Reza Aslan blames Charlie Hebdo massacre on France’s “inability to tolerate multiculturalism”

If your blood pressure is sufficiently low and you’re sitting down, you might want to go to Real Clear Politics and see the video interview of Reza Aslan on the Charlie Hebdo killings. The critical parts are also transcribed on the site. And you can get idea of his theme right out of the gate, for when asked about the causes of the murders, Aslan begins by saying this:

REZA ASLAN: Europe is facing nothing short of an identity crisis. Look, the fact of the matter is there have been these seismic changes on the continent, culturally, racially, religiously, politically. And that’s resulted in this intense anti-immigrant and more specifically anti-Muslim backlash. In France, one of the largest parties, the party of Marine Le Pen, The National Front is a virulently anti-Muslim party and very well may win the next elections.You have the UKIP party in the UK, the Pegida party in Germany. This is a party whose sole platform seems to be let’s get rid of all Muslims. They have had for the last few months every week thousands and thousands of supporters marching in Germany in this notion that Muslims are some internal enemy. In Sweden we’ve had three mosque attacks over the last week. So this has created this sort of, intense, tension among the Muslim population in Europe and non-Muslim population.

It goes on and on in this vein, with Aslan seeing parity between European suspicion of Muslim immigrants and the Muslim killings of the Charlie Hebdo journalists (as well as two police, one a Muslim). The former, he implies, gave rise to the latter. Here’s Aslan’s “thoughtful” explanation of the violence:

ASLAN: Well, it’s not a justification by any means at all, but what Charlie Hebdorepresents for a lot of people in Europe is precisely this clash of civilizations. Look, the editors of Charlie Hebdo would unapologetically say they make fun of everybody, every religion, and they make fun of Muslims for a very specific reason to sort of show, or maybe demonstrate, that look if you maybe want to be in this country, if you want to be in France, then you have to deal with the French values, you have to rid yourself of your own values, ideals, norms, and you have to take on French values. And there have been a number of laws passed not only in France, with regard to prohibitions on Islamic dress, but throughout Europe about whether you can build mosques, about whether build minarets, et cetera. And this tension, this polarization I’m afraid has led to a lot of acts of violence. Not just the tragedy yesterday…

. . . And I think Charlie Hebdo was representative of this distinctly French value and an argument that unless you agree with that value well then you are not really French. That is an argument that a lot of young Muslims, and particularly young immigrants who come from different cultures, they just don’t buy into it and enough of them feel angry, perhaps, threatened, enough to actually take up violence.

. . . And particularly in France, an aggressively secularizing country that has never really tolerated multiculturalism or the kind of cultural religious diversity that is the hallmark of the United States, you can see how that would create the kinds of tensions that would bubble up occasionally into acts of violence on both sides.

As you might expect, Aslan does everything possible to avoid indicting the murderers of the French journalists. The farthest he goes in decrying the brutality of the killers is the statement above (and a call at the end of the interview for Muslim countries to condemn acts of violence).

ASLAN: Well, it’s not a justification by any means at all, but what Charlie Hebdo represents for a lot of people in Europe is precisely this clash of civilizations. . .

The “but” is telling. Aslan is more concerned with giving us a reason why the murders happened. Unfortunately, I don’t agree with his reasoning.

But first, let’s admit that there is in fact a grain of truth in what Aslan says: there is an unacceptable bias against Muslims, and immigrants in general, among the French and other Europeans as well. Mosques have been torched, Muslims attacked for being Muslim. That, in fact, was decried by Charlie Hebo, as Matthew pointed out in the previous post. That xenophobia and its attendant violence is odious, bigoted, and reprehensible.

But does it have anything to do with the Charlie Hebdo killings? Very little, I think. What the terrorists appeared to be taking their revenge on was not the bias faced by Muslims in France. Rather, it was a combination of the magazine’s publication of images of Muhammad (proscribed by many interpretations of the Qur’an), a perception that the journal was a beacon of Islamophobia (it wasn’t; it shone its light on Islamic perfidy), and, most important, a general hatred of the West and its democratic (and perceived “anti-Islamic”) values.

What is wrong with “multiculturalism”? That depends on how you define it. If you mean “tolerating or celebrating the customs of people from another land,” it’s fine—and desirable. The U.S. would be bland and uniform without its many immigrants, their celebrations and holidays, their food, their politics, their philosophies, and so on. But when multiculturalism involves importing antidemocratic ideas into a democratic culture, then it becomes problematic.  The kind of “multiculturalism” that Charlie Hebdo opposed, and wished to be dissolved by “French” values, was Islam’s veneration of sharia law, its institutionalization of the subjugation of women, its calls for the death of apostates, gays, and adulterers, its belief in corporal punishment for criminals, and the Muslim habit, in some places, of patrolling the streets, looking to find and admonish young Muslims partying, drinking, listening to music, dancing, and associating with members of the other sex. Fun is a no-no.

In other words, the more “enlightened” French are uncomfortable with those tenets of Islam that conflict with the values of the Enlightenment; and it’s just too bad if asking Muslims to conform to those values makes them uncomfortable. By all means keep your Ramadan, your delicious food, your clothing (except, perhaps, the veil), your prayers, your mosques, and so on. But don’t you dare try to quash freedom of speech, beat your wives, kill your daughters, or try to practice sharia law in France.

It surprises me that Aslan can’t fathom that multiculturalism can be seen in several different ways, some of which are commendable and others odious. Actually, I’m sure he can, but he’s so committed to Islamic apologetics that he won’t admit that anything about Muslim “culture” is inimical to democracy.

I’m pretty sure that even if all the unconscionable French bias against immigrants were to cease, it wouldn’t for a moment stop the drive of Islamic terrorism to wreck that society. The deep animus of extremist Muslims against Western values per se is just too strong. If you think otherwise, read the Pulitzer-Prize-winning book I constantly recommended: The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright. You will find the animus right at the foundation of extemist Islam in the 1940s.

And even if you think (wrongly) that Charlie Hebdo was racist, sexist, and homophobic, it’s salubrious to listen once again to Christopher Hitchens’s most eloquent defense of free speech, whatever that speech contains: