European democracy presented a disquieting spectacle last week as it negotiated with its most strident minority the terms on which European democracy might be allowed to continue. All Muslims had to do was issue threats, writes John Waters.
European liberals did the rest: analysed the sincerity of Muslim hurt; elaborated on the nature of Islamic alienation; connected the sentiment provoked by the Danish cartoons to the treatment of Muslims in Iraq; talked darkly about "racism" when anyone sought to question the proportionality of Muslim rage; framed fanciful hypotheses to illustrate the alleged extent of European/Judeo-Christian hypocrisy. It did not seem to strike anyone that, if extreme Islamists have their way, the ability of European discourse to embrace such a breadth of argument will be radically circumscribed. European liberalism has become the accomplice of its own gravediggers. Baffled by self-created concepts like "racism", "tolerance", "sensitivity" and political correctness, liberals prefer surrender to an unappeasable enemy before the contemplation of an illiberal thought.
European liberals reared on the virtues of diversity and human rights, pluralism and equality, multiculturalism and secularism, will soon be faced with choosing between square pegs and round holes. Islamic spokesmen know what they are doing when they tap Western buttons about "offence", "alienation" and "imperialism". This is how they get Western liberals to do their work for them. They are rarely disappointed. Although many European liberals are also secularists - lapsed Christians or Catholics - who have long exalted in attacking and jeering at their own religions-of-origin, they discover in themselves previously untapped reserves of tolerance when it comes to defending faiths with which they lack a neurotic relationship. Similarly with the Iraq button: European intellectuals are guaranteed to dissemble in the face of the most outrageous behaviour by anyone listed as victimised by Western "imperialism".
Muslim victimhood, albeit expressed in the language of hate and rage, is the virus that threatens to collapse European civilisation, because liberals cannot resist a victim, even one seeking to destroy them. Although the philosophical bedrock of many Western values resides in the Enlightenment and before that in Christianity, the actual energy of European liberalism has lately derived from victimologies. In the past half-century, European liberals got their impetus from events in such places as South Africa and South and Central America, though for interesting reasons not the Soviet Union or China. South Africans and Nicaraguans were cuddly, lovable and grateful for the support of white Westerners.
In the present century, however, European liberals have transferred their condescension to the people of Islam. While allowing him to strike again at his own culture, flirting with Islamo-fascism also satisfies the European liberal's weakness for a bit of cultural rough. But unlike Sandinistas, the new liberal darlings are unimpressed by liberal values. Their most visible characteristics are in many respects the antitheses of Western values, which Islamist fundamentalists make no secret of their determination to destroy.
This past week or so, they have demanded the standing down of Western democratic values in as far as these may be uncongenial to their objectives. Under the cover of offence, they demanded that Western society listen to their point of view, regardless of the bloodthirstiness of its terminology, and that they and their beliefs receive a derogation from the cut-and-thrust of politico-religious debate. So corrupted is the core of the European value system that these seem like reasonable demands. The only criticisms of Islam that will henceforth be permissible will be those Muslims do not find "offensive".
Threats of bloodletting, together with a battery of liberal pieties which nudge Western voices towards self-censorship, have now dramatically increased the immunity of Islamic obscurantism from scrutiny and discussion. In the course of one debate in which I participated last week, a Muslim contributor asserted that "Islam is Europe too", pointing out that the number of Muslims in Europe is growing exponentially. Soon, he added, Europeans will have to listen to the Muslim point of view. This means more than Europe simply having to recognise the growing Muslim franchise: he appeared to me to be saying that European democratic values such as freedom of expression are not written in stone, that Western values will have to be adapted to Muslim requirements, that a Muslim majority could one day vote European democracy out of existence.
European liberalism has this past week shown that it is sufficiently healthy to finish itself off. The question is: does this generation of European liberals have the right to sell out the principles over which it has temporarily claimed ownership, and so deliver our children into the clutches of a fundamentalist tyranny beyond their wildest nightmares?