Bob,
None of us who consider ourselves to be Progressive, are in favor of any
religious or nationalistic group that wishes to subjugate others and that uses
physical attacks in order to do so. But there’s no such thing as “radical
multi-culturalism”. That’s a term made up by right wing white nationalists to
describe people whose cultures and skin colors are different from their’s. And
as for “radical Islamism”, I’m not sure that exists either. I have heard some
discussion regarding whether or not what AlQaeda and its offshoots espouse, is
actually Islam. But I know that Muslims run the gamit from those who are
basically non religious to those who practice extreme forms of Islam, in the
same way that there are secular Jews and Hassidim or Unitarian Universalists
and Evangelical Christians. However, the author’s assertion that more
recently, Muslims in America are less likely to assimilate, and that this has
to do with a general trend in our society seems questionable. After all,
starting in the late 70’s, the US government became much more suspicious of
Muslims than it had been previously and after the 9/11 attacks, the Muslim
community was spied upon, pressured, imprisoned, etc. One would expect a
drawing inward. Who wants to assimilate into a society that lets yu know in
every way that you’re an enemy?
There is, by the way, a new attack on multi-culturalism from liberal quarters.
Robert Beinart has an article about the values of the melting pot in the
current issue of the Atlantic. His idea is that since we know that people are
made uncomfortable by differences, and since we now have so much open racism in
our country, it would be a nice idea to encourage everyone to learn to speak
English and to start blending in more. Well, Peter Beinart is an old fashioned
Liberal Jew, a “liberal Zionist”, and that what Jewish people learned to do in
order to be acceptable in the US. Most of them were white, which helped, and
some made a lot of money, which also helped, and of course, such assimilation
is not quite as available to brown skinned Latinos and Muslims. But you can
tell from the article that Sidley would hope that at least, Muslim women
wouldn’t cover themselves completely because that really makes American men so
uncomfortable. Samuel Huntington, quoted in this article, a very prestigious
political scientist, worked in the Carter administration. I suppose that’s why
government policy toward Muslims began to change in the late 70’s. The US was
really angry at the Iranians because the government that the US had installed
was over thrown by a bunch of religious zealots. He wrote a book, The Clash of
Civilizations in which he presented his theory that after the fall of the
Soviet Union, the important conflicts in the world would be between western
civilization and Islam. That’s what is behind this article with all its
pretensions of Democracy. It’s Islamaphobia, all dressed up.
Miriam
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Bob Hachey
Sent: Tuesday, July 25, 2017 5:13 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] FW: [acb-chat] The dark side of multiculturalism
Hi all,
Check out this most thought-provoking article. Many of us liberals on this list
have rightly spoken out against American policies that sometimes subjugate
other human beings. But I must agree with the article as to how some liberals
look the other way when it comes to radical Islam. IMHO, radical Islam is every
bit as bad as the radical Christianity practiced by some fundamentalist
Christians. Many including myself have cast aspertions upon American
nationalism. But maybe a small amount of American nationalism is not such a bad
thing. Why is it that we are called intolerant if we rail against radical Islam
when it seems OK to rail against radical Christianity? Why don’t folks like
Obama use the words Radical Islam?
Bob Hachey
From: Demaya, Diego via acb-chat [mailto:acb-chat@xxxxxxxxxxxx] ;
Sent: Monday, July 24, 2017 9:12 PM
Cc: Demaya, Diego
Subject: [acb-chat] The dark side of multiculturalism
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The dark side of multiculturalism
The Ottawa Citizen ^
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| Sunday, September 10, 2006 | Robert Sibley
Posted on 9/13/2006, 2:34:03 AM by
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TheMole
In the shadow of Sept. 11, it is time to confront the unsettling truth that
radical multiculturalism creates tribes that could destroy the society that
produced it.
The day will come when we will rule America. The day will come when we will
rule Britain and the entire world.
-- Sheik Ibrahim Mudeiris, speaking on Palestinian Authority TV, May 13, 2005
It is a still a surprising sight on a North American street: A woman covered
head to toe in a chaddor, with only her eyes showing above a black veil. Even
here, in the Bay Ridge area of Brooklyn, where many recently arrived Muslim
immigrants have settled, the chaddor remains comparatively uncommon.
At least that's my conclusion after a day wandering up and down Fifth Avenue,
poking into kiosks, halal stores and Middle-Eastern restaurants. It is more
common to see Muslim women wearing a hijab, with jeans and a blouse to match
the scarf. But even they are outnumbered by the Hispanic and Chinese girls in
their short skirts and high-soled shoes.
