https://quillette.com/2018/11/02/an-
A review of An Imaginary Racism: Islamophobia and Guilt by Pascal Bruckner. Polity (November 2018), 204 pages.
It is embarrassingly easy to write about the collapse of the Left in the twenty-first century. The explosion in identity politics that has led to the automatic use of “white” as an ethnic insult in condemnations such as “white privilege” and “white, straight men” has made race as defining a factor in left-wing politics as it is in extreme right-wing politics. Meanwhile, the willingness to excuse antisemitsm, misogyny, tyranny, and obscurantism, as long as the antisemitic, misogynistic, tyrannical obscurantists are anti-Western, has called into question whether leftists—or at least the noisiest voices on the Left—have lost all connection to their better values.
I have said as much many times, and in his new book the French political theorist Pascal Bruckner says it again. Bruckner once struck me as the best the French intelligentsia had to offer. In 2007, he provoked an intellectual scandal with the “Racism of the Anti-Racists”, an essay for Sign and Sight, in which he excoriated liberals who denied Ayaan Hirsi Ali and other Muslim dissidents the rights they took for granted. Meanwhile, I admired his Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism enough to call it “a brilliant defence of liberalism and a deservedly contemptuous assault on all those intellectuals who have betrayed its best values.”
The title of Bruckner’s new polemic ought to have warned me that betrayal is not an exclusively left-wing vice. Far from being a principled defence of liberal and secular values, An Imaginary Racism: Islamophobia and Guilt is an unconscious illustration of how easily those who profess to hold enlightened ideals can slip into the ethnic favouritism and intellectual double-standards of the counter-Enlightenment.
Most liberal Muslims and ex-Muslims recoil from the word “Islamophobia.” TellMama, the main monitoring centre for violence and abuse against British Muslims, fought a doomed campaign to enshrine the use of “anti-Muslim hatred” instead. Hard won experience had taught its activists that “Islamophobia” was a weapon in the arsenal of the Islamist Right. Opposing bigotry with the language of bigots, who sought to re-define criticism of religion as racism, struck them as self-defeating to put it mildly.
TellMama keeps its office address secret. Its workers receive threats, not only from white racists, but also from Islamists. (They have taken advice from Jews who monitor antisemitic violence in Britain, and gay rights campaigners who monitor homophobia, and are thus damned in the eyes of the fanatical.) If all Bruckner wanted to do was to criticise the use of the term “Islamophobia” to incite violence against freethinkers and feminists who challenge clerical power, he would be performing a useful service—albeit one that has been performed many times before. But his book is representative of our debased times because it’s far from clear that Bruckner can extend his opposition to Islamism to cover the purveyors of anti-Muslim bigotry.
