Thursday, February 16, 2017

Bad history helps bad ideology and xenophobic extremism

Christopher de Bellaigue has a useful essay on the problems of the "clash of civilizations" theory that Islamophobes use to provide some ideological justification for their xenophobia and militarism and religious bigotry, Trump’s dangerous delusions about Islam Guardian 02/162017.

And he reminds us that once a group perceived as foreign and weak is targeted for hatred, for many people the hatred takes on a life of its own:

Even accounting for the new arrivals of recent years, Muslims amount to just 6% of Europe’s population, and 1% of that of the US. But proportionality of response is not considered a virtue among the new nationalists – and even if the Muslim immigration figures were to start to fall, and all fear of submergence under a Muslim tide was demonstrated to be empirically groundless, who’s to say the populists would allow the thrill of fear to abate?

What seems more likely is that today’s proponents of harsh anti-Muslim measures will find retroactive justification in any virulent reaction they excite, leading to even more and harsher measures against Muslims – much as the European powers whose interventions helped hasten the collapse of the Islamic Enlightenment at the start of the last century felt their actions were vindicated by the violence that followed.

For those whose primary concern is the perpetuation of cultural homogeneity, the pressing question is a simple one: what is to be done with the Muslims? The clashist version of history makes their antipathy to modernity indisputable; integration and assimilation are therefore impossible. This would seem to be the position of the 60% of Germans, for example, who have been found in surveys to agree with Frauke Petry’s AfD that Islam does not belong in their country.

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