By Charles C. W. Cooke
Tuesday, July 26, 2016
Once again, France has been terrorized. The BBC reports:
An 84-year-old priest was killed
and four other people taken hostage by two armed men who stormed his church in
a suburb of Rouen in northern France.
The two attackers, who said they
were from the so-called Islamic State (IS), slit Fr Jacques Hamel’s throat
during a morning Mass, officials say.
One of the hostages is in a
critical condition in hospital.
President Francois Hollande,
visiting the scene, said the attackers had committed a “cowardly assassination”
and France would fight IS “by all means”.
Expressions of horror are all well and good, as are
blanket vows to destroy one’s enemies. And yet Hollande’s words are beginning
to sound a touch . . . hollow.
Clearly, terrorism is a extremely complex issue, and
reasonable people can disagree as to how it can be prevented and fought.
Moreover, as with any problem, there is no inherent virtue in one’s saying “do
something, anything,” or in one’s
pretending that twilight struggles can be overcome by bluster. But it would be
enormously helpful if the West’s ostensibly resolute leaders would level with
their voters as to the nature and source of the threat, rather than treat them
as children who need to be kept in line.
When a country is attacked, the issue of immigration is
inevitably going to come up. If it is homegrown, terrorism will raise
legitimate questions about long-term immigration policy and the degree to which
outsiders are assimilating. If it is imported, terrorism will raise questions
about a country’s border control or its attitude toward refugees. And that’s fine. Indeed, that’s democracy. The primary function of any
government is to keep the people it represents safe from outside threats. As
such, if a polity sees those threats multiplying they will — and should — ask
its representatives what can be done. A responsible government would welcome
such inquiries, and then make the case for its policy as best it could,
acknowledging in the process that any course of action carries with it a set of
costs, and that immigration is no different. A responsible government would be
a responsive government.
Are Western governments responsive? As far as I can see,
they are not. Rather, their typical reaction is to pretend that there are no
possible downsides to our existing systems, and to imply that anybody who
thinks otherwise is a bigot. Time and time again, those who have proposed that
immigration brings problems as well as benefits is accused of racism; of
anti-Semitism; of xenophobia; and they are told — in brutal, mocking tones —
that there is no chance at all that adopting a more open approach will cause
trouble. In the United States, those who argued against the admission of more
Syrian refuges were compared to anti-Semites. In Germany, which has taken more
refugees than any other country in Europe, Angela Merkel’s first instinct has
been to silence,
rather than to heed the backlash. In Britain, the arrival of immigration as a
hot-button electoral issue has yielded sighs of pain from the Left, coupled
with the dismissal of anybody who dares dissent as a “little Englander.”
Has this deliberate myopia worked? Of course it has not.
And why not? Well, because people have eyes,
that’s why. Bluntly put, when you tell people that there will be no problems at
all as a result of a given policy and then the news reports a litany of
problems as a result of that policy, the people you tried to dupe are liable to
get rather cross.
Here’s the BBC again:
The governor of Bavaria has urged
the German government to address public concerns about security and immigration
after a spate of terror attacks.
Germans are “riled up” and “full of
fear”, Horst Seehofer told a press conference, after four violent attacks in
Germany in less than a week.
In the latest, on Sunday, a Syrian
immigrant detonated a bomb, killing himself and injuring 15 people.
A gun attack in Munich was the
deadliest – with nine people killed.
Quite what to do about this is not within my area of
expertise, so I shall say no more now than that negative things tend to flow
from both over- and under-reactions.
What I do know, however, is that if
Western governments do not start acknowledging that their immigration policies
have serious downsides — and, for that matter, that it is not “racist” or
“xenophobic” to say so – they are going to face a series of full-scale revolts,
the likely beneficiaries of which will be political parties that do not take
the “nuanced” view that the hushers and the name-callers believe themselves to
be protecting.
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