BRUCE BAWER
351
reported in early November, revealed that
I I
percent of British Muslims
considered the attack on the World Trade Center justified.)
None of this surprised me. What did make me sit up and take notice
was a poll by
De Volkskrant
showing that more than 60 percent of
Dutch citizens believed that Muslim immigrants who approved of anti–
American terrorism should be ejected from the Netherlands. In an edi–
torial, the newspaper's editors spelled the message out bluntly: "The
Netherlands doesn't accept anti-Western fundamentalistic attitudes from
Muslims. In the eyes of most Dutch people, integration means adapting
to a humanistic tradition, to the separation between church and state,
and distancing oneself from the norms and values of one's motherland."
It
was, at long last, a stunning-and welcome-affirmation of the
Dutch people's basic commitment to democratic values and to true inte–
gration. And it signaled that the Dutch, perhaps the most liberal people
on the planet, have finally faced a crucially important fact: that there is
nothing at all liberal about allowing one's reluctance to criticize another
person's religion to trump one's dedication to individual liberty, human
dignity, and equal rights. Tolerance for intolerance is not tolerance at all.
As the
International Herald Tribune
noted, the
De Volkskrant
poll
marked "an end to the avoidance of talking openly about elements of
conflict in Dutch life that have accompanied the presence of Muslim
immigrants.... The Dutch are treading these days in an area where
most of Europe does not want to go." Indeed, here in Norway there
were, in the weeks after September
II,
no dramatic signs of turnaround
to compare with the
De Volkskrant
poll. Yet there were stirrings. A
November
20
Dagbladet
article quoted a college president as saying
that "powerful people in the immigrant community are the most impor–
tant obstacle to integration"; if Norway wished "to avoid the same con–
ditions as in Denmark," he cautioned, "it doesn't help to be politically
correct and to overlook the weak points." The article caused a stir. That
evening, on the current affairs program "Tabloid," a longtime teacher
at the Rosenhof school described the contempt for democracy and the
active resistance to integration that he had observed for years among his
Muslim students. (Seething with anger, the Muslim community
spokesman sitting across the discussion table charged the teacher with
racism.) The next day, Norwegian newspapers reported on Egil
Straume, a radio evangelist and local Christian People's Party leader
who, citing Muslim demands for "their own meeting houses, schools,
and laws," predicted that "in ten to fifteen years we'll have civil
war-like conditions between Muslims and Christians in orway."