Maybe that's why I was surprised by the sudden sight of a woman walking alone
in a full-black chaddor. I wasn't the only one. I was coming out of a Mexican
restaurant on Fifth Avenue when I saw her. The four men on the bench in front
of the restaurant stopped talking and followed the woman with their eyes. I was
no better. I watched her walk away, the long black cloth flapping gently
behind, revealing the figure of what I assumed was a middle-aged woman. Beyond
that hint, there was no way to guess her age or appearance. I glanced at the
men. Curiosity, hostility, and, maybe, even a tincture of fear; all those
emotions seemed to flicker across their stiff faces.
Arabs have settled in New York as far back as the 1870s, many of them from
Syria and what is now Lebanon. They settled around Washington Street, not far
from where the World Trade Center would be built. They were bankers,
manufacturers and importers of fine lace and linen. The majority were not
Muslims, however, but Catholics. There were also Syrian Orthodox and Syrian
Jews. "This community was an entrepreneurial community, it wasn't an educated
community. It had been influenced by French imperialists," says Philip Kayal, a
professor at Seton Hall University and the author of New York: The Mother
Colony of Arab-America, 1854-1924. "They thought like Western Europeans for the
most part." They learned English quickly and many married outside the community.
The 1970s saw a new wave of immigrants. They were predominantly Muslim and from
various Middle Eastern countries. Muslims from south Asia and Africa have added
to the mix in recent years. Today, according to Louis Abdulatif Cristillo, of
the Muslims in New York Project at Columbia University, there are about 600,000
Muslims in New York, of whom 200,000 are of Arab ancestry. There has been a
major expansion of mosques since the late 1970s, with close to 140 mosques now
in New York.
I had read that Bay Ridge contained one of the heaviest concentrations of
Muslims in New York. Maybe so, but along Fifth Avenue, I saw a mix of cultures.
There were churches for Catholics, Lutherans, Baptists and Jehovah's Witnesses.
But there was also a mosque and a couple of Islamic community centres. A
newsstand sold both English-language and Arabic papers -- Al-Ahram, Al-Hayat
and Al-Quds al-Arabi. Along the avenue, from Senator Street to 77th Street,
jewelry and shoe stores, bakeries and beautician shops, laws offices and real
estate firms, all catering to Arab Muslims, mixed haphazardly with liquor
stores, Mexican restaurants, Chinese herb stores, Dunkin' Donuts, Baskin
Robbins and a Bank of America branch. The Tarboosh Cafe was near a German
schnitzel restaurant. The Halal Food Market was down the street from a
Salvation Army thrift store. The Alpine Cinema was showing the World Trade
Center movie, while next door the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge displayed
posters extolling the virtues of the Islamic life, in English and Arabic.
The only hint something was not quite right was a smashed window at the Islamic
Society's community centre.
One broken window does not tell much of a story, of course. And my one-day
visit to a single neighbourhood certainly didn't make me an expert on relations
between Muslims and mainstream American society. Yet what I saw appeared to
confirm what I'd read. Where Muslims in European cities have been ghettoized,
effectively set apart from the non-Muslim population, Muslims in America seem
to be more integrated into the larger community. On the surface at least, they
seemed to be no more "apart" from mainstream American society than, say, the
orthodox Jewish community in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn, which I also
visited. Indeed, it's probably fair to say that until the Sept. 11 attacks, New
York's Muslim communities were regarded, by and large, as just another
immigrant group, another ingredient in the great American melting pot.
In the aftermath of the terrorist strikes, however, that notion no longer holds
sway. Muslim communities have received a lot more attention, none of it
welcome. Brooklyn, for example, was the focus of several post-Sept. 11 sweeps
by police and federal investigators. Many of the borough's 120,000 Pakistanis
chose to leave the United States. And according to Geneive Abdo, author of
Mecca and Main Street: Muslim Life in America After 9/11, the notion that the
six million Muslims in the United States are well-assimilated and accepting of
traditional American values and contemporary lifestyle is false.
In a recent article in the Washington Post, Abdo recounted the results of
spending the past two years travelling the country, visiting mosques,
interviewing Muslim leaders and speaking to young Muslims in universities and
Islamic centres from New York to Michigan to California. "I found few signs of
London-style radicalism among Muslims in the United States. At the same time,
the real story of American Muslims is one of accelerating alienation from the
mainstream of U.S. life, with Muslims in this country choosing their Islamic
identity over their American one."
Political scientist Samuel Huntington would not find Abdo's conclusions
surprising. In his 2004 book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National
Identity, Huntington looks at the effect of mass immigration from non-western
cultures on the United States. The American political order, as he notes, was
largely founded by British settlers who brought with them particular cultural
values -- individualism, the rule of law and religious faith, to name a few.
Subsequent immigrants generally accepted this pre-established culture and
assimilated into what Huntington refers to as "America's Anglo-Protestant"
system. Even waves of Muslim immigrants in the early decades of the 20th
century were able to assimilate without sacrificing their faith. More recently,
though, says Huntington, the American Creed -- as he calls it -- has been
eroded by the unwillingness of many immigrants, particularly those from Arab
countries, to assimilate and accept the traditional notions of American
national identity.
"Sept. 11 brought a revival of American patriotism and a renewal of American
identity," Huntington writes. "But already there are signs that this revival is
fading, even though in the post-Sept. 11 world, Americans face unprecedented
challenges to our security."
It hasn't helped, he says, that cultural and academic elites promote a radical
version of multiculturalism that undermines and effectively "denationalizes"
the country. Indeed, nothing better exemplifies contemporary elite assumptions
than multiculturalism. Multicultural theory asserts that assimilating
immigrants from non-western countries is wrong because it presumes western
culture is superior. Assimilation, in other words, is coercion. Liberal
societies must accept not only the immigrants but also their cultures. Thus,
the maintenance and even the assertion of cultural values becomes a fundamental
right. Originally, of course, the elites that promoted this theory thought
multiculturalism would amount to immigrants celebrating their native cultures
while gradually adopting prevailing liberal principles of political order.
Immigrants might hang trinkets from rearview mirrors, cheer soccer teams from
the old country and hold festivals displaying the native cuisine and artifacts
of their homelands, but they would, as it were, be good liberals.
Not surprisingly, multiculturalism was pushed beyond trinkets and restaurants.
The original idea of multiculturalism as a way to promote tolerance and
open-mindedness was kidnapped by the radical left and inflated to produce a
variety of notions -- postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism -- all
of which are essentially anti-western. So today, as Huntington remarks,
multiculturalism is "basically an anti-western ideology."
Contemporary multiculturalism, at its most fundamental, is an appeal to and
promotion of what historian Vincent Cannata has called "native nationalisms."
In effect, the imposition of multicultural policies in liberal western
countries resulted in the importation of cultural ascriptions and practices
that are, in some cases, inimical to liberal traditions. Behind this is the
assumption on the part of western cultural elites since the Second World War
that nationalism is almost the equal of fascism. This, of course, ignores the
context of nationalist expression. To wave the flag in Canada or the United
States is not the same as waving the flag in Nazi Germany. To "stand up for
America" is not necessarily a demonstration of xenophobia. For the elites,
however, nationalism demonstrates one of the great sins of liberalism --
exclusion. To apply "nation" to a group or set of values is to exclude others.
In today's globalized worlds, say the cosmopolitans, the nation-state been
superseded by the realities of mass immigration, multi-ethnic populations and
telecommunications.
This makes multiculturalism much more than a feel-good policy to make
immigrants feel more comfortable in their new surroundings. Roger Kimball, a
respected cultural commentator in the United States, summarized the situation
in an essay earlier this year in The New Criterion: "We are now beginning to
reap the fruit of our liberal experiment with multiculturalism. The chief
existential symptom is moral paralysis, expressed, for example, in the
inability to discriminate effectively between good and evil ... The large issue
here is one that has bedeviled liberal societies ever since they were liberal:
namely, that in attempting to create a maximally tolerant society, we also give
scope to those who prefer to create the maximally intolerant society."
Joseph Rhea, in his book Race Pride and the American Identity, offers an
illuminating example of just how far the cultural elites will go in denigrating
western civilization by comparing poems recited at two presidential
inaugurations three decades apart. At President John F. Kennedy's inauguration
in 1961, Robert Frost referred to the "heroic deeds" that marked the founding
of the United States in 1776. America, Frost proclaimed, was established with
God's "approval" and ushered in "a new order of the ages." "Our venture in
revolution and outlawry/ Has justified itself in freedom's story/ Right down to
now in glory upon glory." The United States, the poet concluded, was embarking
on a new "golden age of poetry and power."
Thirty-two years later, at President Bill Clinton's inauguration, Maya
Angelou's poem, "On the Pulse of Morning," portrayed a badly tarnished America.
In fact, Angelou didn't once use the words "America" or "American." Instead,
she identified 27 racial, religious, tribal and ethnic groups -- Muslim, Arab,
Asian, Hispanic, Pawnee, Ashanti, Jews, Irish, Scandinavian and even Eskimos
(Inuit, for politically corrected Canadians), among others. She denounced the
repression these groups suffered at the hands of the United States' "armed
struggles for profit" and its "bloody sear" of "cynicism." (How, you might ask,
has the U.S. oppressed Scandinavians?) The United States, Angelou concluded,
may be "wedded forever to fear, yoked eternally to brutishness."
