The Last Days of Europe
Henryk M. Broder
One of the epochal works of the past century was Karl
Kraus’s “Tragedy in Five Acts with Preamble and Epilogue:
The Last Days of Mankind.” Kraus worked on this magnum
opus for a total of seven years, from 1915 to 1922, and
when he finally finished it and the play was published in
book form, he declared it unperformable. In the foreword
to the book version, he wrote, “The staging of this drama,
which would take ten evenings by earthly reckoning, is
intended for a theater on Mars. Theatergoers of this world
would not be able to bear it.” Kraus refused offers to
stage the play from well-known directors like Max
Reinhardt and Erwin Piscator. On January 15, 1930, the
epilogue to the “Last Days” was performed at the Berlin
Theater on Schiffbauerdamm, directed by Heinrich Fischer,
with music by Hanns Eisler.
Since then, every director brave enough to try his hand at
it has failed. There have been some successful readings
and sound recordings, including one with Helmut
Qualtinger. In 1974, in honor of Karl Kraus’s 100th
birthday, ORF radio produced “The Last Days” as a
multipart radio play, with 160 actors.
Kraus assembled large portions of “The Last Days” from
quotes: newspaper reports, military orders and court
decisions, Kraus’s favorite material. In the foreword to
the published version, he wrote about his methods as
follows: “The most unlikely deeds reported here really
happened; I just portrayed what they did. The most
unlikely conversations held here were literally spoken;
the most outrageous inventions are quotes.” Today, one
would probably call it a sound bite collage, an
approximation of the absurd using documentary means, and
we would note that no theater production can compete with
real life, because life is more absurd, crazier, more
improbable. Take for example the fact that Libya, which is
planning a memorial to the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein,
now that he’s lost both his power and his life—the same
Libya for a time held the chairmanship of the United
Nations Human Rights Commission. Apparently North Korea
and Zimbabwe were overqualified. Or take, for example, the
wonderful suggestion made by Günter Grass on the occasion
of the German city of Lübeck’s application to become an
official European City of Culture. He proposed turning one
of Lübeck’s churches into a mosque, as a good will gesture
towards the Muslims living in Germany--who only have 2,000
mosques, 80 of them in Berlin alone, at their disposal and
therefore really need another one that was once a church.
But I don’t want to get ahead of myself. Let me stick for
the moment with Karl Kraus, who I hope will forgive me for
naming him in the same breath as a man who took his life’s
work as the moral conscience of the nation so seriously
that he forgot all about his brief guest appearance with
the Waffen SS--another nice example, by the way, of life’s
truth being stranger than fiction. When Karl Kraus wrote
“The Last Days of Mankind,” he knew that World War I would
NOT spell the end of mankind, no matter how the war turned
out. Somehow mankind would survive and life would go on.
It was the end of mankind as Karl Kraus had known it: the
end of the much-vilified, but actually not so terrible,
Austro-Hungarian Empire, the end of the casual arguments
over banalities, the excessive excitement over wronglyplaced commas that Kraus loved so much—the excitement, not
the commas—that he couldn’t get enough of incorrect
punctuation. For Karl Kraus, the last days of mankind were
a sort of long solar eclipse, and the only thing he knew
was that they would never end.
Today we know that there is no “end of history,” that
World War I was only the dress rehearsal for World War II
and that the fall of the Berlin Wall was not only the end
of an old confrontation but the beginning of a new one,
defined by the nice term “asymmetrical warfare”--a word
that has many of us looking back nostalgically to a time
when war was still a fair man-to-man fight and the boys in
the Kremlin and the White House simply reached for the red
telephone in times of crisis.
If I speak today, with love and respect to Karl Kraus of
the Last Days of Europe, I don’t mean that Europe will
soon cease to exist—that the peninsula between the North
Sea and the Mediterranean will simply break off along the
Archangelsk-Moscow-Odessa axis and disappear into the sea—
although that might be an attractive thought for many
nature and animal lovers. I mean the Europe that you and I
know—the ravaged continent that developed so astonishingly
over the last 60 years, and especially in the last
fifteen.
