Opinion Journal, NJ
March 18 2007
Islamosocialism
The European left makes common cause with the Muslim right.
BY BRET STEPHENS
Sunday, March 18, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
"It is a profound truth," declared the British Socialist Party in a
1911 manifesto, "that Socialism is the natural enemy of religion."
Not the least of the oddities in the subsequent history of
progressive politics is that today it has become the principal
vehicle in the West for Islamist goals and policies.
Caroline Lucas, a member of the Green Party faction in the European
Parliament, is a longtime activist in anti-nuclear, animal-rights and
environmentalist causes, and not someone likely to describe herself
as an anti-feminist. Yet in June 2004, she joined British MPs Fiona
Mactaggart of Labor and Sarah Teather of the Liberal Democrats for a
press conference in the House of Commons organized by the Assembly
for the Protection of Hijab. The Assembly, better known as Pro-Hijab,
is a pan-European organization formed "to campaign nationally and
internationally for the protection of every Muslim woman’s right to
wear the Hijab in accordance with her beliefs and for the protection
of every woman’s right to dress as modestly and as comfortably as she
pleases."
Once upon a time, feminists and socialists alike would have
translated that as "subservience to the patriarchy." Now they seem to
have rediscovered their roots as civil libertarians, at least when
it’s politically expedient. Consider the issue of the Armenian
genocide. In 1998, the French-speaking wing of Belgium’s Socialist
Party (PS) co-sponsored legislation to criminalize denial of the
Ottoman Empire’s murder of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians, much
as Holocaust denial is also against the law.
Yet for the past several years, the same PS has been blocking the
process of criminalization it helped initiate, presumably in the
service of free speech. "Additional legal and historical research,"
says Belgian Deputy Prime Minister Laurette Onkelinx, remains to be
done in ascertaining exactly what happened in Anatolia in 1915.
Progressives have also been remarkably mindful of civil liberties in
matters of immigration. When the German state of Baden-Wüttemberg
last year required applicants for citizenship to answer a series of
questions regarding their personal views, the leader of the German
Green Party, Renate Künast, denounced it as "immoral." "A country
governed by law," she argued, "cannot ask questions about moral
values." Among the questions: "Where do you stand on the statement
that a wife should obey her husband and that he can hit her if she
fails to do so?"
Curiously, however, Europe’s progressives have been somewhat less
tolerant on other issues concerning moral values and personal belief.
Take "Islamophobia," which progressives often consider akin to racism
and have, in some instances, sought to ban by legal means. In Britain
last year, Tony Blair’s government enacted the Racial and Religious
Hatred Act, which criminalized "threatening" comments against
religious persons or beliefs. Comedian Rowan Atkinson and author
Salman Rushdie, among others, warned that the law undermined basic
rights of speech. But for London Mayor Ken Livingstone it was not
enough: He defined "Islamophobia" as "discrimination, intolerance or
hostility towards Islam and Muslims," and regretted that criminal
acts were not more broadly defined by the legislation.
Since coming to office nearly seven years ago, Mr. Livingstone has
become a symbol of the marriage of the European left and the Islamist
right. It’s a marriage of mutual convenience and, at least on one
side, actual belief. In the Netherlands, a recent study by the
University of Amsterdam’s Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies
found that 80% of immigrants–the overwhelming majority of whom are
Muslims–voted for the Labor party in recent elections, while the two
main center-right parties received a combined 4% of the immigrant
vote. In neighboring Belgium, the left-wing sociologist Jan Hertogen
credits immigrants for "[saving] democracy" by voting as a bloc
against the secessionist and anti-immigrant Vlaams Belang party.
For Muslim voters in Europe, the attractions of the Socialists are
several. Socialists have traditionally taken a more accommodating
approach to immigrants and asylum-seekers than their conservative
rivals. They have championed the welfare state and the benefits it
offers poor newcomers. They have promoted a multiculturalist ethos,
which in practice has meant respecting Muslim traditions even when
they conflict with Western values. In foreign policy, Socialists have
often been anti-American and, by extension, hostile to Israel. That
hostility has only increased as Muslim candidates have joined the
Socialists’ electoral slates and as the Muslim vote has become ever
more crucial to the Socialists’ electoral margin.
More mysterious, however, at least as a matter of ideology, has been
the dalliance of the progressive left with the (Islamic) political
right. Self-styled progressives, after all, have spent the past four
decades championing the very freedoms that Islam most opposes: sexual
and reproductive freedoms, gay rights, freedom from religion,
pornography and various forms of artistic transgression, pacifism and
so on. For those who hold this form of politics dear, any long-term
alliance with Islamic politics ultimately becomes an ideological, if
not a political, suicide pact. One cannot, after all, champion the
cause of universal liberation in alliance with a movement that at its
core stands for submission.
This is not, of course, the first time such a thing has happened in
the history of the progressive movement, or in European history. On
the contrary, it is the recurring theme. In the early 20th century,
the apostles of Fabianism–George Bernard Shaw among them–looked to
the Soviet Union for inspiration; in the 1960s the model was Mao; in
the late 1970s, the great French philosopher Michel Foucault went to
Iran to write a paean to Khomeini’s revolution. In nearly every case,
the progressives were, by later admission, deceived, but not before
they had performed their service as "useful idiots" to a totalitarian
cause.
But the stakes today are different. At question for Europeans is not
the prevailing view of a distant country. The question is the shaping
of their own. Europe’s liberal democrats were able, sometimes with
outside help, to preserve their values in the face of an outside
threat. Whether they can resist the temptations of Islamosocialism
remains to be seen.
Mr. Stephens is a member of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial
board. His column appears in the Journal Tuesdays.