Is Multiculturalism The Cause Of French Riots?
In his article "Multiculturalism and the Self-Liquidation of Europe," Robert Tracinski looks for the cause of recent French riots and identifies it as European multiculturalism.
In his article "Multiculturalism and the Self-Liquidation of Europe," Robert Tracinski looks for the cause of recent French riots and identifies it as European multiculturalism. Tracinski?s views regarding European multiculturalism can be paraphrased as follows:
It draws on the theoretical framework called deconstruction, proposed by Heidegger and de Man, both of whom had Nazi sympathies, and whose philosophy had some commonalities with Nazism.
It is same as collectivism, which in its extreme form is same as inversed Nazi collectivism: European multiculturalism values minority collective identity over majority collective identity.
It is skeptical [about European heritage] and self-deprecating.
It is based on the premise that all cultures are equal, and [ironically] expresses this belief by subordinating European culture to other cultures.
In the context of Islam, this translates into self-imposed dhimmitude, because Islam advocates treating non-Muslims as second class people or dhimmis.
French Muslims cannot assimilate with a culture that is hell-bent on self-annihilating itself.
The French riots are an outcome of years of misguided French ?tolerance,? which allowed Muslims to segregate themselves and turn their quarters into no-go zones for non-Muslims.
Tracinski?s observations about the French bending over backwards to placate Muslims applies to most democracies in the world. Hindus have perfected this art. Invariably, Muslims make more demands on their hosts and isolate themselves until the host nation becomes utterly chaotic. In every democratic state, Leftists offer the same explanation for Muslim riots: Muslims are poor and host society has alienated them from the mainstream. Anyone, who questions the validity of this Marxist axiom, is quickly branded a Zionist, White Racist or Hindu Fascist.
Leftists have monopolized the academy and media and effectively precluded a factual discussion of the cause of Islamic terrorism and Muslim self-imposed segregation. Every time an Islamic aggression is committed, Leftists attempt to portray Muslims as victims. It should be very obvious that the source of the problem is Islam because Muslims everywhere, be it India or France, segregate themselves and turn aggressors. Yet, Leftists attempt to localize the incidents and invent an explanation which blames the local host. Leftists also follow the Islamic propagandist line of sanitizing Islam and portraying it as a peaceful ideology, thereby beguiling society from seeing the dangers of Islam.
Jews arrived in the Malabar Coast of India. According to the traditions of Cochin Jews, they arrived there in 72 CE, probably after the Roman destruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. Hindus extended them hospitality and encouraged the Jews to retain their religion and culture. As late as 1550 CE, when the Jews were persecuted in Christian Europe, the Rajah of Cochin refused to fight a battle on Saturday [the day of the Sabbath] because on that day his Jewish soldiers would not fight. They were the best warriors he had raised. Citing this incident, Nathan Katz [Who Are the Jews of India?] writes:
?Probably India is the only country on earth so civilized that in war, out of deference to its esteemed Jewish soldiers, no battles were fought on the Sabbath.?
Katz also adds that Hindu India encouraged pluralism, as a result of which every immigrant community such as Syrian Christians, Parsis and Tibetan Buddhists became part of the whole without surrendering their identities. Prof. Katz?s words, in the cited book, are very pertinent:
"A crucial distinction between India and the rest of the Diaspora, however, is that in India acculturation is not paid for in the currency of assimilation. By acculturation I mean fitting comfortably into a society while retaining one's own identity, whereas by assimilation I mean that the loss of that identity is a perceived condition for acceptance.?
Jews returned the compliment. Even though a numerically insignificant minority in India, they would emerge as Indian army generals and directors of India?s most prestigious classical dance academy. They would forever remain India?s best goodwill ambassadors.
Here, in the Jewish example, we have a testimony that multiculturalism need not result in alienation of the minority and hostility towards the host, provided the minority respects multiculturalism and strives for excellence as Jews did in India [and everywhere]. The same can be said of Hindu immigrants to the West. They do maintain their religion, languages and culture but still become part of the whole and contribute tremendously to Western societies. They don?t riot or bomb the tube.
So, there is a danger in identifying multiculturalism with Nazism and condemning it for Islamic riots. The Nazis were driven by racial hatred. They had nothing but contempt for other cultures and races. Their hate-filled endeavor resulted in The Shoah. Of course, numerous scholars like Goldhagen [A Moral Reckoning: the Role of the Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair] and Carroll [Constantine's Sword: the Church and the Jews - a History] have demonstrated that the Nazi hatred was a mere culmination with a racist emphasis of two thousand years of Church tradition of anti-Semitism condemning Jews in religious terms.
Historically, the absence of multiculturalism has led to intolerance as seen in the Christian Bible, where the Jews are portrayed as the Children of the Devil. The Christian Bible too made exclusivist claims to the absolute truth. This meant, to those who followed the Church, that every other religion was false, and their practitioners devilish. So, as Netanyahu [The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain] documents, in medieval Christian Europe, even Murranos or Jewish converts to Christianity were suspected of secretly practising Jewish rituals and persecuted. This tells us that any claims to absolute truth by a dominant group results in unmitigated horror for those who are unimpressed by such claims.
So, multiculturalism is not the problem. The lack of it, coupled with intolerance and exclusivist claims to the truth, is. But multiculturalism also requires that every constituent respects pluralism. This is where Islam poses a serious challenge. As my paper "Better Study Islam" argues, Islamic intolerance of others and its unscrupulous use of violence to further itself are enshrined in the Quran, Hadiths and the conduct of Prophet Mohammad.
The mistake Western countries [and other democracies like India] commit is to refuse to discuss Islam and its dangers. Just as a crop and a weed can not grow in the same field, a pluralistic society can not thrive by accommodating an intolerant ideology. The solution lies in deconstructing Islam and de-Islamizing Muslims. On the other hand, attacking multiculturalism would be tantamount to barking up the wrong tree.
The author is an India-born, Silicon Valley-based orthodox, practising, agnostic Hindu. He can be reached at kalavai.venkat@gmail.com
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