A liberal multiculturalism

...The high school tends to emphasize intellectual and scientific accomplishments, self-distinction, competitiveness, worldly success, and social life with other students...

...2. "The convenient myth that changed a set of ideas into western values," The Guardian, Comment Is Free, April 10, 2006 (www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/ 0„1750579,00.html...

...Thus, a State's interest in universal education, however highly we rank it, is not totally free from a balancing process when it impinges on fundamental rights and interests, such as those specifically protected by the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, and the traditional interest of parents with respect to the religious upbringing of their children so long as they "prepare [them] for additional obligations...

...Responding to Islamism Islamist groups are not problematic because of their religious beliefs or separatism...

...According to the U.S...

...The National and International Security Policy Group of the Conservative Party of Britain recently published a report titled "National Cohesion," which characterizes multiculturalism as government policy support of cultural difference "for its own sake...

...They are driven by the same political agenda as has inspired the criminal and disastrous "war on terror" which has laid waste Iraq and Afghanistan and presently threatens Iran and elsewhere...

...Communal secession is not, in itself, necessarily destructive of the social order...

...ingstone's letter to the Guardian, September 30, 2004...

...The largest numbers of immigrants come from Mexico and other parts of Latin America...

...Chief Justice Warren Burger explained, Amish objection to formal education beyond the eighth grade is firmly grounded in these central religious concepts...

...These matters define new political fault lines and polarize Western European electorates...

...This pattern has started to change significantly with the entry of former communist states into the European Union...

...Parts of organized labor support tighter immigration controls to protect their members from putative low-wage competition...

...The right of the Amish to opt out of American society to pursue their religious principles DISSENT / Summer 2007 n 1 5 POLITICS ABROAD has never been controversial...

...Translate that onto the world stage, and you arrive at the view that even when third world people commit terrorist outrages POLITICS ABROAD against the west it must be the west which is to blame...

...SHALOM LAPPIN is Professor of Computational Linguistics at King's College, London...

...Opponents of multiculturalism argue that the failure of many Muslim immigrants to integrate is the main factor for the rise of extremist movements...

...Few people, if any, point to immigrant communities as centers of political extremism...

...In the worst, they exploit well-motivated fears of political extremism to market prejudice...

...So even when minorities behave badly, it's always the majority's fault...

...In fact, three distinct matters have become entangled: (1) religiously based cultural difference, (2) immigration, and (3) the response of a democracy to the threat posed by political extremism...

...However, the Assembly believes, in common with the majority of the British people, that the key to tackling the threat of such atrocities is a change in the foreign policy of the government...

...Both sides to this debate confuse cultural difference with political values, turning the former into an instrument for the latter...

...In this discussion, multiculturalism is generally understood as government support for the cultural and religious institutions of minority communities...

...We condemn terrorist atrocities such as the London bombings last year, which are in all circumstances indefensible...

...Democrats committed to liberal institutions must accept cultural diversity, even when formulated as religiously based secession...

...They also argue that any attempt to deny immigrant 14 n DISSENT / Summer 2007 communities the opportunity to sustain their own religious and cultural institutions violates their rights as members of a minority in a democratic society...

...Both views are inimical to politically free and culturally open societies...

...By indulging the accentuation of cultural difference, they argue, lax public policies produced a generation of disaffected Muslim youth who provide the main recruiting ground for foreign jihadists and local militants...

...These communities are generally regarded as benign, if eccentric, elements of the North American scene...

...Critics of multiculturalism argue that when cultural difference becomes communal separatism, the integrity of the social order is undermined and political extremism gains license...

...In the best case, they confuse religious and cultural questions with political issues...

...This Anabaptist sect originated in Switzerland and Germany and immigrated to America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to escape religious persecution...

...This gave rise to multiculturalism and minority rights, which held that all cultures were equal to each other and which thus provided minorities with an enormous weapon with which to force the majority to give in to their demands...

...The two positions assume that multiculturalism imports third world, anti-imperialist politics through radicalized immigrant groups...

...Many traditions—not just the European Enlightenment—have a history of struggle against fanaticism and intolerance, and they (especially Europe) have fallen lamentably short of those ideals...

...Much of that was due to our old friend, post-colonial guilt...

...In a similar move, the "People's Assembly of the Stop the War Coalition" in Britain recently released a statement that exemplifies the exploitation of multiculturalism to promote an "anti-imperialist" politics: This People's Assembly declares its solidarity with all the Muslim peoples in Britain facing a hurricane of official and unofficial legal, political and physical attacks in a climate of Islamophobic hysteria...

...But influential elements within the left (especially but not exclusively the postmodernist left) confuse the legitimacy of cultural and religious difference with acceptance of political extremism...

...One of the consequences of this was moral inversion, which holds that since minorities are weak they must always be victims of the majority because it is strong...

...Its members live today in farming communities in which they avoid using electrical appliances and modern technology...

...Unfortunately, this distinction has been lost in much of the current debate...

