Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [345]
Like it or not, Islam in Europe is a proselytising religion which asserts its presence through such demands as those for amplified muezzin in a predominantly non-Muslim suburb of Oxford or a 35,000-capacity mega-mosque to be situated next to London’s 2012 Olympic complex. Both of these projects have occasioned deep public unease. There are also quotidian acts of minority-within-a-minority self-assertion, ranging from schoolgirls insisting on wearing the hijab and jilbab, to imams petitioning NHS hospitals with demands that patients’ beds be turned to Mecca five times a day, and female Muslim NHS surgeons refusing to bare their arms for scrubbing up, in defiance of health regulations designed to prevent MRSA. These are not fantasies of right-wing tabloid newspapers, but facts about life today in the UK and in many other parts of western Europe where those strident in their criticism of Islam have to live under constant police guard or go into exile, the fate of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the Dutch MP Geert Wilders.
Islam is a more territorial religion than Christianity or Judaism, with no tradition either of Christianity’s separation of the temporal and spiritual or of accepting the predominance of the host society and its laws as orthodox Jews do everywhere with their Beth Din arbitration courts. Western Europe is witnessing the gradual emergence of Muslim no-go areas, of enclaves based around nodal mosques and community centres, and public housing projects or rows of private terraced housing from which the White indigenous population is decamping. According to a BBC Panorama investigation, these Whites are fleeing because they feel alienated in their own country, both because they have become surrounded by people who have not bothered to learn the language and customs of the host society, and because of a more sinister chill emanating from professional Islamists who ensure the collapse of such things as the betting shop and the street-corner pub. The BBC documentary revealed that in justice minister Jack Straw’s Blackburn constituency there was almost zero interaction between the White north and the Muslim south of this small Lancashire town. Lax immigration policies, cheap flights and phone calls and satellite TV mean that many immigrants do not make the mental break with home that is normative in the USA.22 Instead they simply transplant their home village to British cities—most glaringly when a group of Mirpuri families bought sixteen houses in suburban Slough, knocking down the garden walls so that they could replicate the village environment they had known in Kashmir. Their excuse for resisting integration (as opposed to assimilation) is that they despise what they are being asked to join, namely the popular culture of binge-drinking and television dominated by Big Brother—an especially pernicious reality show produced by the descendant of the eminent Bazalgette who, ironically, built Victorian London’s ring sewers. Much the same state of affairs exists in what Ian Buruma has dubbed the ‘dish cities’ of the Netherlands or in the peripheral banlieues around some French cities.23
So far governments, notably in Britain and the Netherlands, have responded with state programmes to intensify the inculcation of local values through formal citizenship tests and public ceremonies even as they sneer at America’s ubiquitous flags on the lawn. Many new citizens find such ceremonies moving. In these two countries in particular, there has been a rapid theoretical abandonment of the divisive doctrine of multiculturalism, although no commensurate attempt to uproot its massive bureaucratic footprint in education, the media and local government. Indeed, the solution to radicalisation seems to be to create more bureaucrats, presumably to counter the influence of those we already have. It has taken about four years for the British government to realise that the old imperial