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Time To Fire Ross Douthat, round 4095

Jill

Shorter Ross Douthat: Europe wasn’t racist enough, and so now they should be worried about the brown hordes. After arguing that European nations should have done more to restrict Muslim immigration, he concludes that while the end of the West is not near, there is still much to be fearful of:

This is cold comfort, though, if you have to live under the shadow of violence. Just ask the Swiss, who spent last week worrying about the possibility that the minaret vote might make them a target for Islamist terrorism.

They’re right to worry. And all of Europe has to worry as well, thanks to the folly of its leaders — now, and for many years to come.

The Swiss outlaw the building of new minarets — for no reason other than that they want to be hostile towards Muslims — and then they’re right to worry about Swiss Muslims’ hostility?

106 thoughts on Time To Fire Ross Douthat, round 4095

  1. If the NYT were running a respectable paper/editorial section, you might have a point about his firing. Neither it nor the Washington Post can even plausibly make that claim.

  2. While I disagree with Ross Douchebag that Europe should have restricted immigration of Muslims, he has a point about their inability to successfully integrate these immigrants into modern society.

    We have a similar situation in the US–not so much with immigrants–but with “homegrown” religious radicals that have no interest in engaging in a tolerant, open society. They just happen to be primarily Christian. I would venture that quite a bit of their hate and ignorance can be attributed to a lack of economic and educational opportunity (or exposure). Perhaps it is high time for government officials in the US to examine how to work towards assimilating these people.

    I empathize with these “Europeans” (Ross is finger-painting in awful wide strokes) in the sense that I am a little wary of the potential threat religious extremists pose to my way of living.

    1. Oh I agree. But his concern is misplaced. It’s one thing to be worried about the impact that religious radicals will have on your life; it’s another to purposely antagonize an entire immigrant population, like the Swiss did. Europe has sucked at integrating immigrants, and that has resulted in a lot of residual anger and marginalization. But that’s not analogous to the way right-wing Americans have attempted to bring us back to the dark ages. And the answer isn’t to further marginalize huge immigrant populations out of fear. It’s to figure out a way to let Muslim immigrants be simultaneously Muslim and Swiss / French / Italian / whathaveyou.

  3. I think Americans have a weird approach to nationality that makes our understanding of specifically racial/ethnic issues compeltely screwed up relative to every other place on earth. Specifically because of the American experience of segregation, we view the attempt to maintain the cultural qualities of a geographic space as completely out of line (unless it’s being done by brown people against white people, but that’s a separate issue). But in Europe, national identity is frequently coterminous with geographic space; this is especially true in Switzerland, where citizenship is extremely hard to come by, and is predicated on cultural integration. Wanting Switzerland to “look Swiss” isn’t draconian if it’s a question of rapid change within a single generation. The concept behind this is congruent with Swiss immigration policy. It’s not like the U.S., where you’re American when you kind of decide that you’re American– being French, being German, being Italian, is different. Wanting Switzerland to “look Swiss” is intrinsic to Swiss people being Swiss. It’s not like forbidding black kids from coming to your country club. It *is* like enforcing a dress code at your country club. I recognize that the difference between these two is that country clubs are private institutions, while we’re talking about a government initiative in Switzerland, but an emphatic part of European government is granting it cultural authority as well, and the Swiss people have voted.

    Moving on from my racist apologetics, because this segrgation is cultural/ideological in nature, and not a question of per se racism, I’m not sure Douthat is so off the mark– it IS reasonable to say that the Swiss should be able to restrict polygamy in their borders. There’s a million pages that have been written on the inevitable antifeminism of polygamy. Shouldn’t feminists want Western countries to stand up for those kinds of principles?

    The problem with what Switzerland did is that it’s poorly aimed. It comes across as cultural bigotry when what they really need is stricter enforcement and more explicit articulation of the principles they’re worried about. Europe has done an abominable job of integrating Muslims into European culture, and there are some very hard choices to be made about the most just way to stand up for European/Western values like feminism and progressive liberal values. The U.S. tends not to see a whole lot of daughter honor killing or Muslim neighborhood riots, but these are common occurrences in Europe that speak to both the non-acceptance by Europe’s Muslim population of European values and to Europe’s failure in providing opportunities, incentives, and requirements to integrate their Muslim populations into the dominant polity. So if you want to say that there is no way, no how to continue to have enforcement of particular intepretations of Sharia, what’s the best way to do it in opaque communities where monitoring may not be possible? Is it outlawing cultural artifacts and compelling integrated schooling? Is it creating spaces for advancement that create incentives for the next generation of European Muslims to “pass”, if not assume and acculturate with European values? Let’s not ask the question of how Europe stays European– rephrase it as “How does Europe stay liberal when religious conservatives are increasing in number?”

    1. Moving on from my racist apologetics, because this segrgation is cultural/ideological in nature, and not a question of per se racism, I’m not sure Douthat is so off the mark– it IS reasonable to say that the Swiss should be able to restrict polygamy in their borders. There’s a million pages that have been written on the inevitable antifeminism of polygamy. Shouldn’t feminists want Western countries to stand up for those kinds of principles?

      Huh? Who said they shouldn’t be able to restrict polygamy? Your arguments will be more convincing if you actually argue against what anyone is saying.

  4. Jill, you wrote

    “Europe has sucked at integrating immigrants, and that has resulted in a lot of residual anger and marginalization. But that’s not analogous to the way right-wing Americans have attempted to bring us back to the dark ages.”

    What analogy are you striking down? The Islamic European immigrant/right wing American analogy or the European leadership/right wing American analogy? Surely not the former – islamic immigrants in Europe would just as much want to bring us to the dark ages as would right wing Americans. I mean they called for the murder of people over a cartoon, and murdered Theo Van Gough.

    1. Nutnfancy, I’m striking down the analogy of “Muslim immigrants in Europe are like right-wing fanatics in the U.S.” I don’t dispute that some Muslim immigrants in Europe are also right-wing fanatics; I just dispute the notion that Muslim immigration generally challenges a liberal way of life.

      In other words, I think Muslim extremists and Christian extremists are parallel. They exist, but the majority of Muslims and Christians are not extremists, and are perfectly capable of integrating, living in and building tolerant and liberal societies.

      The difference, I think, is that Europe treats immigrants very differently than the United States does. We have plenty of problems, but the American view on when one becomes an American is much more inclusive than, say, the German or the Italian or the Portuguese view. Muslim immigrants are incredibly marginalized in Europe, and they aren’t doing it totally by themselves. On the other hand, right-wing extremists in the United States have inlets to power — they have Fox News and Glen Beck, Tom Coburn and Sarah Palin, Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh. The most extreme of the extremists — the ones who truly do set themselves apart and, I don’t know, build bunkers in the woods full of AK-47s — aren’t numerically all that large, and put themselves there largely by choice. American society doesn’t marginalize religious Christians the way that Europe marginalizes its immigrant populations.

      And, for the record, I am a-ok with marginalizing those whose advocate for intolerance, hate, discrimination and violence. I’m not saying that because someone claims something to be a religious belief, we have to give it the social nod of approval. What I am saying is, let’s marginalize bad ideas, not entire groups of people. The Swiss, for example, outlawed the building of minarets for chrissakes. What’s the point of that? What message does that send, other than “All of you who attend these types of places of worship are not welcome here”?

  5. Standard ingredients for a bad Douthat column:
    – Disparagement of intellectual elites by a guy best-known for his memoir of being a Harvard student.
    – Questionable historical claims (“Switzerland, long famous for religious tolerance”? What about the Sonderbund war between Catholic and Protestant cantons; the settlement restrictions o…n Jews until 1874; the ban until 1973 on Jesuits in both religious and educational life; the refusal to separate church and state and the Landeskirche system of regional churches to which people are forced to give financial support?).
    – Reference to “decadent West.”
    – Completely ignoring significant factor in the phenomenon he’s discussing (in this column about Muslims’ failure to integrate well in Europe, that would be Europe’s failures to provide access to citizenship and upward mobility to immigrants as the U.S. largely has done).

    Stir and re-serve, week after week.

  6. There’s a good article in the current New Yorker about the situation in Holland, specifically, Amsterdam. Apparently some Dutch Muslims have trouble reconciling with the more liberal aspects of Dutch society, especially with regards to sex and drugs.

    Thoughtful people on both sides are using this as a “teachable moment.” A Muslim Dutch police official talks about how it’s possible to be a good Muslim and a good citizen of Holland. For their part, some Dutch people are wondering whether the “anything goes” attitude toward drugs and prostitution goes too far. (They’re targets for money-laundering by international criminal gangs, women are forced into prostitution, etc.)

  7. One thing, becuase I have to run off. Polygamy isn’t necessarily anti woman. Religious polygamy has a tendency to be that way, but I know many happy poly people.

  8. Gotcha Jill, I can agree with pretty much all of that. I was actually going to make a comment earlier that the right wing loons in America tend to have more access to formal “power” than they do in Europe.

  9. Sorry, Jill, I had Douthat’s article sharing my screen space with your response as I was typing, and should’ve responded more precisely to your post; douthat goes on a short jag describing what it means to have large muslim populations in European countries, and polygamy in Sweden was one of the things he tossed up as an example. When you suggest in your post that mourning Muslim immigration is a bad thing, you’re distancing yourself from an article that is, centrally, about the effects of Muslim immigration into Europe that feminists *should* be upset about.

    1. The Flash, any immigrant population is going to bring with it cultural practices that the receiving country finds distasteful. That was true when my grandparents came to the United States, and it’s true now. I think the key, though, isn’t targeting a practice because immigrants do it, but having sets of laws that strive for the most tolerant, free and just society possible, and allowing immigrants the opportunity to integrate into that society. That, to me, is the difference between outlawing minarets and maintaining the illegality of polygamy.

  10. So, you know, I took polygamy in Sweden as an example of what a European country might be trying to avoid in creating a hostile environment for particular Muslim cultures, since it’s an easy one to link to Feminist goals.

  11. Jill, part of the problem is that enforcement of the laws is tremendously complex and can’t accomplish what a broader campaign does. That was my point about the problems of enforcement in opaque communities– how do you know if someone’s a polygamist if they haven’t applied for multiple marriage licenses? Who calls the police to report his neighbor’s second wife? When my grandparents came to the U.S., they lived in an ethnically segregated community and weren’t welcomed into mainstream society, but they did their best to act American and they sent their kids to public school. Acculturation is part of sustaining social values through waves of immigration. Acculturation isn’t occurring in Europe, as evidenced not only by isolated terrorist incidents, but by those riots in the Parisian suburbs a few years ago. Part of the solution is creating incentives and spaces for the next generation of Muslims to opt in to European society, but another part of the solution is to express that immigrants need to break from their home cultures and be interested not only in living and working in Europe, but in making their families European, even if they’re going to be marginalized in the parent generation.

    1. Well, yeah. But why isn’t that integration happening? My point is that it’s not something particular about the Muslim immigrants in Europe; it’s something about European society. Given that, the onus should fall on Europeans to shift their thinking and their targeting of Muslim populations, instead of further marginalizing Muslims. I mean, how does targeting things like minarets do anything positive for that situation? It’s not just about creating incentives for Muslims to integrate; it’s about creating an understanding of French-ness or Swiss-ness or whatever that doesn’t require the person to have a French or Swiss family six generations back in order to be considered French or Swiss.

