Date:
Mon, 26 Jan 2004 20:06:09 +0000
In Europe, Is It A Matter of Fear, Or Loathing?
By Robin Shepherd
It's the biggest political correctness flap Britain has seen in
years. It has pitted one man against the BBC -- Britain's
highbrow, purportedly impartial state television network -- and
unleashed a national fracas over what may or may not be said about
the hottest topic of the moment: Islam and the West.
Earlier this month, Robert Kilroy-Silk, a one time Labour MP and
for 17 years the host of one of British television's most
successful daily talk shows, let loose with a few thoughts about
the Arab world. In a column for the mass circulation Sunday
Express newspaper, under the deliberately provocative
headline "We owe Arabs nothing," he opined, in part, as follows:
"Apart from oil -- which was discovered, is produced and is paid
for by the West -- what do [Arab countries] contribute? . . . They
should go down on
their knees and
thank God for the munificence of the United States. What do
they think
we feel about them? . . . That we admire them for the cold-blooded
killings in
Mombasa, Yemen and elsewhere? That we admire them for being
suicide
bombers, limb-amputators, women repressors?"
The comments exploded in the British media. The Guardian
newspaper, the house
journal of both the British left and the BBC, lambasted them as
"boorish,
ignorant and
offensive." Kilroy, as both he and his show are known, was
promptly
suspended by the BBC. Muslim affairs commentator Faisal Bodi,
writing
in the Guardian,
thereupon declared: "Finally, it's safe to turn on your TV.
Britain's
minority communities can rise this morning in the knowledge that
they will
no longer be assailed by a vainglorious hatemonger affecting
social
concern on their
screens." Ten days ago, after an extended media furor, Kilroy
was forced
to step down. He may even face prosecution under race relations
legislation
that carries a maximum sentence of seven years in jail.
As crude as Kilroy's comments were, the virulent reaction to them
was far out
of proportion to his actual sin. The full text of his remarks
reveals that
his quarrel was
with Arab governments and those religious leaders who use their
positions
to whip up a frenzy of anti-Western sentiment among their peoples.
His
phrasing is careless and smacks of generalization. But surely this
is small
justification for
hounding a man out of his job, let alone threatening to
jail him. The
swiftness of Kilroy's demise points to something more than a
simple
scrap over political correctness. It's a symptom of a new European
reality:
surging growth among Muslim populations and establishment
nervousness over how to deal with them -- a nervousness that
threatens to stifle much-needed debate over events in the Middle
East and Muslim integration at home.
Western Europe's 15 million-strong Muslim community is growing in
both power
and size. The
birth rate among Muslims in Europe is three times that of
non-Muslims. While the Muslim population could double by 2015, the
non-Muslim
population
is expected to shrink by 3.5 percent. And this is not a
community
that lives
in the shadows. As it grows, it is also flexing its political
muscle.
As
the columnist Mark Steyn, writing in defense of Kilroy in the
right-leaning
Daily
Telegraph, put it: "[W]hen free speech, artistic _expression,
feminism
and
other
totems of western pluralism clash directly with the Islamic lobby,
Islam
more often
than not wins."
Bodi himself may have been acknowledging more than he wished to in
his
revealing
observation that the BBC was "left with little choice" in ditching
Kilroy
because of the "increasing organization of the Muslim community,"
which
put out
flyers detailing "names and contacts of editors at the BBC and the
Sunday
Express, and instructions on how to make complaints."
This would not be a problem if it weren't for the distressing but
unavoidable
reality
that small but significant sections of that growing Muslim
community
are
either
outright hostile to or at least ambivalent toward Western values.
Skeptical?
Consider the following: A survey conducted by the ICM polling
agency
and
published in December 2002 showed that more than 10 percent of
Britain's
1.5
million
Muslims believed that further attacks by al Qaeda on the United
States
would be
legitimate, and 8 percent supported such attacks against Britain.
More
than half of those
polled refused to accept al Qaeda's guilt in the 9/11
attacks
and more
than two-thirds believed the war on terror to be a war on Islam.
