If senior fellows from an extraterrestrial think tank were to produce a planet-wide report on Terran politics, they would note that the major nations of earth divide into two groups: those who persecute and kill Muslims at home and those who persecute and kill them abroad.
In the first group, they would count Russia, China and India and in the second they would count every major nation in the Western world. Russia’s history in Chechnya, India’s record of riots and pogroms, and China’s bid to atomise and deracinate the Uighur need no introduction. The countries counted in this group aren’t exhaustive. Myanmar would be a founder member, its ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya having set the standard for 21st-century genocide.
In the second group, our alien area specialists might place the United States of America and its European and Anglophone allies, that permanent coalition of the willing. These countries are liberal democracies and in all of them, Muslim minorities live as rights-bearing citizens, free from the fear of systemic violence. And yet, in this young century, the US, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Poland, Denmark, Canada, Australia have either directly bombed and invaded Muslim countries to save them from themselves, or have provided funds, war material and strategic support to other countries directly involved in the killing of Muslims.
The contrast in the treatment of domestic and foreign Muslims by the countries in this group is striking. These Western nations might be ambivalent about the Muslims in their midst and their conservative commentators might see them as a potentially dangerous fifth column, but this hasn’t prevented their Muslim minorities from participating in mainstream politics as citizens, as representatives, as mayors and ministers.
Muslim women have been elected to Norway’s Parliament, the Storting, as members of both social democratic and conservative parties. Similarly, in Britain, Muslims have been senior figures in the Conservative Party and the Labour Party. The visibility of Muslims in European politics varies from one country to another. Belgium does well — sometimes electing Muslims in excess of their share of Belgium’s population — Italy and France less so. Western countries have, by and large, been true to their democratic values by extending citizenship rights to immigrants drawn to their shores as much needed workers or needy refugees. Some, like Germany, have dragged their feet in the matter of making Turkish ‘guest workers’ citizens, but that same country absorbed hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees during Angela Merkel’s chancellorship in a gesture of great — some would say, quixotic — generosity.
Increasingly, though, the attitude of Western countries to their Muslim citizens is beginning to mirror their hostility towards non-client Muslim states abroad. Some of this is a hangover of the ‘war on terror’ that has defined Western foreign policy since 9/11. France’s weaponisation of laicité and the UK’s Prevent programme are designed to pre-empt Islamism before it takes root. Some of the Western hostility towards Muslims is plain bigotry: Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders are cases in point, politicians who have found in Islamophobia a respectable and politically profitable form of racism. But by far, the biggest driver of hostility towards Muslim minorities in these countries is the rise in immigration, especially illegal immigration.
Immigration is a problem for the Western political class. On the one hand, declining fertility rates, ageing populations and labour shortages make immigrants indispensable. Britain’s National Health Service and its care homes would collapse without a steady supply of foreign workers. On the other, the headlines that illegal migrants make, their demands on the public purse and the votes to be harvested from the resentment that this creates demand a political response.
Denmark’s Social Democrats are a case in point. The popularity of the right-wing Danish People’s Party’s anti-immigration, anti-Muslim rhetoric prompted the Social Democrats to adopt its harsh immigration policy, which included both the repatriation of asylum-seekers and the option of processing them in third countries like Rwanda. Having won the election on the back of these policies, the Social Democrats implemented them in office with the result that a broad anti-Muslim consensus in Denmark drives immigration policy. In 2016, Pia Olsen Dyhr, the chairwoman of Denmark’s Socialist People’s Party, listed “radical Islam” as the biggest threat to Danish “society, freedom, and community.”
Denmark is a tiny country, but the same performative demonisation of Muslims was successfully road-tested in the US at around the same time when Donald Trump introduced his notorious ‘ban’ on Muslim migration. Given Joe Biden’s willingness to follow up on Trump’s signature policies — from building the border wall, to confronting China, to consolidating the Abraham Accords — it isn’t impossible that the Democratic Party might come around to the idea of restricting Muslim immigration. In the UK, Keir Starmer’s stance on Gaza, his willingness to stigmatize pro-ceasefire demonstrations as unwarranted intimidation of members of Parliament, and the Labour Party’s deployment of the charge of anti-Semitism to stifle political debate indicate that the British Centre-Left, like its Danish counterpart, is preparing to drop its Muslim parcels as the West circles its wagons.
The reason Western countries, especially the US, have done little to restrain Israel’s genocidal violence in Gaza is that their politicians have done the math and decided that Muslim votes aren’t crucial to their electoral well-being. Perhaps Biden thinks that the loss of Muslim votes in Michigan is less of a risk than the loss of Jewish votes elsewhere. More likely, he, along with Scholz, Macron, Sunak and Starmer, is ideologically committed to Israel, right or wrong, because a) it is the homeland of the Jews and b) it is the West’s non-Muslim bulwark in the Muslim Middle East. Grotesque and unseemly as the mass killing of Palestinian civilians with Western munitions is, it does, in a curious way, express the West’s resolve, its willingness to violently school unbiddable Muslims at one remove. Gaza is a punishment beating intended to show that the only good Muslims the West recognises are the ones who rule politically-neutered petrostates, attendant lords who do “… to swell a progress, start a scene or two.”
As the West fights Russia in Ukraine and starts a new Cold War with China, it is the work of a moment to create a new axis of evil by nominating Iran as the third prong of a trident. This is useful in a particular way. The hyphenated threat posed by Iran-Hezbollah-Hamas-Houthi lends plausibility to the charge that all protest against the genocide in Gaza or for a free Palestine — including encampments in American universities — is potentially anti-Semitic.
This broadcasting of the charge of anti-Semitism allows the liberal centrist to stigmatize Muslim minorities and their allies in the West for their alleged beliefs, which is respectable, instead of their inherited identities, which is not. As leaders and leader writers in Europe and America declare that the West is fighting for its life on three fronts, dead Palestinians in Gaza recede from view, collateral damage in a global war. Muslims in Western countries are put on notice to behave. Were our Venusian researchers to conduct a follow-up survey ten years from now, they might find the distinction between the West and the Rest dissolved.
mukulkesavan@hotmail.com