  12. Flash,
    You’ve shifted the main thrust of the problem with the article away into the “larger” picture, which allows for the dismissal of what happened in Switzerland. The Swiss didn’t make laws against some more controversial aspect of Muslim culture, but against a very basic and completely unoffensive aspect, the minarets, which already exist and are not outlawed in other forms in Switzerland. Catholic steeples, Mormon, http://www.ldschurchtemples.com/bern/

    So when you do that, you ignore and move away from a legitimately offensive and aggressive action against a minority in order to address the “big picture,” you just let those “little” things simmer and simmer until people get very, very, pissed off. And guess what? They become the big picture because no one ever was able to solve that while ignoring the little things.

  13. Oh I agree. But his concern is misplaced. It’s one thing to be worried about the impact that religious radicals will have on your life; it’s another to purposely antagonize an entire immigrant population, like the Swiss did.

    Nonsense, Jill, it’s perfectly reasonable. Can’t have all those pointy things cluttering up the sky. Parachuters will impale themselves.

    As Bitter Scribe was implying: the latter is not a way to solve the former. You don’t counter violent xenophobia or violent anti-state fundamentalism by making civic and religious affiliation mutually exclusive.

  14. Unfortunately, I don’t think there is any concept of being French or Swiss without having the geneology. That’s what led to the Holocaust. Jews were perfectly integrated into German society and it still happened. Part of the effect of World War II and the subsequent growth of the European Union was realizing that the old notions of national identity needed to be subsumed into something new that reflected the lessons of the war/Shoah. People could still be Swiss/French/German/Italian, but something had to be bigger. In effect, the development of the European Union is the same as the development of human rights.

    So there can be a concept of being European, and I don’t think that’s vague: being European means being Western, with a smaller home and more miles on your bicycle riding than an American (obviously a joke, but you get the idea). But it’s probably true, unfortunately, that Muslim immigrants will never be Swiss/French/German/Italian. Just as Hannah Arendt proposed that the only way for Jews to stay in Europe was to be recognized as Jews, and not to pretend to still be Germans, maybe Muslims in Europe need to figure out how to be European Muslims, instead of trying to be French or Swiss. It falls to European governments, though, to stand up for what it is to be European, which includes being Western. I think part of what Douthat is getting at, as ham-fistedly as he’s doing it, is that figuring out what to do with the mess of a situation Europe has with its Muslim immigrants is a problem for the EU as a governing entity, and not just for individual countries.

    Anyway, all I’m saying about banning the minarets is that it’s not a wacko response, just a wild one (as in a “wild pitch”). Europeans do need to find a way to express the rhetoric of condemning radical conservative Islam and affirming that goes beyond parliamentary statements and into policy and action.

    1. Unfortunately, I don’t think there is any concept of being French or Swiss without having the geneology. That’s what led to the Holocaust. Jews were perfectly integrated into German society and it still happened.

      …huh? Are you kidding? Jews were not perfectly integrated into German society. (And, notably, not by any fault of their own).

  15. Most of the immigration into France occurred at a time when post-war citizenship laws allowed Algerian Muslims to enter France as French subjects if not citizens, and the split in identity is religious, because these peoples’ children and grandchildren are French, legally, as are the children and grandchildren of other North Africans who immigrated from the protectorates, Morocco and Tunisia, rather than from the French departments of Algeria. So since 1962, and in a broader sense, since 1948, the question within France has been one of a French Islam, replacing a residence-permit-equivalent but Other-inflected French-Algerian-Islamic identity. At least legally, the issue has been settled on paper since 1962, and some French Muslims are working on at least six generations of Frenchness, given that (since the end of Algerian resistance in 1848-9) some Algerian Muslims, perhaps workers brought in, certainly soldiers, must have been there since 1914. So the debate about integration there is sui generis, similar to the one on affirmative action in the US, and a function of a long-settled community into which Islamism has, to a certain extent, come from abroad.

  16. Sure they were. Jews may have been the victims of certain prejudicial official and unofficial policies, but by the late 19th century, Jews were being admitted to the professions, Jews were participating in the intellectual life of the German university system, intermarriage was common, Jews held positions in all but the highest levels of government, there were highly decorated and respected Jewish veterans from World War I who had fought in the German army… obviously there was still antisemitism, but it was personal, not, until the Nazis, institutional or even necessarily visible. The image of little Jewish villagers living in a parallel society comes from Poland, where the virulent antisemitism of the Poles ran so deep that Nazis built the worst concentration camps there instead of in Germany. Urban Germans of the middle class and up were used to having Jews as part of their lives, even if they didn’t particularly like it. Jews were far, far more integrated into mainstream German life than Muslims are today.

  17. it’s a *freakin’ BUILDING* a piece of *architecture!*

    If anyone can explain to me how that *inherently* is related to daughter honor killings any more than Cathedrals are to priests molesting children, go *right ahead!*

  18. Also remember that France experienced the easy, French- citizenship-by-fiat integration of (most) Algerian Jews by the Crémieux Law in 1870, which led to Saharan Jews–who were, if nothing else, “Jewish” and not French, by *everyone’s* law, Jewish, French, Islamic–having to become French ex gratia in 1962. The frontier quality of the Sahara meant they were “Jewish natives” the same way that some were “Muslim natives”. When the Algerian state took over, Jews were not included in citizenship, patrilineal by birth to an Algerian Muslim father, producing the gap that had to be rectified above.

    More ambiguity about Frenchness is experienced by the descendants of the “harkis”, those Algerian Muslims who served in the French Army against the Algerian National Liberation Front, primarily because they bear both the foreignness of Islam and the French distaste for collaborators, especially those who served France in a losing war, in the context of a triumphant Algerian nationalist narrative.

  19. @The Flash

    Oh please. The way you gloss over antisemitism as it was nothing is ridiculous. Read something like the biography of the life of Fritz Haber if you want some indication of how Jews were discriminated against widely before the Nazis. Haber was a man who rose to great prominence, why? Only because German classist attitudes outweighed their antisemitism. Prosperous Jews were prosperous because they were prosperous. It’s sounds like circular reasoning, but men like Haber came from already wealthy families, renounced their Judaism, and publically converted to Christianity to attain the level of respect they did. Having the avenue to prestige barred to a certain class of people (I believe the term is “glass ceiling” when it’s informal- but this was more of a “concrete ceiling” anyway.) counts as pretty extreme racism from where I sit.

    Meanwhile if you were a poor Jew- you didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of attaining what a poor “ethnic German” could. Pointing out that there were prestigious and distinguished African Americans in the pre-Civil Rights era doesn’t change the reality for your average working class African American during the same era. That’s not “perfectly” or even “reasonably” integrated. In fact I sincerely doubt you understand the meaning of the word, integrated.

    Your meandering and deflections will only get you so far. You use terms like “Western” and “European” so cavalierly you almost had me fooled into thinking you had a clear definition of the terms. If were so hostile towards “Eastern” and “non-Western” cultures, why not obsess over the Greek/Eastern Orthodox Christians who migrate into other parts of Europe? European? Most Swiss Muslims come from the Balkans- last I checked that’s not terribly Asian.

    Meanwhile, what is “European”? You hardly satisfied that question with your pithy non-answer. Just be honest, you don’t want people different from you living in Europe. What’s “different”? You’ll call it in the air, I guess. Your lamentations and horror at the thought of European culture changing are the paranoid rantings of someone who doesn’t understand how culture changes, or accept the inevitability of syncretic dynamics.

    In short, nothing you say is persuasive, because you don’t say anything that has any meaning. It’s just a vague feeling of malaise you’re complaining about. One which I really don’t hesitate to call xenophobia.

  20. Shouldn’t feminists want Western countries to stand up for those kinds of principles?

    Ahhhh, yes, Switzerland, the country that did not allow women to vote until 1971, is going to defend feminist principles against foreign encroachment

    NINETEEN FUCKEN’ SEVENTY-ONE. Excuse me while I laugh until I cry.

  21. I never really realized how much I believe in freedom of religion (including freedom to practice that religion which would include building minarets) until now. Freedom of religion with a separation between church and state. It just makes sense to me.

  22. Unfortunately, I don’t think there is any concept of being French or Swiss without having the geneology. That’s what led to the Holocaust. Jews were perfectly integrated into German society and it still happened. Part of the effect of World War II and the subsequent growth of the European Union was realizing that the old notions of national identity needed to be subsumed into something new that reflected the lessons of the war/Shoah. People could still be Swiss/French/German/Italian, but something had to be bigger. In effect, the development of the European Union is the same as the development of human rights.

    Ah, yes, since the lack of a concept of being European without the genealogy led to the Holocaust, we should continue to lack the concept of being European without the genealogy WHAT

    I also counted a “Feminists should focus on what I want instead of on what they want,” “People can choose their race” (well, what else could you mean when you said that limiting immigration of non-white people was like enforcing a dress code?), “It’s okay to limit people’s basic rights if it’s voted on by a majority of people,” arbitrary limits of “Western,” historical ignorance, denying people’s identity, simultaneously condemning and advocating segregation…

    Which is a lot of weird and right-wing stuff. Why are we engaging this person, again?

  23. I want to nitpick something else. Immigration of Muslims into Europe is a different story for each country. If I recall correctly, most Muslims in Switserland come from former Yugoslavia. In Holland (where I live), we have Moroccans and Turks, migrant workers -at our own request. In Germany live mostly Turkish and former Yugoslavia. For France, its relationship with Muslim minorities is tainted with its colonial past in North Africa. In Holland, we don’t discuss our colonial past with the largest Muslim country in the world, Indonesia. Oh, and there are refugees from Iran, Somalia and a hoist of different countries.

    And I seriously doubt if can lump all these people, with their different stories, together in the category “Muslims”.

    But they do have some things in common: they tend to be less advantaged. To put it mildly. They do less well in school, they suffer discrimination, they are more likely to be unemployed. Successes notwithstanding.

    I’ll check the New Yorker item.

    Oh, and Douthat has logic issues and fact issues. He shouldn’t have been on those pages. Ever.

  24. If anyone can explain to me how that *inherently* is related to daughter honor killings any more than Cathedrals are to priests molesting children, go *right ahead!*

    It doesn’t. They just want things to look a certain way.

    Speaking of which, check out this mosque in St. Petersburg (it does have minarets, we just didn’t get a good shot with them). If it’s good enough for the most explicitly European city in conservative Russia (of course, there are many, many Russian Muslims, but it’s not as if most people care), you’d think it wouldn’t be a problem in Switzerland. Last I heard, they didn’t have a problem with extremist groups there either, unlike, say, in Britain.

  25. Jill wrote:

    “Well, yeah. But why isn’t that integration happening? My point is that it’s not something particular about the Muslim immigrants in Europe; it’s something about European society.”

    I think I can help with this question. You wrote earlier that Europe sucks at integration. Yes, we do and there are historical and institutional reasons for that. The Flash is very right to point out that there are significant differences in how Europeans understand the concept of nationality as opposed to Americans. To be honest, in my book “integration” is a bad word – and it has a nasty history of pogroms, genocide and population displacement in this continent. I have dual Greek and British nationality and currently live in the Netherlands. In general the Dutch respect my right to retain my cultural and national identity – indeed, the idea that I could ever “become Dutch” is not really something anybody seriously considers – but on the rare occasions when somebody hints that I should try to “assimilate” to the “Dutch way of life” I bristle. I have two nationalities, they are more than enough and they suit me fine. Europe has overcome centuries of wars precisely by accepting neighbouring countries right to be their own selves, by not lording it over each or forcing each other to change in accordance with foreign standards. The EU’s motto is “United in Diversity” and I think that it works very well for us.

