Europe's fear of Islam, from Paris to Dresden

On the day I left for home after an extended research stay in Europe and the Persian Gulf, news broke of the terrible attack on the staff of Charlie Hebdo in Paris. I suddenly felt sickened and shaken, but I was not surprised. A violent media event of this kind – calculated, cold-blooded, daringly simple and staged in the heartlands of the secular West for a global audience – has been on the cards for some time.

The Paris violence is part of a wider pattern, the latest phase in a longer string of attacks that were misinterpreted by French politicians and journalists as the work of “lone wolf” and “disturbed” individuals. It’s worth remembering that in late December, in Dijon and Nantes, more than 20 citizens were injured when men drove vehicles into crowds of pedestrians. In Joué-lès-Tours, a 20-year-old Muslim man armed with a knife entered a police station and wounded three officers before another shot and killed him. Then the violence hit Charlie Hebdo and the Hypercasher supermarket near Porte de Vincennes. More attacks are surely on the way.

Making sense of the violence is imperative for citizens who care about their world. At a minimum, this requires a measure of detachment from the language of outrage and disapprobation that has swept through France and the rest of Europe during the past week. What the world has witnessed is without doubt savage acts of criminal violence. Barbaric they are. But, contrary to the prevailing media narratives, the acts of violence are neither simply “inhuman” (as if “humanity” has a perfect track record in the field of non-violence) nor best understood as an “attack against France” or French values, as François Hollande and many politicians have chanted in recent days. Contrary to the dominant media narrative, such violent incidents are also not isolated or unconnected events. Nor is the violence to be understood, in Rupert Murdoch’s terms of clinical medicine, as a “jihadist cancer”, or even as the work of mentally “unstable” people as French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve has repeatedly claimed.

The barbarism of our times is different. It is political, and it must be understood as such, beginning with the chilling fact that what we are witnessing are acts of revenge by Muslim radicals angered by the rise of a new global bigotry: the fear and dread and despise of Islam. In many parts of the European Union, where more than 20 million Muslim people now dwell, Muslim baiting has become a popular sport. The cold truth is that organised suspicion and denigration of Islam is the new anti-Semitism.

Most of my European Muslim friends and colleagues are disturbed and upset by this trend. They point out that rapturous praise of the sacred principle of freedom of expression – fiercely defended by French intellectuals in recent days – is regarded by most peace-loving Muslims as an alibi for insult. They accuse the champions of free speech of muddling the difference between speech that unsettles the powerful and speech that vilifies the powerless.

Shame and Revenge

A careful genealogy of the principle of free speech shows that these Muslims are on to something. Think of John Milton’s insistence that “the Turk upholds his Alcoran, by the prohibition of printing,” and therefore in his view has no taste for liberty of the press. Then consider the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which discovered to its cost that liberty of the press is not just liberty of the press. There is no such thing as free speech without social consequences and political effects. And cartoons are not just cartoons; parading as ‘free speech” they can easily function as weapons of prejudice and denigration of the powerless.

Little wonder then that in 2012 much upset was triggered among European Muslims when Charlie Hebdo published a series of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammad, including one that showed him lying naked on a bed, being filmed from behind, saying “My ass? And you love it, my ass?” Pornographic undertones and brickbats of that kind cast doubt on the claim made by Philippe Val, the former director of Charlie Hebdo, who told the BBC last week that the magazine was run by people “devoid of hate, of prejudice and was respectful of others.” That may be so – but many intelligent European Muslims don’t see things that way, and for good reason. For them, the doctrine of secularism, with its roots in the French Revolution, is an ideology of state power, just as it was throughout the period of European colonialism. For these same Muslims, the secularist insistence that “reasonable” men and women must leave God not for other gods, but for no god, is a species of bigotry. It is a power move, an excuse to round on people of faith who refuse to let religiosity wither or be pushed away into the obscurity of private life. The Muslim rejection of secularism explains why French school officials who refuse to provide dinner alternatives to pork meat for Muslim pupils, or “kebabphobe”‘ who insist that “foreign” grilled fast food is side-lining the French baguette, are perceived by many Muslims as bigots: hypocrites who pride themselves on “choice” but dish out insults when it pleases them. Muslims in France and elsewhere in Europe similarly feel insulted by the whipped-up controversies centred on the burqa, niqab, hijab and chador. They are humiliated when people who don’t know the difference between each of these garments claim they are incompatible with the “modern way of life” because they “oppress women”, whose weakness (oddly) makes them potentially dangerous accomplices of “terrorism’.