I know it’s in style to complain that times are getting
worse and people getting stupider. The proof seems to be
everywhere. But the evidence is misleading; in fact, the
opposite is true. Times are getting better and people are
getting smarter. They just don’t know it, or don’t want to
know it, because every day they see apocalyptic films on
television and read reports by Food Watch, Robin Wood and
Attac. And because they take everything they have for
granted.
I, on the other hand, after fifty years in the West, am
still amazed at how many newspapers you can buy at every
newsstand. I’m excited that I can fly from Reykjavik to
Rome without being stopped by a single border guard. As we
were driving home recently from Lake Garda to Bavaria, my
daughter wanted to know when we were going to get to
Austria; we’d already passed it. It will be a long time
before I get used to the fact that I can send mail
anywhere in the world from an internet café in Tel Aviv or
Krakow, and expect an answer. And that I only need a
laptop, a digital camera and a mobile phone to work
anywhere there’s an electric socket. But these are
feelings of joy that I can only talk about with other
people from Eastern Europe—with Joachim Gauck from East
Germany or the author Richard Wagner from Romania or my
tailor from Ukraine, who wants to send his kids to the
United States for college. My western friends, even my
wife and daughter, don’t understand me. Sometimes I feel
like someone from a South Sea island who finds himself in
the cold North and is the only one who’s excited that the
central heating works.
Now the central heating is slowly being turned down, and
it’s getting colder in Europe. Not because Gasprom has
raised its prices or throttled production, and not because
everyone’s now driving gas-guzzling SUVs and letting the
air conditioning run. It’s getting colder in Europe
because we are getting more cowardly. Not that we were
ever particularly brave; if chance hadn’t helped us along,
the Berlin Wall would still be standing and we’d still be
emptying our pockets for the border guards on the transit
highway through the GDR to Berlin.
We are living through the last days of Europe as we know
it. The question is not whether Europe is going downhill,
but only how quickly it will happen. Will it take one or
two generations before Europe becomes Eurabia? Or Eurasia.
If I had a choice, I’d pick Eurasia, if only because I
prefer Asian food.
Some of you, I know, because I can read minds, are
thinking, this guy is paranoid. It’s true, I am paranoid,
but that doesn’t mean they’re not after me. I’m not
imagining it—I really am being told more and more often,
and more aggressively, to be tolerant, considerate, and
cooperative towards people I don’t know and who are
neither cooperative, nor considerate, nor at all tolerant
towards me. These days we celebrate the anniversary of an
event you must not forget in case your grandchildren
should ask you one day, “Grandma and Grandpa, when and how
did it all start?” Then you have a choice. You could say:
“On September 30, 2005, the day the Danish newspaper
Jyllands-Posten published a dozen cartoons about the
Prophet Mohammed that were so harmless and innocent that
it took months before anyone noticed them.”
Or you could say, “It began the day Danish embassies were
attacked and burned in Beirut and Damascus.” Or the day
that thousands of ranting demonstrators took to the
streets of London to protest the publication of cartoons
they hadn’t seen, in a newspaper whose name they couldn’t
pronounce. And if you have really prepared yourself, you
could show your grandchildren an 11-minute long YouTube
video of the demonstration on February 3, 2006, in London,
at which masked demonstrators chanted “Allahu Akhbar,”
“Jihad in the name of Allah,” “May Allah bomb you, may
Usama Bin Laden bomb you,” “You will pay with your
blood!”, “Bomb, bomb Denmark,” “Denmark, watch your back,
Bin Laden is coming back,” and “We want Danish blood,” and
where they carried hand-painted signs with slogans like
“Jihad against European Crusaders,” “Europe You Will Pay,
Your Annihilation is On Its Way,” “Annihilate those who
Insult Islam,” “Europe, you will pay, Mujahadeen are on
the way,” and “Slay those who Insult Islam!” It was only
one of many peaceful demonstrations from Islamabad to
Rabat, London to Jakarta, whose participants took the
Mohammad cartoons as an excuse to release pent-up
resentments. They threatened, “Europe, take some lessons
from 9/11,” “Be prepared for the real Holocaust,” and
“Behead those who insult Islam!” My two favorite photos
from those days show a veiled woman whose poster reads,
“God Bless Hitler,” and a man with a sign reading “Kill
those who Insult Islam” standing between two London
bobbies.
