Author: Mark Steyn
Publication: National Post
Date: February 24, 2003
URL: http://www.nationalpost.com/home/story.html?id=%7B643DDA61-2F23-4D73-AF1D-E7A2622457F3%7D
The other day, Barbara Amiel was
writing about the transformation in the European view of the United States
and Israel, and came up with an arresting metaphor:
"Laying out the world's changing
attitudes to Israel and America so barely makes it sound like a conscious
decision -- which is absurd. But changes in the spirit of the times are
as difficult to explain as those immense flocks of birds you see sitting
on some great African lake, hundreds of thousands of them at a time, till
all of a sudden, successively, they fly up and turn in a specific direction.
One can never analyze which bird started it and how it became this incredible
rush. All you see is the result."
The world is always changing. In
1967, when the British Parliament decriminalized homosexuality in the teeth
of some pretty vigorous opposition, no one would have predicted that a
mere 30 years later the Conservative Party would be electing a leader in
favour of gay marriage. If you're a British gay who's been longing to marry
since 1967, that's an eternity. But it's a blink in the eye of a very old
civilization's social evolution. Things change. You don't notice the iceberg
melting, only that one day it seems a lot smaller than it was, and that
the next it's not there at all.
So what will the "spirit of the
times" look like in the Western world in 10 or 20 years' time? Here's a
couple of early birds on the lake, plucked more or less at random from
recent headlines:
1. Last month, Judge Beaumont, the
Common Serjeant of London, ruled that, in the case of a Muslim cleric accused
of inciting the murders of Jews and Hindus, no Jews or Hindus or the spouses
thereof could serve on the jury.
2. On January 21st, the Norwegian
newspaper Aftenposten reported that the Court of Appeals in Eidsivating
had acquitted a Middle Eastern immigrant of raping a retarded woman on
the grounds that he had only lived 12 years in Norway and so could not
be expected to understand her condition.
The man was 22 years old. Thus,
he had lived virtually his entire conscious life in Norway. But the court
ruled that his insufficient understanding of the language was a mitigating
factor. He was a cab driver and the woman was his customer. She paid for
the ride with a "TT" card -- a form of transport subsidy for the handicapped,
which he evidently recognized because he accepted it. Nonetheless, because
of his "cultural background," an adult who'd lived in Norway since he was
10 years old could not be expected to know that this woman was mentally
incapacitated and that he should not assault her.
3. In the second week of January,
Cincinnati's Playhouse In The Park cancelled its tour of a specially commissioned
new play by Glyn O'Malley called Paradise. The subject of the work was
the suicide bombing of March last year by an 18-year old Palestinian girl,
Ayat al-Akhras. My old friend, the Saudi Minister of Water Ghazi Algosaibi,
wrote a poem in praise of Miss al-Akhras as "the bride of loftiness." O'Malley's
approach was a little subtler. His starting point was a Newsweek cover
story contrasting young Ayat with one of the Jews she killed, another teenage
girl, a 17- year old Israeli, Rachel Levy. To some of us, this is already
obscene -- the idea that murdered and murderer are both "victims." They're
linked only because Ayat couldn't care less whom she slaughtered as long
as they were Jews.
But there wouldn't be much of a
play in that. So O'Malley did the decent liberal thing and bent over backwards
to be "balanced." In his play, "Fatima" gets all the best lines, raging
at the Israelis because they should know better: "How can you do this?
You! You who know camps and humiliation and hate and death." "Sarah," by
comparison, is just a California airhead who's come to Israel for the guys
and can't really get a handle on the Holy Land: "It's, like, old."
But O'Malley didn't stop there:
He moved the scene of the bombing from within Israel proper to one of those
"illegal" West Bank settlements. He even managed to remove any kind of
religious component: To dear old Ghazi, Ayat was acting as a good Muslim;
in O'Malley's play, "Fatima" insists, "This is not about Allah!" This is
not some crude Muslim-Jew thing, but instead arises from complex socio-economic
issues unconnected to one's faith.
And what was the upshot? At a read-through
before invited members of the Jewish and Muslim communities, the latter
denounced the work as "Zionist propaganda." A few days later, the Jewish
director was removed from the production. A few days after that, the play
was cancelled entirely.
What normally happens with "controversial"
art? I'm thinking of such cultural landmarks of recent years as Andres
Serrano's Piss Christ -- a crucifix sunk in the artist's urine -- or Terrence
McNally's Broadway play Corpus Christi, in which a gay Jesus is liberated
by the joys of anal sex with Judas. When, say, Catholic groups complain
about these abominations, the arts world says you squares need to get with
the beat: A healthy society has to have "artists" with the "courage" to
"explore" "transgressive" "ideas," etc. Yet with this play, faced with
Muslim objections, the big courageous transgressive arts guys fold like
a Bedouin tent. And, unlike your Piss Christs, where every liberal commentator
wants to chip in his two-bits on artistic freedom, pretty much everyone's
given a wide berth to this one, except for Christopher Caldwell, whom The
Weekly Standard sent to Cincinnati to interview the various figures involved.
What was interesting from Caldwell's account was that the Muslim community
figures didn't really care in the end whether the play was pro- or anti-Islam:
For them, it was beyond discussion.
When you soak a crucifix in urine,
you may get a few cranky Catholics handing out leaflets on the sidewalk.
When you do a play about suicide bombers, who knows what the offended might
do? The arts world seems happy to confine its transgressive courage to
flipping the finger at Christians.
These are a few straws in the wind,
birds on the lake. They're on the periphery of our vision right now, but
they won't stay there. You may have heard the statistics -- in Amsterdam
the most popular name for newborn boys is Mohammed, etc. You may be aware
that some waggish Western Muslims refer to the Continent as "Eurabia."
The great issue of our time is whether Islam -- the fastest growing religion
in Europe and North America -- is compatible with the multicultural, super-diverse,
boundlessly tolerant society of Western liberals. This is the paradox of
multiculturalism: Is it illiberal to force liberalism on others? Is it
liberal to accommodate illiberalism? I don't personally care if Germany
waives its regulations on animal cruelty to permit Muslims to have the
source of their meat slaughtered in accordance with Islamic practice. But
then I'm not a member of PETA. And, if I were a feminist or a gay or an
"artist," I wouldn't be reassured by these early birds winging their way
from Norwegian courts and Midwestern playhouses.
Meanwhile, those of us who talk
of reforming Iraq are assured by our opponents that it's preposterous to
think that Arabs can ever be functioning citizens of a democratic state.
If that's so, isn't that an issue, given current immigration patterns,
not for Iraq tomorrow but for Britain, France, Belgium and Holland right
now? And shouldn't we at least try to understand why Muslims in, say, Kazakhstan
have been able to reconcile the contradictions between Church and state?
Given Europe's birthrates, the survival
of the West depends on conversion -- on ensuring that the unprecedently
high numbers of immigrants to the Continent embrace Western pluralism.
Some of us think it would be easier to do this if the countries from which
they emigrate are themselves democratic and pluralist. But to say there's
no problem here except Texan cowboy fundamentalist paranoia is to blind
yourself to reality, to march to suicide as surely as Ayat al-Akhras did.