Clearly, multiculturalists like Angelou see national identities as threats to
peoples' tribal identities. You have to wonder what the dead white males --
Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Hamilton, Washington, mostly of Anglo-Celtic
extraction -- who established the American republic, drafted a constitution and
wrote its Bill of Rights, would think of Angelou's intellectual shallowness.
They wanted to establish a political order whose principles would help people
overcome the tribal identities that had caused so much bloodshed throughout
history.
But then Angelou's sentimental distortion of history is typical of the
multicultural agenda, as anyone who's been on a North American campus in the
past 30 years will recognize. The demands of multiculturalism have corrupted
the curriculum, particularly in the arts and humanities and social sciences. As
historian Keith Windschuttle says in his essay The Cultural War on Western
Civilization: Until recent decades, most people raised in a western culture
were taught that "Its art and its music were glories of its civilization."
Literary critics, he says, once extolled the genius of western writers and
their contributions to the betterment of the human condition. Nowadays, says
Windschuttle, "much of the academic debate about western literary heritage
claims that it is politically contaminated: Othello is ethnocentric; Paradise
Lost is a feminist tragedy; Jane Eyre is both racist and sexist. Similarly, the
teaching of western history has, in many cases, been reduced to a denunciation
of the West.
Philosophers from Socrates to Hegel are regarded as "old, dead, white males"
with nothing to say to the modern world; never mind that it was those dead,
white men who articulated the concepts of freedom and tolerance that the new
barbarians distort in perpetuating their anti-western program.
These distortions gradually infiltrate the public mind, saturating it with a
particular understanding of the world that is then translated into political
and social action. The promotion of hyphenated identities -- say,
Muslim-American or Lebanese-Canadian -- is a good example. As Roger Kimball
observes, hyphenated identities are not merely descriptive, but also
prescriptive. That is to say, they intimate a divided allegiance, a hesitant
loyalty. "The multicultural passion for hyphenation is not simply a fondness
for syntactical novelty. It also speaks of a commitment to the centrifugal
force of anti-American tribalism." Substitute "anti-American" for
"anti-western" and you have the long-term consequence of radical
multiculturalism.
In this regard, the elites who promote multiculturalism are betraying one of
the essential purposes of the liberal creed -- the creation of "citizens" who,
in their capacity as rational human beings, are able to sublimate their
tribalist instincts and derive their primary public identity from the larger
political order. Australian philosopher David Stove explains the matter this
way: The contemporary liberal West has attempted "to achieve a society which
would be maximally tolerant. But that resolve not only gives maximum scope to
the activities of those who have set themselves to achieve the maximally
intolerant society. It also, and more importantly, paralyses our powers of
resistance to them."
Modern liberalism, as historian Arthur Herman recounts in The Idea of Decline
in Western History, is rooted in the 18th-century Enlightenment effort to
emancipate people from religious and theological dogma. It was, in large part,
a response to the religious warfare that had devastated Europe in the previous
century. In pre-modern times it was assumed a person had meaning and purpose
according to his or her place in the "great chain of being." Your "identity"
was established by gods, kings and nature, and that identity was more often
than not imposed by authoritarian powers, whether kings or bishops.
Enlightenment thinkers rejected this formulation, arguing that having a
pre-determined position in life imposed on you without your informed consent
because of your race, sex or religious heritage is a form of tyranny. As Herman
says, "The classical liberal view originally sprang up precisely because its
adherents recognized the dangers of insisting that individuals have
significance only if they are part of a larger whole."
Enlightenment philosophers -- Descartes and Spinoza, Leibniz and Locke, Kant
and Hegel, to name a few -- championed human reason as the means by which men
could overcome unjustified political and social authority. The great idea of
classical liberalism -- and only in the West did this idea emerge -- was that
the individual could raise himself above his determined status, could overcome
his given circumstances by means of his powers of reason. Through reason a man
could subdue the tribalist passions that enslaved him and thereby become free.
Thus, the capacity for reason is the hallmark of the free, mature, socially
responsible individual. The true liberal recognizes that the institutions of
civil society -- laws and constitutions, parliaments and universities, churches
and social clubs -- serve the ultimate purpose of providing the conditions by
which individuals can live the most fulfilling material life available. At the
same time, the individual is rationally aware that those institutions are
necessary for his well-being, and he therefore willingly supports them,
sometimes at the sacrifice of his life.