You may ask why you didn’t see these photos. Very simply,
because they were not published in any German newspaper.
We can only guess whether the newspapers were trying to
protect their readers or just not to annoy them, after
they had failed to reprint the Mohammed cartoons
themselves—except for Die taz, Die Welt and Die Zeit,
which printed one cartoon each. All other German
newspapers and magazines, unfortunately including the
Spiegel, preferred to show responsibility, rather than the
cartoons, by not publishing them.
Did you notice that the debate a year ago was a phantom
debate about something almost no one had seen, unless they
subscribed to Jyllands-Posten, which is not one of
Europe’s major newspapers? It was like deaf people
discussing music, blind people talking about painting,
impotent people debating orgasms.
POSTER
Never before had there been a debate like this. The
prohibition on pictures of Mohammed—a prohibition that is
controversial even within Islam—was adopted by the media
in anticipatory obedience, not out of respect for Mohammed
and Islam, but for fear of the raging mob, which was able
to get across its message--“Kill those who insult Islam!”-with the help of the same media. For some, this
submissiveness did not go far enough. Günter Grass, who
had not yet gotten over his idea of turning a church into
a mosque, spoke of a “conscious, planned provocation by a
conservative Danish paper,” which he labeled “right-wing
extremist” on another occasion. He characterized the riots
as a “fundamentalist response to a fundamentalist act.”
The score, in other words, was one to one in a match
between two fundamentalist teams; one had published a
couple of cartoons, the other had torn through the global
village like a firestorm. Grass’s view of the situation
was about as correct as someone claiming he’d battled the
Nazis side by side with resistance members But this did
not stop him from stamping his feet more and more loudly
from statement to statement. It wasn’t enough for him to
equate the Danish cartoonists with the Muslim mob, and in
fact to place the mob in a morally superior position
because it was merely reacting. He concluded, “We have
lost the right to seek protection from the right to
freedom of expression... and we shouldn’t forget that
there are places that don’t have separation of church and
state.”
Grass, whose appearances are the best evidence that
freedom of expression can protect all sorts of nonsense,
also recommended “looking at the cartoons more carefully.
They are reminiscent of the famous newspaper from the Nazi
period, Der Stürmer. It published anti-Semitic cartoons in
the same style.”
One might blame this statement on the weakened sight and
hearing of a somewhat elderly gentleman to whom everything
that happens in the world is a challenge to prove his
undiminished powers of judgment. But younger people are
saying similar things. Fritz Kuhn, chief of the Green
parliamentary party, said in an interview with Die Welt
that people had to begin talking “about the relationship
between freedom of expression and the responsibility that
arises from it,” because “many people feel stigmatized by
the cartoons. They reminded me of the anti-Jewish drawings
in the Hitler period before 1939.” (Kuhn born 1955)
Kuhn, who is considered one of his party’s more
intelligent realists, never withdrew or modified this
unspeakable sentence. And the Greens, usually the first to
mount the barricades of virtual indignation when the Third
Reich is “trivialized,” never called him onto the carpet
for it. How could they, when even the chairman of the
Greens, Claudia Roth, took the same line? She called for
“prudence, not a culture war,” and maintained that “deescalation starts at home.” In this context, she
criticized the so-called “Muslim test” in Baden
Württemburg: “This test causes Moslems to feel stigmatized
and generally suspected.” Another glass of beer, and Roth
would have claimed that the demonstrations in Jakarta,
Damascus and Tehran weren’t just protesting the JyllandsPosten cartoons, but also the Muslim test in Baden
Württemburg. The young CDU deputy Eckart von Klaeden
admonished, “We must not contribute to escalation.” The
CDU and the SPD declared separately, but in unison, that
“dialogue with Islam must be strengthened,” shortly after
demonstrators in Tehran had firebombed the Austrian
embassy, shouting “God is great!” and “Europe, Europe,
shame upon you!”