For most Muslims in Europe, such talk is more than absurd, or weirdly contradictory. To them it smacks of political prejudice, which itself is the carrier of discourtesy. The resulting denigration produces a sense of palpable shame. From here, some say, revenge is just a few steps away. They are surely right, for when pushed to the limits, intimidation and humiliation can turn murderous. Indeed, it is a standard axiom of psychoanalysis, championed by respected practitioners such as James Gilligan and Adam Jukes, that vilification and disgrace are always the fuel of murderous acts. Murder may be a crime, and a despicable one at that, but it is rarely a simple and apolitical action of “madmen”.

Last week’s murderous violence is political in yet another sense. It’s a reminder that civil society and its rules of peaceful civility and the public embrace of difference are highly fragile constructions that have no historical guarantees. The “Je suis Charlie” solidarity rallies that have sprung up in France and elsewhere show that these precious civil society values are alive and kicking. But they also show just how gossamer-thin they are, especially when confronted by the darker sides of European civil societies in the maltreatment and humiliation of Muslims and other minorities. Not to mention the facilitation of unregulated black markets in the trade of goods that allow access to Kalashnikov rifles and rocket launchers for just a few hundred euros.

War and Terror

Armed men dressed in black balaclavas are the new symbols of a shameful fact: the global light arms trade is potentially the killer of civil societies everywhere; in Ottawa, Sydney, Mumbai, Peshawar and now in Paris. There’s another political fact here that shouldn’t be overlooked. The the bitter truth is that barbarism of the Paris kind is the poisonous fruit of the so-called war on terror. Just a few hours after the attack on Charlie Hebdo, Bernard Cazeneuve, again quick off the mark, said that the attacks confirmed the need for a widened “global war on terror”. This way of thinking contains an inner flaw that is literally fatal. It stirs up anger and resentment among many hundreds of millions of Muslims worldwide for whom the war on terror includes American-led military violence; drone attacks and B1-B strikes that kill innocent civilians; torture and humiliation at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib; dragnet surveillance; and support for brutal dictatorships in Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Put bluntly, the terrorism we witness is the ugly twin of the war on terrorism. That’s why talk of a global war against terror should be countered by the remark scripted by Sasha Baron Cohen in the comedy film Borat (2006: this permanent war on terror is more like a “war of terror”.

Democracy under threat

Many French commentators have noted in recent days how the Paris murders are an assault on “democracy”. They are indeed, especially because the new barbarism robs innocent citizens of their lives and spreads fear and self-censorship throughout civil society. But the state antidote to violence is arguably just as threatening. Dawn police raids, red alerts and security checks are bad for democracy. So are helicopters hovering over our heads, troops on the streets, gun battles and, worst of all, the military siege mentality that is settling not just on Muslim minorities, but on the democratic rights of each and every citizen.

The way things are going, democracies in Europe and elsewhere will soon resemble garrison states. Democracy means lying politicians like Tony Blair and double-standard hypocrisy (“be kind to America”, reads one of my fridge magnets, a gift from a Muslim friend, “or else it will bring democracy to your country”). For many Muslims living in the West, democracy unfortunately stands for unemployment, job market discrimination, second-class citizenship, or no citizenship at all. Democracy is disappointment, a dismal affair, a codeword for Gaza, Libya, Syria and Iraq. At home, in Europe, it means hostile media coverage, street snubs, silence and suspicion, and growing state repression.

Sad Khartoon! I’m Just a Muslim .. From a Muslim #Cartoonist RIP #CharlieHebdopic.twitter.com/27Vt2RvAGs

— ALBAIH (@khalidalbaih) January 7, 2015

It is exactly this trend the hooded gunmen want to strengthen. Contrary to what has frequently been said during the past week, jihadi actions do not prove that Islam is humourless or that Muslims have a genetic dislike of satire and frank speech. Equally misleading are the claims that the Paris attacks are symptoms of a “clash of civilisations” or a regression to the “Middle Ages” (as claimed by Xavi Puig, co-founder of El Mundo Today). The substance and style of the new violence are thoroughly twenty-first century. Its key aim is strategic: it is designed to trigger tougher anti-terrorism laws, tighter surveillance, the militarisation of daily life and more Muslim baiting.

