MarketWatch, NY
July 15 2005
Fighting the banality of evil
Commentary: As cultures collide, conflicts surge
By Marshall Loeb, MarketWatch
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — The scariest part of the terrorist attack
on London was the very ordinariness of the perpetrators.
They were not cold-eyed crazies from far away. Of the four known
suicide bombers, at least three had been born in Britain, raised in
Britain, schooled in Britain, employed in Britain. Two of them had
attended a local college in Leeds. One had married a Leeds woman,
had a baby, now aged eight months, and was expecting another. None
was known to have made any trouble — until now.
They reflected, as social historian Hanna Arendt said of the
rank-and-file Nazi war criminals who had so easily massacred innocent
women and children, “the banality of evil.”
But what set these terrorists off from the majority of Britons was
that they were Muslim; three had Pakistani roots, one Jamaican.
Apparently, this somehow made them feel different, and susceptible
to radical incantations.
That bespeaks a deeper and wider problem we all face. In many
countries, big and growing parts of the citizenry are segregating and
separating themselves from the broad majority. Instead of seeking
to integrate with the majority, they wall themselves off, creating
tensions that can literally explode.
The situation will only worsen because birth rates in many developed
nations are plunging. In order to stabilize their populations, and
find enough people to fill entry-level jobs, these countries need
immigrants, most of them from the Third World.
But that’s just what the majority populations do not want.
Almost overnight, large immigrant populations have risen throughout
Europe. Countries with the most liberal policies of granting political
refuge and admitting immigrants have had the most severe problems —
because so many have come flocking in.
For example: Norway. In Oslo, 7.3 percent of the population are
outsiders. Crime rates are surging, and most of the perpetrators
are newcomers.
Or take the Netherlands. In Amsterdam, TheoVan Gogh (a descendant
of the painter) was shot and stabbed to death on a busy street by a
Dutch citizen of Moroccan origin because he had made a film considered
critical of Islam by some radicals.
In Germany, which for more than 50 years has accepted large numbers of
immigrant Turks to fill low-level jobs, the Muslim population is up
to almost 6 million (out of a total 82 million) and tensions between
majority and minority are bruising.
So, too, in France, where the largely Muslim minority, primarily from
the former French colonies of Algeria and elsewhere in North Africa,
is 5 million, or 8.6 percent of the population.
The trouble is not confined to Western Europe. Almost everywhere that
different ethnic groups live side by side in this world, there has been
a long history of tension, often bloodshed and sometimes raw genocide
— as when the Turks massacred 1.5 million Armenians beginning in 1915,
or the Nazis slaughtered 6 million Jews beginning in 1939.
More recently, recall how the Orthodox Serbs destroyed the Muslim
Bosnians in the former Yugoslavia. Or how the Tutsis wiped out the
Hutus in Rwanda. Or how the tan-skinned Muslim majority of Sudan’s
North have been murdering the black-skinned Christian Animists of
the South.
Perhaps we can draw some warnings and lessons from this sad portrait:
— More and more groups of people — with different cultures and
clashing religions — will be thrown up against each other in the
future. That is substantially because the number of immigrants will
continue to expand, particularly in countries that need more workers
to empty the garbage, bury the dead and do other distasteful jobs.
— Countries that receive those immigrants should pay much more
attention to developing. policies to integrate them into the local
culture. Most important is to improve the schools, and require that
the newcomers learn the local language.
On these issues, the United States can give some guidance to the
rest of humankind. True, we should not boast, given our inexcusable
and sinful heritage of slavery; Until fairly recently the people who
came to America from Africa were involuntary slaves.
But still, ours is, along with Canada, one of the two most successful
polyglot immigrant nations in the world. Our immigrants benefit
America.
That is at least partly due to public policies and private institutions
that have worked together to make immigrants feel welcome, to help
educate them, meld them into the greater society, and to equip them
with the skills to rise in their jobs.
Settlement houses, often focused on aiding specific ethnic groups, have
done just that. Churches, synagogues and other religious institutions
have served to build the nation, not destroy it.
This is not to say that the attacks in London could have been avoided
if only Britain had spent more time and treasure in training those
four mad, but all-too-ordinary messengers of death.
But it is to say that many peoples in the world face an inscrutable
problem, that its roots run deep and that we had better create some
effective policies for dealing with the future waves of immigrants,
because they surely will come.
Reporter Sarah K. Wulfeck contributed to this article.