If one followed the events of those days closely, one
found oneself thinking of the Bavarian doctor and writer
Oskar Panizza, sentenced by a Bavarian court in 1895 to a
year in prison for “offenses against religion” for writing
a satire about the Vatican, Das Liebeskonzil (“The Love
Council”). Panizza is the source of the quote, “When
insanity becomes epidemic, it’s called reason.” Europe
experienced an epidemic of insanity masquerading as
reason. The Danish firm Arla Foods, which exports a
considerable volume of its products to Arab and Muslim
countries, took out ads in 25 leading Arab papers
distancing itself from the Mohammad cartoons. The Swiss
firm Nestle soon did the same, but went one step further,
promising not to use Danish ingredients in its products.
Although no British newspaper had dared to publish any of
the cartoons, British Foreign Minister Jack Straw called
their publication “unnecessary, insensitive, disrespectful
and wrong.” British newspapers, not known for showing
restraint in disseminating intimate details about the
royal family, voiced regret over misdeeds they had not
even committed. The “Observer” assured readers that
“heightened Islamic sensibilities are something we must
take into account in the future.” Faced with riots on its
doorstep, the Daily Telegraph expressed “respect for
Islam, this purest and most abstract of all monotheistic
religions.” Even the Times rationalized its restraint,
saying “This is not appeasement, but responsible use of
freedom of speech.”
When a newspaper takes an act of self-censorship and turns
it into evidence of responsible use of free speech, more
is lost than just the last remnants of its professional
honor.
The Vorwärts, the SPD newspaper, which has historically
been persecuted and banned more often than any other
German newspaper,
confused cause and effect, claiming
that, “in the strange feud that the right-wing populist
newspaper Jyllands Posten has triggered with its reckless
Mohammad cartoons,” more was at stake than just press
freedom: “Of course Jyllands Posten has the right of free
speech. But one must distinguish between a right and the
moral use of that right. Jyllands Posten abused press
freedom, not in a legal, but in a political and moral
sense.” (Bismarck was right.)
As varied as the details of the reactions were, they all
had in common their origin in a sense of powerlessness and
helplessness. Critical minds that, a day before, had
agreed with Marx that religion is the opiate of the people
suddenly found it necessary to be considerate of religious
feelings, especially when they were accompanied by
violence. As with Günter Grass’s recommendation following
the September 11 terrorist attacks (“The West should
finally ask itself what it’s done wrong”), western “civil
society” was the target of de-escalation , rather than the
jungle of indignation from which the jihadis took their
strength. A veritable race ensued to find the boldest,
most audacious, and most original excuses. Here are my two
favorites:
Peter Scholl-Latour, expert on Islam, the Orient, and good
behavior, expressed his understanding for the response of
insulted Muslims (“Anyone who ridicules the prophet
Mohammad in a cartoon . . . offers Muslims an extreme
challenge”), and then spoke of his own sensibilities: “As
a devout Catholic, I can say that when people mock the
Christian religion on TV or in the newspaper, this also
shocks me deeply.” His younger colleague Franz Josef
Wagner voiced his solidarity with the insulted prophet:
“When we die, we want to travel on. As Christians, as
Muslims, as Buddhists—I want to travel on and not be made
fun of like Mohammad.”
(As a Jew, I am grateful that Franz Josef Wagner does not
want me along on his post-mortal excursions).
Thus within a few weeks, a culture of fear, regret and
apology developed such as Germany had never seen before.
Across the political, journalistic, religious and
scholarly spectrum, society stood as one, firmly
determined to nip any distress to Muslims in the bud
before it could reach them.
