Dutch Courage, Liberal Cowardice

Dutch Courage, Liberal Cowardice

http://frontpagemag.com/2010/10/05/dutch-courage-liberal-cowardice/

Posted by Jacob Laksin on Oct 5th, 2010 and filed under FrontPage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Jacob Laksin is managing editor of Frontpage Magazine. He is co-author, with David Horowitz, of One-Party Classroom: How Radical Professors at America's Top Colleges Indoctrinate Students and Undermine Our Democracy. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Weekly Standard, City Journal, Policy Review, as well as other publications. Email him at jlaksin@gmail.com.

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As a parable on the cluelessness of the liberal commentariat about the threat of Islamic extremism, Slate magazine’s feature “explaining” why the Netherlands is supposedly more “anti-Islam” than other nations is hard to top.

The idea that Holland is uniquely given to “Muslim bashing,” as Slate’s headline writers put it, is itself highly suspect. Even the most of prominent of the Dutch Muslim “bashers,” Dutch politician and provocateur Geert Wilders, who went on trial this week for the ludicrous charge of insulting Islam and inciting discrimination against Muslims, has taken pains to differentiate between Islam as a militant ideology and its many peaceful Muslim followers.

It is also worth noting that much of what the popular press has derided as “Muslim bashing” is actually a well-warranted anxiety on the part of the Dutch populace about the increasingly restive, radicalized, and unassimilated Muslim immigrants in their midst. From the killing of libertarian politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002, to the 2004 murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh by a Dutch-Moroccan Islamist, to the upsurge in violent attacks on gays in Amsterdam by Moroccan street thugs, to the death threats and daily harassment that have driven critics of radical Islam like Ayaan Hirsi Ali from the country, the Dutch have become acutely aware of the wages of the country’s immigration policy from the Muslim world. At the same time, the official appeasement of Islamic sensibilities, represented most recently by the Wilders trial, and the crisis of national confidence exemplified by a Dutch justice minister’s notorious assertion that Islamic Shari’a would be welcome in the Netherlands so long as it was democratically introduced, have underscored just how attenuated the country’s defenses against Muslim religious radicalism have become.

But even if one accepts the strained premise that the Netherlands is singularly and unreasonably antagonistic toward Islam, Slate’s explanations for that phenomenon are so utterly divorced from reality that it’s hard to see them as evidence of anything except the intellectual cowardice of the liberal pundit class.

Chief among Slate’s explanations for the intensity of Dutch Islamophobia is the country’s size. In this account, it is the Netherlands’ population density that, combined with a high immigration rate from Muslim countries, has amplified anti-immigrant sentiment in a way that has not happened in other countries. That observation might be interesting if it were true. But it ignores the demonstrable fact that the Netherlands is far from alone in its concerns about its resident Muslim population.

France, Britain and Germany are perhaps the best known examples of European countries struggling to cope with their Muslim minorities, but they are hardly the only ones. Sweden, where one-in-seven residents is now foreign-born, has in recent years witnessed many of the same problems stemming from its unassimilated Muslim community. It has responded by making its immigration policies more restrictive and, just last month, voting into parliament an anti-Islam party for the first time. Policies to limit Muslim immigration have also been passed in Denmark, where the publication of the Mohammed cartoons by Copenhagen-based paper Jyllands Posten tragically demonstrated the gulf in values between the Western and the Islamic world. Norway, where Muslim attacks on Jews have become more common, has similarly struggled to reconcile its tolerant culture with Islam, and the creeping Islamization of the country is now a perennial election issue. Insofar as Islam is now a major political issue, much of Europe is literally going Dutch.

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