This understanding of liberalism has shaped the political and cultural
institutions of the West for the past two centuries. Admittedly, the modern
project has been less than perfect. Colonialism and imperialism, fascism and
communism, nationalism and anti-Semitism; all are perversions of the modernist
thrust. Even the desire for freedom has produced horrors. The French Revolution
began as a demand for liberty but degenerated into a campaign of terror in the
name of freedom. The liberal revolution also prompted a counter-revolution that
helped give birth to fascism and now influences the Islamists.
But modernity has also been challenged by various postmodern theories,
including radical multiculturalism, that challenge the core concepts of western
civilization -- reason and freedom. Postmodern theory asserts that appeals to
universal reason are merely ethnocentric, a racist appeal to the superiority of
western culture. Reason, therefore, is an excuse for repression and the
imposition of power, and to expose it as such is to reveal the dark heart of
the West. If Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn can be analysed as a
white-supremacist tract, as postmodern literary analysis contends, then maybe
the entire western literary canon can be exposed as an ethnocentric expression
of imperialist power.
In such a manner does the "postmodern virus," to borrow a phrase, infects
social and political life, providing the theoretical basis for the anti-western
slant now popular in academe. It regards the western literary and philosophical
tradition canon as just so many dead white men imposing their values on women,
minorities, gays and all the oppressed of the world.
Even our narcissistic obsession with self-esteem, the trivial pursuits of
celebrity worship, the debasement of high culture and hedonistic rejection of
traditional morality -- the institution of marriage, for example -- can be
traced to the influence of postmodernist teachings that preach the relativistic
gospel that there is no right or wrong, no "high" or "low" culture, only
opinions, none of which are inherently any better than another.
Thus, says political theorist Richard Wolin, postmodernism rejects
western-style rationalism, liberal institutions (constitutional democracy, the
rule of law, etc.), language, and even the western idea of man, as a cultural
dead end. Liberal bourgeois society is regarded as rationalistic, oppressive
and, of course, imperialist and racist, he writes in his book, The Seduction of
Unreason. "Paradoxically, whereas a visceral rejection of political modernity
(rights of man, rule of law, constitutionalism) was once standard fare among
counter-revolutionary thinkers, it has now become fashionable among advocates
of the cultural left. Postmodernists equate democracy with 'soft
totalitarianism.' They argue that by privileging public reason and the common
good, liberal democracy effectively suppresses otherness and difference."
Paradox, indeed. Under the postmodern banner, liberal concepts such as freedom,
equality and tolerance have been distorted by political correctness into their
opposites. It is OK in the name of free speech to attack Christianity (Catholic
or Protestant), but say anything critical of Islam and you risk being charged
with hate speech. Multicultural policies intended to encourage people to honour
their cultural heritage have been inflated to the point where immigrants reject
assimilation in the wider society, thereby creating de facto cultural ghettoes
that are many cases hostile to the host culture. As Roger Kimball says, "What
we have witnessed with the triumph of multiculturalism is a kind of hypertrophy
or perversion of liberalism, as its core doctrines are pursued to the point of
caricature."
The great danger of multiculturalism, when taken to extremes, is that people
think they can achieve a sense of identity, a sense of belonging, not as
rational creatures capable of transcending the limits and restrictions of
biology and geography -- which was the Enlightenment ideal that gave birth to
liberalism -- but as members of a particular "tribe" or community and a
particular history. This is a reversion to the kind of tribalism that produced
centuries of warfare in Europe, and still plagues much of the rest of the
world. Indeed, the idea that as a consequence of being born into a certain
ethnic group you assume the duty of having to maintain and even promote the
ancestral culture and its creed smacks of the same kind of ethnic nationalism
that is fundamentally at odds with liberalism.
There is considerable irony in this. Multiculturalism was born out of
liberalism's belief in diversity and tolerance for difference. But like all
utopian illusions it has fostered the kind of societal and cultural conditions
that undermine liberal order. Which is to say that multiculturalism's reversion
to tribes will, if taken to the extreme, destroy the society that produced it,
in same way that an infection wreaks havoc on the body's immune system. Radical
multiculturalism, in short, constitutes an enemy within liberal society. As
Arthur Herman says: "Radical multiculturalism implies that American (read:
Western) society systematically produces race hatred and social inequities,
while cultural pessimism's various other offshoots and branches insist that our
society is irredeemably racist, sexist, imperialist, homophobic, phallocentric,
greedy, and proto-totalitarian; or alternatively (for those of the political
Right), corrupt, decadent, mindless, hedonistic, apathetic, morally bankrupt,
as well as proto-totalitarian. In effect, the very things modern society does
best -- providing increasing economic affluence, equality of opportunity, and
social and geographic mobility -- are systematically depreciated and vilified
by its direct beneficiaries."
