(This is Part Three of a Four Part Essay exploring the Norway Terror Attacks in Utøya and Olso by Anders Behring Breivik, and the sources of his Islamophobic ideology: Part One was published on Monday What Norway's Terror Teaches us about Islamophobia and Online Hate and yesterday Part Two: A Brief History of Islamophobia)
In the comment section of the last diary, readers made some very astute points about the relative lack of marginalisation of Muslims in the US. Indeed, by coincidence, a Gallup poll came out yesterday to say that American Muslims were the most optimistic of all the American faith groups when it come to others. So, while I'm fascinated by the vocal evidence of Islamophobia on the far right in the US and the real experiences on the ground, bear with me while I concentrate on the European dimension: because this is where Anti Islamist parties about, and where Breivik drew succour and support - particularly from members of the English defence league
Mohammad Atta: A European Problem
I've got a confession to make. My uncle taught the leader of the 9/11 attacks. Mohammed Atta was part of the notorious Hamburg circle of Al Qaeda terrorists, and was a student at the Hamburg Technical institute where my Uncle, German by birth but commuting between London and Hamburg, taught him urban planning for several years. According to my uncle he was a serious, quiet, dedicated but socially unprepossessing student. (This has been documented in a biography of the 9/11 attackers). Apart from the personal connection, I (like many) became fascinated by the character and psychology of the 19 or so men who carried out the biggest terror attack on US soil, and who basically changed the world in 2001.
One thing is salient about all of them:
The intellectuals and leaders were radicalised by their experiences of living in Europe
Of course, the intelligence services could have been more alert at the kind of things going on the Hamburg Mosque or our own Finsbury Park Mosque. But that's not enough to explain the radicalisation of so many young men in Europe.
The foot soldiers were Saudis and Yemenis, but the organisers, pilots and leaders were well acquainted with the 'western' society they wanted to destroy. And all of them - Egyptian, Jordanian, Saudi - had lived for a number of years not in the US, but Europe.
One can only conclude that something about Europe - it's lack of mobility, it's suspicion of immigrants and asylum seekers, it's fear of invasion and conquest and otherness, had a radical impact on these men, enough to turn them into Salafist multi murderers.
You would have thought such an example would encourage European politicians to examine the integration in their society, their attitude to foreigners and their understanding of the alienation that many migrants, forced by economic or political necessity, feel when they arrive on the continent
But no: rather than questioning are own intolerance, most European politicians are wondering if they're too tolerant.
Is Multiculturalism to Blame?
Let us not forget, though there were numerous young Muslims at the Utøya summer camp, Breivik's target wasn't a mosque or the small Norwegian Muslim community, but what he considered their 'Marxist' enablers; young members of the ruling Labour Party, who were using 'multiculturalism' as a back door for the secret destruction of Christendom.
It's a completely illogical belief: why would Marxists pretend to be social democrats to ally with Fundamentalist Islam to destroy Christianity? But it's not unheard of in the UK, and on these boards I've argued with commenters who claim that Labour deliberately 'swamped' the UK with Muslim immigrants in the rush for more votes.
Despite the crazy conspiracies, Breivik's hatred of multi-culturalism is a popular them among far right parties in Austria, Holland. Switzerland, Sweden and Denmark. For the most part, especially in the Scandinavian countries, these are relatively small ethnically homogenous states and aren't multi-cultural at all. But that doesn't seem to stop them worrying about it. As I said ten days ago
In France, they ban niquab. In Switzerland, they ban minarets. Holland includes an Islamophobe bigot in its ruling parliamentary coalition. In Britain, the biggest threat to public order in the last few years has been hard line Islamphobic English Defence League which now targets Muslims (though Jews, Blacks and Gays are next in line).
Unfortunately, in the last year, the 'multi culturalism' canard has been echoed by leaders of two of the largest countries in the EU: in February the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel talked about how 'multiculturalism' had failed. Two months later, in Munich David Cameron joined the throng.
As the Nobel Chair and former Norwegian Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland has suggested, they could be "playing with fire"
Four months ago in Munich, Cameron declared that state multiculturalism had failed in Britain, a view immediately praised by Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP, as "a further huge leap for our ideas into the political mainstream". Marine Le Pen, vice-president of the far-right National Front party in France, also endorsed Cameron's view of multiculturalism, claiming that it corroborated her own party's line.
