It’s never been easier to emote, to shout or protest. But in our increasingly knee-jerk, ahistorical culture, fuelled by the deranged, bullying vehicle that is social media, it is becoming harder than ever to think. Given that we are rational animals or we are nothing, this is an appalling development. Humanity faces great challenges that require dispassionate, nuanced analysis.
Take extremism. There are at least four ways to deal with this critical issue, of which three, in my view, are utterly wrong. Let’s start with United States President Donald Trump’s, which is to pull up the drawbridge. His decision to ban citizens of seven Muslim-majority nations from the US for 90 days is misguided, dangerous, unjust and ineffective. Yes, travellers need to be vetted; but banning everybody, including dissidents, is absurd. Iranians accounted for 48.1 per cent of the visas issued from those seven countries in 2015. Southern California is home to between 300,000 and 500,000 Iranians, almost all of whom loathe the despicable, missile-wielding regime. It is the unofficial home of the Iranian opposition, at least in cultural terms.
Yet, Trump is now punishing Iran’s anti-Islamists by blocking them from visiting their families. An even greater problem with Trump’s approach is its underlying worldview: Could it be that he, or some of his advisers, genuinely believe that the West is in a religious war with Islam itself, as opposed to the political ideology of Islamism?
A tragic, defeatist ideology is gaining ground in some circles: It purports that Europe has erred fatally by allowing in so many Muslim immigrants, and is turning into “Eurabia”, and that America must resist following suit. Crucially, this is not a critique of the way countries have managed their migrants, but a claim that they were always bound to fail.
The shocking implication — disproved by the evidence — is that it is hard or even impossible for Muslims to integrate, that religion (or even merely one’s parents’ religion) trumps citizenship, and that the American dream and western universalism are all dead. No wonder that Republicans such as Justin Amash, House member for Michigan, have been so opposed to the executive order: He is half Syrian and half Palestinian, a radical free-marketeer, a lover of the US Constitution and a poster boy for a new generation of conservative politicians. So much for the disastrous drawbridge approach.
Former US president George W. Bush and the neo-cons made the opposite mistake: They thought military intervention and state-building were the answer to extremism. They wanted to bridge East and West and defuse the clash of civilisations. The West would set up new forms of governments and liberal economies across the Middle East, starting with Iraq. The model was post-1945 Germany and Japan, when the West helped create prosperous democracies in countries destroyed by totalitarian dictators. The neo-con quest turned out to be yet another instance of what Hayek called the Fatal Conceit: The idea that intellectuals, harnessing the power of the government, can remake the world in their image, that political will can triumph against all forms of reality. It led to hundreds of thousands of extra deaths, complete chaos in the Middle East and the rise of Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant).
British Prime Minister Theresa May finally and rightly rejected this approach in her speech in Washington week before last.
A third approach is denial. In its extreme form, it’s the idea that there is no meaningful problem, no threat posed by terrorists, no need to worry about borders or home-grown extremists. This error includes turning a blind eye to rising anti-Semitism, especially in continental Europe, as well as the existential threat to Israel from Iran and its surrogates. It involves denying the link between extremists and acts of terror, as when former US president Barack Obama claimed that “you’ve got a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris”. Hypercacher’s Jewish customers, of course, were hardly chosen “randomly”.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel also falls into this head-in-the-sand category: While seemingly generous, her decision to let in so many migrants from Syria and plenty of other places — compounded by an official policy to downplay problems — was a disaster. It helped turn Europe against refugees and triggered an unpredictable sequence of political events. The Belgians tolerated no-go zones in their country, as did the French, allowing terrorists to thrive and strike. France’s handling of immigration has generally been catastrophic: Vast numbers have been deprived of economic opportunity — thanks to socialist policies, parked into horrible estates and told to conform to a compulsory form of secularism.
The Americans are right that Europe faces massive problems with extremism; but the politics of the drawbridge, and neo-con utopias, are just as empty as such denialism. The solution is a fourth approach, a toughened-up version of the British way. Britain should be proud to be the country of Sir Mo Farah, Sajid Javid and Sadiq Khan, a nation so at ease with itself that it encourages Muslim state schools. It should continue to embrace refugees fleeing persecution and pursue a controlled yet liberal migration policy. But Britain should terminate the old politically correct, cowardly attitude that allowed scandals such as Rochdale, do a lot more to root out extremism, extend economic and educational opportunities, encourage interfaith engagement, recruit more Muslims into the Armed Forces and combat ghetto-isation. Britain’s mission is to show the world how to host a thriving, prosperous, integrated Muslim minority that can fully buy into core British values while practising its faith. Realism and hard, patient work, not digital hysteria, are the only ways to defeat the demagogues.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2017
Allister Heath is a British business journalist and commentator. He is currently deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph, responsible for Business content, and an associate editor at the Spectator.