Even a staunch multiculturalist like Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen has
recognized that the "sunny days" of multiculturalism are over in the wake of
the terrorist threat. "The French and the Germans are very doubtful of the
wisdom of the (multicultural) approach, and Denmark and the Netherlands have
already reversed their official policies," he wrote recently in the Financial
Times. "Even Britain is full of misgivings."
Some countries are already toughening their security arrangements -- without
violating constitutional rights and freedoms. In Europe, for example, the
Netherlands vigorously prosecutes mullahs who indulge in hate speech. The Dutch
also limit immigration from the Middle East and deport Islamic extremists,
including those with Dutch passports. Last year, French Interior Minister
Nicolas Sarkozy introduced new anti-terrorism laws that allow the government to
summarily deport residents and strip extremists of their naturalized
citizenship. The British government introduced legislation that would make it a
crime to associate with Islamic radicals, as well as allow the government to
more readily deport those who support terrorism. As British Prime Minister Tony
Blair put it. "Let no one be in any doubt that the rules of the game are
changing."
Sen, too, seems to recognize multiculturalism took a wrong turn. In a nutshell,
the multiculturalists forgot that in liberal societies freedom must take
precedence over communitarian impositions. Considering his prominence as a
supporter of multiculturalism, it is worth quoting Sen in full: "The history of
multiculturalism offers a telling example of how bad reasoning can tie people
up in terrible knots of their own making. The importance of cultural freedom,
central to the dignity of all people, must be distinguished from the
celebration and championing of every form of cultural inheritance, irrespective
of whether the people involved would choose those particular practices given
the opportunity of critical scrutiny, and given an adequate knowledge of other
options and of the choices that actually exist in the society in which they
live. The demands of cultural freedom include, among other priorities, the task
of resisting the automatic endorsement of past traditions, when people -- not
excluding young people -- see reason for changing their ways of living."
Perhaps, though, the most vivid example of multiculturalism's incoherence in
the face of terrorism is an essay Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor wrote in
1989 about the Iranian fatwa against Salman Rushdie after he published his
novel The Satanic Verses. In The Rushdie Controversy, Taylor acknowledges that
writers cannot be expected to avoid dealing with sensitive religious symbols
without betraying their own understanding of the world. Nevertheless, he
maintains that in adopting the anti-religious and secular perspective of
western liberal society, Rushdie ignored how religious symbols and dogmas mean
a great deal to those who espouse them. To mock those symbols is to mock those
existential supports that provide people with meaning in their lives.
"Rushdie's book is comforting to the western liberal mind," Taylor says,
"(because it confirms) the belief that there is nothing outside their worldview
that needs deeper understanding." In other words, Rushdie engaged in a
deliberate act of "misrecognition," which, according to Taylor, amounts to
doing damage to an individual or group.
Taylor's argument implies that even fundamental principles of liberalism such
as freedom of expression have to bend to accommodate the feelings of others.
"Any regime of free expression has limits which are justified by the
possibility of harm on others," he says, noting the existence of libel laws and
the taboo on shouting "fire" in a crowded theatre. In a world in which
international migration is making societies less culturally homogeneous, he
concludes, "the liberal mind will have to learn to reach out more."
Using the analogy of libel laws to challenge liberal principles is
questionable. Libel laws offer redress to individuals -- not groups -- who
think their reputations have been harmed. What individual Muslims did Rushdie
libel? How do you libel an entire religion? Taylor's standard, if taken to its
logical conclusion, would forbid any criticism of religion since whatever you
say is sure to offend some believer somewhere. As for the crowded-theatre
comparison, that is a matter of self-preservation, not principle.
Taylor's one-sided insistence on tolerance and understanding suggests liberal
societies must violate their most fundamental principles to accommodate a
cultural "value" -- a fatwa, after all, asserts some kind of "value" -- that
denies those very principles. Why is Rushdie supposed to be tolerant of how
some Muslims see the world, but they are not obliged to be tolerant of his
views?
The question points up an essential conflict between liberalism and radical
multiculturalism. Why is western civilization required to dilute or deny its
basic principles when confronted by cultures that reject those principles? More
pointedly, what does a society do when confronted by even a small minority
within an immigrant group that rejects the liberal principles of tolerance and
diversity that inform multiculturalism? It is doubtful that liberalism can
compromise on its most fundamental principles without becoming illiberal. As
political theorist Brian Barry writes in Culture and Equality, "a liberal
cannot coherently believe that liberal principles should themselves be
compromised to accommodate the demands of anti-liberals."
