat, an Urdu word for “honor” or “face,” and perhaps the greatest service of his book is to show how purely Asian are the moral codes against which Pakistani immigrants and even many of their offspring measure themselves. It would be hard, without resorting to expletives and colloquialisms, to convey the degree of contempt in which the Mirpuris whom Leiken describes hold the “host” country:

Migration, cousin marriage, seclusion of women, the return of remains ... these practices occur not in isolation but as part of a way of life, a culture. They are the threads of a fabric that binds the British Pakistani in general and the Mirpuri in particular, to his family place of origin.... The institutions of the Mirpuri village went along on the migrant journey in order to regulate behavior against the temptations of Western culture. 

As early as the 1970s, long before controversies over the veil arose, one anthropologist noted that Mirpuri women were subject to stricter rules of purdah in Britain than in their ancestral villages. Even when migrants appear to embrace “Britishness,” in matters from getting a U.K. passport to working hard at one’s job, they are (in Leiken’s words) “not building the spiritual foundations of thrift or asceticism but rather family prestige to be paraded back home.”

In the village of Chak-477, in Punjab, Leiken informs us, the remains of Shehzad Tanweer are buried. Tanweer, the suicide bomber who murdered seven Londoners traveling on a Circle Line train out of Liverpool Street Station on July 7, 2005, has the tallest headstone in the graveyard, with a solemn Koranic inscription. He is treated as a saint. The pride of Mohammed Merah’s family begins to look less and less like an exception. “If the opinion polls conducted in the U.K. since July 2005 are only broadly accurate,” said Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of Britain’s domestic intelligence agency MI5 a year afterward, “over 100,000 of our citizens consider that the July 2005 attacks in London were justified.” Peter Clarke, chief of counterterrorism for Scotland Yard, made a similar point: “I firmly believe that there are other people who have knowledge of what lay behind the attacks in July 2005—knowledge they have not shared with us. In fact, I don’t only believe it, I know it for a fact.”

It took Britain a long time to care about keeping tabs on the radicals in its midst. Omar Bakri Mohammed, the Syrian-born groomer of suicide bombers, announced during the Gulf war that Muslim law permitted the assassination of Prime Minister John Major, should he travel to the Arabian peninsula. Shortly thereafter Bakri successfully applied to Britain for political asylum. There was much talk of a “covenant of security”—a tacit agreement that terrorists would be left unmolested, so long as they did not plant any bombs in Britain. “London must have acted according to a well-studied and well-known international plan,” said the jihadi Abu Musab al-Suri, who was recently released by the government of Bashar al-Assad. But there was no such plan. It was just that the indulgence that Britain showed to those who had not only declared themselves its enemies but also shown a willingness to use violence strained the radicals’ credulity. Britain looked so pitifully stupid, so ignorant of history and heedless of geostrategic reality, that its passivity could be explained only as some kind of wily ambush.

 

WALTER LAQUEUR sees Europe’s Muslim migration in much the same way that Leiken sees England’s. Laqueur has been writing about the evolution of Europe’s institutions for almost seventy years now, in a roving life that has led him from central Europe to pre-war Palestine to the United States to Europe to Britain. This remarkable intellectual is well-read in English, French, German, Russian, Italian, and Spanish. His new book on Europe claims some of the license due a ninety-year-old man—it jumps from theme to theme, un-footnoted, and it is sometimes repetitive; but it has an undeniable authority to it. The tone is that of a rambling letter full of robust wisdom that all would do well to heed.

At first sight, it seems a bit odd that immigration should be of rising interest now. The economic crisis of 2008 might have been expected to put it on the back burner. Yet the years since have seen the rise of anti-immigrant—or, more accurately, anti-multicultural—parties in Sweden, Finland, and the Netherlands. Laqueur knows a part of the reason why this is happening. You can call Muslim immigration an “enrichment” if you like, but a poll that appeared in Le Monde in December 2010 shows that only 22 percent of French people and 24 percent of Germans see it that way: 42 percent and 40 percent, respectively, see Muslim communities as a threat.

Like others who have written about the challenge of international migration, Laqueur notes that many Europeans today feel like “strangers in their own homelands.” Where he differs from most of these writers is in his belief that, while no one was watching, Europe’s migration problem came to exceed Europe’s capacity to address it. At roughly the time of the attacks on the World Trade Center, Laqueur observes, “it was suddenly realized that these newcomers constituted about a quarter (sometimes a third) of the population of the inner quarters of many European cities and that they were a majority among the youngest generation.” By that time the crisis was intractable. “It had been discovered too late.” How to assimilate immigrants into Europe’s culture is yesterday’s question. Today’s question is how to adapt Europe’s institutions to non-European communities that are so large, so powerful, and so various that non-assimilation is often the path of least resistance, both for them and for the broader society.

A longstanding loss of interest in bearing children brought Europe to this pass. Demographic decline fascinates Laqueur, who devoted much of his last book to it. He notes that, assuming no immigration, the United Nations projects Germany’s population to fall from 82 million to 61 million by mid-century, and Italy’s to fall from 57 million to 37 million. Even under the U.N.’s assumption of an uptick in the European birthrate, Europe is going to lose more than a hundred million people by then. By 2015 its working-age population will begin declining. Lord Grey warned at the start of World War I that the lamps were going out all over Europe. Laqueur has come to believe they were never re-lit. He grants that people have been prophesying decline for upward of a century, but he sees a difference: “Yesterday’s prophets were dealing with future trends, whereas those concerned with today’s Europe are dealing with developments that, for the most part, have already happened.”

At heart Laqueur is a liberal. He is not saying that a young man of, say, Sri Lankan descent cannot be just as good an Englishman as Churchill. He is saying only that when people of unambiguously foreign cultures make up majorities in many European cities, and where a kind of unwritten constitution has developed across two generations to permit them to abstain from the national culture that existed before their arrival, it becomes wrong to speak of Europe’s “national” cultures as if they are unchanged. The twenty-first-century metropolises to which migrants flock can be dynamic, rich, sophisticated, and interesting. But Amsterdam’s culture is no longer the “culture of Rembrandt,” and London’s culture has more in common with that of Los Angeles or Dallas than it does with that of the city that braved the Blitz.

 

LAQUEUR’S FOCUS is different from Leiken’s—not immigrant sociology but European institutions. In the manner of a nineteenth-century historian, Laqueur is also interested in buttressing with facts certain home truths about what happens when rising cultures meet declining ones. He is not keen to split theological hairs. Europe’s crumbling currency, its impotent social institutions, its rapidly changing demography—all these are part of a civilizational shift. “The present crisis is not primarily a crisis of financial debt,” Laqueur writes, “but a crisis of lack of will, inertia, tiredness, and self-doubt, and, however often ‘European values’ are invoked, a crisis of lack of self-confidence, a weak ego in psychoanalytic terms.”

The “European values” to which Laqueur alludes are those bound up with the European welfare state (which he defends) and the building of the European Union (which he sees as a dangerous self-delusion). Through its “frequent evocation of democracy and human rights,” he writes, the EU has sought to dress up Europe’s weakness as virtue. It amply deserves the “mixture of condescension and incredulity” with which the rising powers of Asia treat it. The EU is a project pursued with unstinting energy by a generation of utopians, to replace accountable national governments with a more distant authority that manages to be simultaneously sinister and naïve. For Laqueur a good symbol of its modus operandi came in late 2010, when the European Commission printed millions of calendar diaries to hand out to schoolchildren: they had the dates for Ramadan and for Hindu and Sikh feast days, but not for Christmas.

What is most dangerous about the European Union is not its politically correct bluster. It is that it breaks the main tool—the nation—through which people have traditionally defended themselves against the drift of history and brought common sense to bear on the folly and the vanity of their rulers. Quite naturally, the public is beginning to lose patience. Marine Le Pen’s rejuvenation of France’s National Front, which in 2007 looked rickety and passé, is one symptom; but so are the calls for “de-globalization” that have lately led voters to flock to Arnaud Montebourg, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and other populists on the French left. Meanwhile the EU’s leaders continue to insist that the solution to any problems, from exchange rates to mass migration, is “more Europe.”

Europe appears more likely to go out with a whimper than a bang. Grievances are not lacking, but energy is. The baby boomers who took to the streets in 1968 could sense their vast demographic power. They were on the verge of making up a third of the electorate (and of the market) in many European countries. Today’s youth generation is less than half as large as the postwar boomers, measured as a percentage of population. A pessimist could predict that they will have correspondingly little faith that their grievances can be redressed democratically. Youth rioting of one kind or another has broken out in Greece and Spain, mostly over plans for long-term austerity, and the Occupy movement is made up heavily of people in their teens and twenties. But the likelihood that this younger generation will be disruptive looks very low.

Europe is beginning to deploy for its domestic problems many of the tools the United States tried on its race problem: vast economic resources invested directly and indirectly in poverty-fighting schemes, controversial and morale-sapping exceptions to constitutional equal treatment (via affirmative action), and what Laqueur calls “appeasement,” by which he means a deference to immigrant communities on foreign policy questions and “a certain amount of self-censorship.” He mentions the decision of one European network to join Al Jazeera in not airing a program about the persecution of Christians in the Arab world. Laqueur has a disarming way of using understatement to impart grim news and dire warnings. “Tolerance toward minorities has not been one of the distinguishing features of Muslim societies in modern history,” he writes. “If this trend does not change in the course of the coming decades, the prospects for peaceful coexistence in Europe will be less than bright.”

Europe’s problem is that it believed its own legend. As Laqueur puts it, “Europe had become weak but the fact had not yet registered.” So little had this weakness registered that Europeans continued to view themselves as a model for emulation. The Italian politician Romano Prodi, chair of the European Commission, predicted in 2001 that Europe’s role would be that of “replicating the European experience on a global scale.” Europe continued to spit contempt at small Third World countries for human rights violations, long after it had ceased to cow them militarily, and at its protector, the United States, long after it had lost the ability to defend itself unaided. Britain, France, and Poland are the only countries in Europe that spend as much as 2 percent of their budget on defense. Yet the United States has only 65,000 soldiers left in Europe, and this “forward posture” can hardly continue.

For twenty years, European policymakers have wrung their hands and fretted that America’s attention was turning towards Asia. Only in the last two or three years has this actually been the case. For Europe, insoluble foreign policy problems await. Europe is not rich enough in natural resources to withdraw from the world, but for the first time in half a millennium it is not strong enough to engage with the world either. This being so, Laqueur is as mystified at the behavior of Europe’s leaders in the face of mass immigration as the terrorist al-Suri was at impunity for jihadists: “It is difficult even in retrospect to establish what the authorities in these countries were thinking—that uncontrolled immigration did not involve major problems; that the economic, social, and cultural problems would be solved; that the immigrants would one day disappear or be well integrated?”

One often has the sense in reading about contemporary Europe that one is reading about the period between the two world wars. Not the small outbursts of evil that prefigured cataclysmic war, but the small outbursts of naïveté that might well have been forgotten in light of what followed: the Kellogg-Briand pact to abolish war, the Oxford Union’s resolution never to fight for King and country in 1933, and so on. Europe’s problem is not that bad people have been indulging their animosities, but that good people have declined to observe that animosities exist in the first place. Over decades, Europe has undertaken high-stakes experiments with both demography and democracy. Breakdown has been the result. It is going to have to be faced squarely.

Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, a columnist for the Financial Times, and the author of Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West (Doubleday). This article appeared in the May 24, 2012 issue of the magazine.

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83 comments

This is a terrific review article, well written and terrifying. Caldwell makes a strong case that European civilization doesn't exist anymore and that we exist in its afterlife. What makes the decline worse the inability of large segments of the intelligentsia to come to terms with this precipitous decline.

- arnon1

May 8, 2012 at 12:08am

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Rather than despair, it's possible to view Muslim immigration as a net positive. First, there's the Corleone view: keep your friends close, and your enemies closer. Better a few plotters of mayhem next door on which to keep a watchful eye than lots of plotters far away plotting in secret. Then there's the ugly side of European history, one characterized by nationalistic excess and war, kept in check for awhile by the Soviet threat and then by the unification experiment that is about to unravel, and now once again on the rise. Better for nationalistic excess to be directed at the nation's own immigrants than the neighboring country. As to the larger issue of Europe's falling population, I suppose we will soon know whether a growing population is the sina qua non of a growing economy, a rather grim idea (Malthus was a rather grim fellow). If that's the case, and I suspect it is, then what kind of political and economic disruption can we expect in the second half of this century, when demographers project a drop in China's population by more than the total number of people now in the United States. That's right, a drop of more than 400,000,000 Chinese! Maybe all those Muslim immigrants in Europe can move to China.

- rayward

May 8, 2012 at 7:38am

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A writer for the Weekly Standard Muslim-bashing in The New Republic... what a surprise. When will we see Mark Steyn in as a regular columnist?

- SMacEachern2

May 8, 2012 at 10:13am

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Massive demographic change (the non-white population of the UK - of which Muslims represent the largest and most fertile portion - is set to become the majority by the late 2060s - my source is the Guardian) brings with it significant cultural and political disruption. This is uncontroversial to those of us who don't live tucked away in the ethnic and class enclaves that are so numerous in the US and are witnessing a slow but inexorable decline of long-established national cultures and appearance of an "ethnic" vote. As the above comment illustrates, merely stating the current projections of Europe's demographic future is enough to be branded a racist, Islamophobe or whatever smear is currently in vogue among the ultra-PC brigade. As someone enamoured of the European welfare state, I worry that more immigration and more diversity will, in the long-run, undermine the values consensus upon which this humane model was founded.

- Singlpayer

May 8, 2012 at 10:42am

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What arnon said. Nice piece, Mr Caldwell.

- Tristan

May 8, 2012 at 11:31am

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Smac - I've been pretty aggressive in defending against "muslim bashing" on here in the past, and this does not come close. Come on, man. Recognizing there are often significant inherent problems when large ethnic groups resettle is not xenophobic. And the article is pretty clear cut to me on highlighting the very real dangers that fanatical fundamentalist Islam presents, rather than bashing "muslims".

- Tristan

May 8, 2012 at 11:47am

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I think the problem with European civilization is that, unless one is being pollyanna-ish about it, the term can be used to label a number of things, from Michaelangelo to a smartly executed genocide plan aimed at Jews and Roma, from the European slave trade to James Joyce, from the Parthenon to the Paris banlieu. Unless, of course, one separates out the evil stuff from the beautiful stuff, as if the former were some kind of surprising anomaly ("how did that get in there?") -- rather like the German desire to see the Nazis as a weird historical accident. One could assert, too, with some grounds, that one was living in the "afterlife" of "European civilization" in 1848 (armed rebellion all over the continent), 1918 (collapse of Russian, Hapsburg, and Ottoman Empires), 1945 (obvious reasons), or 1997 (Elton John playing at Princess Diana's funeral service). I always think about the opening to T.S. Eliot's "Waste Land" in which the poem mourns the disintegration of the continental European empires ("bin echt deutsch, kam aus Litauen") after WW1 but appears to discount the nations such as Czechoslovakia and Ireland that gained their independence largely as a result of that collapse.

- ironyroad

May 8, 2012 at 1:10pm

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You are missing the point of ;the article, ironyroad. Muslim 'immigrants" in Europe is changing European culture. For good or for ill this is a fact. Of course different Europeans will react according to their political inclination. To some like Mac above the islamization of Europe is a good thing, to others it's a frightening prospect since it will mean the end of all liberal values. The Muslims are not a neutral immigrant population like those that settled in the US. They have no intention to become "good Europeans." They are acting more like colonizers than immigrants. Again to the pro Islamo Fascist MacEachern this is a good thing.

- arnon1

May 8, 2012 at 2:08pm

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Still, even if the Muslim population of the EU doubled to 32 million over the next 20 years, we're talking about a total EU population of probably 500 million people (it's 490 mill today). Hardly the demographic death-knell. I'm not disputing that there are political problems on the board to do with radical Islamism and integration. I am disputing that anyone has a crystal ball and can predict that, for example, Muslim birthrates won't begin to fall somewhat in line with non-Muslim birthrates in Europe.

- ironyroad

May 8, 2012 at 2:56pm

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The article isn't merely about demographics. If you have a large minority willing to engage in violent intimidation of the citizens of a State, and thereby nullify democratic decisions such as the tolerance of freedom of speech or freedoms to engage in lawful behavior even if they counters religious strictures without opposition from the majority of citizens then you are no longer living in a free state. This is life in many European countries today where individuals can be killed for uttering comments about Islam that are deemed offensive by Muslims. Europe has been colonized by a large minority of Muslims and has succeeded in intimidating the non Muslim majority.

- arnon1

May 8, 2012 at 3:44pm

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Irony makes a reasonable observation about the relative size of Islamic Europe and total Europe. And some Islamic countries, notably Turkey and Iran, face demographic decline. But the problem today seems to be the lack of moral seriousness among Western elites about Islam's challenge to the liberal order. Islam aggressively seeks new converts among the "native" populations. It is a religion, not a race. , We're not just talking about immigrants and their children. In most European countries, critics of Islam face costly legal sanctions, death threats, and social ostracism. In the US, protected by the First Amendment, they face mostly ostracism and marginalization by polite society. Islam is the ideology of the Jihadists and we're not allowed to say that. The same people who lament the power of conservative evangelical Christians strangely zip their lips when it comes to Islam, which is even more intolerant, and even ignorantly and hysterically defend it!