    In this context, everybody can live their life how they please and the limit is the law, for everyone no matter what their national or religious background. So, worship how you will, but don’t kill your daughter for having sex. The trouble is of course that this approach reaches its limits with Muslim communities who do not always share the fundamental basis that enables European nations to get on well, while respecting each other’s right to be different. And we don’t know how to handle that because the law is the only acceptable way of interfering in how people live their lives – integration is taboo. Trying to convince somebody else that your way of living is better to your own and they should adopt it is not done. Arrogantly proclaiming that your country is better than any other is nationalistic. However, when it starts to seem like somebody’s way of life is what is inducing them to break the law, in a society that does not find it acceptable to force a certain way of life on somebody, your hands are tied. Till of course the problem escalates and the spasmodic reaction is to try to outlaw what you perceive as the source of the problem, e.g. certain aspects of that way of life…. Hence the ban on headscarves in public buildings in France or the recent Swiss vote. Bad? Definitely. But the inevitable side-effect of what has been a huge success story over here – and understanding that is essential to trying to find a successful solution.

    I am an expat, which is just a fancy way to say immigrant. I have no desire to integrate into Dutch society. I see no reason to impose such an obligation on Muslim immigrants. And I am at a loss to see how one can avoid marginalising people, while respecting their identity at the same time. I have no solutions and I certainly do very much condemn the Swiss vote. But to be honest, I do not what to see American notions of “integration” implemented here. It would erode the very foundation upon which the EU is built.

    “it’s about creating an understanding of French-ness or Swiss-ness or whatever that doesn’t require the person to have a French or Swiss family six generations back in order to be considered French or Swiss.”

    You seem to automatically assume that being Swiss or French is a good thing and not a neutral one… I do see where you’re coming from, but it is a *very* American POV and – I have to admit – not one that I feel particularly comfortable with. What is somebody doesn’t want to be Swiss or French? Should they then not be allowed to live in Switzerland or France?

    The Flash wrote:

    “Unfortunately, I don’t think there is any concept of being French or Swiss without having the geneology.”

    Well, no, I don’t think you need the genealogy. I think a lot of it also has to do with how you feel about yourself and notions of nationality are becoming increasingly flexible. You can integrate into Greek/British/German/Italian etc societies. But nobody’s going to ask you to do so, because that would be viewed as nationalistic.

    Europeans are *very* sensitive to nationalism. I don’t think this is the same in the US, something which is becoming increasingly obvious in the comments to this thread. The Flash is making some very good points (although I do not agree with all of them), which do not seem to be going down very well with the rest of the commentators… And honestly, I’ve got to say, that is coming across a teeny weeny bit as a bit of American arrogance.

    Finally, the Chemist wrote:

    “If were so hostile towards “Eastern” and “non-Western” cultures, why not obsess over the Greek/Eastern Orthodox Christians who migrate into other parts of Europe?”

    The Greeks and most Eastern Orthodox Christians are European and Western. So are a lot of Muslims btw, even historically speaking.

  26. Ugh. How did I know this thread was going to be chock full of comments saying, “Wellllllllllllllll, but…” and bringing up the Holocaust and saying “BUT CHRISTIANS” and what not?

    Look. That Swiss law? Out and out racist. No quibbling. Racist.

  27. We should remember that the US concept of separation of church and state does not exist to the same degree, or necessarily at all, in Europe. The laws in many European countries grant much less deference to the religious mores of their citizens. European laws also are muchh less protective of free speech than are US laws.

    As a combined result, the laws basically permit what amounts to a direct conflict between the government and certain religions. You can see this, for example, in the fact that certain European countries have recently gone after christian scientists in a way that the US government would–and could–never do.

    So the framework for this conflict largely existed even before the recent Swiss decision. Inherently it comes down to how the government in question decides to classify Islam. Is it classified as a religion with “acceptable” views, which unfortunately contains a few malcontents? Or is it classified as a religion with a relatively high level of “dangerous” views and/or adherents, which the government may properly act to suppress?

    The very question may seem ludicrous to US citizens. But the question gets asked in Europe, and apparently not only about Islam.

  28. I am an expat, which is just a fancy way to say immigrant. I have no desire to integrate into Dutch society. I see no reason to impose such an obligation on Muslim immigrants. And I am at a loss to see how one can avoid marginalising people, while respecting their identity at the same time. I have no solutions and I certainly do very much condemn the Swiss vote. But to be honest, I do not what to see American notions of “integration” implemented here. It would erode the very foundation upon which the EU is built.

    I think there are some serious errors in this line of argument. Contrary to your claim, “expatriate” and “immigrant” have neither the same denotation nor connotation. An expatriate is one who has been banished from his native country or who has chosen to withdraw from it; the “fanciness” you perceive in the term is no accident. More importantly, someone who already has two EU citizenships who chooses to live in a 3rd EU country is not in the same position as a Muslim from a non-EU country immigrating to an EU country. There is no particular reason for you to integrate into Dutch society because you evidently are happy with your existing EU citizenships as Greek and British. You already have an identity that is part of the EU. In contrast, a Turkish person who immigrates to France currently has no pre-existing EU citizenship nor identity. (This obviously would be different if Turkey were part of the EU.) If he refuses to integrate into the society into which he has immigrated — or, as is the problem in much of Europe, that society refuses to integrate him — then he is left without an identity that the EU recognizes. He is a permanent outsider to the political superstructure of the EU.

    To analogize to the U.S., I refer to myself as a “Texpatriate”; having grown up in Texas, I now live in New York. My identity as an *American* exists regardless of where in the U.S. I live. I do not want to become a New Yorker (I find quite a lot of them have obnoxious accents), and there’s no particular reason for me to do so; should I find New York too intolerable, I always have the option of remaining in the larger socio-politic-economic system that is the U.S. by moving back to Texas.

    I am at the same time the child of Indian immigrants. I can’t say that my parents have particularly adopted a Texan identity (pull up every image you have of Texans; my parents probably fit none of them). They have, however, adopted in many respects an American identity. They have become citizens, they participate in the American political process, they speak English in public, they have reluctantly resigned themselves to their children’s possibly marrying people of different races, religions and ethnicities. They are still very much Indian; they have not changed their religion, their cuisine, the language they speak at home; their closest friends are mostly other Indian immigrants. Such is hyphenated identity: Indian-American.

    If they were not given access to economic, social and political integration in Missouri, Illinois and Texas, however, they would not be Indian-American; they would be permanent Indian immigrants, outsiders, never Americans.

    You seem to automatically assume that being Swiss or French is a good thing and not a neutral one… I do see where you’re coming from, but it is a *very* American POV and – I have to admit – not one that I feel particularly comfortable with. What is somebody doesn’t want to be Swiss or French? Should they then not be allowed to live in Switzerland or France?

    Again, I think the “somebody doesn’t want to” is coming from your position of privilege, relative to Muslim immigrants who don’t already have an EU citizenship. It’s not just a matter of whether one wants to; it’s also a matter of whether one *can*. It is a very unusual choice for someone to decide to immigrate to a country while seeing nothing particularly good about the country. I can see all nationalities (or religions, for that matter) as equally good, or equally bad; equal, in any case. But someone who immigrates nationalities, or converts religions, presumably has a reason for doing so. From that point of view of the immigrant or convert, it doesn’t make sense to claim that they’re all equal. If everything’s equal, why change?

    And this is an important distinction between the temporary expat and the immigrant; the expat may come for a particular job or a romance, but hasn’t decided that his life and that of his descendants is going to be rooted in that country.

  29. @ PG.

    Thanks for the detailed reply. I’m responding very quickly unfortunately as I am expected elsewhere.

    “An expatriate is one who has been banished from his native country or who has chosen to withdraw from it;”

    Maybe this a difference between American and British English? From Miriam Webster (which is actually Amarican but whatever): “expatriate: = living in a foreign land”.

    “the “fanciness” you perceive in the term is no accident.”

    I know. I am ridiculously privileged. Is that a reason to heap yet more difficulties on the heads of those who already have far more problems than I to deal with?

    “Again, I think the “somebody doesn’t want to” is coming from your position of privilege, relative to Muslim immigrants who don’t already have an EU citizenship.”

    Obviously. I’m just not willing to retain that privilege just for myself, while declaring that those Muslim immigrants have no other choice than to relinquish their traditions and language and adopt those of the society they found themselves in. You are operating on the assumption that everybody who chooses to move to a foreign country must do so out of admiration for that country and willingness to become more like the indigenous population. Not so. Quite likely some Muslim immigrants moved to Europe to escape oppression at home, but most will have done so simply in search of financial opportunities. Just like me. But even those that were searching for e.g. more tolerant legal systems will presumably retain affection for some elements of their homeland and nation – why should we ask them to give those up?

    “In contrast, a Turkish person who immigrates to France currently has no pre-existing EU citizenship nor identity. (This obviously would be different if Turkey were part of the EU.) If he refuses to integrate into the society into which he has immigrated — or, as is the problem in much of Europe, that society refuses to integrate him — then he is left without an identity that the EU recognizes. He is a permanent outsider to the political superstructure of the EU.”

    I have no objection to naturalising people who still feel that they belong to a group other than the dominant national group of the country they are living in. Turks can obtain German/French/what have you nationality – must we force them to stop speaking Turkish and feeling Turkish so as to do so?

    “To analogize to the U.S., I refer to myself as a “Texpatriate”;”

    This is a bad analogy. I’m sure there are many differences between Texas and New York. But in both states the same language is spoken and people identify as belonging to the same nation.

    “But someone who immigrates nationalities, or converts religions, presumably has a reason for doing so.”

    These reasons need not be cultural. It is culture that I am talking about here. What I don’t get is very simply this: do we all have to be the same so as to get along? If so, we’re building castles in the sand here, because that system is never going to work in the end. It maybe makes sense when you are building a new nation that brings together lots of people from lots of places and nobody really has a strong advantage. But in European countries where the local population has already formed the dominant culture and established its connection to the land in long history and ethnic similarities that bind them as a group in way others do not share, integration reaches its limits.

    “And this is an important distinction between the temporary expat and the immigrant;”

    Who said anything about temporary? I don’t know where I am going to end up. But my mother has been living in Greece for 30 years now – she still considers herself to be English (despite having Greek nationality) and is immediately identified as foreign wherever she goes. I should also have noted before that there is a difference between the concepts of “nationality” and “ethnicity” – the two are very much interconnected in Europe. In fact, when somebody talks about being Italian, Greek, Swedish etc a lot of the time they will be referring to ethnicity rather than the name of the country on their passport.

  30. The Greeks and most Eastern Orthodox Christians are European and Western. So are a lot of Muslims btw, even historically speaking.

    You forgot to add, “today.” Brush up on your European history- The East-West divide used to exclude the orthodox churches. My point is that what is “Western” is inherently arbitrary, and that the wide variation in cultural practices and taboos within Europe render the “Western preservation” argument moot.