That's just Britain. France's Muslim population, which is if
anything more
disaffected and
less well-integrated, numbers upwards of 6 million, or 10
percent of
the population. Within 20 years, according to some estimates,
half of
all people
under 18 in the Netherlands will be Muslim.
Like America, Britain and Europe have come a long way since the
days when
racism was a fact
of daily life for ethnic minorities and recent immigrants.
This is not
to say that racism has been wiped out: In recent years, openly
racist
political groups have made small but significant inroads in local
elections
in the north of England, while France's Jean Marie Le Pen, who
appears
to hate
Arabs and Jews with equal fervor, came in second in presidential
elections
in 2002. But by and large, bigotry against immigrants and
minorities
is now
frowned upon in mainstream society.
Much of the credit for this is due to a remarkably effective
partnership
formed
in the
1960s and '70s between leftist activists -- who in most cases were
much
more
welcoming to immigrants than their counterparts on the right, and
therefore
mopped up
most of the Muslim vote -- and post-Holocaust political
establishments
determined to stamp out racism in all its forms.
Now, however, that partnership has mutated along with wider changes
in politics
and society. Muslim groups have combined with and helped
reenergize a
European
left that is to a significant degree defined these days by a
complementary
hostility to the
United States and to Israel -- both of which the left sees
as
representative of the worst excesses of capitalism and
imperialism. That
hostility is
shared by substantial sections of the Muslim community, more
than
80 percent
of which voted for Labour in Britain's 1997 general elections.
Both
elements of this
new partnership are highly sensitive to any criticism of
Islam,
seeing in
it de facto justification for the policies of governments they
implacably
oppose. For the equal and opposite reason, criticism of Israel
and
the United
States is welcomed and encouraged, however unbalanced and
fanatical
it may be.
Alongside this political alliance stands a powerful center-left
establishment
-- epitomized by
the BBC itself -- that is also unremitting in its hostility
to
Israel and
broadly sympathetic to the Arab and Muslim cause, for reasons
that
some
attribute to rising anti-Semitism, others to post-imperial guilt,
and
many
more to an
anti-Americanism that appears to grow stronger by the day.
Thus it is that Tom Paulin, a left-wing Oxford academic and poet
and a
regular
contributor to the
BBC's "Newsnight Review" program, could, in 2002, say to
an
Egyptian
newspaper about Brooklyn-born Jews living on the West Bank: "I
think
they should
be shot dead. I think they are Nazis, racists. I feel nothing
but
hatred for
them," and get away with it, suffering no sanctions of any kind
from
the same
BBC that silenced Kilroy.
Paulin's outburst reveals how smoothly anti-Israeli prejudices
slip into
anti-American
clothing -- it is "Brooklyn-born" Jews who are marked for
death.
Anti-Americanism is the acceptable face of European bigotry in a
way that
anti-Semitism is
not.
On
a continent whose face is rapidly changing, and where memories of
the
Holocaust are
fading fast, new rules of engagement are emerging: You upset
the
Muslim
community at your peril, but the social and political consequences
of
alienating the
much smaller and much more assimilated Jewish communities are
negligible.
Seen in this light, the brouhaha over Kilroy's comments offers a
perfect
illustration of
the ruthless attitude being encountered by Islam's critics
in
Europe. Had
he directed his polemic against Israelis or Americans, it hardly
seems
likely that the BBC, which allows free rein to many of its
contributors to
do both, would
have kicked up such a fuss.
The BBC and its supporters have fallen all over themselves to say
that the
Kilroy affair is
not about free speech, a plainly ludicrous argument. But
this
case is no
ordinary recycling of the familiar pros and cons which that
discussion
from time to time produces. Tectonic shifts are underway in
Europe,
reconfiguring the political and social landscape. Kilroy's crime,
if he
committed one, is
that he failed to see that coming.
============================================================
Robin Shepherd, former Moscow bureau chief for the Times of
London, is a
public
policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center. He is writing a book
on the
future
of Europe. Author's email:
[email protected]
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