- amidut

May 8, 2012 at 3:57pm

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If we leave aside the issue of actual terrorism and violence, then I must stay that I was in Europe for six weeks last summer, in Marseille, Dublin, and (most of the time) Berlin. At no point was I intimidated by a Muslim nor did I hear a story about anyone else being intimidated (I assume we're not talking urban crime here but something else). And I wasn't exactly residing in leafy bourgeois suburbs, either. There appeared to be twice as many bars, clubs, pubs, and discos in Berlin as there were twenty years ago when I lived there. Now, I certainly admit that I don't live there, I don't have a child in school there, I didn't try to mount a production of The Merchant of Venice there, and most of the time I hang out with a vaguely bohemian set. Changing any of those conditions might have important effects. Nevertheless, while I'm not dismissing Caldwell's piece, I have some difficulty squaring it with my personal experience and that of friends who live all over Europe. It's worth saying that there have been Hindu threats and intimidation in Britain also e.g. against an art exhibition, if I remember correctly.

- ironyroad

May 8, 2012 at 5:53pm

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Also, I just noticed this rather silly comment of CC's: "But Amsterdam’s culture is no longer the 'culture of Rembrandt,' and London’s culture has more in common with that of Los Angeles or Dallas than it does with that of the city that braved the Blitz." It's called history. It doesn't stay the same. The culture of the city that "braved the Blitz" wasn't the same as the culture of that same city when Shakespeare was writing plays there. Germany's culture isn't the same as it was in the 1930s either -- shouldn't we be thankful?

- ironyroad

May 8, 2012 at 6:24pm

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I am sorry but your weeks of vacation do not prove a thing. You are not an artist like Van Gogh was. You are not a writer. You are not a Jew. You are not a woman. You are not someone who lives and works there day to day. Caldwell the author lived and worked in Europe for years and I believe that he is Gay. Hence his perspective is a lot more real than yours.

- arnon1

May 8, 2012 at 7:01pm

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Right, but as I noted above, I was living with and meeting people who do live there day to day. I've also lived in several countries in Europe for around thirty-five of my current fifty-five years, so it's not like I've nothing to go on. I'm just raising some counter-considerations.

- ironyroad

May 8, 2012 at 7:21pm

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Well, I have considered your counter-considerations and found them wanting.

- arnon1

May 8, 2012 at 9:24pm

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Europe today and yesterday: http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2012/05/alibi-anti-semitism.html Alibi Anti-Semitism

- arnon1

May 8, 2012 at 9:25pm

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The central problem about the Muslim issue in Europe (and increasing slowly in the U.S.) is this. You have a significant but growing minority of the population that never has accepted and does NOT accept the Enlightenment Social Contract: that is, I myself have freedom of speech and religion but so does everyone else, which means that no opinion or tradition is safe from being questioned, and anything and everything can be questioned, criticized, or even lampooned by others. When you have a significant but growing minority that does not accept this idea--that is ready to engage in violence if certain ideas are even questioned by others, or customs are simply criticized by others--this in turn puts government in a difficult position. The primary internal duty of government is to preserve social peace. If social peace comes to be threatened because a significant minority will not stand for having its traditions or opinions criticized in (say) print, and the result of (say) cartoons is massive riots, the government is going to be tempted to quash freedom of speech, because the alternative is to take on the cultural transformation of millions of people. Not only is the latter very difficult but it is of no use regarding the government's *immediate* job, which is the preservation of social peace. There is no doubt that this is happening in European countries, where written criticism of Islam (say in France), or cartoons about Islam (not only in Denmark but in the Netherlands) can bring you negative attention not merely from violent Muslims (ask Theo van Gogh), but from the police. Thus debate and free discussion of Islamic immigration is quashed because it has become too dangerous for society--there are too many Muslims who object, and who violently object. Meanwhile the European Court of Human Rights has been tending to rule that any criticism of Islamists equals criticism of Islam per se and is thus "racism."

- ProfEthan

May 8, 2012 at 11:45pm

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I agree Ethan. Thew problem with posters like ironyroad is that they think they can counter studies with "personal experience." I am sure they wouldn't accept such counter arguments if that is what they are when discussing say the status of women in society. Would irony say "every woman I know is happy?"

- arnon1

May 9, 2012 at 12:12am

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No, I wouldn't say that, and I'm not saying its equivalent either, but I also accept that personal observation and conversation with others are a valid contribution to any debate unless there is some sleight of hand at work. Plenty of people use personal experience as one (NOT the only) criterion of judgment and I think it's at least as legitimate as portentious statements on "European civilization." I would argue that what we should not do is glibly mingle three separate issues: 1) the threat of Islamist terrorism (violent attacks on people, no matter how small or large-scale); 2) the threat of a non-European culture forming a kind of sealed parallel society in some countries and regions; 3) normal problems to do with immigrant communities in a society. and stir them into some kind of grim porridge that tries to label huge numbers of people with some collective accusation. The measures to deal with 3) cannot be the measures to deal with 1). It's worth thinking about why, for example, the long-standing Muslim population in the former Yugoslavia until around 10-15 years ago looked and lived pretty much like the rest of the country; indeed, in contrast to the Croats and the Serbs, they had possibly less ethnic tension going on.

- ironyroad

May 9, 2012 at 12:36am

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Islam is not designed to integrate with Western society. It is adversarial. This becomes a serious problem when there are large parallel societies of 3rd World Muslim immigrants in Europe and elsewhere, reinforced by satellite TV from the Middle East, and they have the power to establish shariah courts, establish police no-go zones in the banlieues, and attack Jews, gays, and women on the streets in wolf-packs. "Visible" Jews have been publicly advised to leave the Netherlands. German police have said they don't the resources to protect "visible" Jews on the streets. Jewish institutions must hire guard services. I once saw a young soldier with machine gun stationed in front of a Jewish community center in central Europe. The imams sanction honor killings, forced marriages, and female genital mutilations. Muslim women are pressured to wear burquas and veils. Those who don't look "modest" enough are subject to violent reprisals by busybody Muslim strangers on the street. There is nothing benign about Islamic parallel societies that encourage their young to harass public school teachers for teaching officially prescribed classes about the Holocaust. Muslims do not accept the historical veracity of the Holocaust and do not celebrate the defeat of the Turks by John Sobieski at Vienna in 1683 or Charlemagne's victory at Tours (Chanson de Roland anyone?). Islam is a very public and political religion. It invades your space and the space of moderate Muslims and makes demands. History must be rewritten to Muslim sensibilities. In Yugoslavia, the Communist regime enforced conformity by the Muslims in Bosnia, Kosovo, and elsewhere. Today, Triumphal mosques are built there and religious teachers hired with funds from Turkey and Saudi Arabia. European Muslim communities contribute disproportionately to crime and delinquency. They depend disproportionately on public welfare, much easier to obtain in western Europe than in the US, even for polygamous families. Muslims perpetrate most of the rapes today in Scandinavia. They "groom" young white girls for prostitution in Britain. Other immigrant groups are more interested to obtaining real jobs and integrating into their host societies. When they talk about "Asian" crime in Britain, it's mostly from Muslims, not Hindus, Sikhs, or Chinese. But I suppose none of this is likely to personally impact Irony and his friends. After all, I live in a northeast US city but am rarely exposed to the raw edges of life there. I rarely read the local tabloid; too many murders of passion, drug deals gone bad, and indictments for corruption. There are enough pleasant distractions. I avoid air travel which is unsafe and inconvenient because of the ambient threat of Islamic terrorism. I do notice stepped-up and intrusive security when I visit Jewish places. Why is that? Something Irony is not likely to experience. But Islam is invading our space and changing it.

- amidut

May 9, 2012 at 7:23am

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"I would argue that what we should not do is glibly mingle three separate issues: 1) the threat of Islamist terrorism (violent attacks on people, no matter how small or large-scale); 2) the threat of a non-European culture forming a kind of sealed parallel society in some countries and regions; 3) normal problems to do with immigrant communities in a society." Nice try Irony, but neither the article nor the books reviewed did that. You are arguing against a straw-man.

- arnon1

May 9, 2012 at 9:41am

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The issue of personal experience vs. large-scale studies is a difficult one. Like Irony, my personal experience with Muslims (in my case Americans) has been positive overall. I had two who troubled me, they were not radical Islamists, just ne'er do wells; I had more who were just nice American kids, and very hard working and serious students, quite accomplished. One's going into the Army (Judge Advocate General's Corps). Maybe it's because I don't live in Detroit. Maybe it's because American Muslims to begin with generally come from a more educated social stratum back in the Muslim world than do ignorant peasant work-force brought from Pakistan to Britain and from the Maghreb to France. Or maybe, Irony, I've just been lucky. Several Muslim Americans from the area where I live have turned up as would-be terrorists.

- ProfEthan

May 9, 2012 at 9:51am

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Irony. Howzit? I'm developing some ideas in the vicinity of social patterning. A offshoot of this inquiry describes a condition I refer to as the Baffled Pagan Syndrome. (BPS) The manifestation of this condition is evidenced by the inability, for whatever reason, to recognize confluential patterns of the human condition. A simple typification of this concept might be found along the lines of when Bill Moyers was asked, after having given his interview/exposition of Joseph Campbell's mythological Hero concepts, whether or not he saw any relevance and confluences to the Christian /Jesus story and Campbell's propositions of such aspirational universality. Moyers quite honestly and matter of factly stated that he saw absolutely no similarities or parallel application as such. Now on the face of it this would seem so preposterous as to indicate a willful ignorance. I rather suspect that there is more to it than that. The ins and outs of it don't matter for my purposes right now but it is almost as if we have lost an entire vocabulary. Contempt is a self proving loop and benign benevolence have no quarter in these realms. Islam is busy proving itself out and everything is further proof of Allah's will. Good or bad, friend or foe.

