If multiculturalism has failed, the blame lies with neo-cons as much as Daesh

Daesh doesn’t want Muslims and Christians to live together freely; it wants to eliminate what it calls the “grey zone”. The group’s own publication, Dabiq, makes this clear. This is the lesson from Paris of which we should be most wary. Future attacks will share this objective.

Looking at the Western reaction to the Paris attacks, it is clear that Daesh is winning. A US presidential hopeful has called for ID cards for American Muslims; dozens of US state governments immediately closed their borders to Muslim refugees; while treatment of Islam looks set to be a major theme of the presidential campaign trail. Consider the spike in attacks on mosques in all European countries in recent weeks. Consider that a “Christian State” far right terrorist group now appears to have been founded in Belgium, just down the road from the now notorious Molenbeek district of Brussels; the group has threatened to kill Muslims and burn down mosques in a Belgian “Kristallnacht 2.0” against fellow citizens of the Islamic faith. In Holland, the third largest party in the Dutch Parliament, Party for Freedom – which at one stage played a minority role in a coalition government — has long called for a halt to immigration from Muslim countries. Marine Le Pen has toned down the forced repatriation policies of her National Front Party, but has framed the mere presence of Muslims in France as a threat to French “values”.

The reality is that, while I have great faith that most Europeans and North Americans shun the bigotry that has come to characterise swathes of the right-wing, I don’t trust canny politicians not to exploit fear and prejudice for their own ends. That is what Daesh wants. It knows our political and media ecosystem well. It knew, for example, that France would respond to the Paris attacks with immediate force; and France did exactly that. Daesh knew that this would finally drag Britain into the Syrian civil war; and it has. Equally, it knew that anti-Muslim sentiment in the West has been nurtured carefully or condoned by both far-right and establishment figures for many years, and that terrorist attacks that kill a fraction of those murdered on 9/11 can exacerbate these instinctive prejudices.

To eliminate what Daesh calls “the grey zone” means implicitly to reject what the West calls “multiculturalism”. In this, Daesh is onto a winner; it is tapping into a pre-existing, well-established and elite-sponsored current of anti-Muslim prejudice.

There are two political movements in particular that could enable Daesh to succeed in Britain. The first is the far-right, a radical but growing movement across Europe. Tommy Robinson, the founder of the English Defence League, has just announced his new project, Pegida UK, drawing inspiration from the German far right.

The second, more interesting and more threatening, is the reaction of Britain’s ruling Conservative Party. In one of David Cameron’s first major speeches as prime minister he declared, “Multiculturalism has failed.” It was an extraordinary jab at the British Muslim community. Pointedly, he delivered this speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2011, and made the assumption that Islamic culture, long embedded into Western immigrant communities, was tied directly to terrorism. However, as Jason Burke, one of the foremost experts on Al-Qaeda, has put it, there has in fact been “a belated recognition of the importance of religious knowledge as armour against radicalisation.”

Cameron is probably not a neo-conservative himself, but the Conservative Party is now dominated by neo-con thinking. It is a very British form of neo-conservatism, not widely advertised.

Unlike the far right, neo-conservative antipathy to multiculturalism was not necessarily born out of racism. Neo-conservatives have long advocated a strengthening of Judaeo-Christian culture. They believe that the West has failed to celebrate itself by building on the grand institutions of churches, literature and Enlightenment thinking. There is something to this point of view, and it would make for an interesting public debate.

Unfortunately, neo-conservatives debuted their views on multiculturalism, Western culture and foreign cultures in the worst way possible. Instead of an agenda of cultural strengthening from within, of our proud culture and institutions themselves being strengthened, they took the route of the far right and focused on the threat from outside; from, in this case, Islam. The faith is not only illiberal and non-Western, they posited, but violent. Neo-conservatives used the catastrophe of 9/11 to legitimise their views.

By using 9/11 as a launch pad, neo-cons’ entirely legitimate proposals for strengthening Western identity were side-lined. It was, ironically, an expression of cultural weakness; in order to strengthen our culture they choose not to assert its own strength, but to remove foreign influence, using an emotive terrorist threat as the way to do this.

Little effort has ever been made to explain the link between wearing a hijab and setting off a suicide belt. The media has never questioned how the Islamic practice of gender segregation, usually self-instigated rather than enforced, has somehow become an indicator of potential violence. Believing that the death penalty should be extended to adulterers and apostates certainly sits uneasily with liberals, but neo-conservatives tend to think that this also indicates a terrorist threat. The public has come to assume this too.

This leap in logic – in connecting orthodox Islam with terrorism — is symptomatic of the culture of fear that neo-conservatives have perfected. It is a culture of fear which, drawing on the far-right, Daesh will feed on. If multiculturalism has failed, as Daesh hopes it will, the far-right and neo-conservatives will be as much to blame as the terrorist group. It is a strange and tragic phenomenon.

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