What happened in the German City of Cologne on New Year’s Eve is extremely troubling, especially if you’re on the liberal left. There was clearly a major failing of policing; the assumption has to be that with a high state of alert over terrorism they paid insufficient attention to other potential sources of trouble. It does prompt speculation over the shadowy hand of Islamic State. It’s been pointed out the perpetrators were drunk and IS are strict about that sort of that sort of thing. But I don’t think we should rule out agent provocateurs making good use of useful idiots. It does after all advance their malign agenda, and it was all clearly orchestrated by someone.
But there are big cultural and political issues for the whole of Europe too. The important liberal values of opposition to racism, and opposition to violence against women come dangerously into conflict. It’s hard to determine what lessons ought to be learned.
You should start by reading Maajid Nawaz’s piece in The Daily Beast. Maajid is both a Muslim and a genuine Liberal, and knows what he’s talking about in a way none of the ignorant blowhards can come close to.
Maajid Nawaz almost certainly knows far more about both radical Islam and Middle-Eastern cultures than you do, and when he talks about important and sensitive subjects you should listen even if you don’t agree with his conclusions. His background means he can speak uncomfortable truths which we white people frequently cannot.
There are also good pieces by Deborah Orr in The Guardian, and on The Rambling Infidel, the latter of which highlights some prominent left-wingers getting it badly wrong. But start with Maajid.
Obviously the white nationalist right will be exploiting this with all their might. It’s Kristallnacht come early for the worst of them. But it also exposes the failure of the iteration of identity politics adopted by large parts of the modern left. If you have to play Oppression Top Trumps before you can decide whether to condemn an atrocity or to blame the victims, your ideology is not fit for purpose and should be discarded. The Tweet from Laurie Penny highlighted in The Rambling Infidel’s blog demonstrates the sort of divide-by-zero error some of the left are experiencing.
The whole topic of immigration is a political hot potato few people other than right-wingers want to talk about. Yes, there have been plenty of pieces extolling the economic benefits, but the conversation we haven’t been able to have concerns the integration and assimilation of people from very different cultures. It’s something that, for all their own problems with structural racism, America seems to do better than Europe. It’s not an easy conversation to have, which is probably why some are so quick to shut it down with accusations of racism. But if we don’t talk about it, the racists will.
Ultimately we all, whether native or migrant, need to uphold the Western values of pluralism, tolerance and individual rights. As a civilisation, we cannot afford not to.
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