- jacko

May 9, 2012 at 10:43am

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I'm always somewhat puzzled, if not baffled, jacko, but it is obvious to me that Bill Moyers, M. Div. (Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary) and former Baptist preacher in Texas before he went into politics full time, is at least an unlikely candidate for the "Pagan" in your BPS syndrome. Ethan -- that's a fair point about American Muslim immigrants having a higher educational level than immigrants (or children of immigrants) in Europe. Again, I would just like to distinguish between the threat of organized or semi-organized terror by radical Islamist groups and apocalyptic visions of the "end of Civilization" which appear to be projected onto a group representing about 7% of the total population of the EU. arnon -- sorry, but my impression not so much of the books themselves (which I haven't read) but of Caldwell's review is that it does mix up those somewhat separate issues in an unhelpful way. Funnily enough, the very first book review I ever wrote, about 30 years ago, was something by Laqueur on Germany -- I remember that I thought he was very good on German history but weak on the 1960-80 period.

- ironyroad

May 9, 2012 at 11:48am

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"arnon -- sorry, but my impression not so much of the books themselves (which I haven't read) but of Caldwell's review is that it does mix up those somewhat separate issues in an unhelpful way." I need examples, Irony. The above is just an assertion. Also your review of Lacqueur's first book isn't relevant. I have read many books by him and found them historically sound. However, my views on his other books are also not relevant.

- arnon1

May 9, 2012 at 12:56pm

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I know it's not "relevant." Not every single sentence one writes has to be "relevant." Sometime it's just conversation.

- ironyroad

May 9, 2012 at 1:06pm

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"Funnily enough, the very first book review I ever wrote, about 30 years ago, was something by Laqueur on Germany -- I remember that I thought he was very good on German history but weak on the 1960-80 period." Which book was that, Irony? This is the title of the first book Walter Laqueur. I'd love to read it. "Communism and Nationalism in the Middle East," London, Routledge & Paul 1956.

- arnon1

May 9, 2012 at 1:17pm

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I agree with Irony that we have to disaggregate the different elements in the problem being addressed here. The issue raised by the books and by the review has to do mostly with Irony's group 2: "2) the threat of a non-European culture forming a kind of sealed parallel society in some countries and regions." I think this is a serious issue in Europe, including the UK, and it is getting worse. It is also linked--and closely--to Irony's group 1: "1) the threat of Islamist terrorism (violent attacks on people, no matter how small or large-scale)." It does not good to talk about group 1 as a mere 7% for a variety of reasons. (a) the level of support sometimes reaches 13% in some polls, or even 25% in others, depending on how the question is itself phrased. 7% of the three million Muslims in Britain means 210,000 supporters of terrorism. Another poll showed that 68% of British Muslims believe that people should be prosecuted for "insulting Islam" That's Irony's group 2. I think this is a far different situation from Irony's group 3: "normal problems of immigrant groups in society." Many leftists want to converge 2 and 3, and then attack those worried about group 2 as simply prejudiced about group 3 ("racist" and "islamophobia" are two examples of that sort of discourse). But if 68% of British Muslims have not bought into the Enlightenment Social Contract, that is very serious indeed. I think it is a less serious issue in the U.S., for a variety of reasons. One I have already suggested: the higher socio-economic and educational status of the Muslim immigrants who come here. Here's another one to consider. Muslims in the U.S. only amount to 2% of the American population. But when Muslims reached 10% of the population, as in France, then their electoral and social weight combined with their insular views and their increasingly strident demands for special consideration of Islam (i.e., their lack of allegiance to the Enlightenment Social Contract) begin to take a heavy toll on the free-speech traditions of European culture.

- ProfEthan

May 9, 2012 at 1:32pm

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arnon, I think it must have been Germany Today : A Personal Report (1985).

- ironyroad

May 9, 2012 at 1:47pm

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"arnon, I think it must have been Germany Today : A Personal Report (1985)." Well, how can a "personal" report be weak on the 1960-1980 period? Did Laqueur forget his personal experience in that 20 year period?

- arnon1

May 9, 2012 at 1:59pm

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What I meant was that he sounded expert on his readings of German history but pretty clueless on the younger generation ca. 1980 that I felt I knew more about than he did. His views on punk music, ecological politics etc seemed to have a lot of clichées going on.

- ironyroad

May 9, 2012 at 3:03pm

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Ok, but he wrote it as a "personal" report, (I assume he meant that he was describing his experience) and not as a historian.

- arnon1

May 9, 2012 at 4:25pm

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Irony: I'm always somewhat puzzled, if not baffled, jacko, but it is obvious to me that Bill Moyers, M. Div. (Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary) and former Baptist preacher in Texas before he went into politics full time, is at least an unlikely candidate for the "Pagan" in your BPS syndrome. Me: Nothing like a little irony to leaven that somewhat facetiously offered syndrome. I suppose it all fitting and proper per scientism.

- jacko

May 9, 2012 at 6:19pm

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Must you bring Levon into everything? The guy only left us a couple of weeks ago.

- ironyroad

May 9, 2012 at 9:50pm

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I'm always puzzled by the nonchallant attitudes to the incremental empowerment of Muslim minorities in Europe. While ironyroad may be correct in his estimates about percentages and actual numbers, I see a different picture. There are certain minorities in Europe that are genuinely vulnerable, though on different levels of vulnerability. Jewish minorities are under threat by the general animus trained on them by their Muslim compatriots. They are already stressed by having to conceal any outward sign of their Jewishness, by having to provide heavy security in their schools and synagogues, etc. There is something very undemocratic and illiberal in having to live under this kind of siege in countries that are supposed to be democratic and liberal and free. Jews do have some last resort solutions, such as packing up and immigrating to more Jewish-congenial countries such as the US, Canada, or Israel. Truly vulnerable minorities are the Roma, in that they have nowhere to turn to and no one to advocate for them when they are actively persecuted by their societies. As for Muslim minorities, I don't really see them as genuine minorities since they have their back watched by 1.4 billion Muslims worldwide (including 400 Arabs). Muslim minorities do not really feel powerless. Enough to recall the Danish cartoons to realize how Muslim minorities regard their rights in their societies. Under these circumstance, I don't see why they would make any extra efforts (as, for example, Jews did, historically, as soon as they were allowed into mainstream culture) to integrate into the cultures among which they live. ironyroad, your anecdotal sojourn in Europe really means nothing. The shooting of three Jewish schoolchildren and the father of two of them in France last month is indicative of the where things are moving, not your vacation experience. As arnon reminded you, you are not a member in any of the groups that are on the first line of vulnerability in Europe.

- noga1

May 10, 2012 at 2:11pm

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I did in fact put in a disclaimer earlier to the effect that I conceded that I'm neither in any obvious firing line (e.g. I'm not Jewish) nor a resident of Europe. Initially I was responding more to arnon's comment about European civilization rather than Caldwell's review. I think if I had a broader point it was well caught by Ethan's phrase about "disaggregating" different strands of an issue, so that a brutal antisemitic murder spree doesn't become a kind of framework for dealing with a whole set of problems and implications that have to do with people 98% of whom are law-abiding citizens or residents in their host countries (or just "their countries"). I have never even remotely suggested that terrorism or the threat of same should not be fought with all legitimate methods available to us.

- ironyroad

May 10, 2012 at 6:04pm

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Arnon's comment was prompted by Caldwell's well argued review. You don't have to be Jewish, gay, or a woman to fear a Europe giving in to Muslim demands. You just have to be a liberal with enlightenment values who takes the notion of human rights seriously.

- arnon1

May 10, 2012 at 6:13pm

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btw: not in the article but London just averted disaster by rejecting (too narrowly in my view) an antisemitic and pro Islamic Ken Livingston as Mayor.

- arnon1

May 10, 2012 at 6:15pm

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ironyroad: You did not address my argument about what I see as the faux vulnerability of Muslim minorities in Europe. I'm interested to know how you describe this unique circumstance.

- noga1

May 10, 2012 at 9:50pm

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I'm not sure how to address it, Noga. The first thing that occurred to me when I read the word is that certain people, women for example, are probably less vulnerable in Europe than they might be back in wherever. But as I never said that Muslims as a totality were a "vulnerable minority" per se -- they are a minority, however -- I'm not quite sure what I'm addressing. As a general issue, it's clear that bringing in religious leaders and ranks of extended family from the Islamic countries of origin to Europe has not been a good idea. However, it's difficult to reverse as one would have to justify a particular kind of group discrimination. The law allows one to say "you aren't coming in because we are suspicious of your links to known terrorists" but it doesn't allow one to say "you can't bring your parents or siblings after you because we don't want any more people like you." And even beyond that, how one deals, in immigration regulation, with the fact that there are vast numbers of Muslims elsewhere in the world is certainly a conundrum. It seems to me that in the longer term Muslims themselves have to create new social and psychological dynamics for themselves -- the project (if there is one) of recreating the village in Pakistan in Leeds or the town in southern Algeria in Lille doesn't seem to hold out much promise, long-term. I'm curious as to how Israel manages a 17% Muslim population -- more than twice the Western European statistic.