    Meanwhile, stop with the canard that daughter killings are somehow common and have reached epidemic proportions in Europe; and that Muslim communities are exceptionally problematic in that regard. If you really payed attention, you would realize that violence against women, including the killing of daughters, is not restricted to the Muslim community.

    I would add on a pragmatic level, that the marginalization of the Muslim community doesn’t help Muslim women, it makes things worse. Take a look at the Han-Chinese practice of foot-binding. It experienced a surge in popularity at one point specifically as an anti-Mongol expression. It became a status symbol that set the community apart from their conquerors. Meanwhile, the Europeans continue to consider Muslims, as you do implicitly with your language, a community apart from them.

    Yet they make demands that they “integrate” “assimilate”, or what-have-you. I’m waiting for them to drop all pretense and just say, “Look, you can’t ever really be real citizens in our minds, we’re scared of you, we think that you have a pernicious effect on our societies, here’s a ghetto and a yellow crescent, now fuck off.”

  31. Chemist:

    Your belief that hard details are a prerequisite for truth have no place in a conversation about ‘what is European,’ because the question, obviously, publicly, and currently, hasn’t come to a complete answer. It would be the same as trying to ask ‘what is American’ and expecting an encapsulated answer. The question isn’t scientific, *Chemist*, but is constantly changing. That said, there are absolutely things that can be called out as being un-European, and daughter honor killings should fall into that category. The answer to ‘what is European’ should be both diagnostic *and* prescriptive, at the same time, and it should be a complicated answer. Complicated does not equal undefined.

    Also, if you imagine that the Jews were anywhere near as marginalized in pre-war Germany as Muslims are today, you’re the one ignoring history. While antisemitism may have been widespread, Jewish integration was also widespread. The fact that conversion was an available option is itself a statement of inclusion: can today’s Muslim immigrants escape their marginalization as easily? I’m not apologizing for, or excusing away, pre-war German antisemitism, in any way. What I’m saying is that the level of alienation and marginalization towards Muslims is more extreme, and the less extreme marginalization that the Jews experienced right up to the Shoah itself shows that even people who *are* better integrated into European society can still end up in concentration camps, because lineage as a European counts.

    And Chemist, I said feminists should focus on feminist issues, not “ignore what you want and look at what I want.” It’s a question of principle, not of attention-getting.

  32. A conservative blog says:

    Anne Applebaum wrestles this morning with the recent ban on the construction of minarets on mosques in Switzerland. Applebaum sees the Swiss move as a preemptive strike against extremist Islam while at the same time proactively dealing with the integration problem facing Europe.

    The Swiss, Applebaum observes, have welcomed a significant number of Muslims into their country, but they are of the more moderate bent, with few, if any wearing burqas, and most integrating into daily Swiss life. There are no “muslim ghettos” as, say, in France or Germany. The Swiss strike against minarets hopes to prevent exactly that separation and non-integration prevalent in other European nations.

    Having lived in Switzerland for some time, I know the Swiss are relatively fanatical about the visitors “not rocking the boat.” Swiss immigration policies basically force you to radically integrate, if you wish to stay permanently, or at minimum, stay and lay low, or just plain get out. In fact, to become a Swiss citizen, the local town in some cantons has the right to vote on whether or not you get citizenship after a public examination. The Swiss, in this instance, aren’t banning mosques or the practice of Islam, but simply the construction of minarets.

  33. @The Flash,

    I’ll address your points in random order:

    And Chemist, I said feminists should focus on feminist issues, not “ignore what you want and look at what I want.” It’s a question of principle, not of attention-getting.

    Funny, I don’t recall saying anything about that. Are you know making up my arguments for me? Or are you simply uninterested with who says what?

    The question isn’t scientific, *Chemist*, but is constantly changing.

    Yes, when all else fails, jump on a nickname. “Well, maybe if you weren’t in such a hurry to make a point, *Flash*…” Seriously, is this what passes for an argument in your mind? Hell, does it even pass for a clever insult? Don’t be idiotic, this isn’t high school.

    Your belief that hard details are a prerequisite for truth have no place in a conversation about ‘what is European,’ because the question…

    Hard details? I would prefer a nebulous answer. My concept of an “American”? Someone who belongs to the imaginary community of people self-identifying as “American”. It’s not sufficient as a legal description, but it’s defensible and works when discussing identity politics quite nicely. Your definition of European is evasive, and inexcusably so. You can choose to give me a definition as wide or as narrow as you like, but you don’t, because you know it’s a non-argument. My point is that it doesn’t matter how much Muslims do to be a part of mainstream European society, they will never be “European-enough” in your eyes until they demolish their own identity as Muslim, which is a religious affiliation and not preclusive to other cultural ones. My point is that you will shift the definition of “European-ness” to exclude Muslims every time- until they no longer resemble or identify as Muslims. Which is okay, because based on the next quote, you consider that “integration”:

    While antisemitism may have been widespread, Jewish integration was also widespread. The fact that conversion was an available option is itself a statement of inclusion: can today’s Muslim immigrants escape their marginalization as easily?

    You missed the part where I pointed out that “conversion” was predicated on wealth, and the ability to provide people with an incentive to let you in “The German Club”. Meanwhile, plenty of people, taking Haber again as an example, never considered even those Jews truly German. INTEGRATION -which I pointed out that you apparently don’t know the meaning of, and your comment cements this- means that there would have been a seamlessness of shared-identity between Jews and Germans, and not public debate about whether a Jew can really be a good German. Your fantasy of a society where Jews were integrated, yet marginalized never existed. You concede there were official policies that made life for Jews difficult. Integration, by its very definition, precludes marginalization! How do you not get that? Once again, I don’t think you know what integration is.

    Meanwhile, your point about “genealogy” (read: ethnicity) doesn’t make anything the Swiss do defensible, primarily because ethnicity is an illusion. It’s a trick of our minds. Even genealogy in its strictest sense, is illusory, since we all come from common African ancestors. Nationality is equally imaginary, but at least we acknowledge that on some level.

    Also you failed to address the inevitability of syncretism, and finally, you’re still buying into the bizarre and disconnective canard about Muslims being somehow exceptional when it comes to violence against women. As I pointed out in a comment to someone else, that’s nothing more than press-inflated moral panic.

    Finally, I will address the biggest problem with you statement regarding feminists, even though I was going to leave it alone: What’s with the third-person? I’m a feminist. Why aren’t you? Saying what feminists can and should be concerned about without wanting to be a part of the group seems a little arrogant on your part- especially when it costs nothing to be a feminist. No, I think like integration, you don’t actually know what feminism is either. It’s become quite obvious to me that what you don’t need persuasion or discussion. These things happen on level-footing. What you need is an education, and far be it from me or anyone else to try and give it to you against your will.

  34. Ah, Chemist, you’re right, it was Rebecca who said I was trying to dictate what feminists should pay attention to. My mistake for responding from memory.

    The debate over what constitutes European, and whether religious Muslims can be Europeans, dates way back to Ataturk, who said that yes, religious Islam is most definitely at odds with being European. In effect, it is true that defining Europe does involve a cultural break from the Middle East and Africa. Being European involves assuming the historical-intellectual mantle of the European enlightenment (explicitly or implicitly) and of appreciating the tolerance taught by the experiences of the world wars. Europe is democratic, is semi-socialist within a capitalist structure, Europe is geographically defined with fuzzy borders at its eastern end.

    But look, I’m an American, it’s not my place to define what Europe is. What I am reasonably able to do without overstepping myself is to think critically about whether it’s racist for Europeans to say that middle eastern Islam is at odds ideologically with things that are most probably within the boundaries of being European… and the answer is probably yes.

    You write that ethnicity is fake and a trick of our minds, but that’s wrong in a million ways. It’s an adolescent trick to pull things back to an extreme and say that “we’re all from Africa” when ethnicity is very real in the modern world. Something being constructed isn’t the same as being fake. The way we construct ethnicity today has real effects– would you say that native peoples shouldn’t fight to maintain their identities because ethnicity is constructed anyway?

    Anyway, I’m not discounting syncretism, I’m saying that Europeans looking to preserve an idea of Europe are entitled to fight back against a particular strain of syncretism that compromises things they hold dear that I think feminists, *myself included*, should hold dear as well. In fact, I’m encouraging syncretism… on the part of the alienated muslim subculture.

    Finally, integration and marginalization are not mutually exclusive. That’s the difference between formal integration and being “post racial”, for example. The extremism in your statements is adolescent. Integration isn’t the same as assimilation, which, it sounds like, is what you’re talking about (“seamlessness of shared-identity between Jews and Germans”). You need a better grasp of nuance and less ego before you start attacking me, and not just my ideas.

  35. Your belief that hard details are a prerequisite for truth have no place in a conversation about ‘what is European,’ because the question, obviously, publicly, and currently, hasn’t come to a complete answer. It would be the same as trying to ask ‘what is American’ and expecting an encapsulated answer. The question isn’t scientific, *Chemist*, but is constantly changing. That said, there are absolutely things that can be called out as being un-European, and daughter honor killings should fall into that category. The answer to ‘what is European’ should be both diagnostic *and* prescriptive, at the same time, and it should be a complicated answer. Complicated does not equal undefined.

    It doesn’t have to be fact-based, The Flash (nor does it have to be about superhero comics), but it ought to be internally consistent, and an European ethic of “Westernism” and tolerance is inconsistent with exclusion based on religion or race.

    And Chemist, I said feminists should focus on feminist issues, not “ignore what you want and look at what I want.” It’s a question of principle, not of attention-getting.

    Hi, I’m the one who made that comment. Racism is a feminist issue. Pls. go back to 101 before coming here to tell us what we should talk about.

  36. The debate over what constitutes European, and whether religious Muslims can be Europeans, dates way back to Ataturk, who said that yes, religious Islam is most definitely at odds with being European. In effect, it is true that defining Europe does involve a cultural break from the Middle East and Africa. Being European involves assuming the historical-intellectual mantle of the European enlightenment (explicitly or implicitly) and of appreciating the tolerance taught by the experiences of the world wars. Europe is democratic, is semi-socialist within a capitalist structure, Europe is geographically defined with fuzzy borders at its eastern end.

    But that’s not what you’re arguing. The only way for this paragraph to be consistent with your previous arguments would be if you believed that it was impossible for people with dark skin or who practiced a non-Christian religion to be tolerant or democratic. It wouldn’t surprise me that you think that, but it’s still a ridiculous position.

    1. Also, The Flash, you seem to be under the impression that Muslims are all Middle Eastern and African, that there isn’t a looooong tradition of Islam in Europe, and that European identity hasn’t been shaped by Islam. I mean, hi, Spain. Also a lot of the former Yugoslavia.

      Also, who are you arguing with? You’re propping up strawmen and then beating them down. No one is saying that Europeans aren’t entitled to hold onto their values and to push back against those who would compromise those values. That’s fine and dandy! Yes, push back against human rights violations and anti-democratic ideals and misogyny and racism and violence. Please! What at least I am saying is that banning minarets doesn’t do that that. Targeting Muslims for being backwards or overly-religious or whathaveyou doesn’t do that. You seem to be playing Devil’s Advocate against arguments no one is actually making.

  37. I am not fond of this column (though I’ve thought some of Douthat’s other writing was thoughtful for a conservative), nor of the minaret law. However, I do think it’s legitimate to wonder if the Muslim immigration into the EC threatens what is I think without question the world’s most progressive and feminist region. The vast majority of Muslims hold views on social issues (marriage equality, women’s rights, contraception, abortion, evolution, education, etc.) that are antithetical to progressives. (And I say this btw as an atheist who rejects all theocracy but sees the greatest threat as coming from Islam.)

    So it is ironic, then, that progressives tend to do the most to bend over backward to be tolerant to Muslim immigration. And a politician like Pim Fortuyn is reflexively called “far right” for his views about Muslim immigration (which are pretty close to mine) when there is much evidence that (also like me) he strongly supported Western progressive ideals and for precisely that reason opposed the potential erosion of that progressivism by the influx of Muslims.

    I mean, would anyone here want to live permanently in any of the nations in the world inhabited primarily by Muslims? Ask yourself that before you reject what I’m saying out of hand.

    1. The vast majority of Muslims hold views on social issues (marriage equality, women’s rights, contraception, abortion, evolution, education, etc.) that are antithetical to progressives.

      So do the vast majority of people generally. And very large numbers of Americans.

    2. So it is ironic, then, that progressives tend to do the most to bend over backward to be tolerant to Muslim immigration.

      This sentence doesn’t even make sense. How are progressives bending over backwards to be tolerant of Mulism immigration? Unless by “bending over backwards” you mean “not trying to create special laws that target Muslim immigrants and would-be immigrants.”

    3. Pim Fortuyn promoted closing the border to Muslim immigrants, based on their religion. That’s pretty ass-backwards and racist and, yes, far-right. One can be bigoted and have far-right views on immigration and still be progressive in other areas. These arguments sound a lot like American arguments against immigration rights for Chinese people, Irish people, Italian people and Jewish people from not so long ago.

  38. But Rebecca, this conversation isn’t happening at a theoretical level. The issue with much of the backlash against Muslims in Europe is one of tolerance. I’m not saying that theoretical brown people can’t be tolerant, I’m saying that there are large groups of intolerant people in Europe and Europeans are doing some racist things in a poorly-assembled attempt to conduct the more-reasonable fight back against the encroachment of intolerance, like anti-gay violence in the Netherlands by Muslims.

  39. Well, Jill, look, I’ve gotten a little off track responding to Chemist, but my point is that:

    a) The Swiss may be fumbling their attempt at it, but there’s nothing intrinsically unjust about trying to preserve a cultural character for a European nation;

    b) Europe has a very real task ahead of itself in trying to create a definition of European that can also make space for Muslim immigrants to acculturate and become European Muslims instead of Middle Eastern and African Muslims who happen to be living in Africa; [I know that there’s a long history of Islam in Europe, but it has either been in eastern/central Europe, and distant from the Western European countries that define what the European Union does, or it’s been invasive/contentious, as in the case of Spain]

    c) It is not unjust to say that there are principles that are intrinsic to being European that are worth defending that are at odds with a constructed idea of the Muslim immigrant in Europe, and that the contructed idea of the Muslim immigrant has sufficient basis in fact to warrant targeted and policy-level action to ‘defend’ European-ness;

    d) The accomodation of Muslim immigrants into European society will not just involve legalistic application of laws that express European ideals, but will involve cultural transformation, and more transformation for the immigrants than for Europe. This is true both because of the difficulty of simply applying many of those laws to an insular subculture, and because of probable intrinsic dissonance between the original culture of the immigrant group and the dominant culture which they seek to, or will be forced to, integrate with.

  41. “Anyway, I’m not discounting syncretism, I’m saying that Europeans looking to preserve an idea of Europe are entitled to fight back against a particular strain of syncretism that compromises things they hold dear that I think feminists, *myself included*, should hold dear as well. In fact, I’m encouraging syncretism… on the part of the alienated muslim subculture.”

    oooo…. POOR European colonial powers, have to “fight back” against the much less powerless cultures they oppressed and exploited so long. Those EVIL anti-feminist minarets! Oh no, someone might have a heart attack looking at them, they are so *foreign!*

    There are common problems with the popular interpretation of Islam, which can VERY easily be linked with the lower socioeconomic level of many of it’s practitioners, which partly is due to colonial interference. Poorer Christians are also likely to be more reactionarily conservative, and to be against progressive social issues, etc. Just look at the witch burnings, extreme homophobia, and other killings in areas of Africa which are primarily populated by evangelical Christians. These intolerant behaviors are not tied to “o.O scary Islam” but people who have been mistreated economically by the “big powers” who now decide that the best way to deal with this is to *BAN Freakin’ MINARETS!*

    You don’t see the insanity?

    1. oo…. POOR European colonial powers, have to “fight back” against the much less powerless cultures they oppressed and exploited so long. Those EVIL anti-feminist minarets! Oh no, someone might have a heart attack looking at them, they are so *foreign!*oo

      Personally, I think minarets should be banned because they are clearly phallic symbols. Also, they should raze the Eiffel Tower. In the name of feminism.

  42. But Rebecca, this conversation isn’t happening at a theoretical level. The issue with much of the backlash against Muslims in Europe is one of tolerance. I’m not saying that theoretical brown people can’t be tolerant, I’m saying that there are large groups of intolerant people in Europe and Europeans are doing some racist things in a poorly-assembled attempt to conduct the more-reasonable fight back against the encroachment of intolerance, like anti-gay violence in the Netherlands by Muslims.

    Then they should institute an ideological test at the border, not a racial one.

  43. @ Jill

    Two things. First, thank you for trying to return the whole discussion away from the attempt being made to dicuss only big picture intellectualized concepts of culture and remind people that the whole damned point was that the claim was made that it is unfortunate that Europeans are afraid they might be hated by people they are hating on and taking incoherent offensive action against.

    That said. I’m also on board with the banning of minarets and the razing of the Eiffel Tower. Not because they are phallic symbols but because I have an overall irrational fear of tall pointy things. I think it comes from the time I hurried my brother out of a plane while we were parachuting and he was impaled on a steeple…

  44. a) The Swiss may be fumbling their attempt at it, but there’s nothing intrinsically unjust about trying to preserve a cultural character for a European nation;

    I dunno, I think there is something intrinsically unjust about levying the violence of the state against a group for not meeting certain cultural characteristics.

    At best, I think the threshold has to be incredibly high to justify using the state against others. Everyone here (nearly everyone?), I imagine, would agree that minarets don’t meet that threshold. I’d also argue that a lot of what European countries do to force cultural conformity through the levying of state power doesn’t meet that threshold either. If the state is going to suppress the activities of others, a clear and compelling reason beyond “it isn’t part of national identity” needs to be made.

  46. @P.T. Smith

    AAHH, pointy things! That is a bad story. Definitely we need to ban steeples, obelisks, minarets, the Eiffel Tower, cell phone towers, the Space Needle, and…. oh, I’m running out of ideas, but I’m SURE there’s stuff I’m forgetting…

  47. @SlackerInc.

    I mean, would anyone here want to live permanently in any of the nations in the world inhabited primarily by Muslims?

    I would. Okay, so I’m not a woman. What about a large number of Arab and Muslim women? Or can they never be feminists?

    Yeah. I’m dismissing what you’re saying out of hand- because it’s pathetically textbook.

    @The Flash

    You need a better grasp of nuance and less ego before you start attacking me, and not just my ideas.

    This? Really? From the guy who was harping on “Chemist” a few comments ago. Get the 2X4 out of your eye.

    The debate over what constitutes European, and whether religious Muslims can be Europeans, dates way back to Ataturk, who said that yes, religious Islam is most definitely at odds with being European.

    Yeah, the man that banned people’s personal expression of religion and used violence to enforce it because of his personal obsessions. I think you’ll find Attaturk’s legacy is hardly uncontroversial. Your examples betray your sentiments.

    You write that ethnicity is fake

    Fake? Learn to characterize my arguments correctly. I said it was imaginary, and a trick of the mind. It is exactly that. Are you saying that ethnicity is a real thing? That it’s not a human pattern-recognition at work? Ethno-nationalism didn’t exist until fairly recently. Race was an invention of the Enlightenment era. It’s not simply being reductionist, I’m pointing out that these arguments and requests for “preservation” have no intrinsic merit such that they can come at the cost of freedoms and rights. Architecture is art, art is expression, freedom of expression is more important than European-ness.

    Being European involves assuming the historical-intellectual mantle of the European enlightenment (explicitly or implicitly) and of appreciating the tolerance taught by the experiences of the world wars.

    So Muslims are incapable of this? Nononono! Sorry, Middle-Eastern Muslims are intrinsically incapable of this. I don’t mean to mischaracterize you. Did you miss the part where most Swiss Muslims are in fact from the Balkans?

    Come on! Really? Is this what you’re arguing?

    Finally, integration and marginalization are not mutually exclusive.

    Yes they are! They’re fucking antonyms for cripessake! Also, I’m not talking about assimilation. If I wanted to talk about assimilation, I’d have said assimilation. In sociological terms, assimilation is a specific thing, and it would mean that Jews cease being Jews in order to become German. YOU are the one confusing assimilation with integration, not me. (In short, look stuff up before you say stupid things.) Integration does not exist where one group is marginalized, and where that group’s ability to identify as part of a larger group is constantly called into question. That’s called being a second-class citizen, and that’s hardly “integrated,” because there’s no intersection of the common good. Now Germany was moving towards integration before the Nazis, certainly, but it wasn’t there. Einstein was constantly berating Haber for trying so hard to be “a good German” well before the Nazis came to power. He felt it was a lost cause for a reason.

    Then again, here I am educating you against your will again. I really am stupid.

  48. I mean, would anyone here want to live permanently in any of the nations in the world inhabited primarily by Muslims? Ask yourself that before you reject what I’m saying out of hand.

    Er… Well, I’ve lived in Jordan and the UAE, and while Jordan was extremely hard on me, I know a number of Western expats in Jordan, both male and female, who love it and would never leave.

    You’re also pretty much assuming that there aren’t any Muslims who are reading this thread. Which is pretty rude, imho. They’re not just “those people over there,” for many of us non-Muslims, they also happen to be friends and colleagues.

  49. “So Muslims are incapable of this? Nononono! Sorry, Middle-Eastern Muslims are intrinsically incapable of this. I don’t mean to mischaracterize you. Did you miss the part where most Swiss Muslims are in fact from the Balkans? ”

    I didn’t say they weren’t capable of it. I said the cultures of origin for these groups probably have aspects which are intrinsically at odds with European values and there needs to be a break from their cultures of origin and assumption of the mantle of a new European Muslim culture that is still nascent but that is definitively European.

    I’m tired of your excessive use of dickering over language as a proxy for a real argument about ideas. I’m also tired of treating the status of the Jews in pre-Shoah Germany as central to the point that European identities are intrinsically geneological. European countries agonize over their obligations to people whose families have not lived in the subject country in centuries. Many countries have a right of return or a right to citizenship for people whose families left the country in question generations ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_return
    Take a look at Greece and Ireland in particular.

    My point about the Jews in Germany was that even when you are a participant in mainstream life in European countries, those countries still look at membership in their cultural-ethnic group as subject to a geneological qualifier.

    Also, I’m bothered by your insistence on academic language (suggested by the site you linked to) regarding “integration,” but you proclaim angrily (unless I’m misreading your tone) that your use of terms like “illusion” and “trick of our minds” isn’t supposed to mean fake, but rather the academic term “constructed,” which I assumed you would have used if you had meant it. Also, identity being connected to place of origin dates back at least to Herodotus or Thucydides.

    You don’t know everything. Slow down and don’t be a jerk, because, in any internet debate, you’re going to say at least one thing that’s wrong, or that’s right but misses the point, and it makes you look weak when you’re too emphatic about those things. A little big picture, here?

  50. Flex:

    I get what you’re saying here about using the state to prohibit cultural expression. (With “I dunno, I think there is something intrinsically unjust about levying the violence of the state against a group for not meeting certain cultural characteristics.”)

    The thing is, we do allow this in vaguer terms. Isn’t “Historic District” just another term for “you can only build here if what you’re building is within our cultural tradition”? The Swiss are just being honest, here. So I have a hard time buying the idea that it is totally out of bounds for a just society when the ‘violence of the state’ is more narrowly focused at identifying the encroachment of cultural symbols that belong to what the Swiss, and many European government essentially consider a fifth column (both as an agent for bad cultural change, which is fair, and as a toehold for terrorists, which is racist).

  51. I don’t really see the connection between buildings and swiss culture, myself. Although Muslims and Muslim culture are pretty much always present where minarets get built, only an idiot would think that the absence of minarets would make Muslims and Muslim culture go away. Minarets /= Muslims. Minarets /= Muslim thought. They’re just minarets.

  52. I didn’t say they weren’t capable of it. I said the cultures of origin for these groups probably have aspects which are intrinsically at odds with European values and there needs to be a break from their cultures of origin and assumption of the mantle of a new European Muslim culture that is still nascent but that is definitively European.

    Unlike Christianity, which is all about the secularism and tolerance.

    The thing is, we do allow this in vaguer terms. Isn’t “Historic District” just another term for “you can only build here if what you’re building is within our cultural tradition”?

    It wasn’t skyscrapers that Switzerland banned.

    Now please stop being condescending and make some real arguments that don’t boil down to “I don’t like people who are different.”

  54. Rebecca, Christianity poses exactly zero threat of subverting the progressive values that mark what we think of as modern Europe.

    And “historic districts” don’t always block new development. sometimes they just require approval by a community board. Look, obviously historic districts don’t operate the way this does, and have at least a superficial purpose beyond xenophobia/racism, but they end up being used in substantially the same way all oevr the world. We’re hearing about this now because Switzerland decided to get explicit about what they’re trying to counter.

    Okay, obviously what Switzerland did is wrong, and I’ve been, as Jill pointed out, playing a little bit of Devil’s Advocate. Real question, though: what should Europe do to avoid a demographic crunch that ends up subverting the progressive values that have taken root in Europe? For that matter, what can Europe do to curb the problems that the large immigrant groups have brought with them, like spiking antisemitic attacks by Muslim immigrant youth throughout Europe? On the one hand, you could just treat the symptoms, but that just pushes off the problem to the next generation, while the divide between Muslim immigrants and ethnic Europeans just gets more and more contentious. One alternative to what Switzerland did is to take a more facistic, equally racist tack of monitoring schools, mosques and other institutions to determine if they are encouraging behavior that runs contrary to European values of human rights, feminism and tolerance, or to monitor them for indications that other laws are being broken, like laws enforcing monogamy.

    Let’s also consider the implications of trying to apply a tack like that in the face of modern notions of specific acts, like hipsters who “practice” “polyamory”. Is it racist to have a problem with Muslim polygamy but not with trendy 28 year olds with awesome not-for-profit or arts-sector jobs who live in more-than-two-person relationships (or Tilda Swinton)? I posit that it isn’t, because the cultural context and the accompanying behavior reflect a deeper commitment to progressive values, which is really the point: not compliance with any one thing, but a Wittgensteinian “family resemblance” concept of values. That’s another problem, then: when do the divergences reflect a cultural rift, and when do they represent an innovation or variety within a group? Do people who may not identify as European have a say in what counts as European?

  55. @ The Flash

    C’mon. You complain about The Chemist’s excessive use of academic language, then you try, and fail, to use Wittgenstein? His concept of “family resemblance” does not apply to what you said in the slightest. Family resemblance applies to something like “games” or “colors.” Within games, there are lots of different types of games, and they all have some things in common and some differences. It does not mean that within a single game you have different rules for different people, which is what your attempted example suggests.

    I know this isn’t necessarily getting at the point of your argument, but it says a whole lot about your style and overall content.

  56. Rebecca, Christianity poses exactly zero threat of subverting the progressive values that mark what we think of as modern Europe.

    Exactly the same threat level as Islam, you mean. What’s that I hear you say? Islam condones domestic violence and polygamy? Oh wait, Christianity does too.

    It’s right-wing values that need to be countered, not one particular religion.

    And “historic districts” don’t always block new development. sometimes they just require approval by a community board. Look, obviously historic districts don’t operate the way this does, and have at least a superficial purpose beyond xenophobia/racism, but they end up being used in substantially the same way all oevr the world. We’re hearing about this now because Switzerland decided to get explicit about what they’re trying to counter.

    Which doesn’t change my point at all. Switzerland is banning one kind of building because it doesn’t fit the “traditional Swiss look,” while allowing many other kinds of buildings that also do not fit the traditional Swiss look because those kinds of buildings are not built by Muslims.

    Okay, obviously what Switzerland did is wrong, and I’ve been, as Jill pointed out, playing a little bit of Devil’s Advocate. Real question, though: what should Europe do to avoid a demographic crunch that ends up subverting the progressive values that have taken root in Europe?

    As we’ve already said, “Muslim” and “progressive” are not mutually exclusive, please try again.

    For that matter, what can Europe do to curb the problems that the large immigrant groups have brought with them, like spiking antisemitic attacks by Muslim immigrant youth throughout Europe?

    Religious bigotry is a problem? That’s not what you’ve been telling us here.

    One alternative to what Switzerland did is to take a more facistic, equally racist tack of monitoring schools, mosques and other institutions to determine if they are encouraging behavior that runs contrary to European values of human rights, feminism and tolerance, or to monitor them for indications that other laws are being broken, like laws enforcing monogamy.

    I don’t have a problem with the government monitoring schools. I actively support government oversight of education, as I believe people have the right to one. I do not think that only Muslim schools need to be surveyed. Which schools are turning out all these racist Swiss, after all?

  57. @The Flash

    Leaving aside whether or not minarets represent a “fifth column” type of situation, I’ll agree that when it comes to the application of state power for most people the issue is finding the dividing line between appropriate and inappropriate. My thoughts here are twofold:

    1. Putting my cards on the table: I’m a philosophical anarchist (I can’t make claims to living in a bunker off the grid or anything), so I don’t recognize the state as having ANY right to enforce cultural norms (or anything else for that matter). The point is just that it’s worth at least considering that not everyone is working from the same assumption about what powers the state should be able to exercise, so it may not be obvious or self evident that there’s any kind of right to use government to promote or maintain a country’s culture (my initial response was to the comment that a country “obviously” or “clearly” had at least some right to enforce cultural norms, iirc).

    2. Even assuming the legitimacy of the state, most people still have limits on what the state may do. Thus, it becomes a matter of degree. I don’t think that historical district protections are the same as banning minarets, since the former doesn’t intrinsically oppress the cultural expression of another group while the latter certainly does. Regardless of what continent you live on, I believe that doing the latter – unless there’s a compelling safety or rights issue at stake – is wrong (e.g. assuming the legitimacy of the state, we can still ban practices which represent actual safety or rights threats to others).

    In other words, I second what’s already been said here repeatedly, but saw an opportunity to make the position a little more tedious.

  58. *grin* Chemist was being a jerk about subtle shades of meaning on the word “integration” and linking to a social science dictionary while metaphorically having a seizure. I’m just using a philosophical concept that expresses that “things which may be thought to be connected by one essential common feature may in fact be connected by a series of overlapping similarities, where no one feature is common to all.”

    Anyway, Rebecca, I think we’re talking past each other a little because you want Europe’s actions to be in comportment with a system that can be evenly applied at the level of principle. I’m not convinced that principle is all that matters here: there’s a current reality that Christianity is relatively impotent at the political level in Europe, and Christians aren’t out in the streets militating for social change. Meanwhile, the same can’t be said about Muslim immigrant groups in Europe– Christianity and Islam aren’t comparable in this situation.

    Also, I’ve been implicitly saying that Islam and progressive values aren’t intrinsically opposed at all. What fall into conflict are progressive values and African/Middle Eastern/Balkan Muslim cultures and values– I believe emphatically that there can be a progressive Islam just as there can be a progressive Christianity. However, that’s not, as far as I know, the dominant cultural force in European Muslim immigrant groups. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

  59. The Flash, ‘seizure’ should not be used as a metaphor for anything. As has been pointed out, the dominant cultural force everywhere is not progressive, this is not something particular to African/Middle Eastern/Balkan Muslim cultures or European Muslim immigrant groups. Your characterisation of poly people is also irritating me – and it’s curious how you’ve placed Muslims as separate from ‘trendy 28 year olds with awesome not-for-profit or arts-sector jobs’. And… oh, other people have taken apart lots of your other points, so I’ll leave it there.

  60. Intolerant Christians are powerful and militant in the United States. Their power has increased over the past few decades, as has the social legitimacy of dominionism, including dominionist conceptions of warfare–as we have waged two wars. They’ve used the force of law to oppress other groups of people, including nonbelievers, queer people, and women. They’ve incited and committed acts of terrorism, even if our government and media have largely refused to label them as such.

    So, should we crack down on Christianity? Make it illegal to wear crucifixes at school? Modesty clothing on the street? Ban certain kinds of Christian architectural tropes, or crosses on steeples, or steeples? Abolish Christian homeschooling? Shut down churches that spread Christian hate?

  61. Chally:

    My characterization of poly people was totally sarcastic, and I recognize I may not have built up the buffer to employ that kind of rhetoric. I will take issue, though, with your characterization that the dominant cultural force everywhere is not progressive; Ther eare lots of places where dominant cultural forces tend to be progressive. This isn’t only true in town/city-level communities, but also at the national level in scandinavian nations and many European nations. They may not be socialist utopias, but as people often point out in debates about, say, healthcare reform, Europe is leagues ahead of the U.S. on some issues, and, as someone else pointed out above, the most feminist national policies in the world are housed in European nations.

    Really? Can’t even qualify “seizure” as “metaphoric”? Too ableist? How about “paroxysms”?

  62. You’re jumping around from cultural to legal aspects. Obviously those interact, but talk about what you want to talk about, yeah? For instance, Switzerland may have an image of enlightened diverse European nation culturally speaking, but that hasn’t stopped them from this rubbish on the legal side of things. More to the point, you’re setting up African/Middle Eastern/Balkan Muslim cultures or European Muslim immigrant groups specifically as not progressive. Do you seriously not understand how that is problematic?

    ‘Really? Can’t even qualify “seizure” as “metaphoric”? Too ableist? How about “paroxysms”?’

    Try again. Or, rather, please don’t.

