By M.G. Oprea
Friday, April 08, 2016
Charlie Hebdo,
the French satirical magazine whose offices Islamists attacked in 2015,
published an editorial recently titled “How Did We Get
Here?” that has raised some eyebrows. In it, they ask how Europe has become
where European-born Muslims have attacked the hearts of Paris and Brussels.
Their answer has proved distasteful to many on the Left.
The editorial has been harshly criticized and the
magazine accused of racism and xenophobia. The Washington Post says Charlie
Hebdo blames extremism on individual Muslims—the veiled woman on the
street, the man selling kebabs. There’s some truth to this accusation, and to
the extent that there is, Charlie Hebdo
is wrong. But this, and other critiques, miss the larger point of the article,
which is to demonstrate the gradual and quotidian way in which criticizing
Islam has been silenced.
It’s worth quoting Charlie
Hebdo at length:
In reality, the attacks are merely
the visible part of a very large iceberg indeed. They are the last phase of a
process of cowing and silencing long in motion and on the widest possible
scale. Our noses are endlessly rubbed in the rubble of Brussels airport and in
the flickering candles amongst the bouquets of flowers on the pavements. All
the while, no one notices what’s going on in Saint-German-en-Laye. Last week,
Sciences-Po* welcomed Tariq Ramadan. He’s a teacher, so it’s not inappropriate.
He came to speak of his specialist subject, Islam, which is also his religion…
No matter, Tariq Ramadan has done
nothing wrong. He will never do anything wrong. He lectures about Islam, he
writes about Islam, he broadcasts about Islam. He puts himself forward as a man
of dialogue, someone open to a debate. A debate about secularism which,
according to him, needs to adapt itself to the new place taken by religion in
Western democracy. A secularism and a democracy which must also accept those
traditions imported by minority communities. Nothing bad in that. Tariq Ramadan
is never going to grab a Kalashnikov with which to shoot journalists at an
editorial meeting. Nor will he ever cook up a bomb to be used in an airport
concourse. Others will be doing all that kind of stuff. It will not be his
role. His task, under cover of debate, is to dissuade people from criticising
his religion in any way. The political science students who listened to him
last week will, once they have become journalists or local officials, not even
dare to write nor say anything negative about Islam. The little dent in their
secularism made that day will bear fruit in a fear of criticising lest they
appear Islamophobic. That is Tariq Ramadan’s task.
The Charlie Hebdo
editorial correctly points out that in Europe the dominant liberal culture has
pounded into us that we must adapt to Muslims who come to our country, and
never ask them to adapt to any of our ways. Doing so would be colonialist and
wrong. It’s a double standard, of course. As the welcoming countries, Europeans
must suppress their own culture and ideals for those of the Islamic immigrant
population. But when they go abroad to non-Western countries, either to live or
to visit, it’s considered offensive not to adapt to their ways of life.
Learning a Culture
Should Work Both Ways
No one who found the Charlie
Hebdo op-ed so offensive would ever suggest Morocco ought to welcome
McDonalds or Wal-Mart with open arms. They would say the country is being
ruined with Western culture. They want non-Western countries to remain exactly
as they are—preserved and frozen in time-while the West must endlessly adapt to
anyone who makes it their home.
The article highlights the important fact that Europe has
failed to ask its Muslim immigrant population to assimilate. This fact was demonstrated
recently when police discovered that the only surviving terrorist from the
Paris attacks, Salah Abdeslam, was able to travel from Paris to Brussels and
conceal himself there until a few days before the Brussels attacks. He was
aided by a large community of French and Muslim Belgians whose loyalties
clearly lie with their own community, not with Belgium, or Europe at large.
What’s more, a 2013 study shows the shocking degree to which European
Muslims hate the West.
Asking immigrants to assimilate doesn’t mean
white-washing their culture and religion, asking them not to wear the hijab, or
demanding that they eat pork. But it does mean asking them to accept, to some
degree, the culture of the country to which they have willingly moved. These
are things like women’s rights, tolerance, free speech, or criticism of
religion. It also means not having to apologize for having a culture of one’s
own. This is the point that Michel Houellebecq made in his recent novel,
“Submission.”
Slow-Boiling Our
Brains
Europeans have been lulled into accepting that it’s wrong
to criticize Islam or scrutinize it in any way. The Charlie Hebdo editorial points out that it’s a slow process, an
insidious wearing away of what is and isn’t acceptable to say or think. The
process must be slow, because few people would accept a proposal dictating what
topics they’re not allowed to discuss. So, you gradually shame them into it.
This establishes a pre-conditioned mindset so the line of
acceptability can be moved further and further until the problem of global
jihad can no longer be effectively explored because we aren’t even allowed to
ask fundamental questions. This is Charlie
Hebdo’s point about Tariq Ramadan, whose grandfather founded the Islamist
Muslim Brotherhood and whose father was an active member of the group. Through
the guise of intellectualism and purported adherence to moderate Islam, he
instructs his audience ever so gently that the problem has nothing to do with
Islam, and that suggesting so is ugly and base.
We acquiesce, because, as Charlie Hebdo points out, we fear being seen as Islamaphobic or
racist. We are made to feel guilty if the thought flashes through our head that
we wish that the new sandwich shop run by a Muslim sold bacon, or that a woman
wearing a hijab makes us a little uncomfortable. That fear that we feel when we
entertain those thoughts, the op-ed argues, saps our willingness to scrutinize,
analyze, debate, or reject anything about Islam. And this is dangerous.
Fierce Reactions
Aim to Condition Us Into Fear
Although Europe is further along in this process, there
is a clear relevance to the United States. We are already being instructed on
college campuses and by our own president that Muslims are a sort of protected
class regarding criticism. President Obama even went so far as to censor French
President François Hollande when he used the forbidden phrase “Islamist
terrorism.”
The latest incident of shaming those who do push back is
happening in Kansas, where the Islamic Society of Wichita invited Sheik Monzer
Talib to speak at a fundraising event on Good Friday. Talib is a known
fundraiser for Hamas, the militant Islamist Palestinian group that the United
States classifies as a terrorist organization. He even has sung a song called
“I am from Hamas.” U.S. Rep. Mike Pompeo dared to put out a press release
objecting to the speech out of concern that it would harm the Muslim community,
particularly in the wake of the Brussels terrorist attack.
In response, the mosque claimed Pompeo stoked prejudice
and Islamaphobia and that they had to cancel the event because of protest
announcements and because some individuals on Facebook made some offhand
comments about guns. Cue a local media frenzy, letters to the editor accusing
Pompeo of government overreach, and the predictable arrival of two CAIR
(Council on American-Islamic Relations) representatives to skewer Pompeo.
This is just one example of how criticizing or
questioning the actions of a Muslim community—even one that is supporting a
Hamas fundraiser—has become anathema. The line of acceptability has been moved
so now it’s Islamaphobic to object to someone with links to Islamist groups
being invited to a U.S. mosque while we’re in the midst of a global battle
against Islamist terrorism. People don’t even want to discuss it. The
conversation is over. Just as Charlie
Hebdo asks, so should we ask ourselves, “How did we get here?”
Although the particulars of the Charlie Hebdo editorial may go too far, and I do not endorse
everything the article says, the overarching message is that Europe has slowly
let this happen year by year, decade by decade, like a frog in a pot slowly
brought to a boil. Post-colonial guilt and shame have stopped Europeans from
openly loving and defending their own culture. The state of things in Europe
today is the natural conclusion of that neglect. We in America are on the same
road.
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