The liberal blind spot

The reluctance to discuss problems in minority cultures has boosted the far right.

In case it wasn’t clear enough already, yesterday’s German election confirms it: Europe’s establishment has lost contact with a huge chunk of voters. Fully 20.8% of them opted for the AfD, a nationalist party seen by all others as too extreme to go into coalition with, boosting it into a comfortable second place.

Friedrich Merz has the numbers, just, to put together a coalition between his centre-right CDU/CSU and the centre-left SPD – avoiding a fractious three-way coalition similar to the one that collapsed last year. That would have been catastrophic: With Europe’s economies stagnant and the US folding up its security umbrella, another four years of weak government in Germany would be an existential threat to the European project.

Still, freezing the country’s second-largest party out of coalitions is only tenable for so long. Merz himself has said that the AfD could win next time around. So it’s worth thinking about why one-fifth of Germans are willing to vote for one of Europe’s most extreme right-wing parties.

The dominant driver of AfD support, judging by interviews with its voters and the statements of its candidates, is migration. Specifically, uncontrolled migration from Muslim-majority countries and the state’s perceived failure to integrate those migrants into society – a pattern also visible in France, the Netherlands and others.

The AfD and other nationalist parties are tapping into a narrative that Islam is in tension with liberal European values. Due to lacklustre efforts towards integration, the argument goes, large Muslim populations have become a fount of antisemitism, homophobia and other social ills that we have worked so hard to overcome.

No mainstream party makes this argument, at least not explicitly. Some narratives against immigration are overtly racist, and the nuances aren’t easy to perceive in our bite-sized news cycle. So they avoid the topic. But in rejecting anything that smells even vaguely like ethno-nationalism, politicians are also closing their ears to the legitimate concerns of a growing share of voters.

As a result, the only parties willing to discuss illiberalism in minority communities are those of the far right – many of which, ironically, have not entirely shed their own antisemitism, homophobia and misogyny (some people argue that their recent progressive turn is merely a smokescreen through which to bash Muslims).

The vexed question of migration and integration is much more than a populist distraction from bigger questions of geopolitics, economy, climate and so forth. Solving it is crucial for re-establishing social and political cohesion in Europe, which in turn is needed to navigate this turbulent period of history.

Binary worldview

Much of the disconnect goes beyond political parties and into public institutions including academia, NGOs and state-funded broadcasters. By refusing to acknowledge the possibility that minority cultures might produce some problematic views, they can perform some interesting rhetorical contortions.

A few weeks ago the editor of Euractiv, an EU-focused news service, caused outrage by claiming that Muslim communities were partly responsible for European countries’ fading collective memory of the Holocaust and diminished vigilance to antisemitism. “Much of this ignorance resides in Muslim migrant communities, where hatred of Jews is as much a staple of daily life as baklava,” he wrote in an otherwise nuanced opinion piece.

The position is overstated and the language provocative; the culinary reference both crude and inaccurate. But the furious reactions caused by this one throwaway line were no less exaggerated.

Amnesty International performatively cancelled its subscription, accusing the editor of trying to “drum up hatred against minorities”. It appeared to suggest that minority groups should be defined by victimhood and are incapable of themselves behaving badly.[1]

“This racist remark plays into a discriminatory discourse across Europe that seeks to blame antisemitism on Muslims – who themselves are facing racism and Islamophobia,” Amnesty intoned, failing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s intelligence test of being able to hold two conflicting views in one’s mind.

This fallacy was more explicitly stated by a Muslim youth group, which wrote that the article “dangerously shifts focus away from the real drivers of antisemitism – far-right nationalism and rising populism across Europe”, as if the existence of racist white people excludes the possibility of racist Muslims.

Various studies have shown a higher-than-average prevalence of antisemitic attitudes among European Muslims, as Euractiv’s editor later pointed out. Some prominent Jewish activists have said they feel more threatened by Muslims and their leftist allies than the far right. Anecdotally, many Jewish friends tell me the same (to be fair, some others do not). One can debate the details of those studies and experiences, but clearly there is a conversation to be had, however uncomfortable.

Obviously this doesn’t mean we should assume that any given Muslim is antisemitic, that we should discriminate against Muslims or that we should tolerate any such discrimination. It just means that we should look fearlessly at all modern forms of racism in order to come up with the best policies to stamp it out.

Wrongthink in the gay community

Similar mental gymnastics were on display last week in a study exploring to what extent people in the US, UK, Netherlands and Germany view Muslims as a threat to LGBTQ+ rights, which the authors described as an “Islamophobic stereotype”.

The researchers, from top universities, used a very clever method to allow people to express this unfashionable view obliquely,[2] thereby capturing what they truly believed rather than what they felt comfortable saying in front of the researchers.[3]

They found that far more than half of respondents – 70% in Germany – viewed Muslims as a threat to LGBTQ+ rights. Moreover, the prevalence of this view was consistent across the political spectrum, as well as among sexual minorities themselves: “we found no significant difference between LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+ individuals”.

In other words, 50-70% of LGBTQ+ people, when given the opportunity to air their concerns discreetly, told the researchers that they perceived a threat from Muslim communities. These are all people who presumably have direct experience of homophobic hate crime.

One might expect the researchers, confronted with this extraordinary testimony, to entertain the idea that it might be true. Instead they wag their fingers at the dissenting gays, tutting that the unfashionable view appears to “resonate broadly, even among those who might otherwise be expected to hold more inclusive views.”

Like Amnesty, the researchers appear to have taken the view that minorities of all kinds are united in their victimhood and ought to be natural allies against the universal oppressor, namely colonial-brained straight white men.[4] Any tension within this grand coalition must be the result of dastardly misdirection by the far right: “illiberal actors use liberal issues as a tool to justify anti-immigrant sentiment and Islamophobic stereotypes,” the study says (italics in original).

The idea of homophobia in Islam is hardly outlandish. Almost all Muslim-majority countries outlaw gay sex, sometimes with the death penalty. While much of Asia is liberalising – Thailand legalised same-sex marriage last month – Malaysia and parts of Indonesia still cane gay men under sharia law. The world’s first openly gay imam, in South Africa, was shot dead last week.

And yet the researchers refuse to acknowledge the possibility that Muslim communities in the West might be a source of homophobia. More than that, in a paper exceeding 4,000 words, they don’t even bother to make the case against it. There’s apparently no need to establish the facts: The proposition being studied is simply assumed to be false because the researchers’ ideology requires it to be so.

The researchers go on to observe, correctly, that far-right parties will use these concerns to their advantage – perhaps even winning a share of the gay vote. “By aligning their messaging with the defence of liberal values, like women’s rights and LGBTQ+ equality, these [far-right] groups can appeal to a broader base… [with] the potential to create unexpected political alliances.”

But for their conclusion, they return to the unproven premise that the perceived threat from Islam is an illusion. “As citizens, we should be cautious of narratives that seek to demonise out-groups by playing on stereotypes, even those that claim to defend liberal values,” they say.

Narratives that demonise minorities are bad. But so too are narratives that portray them as simple victims and absolve them of all responsibility. In our defence of liberal values, we need to be honest about any and all threats to them – or else gift the banner of liberalism to the far-right parties that have done the least to earn it.

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[1] The same binary worldview has led Amnesty and others to be disproportionately hostile towards Israel, as I explored in an earlier essay.

[2] People appear to be especially reluctant to express views coded as culturally right-wing, for complex reasons that I have written about here.

[3] The methodology is fascinating and well worth a read.

[4] This absurd logic reaches its zenith in the Queers for Palestine movement, whose proponents argue that “the queer liberation struggle cannot be disentangled from the anti-imperialist struggle.”