Europe is at war. The photos and video footage we saw of the streets in Brussels, almost deserted with the metro, schools and most shops and restaurants remaining closed for four days and soldiers on patrol, depicted scenes of a city under siege. I recently listened to a commentator on the BBC world service describe President Francois Hollande’s description of the November 13 Paris attacks as an ‘act of war’, as the start of ‘War on Terror II’, the first having been that unleashed by George W. Bush following the September 11 attacks in the United States in 2001.
Undoubtedly, the world has never been the same since that dramatic Tuesday morning when the planes crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre building in New York. We had just celebrated the start of the new millennium with a certain degree of optimism following the end of the Cold War. However, before that, back in 1992, Samuel P. Huntington had already predicted that: “The clash of civilisations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilisations will be the battle lines of the future.”
Has Huntington’s hypothesis been proved correct? Does what we are witnessing today have, at its core, a cultural and / or religious motivation?
If one were to look at how people of different cultural and religious backgrounds have settled into European society, one sees much that could start providing an answer to the question as to why individuals who have made their home in Europe, choose to join ranks with violent and terrorist organisations that seek the destruction of that way of life in which they grew up, often using religion as a convenient pretext.
We have a continent living through an identity crisis
On the one hand we have the fact that inclusion policies in many European countries seem to have failed. If one looks at other continents, my reading of the situation is that in countries such as the United States or Australia, although migrants retain some kind of link with their country of origin, they appear to have managed to integrate among the mainstream of society much more successfully than in Europe. We may refer to Afro-Americans, to Italo-Americans or to Hispanic Americans; however, they are primarily American.
This is not to say that everything is rosy because there are also instances of racially or ethnically motivated clashes in the US that we hear of from time to time such as the ones in Chicago over the past months where the police department has been accused of brutality particularly towards black residents.
Moreover, religious differences among Americans can become nasty affairs as we have seen recently with Kim Davis, the Rowan County clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same sex couples following the decision in June by the US Supreme Court that effectively legalised same sex marriage in all the states of the union.
However, the contrast appears to be much more significant in Europe. Integration policies, if there have been any such policies at all, do not seem to have worked with migrants being marginalised such as can be seen in the ghettos that have sprung up around major cities such as Paris and Brussels. Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director for Human Rights Watch has spent the last few months interviewing refugees coming to Europe mostly from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.
He speaks of the “marginalised ghettos” in European cities where many migrants live, including Molenbeek, the Brussels suburb where some of the Paris attackers lived. Bouckaert is of the view that “Europe really should be focusing more on the marginalised Muslim communities at home and try to better meet their needs, make sure that young people are educated and have jobs available, because the reality is that the majority of these people who carried out the Paris attacks were French citizens — some of them resident in Molenbeek – who have been living in France all of their lives”.
He adds that “When we do take refugees – or migrants, for that matter – it’s very important to integrate them into our societies, to give them the language skills and the support they need to become productive members of our societies. And one of the gravest mistakes that Europe has made, several decades ago, is to put people in these marginalised ghettos, basically, where extremism has built”.
On the other hand, we also have a continent living through an identity crisis. A few days ago we heard that three leading cinema chains in the UK refused to show a Church of England sponsored advert that features the Lord’s Prayer, claiming that it “carries the risk of upsetting, or offending, audiences”, despite the fact that the advert had been cleared by the Cinema Advertising Authority and the British Board of Film Classification. No wonder we are in such as mess. When, culturally speaking, a society is at war with itself, it becomes the ideal breeding ground for radicals to infiltrate and operate with little difficulty at all.
Religion is part of the identity of each and every European nation. I am a fervent upholder of the right of all individuals to profess their beliefs freely and that no one set of beliefs should be imposed in any way on others. However, I fail to understand why certain individuals or groups consider a manifestation of faith as a threat, or appear to be upset or offended by this.
A non-Christian would watch and listen with respect when Christians recite the Lord’s Prayer just as a non-Muslim listen with respect when Muslims pray, without taking offence.
Going to work on Wednesday morning, I heard on radio an atheist protesting at the fact that November 26 had been declared a public holiday in Kenya in view of the visit by Pope Francis, presumably to facilitate participation by the public in the Mass that was expected to attract around one million persons in Nairobi. The individual concerned stated that he would be taking up the issue with the Kenyan Supreme Court to try and stop the authorities from declaring the public holiday.
Rather than allowing one another to manifest our beliefs, opinions or whatever in a civilised manner, we would prefer to seek to curtail such right on grounds that it would offend or upset others who hold different views. It seems to be in our nature to be in this constant warmongering mindset.
This can also be seen locally. On Tuesday, Tony Mifsud, coordinator of the Malta Unborn Child Movement, wrote an opinion piece in this newspaper which he titled ‘Pro-choice on the attack’. He was reacting to an article, also in this paper, written a few days earlier by Martin Scicluna. Mifsud refers to “the pro-choice lobby which in Malta seems to have started firing its guns in many directions ... regardless, and seemingly underestimating the resilience of the pro-life movement”.
C’est la guerre! T! The pro-life lobby, presumably a movement inspired by Christian values, uses bellicose language as it positions itself to fight a battle against the so-called pro-choice lobby. Indeed many comments posted online and letters in newspapers point towards a society that still likes to draw battle lines on many issues. Yet European society is meant to be one that is built upon fundamental values that include tolerance and respect for others. It is not a healthy sign when public debate is phrased in the language of war especially by those who should know better.
The seventeenth century philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, wrote that “Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice”. Many centuries later, Martin Luther King stated, on similar lines, that “True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice”. So long as we continue to think and speak as though we are constantly at war with one another, this world of ours will not become a better and safer place.