Rising Resentment in Europe

German Chancellor Angela Merkel seems to have developed a fitful case of the John-Howards this week.   Much like the former Australian prime-minister, she found herself being forced to publicly confront the reality that a large swathe of the Muslim minority in her country has no interest in assimilating into German society.

Germany has been roiled over the past month after the publication of former  Central Banker Thilo Sarazzin’s book Deutschland schafft sich ab “Germany Does Away With Itself” in which Mr. Sarazzin alleges that Germany’s immigrant Muslim population is reluctant to integrate and tends to rely more on social services than to contribute productively to their society.   Furthermore, he calculates that their population growth may well overwhelm the German population within a couple of generations at the current rate. He proposes stringent reforms for the welfare system to rectify the problems. The first edition of his book sold out within a few days.

The political uproar occurred when German president Christian Wullff responded to Sarazzin with a plea for greater tolerance of Muslim sensitivities. That pushed members of Merkel’s governing conservative coalition, the Christian Democratic Union, to call on the president to show her conservative muscle and counter Wulff’s apparent words of appeasement.

Increasingly, European leaders are being forced to state openly what isolated members of their conservative constituencies have been saying for nearly a  decade – that  Europe has a Muslim problem that is not going away any time soon.  Men and women who have  been brave enough to defy politically correct prohibitions have suffered for their convictions. Pik Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh were murdered;  Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Dutch legislator, was forced to flee and Geert Wilders, the leader of the second largest party in the Dutch parliament, is currently standing trial for incitement.

But the fact there is a movement afoot to confront the realities of a restive, unassimiable minority of Muslims in the midst of Europe, cannot now be denied.  Last December the Swiss voted to ban the construction of further minarets in their country; the French have been debated the banning of the burqa for nearly two years and the Italians, whose problems are not quite as severe, nevertheless have developed stringent judicial responses to honor killings and wife beating incidents in Muslim homes.

Now its Germany’s turn.  The German journalist Henryk Broder, who appeared at the first Collapse of Europe conference in June 2007, once explained to me that German passivity was a result of its disinclination to be regarded in any way as racist.  Its own history with racism has inoculated it, he said , against any notion that other groups should be coerced into accepting Western values.

Its not quite good enough any more.   Over the next five years European political leaders will come under increasing pressure from their constituencies to make bold statements, much as Ms. Merkel did this week.   They may not be quite as brave as John Howard, who, in 2005, faced down multicultural pressure to state assertively that Muslims who do not subscribe to Australian values or choose to place their religious convictions above the Australian constitution, will be stripped of their citizenship.

But that day might be coming to Europe sooner than anyone expects.

Indifference to the Suffering of Co-religionists

I have always considered Marty Peretz, Harvard don and long time owner of The New Republic, one of the saner liberal commentators in this country. His supple prose and incisive views regularly cuts across liberal cant and he is never afraid to point out hypocrisy on the left (particularly when it comes to its dismal failures in the defense of the State of Israel). But the staggering range of condemnation that visited a recent blog entry in September, regarding local Muslim indifference to the fate of their co-religionists, must have him questioning some of his alliegences.

He crossed the line here first:

“I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment, which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.”

Oops. Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times quickly pounced on that one:

“Thus a prominent American commentator, in a magazine long associated with tolerance, ponders whether Muslims should be afforded constitutional freedoms. Is it possible to imagine the same kind of casual slur tossed off about blacks or Jews? How do America’s nearly seven million American Muslims feel when their faith is denounced as barbaric?”

Peretz went on to add fuel to the fire:

“Why do not Muslims raise their voices against these at once planned and random killings all over the Islamic world? This world went into hysteria some months ago when the Mossad took out the Hamas head of its own Murder Inc. But, frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. And among those Muslims led by the Imam Rauf there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood. So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.

The liberal establishment has unsurprisingly made preparations to burn Peretz in effigy, with the blogsphere spinning into a frenzy.

Recognizing his mistake, Peretz quickly offered apologies for the first allegation but was brave enough to stand his ground on the second:

“The other sentence is: “Frankly, Muslim life is cheap, especially for Muslims.” This is a statement of fact, not value. In his column, Kristof made this seem like a statement of bigotry. But on his blog, he notes that he concurs with it. “Peretz makes some points that are valid, and I agree with him that Muslims haven’t said nearly enough about those Muslims who kill other Muslims—in Kurdish areas, in Iraq, in Western Sahara, in Sudan, and so on.”

So the tit for tat goes on.

When considering this question I began to reflect on my own community and how it stands up for its co-religionists.

It is extraordinary fact that some of the most vocal opponents of Israeli policies are Jews who never fail to point out that their heritage lends their opposition greater seriousness. But nary a practicing American Muslim, besides brave souls such as Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, will adamantly protest the slaughter of innocents in Muslim lands.

This strangely enough is a characteristic of even secular Muslims. During a flight to London a few years ago I was sitting next to a young woman with whom I began chatting. When the conversation drifted into religion, she pointed out that she was of Muslim heritage, if non-practicing. At some point in the conversation, I asked her the very question Peretz had raised in his blog entry: Why were Muslims not more vocal in their condemnations of the fratricidal killing of fellow Muslims?

The answer she gave me seemed to sum up a general malaise: “Its enough to worry about our own communities, let alone others.”

That kind of indifference is not peculiar to Muslims. I have found Christian churches of most denominations, largely wanting in a forceful approach to the persecution of fellow Christians in Muslim lands. When I participated, some years ago, in a campaign to bring the escaped Sudanese Christian slave Francis Bok to Los Angeles in order to spread the word about his suffering under Muslim oppression, we could attract few Christian churches to give him a platform. One pastor at the First AME Church, one of the largest black Churches in the country, even told us:

” We still consider ourselves slaves. Why should we worry about the Sudanese?”

I was stupefied. At my own barmitzvah, back in the early 1970s, without any prompting from either my parents or my rabbi, I felt compelled to remind my congregation, that while we were free to enjoy the luxuries afforded by life in the West, millions of Soviet Jews still lived behind bars in a giant state prison. Throughout those adolescent years, the fact of their incarceration was never far from my mind – and something of which I was reminded by constant community rallies on their behalf.

Why don’t we see those kind of rallies by Muslim communities in American cities as every day Muslims kill Muslims in the most horrific manner?

The answer, I fear, is exactly as Peretz contends: Muslim life IS cheap to other Muslims and its about time the liberal establishment recognizes it. The obvious corollary arises: If Muslims can be so indifferent to the spilling of their own peoples’ blood, how do they feel about the spilling of the blood of ordinary Americans in the name of Islam?

That should certainly be the subject of significant public debate.

Islamic Education for Public School Students

Watch this extremely disturbing video about what happened during a public school outing to a local mosque in Massachusetts: