A Turning Tide in Europe as Islam Gains Ground
NEW YORK TIMES: Christopher Caldwell’s “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West” is a hot book presented under a cool, scholarly title. To observe that Mr. Caldwell’s rhetoric is “hot” is not to say that it is aggrieved or unruly. On the contrary, Mr. Caldwell, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and a columnist for The Financial Times, compiles his arguments patiently, twig by twig, and mostly with lucidity and intellectual grace and even wit.

But they are arguments one is not used to hearing put so baldly, at least from the West’s leading political journalists. Primary among them are these: Through decades of mass immigration to Europe’s hospitable cities and because of a strong disinclination to assimilate, Muslims are changing the face of Europe, perhaps decisively. These Muslim immigrants are not so much enhancing European culture as they are supplanting it. The products of an adversarial culture, these immigrants and their religion, Islam, are “patiently conquering Europe’s cities, street by street.”

Mr. Caldwell is a vivid writer, and like an action-movie hero he walks calmly away from his own detonations while fire swirls behind him. “Imagine that the West, at the height of the Cold War, had received a mass inflow of immigrants from Communist countries who were ambivalent about which side they supported,” he writes. “Something similar is taking place now.”

Muslim cultures “have historically been Europe’s enemies, its overlords, or its underlings,” he deposes. “Europe is wagering that attitudes handed down over the centuries, on both sides, have disappeared, or can be made to disappear. That is probably not a wise wager.” >>> Dwight Gardner | Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Christopher Caldwell: In Defence of the Right to Offend
FINANCIAL TIMES: The Netherlands has spent the past several weeks in a political crisis out of a novel by Borges. People are worried that a politician might say something he has already said. And they are divided over how to interpret a film that may not exist. Last August, the anti-immigration legislator, Geert Wilders, wrote in the daily De Volkskrant: “I’ve had enough of Islam in the Netherlands – not one more Muslim immigrant. I’ve had enough of Allah and Mohammed in the Netherlands – not one more mosque.” Mr Wilders, whose Freedom party controls nine of the 150 seats in the Dutch lower house, also urged banning the Koran, which he calls “the Islamic Mein Kampf ”.

But his announcement in late November that he would make a short film to that effect sent the government into a panic. The cabinet met in secret. It ordered foreign embassies to draw up evacuation plans in case of mob violence. It put the mayors of Dutch cities on alert. It arranged meetings with imams and other Muslim representatives, distancing itself from Mr Wilders’ positions. The interior, justice and foreign ministers summoned Mr Wilders to meetings, and the country’s terrorism co-ordinator warned him that he might have to leave the country for his own security. The government reportedly investigated whether it would be possible to block or delay Mr Wilders’s broadcast.

Not that there is anything illogical about taking precautions against radical Islam. When the director, Theo van Gogh, made a 10-minute film critical of Islam in 2004, he was murdered on the streets of Amsterdam by a Dutch-born Muslim. The printing of cartoons showing the prophet Mohammed in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten sparked deadly riots around the world. Each time a gauntlet is thrown down, someone will credibly promise violence in the name of Islam. Mr Wilders’ film idea was no exception. At the European parliament in Strasbourg last week, Ahmad Badr al-Din Hassoun, Grand Mufti of Syria, warned that Mr Wilders would be responsible for any “violence and bloodshed” that resulted from his film – and that the Dutch people would, in turn, be responsible for reining him in. Noor Farida Ariffin, the departing Malaysian ambassador, told De Volkskrant: “Compared to what I’m expecting, the riots over the Danish cartoons will look like a picnic.”

The climate has grown still more raw in the Netherlands lately. Ehsan Jami, the controversial leader of a new “Ex-Muslims Committee”, founded in protest against the Koranic prescription of death for apostasy, has allied himself with Mr Wilders. The municipal museum in the Hague cancelled an exhibition by the Iranian Dutch photographer, Sooreh Hera, who had planned to show two homosexuals wearing masks of Mohammed and his revered son-in-law, Ali. Mr Wilders wrote a triumphant op-ed in de Volkskrant this week asking people to imagine what would happen if he had made a film describing the Bible as “fascistic”: “Would Dutch embassies in countries where a lot of Christians live, like Germany and Belgium, have notified Dutch residents and dusted off their evacuation plans?”

Was Mr Wilders asserting a right to free speech? Or was he dressing up a gratuitous religious insult in constitutional language? He was doing both, of course. In their eagerness to keep Mr Wilders from airing his argument, the Dutch authorities helped make it for him. They were unable to admit that widespread worries about violence stem from a problem (extremism in the Muslim world) and not just from an approach to a problem (Mr Wilders’s brusqueness). At a speech in Madrid, Maxime Verhagen, the foreign minister, said: “It is difficult to anticipate the content of the film, but freedom of expression doesn’t mean the right to offend.” It doesn’t? Well, if it doesn’t, then freedom of expression is not much of a right. But that does not end the discussion. >>> By Christopher Caldwell

Mark Alexander (Paperback)
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