- ironyroad

May 10, 2012 at 10:28pm

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I still think ironyroad confuses his group (2) with group (3). They must be disaggregated (I'm glad you like the phrase, irony) in order to understand the problem Europe faces (and, to a lesser extent, the U.S. and Canada). A significant, ever larger and ever more assertive immigrant minority pursuing their own culture which is hostile to the Enlightment Social Contract (irony's group 2) is different from an immigrant minority with the usual problems of social adjustment (irony's group 3). I wouldn't accuse Irony of this necessarily, but many bien-pensant liberals and leftists are clearly confusing situation (2) by claiming it is situation (3), and their bien-pensant instinct is thus to protect and excuse. Moreover, since group 3 is vulnerable by definition, anyone who "attacks" that group (by pointing out that it is really group 2) is by definition a heartless, unfeeling s.o.b. In America, this can simply lead to arguments in the faculty lounge. In Europe, it can lead to your being hauled before the European Court of Human Rights.

- ProfEthan

May 10, 2012 at 10:48pm

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My point to ironyroad is the circumstance itself of genuine minority vulnerability and I thank Prof. Ethan for actually re-phrasing my argument in a more academic manner. The very attention, books, articles, discussions centering around the Muslim communities in Europe are an indication that these minorities are not really vulnerable to persecution. My own main concern is also the fact that most violent antisemitic attacks on Jews come from these groups, and that the Left representatives find "explanations" for them in the Middle East politics. What I see is aggressive insular Muslim minorities acting from a religious righteousness and a sense of of entitlement, defended and advocated for by the intellectual European elites. How many dead Jewish children are European societies willing to tolerate in order to maintain their liberal open-door Muslim immigration policies? How come Europeans tolerate the expulsion of gypsies to their hostile countries of origin while they will not even contemplate the reduction in immigration influx from the Arab Muslim countries?

- noga1

May 11, 2012 at 7:03am

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Those are all good points Noga. A good example of what Noga means is this: The reaction of LeMonde to the Toulouse murders of Jewish children was to warn NOT of growing Muslim anti-semitism in France, but to warn the French public of an anti-Muslim backlash to the event. THAT--not the murder of Jewish children by Muslims--was seen as the main social issue! Thus for the bien-pensant the murder of Jewish children by an Islamic fanatic--and that included grabbing by her hair a little girl who was running away and then blowing her head off--points only to the parlous socio-economic condition of Muslims in France...

- ProfEthan

May 11, 2012 at 7:18am

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http://www.thejc.com/news/world-news/67454/kill-jews-abuse-toulouse-campus "The incident occurred just over a month after three Jewish children and a rabbi were shot by an Islamist gunman in Toulouse. The delegation of Israeli students from the non-political organisation What Is RAEL were midway through a tour of French universities and had held successful events in Lille and Lyon before visiting Le Mirail campus, in the area where the Toulouse gunman Mohammed Merah grew up. They were at a stall on the campus and were handing out leaflets and chatting to students when a group of protesters arrived and began shouting at them through a megaphone. "They began shouting anti-Israel slogans and saying that Israel was a criminal state," said Sacha Reingewitz, vice-president of the UEJF. "They said Jews should be exterminated and that Israel commits genocide." The protesters demanded that the group remove the Israeli flag from their stall and, when the group refused, they took it down by force. "Security had to intervene - it was very upsetting," said Mr Reingewitz. "The protesters were saying 'get out of here' and they sang an antisemitic slogan in Arabic: Khaybar Khaybar is Yahud, Jaysh Muhammad sawfa ya'ud ['Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews, the army of Muhammad will return']." _____ Earlier ironyroad was saying: "I think if I had a broader point it was well caught by Ethan's phrase about "disaggregating" different strands of an issue, so that a brutal antisemitic murder spree doesn't become a kind of framework for dealing with a whole set of problems and implications that have to do with people 98% of whom are law-abiding citizens or residents in their host countries (or just "their countries")." The students who sing "Khaybar Khaybar is Yahud, Jaysh Muhammad sawfa ya'ud" and call for the extermination of Jews are part of the 98%. Let me just suggest to you, ironyroad, that any attempt to pressure the Muslim communities into moderation of their customs (antisemitism, misogyny, honour killings, firebrand preachers, etc) have been met with a stubborn response from the Degenerate Left for openness to "multiculturalism" and bludgeoning the critics with labels of racism and Islamophobia. Try reading some of the silliness from Naomi Wolf, or the debate about Ayaan Hirsi Ali in "Sign and Sight" to get a feel of what it is. I don't remember who in that debate coined the phrase" Enlightenment fundamentalist" and likened the use of the pen by someone like Pascal Bruckner, to terrorist intimidation. Don't you think you should make an effort to provide or at least think about, better answers to these problems (for Jews, for women, for homosexuals, for atheists, for pro-Israel supporters)? In the auction for pity points, Muslim take the lot, it seems.

- noga1

May 11, 2012 at 11:23am

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"Thinking about better answers" was precisely my motive, Noga. But I'd also note that you adroitly failed to address my question about how Israel gets on with a 17% Muslim population. It cannot only be that Israel has a tighter internal security network. I'm not sure if Ethan is backtracking from his "disaggregation" term now, but I while I like to think I'm not a bien-pensent liberal pollyanna of the kind he describes (conflating group 2 and 3 and pretending they are all 3) I also warn against conflating 1 and 2 and claiming they are all 1. I too fail to understand the attitude of sections of the left in Europe to a thoroughgoing hostility directed by Muslims (and certainly manifested by Islamic organizations) at secular principles that the left that I knew back in the day would have defended e.g. on women. Not that they didn't have other problems, but . . .

- ironyroad

May 11, 2012 at 1:08pm

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Incidentally, I made some false connection once back when I was younger and for years I couldn't read "bien-pensant" without imagining a friendly French peasant.

- ironyroad

May 11, 2012 at 1:11pm

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I'm not back-tracking on "disaggregation", irony. And I agree that people on the left conflate groups 2 and 3 and pretend they are all 3, while some other people conflate groups 1 and 2, and pretend they are all 1. Nevertheless, you need to react to the upsetting story posted by noga. Are these part of your 98%? Don't forget that Toulouse Islamists (including women in burkas) demonstrated in favor of Mohammed Medha--who, on his part, had an extensive support network starting with his family. And what are we supposed to make of that incident and the new one? Is that group 3? group 2? group 1? How big is group 1 in Toulouse. In any case, group 2 is significantly large and poses a danger: not simply a problem, but a danger. "Problem" is shown to be a euphemism now.

- ProfEthan

May 11, 2012 at 2:14pm

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The Arab minority in Israel, ironyroad, are not immigrants. And Israel's position about admitting more Arabs into Israel is well known. We call it Israel's right to self determination as a Jewish state. Additionally, the Arab minority in Israel is much influenced by Israeli mainstream culture and tends toward the traditional-secular. I don't really remember reading about honour killings or persecution of gays in this community in Israel. There is however a grave problem of high criminal levels within that community and there is an intensive attempt at radicalization at the mosques, but for some reason it seems like most Arabs in Israel do not have a taste for jihadism though there are in Israeli jails quite a few who were convicted for assisting and facilitating Palestinian terrorism. I would say that the Arab minority in Israel acts like a genuine minority (with some exceptions, like the execrable Hanin Zoabi) in that it tries to live in peace with the majority and work towards greater integration through legitimate channels, such as in media advocacy, politics, legal system, education, interaction, etc. Having said all this there is a great anxiety in Israel about which direction the Arab minority which greatly identifies with Palestinians, will take in cases of national emergency or in case of Israeli weakness. And, BTW, when we visited some friends on the northern border three years ago, we traveled through a string of Arab towns. When we were ready to return home at night time, our hosts told us to take a different rout that doesn't go through the Arab towns. Why? It's dangerous, they said. They did not explain whether it was dangerous for us as Israeli Jews (how would they know we were Jews, anyway?) or because crime was a factor in those towns. I learned about this intolerable reality from the column of Sayed Kashua, the Arab Israeli satirist who writes for Haaretz and is the screen writer for an Israeli sit-com: Arab Work.

- noga1

May 11, 2012 at 2:25pm

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Yes, ironyroad, prof Ethan is right. I'm so used to your prevarications that I didn't even notice you avoided making even the slightest noise about the story I posted. I assume it comes from: of course this is shocking and I don't really have to say it because anyone who knows me would take that as a given. Now that this un articulated shock is done I can go on to what really interests me, or whatever.

