April 6, 2004

Defending Secular Democracy

A special report from HobbsOnline's new London correspondent.

By George Miller
LONDON - A report issued by the European Union's Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (isn't it comforting to know the EU has one?) has decided that, yes, attacks against Jews in Europe are on the increase, but, wait for it…they are being carried out, in the main, by European white racists. At the same time, the EU has suppressed a report by a German academic that finds that Arab gangs are responsible for almost all of these attacks, according to a report by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard published April 1 in the Daily Telegraph headlined EU 'covered up' attacks on Jews by young Muslims.

Why would a European Union agency want to misinform the European people on the nature of anti-Semitic violence? What does it gain from doing this? I suppose it could just be to avoid the risk of provoking an argument with the Islamic minority in Europe (there is plenty of reason to regard such a clash as dangerous). It could also be because the EU itself is anti-Semitic. But even if such an allegation is true, it doesn't explain why the EU transfers the blame for widespread anti-Semitic violence by Muslim youths to white European skinheads.

Perhaps an explanation can be found in the EU's struggle to dominate the nation states of Europe. Nationalism is the only force capable of arresting the development of the European Super State. To the European ideologues, European nationalism is a bigger threat than is militant Islam. By tarring European nationalism with the brush of racism and xenophobia, the EU is able to present further steps to political union in Europe as the antidote to such racist poison. After all, the EU's raison d'etre is to prevent nationalism from ever re-emerging and causing another European war.

Put even more charitably, the EU may have suppressed the truth about the violence because it was inconvenient to its bureaucratic outlook and culture. Anti-Semitism has a long history of finding a happy home among the people of Europe. The presence of a large and aggressive Muslim community in Europe is something rather new. The EU might simply be exhibiting bureaucratic inertia in fighting today's battles with yesterday's strategies.

There is another factor at play here. Western society is bending over backwards to be sensitive to minority cultures. This cultural obsequiousness can have unfortunate results when government officials transform these attitudes into policy. Consider the case of the local library in a little town north of London that banned posters advertising a Christmas service while at the same time its "Multicultural Services Librarian," hosted a Muslim religious festival. The local council officials splutter and explain their reasoning, but it's fairly obvious which religion is being treated with the greater "sensitivity." (See The Daily Telegraph, Muslim Party at Christmas ban library, by Fiona Govan, December 14, 2003.)

If the EU is suppressing information on Muslim violence for fear of causing offence, and librarians are banning Christians from using their facilities while welcoming Muslims, then it is not surprising that Islamists might press for further enhancements to their special status in Western society. The former archbishop of the Church of England, Lord Carey, spoke out recently about the failure of Islam to rise to the challenges of modernity. Dr Carey asked whether Islamic scholars might want to indulge in some religious, cultural and textual self-criticism, as Jewish and Christian scholars have done for centuries. The response of Iqbal Sacranie, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Great Britain, is breathtakingly self-referential. The Telegraph quotes him declaring:

"Dr Carey is trampling on a very sensitive area by referring to the Koran and the traditions of the Prophet."

The way a country grapples with the Islamic challenge is surely directly related to the strength or weakness of that State. Canada has a history of developing Balkanised political institutions as it attempts to forge a weak political unity out of its ethnic and cultural diversity. Canada is the first Western State to permit Islamic Sharia law to rule over its one-million Muslim citizens, according to an article, First Steps Taken Towards Sharia Law In Canada, by Judy Van Rhijn, in the Nov 25, 2003, issue of Law Times. The Canadian courts reserve ultimate jurisdiction, but only if the case is appealed to them by one of the disputing parties. One wonders how many successful appeals to Canadian courts will be made by Muslim women?

The former Pakistani federal minister, who spoke at the conference that welcomed Islamic rule to Canada, applauded Sharia as inexpensive to administer (welcome words indeed to the hard-pressed Canadian taxpayer) and added that it saves those subject to it from "great mental agony and spiritual distress…if matters drag on or are heavily publicized through court proceedings." It just would not do for non-Muslims to hear in open court that a Muslim woman was unhappy about the denial of her basic human rights, would it?

You might argue that other minority groups such as the Amish, Mennonites and Hassidic Jews live in Western society and practice internal discipline in their own communities. But these groups don't have a brother living down the road, storing ammonium nitrate in his barn, and plotting to blow up the Pennsylvania Legislature. If they ever do develop that level of resistance to the State, then they will put themselves and their beliefs under the microscope. As it is, the secular democratic state has historically been very quick to assert legal jurisdiction over sectional groups, however peaceful.

The privatisation of the Canadian legal system is Islam's greatest victory over the secular state, in the Western World, to date. Non-Western states, such as Nigeria, have had their secular institutions effectively wrecked by Islam. Turkey proves that Islamic faith does not have to be antithetical to secular democracy. But Islam has not yet developed a very impressive history of subordination to secular democracy. Europe has such a tradition and it emerged from decades of bloody struggle between people of different Christian faith.

A coherent Western response to Islam's challenge would reiterate the primacy of secular democratic government and the rule of law. The proper response is not to tell Muslims how they should dress. Such measures as the French ban on headscarves undermine personal freedom and trivialise this cultural confrontation. Insisting that all are equal before the law and indeed that there is but one law is a far more important principal and one that has already been seriously compromised in one Western country.

As to Muslim violence against Jews, European leaders have a minimal responsibility to uphold the rule of law. They must look anti-Semitic violence squarely in the face and confront it – this is a moral and historic duty and fulfilling it would give some credence to the homage they pay to the Holocaust dead.

Upholding the rule of law and honouring secular democratic values might actually reduce ethnic and religious tension. It would certainly do more good than ignoring violence and mis-apportioning the blame for it. We might discover that many Muslims share these values but are afraid to support them because of the religious extremists in our midst. The defence of the democratic and secular state should be the rallying banner for all peoples. A Europe where Catholics and Protestants massacred each other for generations should know all about this. We have been here before.

Editor's note: The author of the above piece, George Miller, was born in the United States and raised in Vermont and then London. He works in London and lives nearby with his English wife and two small children. He was born on the same fateful day in 1964 as the editor of HobbsOnline - and also happens to be my cousin.