The Rushdie controversy, like the more recent controversy over the Danish
cartoons, exposes the dark side of multiculturalism. While it is commendable
for western societies to be open to other values, it is self-destructive to
carry that effort to the point where you have so little regard for your own
civilization.
Pope Benedict considers this strange self-loathing on the part of westerners in
an essay titled The Spiritual Roots of Europe. "Multiculturalism, which is so
constantly and passionately promoted, can sometimes amount to an abandonment
and denial, a flight from one's own heritage. At the hour of its greatest
success, Europe seems hollow, as if it were internally paralysed by a failure
of its circulatory system that is endangering its life, subjecting it to
transplants that erase its identity."
According to some observers, it is this self-hatred, and the doubt and
uncertainty it engenders, that is at the root of West's hesitation to
acknowledge the Islamist declaration of war. Italian philosopher Marcello Pera,
for example, warns that the "winds of Munich" are blowing across Europe. He
regards the opposition of European elites to the war in Iraq as a replay of the
appeasement mentality that gripped Europeans in the 1930s and made them
unwilling to confront Hitler and the Nazis until war was inevitable.
Pera attributes this self-hatred to the "guilt of the West" over the "horrors"
of its past -- everything from colonialism and imperialism to Nazism and
communism. Nonetheless, this self-loathing presents the greatest danger to the
West in the conflict with Islamism, because it "weakens our cultural defences
and prepares us for, or inclines us toward, surrender. Because it makes us
believe that there is nothing for which fighting or risking is worthwhile."
Thus, "the West is paralysed twice over. It is paralysed because it does not
believe that there are good reasons to say that it is better than Islam. And it
is paralysed because it believes that, if such reasons do indeed exist, then
the West would have to fight Islam."
Obviously, war would not be necessary if there could be a reasonable and
respectful dialogue between the West and Islam. But that would of necessity
require the Islamists to "respect" western values, even if they don't wish to
adopt them. But peaceful coexistence is exactly what the Islamists reject. As
Hussein Massawi, a former Hezbollah warlord put it, "We are not fighting so
that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you." Osama bin
Laden has been equally warlike: "The rule to kill Americans and their allies --
civilians and military -- is a sacred duty for any Muslim," he said in February
1998.
They don't speak for all Muslims, of course. But even so, as recent events
attest, a considerable number of Muslims are sympathetic to their views. In
July 2005, a British poll indicated that of the approximately two million
Muslims in Britain, about six per cent - 120,000 people - thought the London
suicide bombings were justified, while another 24 per cent - that's 480,000 -
sympathized with the killers. Moreover, 16 per cent - 320,000 - say they have
no loyalty to Britain.
So, most Muslims aren't terrorists, but if the British polls are anything to go
by, way too many are sympathetic to the terrorists' goals.
One Canadian sociologist estimates there are more than 300,000 Muslim 'youth'
in Canada. Even if only one per cent sympathize with Islamist terrorism, that's
3,000 whose views, potentially at least, are a threat to Canada's liberal
democracy. Sociological surveys of Muslim students might suggest most are
tolerant and open-minded, but that doesn't deny the reality that a tiny
minority can, as it were, ruin things for everyone else.
Which raises a point made by Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington:
"Muslims increasingly see America as their enemy. If that is a fate Americans
cannot avoid, their only alternative is to accept it and to take measures
necessary to cope with it." In other words, how long can a liberal democracy
tolerate the presence of a substantial number of those who regard themselves as
a distinct and potentially hostile body? Surely, if this group refuses to
reciprocate the basic principles of liberal democracy and, indeed, declares
jihad against those principles, then that group constitutes an enemy within.
As historian Victor Davis Hanson writes in a recent edition of City Journal,
"The continued presence within our borders of so many who seek to destroy us
suggests that we still haven't squarely faced the problem that Islamic
radicalism poses to our domestic security." He's referring to the United
States, but surely the idea applies equally well to other western countries,
including Canada.
There's no guarantee another terrorist attack can be prevented. But you would
think an all-out effort would be made to do so. So what should the nations of
the West do? Suspending most legal immigration from Middle Eastern countries
known to tolerate or even subsidize radical Islam, particularly when it calls
for the destruction of the West, would be a sensible place to start. Another
would be the institution of "profiling." It makes no sense in terms of security
or economics to search the bags of a Glaswegian grandmother when you know that
the most likely terrorist candidate is a young, Arabic-looking male. Most
western countries already have laws against hate speech. Those laws should be
extended to include radical Islamic doctrines that routinely denigrate
westerners, Jews, women and gays. Those convicted of promoting Islamist hatred
and of being involved in plotting terrorist actions should receive stiff prison
sentences. Other countries should be told that their sponsorship or funding of
charities, madrassas and mosques that become sources of Islamist promulgation
will no longer be allowed. Finally, and perhaps most crucially, western nations
need to foster a public culture that demonstrates to their citizens that
Islamism is no less a threat than were fascism, Nazism and communism.