- noga1

May 11, 2012 at 2:39pm

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I don't prevaricate. I say what I think and when I don't have anything to say at that moment I (mostly) remain silent. Thanks, that tells me a little something about Israel I've been trying to figure out -- I couldn't quite get it the short time I was there. I kept having the impression that there was more overlap among some parts of the population in . . . style, attitude? I can't think of the right word. More than in Europe, I mean. Some of it was just my foreigner status as clueless outsider -- I'd look at some guy and not know who/what he was unless he was dressed in some identifiable manner. I doubt that I would have immediately identified Arabic if I heard it (which I presumably did).

- ironyroad

May 11, 2012 at 5:57pm

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It seems to me that Noga's hypothesis about Israel contains two aspects: (a) a very powerful and dynamic mainline culture, which attracts or pushes even self-identified minorities towards modernity; and (b) a stern determination to imprison any and all trouble-makers. And it seems to me that neither of these conditions exists in Europe. Hence the current problems and looming catastrophe. Irony, you haven't responded to the news from Toulouse, and its implications, as I asked.

- ProfEthan

May 11, 2012 at 6:55pm

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"I don't prevaricate. I say what I think and when I don't have anything to say at that moment I (mostly) remain silent." Oh really? In that case, why did you not extend to me the same courtesy of assuming that I had nothing to say to your observation about how it is in Israel? You accused me of adroitly dodging your question, as if I had something to hide or whatever. You seemed to insist on a response and I respected that. I, it seems, do not deserve the same reciprocal respect.

- noga1

May 11, 2012 at 8:13pm

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It wasn't a question -- at least I didn't think it was. But as I've been asked to respond, I will: I think if people are invited to a college campus and they are then attacked more than verbally by others, then there are basically four options: 1. campus police or other security measures 2. gritting teeth and shouting back, refusing to be intimidated 3. solidarity protests by others who want to protect the rights of the visiting group 4. departure. I think every situation is different, and certainly in the U.S. there's an assumption that free speech has to be balanced against disruptive behavior that constrains others' identical rights. What you describe seems to go beyond making your views known to the visiting group into a kind of intimidation that tactically stops short of actual violence. How to deal with that is the issue, and it seems to me that the people who invited the Israeli group to the university have the responsibility to see that the guests can do the things they've come there to do. As to the inference that the Muslim students were engaging in symbolic support for the perpetrator of the recent psychopathic killing spree, it's certainly possible. But symbolic messages that don't break the law are difficult to contest in a free society.

- ironyroad

May 11, 2012 at 9:45pm

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Is it unthinkable for you, ironyroad, to simply express solidarity with the Jewish students and their plight? If I didn't know better, I would think that you were unaccountably leery of showing any preference in sentiment and principle, to the Jewish students or even to me as a Jewish person who is outraged by these incidents.

- noga1

May 11, 2012 at 10:06pm

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I'm sorry if my comments don't meet your requirements. I'm tired of being presented with questions when, no matter what my response is, I've already been condemned before the question was even asked.

- ironyroad

May 11, 2012 at 11:23pm

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I asked a genuine question, ironyroad. A genuine question as in, I don't know the answer. I'm curious about this seeming remoteness from any explicit show of outrage in such cases as these. If you don't wish to answer, fine but don't attribute to me any unkind thoughts about you. That's as ungracious as the kind of bad faith response you have just complained about.

- noga1

May 11, 2012 at 11:32pm

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1. Irony, the demos I referred to were not the second Toulouse incident at the university. They were demos in direct support of Mohammed Merah by elements in the Muslim community in Toulouse, immediately after his death. They were similar in feeling but not in violence to the Muslim riots that occurred in 1996 when the terrorist who planned to blow up a Jewish school in Paris was shot by the police, referred to in the original article above. 2. I agree with noga: irony, where is your outrage over the second Toulouse "event"? And ESPECIALLY that here we have Muslims, on a UNIVERSITY campus, shouting "DEATH TO JEWS" a MONTH after four Jews including three children were shot to death. 3. All of irony's remarks about it being the INVITING group's responsibility to see that their guests are treated with decency is either (a) beside the point when there is a mass of students who do NOT intend this, or (b) invites the Israeli solution: mass arrests of troublemakers. A few of those mass arrests and you wouldn't have this sort of trouble on the university campus. But then the left would REALLY go beserk, would it not? Oh, no--targetting of immigrants (irony's group 3). Instead, the disrupters with their vile slogans were treated with kid gloves. 4. And all the last post above by irony (which I find disturbing both in content and attitude) is in the service of refusing to see how large the problem is with his Muslim group 2. That problem is the context in which we need to see such vile actions as Muslim students shouting "KILL THE JEWS!" in a city where one of their number SHOT THREE JEWISH CHILDREN IN THE HEAD JUST A MONTH BEFORE, irony. HOW would anyone with any sense of decency DARE to do that, SHOUT that?? You don't want to face the answer to that question, and instead you shift responsibility onto...the people who invited the Israelis!

- ProfEthan

May 11, 2012 at 11:52pm

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When the congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot and nearly killed last year at the mall in Tuscson, Noga's principal concern seemed to be some possibly unjust indictment of Sarah Palin. Excuse me for having found that disturbing in both content and attitude. I have nothing I'm required to prove to either you, Ethan, or to Noga concerning my attitudes to Muslim activist intimidation, my hatred of the left's compromising on basic civil rights, my belief that terrorism should be met with appropriate force, or my commitment to Enlightenment values for which I don't apologize to anyone. So let me politely request that you take your CAPITAL LETTERS elsewhere to some more receptive target. Have a nice day.

- ironyroad

May 12, 2012 at 12:52am

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ironyroad: Where is the analogy in the Palin example to the case we are discussing here? In a way it is a good example of your own selective outrage when it comes to antisemitism. If I recall you were among those who blamed her for being antisemitic because she used the term "blood libel" to describe how some democrats tried to blame her as an instigator of that shooting spree. In that instant, there was NO silence on your part. Interesting priorities, perspectives or whatever, considering you are going to such lengths now to maintain your precious silence. I would defend anybody against a blood libel.

- noga1

May 12, 2012 at 7:05am

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The translation of Ironyroad's last comment is that he has no comfortable answer to the questions I posed about the second Toulouse incident, except to blame those who invited the Israelis in the first place: why, it's *their* responsibility to provide proper security! But the invited group had no trouble on the other French campuses they visited--only on the campus in the city that produced a Muslim murderer of Jewish children. I wasn't part of the debate between irony and noga over the Giffords shooting. But Palin had nothing--absolutely zero--to do with it, and neither did the Tea Party. Repeat: nothing, zero. Yet certain liberals kept to this position (including, by the implications in his remarks about political "civility," President Obama) as the evidence piled up and piled up against them. It wouldn't surprise me in such situations if the debate got heated. I too have to sign off, though--I'm flying today to visit my relatives in Paris. I hope they're alive. But if some brutal, fanatical French Islamist has murdered them, I'm sure certain people will find a way to say that, after all, it was my relatives' responsibility for what happened...

- ProfEthan

May 12, 2012 at 7:54am

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Prof Ethan, I have a natural affinity to what you are saying but I can assure you (whatever worth my word has for you) that ironyroad is a thoroughly honourable and decent thinker who is just as appalled as any of us with what's going on. I can't say it in any clearer and more certain way. I don't think he was saying that it was the Jewish students' responsibility to provide the necessary security for the Israeli speaker. He was only providing a few theoretical ways of considering the issue. As in, what were the options. I did not see that he was endorsing this particular options. He is an academic, after all, and considers it a matter of academic integrity to look at all the possible angles before beginning to discard them as insufficient. ironyroad and I have a love/hate relationship:) We love talking about literature and films. We hate each other's politics. What can you do?

- noga1

May 12, 2012 at 8:11am

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I accept that irony is a thoroughly honorable and decent thinker. He's always been polite. But I find irony's stance about the second Toulouse incident incomprehensible--not just his four possibilities, none of which were feasible beforehand, but the emotional distance from the emotionally-devastating scene (for Jews) that lies behind the suggestions. Why talk about theoretical possibilities about how to have avoided the second incident (all on Jewish shoulders!!), when Jewish students were under assault by a mob of Muslims shouting "Kill the Jews!" a month after one of their cohorts actually did it? Irony needs to accept--and I mean, fully accept--where the responsibility lies here. Any evasion is an attempt (consciously or unconsciously) not to face the seriousness of the Muslim/Islamist problem. Sorry: not "problem," because in France it's no longer a "problem". It's a danger.