The point of the Muslim radicals is to accelerate the decline of democracy by demonstrating to their uncommitted sisters and brothers that democracy is a sham. We could say that the ultimate aim of the Muslim radicals is to finish off European democracies that are already in a parlous state. In this aim, they are succeeding, thanks to the perverse fact that they find themselves twinned with populist movements that opportunistically take advantage of Europe’s civil and political freedoms so as to press home their bigoted claim that Europe is being swamped by Muslims.

Perhaps the most disturbing consequence of the Paris murders will be the way they fuel the growth of populist backlashes against Muslims throughout Europe. High on the opium of general discontent with the status quo, the new populism finds its multi-media voice in settings as dynamic and different as local newspapers and radio stations, Facebook and Twitter (where #KillAllMuslims is currently trending) through to quality television and high-brow literature.

At the street level, in neighbouring Germany, it is exactly this anti-Muslim sentiment that fuels the rise of the PEGIDA movement. Led by Lutz Bachmann, a convicted criminal and son of a Dresden butcher, PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the West) is much more than a Dresden or a German phenomenon. PEGIDA is many different things to many different people. It is a rejection of the complacent post-politics symbolised by Angela Merkel. It speaks to the unsolved European political crisis and serves as a barometer of the growing public disaffection with mainstream parliamentary democracy.

Yet PEGIDA is much more than a protest against the dying party systems of Europe. It is also a Pied Piper of the new anti-Muslim bigotry, the feeling that Muslims are taking over Europe. Remarkable is the movement’s knack for plumbing the depths of civil society. In the ranks of the movement are football fans, the educated middle class and opponents of factory farming. There are neo-Nazis, Christians, Putin sympathisers, street hooligans and the rich upper middle class.

PEGIDA supporters and sympathisers may seem a motley crew, but they share some important things in common. They are annoyed with politicians and the political establishment. They curse the “lying media”. They’re sure the prevailing party system doesn’t represent either their material interests or their gut feeling that their own nation is drowning in the rising tides of Islam. PEGIDA members see no need for a New Deal with Muslims, which is what the whole European region now so urgently needs. They don’t much like people of the Muslim faith. They say they’ve had enough of Muslim asylum seekers, including those who come from the war zones of Syria and Iraq. PEGIDA members only like people similar to themselves: good, white, upright, hard-working citizens who now want their homeland back.

Surely the strangest political fact of all is that PEGIDA supporters consider themselves democrats. They think of themselves as people of The People, as champions of the shortest of short textbook definitions of democracy as “self-government of the people, by the people, for the people”. PEGIDA seem wilfully ignorant of the historical fact that since 1945 the norms of democracy have been democratised. Democracy has come to mean much more than winning elections. It now stands for the refusal of arbitrary power, wherever it is exercised. Democracy these days ideally means the public accountability of power, political humility, respect for diversity and complexity, and the refusal of all forms of bossing, bullying and violence against flesh and blood people, wherever they live.

These democratic norms uniquely belong to our age of modern democracy, but strange and striking is the way PEGIDA supporters and fellow travellers want to turn their backs on them, and to do so in the name of the old and discredited Sovereign People Principle. Never mind that their definition of democracy is exclusionary and potentially murderous, and that it has no room for Muslims. When these authoritarian populists speak of “democracy”, what they really mean is “you don’t belong here because you are not one of us”.

PEGIDA populists are in this sense recidivists. They want Europe to turn back the clock, to move forward by stepping back in time, into a world where The People supposedly once ruled. “Wir sind das Volk”, “We are the People”, they shout at their Monday evening rallies. Just as bigoted people shouted on the streets in the years before 1933.

Prof John Keane is the director of the Institute for Democracy and Human Rights at the University of Sydney. He delivered the inaugural Abdulwahab ElMessiri Memorial Lecture sponsored by MEMO in May 2014.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.