I found no "enemies" during my visit to Bay Ridge, no evidence of hostility
beyond the broken window. After an afternoon's wandering I had a late lunch in
the Damascus Gate restaurant on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 73rd Street. The
Syrian woman who ran it served a delicious shawarma chicken wrap, thick with
meat and stuffed with pickles and peppers. Afterward, I nursed a cup of Turkish
coffee and I watched the passing traffic on the sidewalk. That's when I saw my
second chaddor of the day.
Earlier, I'd visited Williamsburg area of Brooklyn with a friend who'd grown up
in the area when it was populated largely by orthodox Jews. It still is, but in
recent years there's been a big influx of Hispanics. My friend, Sally
Heinemann, the former editor of Bridge News, pointed out how many of the
Williamsburg streets - Hewes, Lee, Rutledge, Penn, Heyward, etc. - were named
after the men who signed the American Declaration of Independence in 1776. For
some reason, when I saw that second woman in the chaddor I thought of the
orthodox Jewish women on the streets of Williamsburg. While they they were
nowhere near as extreme in their dress as fundamentalist Muslim women, they,
too, wore scarves and dressed modestly according to their faith. Suddenly, I
thought I'd been offered a glimpse at the secret of America's success, and what
threatens that success.
The American founders asked themselves: How can a democratic and multi-ethnic
state be organized? What are the political principles necessary for reconciling
competing interests? Canadians like to think our constitutional monarchy and
our motto of peace, order and government provides for greater political
stability than does the republican system of the United States with its motto
of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. History, however, suggests
something different. For all its dynamism, the United States has been a
remarkably stable country, at least since the Civil War. Where Canadians still
puzzle over their identity, Americans long ago figured out who and what they
were. While Canadians have tied themselves in knots over constitutional
questions for 40 years, the United States got on with defeating the Soviet
Union and expanding its commercial empire. All of which suggests the American
founders did a pretty good job figuring out how to organize a democratic,
multicultural state. There's no denying that the United States is one of the
most stable nation-states in the world, as well as the most prosperous. So what
is the secret?
Clearly, geography played a part. Having oceans on either side of you and
non-threatening neighbours to the north and south does wonders for your sense
of security. Likewise, vast resources and an enterprising and growing
population played their part. Nevertheless, it seemed to me that the success of
the United States as a multicultural, multi-ethnic democracy was bound up with
its allegiance to a particular ideological claim, a notion that resides at the
core of the American constitution, politics and culture - the concept of
freedom.
It is the devotion to individual freedom and the long commitment by generations
of Americans to that concept that has provided the glue for the American
national identity and allowed the United States to maintain itself as a
democratic, multi-ethnic state. Everyone, regardless of race, creed or colour,
has been expected to set their American identity over all other identities in
exchange for living in a country that allows them to pursue their individual
freedom (including religious freedom) to its rational limits. It is this
ideological pillar that radical multiculturalism threatens to topple. If that
pillar falls, if the American national identity fragments into tribalist
attachments, well, arguably, so will the United States as a united
nation-state.
Will Muslims in the United States accept the principle of freedom and all it
implies in the same way as, say, orthodox Jews? Geneive Abdo says a new
generation of American Muslims - living in the shadow of the Sept. 11 attacks -
is less likely to embrace the nation's fabled melting pot of shared values and
common culture. She links this phenomenon to the resurgence of Islam over the
past several decades. But the Sept. 11 attacks have also made American Muslims
feel isolated. "From schools to language to religion, American Muslims are
becoming a people apart," Abdo concludes. "Despite contemporary public opinion
- or perhaps because of it - Muslim Americans consider Islam their defining
characteristic, beyond any national identity."
I was thinking about that question as my second chaddor-clad woman walked past.
I'm pretty sure it wasn't the same woman I'd seen earlier. This one was
slimmer. And she was talking on a cellphone through the black veil. I noticed
something else, too, showing beneath the chaddor: she wore open-toed sandals
and bright red toenails. In Saudi Arabia, where police strictly enforce
religious dress codes, such a display would get a woman a harsh reprimand, if
not worse. Here, in the United States, along Fifth Avenue in the Bay Ridge area
of Brooklyn, I'd like to interpret that small bright flash of vanity as an
expression of individual freedom, however minor.
Maybe, I thought, the melting pot can still work its alchemy.
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