- ProfEthan

May 12, 2012 at 8:44am

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Prof. Ethan, politeness is just a style for most people. Integrity and decency are integral to the structure of a person. If irony errs, he errs on the side of too much caution. I don't wish to speak for him but I think I understand his standoffishness to some extent. People don't wish to take explicitly this side or that, assuming that implicitly it will be self evident which side they are on. I've had this conversation with irony many times before. I'm not sure he fully understands why it bothers me. But there it is. I think Sartre explained it best. I quoted this before: "Thus the Jew is in the situation of a Jew because he lives in a society that takes him for a Jew. He has passionate enemies, and defenders lacking in passion. The democrat professes moderation; he blames or admonishes while synagogues are being set on fire. He is tolerant by profession; he is, indeed, snobbish about the tolerance and even extends it to the enemies of democracy. Wasn't it the style among radicals of the Left to consider Mauras a genius? How can the democrat fail to understand the anti-Semite? It is as if he were fascinated by all who plot his downfall. Perhaps at the bottom of his heart he yearns for the violence which he has denied himself. In any case, the struggle is not equal. If the democrat were to put some warmth into pleading the cause of the Jew, he would have to be Manichean too, and equate the Jew with the principle of Good. But how could he do this? The democrat is no fool. He makes himself the advocate of the Jew because he sees him as a member of humanity; since humanity has other members who he must also defend, the democrat has much to do; he concerns himself with the Jew when he has time. But the anti-Semite has only one enemy, and he can think of him all the time. This it is he who calls the turn. Vigorously attacked, feebly defended, the Jew feels himself in danger in a society in which anti-Semitism is the continual temptation. This is what we must look at more closely." And this: “The cause of the Jews would be half won if only their friends brought to their defense a little of the passion and the perseverance their enemies use to bring them down.In order to waken this passion, what is needed id not to appeal to the generosity of the Aryans- with even the best of them, that virtue is in eclipse. What must be done is to point out to each one that the fate of the Jews is his fate. Not one Frenchman will be free so long as the Jews do not enjoy the fullness of their rights. Not one Frenchman will be secure so long as a single Jew – in France or in the world at large – can fear for his life”

- noga1

May 12, 2012 at 9:43am

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Excellent (surprisingly excellent) quotes from Sartre, noga. This explains my frustration with ironyroad quite well. Thanks.

- ProfEthan

May 12, 2012 at 10:18am

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I'm beyond astonishment that, after the series of posts you made, Ethan, that you would consider Obama's very careful remarks on civility to be part of a liberal plot againt innocent conservatives who merely wanted to use target practice with gunsights as a motif in an election campaign and became defensively indignant when someone turned it into reality. If you keep on hammering home a metaphor of aggression and killing, then one day someone will get tired of the metahporical constraint and cross the line into reality. In any case, as regards Noga's Sartre passage, I most certainly do not "yearn" for some violence I'm denying myself. I have no problem with people fighting back against intimdation and death threats and nowhere will you find that I have ever recommended (other than tactically) caving before them. It seems to me that all you want is for people to say the right thing -- "I'm shocked at the Muslim students behavior, shocked at the demonstrations, how awful yada yada yada" -- and once I say the right thing in your eyes, then I've passed some test. But I'm not shocked, I expect it. I don't mean I know anything particular about Toulouse university, but such incidents have happened all over the place, not just in Europe. Why other people don't expect it, including those who might have the experience to know what may be coming down the pike, is a question I can only speculate about. By the way, a funny thing that I've never mentioned: I was on the board running student media at grad school ten years ago. I quickly developed a dislike for the representative of the Muslim Students Association (they had a paper called Al-Talib) which I sensed was reciprocated. He seemed to me both insufferably smug about being a Muslim and grimly hostile to anyone who didn't buy into the diversity ideology that the MSA flew under. At the same time, one of the non-student board members was this Jewish woman, who seemed to develop an intense dislike for me and was always taking the MSA guy under her wing, as if to protect him against my dislike. It was a slightly disconcerting experience, but maybe personality had something to do with it.

- ironyroad

May 12, 2012 at 12:33pm

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Oh, and by the way Ethan, if this is a cowardly way of naming me: "I'm sure certain people will find a way to say that, after all, it was my relatives' responsibility for what happened..." I can assure you I'm quite happy to deal with any accusation you wish to make, but make it openly. I have no interest in wasting time tryng to guess what nonsense anyone might or might not be thinking.

- ironyroad

May 12, 2012 at 12:40pm

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1. Obama's comments were an attack on Republicans and the Tea Party, whom he wrongly (as we now know) blamed for creating the atmosphere that led to the assassination attempt on Gaby Giffords. Two weeks later it was quite okay for him not to comment on an introduction in which a union leader said (I'm approximating), "We ought to destroy those s.o.b.s". I see. Talk of the need to maintain civility disappeared as soon as Occupy appeared, with their total lack of civility. But that was okay, because they were on the "right side"! So what if they trashed places where they demonstrated, or even wrecked stores? (None of which the Tea Party did, but the latter were attacked by liberals for" lack of civility"...) 2. The point about accepting the awful meaning of Toulouse and Toulouse #2, instead of trying to offload responsibility onto those who invited the Israelis as you did, irony, is to recognize fully the danger that exists. Once one does this, then one can come up with programs to counteract it. Until one does, though, nothing to counteract the danger can be proposed, because bien-pensants confuse both your group 2 and even your group 1 with innocent group 3, and any proposed measures are denounced as mean-spirited attacks upon the "vulnerable". Noga's "Israeli solution" was a self-confident and powerful mainline culture, and a stern policy of mass arrests of trouble-makers. I am certain myself that a series of mass arrests of those vicious Islamists at Toulouse Univ, every time they did something like they did on campus, would soon end the harassment on campus of those with whom they disagree. But the French will never do this--or at least, not right now. But coddling these moronic fascists--or worse, suggesting it was the other side's responsibililty as you did, ironyroad-- only encourages and, far worse, empowers them. What is your solution, ironyroad? 3. Yes, I do hope my relatives are still alive and not murdered by some Islamist, ironyroad. And I do hope that my nice nieces are not harassed at their Paris universities by the Islamofascists, and that if they are, you won't try to shift the responsibility onto them for not being, e.g., multicultural enough. Perhaps that is an unfair suspicion on my part, ironyroad, given what you've written about your own bitter experiences with MSU and their bien-pensant supporters. If so, I apologize. But given what you wrote at 9:45 p.m., my suspicions seemed warranted. Again, I apologize if they were not. But I ask you to explain exactly what you would do: (a) to punish the Islamist student demonstrators at Toulouse, and (b) to make sure peaceful expositions of opinion are not threatened by them again on that campus, and (c) explain to them exactly why it is indecent to shout "Kill the Jews!", and especially why it is indecent to shout that when one of their own cohort has just killed a few.

- ProfEthan

May 12, 2012 at 1:55pm

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"instead of trying to offload responsibility onto those who invited the Israelis as you did, irony," That isn't true. I said that, among other things, some responsibility for people you invite belongs to you, if you think there is a possibility that they could be the target of hostile action of some kind (potentially even violent?). That's not "offloading," it's suggesting a rational approach given that similar things have happened elsewhere. I find it difficult to answer your question about what exactly to do regarding Toulouse. I don't know the local situation. In a general way, I listed some options earlier. Most effective and indeed most gratifying would be, of course, a large demonstration in solidarity with the Israeli group by other students in order to protect their right to do their information/publicity work on campus as per their invitation. In the case of actual death threats directed at individuals, then that is a matter for the authorities. With regard to your 3, I'd like to go on record as saying that I am against people (Jewish or not) being harassed by Islamofascists and I would not -- nor have I ever, to the best of my knowledge -- argued that if people are thus harassed, it's somehow their own fault for not being multicultural enough. And, indeed, if I was inviting an Israeli student group to visit and I knew of the Islamofascists on campus, I might even do a little advance thinking about how to respond to possible trouble e.g. harassment by said Islamofascists. In Gifford's case, I'd simply note that there's a difference between the Occupy movement (generally pretty peaceful, and certainly no weaponry on show) and the approach of her opponent, who had invited people to a campaign event in which target practice took place, with the target consisting of Gifford's head in a gunsight. I think if I had done that, and my opponent had been almost killed with a bullet in the brain, I might feel some embarrassment at least. You?

- ironyroad

May 12, 2012 at 2:36pm

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I don't know anything about the last parapgraph; all I know was that Palin was crucified for having Gifford with a target on her website--i.e., as a person to be defeated. As for Occupy--are you joking, Ironyroad? Non-violent, weapons not on display? Masked anarchists swinging iron staves ring a bell (in Oakland and Seattle, to name two places where Occupy created violent riots)? The Pittsburgh bombers? But no, let's not talk about it because their hearts are after all in the right place and the peaceful demos of the T-P's are actually threatening fascist marches. I had an honors student involved in the early Occupy organizing and he left in disgust. But as Nancy Pelosi said, "God bless them." Hearts in the right place, etc. But if the T-P's had ever done *anything* like Occupy has been guilty of, then you can be sure that the threat of fascism would be the major story. As far as I can see, you did argue that those who invited the Israelis to Toulouse had a share in the responsibility, Irony. I disagree: responsibiilty for this new and grotesque event lies solely with the vicious Islamist morons who caused trouble (and how do you propose to prevent such trouble, irony?). Really, it is perverse to go forward in discussion of these cases on any other basis. Irony, I am indeed glad you are thinking about how to respond to the Islamofascists on campus. To my mind, a "solidarity" demo in response is very weak. People might not show up and that would empower the Islamofascists even more. Perhaps the answer is immediate mass arrests at the first sign of threats or physical intimidation (the Israeli method). But there are certainly civil rights issues about that! In any case, it's not on the boards because no campus administration either here in the U.S. or in France would dare to do it. So let's all think some more about what to do about these Islamofascist morons. Irony is right that thinking ahead is necessary. Preparation is necessary. Because the tidal wave is coming, at least in Europe. Off to Paris now. An interesting conversation.

