Whenever Jews are killed or beaten, on 7 October or last night in Amsterdam, well-meaning sorts solemnly intone that this latest outrage must be a ‘wake-up call’ about the threat of anti-Semitism.
Ah, the Wake-Up Call. Much vaunted, long awaited, never heard. There have been no shortage of wake-up calls. Off the top of my head, there has been 7 October, Neve Yaakov, Monsey, the 2019 New York attacks, Poway, Jersey City, Pittsburgh, the stabbing intifada, Hypercache, Kehilat Yaakov, Merkaz HaRav, and the second intifada. That list isn’t remotely comprehensive and doesn’t stretch back further than 2000. Amsterdam will be condemned – though by no means universally – but it will not change anything. When it comes to anti-Semitism, the West’s wake-up calls all go to straight to voicemail.
Why? A number of reasons. One we prefer not to dwell on is that rather a lot of people are relaxed about Jews being bloodied. Keen, if anything. For a while there, and certainly in the generation or two that followed the Holocaust, such people had to smuggle their prejudices out in the guise of ‘anti-Zionism’. Outside of ultra-Orthodox communities, declarations of anti-Zionism once came only from the far-left and the far-right, from Sovietists and skinheads, but hatred of Israel and marshalling this hatred to justify anti-Semitism is now a mainstream centre-left position. Well, of course, it’s a bad business when Muslims attack Jews in France or Germany or Sweden but you have to remember those settlements and checkpoints and the like.
But by far the most compelling reason is that taking the wake-up call means facing up to some unpleasant truths. Chief among them is the realisation that although multiculturalism is a central tenet of liberalism, liberalism is not a central tenet of multiculturalism. The more that Europe continues to import its population from countries where anti-Semitism is endemic, the more anti-Semitic Europe’s population will become. The same applies to maltreatment of women, homophobia, sectarianism, censorship and communalism. Liberals, of which I am one, have deluded themselves that mass immigration is a story only of cultural enrichment, bringing valued skills, exotic cuisines, innovative music, colourful fashions and new languages. Many immigrants do enrich the West but others come bearing the customs and beliefs that shaped the societies they were desperate to leave. The challenge lies in maximising the former while minimising the latter. That is impossible unless we take the ‘mass’ out of mass migration.
Another unpleasant truth is that, having prated for so long that ‘diversity is our strength’, we find that we are not strong enough to manage diversity. A common theme in reporting on the Amsterdam pogrom is the failure of the Dutch police to act swiftly, or at all, to racist gangs marauding through the streets of their capital city on the lookout for Jews to pummel. Police forces sometimes struggle to contain violent incidents, but it’s hard not to recall the claim from the Dutch Jewish Police Network, made just one month ago, that ‘there are colleagues who no longer want to protect Jewish targets or events’. Whatever caused Amsterdam police to fail so miserably, it echoes police failings in this country, where we have seen the Met slow to act on extremist chants on London marches, where teachers must go into hiding for showing students drawings of the Prophet Mohammed, and where officers sit by as a mother pleads for her autistic son who scuffed a copy of the Qur’an. Across liberal Europe, populations are losing confidence in the reliability, neutrality and effectiveness of the police, and many other institutions besides.
Especially distasteful to liberal palates is the thought of conceding, even implicitly, that The Bad People might have been right all along. Geert Wilders called last night’s scenes ‘a Jew hunt in the streets of Amsterdam’ and says the Netherlands has become ‘the Gaza of Europe’. When he first emerged as figurehead of the Dutch nationalist right, Wilders could be dismissed as a rabble-rouser who made political capital from fear and suspicion of Muslims. Yet until fairly recently, the Dutch state seemed almost determined to give Wilders a point, studiously ignoring the worst aspects of multiculturalism when it wasn’t pandering to them. Whenever I hand-wring about the far-right exploiting one outrage or another, a conservative friend of mine says: ‘Perhaps your lot could stop trying to make them right.’ I want him to be wrong about that, but he’s not. Liberals would sooner a thousand Amsterdams than concede any failing that has been exploited by the far-right, as though keeping the wrong policy despite the consequences is proof of their progressive machismo. Let liberal societies burn to own the fash.
The West is too deep in its civilisational nap to hear the wake-up calls. When organised anti-Semitic thuggery returns to the streets of Amsterdam, we prefer to tell ourselves that it’s just ‘clashes’ between football supporters, or that Israeli fans who reportedly tore down Palestinian flags or sang anti-Arab chants provoked the violence. Note that offensive words, which we always say do not excuse violence, now excuse violence. Note that attacking a minority or nationality because of the actions of some of their number, which we always decry as racism and xenophobia, are no longer racism an xenophobia. With what timorous ease we drop our principles to show our enemies that our hands are up.
A liberalism quietly arranging its own funeral is a liberalism I want nothing to do with. The liberalism I want to belong to is a strong, confident, clear-eyed, hard-headed liberalism that knows liberal societies are delicate creations that must be guarded from all enemies, and not just the enemies we are comfortable acknowledging. A liberalism that stops trying to make the far-right right and instead confronts its own failings, changes course, and gives people of all races and religions confidence that they can live in safe, free and orderly societies under liberalism. When liberals fail to wake up, they awaken something ugly. Amsterdam may horrify us, but it will inspire others. Our response may help us avoid unpleasant questions, but it will send some to look for answers elsewhere.
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