All of this has gone on despite the entire Western European governing class telling the people that they are wrong. In fact, to date the most common response of Western Europe’s governing leaders has been that people who think in such a way have clearly not experienced enough diversity, in particular they haven’t experienced enough Islam, and that if they did they would think differently. The polls in fact show the opposite. The more Islam there is in a society the more dislike and distrust there is in that society towards Islam. But the response of the political classes has had something else in common, which has been their insistence that in order to deal with this problem they must deal with this expression of public opinion. Their priority has been not to clamp down on the thing to which the public are objecting but, rather, to the objecting public. If anybody wanted a textbook case on how politics goes wrong, here is one.
In 2009 the Royal Anglian Regiment, on their return from Afghanistan, was given a homecoming parade through the town of Luton. This is one of the towns in England in which ‘white British’ are in a minority (45 per cent) and the town has an especially large Muslim community. Many locals turned out for the parade and were angered by the sight of extremists from the Islamist group al-Muhajiroun heckling and protesting the soldiers as they marched through the town centre. Among other things the group called the soldiers ‘murderers’ and ‘baby killers’. Enraged members of the public attempted to confront the protesters, but the British police protected the protesters and threatened the enraged locals with arrest. In the weeks that followed, some of these locals tried to organise a protest opposing the Islamists, but they were prevented from getting to the same Town Hall to which al-Muhajiroun had previously walked. And while al-Muhajiroun had handed out their flyers of protest in mosques with impunity, the locals opposed to the Islamists were prevented by police from handing out any leaflets.
Appalled at the double standards they perceived, in the weeks that followed a group formed that became known as the English Defence League (EDL). In the years that followed they organised protests in numerous cities across the United Kingdom that often descended into violence. This was, by the admission of the main organiser (called ‘Tommy Robinson’), partly because of the people that such protests attracted and also because everywhere they went organised groups of ‘anti-fascists’, often comprising large numbers of Muslims, turned up and began violent confrontations. These ‘anti-fascist’ groups all had the support of leading politicians, including the Prime Minister. They had also previously held ‘anti-fascist’ rallies where one of the killers of Lee Rigby had addressed the crowd on the ‘anti-fascist’ side. But the most important thing about the EDL was not so much its activities as the attitude of the authorities towards them. At no stage did the local police or local government, the national police or government, consider that the EDL had a point. As well as allying with groups that opposed the EDL even when those groups were themselves involved in extremism and violence, the upper echelons of government had clearly issued an order to shut the EDL down and prosecute its leadership.
On one occasion the EDL’s leader was arrested for trying to walk, with one companion, through the heavily Muslim area of Tower Hamlets in London. On another occasion he was arrested after an organised protest overran its running time by three minutes. And from the outset the authorities did everything they could to make life difficult if not impossible for the leadership of the group. From the moment Robinson started the organisation his bank accounts were frozen. He and all of his immediate family had their homes raided by police and files and computers were taken away. Eventually, a mortgage irregularity was found and Robinson was tried, convicted and sent to prison for this offence.15 At the same time there were constant threats from Islamist groups. As well as repeated assaults by Muslim gangs on the EDL’s leaders, there were also serious efforts to kill them. In June 2012 the police stopped a car containing part of a cell of six Islamists. The vehicle contained bombs, sawn-off shotguns, knives and a message attacking the Queen. The men were heading back from an EDL demonstration where they had planned to carry out the attack but due to a small attendance that day the protest had finished early. As on other occasions there was little public sympathy due to a general feeling that the EDL had brought any such attacks upon themselves. In response to the problematic light in which their town was shown by the emergence of Muslim gangs as well as the EDL, the local council put on an event called ‘Love Luton’. This was a celebration of the ‘diversity’ and ‘multiculturalism’ in Luton that included a range of foods and also stilt-walkers.
In different versions this same story has been replayed across Europe. In Germany in 2014 a movement calling itself Pegida formed in Dresden. Their agenda was similar to that of the EDL and other popular protest movements across Europe. They expressed themselves opposed to radical Muslims and mass immigration, though stressed their openness to immigration in general (especially in the case of Pegida to legitimate asylum seekers). As with the EDL their numbers included prominent members of ethnic and sexual minorities, though these were rarely if ever mentioned in the press. Pegida’s protests centred on an objection to indiscriminate Muslim immigration and an objection to hate-preachers, Salafists and other extremists. As with the EDL, the group’s founding symbols were not only anti-Islamist but anti-Nazi, attempting to distance themselves at the outset from any connection to such horrors of the past. Although such connections were consistently made in the media, by December 2014 the number of attendees at Pegida protests grew to more than 10,000 and had begun to spread across Germany. Unlike the EDL, which had attracted an almost exclusively working-class contingent in Britain, Pegida seemed able to appeal to a wider range of citizens in Germany including middle-class professionals. Eventually (though in much smaller numbers) the movement spread to other parts of Europe.
The reactions of the German authorities was the same as their British counterparts.
This habit of attacking the secondary symptoms of a problem rather than the primary problem has many causes. Not the least of them is that it is infinitely easier to criticise generally white-skinned people, especially if they are working class, than it is to criticise generally darker-skinned people whatever their background. And not only is it easier, but it elevates the critic. Any criticism of Islamism or mass immigration – even criticism of terrorism and rape attacks – can be seized upon by anyone else as a demonstration of racism, xenophobia or bigotry. The accusation, however untrue, can come from anywhere and can always carry some moral taint. By contrast, anybody who criticises someone as a racist or a Nazi is somehow elevated to the position of judge and jury as an anti-racist and anti-Nazi. Different standards of evidence also apply.