"Political leaders have got to defend the fact that society has become more diverse. We have to defend the reality, otherwise we are going to get into a mess. I think political leaders have to send a clear message to embrace it and benefit from it.
"We should be very cautious now, we should not play with fire. Therefore I think the words we are using are very important because it can lead to much more."
Though I think Cameron's speech was ill-advised, and a bit of a sop to the Tory right, I don't he can be at all blamed for the atrocity in Norway ten days ago. Indeed, Breivik discussed Cameron as one of his targets. I also don't think that debating 'multiculturalism' is inflammatory in itself. The problem is - as I'm willing to debate - that the term means many different things.
In most of Central Europe, Multi-Kulti was a policy to deal with historic minorities of Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles etc left over from the decay of three empires, and not yet cleansed by either Hitler or Stalin. As the Former Yugoslavia shows, that policy of effective segregation was neither stable nor enlightened.
When Merkel uses the term 'multi-culturalism' she is part adverting to this, and arguing in favour of rights for long-standing children and grand-children of Turkish gastarbeiter (guest workers) who under the old blood-line form of German citizenship didn't have status, (though an ethnic German from the Russian Volga would). Merkel's attack on multi culturalism is partly an attack on and Jus sanguinis and a defence of integration.
However, when David Cameron used the same language, he was kicking a giant strawman. Multi culturalism has never been Government policy here and Jus soli - place of birth - has generally determined citizenship. In terms of civil rights, immigration, housing and cultural policy, Britain has generally followed a path of integration, or - as David Goodhart would argue in recent years - no plan at all. Apart from the unfortunate exception of the former Mill Towns of the north, most our cities are heavily integrated compared to Rotterdam, Brussels, Paris or Berlin.
Britain is a Multi-Ethnic, Multi-National, Multi denominational State
No doubt much more needs to be done, but I know of no-one in the Labour Party, even during left separatist sections in the 80s, ever argue for the policy of segregationalist multi-culturalism. Since the overwhelming majority of our Muslim population are now first or second or even third generation, the question of current immigration hardly solves this point either.
And let us not forget, Britain has been for three hundred years a multi-national, mult-ethnic and multi-denominational state. There will be and always has been a problem between communities. But yolking together, as Cameron did, the problem of Islamic extremist and multiculturalism, is just a bit of short term blindness.
Throughout my youth, the problems of integration had nothing to do with religion, unless someone wants to argue the riots in Handsworth, Toxteth, Brixton, St Pauls or Tottenham were a problem of fundamentalist Rastafarianism. Whatever the issues today in Tower Hamlets and Bow, a hundred years ago the press was filled with similar stories of terrorists and anarchists in the East End.
These new immigrants dressed strangely, spoke incomprehensibly, ate weird food, and followed disturbing religious practices with their own 'laws'. It was fashionable to denounce them, in newspapers, novels, even in Nobel prize winning poetry. To many their presence in Britain was a huge threat to our way of life and security. Many inveighed against the tolerance of the government, their kowtowing to extremism. Things got so bad that fear of these strange co-religionists and their conspiracies ignited a Europe-wide movement. The tension finally erupted into major street violence, as those who opposed fundamentalist religion marched through the East End...
This of course was march of Mosley's Black Shirts in 1936 and their routing at the Battle of Cable Street. These strange and alien people were Ashkenazi Jews, who had fled pogroms in Lithuania, Poland and other dominions of the Tsarist Empire and arrived in London in their hundreds of thousands at the end of the 19th Century. Anti-semitic fascism was stopped in its tracks in London that day in 1936, though it raged unabated in Europe for another ten years, leading to the destruction of Central European Jewry and the ultimate horror of the Holocaust.
Though feared a century ago, in many ways redolent of the language to describe Muslims in the UK today, we now see the influx of Jews into this country not as a social problem, but a huge boost to the intellectual, social and economic life of our nation.
If 'multiculturalism' means this, the British history of religious and ethnic tolerance, of rejecting faith or raced based hatred as a political program, then what's wrong with it? Let me sign up.