The representatives of the Enlightenment responded like
people threatened by a hurricane: they can’t do anything
against the power of nature, so they store provisions,
nail the windows and doors shut, and pray that the storm
will pass. This may be the only option for natural
catastrophes, but it doesn’t work in a dispute with
fundamentalists; encountering no resistance only makes
them more determined. Quite rightly, Islamic
fundamentalists consider the West to be weak, decadent and
unwilling even to defend itself. Those who react to
hostage takings and beheadings, massacres of people of
different faiths, and outbreaks of collective hysteria by
calling for a “dialogue of cultures” deserve no better.
But how can we expect decency and backbone from the
freelance dissidents and notorious nonconformists who love
to throw monkey wrenches into the machinery of the times,
when even the leading mind of the first and most powerful
global player, the Pope, believes he needs to de-escalate?
The Catholic Church took 359 years to rescind Galileo’s
conviction and rehabilitate the dissenter. They still
haven’t apologized to Giordano Bruno, who was burned at
the stake 407 years ago. But it took only two days for
Benedict XVI to modify his Regensburg speech and voice
regret over the misunderstandings it might have caused.
It’s true that the Pope, unlike Franz-Josef Wagner,
Nestle’s, or the Vorwärts, didn’t strew ashes on his head.
But what he said came very close to an apology, and that
is how it was understood. In contrast, we are still
waiting in vain for major representatives of political
Islam to apologize for the fatwa against Salman Rushdie or
for burning down the Danish embassies in Damascus and
Beirut.
Military historian Martin van Crefeld has coined the term
“asymmetric warfare.” It refers to the impossibility of
combating terror and terrorists by military means, because
they do not obey any of the rules of war, while the
representatives of state power fight with their hands
tied—first of all by the Hague and Geneva Conventions, and
second of all by the public, which expects adherence to
the rules even in regard to terrorists who abide by no
rules and opposes civilian casualties, even if they are
non-uniformed combatants.
This asymmetry is not limited to military matters; it
typifies the entire dispute. In line with Chairman Mao’s
exhortation to “punish one, educate a hundred,” terror
works by creating a background threat. The threat must, of
course, be credible and convincing. That’s why Daniel
Pearl’s beheading was filmed and placed on the internet,
and why the murderer of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh
combined his deed with a warning to anyone else who failed
to show Islam the necessary respect.
You may know about the German artist Hans Haacke. For him,
art is a means of participating in political discussions,
getting to the heart of problematic matters in striking
fashion, and provoking controversy. Haacke honors no
taboos—except for one. In a long interview recently with
the Zeit, he was asked why he has done no works “dealing
with the role of Islam.”
Haacke answered, “And I won’t be doing one anytime soon.
The relationship with Islam seems so complex and explosive
to me that I don’t dare. Too much explosive material has
built up on all sides. You can’t predict who might
suddenly go crazy.”
The interviewer persisted: “You said before that an artist
can’t be a coward.”
To which Haacke explained, “Not being a coward shouldn’t
be confused with being foolhardy. . . . When I did
critical pieces on apartheid or on Bush’s policies, there
was no reason to be afraid anyone would be risking life or
limb. I knew the American National Guard wouldn’t come in
shooting.”
Haacke didn’t need to say who might appear unexpectedly on
his doorstep if he criticized Islam; it was obvious. But
he could not resist mentioning that the Mohammad cartoons
were “not about free speech,” but about “provoking a
religious minority in Denmark.” He called his own
attitude, that of a detached observer, “not cowardly,” but
“wise.” There could be something in that, if he did not
otherwise take any opportunity to speak his piece . A bit
of violence is helpful to turn cowardice into wisdom,
like water to wine. “Punish one, educate a hundred!” And
it’s just a small step from active abstinence for wisdom’s
sake, like that practiced by Haacke, to passive
collaboration.
