I have a few issues with Andrew Murphy's little riff on Geert Wilders. Wilders, of course, is the right-wing Dutch parliamentarian who's been clamoring for immigration reform. He's (in)famous internationally for making Fitna, a short movie in which he lets extremist Muslims hang themselves with their own words and deeds.
Murphy, guest-blogging at Harry's Place (a U.K. outfit that's long been on my blogroll), can't complete his short essay without throwing in an oft-repeated canard about Wilders, so let's start there:
Wilders refers to the Koran as a 'fascist' book. ... If
Wilders truly believes the Koran is a fascist book, then why has he not
demanded 'Mein Kampf' or any of the other fascist tracts that circulate
in book stores be thrown into the book burning pyre as well?
Murphy is either misinformed or happy to perpetuate the falsehood. Selling copies of Mein Kampf is already illegal in the Netherlands (and in some other European countries, such as Austria). It has been for as long as I've been alive.
More to the point, though I'm hardly a big Wilders fan, the man is actually being entirely consistent, and merely expecting consistency of others. I make amends right here and now for having previously gotten this wrong, as it's really simple enough: Wilders' point is that because Mein Kampf is considered so dangerous that the state has declared the sale of the book illegal, therefore the same limitation ought to be placed on the hate-filled tract that is the Koran. He's not in fact pushing for either book to be banned.
The Dutch are seriously wedded to the idea of gelijke monnikken gelijke kappen (which can be roughly translated as 'equal treatment,' though the closer expression in English is probably 'What's good for the goose is good for the gander'). Wilders is furthering this ur-Dutch principle. Nothing wrong with that — on the contrary. (For the record, I think banning books is by definition silly and wrong, and I will always fight for the unfettered availability of the Koran, Mein Kampf, the Bible, and even anything written by Robert James Waller.)
But let's return to Murphy. He fails to show why Wilders' fears are allegedly overblown. The politician warns of Western culture being under assault from unenlightened religionists whose beliefs are incompatible with the values that the West stands for. Why worry, Murphy writes a bit cavalierly, when
Muslims only make up about 4.5% of the entire population of Europe. Wilders doesn't take into consideration that eventually, many of these first generation immigrants will have assimilated into society and intermarried with Brits, Germans, French, etc. — and their children and grandchildren will be very much European.
For Murphy's statistic to be of any real-world consequence, you'd have to suppose that the spread of Muslims is geographically more or less even; that you can take a sample of a thousand people anywhere on the European continent and come up with 45 Muslims, give or take. But the reality for millions of Europeans is that they live in neighborhoods and cities where Muslims are now either a majority, or very nearly so. The population of the Schildersbuurt in the Hague, for instance, now consists of 90.6 percent immigrants (no typo), most of them Muslims. Citywide, the percentage is 46.2 — and growing. The nearby city of Rotterdam is on the verge of having a majority-immigrant population, with Muslims again making up by far the biggest demographic slice. If current trends continue, it'll be Amsterdam's turn in about a dozen years (this seems irreversible, considering that already, more than 50 percent of Amsterdam's children have a "non-Western background."
A reasonable question is "So what?" Yes, there is something enormously appealing about the idea of a polyglot, harmonious, multicultural society where hookah bars appear next to Japanese restaurants, and where the Turkish rug-store owner can be seen shooting the breeze with the burly tattooed white guy next door who's working on his motorbike. I savor such scenes. Parts of Amsterdam are like that. I am as susceptible as the next person to pangs of positivity when I read that my erstwhile city is home to the largest number of nationalities in the world (177, compared to New York's 150).
But you don't have to be a bigot (as many of Wilders' followers are) to see the problems outweighing the benefits.
Just step back for a moment and focus on your own town or neighborhood. Mentally remove half the current population and substitute lots of women in hijabs and burkas, and men who've grown up in a culture where honor killings are widely tolerated and Sharia justice is preferred. Now imagine that virtually none of the women are gainfully employed, and that only about 38 percent of the 40-to-64-year-olds have jobs (that's the official number for the Moroccan population in the Netherlands). The others — 62 percent — depend on welfare.