- ProfEthan

May 12, 2012 at 3:48pm

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"But I'm not shocked, I expect it. " I guess this accounts for a great deal of our disagreement, such as it is. I AM shocked. I DO NOT expect it.

- noga1

May 12, 2012 at 5:59pm

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I think Occupy did a magnificent job, Ethan, in bringing back the issues of wealth concentration and power to a country that had conveniently forgotten them. I'm not defending every single action by every single person or grouplet at every Occupy site but the broad energy of the events nationwide was peaceful, democratic, egalitarian, and open to lots of people with vastly different angles and ideas. The Tea Party? Not so much. I may be crazy but I have a lot more in common with a group of people doing that than a group who wants to return us to some 18th century fantasy land (notably without even the respect for the rational mind that was a feature of that era). But, as you say, perhaps mass arrests is the way to go. Noga, I "deployed the fortress" of my comment in a way that tried to say that I'm not one of Ethan's bien-pensant political hypnosis victims. I have no illusions about people who enjoying intimidating; they like wielding a threat especially when they sense that there is little to no resistance. But there is a reasonable discussion to be had on how to deal with this onslaught, provided we don't start by demanding that everyone who wants to participate come up and testify to virtue with the correct emotional response.

- ironyroad

May 13, 2012 at 12:05am

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So how did you like "Footnote"?

- noga1

May 13, 2012 at 10:48am

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I thought it was great. I managed to corral a few colleagues/friends to go and everyone liked it a lot, although people seemed to get different things from it. As we're all involved in the same work, more or less, there was a certain amount of uncomfortable recognition of the peculiar egoisms of academia, but there were so many strands of personality and motive entangled in the story that it was difficult to come down comfortably on anyone's side for any length of time. I found myself being strangely drawn to the father and I wondered at the beginning if the film was going to justify, in some way, his odd behavior at the opening ceremony. But later I thought Grossman's conditions for helping Uriel and maintaining the fiction were in fact legitimate -- I couldn't pick a hole in them. The meeting in the office at the Education Ministry was the best piece of physical/spatial comedy I've seen in a long time. It's actually a very visually smart movie too -- the recurrent impression of the microfiche reader is the obvious gag, but the obsessive close-ups e.g. to the extent that one began to recognize the individual bits of stubble on Eliezer's chin, were very striking.

- ironyroad

May 13, 2012 at 2:42pm

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"I couldn't pick a hole in them." It was irrational and at the same time it made sense. The fly in the ointment was of course that the senior Shkolnick became a party to the conspiracy of silence. Why? Was he so hungry for the public recognition? What I got from the scene at the Education Ministry was how very typically Israeli it all was. I identified most with Shkolnick junior's wife. She saw everything. Understood the value of everyone. I think the entire film was a jazz variation on the Talmudic saying that "Envy among the scholars augments the wisdom in this world".

- noga1

May 13, 2012 at 6:00pm

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"A jazz variation" is pretty inspired. I wouldn't have thought of that. As far as Sk. senior goes, what exactly can he do? He knows to a 99% certainty that Uriel wrote the judge's summary of the reasons for the award, and he knows to a 75% certainty (based on the discrepancy in the date of the registered letter) that something untoward happened, and the mix-up in the names is a reasonable guess. But he's now facing a kind of mirror image of the son's conundrum -- if he reveals what he knows, he not only essentially concedes that he realizes why he won't ever get the award, but he's also done the interview in which he castigated Uriel for being trendy and treated his work with contempt at the same moment K. junior was trying to make sure he got the prize. He's confronted with the possibility of his own squalid egoism and lack of maturity becoming front-page news (and it will drag the prize itself through the mud, and he secretly cares for it). I'm also puzzled by Uriel's wife -- the other wife, the grandmother, has obviously put up with a lot over the years -- because, although she sees a lot, as you say, she also provokes him. In the bedroom scene she says "you're a coward who avoids confrontation" and then -- almost as if stung by her words -- he proceeds to steer directly toward it in the Education Ministry scene as if he needs to prove something.

- ironyroad

May 13, 2012 at 9:49pm

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I, too made the connection between what she says and what he does later. If so, then don't you think she provokes him to be a better son, person, father? In that case, am I not right to like her? She's got what the Greeks attributed to Achilles, "arete", a sobriety and an ability to get the job done, by fair means or foul. And don't forget that she says she loves him, and she is glad he will never cheat on her, even if only because he is a coward. And isn't cowardliness why most husbands (I presume) do not cheat on their wives? Have you seen the Israeli film "Walk on Water"? Lior Ashkenazi, who plays Uriel acted in the main role there as well. A very talented actor. And a film well worth seeing (it's got all your favourite themes: Mossad agents, ancient Nazis, Germans, Palestinians, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, the works).

- noga1

May 13, 2012 at 10:44pm

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All that, and "the works" too? Get behind me Satan! Ok, I give in, I just put it on my Netflix list. Your mention of "arete" reminds me of what you were saying briefly about Irene Papas in The Guns of Navarone a few weeks ago, when I remembered the story wrongly: she's the one who does the job of taking care of the Nazi informer in the resistance group while the guys are arguing the toss over who's responsible for what. I think there's some wider framework there in Footnote: maybe she gets the job done but maybe she doesn't see all the consequences. Also, I don't think she says she loves him in that scene. He (Uriel) says he loves her, and she says something like "I value the way you take care of your family."

- ironyroad

May 14, 2012 at 2:43am

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I liked the way she flew at him after he had come down on their son who doesn't know what to do in his life and just idles away his time. She used some pretty cutting Hebrew colloquial language to get the message across and through the fog of his narcissism which I'm not sure was well translated. BTW, one thing I enjoyed was the location of the film. It takes place within a 3 KM square which included the Hebrew U campus on Givat Ram (where I was a BA student), the Valley of the Cross park (where Shkolnick senior gets the phone call from the Minister of Education) , which I used to cross each time I walked downtown (about an hour's walk from the campus), Rehavia, Abrabanel St where my best friends' parents lived, the Israel Museum, the National Halls (where the Israel Prize was being given). Another thing I liked was the fact that it was completely devoid of national politics. In that respect it was pure cinema, just a very good and witty story about human folly.

- noga1

May 14, 2012 at 6:49am

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I thought you might be familiar with the territory in that way. Incidentally, I looked over at the Hebrew U campus from the other side of the road, but didn't go in. When I was coming up for tenure, I had to propose a few names of scholars who would review all my work and submit their evaluation for my file (the department head chooses another few and then they create a combined list with a couple from each set of names). One of my choices was Shira Wolosky, who is in the Dept of English and American Lit at Hebrew U. She wrote The Art of Poetry and also the extended essay on Whitman and Dickinson which forms about 40% of The Cambridge History of American Literature: Vol 4, Nineteenth-Century Poetry. The other 60% (covering basically everything else in 19th c. American poetry) was written by my late doctoral advisor and mentor Barbara Packer. Both turned in great pieces of work for that volume. Barbara also acknowledged me in the preface for helping her with her contribution even though it wasn't the case. As I wrote to her once, it's nice when a mentor thanks one of their former students for work they did, and even better when she thanks them for stuff they never did! Anyhow, I sort of wanted to wander over and see if Prof. Wolosky was in her office and just say hello and that I liked her work and that I had been a student of Barbara's. But because there was a chance that she was actually one of my reviewers, I let the idea drop, as it might have been a little weird if she were actually reading my book or something and suddenly I show up at her office door in Jerusalem! Ironically, I could have gone ahead, as I found out later they didn't choose her for the final list of reviewers.

- ironyroad

May 14, 2012 at 2:21pm

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I think that the English lit Dept. was moved to the Mount Scopus Campus years ago. When I was a student it was still in Givat Ram which is a much nicer site for a university in my humble opinion. Most of the Science Depts are now in GR. I think Jewish Studies dept is scheduled to be moved to MS into a building which looks over to the Judean desert, most appropriately ... There is a shuttle bus between the two campuses. This summer we are planning a visit to Israel so I think I'll take the opportunity to revisit all the sites.

- noga1

May 14, 2012 at 3:00pm

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Oh yes, it must have been the Mount Scopus campus I was looking at -- that I remember now (but I thought it was the only campus). I was only in Jerusalem for two days so I didn't get around to all that much.

- ironyroad

May 14, 2012 at 3:22pm

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Let me know when you have watched "Walk on water". Some interesting ethical issues there, too, which I was pondering.

- noga1

May 14, 2012 at 4:56pm

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