The idea that one is acting wisely by quickly coming to an
understanding with Islam has long since entered the
popular mindset. Some talk about a “dialogue of equals,”
for which they will bend over backwards; others talk about
developing “interfaces.” Recently, Oskar Lafontaine, once
the SPD’s chairman and candidate for chancellor, talked
about “interfaces between left-wing politicians and the
Islamic religion.” In an interview with the former
Communist newspaper Neues Deutschland, he said, “Islam is
concerned with community, and thus contradicts the concept
of exaggerated individualism in the West that threatens to
fail. The second point of contact is that devout Moslems
are obligated to share. The left also wants the strong to
meet the weak. Thirdly, in Islam the prohibition on usury
still plays a role, as it once did in Christianity. At a
time when the entire economy is in crisis because ideas of
profit have become completely absurd, there are reasons
for the left to enter into a dialogue with the Islamicinfluenced world.”
Lafontaine called on the West to exercise self-criticism
(“We must always ask ourselves with what eyes the Muslims
see us”) and expressed sympathy for Muslims’
“indignation”: “People in Islamic countries have
experienced many humiliations—one of the most recent is
the Iraq war. It’s about raw material imperialism.”
In his search for interfaces, Lafontaine overlooked one
important point: if there really were to be a union
between left-wing politics and Islamic religion, how long
would he survive without his beloved Sancerre wine? His
dialogue with the Islamic-influenced world would take
place with fruit juice and mineral water.
If one wants to know what extremes are good for, one must
go to extremes. Now that all the old utopias have failed,
proving to be either monstrous misunderstandings or
criminal enterprises, a new seduction has appeared on the
utopian horizon: Islam. It’s a simple, easily
understandable system that offers a solution to many
problems: A prohibition on interest instead of usury.
Community instead of individualism. Sharing instead of
cashing in. Of course, if this were true, Saudi Arabia
would be a paradise on Earth and not the most reactionary
system in the world. Those most easily susceptible to
these ideas are people who have, as the saying goes,
danced at many weddings but haven’t yet found a partner
for life—those who have tried democratic socialism and
totalitarian socialism, but never found the answers they
were seeking.
You may not have heard that David Myatt, the founder of
the National Socialist movement in Great Britain,
converted to Islam a few months ago and changed his name
to Abdul Aziz ibn Myatt. This is exactly the type of news
you won’t find in German newspapers, the same papers that
otherwise report on the most insignificant ecumenical
events in the most insignificant small towns.
Myatt, now over 50 and hardened by long stays in prison,
published an essay entitled “From Neo-Nazi to Muslim,” in
which he explained his reasons for converting. They mainly
involve his antipathy towards the western system, which
worships materialism and believes in the Holocaust:
= The pure authentic Islam of the revival, which
recognises practical jihad (holy war) as a duty, is the
only force that is capable of fighting and destroying the
dishonour, the arrogance, the materialism of the West . .
. For the West, nothing is sacred, except perhaps
Zionists, Zionism, the hoax of the so-called Holocaust,
and the idols which the West and its lackeys worship, or
pretend to worship, such as democracy.
They want, and demand, that we abandon the purity of
authentic Islam and either bow down before them and their
idols, or accept the tame, secularized, so-called Islam
which they and their apostate lackeys have created.
This may well be a long war, of decades or more—and we
Muslims have to plan accordingly. We must affirm practical
jihad—to take part in the fight to free our lands from the
kuffar (unbelievers). Jihad is our duty.=
What is noteworthy about Abdul Aziz ibn Myatt’s words is
not only his hatred of the West and democracy and his
commitment to jihad. What is especially noteworthy is how
Myatt says “we Muslims.” He’s hardly jumped on the
bandwagon when he’s already making himself the conductor
and examining his fellow passengers, whom he despises as
lackeys.
You might argue that Islam can’t help it if someone like
Myatt converts. That’s true, but we still have to ask why
a British Nazi would mutate into a Muslim—why not a Hindu
or Buddhist or Confucian? Why wouldn’t he join the Baha’i,
a very liberal and progressive religious community with
roots in Islam? It must have to do with the “interfaces”
he’s found between his political beliefs and the Islam of
today.