  63. Okay, I get your point. I’m showing my privilege and exoticizing Muslim cultures in my characterization of them as regressive. But I think there’s a certain amount of willful blindness in resisting characterization of African/Middle Eastern/Balkan Muslim cultures as less progressive than dominant European culture. If you want to look at legal cultures, then the appropriate comparison is to the governments in the countries of origin for these immigrant groups. If you want to look at social culture, then the comparison is aptly made to the European domestic groups. Either way, I think modern European culture comes out as demonstrating much more commitment to what Western progressives hold dear than do the dominant social/legal cultures of the African/Middle Eastern/Balkan Muslim populations in Western/Central Europe. This makes sense… Western progressive values grew up in the West/Europe. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still believe in, advocate for, and defend those values and the cultures that demonstrate commitment to them.

  64. Rebecca, Christianity poses exactly zero threat of subverting the progressive values that mark what we think of as modern Europe.

    Maybe. Wouldn’t say so about places like Italy.

    “Seizure,” though, can make for a good metaphor.

  65. I’m not sure if you’re trying to rile me up with a further ableist metaphor or not, but if that was intentional, can you please stop?

    I don’t understand how a Western progressive assessment of the cultures of African/Middle Eastern/Balkan Muslim populations in Western/Central Europe as not as progressive as modern European culture(s) means that it’s okay for the assessors to marginalise those groups? I mean, if you’re saying that the Swiss law is wrong, all I’m really getting from what you’re saying now is Muslims, broadly speaking, from those particular social cultures don’t have progressive values as determined by white Westerners, which is… for a start, a) not something I necessarily accept and b) not really relevant to the point of discussion here in any case, which is the Swiss law. This kind of sentiment comes up again and again from people who ID as Western progressives, and there is a really problematic tendency to exoticise Muslims (always focussing on those specific backgrounds, and placing the popular non-progressive image as the central rule) in the name of progressive discourse, which is of course really not progressive at all. Have you thought about who gets to decide whether these populations really do conform sufficiently to progressive ideologies? In my experience it’s largely white, non-Muslim Westerners (not saying you necessarily fit all of those categories yourself) who act as though no one else in the conversation could be Muslim. I mean, who is this ‘we’ you’re talking about?

    How about we direct the conversation back to the problems in this law, rather than the scary scary Muslims who will surely make everything all regressive, please?

  66. It’s impressive how something that I’d have thought would be fairly simple (a racist law is passed in Switzerland; Ross Douthat writes yet another ghastly column) turns into HOLY SHIT THOSE PEOPLE IS SCARY the Wall of Text Edition. We’ve got someone all explaining how Muslims aren’t good for Decent European Values (and gratuitously using ableist metaphor and getting cutesy-defensive about it when called on it) and that’s somehow okay? It’s not racist because why?

  67. kaninchenzero, it is racist and Islamophobic. I’m not sure how much stomach I have for responding to comments that violate the comments policy. I’ll let or not let through any further comments with such content as I see fit, and if there are some I don’t let through I’ll leave them for Jill to deal with, seeing as it’s her thread. Let me just say to any Muslim readers that I know this thread must be quite upsetting, and I am sorry for that.

  68. Being Swiss myself – and not particularly proud of my country at the moment – I would say that the main problem with the law that has just passed is that it does nothing to resolve any potential difficulties concerning the integration of Muslims; nor does it restrict immigration in any way. By forbidding the construction of minarets, the Swiss have broken religious equality. It is very paradoxical that peoples’ fear of terrorism – terrorism itself being virtually absent from the country – should be applied to a religious symbol such as a minaret, which in turn becomes, quite arbitrarily, a symbol for terrorism. Swiss Muslims can still practice their religion freely, yet they cannot build minarets… the object of the vote itself fails to make sense to me. What has this got to do with anything?

  69. *grin* Chemist was being a jerk about subtle shades of meaning on the word “integration” and linking to a social science dictionary while metaphorically having a seizure. I’m just using a philosophical concept that expresses that “things which may be thought to be connected by one essential common feature may in fact be connected by a series of overlapping similarities, where no one feature is common to all.”

    But your example wasn’t “values,” which that would correctly apply to. It was specific right, given to one group of people, not another.

    You grin at your willful misuse of a philosophical concept in order to distract away from meaningful discussion…because all of your responses consist of attempted distractions from the core issue.

  71. But your example wasn’t “values,” which that would correctly apply to. It was specific right, given to one group of people, not another.

    Values does come in here as well. How are liberal values expressed by a law clearly intended to single out one religion as unworthy of respect? What’s the laicite-based rationale for banning minarets? What do minarets have to do with condoning or preventing violence, even in theory? Who is refusing to call something by its right name, here?

  72. piny,

    You are either being incredibly unclear and I am misinterpreting you, or you haven’t actually read any part of the discussion I’m having with The Flash. Please either elaborate on your point or reread/read my exchange with Flash.

  73. Anne pretty much said what I had in mind. I voted no and was shocked when that law passed. The whole campaign by the rightwing populist Swiss People’s Party was utterly racist and islamophobic, it made my skin crawl – and I can’t believe 58% of voters actually bought into the fear-mongering!

    I also can’t believe how anyone can think that the building of minarets will lead to the introduction of sharia law, but apparently a lot of normally progressive women voted ‘yes’ for exactly that reason. I am very disappointed, to say the least – and frightened, too, because some SVP politicians actually talk about quitting the European Human Rights Convention just so we can implement the minaret ban. 🙁

    (Incidentially, Switzerland is not part of the European Union – which in this case I regret, because I don’t think this kind of legislation would be legal in EU countries – even if quite a lot of EU voters would actually be behind it, I’m afraid. Islamophobia is widely-spread in Europe, hiding behind the mantle of “Western/Christian values”, “cultural preservation”, but also “feminism”.)

  74. The whole thing with The Flash isn’t worth reading. Lots and lots and lots of words. Best I can tell it’s designed to obscure bigotry against Muslims, immigrants, brown people, poly folk, disabled people, and is pretty disrespectful of the readership here what with dominating the ever-living shit out of this here thread with much much more of the same.

    piny is clear enough. The Flash has been arguing at length that Muslims in Europe don’t assimilate and are a threat to fine upstanding liberal Euro-values. They’re violent scary people and they’re famous for harming women. The law against building minarets is also clear: MUSLIMS ARE NOT WELCOME HERE. Folk can try to pretty it up all they want but it’s straight bigotry. As are laws and regulations prohibiting hijab and niqab and chador. If Islam is such a threat to progressive values what about Roman Catholicism? Orthodox Christianity? The Church of England? Are y’all gonna ban spires and rose windows any time soon?

    Not that my country does much better. But I’m pissed with us too.

  75. P.T.-

    I think you’re taking my example too narrowly, and I think I may have expressed it poorly. My point was that we regard traditional religious polygamy as something that is beyond the pale of a just society, because it has all sorts of bad antifeminist implications that routinely accompany it. At the same time, polyamory as practiced by card-carrying members of the Left may have some superficial resemblance to religious polygamy, but feminists mostly honor it as the exercise of someone’s sexuality– i.e. a Muslim immigrant with three wives is probably doing something antifeminist, but a member of the Park Slope Food Co-op with a “No Blood For Oil” sign in the back of his or her closet and a well-read copy of The Second Sex sitting on the nightstand can be polyamorous without tripping too many antifeminist alarms. My use of family resemblance was to express that polygamy is not a single defining characteristic of threat to progressive values, because, expressed in the right context, it is an expression of those values. Instead, when we talk about progressive values, we have to be aware that there’s a nexus of values that has no single unifying thread, but rather is identified by a cloud of characteristics that overlap to form an identifiable group when taken as a whole. Somewhat like Wittgenstein’s example of defining the word “game,” where no single unifying characteristic defines a game, but we know what a game is by reference to a set of characteristics that, together, create an idea of what a game is even if there is no single characteristic embodied in every game.

  76. @Chemist: I object in the strongest possible terms to your characterisation of me as racist. I am as anti-racist a person as you’ll meet (even “aced” the Project Implicit test). But I am an atheist who has tolerance for religion< only to the degree that it remains separate from the secular and political sphere.

    Sure, fundies in this country also run afoul of my standards. But they are already U.S. citisens and there's not a lot we can do about that at this point, whereas in Europe they do still have the ability to restrict immigration. This has nothing to do with "brown people": I am perfectly happy, for instance, to open up immigration to Mexicans whose Catholicism does not seem to prevent them from supporting progressive politicians. And I would welcome with open arms refugees from Muslim nations who were coming to the West specifically to escape the conservative social norms in their home countries.

    But I see no reason why people in progressive Western nations need to welcome immigrants who routinely oppress women and support barbaric sharia law (as a majority of British Muslims told pollsters they do).

  77. @ kaninchenzero

    piny isn’t clear, at all. Piny quoted me, then seemingly tried to say that I said values had nothing to do with the situation. Piny seems to have attempted to quote me disagreeing with Flash as a way of putting me on the same side.

    @ Flash

    Okay, so now you want your family resemblence term to be “threat to progressive values” and one of the qualities to be polygamy. Okay, so we can all be on board that polygamy is not necessarily a characteristic of threat to progressive values. Guess what? No one was talking about polygamy. No one except you. You made one false move by switching minarets for polygamy; then you made another by obscuring the point through intellectualizing. My problem with your whole style of discussion still stands. It is based in false intellectual steps away from the core issue; it is arguing through legerdemain.

  78. @Natalia #60, you’re right: when I said “any of us” I should have considered that some Muslims might be reading. However, if a feminist would prefer to live in a predominantly Muslim nation rather than in the West, it must (it seems to me) be in spite of the cultural norms for women in these countries, and not because of them. And more generally, I take the Hitchens/Dawkins approach to religion; I don’t mince words or pretend that I have more respect for it than I do (which is very little).

  79. What you are saying, The Flash, is still racist. It hasn’t ever stopped being racist. You go on justifying your bigotry however you like but saying progressive progressive progressive doesn’t make it magically not-bigotry.

  80. Ok. I have a job and other things to attend to and clearly have not been monitoring this thread as closely as it should have been monitored. So! We are now turning the conversation back to, as Chally said, “the problems in this law, rather than the scary scary Muslims who will surely make everything all regressive, please?”

    Further comments that are totally far afield and/or racist will be deleted.

  81. (I would like to plead with the moderators to allow me to at least make a statement to defend myself against the allegation that my views on immigration are racist. Isn’t that only fair?)

    I welcome the immigration of people of any race or ethnicity and generally strongly oppose “nativist” political movements of the sort you hear on right wing talk radio. But I think secular, progressive societies like those found in Western Europe and Scandinavia are entirely within their rights to resist the importation of immigrants whose religiosity threatens to undermine those secular progressive values. I would absolutely say the same, btw, if there were significant numbers of white evangelicals wanting to emigrate from the U.S. to Europe.

  82. kaninchenzero 12.9.2009 at 9:36 am
    …If Islam is such a threat to progressive values what about Roman Catholicism? Orthodox Christianity? The Church of England? Are y’all gonna ban spires and rose windows any time soon?

    That comparison keeps coming up and it makes no sense.

    Christianity and other religions have problems, to be sure. But they’re already in place and, in many cases, are linked to the state religion of the country in question. When the vast majority your population is Christian, you’re not going to change that through limited immigration. The reason that Islam is being treated differently w/r/t immigration is, in part, because it is possible to have an effect.

