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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Secularists, Neocons and Danish Cartoons

Neocon conspiracy or a protest of Islamic presumption and intransigence? I must not have gotten the memo from headquarters. Apparently, the Danish cartoon controversy is the result of a sinister plot of neocon propaganda and a heavy dose of European secularism to boot. While it is undoubtedly regrettable that the culture editor of the Jyllands-Posten […]

Neocon conspiracy or a protest of Islamic presumption and intransigence?

I must not have gotten the memo from headquarters. Apparently, the Danish cartoon controversy is the result of a sinister plot of neocon propaganda and a heavy dose of European secularism to boot. While it is undoubtedly regrettable that the culture editor of the Jyllands-Posten may have anything to do with Daniel Pipes, why consorting with a known Islamophile and apologist for Islam proves a sinister neocon-oriented conspiracy for provoking Muslim outrage does escape me. The neocons do not need a Danish newspaper outlet to offend Muslims worldwide–they influence vital aspects of U.S. foreign policy that have already had far more long-term effects on Muslim attitudes towards the West than this newspaper row ever will.

As for the charge of galloping secularism, I am a little confused. Near as I can tell, this was a fairly mild response to the growing frustrations in Denmark and throughout Europe at Muslim immigrant demands for special treatment. This all together mild rebuke was the answer to the insistence that the majority respect Muslims’ separate, distinctive identity while at the same time wanting the majority to provide them with all the advantages of the European welfare state, while also requiring a virtual ban on criticisms of Islam (to which many silly “anti-racists” and the like in Europe reflexively agree) and increasingly expecting (in Denmark especially) that shari’a should govern many of the domestic affairs of Muslims now there.

This was one instance of a symbolic poke in the eye of people who seem to expect consistently that they can come to European countries, change little or nothing about themselves and expect their norms to become the norms of the entire society. That is what this controversy represents: the struggle to determine who controls the setting of those norms and what those norms will be. If those of us warning about the eventual death of Europe want the Europeans to stand up and begin defending their way of life, admittedly largely secularist as it is, because at the very least we believe the alternative to be much, much worse, it makes little sense to turn around and chastise them for having the temerity to stand up and begin reasserting their claims to defining public space and public discourse. Think of these cartoonists as probably unwitting and more aggressive cultural Minutemen. Of course, the moment the controversy erupted the paper immediately apologised for any offence that had been given.

Europeans have been engaged in cultural unilateral disarmament vis-a-vis their immigrants for decades, and now a few of them have decided to do a little skirmishing. The American response? All too often, Americans have appeared shocked and dismayed that defending a way of life could be so, well, crude or unpleasant. Contesting control for the identity of one’s society might make someone angry, and apparently we wouldn’t want that. It’s almost as if some want Europe to defend itself, but not at the cost of offending anyone, least of all the Muslims, in what is a strange imitation of the very hypersensitivity that has helped bring Europe to its current pass.

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