Carlos the Jackal, real name Illich Ramirez Sanchez, the
top terrorist of the 1970s and 80s—the one who planned and
carried out the attack on OPEC headquarters in Vienna in
1975—Carlos, too, became a militant Muslim after being
sentenced to life imprisonment by a French court in
December 1997. In mid-2003, he published a book from
prison entitled “Revolutionary Islam,” in which he
explained and defended terrorism as a tool of class
warfare. He also voiced his support for Osama bin Laden
and the September 11 attacks. Since 2005, he has been
writing articles under his Muslim name, Salim Muhammed,
for the Islamic newspaper Aylik, the illegal organ of the
Great East Islamic Raiders Front, which is responsible for
numerous terrorist attacks in Turkey. So Carlos has found
a religious—or, if you prefer, ideological or
metaphysical—justification for his acts.
Whatever it is, Islam captivates many people--not only
Oskar Lafontaine and Illich Ramirez Sanchez, but also the
rank and file of those searching for guidance. From July
2005 to June 2006, some 4,000 Germans converted to Islam.
That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it was four times as
many as in the same period the previous year. And while in
the past it was mainly women marrying Muslim partners who
changed their religion, the motives have become more
varied.
Now, I am always suspicious of converts. A while ago, in
Kiryat Arba near Hebron, in Israel, I met a Nazi judge’s
son who had converted to Judaism. For him it was the best
way to free himself from the burden of German history, and
at the same time give the finger to his Nazi father. What
a cruel irony of history: the son of a Nazi judge becomes
a Jew. But that wasn’t enough for him. He could have
converted, moved to Tel Aviv and enjoyed life on the beach
and in the cafes. Instead, it had to be Kiryat Arba near
Hebron, a place densely populated with fanatics, nutcases
and idealists, in the worst sense of the word. And that’s
where he lived, defending the right of Jews to live
anywhere in the Holy Land, and saying things that made me
nauseous, such as: “In the past it was our turn, now it’s
the Palestinians’ turn.” And whatever he said, it was his
father speaking through him.
A conversion to Judaism is a complicated and difficult
matter. Judaism doesn’t proselytize; it prefers to remain
a small and exclusive club. In contrast, converting to
Islam requires hardly more than a statement of intention.
Judaism has 613 commandments and prohibitions, which no
one, not even the most pious, can follow. Islam, in
contrast, is based on five easy-to-remember commandments:
monotheism, ritual prayer, fasting on Ramadan, pilgrimage
to Mecca and charity to legitimize property. This is not
only simple and easy, but also very appealing. If I were
looking for a religious home, Islam would be an option I
would seriously consider. What makes the whole thing more
complicated is the fact that Islam is both a religious and
a political faith; in fact, perhaps a political one first,
and then a religious one. To separate the one from the
other, Bassam Tibi created the distinction between Islam
and Islamism—not a bad idea theoretically, but one that
doesn’t stand the test of practice, because experts can’t
even agree on the meaning of jihad: inner effort or war
against unbelievers or maybe both, depending on who is
calling for jihad and why. We are also told over and over
that Islam prohibits suicide and that suicide bombers
cannot be Muslims. But we are also told that it is not
suicide if it targets enemies of Islam and if the
perpetrator sacrifices his life and becomes a martyr. In
this way, terror can be rationalized and any violent
action justified as an sacred act.
But there are some questions waiting for clarification.
Are there really 72 young virgins in heaven waiting fort
he martyr or is it only one 72 years old virgin waiting
for her redemption?
And so we keep hearing the argument we remember from the
days of the Red Army Faction: it’s just a small radical
minority that does not represent Muslims or Islam. There
are three things to be said about that. First of all: of
course not all Muslims are terrorists, but pretty much
every terrorist since September 11, 2001 has been Muslim.
Second: what is or is not representative is not a question
of surveys or election results, but can be determined by
looking at history. It’s not quantity that matters, but
quality, and what today is known as “sustainability.” The
Nazis never had a majority, but they were still
representative, and what they did in only 12 years
continues to have consequences today. Third: The idea that
violent Muslims are only a small radical minority is meant
as a tranquilizer, but is nevertheless probably true.
