"The Romance of Multiculturalism"

As always, pithy about the particular as well as the universal situation, Victor Hanson pens a great term about what enables Islamicist's success....

Q: I just finished Oriana Fallaci's Force of Reason. She paints a very dark and foreboding future, while you seem much more optimistic, at least for the Islamic world. What is your take on her work? Is Europe finished? Is there no reconciliation with Islam and modernity? Are the Kurds the exception not the rule?

Hanson: I just finished it as well. If one puts aside the bombast and furor, which is the charm of her style, and sticks to her message and courage, then one sees her point is unmistakable. We in a tired West just want our blessed lives not to be interrupted, so we invent all sorts of exemptions, euphemisms, and considerations for a fascist core of radical Islamicists who brilliantly have played on the entire multicultural romance [emphasis mine] that we embrace. That being said, Turkey, the Muslims in India, Kurdistan, and Muslims elsewhere can and do live under democratic auspices.

The problem is the toxic brew of autocracy, statism, oil revenue, and terrorism that leads to creepy results whether in Iran or Saudi Arabia. The Islamist is parasitical on the West for his critique of the West, and, usually of the middle and upper classes, hates himself for wanting what his own culture cannot produce, and always finds victimhood in his own feeling of inadequacy. If Hamas declared a truce tomorrow, reformed its economy, became truly democratic, and copied a Singapore or Switzerland, then it would have little beef against Israel — but then it wouldn’t be Hamas, would it?

Remember how in ages gone by it was thought noble and the mark and ideal of a civilized person to be chivalrous? As a matter of fact, much literature of the Middle Ages and after was dedicated and most people harkened to the 'romance of chivalry'. But now, it is mostly discredited, through ridicule (see Monty Python's Search of the Holy Grail for but one contemporary example) and, to be sure, through radicalization of western notions of equality of the sexes but not, and this is key, through some failure of its ideals.

Today chivalry is replaced with the 'romance of multiculturalism', wherein no one culture is better or worse than the other. It prevails even while it recedes due to the sudden and ruthless intervention of the real, that is, events such as 9-11 and every other subsequent terrorist action. Before 9-11 (go back to 1972, the Olypmics in Munich), when the threats were distant or rendered innocuous by leaders using euphemisms like 'blowback against Orientalism', or a 'criminal activity' which would be prosecuted with the 'full weight of the law'--thereby lulling us into a false sense of security and the slumber of the '90's--, the multiculturalist believers could and did turn a blind eye to the dozens of terrorist actions all over the world; usually justifying the terrorist and their horrific actions with a 'Well, what can we expect? We deserve it! Moreover, it's what our founding fathers did!'

You see the infernal situation multiculturalism put us in: we are either as bad as they are; or they are as good as we. It can't be any other way. It cannot be that this particular radical faction of Islam--whose men brutalize and subjugate their women to domestic servitude (indeed, their rewards in the afterlife indicates their true opinion of woman--the man with the most sexual slaves after death is the man among men), which cultivates homicidal bombers out of their children, whose best idea of government does not recognize the fundamental human aspirations for life, liberty and happiness for its denizens let alone its enemies, and whose recourse with those they disagree, in word and in deed, is untethered to anything good, moral, sane, or civil--it cannot be that this cultural is inequal, or less worthy, or (Cole or Chomsky forbid!) more evil than our culture! That would be just too imperialistic and perhaps even a racial thing to say!

But, some are worse than that! One might be tempted to say what Churchill said:

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.

Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities — but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome. (The River War, 1899, p. 248-50)

Unlike Churchill, I hold the hope that the problem is not with Islam, but with either a medieval understanding of Islam or, what's more likely, a decadent, hyper-critical western understanding of medieval Islam and the West. (I suppose that Churchill's damning observations, based on his exposure to the Sudanese Muslims whose problems pre-date the Muslim invasion in 9th Century, are not quite applicable to all Muslims. Indeed, the Muslims he refers to could not have built an empire which rivaled the Roman Empire in breadth and arts of civilization that the Islamic Empire did, in fact, do in its prime.) To be sure, I think we see the fruits of moderate, modern Islam here in the West today--in the growing presence and influence of people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji, Salman Rushdie, Farish Noor, among others).

So, while it may be the case that the truly noble has been displaced through the ridicule of the low, but it is reality, 9-11 in particular, that has begun and will thoroughly discredit the vacuous idealism masquerading as a virtue in our day. And ideals more sane, moral and humane will then prevail.