...Postmodernist multiculturalists insist on the legitimacy of radical communalist agendas as a way of challenging the hegemony of Western political institutions on their own home ground...

...Consider the case of the Old Order Amish in the United States...

...For decades, the British elite has been consumed by loathing of its national identity and values which it decided were racist, authoritarian and generally disagreeable...

...Sustaining the language and cultures of the Scots and the Welsh in Britain or the Catalans and the Basques in Spain is not at issue, even when tensions between these indigenous groups and the majority population of their countries seriously threaten national cohesion...

...wisdom, rather than technical knowledge...

...Muslim immigrants formed a large part of the total immigration to Western Europe over the past thirty years...

...When opponents of multiculturalism focus on Muslim religious practices and cultural institutions in Europe, they aim at the wrong target...

...They construe opposition to the noxious political program of Islamism as anti-Muslim bigotry, and then seek to bludgeon critics into submission by charging them with "racism...

...FrontPage Magazine, May 12, 2006) While moderate conservatives limit themselves to demanding assimilation of immigrants through robust citizenship training programs, more extreme conservatives criticize immigration itself and suggest that a large influx of foreigners is the real source of social breakdown...

...This figure represents close to a threefold increase in Polish immigrants over 2004...

...Misapplied Arguments The three issues (cultural difference, immigration, and political extremism) need to be distinguished in order to avoid misapplication of arguments that properly concern one domain into others...

...debates focus on the economic effects of the immigrants...

...They claim that Islamism is the natural consequence...

...This is not only true in France, where Jean Le Pen's National Front grew in electoral strength for more than a decade...

...It is a basic commitment of liberal democracy...

...The issue is immigrants from Muslim countries, although other immigrant groups are frequently drawn into the controversy...

...Adversaries of multiculturalism threaten those values by rejecting cultural and religious pluralism...

...4 What should we conclude from these important European debates...

...They promote this program in Europe, as well as in the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia...

...The far right in many European countries is gaining considerable traction by promoting xenophobia...

...Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, provided a clear example of this move when he described protests against his hosting of Sheih Yusef alQaradawi, the Qatar-based cleric associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, as "a wave of DISSENT / Summer 2007 n 17 POLITICS ABROAD Islamophobia...

...What are our values...

...It's being used to answer questions such as: what are we...

...It has subordinated this country to the aggressive foreign 1. Johann Hari, "Islam in the West" (Dissent, Winter 2007) argues from a left-liberal perspective that multiculturalist attitudes facilitated the rise of militant fundamentalists among Muslim immigrants in Europe...

...The Court ruled that the state's right to impose this obligation is superseded by the First Amendment right to the free exercise of religious belief...

...There are some constraints imposed on them by the majority society, such as the ban on Mormon polygamy...

...Melanie Phillips, a columnist for the Daily Mail, stated this belief to an interviewer in even starker terms: Multiculturalism has turned Britain's values inside out—and the root cause of the problem is the deconstruction of Britain's identity...

...Consequently, U.S...

...The survival of democracy depends upon our embracing both obligations...

...Madeleine Bunting, a columnist for the Guardian, who urges understanding of Islamist movements in Britain and abroad, asserts that the defense of Enlightenment values expresses cultural parochialism: That the clash of civilisations debate is being cast in the same mould as the struggle against fascism would explain how the Enlightenment has come back into play...

...They continue to speak an old dialect of German, and they adhere to a conservative family pattern based on literal Protestant interpretations of biblical texts...

...In these features they are not different from the Amish or other religious movements outside the social mainstream...

...3. "The Fight against Oppression and Islamophobia," Livpolicy of the Bush government, in its invasion of Iraq, its threats to Iran and its support for Israel's aggression against Lebanon...

...community welfare, rather than competition...

...But we are also obliged to protect these institutions against religiously inspired totalitarians and their apologists, who misrepresent a deeply reactionary agenda as a form of alternative cultural expression...

...From the left come routine objections to religious schools (referred to in Britain as "faith-based schools") and communalist politics on the grounds that they encourage ethnic divisions and undermine social cohesion.' By contrast, some of the most enthusiastic advocates of multiculturalism come from the postmodernist left...

...It draws the dividing line in the wrong place...

...They point to immigrant societies such as Canada and the United States as successful examples...

...Rather, its exercise is protected by basic liberal values...

...a life of "goodness," rather than a life of intellect...

...Non-Muslim immigrants from India, the Far East, and Africa, as well as non-Islamist Muslims, frequently become targets of the bigoted charge that immigration itself undermines social cohesion and feeds religious extremism...

...We can value the Enlightenment without using it to feed an arrogant superiority which blinds us to our allies in other traditions.' More radical adherents of this sort of relativism see diversity not only as a positive feature in pluralistic societies but also as a form of anti-imperialism that resists the universality of liberal norms...