When you picture your now-transformed living environment, sprinkle in a
lot of Muslim teenagers (school dropout rate roughly 60 percent) who,
in the Netherlands, are disproportionately responsible for petty
street crime. Almost 70 percent of under-24 Moroccan males in Amsterdam
have been detained at least once, and many have an actual criminal
record. Then imagine that there are in fact many more young
street hooligans than the official crime statistics let on. Moroccan
youth, especially, are widely observed to act out with great disrespect
— calling Dutch girls hos, publicly hurling insults at white people and black
Dutch citizens from Surinam for no apparent reason, openly jeering at gays,
and so on.
How would you like to live in that social environment? I imagine Andrew Murphy's rainbow-colored opinions would be quite different if he were forced to live in districts like The Hague's Schildersbuurt, or Amsterdam's Slotervaart, or Utrecht's Kanaleneiland.
(Incidentally, the dropout rate alone makes an instant mockery of
Murphy's belief that the way out of the problems is the "education,
education, education" of immigrants. And considering that the crime wavelets I just described are mostly the work of second- and third-generation
Moroccan troublemakers, I wonder if Murphy would like to reassess his
somewhat blinkered view of "assimilation" leading inevitably to an identity that's "very much European.")
The stats from which I'm quoting, by the way, do not come from Mr. Wilders or some organization of Aryan weasels. They were revealed last month in the broadsheet NRC Handelsblad, Holland's newspaper of record, and the closest thing that Dutch journalism has to a New York Times or a Washington Post.
So I ask again: post-sea-change, how do you like your new city, or your new neighborhood?
The Muslim-immigrant surge in Europe's major cities is poorly understood by American journalists, who tend to paint the people alarmed by it as Chicken Littles, Islamophobes, or worse. To put matters in perspective, this, I think, is the proper analogy: Take Chicago or New York or Denver, and subject those cities to the thought experiment above. If you can honestly say that you would not mind living in a city in your own country where foreign fundies with a welfare addiction and a crime problem have begun to outnumber the original population, you're a more tolerant person than I am.
Are you?
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P.S. Americans have their own unique take on the immigration issue, and are generally less likely to find the arrival of any large group of immigrants, including Muslims, problematic. That's laudable — being a first-generation immigrant myself, I appreciate and share the sentiment. I'm generally pro-immigration (and always pro-assimilation).
But there are reasons why U.S. Muslims do not pose anywhere near the dilemma to American society that European Muslims pose across the Atlantic. Ayaan Hirsi Ali talked knowledgeably about the differences when I interviewed her for Reason two years ago. Excerpt:
For one thing, America doesn’t really have a welfare system.
Mohammed Bouyeri had all day long to plot the murder of Theo van Gogh.
American Muslims have to get a job. What pushes people who come to
America to assimilate is that it's expected of them. And people are not mollycoddled by the government.
There's
a lot of white guilt in America, but it's directed toward black
Americans and native Indians, not toward Muslims and other immigrants.
People come from China, Vietnam, and all kinds of Muslim countries. To
the average American, they're all fellow immigrants. The white
guilt in Germany and Holland and the U.K. is very different. It has to
do with colonialism. It has to do with Dutch emigrants having spread
apartheid in South Africa. It has to do with the Holocaust. So the
mind-set toward immigrants in Europe is far more complex than here.
Europeans are more reticent about saying no to immigrants.
And by
and large, Muslim immigrants in Europe do not come with the intention
to assimilate. They come with the intention to work, earn some money,
and go back. That’s how the first wave of immigrants in the Netherlands
was perceived: They would just come to work and then they’d go away.
The newer generations that have followed are coming not so much to work
and more to reap the benefits of the welfare state. Again, assimilation
is not really on their minds.
Also, in order to get official
status here in the U.S., you have to have an employer, so it's the
employable who are coming. The Arabs who live here came as businessmen,
and a lot of them come from wealthy backgrounds. There are also large
communities of Indian and Pakistani Muslims, who tend to be very
liberal. Compare that to the Turks in Germany, who mostly come from the
poor villages of Anatolia. Or compare it to the Moroccans in the
Netherlands, who are for the most part Berbers with a similar
socio-economic background. It’s a completely different set of people.
And
finally, there's the matter of borders. In America, Muslim immigrants
typically pass through an airport, which means the Americans have a
better way of controlling who comes in — a far cry from Europe's open
borders. Forty years ago, when Europe began talking about lifting
borders between countries to facilitate the free traffic of goods and
labor, they weren't thinking about waves of immigrants. They thought of
Europe as a place people left. America, on the other hand,
has always been an immigration nation, with border controls that have
been in place for a long time.
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