The US decision to fingerprint, photograph and question visitors from Arab and Muslims countries has raised a storm of protest across the Muslim world. Even American civil rights organizations see this targeting as blatant discrimination. However, while much attention is focussed on anti-Muslim discrimination in the US, comparatively little is directed at discrimination in Europe, despite the fact that it is virulent and getting worse. Two developments this past week, neither of which could be imagined happening in the US, speak of the deepest anti-Muslim bias in Europe, and at the highest levels.
The first is to be seen in the EU snub to Turkey, which has been trying to join the club for years. On Wednesday, in discussions in the European Commission on expansion, Ankara’s demands to set a date by the end of the year for beginning entry talks were rejected: Turkey’s human rights record was again the reason for not allowing it to join. But it was not the only reason. Some members of the Commission, uncomfortable about allowing a large Muslim country into the Union, questioned whether Turkey should ever be allowed to join. There was no problem, however, with the 12 other aspiring member states, all of them Christian; their applications are all being processed, albeit at different speeds.
Another instance of anti-Muslim bias, and one with potentially enormous ramifications, is the remark by the Dutch Immigration Minister Hilbrand Nawijn, who last week said that Dutch should be used in the country’s 450 or so mosques. No one should be surprised at the comment: Nawijn is a colleague of the murdered anti-immigration and anti-Muslim politician Pim Fortuyn. It is telling that he does not say that Dutch Jews should not use Hebrew or traditionalist Catholics, Latin; only Muslims are picked upon. And this cannot be dismissed as the ravings of a populist who will soon realize the impossibility of what he is saying and change tack. Nawijn has already piloted into being a course in Dutch and the values of Dutch society which all newly arrived foreign religious leaders must attend but which appears to be specifically targeted at Muslim clerics. Nawijn is on record as saying that they have a duty to convince fellow Muslims to be loyal to the values and norms of Dutch society. Nothing difficult about that, one might say, especially when those norms include freedom of speech and religion. But they also include euthanasia and sexual issues, such as the rights of homosexuals. These, too, religious scholars are supposed to not only endorse but also promote in mosques. They are not going to say yes to that. Nawijn now intends to bring in a law that anyone who fails the course will be kicked out of the country. Clearly, any new Muslim leader arriving in the Netherlands who is not prepared to sign up to these "values" would face expulsion.
This is far more serious discrimination than what is happening at airports in the US. It is an attack on Islam and its values, indeed on the very freedom of religion that Nawijn and the Netherlands supposedly support. It has to be fought all the way.
Put alongside the UK home secretary’s remarks that immigrants must accommodate their own culture to life in Britain, it looks to be a disturbing indication of where Europe is heading.
