The peculiar genius of the cultural-Marxist Left is to use the conscience, the good intentions, and the noble institutions of the West against it, including European guilt over the Holocaust and simple Christian charity. In this they follow slavishly Saul Alinsky’s Rule No. 4: “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”
A case in point is the current push for “diversity” in the nation-states of Europe. Having effectively eliminated the borders among France, Germany, and Italy, the European Union is now trying to erase them between the EU and the rest of the world, as evidenced by the “migration” crisis of the past three years. That there would be no crisis at all were it not for German chancellor Angela Merkel’s stupefying decision to effectively end the notion of European sovereignty and throw open her country to Islamic invasion in the guise of humanitarianism continues to go unremarked by officialdom.
Intead, they have embraced the notion that “diversity” is somehow a positive good, rather than a simple noun, along the lines of the American model. Never mind that the United States was unique among nations in its desire for (controlled) immigration, and its ability, via the melting-pot, to transform disparate peoples into Americans: the French, Germans, Italians and many others came here, in order to become Americans — Americans, with few exceptions, did not go back to Europe to become Europeans.
Is the same true of the Muslims arriving in ever-greater numbers at the heart of the EU — do they want to become “Europeans” (a literal impossibility, if “European” is to mean anything other than a passport) or do they want to transform Europe into a higher-functioning — but not for long! — simulacrum of their own dysfunctional homelands?
Writing in the Spectator, Douglas Murray raises some uncomfortable questions:
On Wednesday, two striking events happened in France. The first was that the President of the Republic led the nation’s mourning for Lieutenant-Colonel Beltrame, the policeman who swopped himself for a hostage at the siege at a supermarket in Trèbes last week. Elsewhere in Paris on the same day there was a silent march past the flat of Mireille Knoll. As a girl, in 1942, Mme Knoll narrowly escaped being rounded up by the French police and put on a train to Auschwitz. Last weekend, at the age of 85, the remains of her wheelchair-bound body were found in her Paris flat. Her body had been stabbed and burned. Mme Knoll, who suffered from Parkinson’s disease had apparently previously told police about a neighbour who had threatened to ‘burn her’. And so the fires that failed to catch the nine-year old Mireille in Auschwitz caught up with her seven decades later in multicultural, diverse, 21st century France.
What are we to think about this? Well, that depends on what we are allowed to know. There has been some outcry about the murder of Mme Knoll (not least because of its similarity to the murder of 66-year old Sarah Halimi last year) and it has been described as an act of ‘anti-Semitism’. But you might have to search – certainly in the English-language press – to find out what variety of anti-Semite might have stabbed a Jewish grandmother eleven times and then burned her body. Was it a member of the National Front? Or Momentum?
Read a report like this one at Sky and all you will learn is that ‘Two men, including a neighbour, have been charged with the 85-year-old’s murder.’ But if you read other parts of the press in France then the reference I made earlier to France’s new ‘diversity’ and ‘pluralism’ begins to make sense.
I frame this in terms of ‘what can we think about this’ for a very particular reason: which is that this is now a question which citizens of free countries must consider very carefully. In the wake of a number of official and unofficial government directives across Europe in recent months there is now a battle going on for the education of the general public.
Mis-education is more like it. Lt. Col Beltrame was a Frenchman. The man who killed him, Redouane Lakdim, was a Moroccan holding French citizenship. The difference is crucial and worth maintaining. The policeman was raised in nominally Christian France, was educated in the ways of the French, and was a blood relative to thousands of other Frenchmen and -women. Lakdim was an Arab. This is not to say that some Arabs cannot become productive French citizens — old Lebanon provided numerous examples. But they cannot become truly “French.”
Why this simple statement now provokes cries of racism is mystifying. Even a decade ago, and for at least a thousand years before that, it would have been unexceptionable. And yet, so fast has the ball been moved, that one cannot defend the cultures and peoples of the various European nation-states without hearing it. Throw in the high crime rates among the “immigrants” — and at the same time prevent the locals from fully understanding the magnitude of the problem — and you have a prescription for civil distress:
Earlier this year, the former founder of the English Defence League, Tommy Robinson, was suspended from Twitter for tweeting a statistic about rape-gangs – something that has been much in the news of late. Indeed if we are not merely going to pass around cat photos on social media, discussion of the mass-rape of the nation’s children might seem to be a legitimate activity. Just this week another such gang has been convicted – this time once again in Oxford. Saying ‘rape-gang’ or ‘grooming gang’ is of course itself a get-out. As is the dishonest and deliberately misinforming term ‘Asian rape-gangs’. But it is hard to know what one can say these days. ‘Muslim rape gang’ or ‘Pakistani rape gang’ may be accurate, but it will also bring forth a world of problems – including flaggings on social media. In recent days readers have shown me how they have been suspended from Facebook just for posting my recent Spectator article on ‘Rowleyism’. ‘Rape-gangs’ is certainly a flagged term.
And so it is that anyone interested in anything other than just feeling sad about the latest cache of rape-victims, and who, for instance, wonders about the characteristics of the latest Oxford gang (whether it is, for instance, an average Inspector Morse don-on-don style mystery) must work it out for themselves. They might be lucky and see the photo accompanying the BBC’s report of the story here. Or they may not. And more and more one gets the sense – in France, the UK and elsewhere – that there is a hope that we don’t work it out. Certainly an ever-decreasing number of people appear to be allowed to help us.
So the suspension of Tommy Robinson from Twitter for saying this raises a fascinating modern conundrum. Is it possible that there are facts which one person is allowed to say, but another is not? Can it be the case that, because of certain racial or religious characteristics, one person’s statement of facts is another person’s demonstration of prejudice?
In Germany friends and readers describe to me how they are learning anew how to read their daily newspapers. When the news says that ‘A person was killed by another person’ for instance, and no names or other identifying characteristics are given, people guess – correctly – that the culprit is probably of migrant background. For the time-being serious crimes are still reported, but the decision has been taken that the public should not really be informed about them.
Why would European governments — in Sweden, Germany, Britain, Ireland, France, and elsewhere — not want their peoples to understand what’s happening in their countries? The answer is simple: to the trans-national political “elites” based in Brussels, one “citizen” is as good as another; that what counts is bodies, not hearts, minds, and souls; that national differences can be papered over (which is precisely the objective of the EU); that national allegiances are dangerous; and that, most importantly, after them the deluge. But in a post-Christian, post-religious, and increasingly childless world, they don’t care.
So Lt. Col. Beltrame has to die to preserve the fiction that one Frenchman is as good as another, and an elderly Holocaust survivor falls victim to generic anti-Semitism — you know, just like during World War II — rather than specifically Islamic anti-Jewishness.
Anti-Semitism was supposed to be a disease of the far right. But the people actually killing Jews in France these days are not members of the National Front. They are Islamists.
“The major crimes against the Jewish community — Ilan Halimi, the Toulouse killings, the Hyper Cacher killings, Sarah Halimi — all of them have all been carried out by radicalized Muslims,” Robert Ejnes, the executive director of CRIF, an umbrella organization of French Jewish groups, told me in a call from Paris. “These young people have French identity cards, but they hate what France stands for. This is the nature of the problem we are facing. And it’s very hard to talk about.”
Maybe it’s time to start. The EU knows it, the European governments know it, the media knows it. Only the people don’t. And so more innocents and heroes will have to die to make France, and the rest of Western Europe, live up to its own book of rules, even if it kills them.
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