There is a great deal of evidence that the majority of
Muslims wants the same things as the rest of the
population: to live normally, work, shop, travel,
occasionally pray, and get annoyed at what’s on TV. But
this “normal” majority is not able, or, for whatever
reasons of ethnic solidarity, is not willing to discipline
the small radical minority, which is allowed to terrorize
them and to represent them publicly.
The problem is not my Turkish grocer, who sends his five
children to good schools so they’ll make something of
themselves. The problem is the “good guys” in the majority
society, whose willingness to ignore problems or
rationalize them away has grown to absurd proportions. The
problem is, to give just one example, the judges on the
Hesse Administrative Court in Kassel who recently decided
that four officials of “Milli Görus,” an organization
officially considered hostile to the Constitution, could
keep their German citizenship, even though they had
concealed their membership in the organization when they
were naturalized. The state of Hesse had rescinded the
naturalization when it discovered their activities; the
four sued the state and won before Hesse’s supreme
administrative court. The court argued that the
citizenship had not been obtained through trickery because
they had taken the loyalty oath in good faith. The Hesse
minister of the interior is considering an appeal.
Meanwhile, the four Milli Görus members can
continue
their Islamicist activities, as German citizens.
The problem is not the muezzins, whose prayers apparently
disturb some Germans’ peace and quiet. The problem is a
public that hardly notices when a Turkish lawyer in Berlin
is forced to close her office as a result of death threats
that she takes seriously, because she once barely survived
an attempted murder. And guess who’s after her life?
Christian fundamentalists, nationalist German xenophobes,
crazy Kurds or Armenians? It’s the fathers and husbands of
the beaten and raped Turkish women she has represented in
court. The only organization that supported Seyran Ates,
the lawyer, was Berlin’s gay-lesbian association, which
probably didn’t do her much good in her own community.
We’ve become used to many things that we write off as the
collateral damage of the multicultural society. That
Salman Rushdie had to live in hiding for over ten years,
while we carried on a “critical dialogue” with those who
had issued the fatwa against him. That a Green
parliamentary deputy, Ekin Deligöz, required round-theclock police protection after she called on Muslim women
to take off their headscarves and was flooded with hate
mail and death threats. That a French philosophy
professor, Robert Redeker, has been forced to live like
Richard Kimble, the Fugitive, because he published a piece
in the French newspaper Figaro dealing critically with
Muslim reactions to the Pope’s Regensburg speech—an act
that was seen as an additional, unacceptable slight. And
we never even discuss the constant readiness of many
Muslims to feel insulted, offended, and hurt, because we
know that even posing that question could insult, offend
and hurt them—and we know the consequences of that.
So whats the way out? If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
The last Dutch minister of justice, Piet Hein Donner,
declared that he could imagine introducing Sharia law in
Holland if the majority of Dutch voters wanted it. And on
the homepage of the minister of the interior in the
federal state of Northrhine-Westfalia, you’ll find an
affidavit proving the compatibility of Sharia law with the
German Constitution, the Basic Law.
It’s quite possible that you’re hearing a lot of what I’ve
told you for the first time. After all, it’s possible to
get through even the most unpleasant situations quite well
if you just make your perceptions more selective. The
power of denial is not a Freudian invention, but a very
useful human trait. It’s also possible that you consider
my claim—that we’re living through the last days of Europe
before it becomes Eurabia—to be correct in principle, but
grossly exaggerated. I’ll be happy to be proven wrong. But
I’m afraid that a society that is too comfortable and lazy
to reproduce because the state can’t provide complete
security from cradle to grave is also too comfortable and
lazy to realize which achievements of the Enlightenment it
should be defending. Freedom of opinion? Freedom to
travel? Or just the freedom to redefine cowardice as
wisdom?
I may well be paranoid. But they’re still after me.