    Switzerland doesn’t have that many Muslim citizens. It has a choice whether to have more or not, and (if it lets more in) how to treat them. Immigration policy w/r/t Muslims may have a large effect on the overall Islamic presence in Switzerland (currently ~ 4%), while immigration policy w/r/t Christians will not; the country is already more than 80% Christian.

    That doesn’t mean it’s the right choice, or a good choice. But it makes no sense to treat Islam and Christianity as equivalent in the Swiss immigration context.

  83. Sailorman, look at the recent anti-gay legislation proposed and supported and pushed through by CHRISTIANS in Uganda. Than tell me how in the WORLD that could possibly be *less* objectionable than a group of people who want to build spires with kind bulbous shaped bottoms on them.

    Good luck.

  84. “spires with kind bulbous shaped bottoms on them”

    I’m fairly certain you meant “kinda” but it really makes me smile to think of them as kind.

  85. Uh. I’m European, and while i’m not that closely following actual population statistic Ross Douthat seems to have even less idea about that (and our continent in general)

    Really, linking Lisbon treaty to Swiss referenda or Switzerland in general? It’s worse than some anti-integration politicans that routinely point to EU when Council of Europe, totally different organistation, or ECHR does anything. They do it on purpose, he probably because of ignorance. And really, religious tolerance and SWITZERLAND??? Did he learn ANY European history? Rest of his examples aren’t better.

    So, we have bad premise, and then it gets worse.

    Repeating the usual Eurosceptic stuff about undemocratic process of European integration, totally missing the point of integration of COUNTRIES (for f**k sake, who is going to integrate them if not elected representatives???)

    And he is ignorant on both the specifics of different countries muslim populations and muslim integration in general (really, France? The riots were class/race issues, not much different from the Blacks situation in USA). Or Germany’s Turs/Kurds? Dude, integration doesn’t happen overnight, it takes generations. And it actually IS hapenning. You do understand the problem with honor killings is exactly because the younger generation is integrating?

    The only thing he is right is the political backlash. But, seriously, this guy based his article on book (“the best to date” WTF?!?) by Chistopher Caldwell? The one from Weekly “Far-right propaganda outlet” Standart? Seriously, these guys have no idea. Jill, why did you even bother, really?

    On a side note, wasn’t NYT liberal newspaper? I was kind of surprised to see article based on Weekly Standart there…

    That said, Swiss law is extremely stupid and counter-productive. I’m not a lawyer, but i wonder if it goes against ECHR and as such would be subject to overturning. I’d hope so.

    Hmm, looking at this, i made a rant apparently… i won’t say anything about comments except: religious persecution is not racism. Why do you guys keep saying that???

  86. Tomek: You say that religious persecution is not racism. It’s one of the things I kept thinking about as I read this thread. Can islamophobian be assimilated as racism?

    When we say islam, we usually think Middle East – Saudi Arabia, Iran and so on – and I’m wondering to what extent this assumption motivated the vote here in Switzerland. The outrageous political campaign in favour of the ban depicted a plethora of tall black minarets with a woman in burka at the forefront, thus encouraging the confusion. The fact that most Muslims in the country come from the Balkans was virtually ignored, and the ban aimed at the fundamentalists we are afraid of but do not see. The fact that many Swiss know Muslims personally or even work with them did not seem relevant, because the imagined threat doesn’t come from them but from the Middle East.

    This then would indicate racism rather than mere islamophobia. But I may also be wrong in my assumption that this is the dynamic that motivated the vote.

  87. Christianity and other religions have problems, to be sure. But they’re already in place and, in many cases, are linked to the state religion of the country in question. When the vast majority your population is Christian, you’re not going to change that through limited immigration. The reason that Islam is being treated differently w/r/t immigration is, in part, because it is possible to have an effect.

    Nor will you have an easy time freeing yourself from Christian-centric bigotry. QED.

    Right-wing Christianity did not always have either the social power or the social legitimacy it does now. While Christians are a social majority in many countries, reactionary Christians don’t have either the numbers or the actual consensus. If our government saw Christian fundamentalists as dangerous to the American way of life, they’d have a lot less power; their beliefs would be reflected in less of our legislation. To be sure, you can draw a line from approbation to power, but they’re not quite the same thing. The mainstreaming of stuff like lachrymal seroconversion requires a lot of help.

    Second, it’s not more appropriate to discriminate against one religion and its adherents because that demographic is more powerless. It’s more reprehensible to enact laws designed to marginalize a population because you know that a minority is incapable of defending itself. And it’s dangerous to a culture of tolerance to decide that a religion deserves respect only if it’s powerful enough to demand it.

    And again: what precisely do minarets have to do with violent fundamentalism? Why is this larger issue at issue, when what actually happens is that western, Christian countries keep enacting laws against religious behaviors that are neither fundamentalist nor violent? When they are not actually demonstrating that vaunted tolerance, but rather demanding protection from the sight of religious and cultural difference?

    Sure, it’s difficult for a bunch of white Christians to distinguish between a legitimate interest in tolerance and an illegitimate interest in racial and cultural segregation. Especially if religious and racial homogeneity is part of their culture. It’s difficult for any state to balance cultural plurality and civic identity.

    But this law, in effect and in intent, is about an illegitimate need to preserve racial and cultural segregation. So shouldn’t we help the Swiss out by saying so?

  88. @Anne

    Keep in mind i’m not native speaker, but it seems to me that’s simply the wrong word. Like, using “racism” for homophobic or sexist attitudes? Even if there would be racist component, it would be using wrong word, still. And really loaded at the same time.

    And since the topic is Switzerland muslims, IIRC, from former Yugoslavia, it’s not racist at all. I mean, Switzerland. Country with 4 languages. French, German and Italian. Ok, i’m sure there are 3 nutjobs that think Swiss are a “race”. And 4 more that think Southern Slavs are of different one, but…

    That said, there were two comments from Swiss here that mentioned the heavily xenophobic (with racist undertones) no-campaign. So even though the ban doesn’t cross race, it’s aim might be drawing from racism. Although i simply don’t know what’s more important. Certainly, islamophobia is much more common in media than racism, but that doesn’t say anything about people attitudes. However, even if it’s directed against middle east it doesn’t necessairly mean it’s motivated by racism. First, people might actually differentiate between Balkan and Middle-Eastern Islam (two different kinds of animals), second, it’s sort of congruence/confirmation bias – we should find something that can disprove it too, like checking for attitudes for Black or Indian (dark) immigrants, where race is obvious and religion is not (or at least isn’t Muslim).

    And keeping in mind that racism doesn’t exclude religious prejudices.

    “when what actually happens is that western, Christian countries keep enacting laws against religious behaviors that are neither fundamentalist nor violent? When they are not actually demonstrating that vaunted tolerance, but rather demanding protection from the sight of religious and cultural difference?”
    You mean like removing crucifixes from classrooms or forbidding wearing overt religious symbols in schools? Well, you know, it’s continent where religion is private and not public and it keeps in mind it’s religious persecutions and warfare history.

  89. Keep in mind i’m not native speaker, but it seems to me that’s simply the wrong word. Like, using “racism” for homophobic or sexist attitudes? Even if there would be racist component, it would be using wrong word, still. And really loaded at the same time.

    A good deal of Islamophobia is “oh no, brown people,” though.

    You mean like removing crucifixes from classrooms or forbidding wearing overt religious symbols in schools? Well, you know, it’s continent where religion is private and not public and it keeps in mind it’s religious persecutions and warfare history.

    Your first example is not like your second example.

  90. Not to get too incredibly atavistic, minarets play a symbolic role in a lot of the legends associated with the sieges of southeastern European cities in the Ottoman period of involvement in Europe, 1517-1923. The tale of a bugler’s miraculous warning cut off by an arrow on the castle wall of a Christian stronghold resurfaced in Muslim lands as the call of a muezzin cut off by an arrow. The ban is also reminiscent of the bans on church- and steeple-building by Christians in Muslim lands in the past, so part of the problem is the whole “tu quoque” problem of precedent and the fact that this evokes some very, very deep historical memory, 1683 and all that.

  91. You mean like removing crucifixes from classrooms or forbidding wearing overt religious symbols in schools? Well, you know, it’s continent where religion is private and not public and it keeps in mind it’s religious persecutions and warfare history.

    Where does the Pope live, Italy or Idaho? Is Notre Dame in Paris, Texas? Who built Vienna’s plague monument? Europe has festivals of religious observance, religious monuments, and religious buildings. The strong influence of religion in European history hasn’t resulted in a culture without religion. Italy still tithes.

    We had holy wars of conquest in the Americas, too.

    You can’t selectively prohibit the exercise of religion without implicitly promoting another belief system. And you don’t selectively prohibit the exercise of religion unless you have a stake in another belief system. If Switzerland truly were post-clannish xenophobic Christianity, then the minarets would not be offensive.

  92. @Rebecca
    “A good deal of Islamophobia is “oh no, brown people,” though.”
    It might be, There are white Muslims in Poland, both old (Tatars), and new (Chechen refugees), and while the latter indeed have a hard time, it’s most likely because they are foreigners. Good old xenophobia at work. Point is, it doesn’t actually disprove ‘islamophobia=racism’. We would need otherwise mainstream muslims having worse time, and i’m not knowledgeable enough about it.

    And racism (here) definitely exist. Religious prejudices do exist too. The problem is that it’s usually done by the same folks, so it’s hard to tell one from another. But i don’t think it’d good to lump everything into one “racism” bag.

    @Piny
    I worded it wrongly. It should be “private and public but not political”. This is about secularism (yes, that’s the idea that lies behind prohibition of religion ties to politics), and that was behind both the French and Italian cases. Mind you, Switzerland went in entirely different direction, with that referendum – but you said “western, Christian countries keep enacting laws against religious behaviors that are neither fundamentalist nor violent” and i don’t think there was another example. Certainly not these two, public schools aren’t places for religion.

  93. Obviously, the Swiss law is bigoted and stupid. No excuses for it.

    That being said, I want to contribute a little bit to the “Can Muslims be European?” debate that seems to be going on here, from a French perspective.

    The riots were never about Islam, they were about black and brown kids living in ghettoes who had wanted to integrate into French society but couldn’t. Burning cars is actually a French tradition on New Year’s Eve.

    On the other hand you also have gang-controlled Muslim neighborhoods in France where Shari’a law is enforced by the gangs, and anti-Semitic violence from French Muslims. The question is, how much of this is due to cultural traditions brought over from the immigrants’ original countries that would be kept no matter what, and how much is simply a reaction to being kept out of French society? I’ve met many French of Arabic descent, some Muslim, some non-religious, who were basically completely French in outlook. Not surprisingly, they were all economically successful, none of them were trapped in the cites. I think that when you have young people turning to a very conservative form of Islam you have to ask what’s pushing them to it–the normal thing is for immigrants’ children from traditionally conservative societies to integrate and become less conservative than their parents.

    Some politicians are trying to answer these questions, others are trying to just say Muslims are intrinsically scary so let’s keep them out or at the very least prevent them from looking Muslim by governmental fiat. Yet others are cultural relativists who will not even take Muslim immigrants or their descendants to task for breaking the law.

    Affirmative action in hiring is probably the answer. That and offering families a way to move out of the housing projects into neighborhoods that aren’t ghetto quarantines.

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