...With the recent inclusion of Romania and Bulgaria in the European Union and its anticipated expansion into former Yugoslavia, this trend seems likely to continue...

...We affirm that such diversity in fact makes an important contribution to the overall development of our society...

...Traditionally immigrant-tolerant countries such as Holland and Denmark have seen a dramatic rise in racist anti-immigrant politics...

...The Amish are an extreme case of a religiously motivated cultural separatism that is practiced by a wide variety of other groups in America, such as Mennonites, Hutterites, Hasidim (as well as other ultra-Orthodox Jewish movements), and Doukhobors...

...The elite was therefore vulnerable to the predations of the left, which had signed up to Gramsci's insight that a society could be suborned by replacing its normative values by the mores of those who transgressed them or were on society's margins...

...Amish society emphasizes informal learning-through-doing...

...4. Stop the War Coalition, People's Assembly, November 18, 2006 (www.stopwar.org.uW1slamophobia.htm...

...Supporters of multiculturalism maintain that cultural differences enrich a host country and contribute to its vitality...

...They press multiculturalism into service as a struggle against Western dominance...

...The neofascist British National Party is enjoying increased popularity at the municipal level among marginalized poor white voters...

...However, an estimated 49,000 Poles migrated to the United Kingdom by 2005, more than citizens of any other country...

...The groups at its center are immigrants or their first- and second-generation descendants...

...They do not aspire to live alongside liberal democratic institutions, but seek to replace them by a repressive theocratic order...

...They object to the high school, and higher education generally, because the values they teach are in marked variance with Amish values and the Amish way of life...

...In particular we condemn the statements made by government ministers designed to isolate, demonise and even criminalise Islamic religious practices, choice of dress and cultural expression...

...In fact, this relation is becoming increasingly irrelevant because internal European population movePOLITICS ABROAD ments are replacing the flow of Asian and North African migrants...

...Conservatives are the most strident antimulticulturalists...

...and separation from, rather than integration with, contemporary worldly society...

...Twenty-five percent come from Asia...

...In a well-known case in 1972, Wisconsin v. Yoder, the Supreme Court upheld their right to remove their children from school after the eighth grade and to send them to work in their communities, despite Wisconsin's state law on universal secondary education...

...If devout Muslim immigrants were to establish voluntary, autonomous communities like the Old Order Amish, there would be no basis for objecting to their separatism...

...It argues that Muslim schools and community groups that promote separatist agendas are primary agents of alienation and radicalization among British Muslim youth...

...Census Bureau figures for 2004, Latinos constituted 53 percent of the foreign population...

...Moreover, the rise of Islamism in Europe is mainly a problem among first-generation descendants of settled communities, rather than for their immigrant parents...

...They are pacifists and refuse military service...

...The real threat is the totalitarian political ideology that they seek to impose on non-Muslims, as well as on Muslims (many of whom reject their program...

...The Assembly recognises these attacks as essentially racist and anti-democratic...

...Criticism of multiculturalism comes not just from the political right...

...That's how it was used to rally an exhausted continent after fascism, but to invoke it now against Islam is a dangerous distortion of history...

...But postmodernist "progressives" who use multiculturalism to promote political Islamism as an "anti-imperialist" resistance serve as impresarios for a violent totalitarian movement packaged as the renaissance of religious tradition...

...The problem with Islamism is, then, not the cultural separatism that many of its supporters pursue...

...Various British government sources on UK immigration indicate that 39 percent of people granted residence in 2004 came from Asia and 28 percent from Africa...

...18 n DISSENT / Summer 2007...

...But the Yoder ruling reflects a deep tolerance of religious communal 16 n DISSENT / Summer 2007 autonomy, even when it violates widely held principles...

...See S. Lappin, "How Class Disappeared from Western Politics" (Dissent, Winter 2006), for a discussion of some of the processes through which cultural relativism and the politics of identity in the service of a false anti-imperialism have come to replace class struggle as the primary concern of this part of the left...

...They minimize contacts with the non-Amish environment in order to protect a self-contained lifestyle...

...they view secondary school education as an impermissible exposure of their children to a "worldly" influence in conflict with their beliefs...

...Immigration and Cohesion Muslims constitute a comparatively small proportion of the immigration to the United States...

...Although this change in the demography of immigration has been widely reported in the press, the relationship between immigration and Islamism still drives much of the public debate over policy...

...Acceptance of cultural difference is more than an enriching feature of immigrantfriendly societies...

...That's why multicultural Britain said, after 9/11, that America "had it coming to them''—and why, after the London bombings last July, it said the reason British Muslim boys had blown up the London transit system was because of Britain's support for the US in Iraq...

...Both immigrant-rights advocates and business groups point to their positive contributions, and while the former are concerned to protect the newcomers' civil rights, the latter are frequently motivated by the appeal of cheap labor...

...Acceptance of cultural difference, even when expressed as religiously based separatism, is not a "concession" to immigrant minorities but follows directly from the foundational principles of liberal democracy...