So, for instance, the chairman of the Luton Islamic Centre, Abdul Qadeer Baksh, is also the headteacher of a local school, associates with local politicians including MPs, and works with local officials on the ‘Luton Council of Faiths’ interfaith network. He also believes Islam to be in a 1,400-year war with ‘the Jews’, that in an ideal society homosexuals would be killed, and he has defended the chopping off of hands of thieves and lashing of women under Islamic ‘hudud’ punishment laws. Yet none of these facts – all easily available, all known or knowable – made him a pariah or an untouchable. The local police never raided the houses of his relatives looking for any excuse at all to arrest him. By contrast, from the moment that Tommy Robinson emerged, the desire was to pin the accusation of ‘racism’ and of being a ‘Nazi’ to him, whatever he did. The Islamists against whom the EDL and similar movements protested were innocent even when found guilty, whilst those who reacted to them were guilty even when they were innocent. European governments tried to avoid finding the Islamists guilty but went out of their way to find movements that reacted to them guilty. Most of the media demonstrated a similar order of priorities, the most striking example of which was the desire to prove anti-Semitism on the part of any reactive movement whilst ignoring actual anti-Semitism in the primary movement to which the secondary movement was objecting. So although the entire German media rushed to try to prove Pegida’s leaders or members anti-Semitic, it has shown itself to be almost as slow as the German government when it comes to identifying the anti-Semitism among the Salafists and others to whom Pegida says it objects. Only after the government had let in the migrant flow of 2015 did members of the government and media in Germany start to concede that anti-Semitism among migrants from the Middle East in particular might be a problem.
But this is not just a political failing, it is a public one also. When it comes to anti-fascism in most of Western Europe, there would appear for now to be a supply-and-demand problem: the demand for fascists vastly outstrips the actual supply. One of the few bedrocks of post-war politics was anti-fascism, a determination never to allow fascism to emerge again. And yet in time this became perhaps the sole remaining certainty. The further fascism receded into history and the fewer visible fascists there were on display, the more self-proclaimed anti-fascists needed fascism to retain any semblance of political virtue or purpose. It proved politically useful to describe as fascist people who were not fascists, just as it proved politically useful to describe as racist people who were not racist. In both cases the terms were allowed to be applied as widely as possible. In both cases a huge political and social price was paid by anybody accused of these evils. And yet unjustly accusing people of these evils carried no social or political price whatsoever. It was a cost-free exercise, which could bring only political and personal advantages.
Nonetheless, while it may also be noted that no similar ‘anti-communist’ fervour was ever sustained in Western Europe, or was dismissed where it was suspected as akin to ‘witch-hunting’, anti-fascists in Europe were not always onto nothing – a fact that applies yet another layer of complexity onto Europe’s social problems. In the United States a popular protest movement of any kind, including one to do with immigration or Islam, is likely to attract some eccentric or even crazy people with kooky signs. But it will rarely consist early on, let alone firstly, of actual Nazis. When the Dutch MP Geert Wilders split off from the Dutch Liberal Party (VVD) in 2004 over the VVD’s support of Turkey’s entry into the EU, he formed his own party. The Party for Freedom (PVV) gained nine out of 150 seats in the Dutch Parliament at its first election in 2006. Opinion polls in 2016 showed the party to be the most popular party in Holland. Despite a growing number of MPs, Wilders remains to date the sole actual member of his party. When the party was first incorporated, Wilders himself ensured that this was the case. Neither members of the public nor in the end his own party’s Members of Parliament were able to join the party. In the process Wilders forfeited large amounts of state funding (which increases in Holland with the size of the political party). The single reason why Wilders chose to operate the party in this manner was, he explained privately at the time, that if he were to make it a membership party the first people to join could be the small number of skinheads that exist in Holland and because of them the next groups of people would not join.16 He was not willing to allow a tiny fringe of actual neo-Nazis to destroy the political prospects of an entire country.
This points to a deep problem in modern Europe and poses a severe challenge to any movement of people committed to challenging the issues that are at the forefront of European concerns. The same story is replicated in parliamentary parties and street movements. When Tommy Robinson set up the EDL he was shortly afterwards told that an actual Nazi, based abroad, insisted on coming in and taking the movement over. Robinson refused, at some risk to himself, and much of his time in the EDL was spent trying to keep such people out of the movement, not that he was ever given any credit for these moves. Nor was it often noted that a conviction for assault in 2011 was caused by him head-butting a person he said was actually a neo-Nazi. If the media and politicians claim that a movement is far to the right, it will of course attract what far-right people there are, even if the organisers are sincerely trying to rid the movement of such people.17 But it is also the case that there are small movements of actual racists and fascists in European countries.
All of which raises numerous questions for Europe. The short-term answer to those objecting to the consequences of mass immigration has been to ostracise them from any place in the discussion, by calling them racists, Nazis and fascists. If it was recognised that at least some of the people so designated did not warrant the label, then this was clearly thought a price worth paying. But what does a political class and the media do when they discover that the views they have tried to make beyond the political pale are in fact the views of the majority of the public?
Yet attacking all expressions of concern and failing to address or in any way stem the cause of them – to attack the secondary problem and not the primary problem – became a European habit in these years, and a sign of significant further problems to come.
- By ingliz
- By Fasces
- By wat0n
- By Puffer Fish