“Why are Jews, gays, and other minorities in Europe increasingly voting far-right?” So read the headline of a recent article in the Christian Science Monitor by Sara Miller Llana and Tamara Micner. I’m going to take a quick stroll through their article – not because there was anything special about it, but precisely because it provided a near-perfect example of the way in which the mainstream media handle anything related to Islam. The headline alone contained two familiar elements: (1) the reflexive grouping of all European counter-jihadist parties under the thoroughly mendacious rubric “far-right” and (2) the feigned puzzlement over declining gay and Jewish support for the European political establishment.
What’s worth noting about Llana and Micner’s article is that it made the answer to the question in their headline crystal clear: quite simply, European Jews and gays are voting for counter-jihadist parties because they know that Islam represents an existential threat to their own lives, and that the political establishment has increasingly aligned itself with their would-be executioners. Llana and Micner admitted, for example, that Jewish schools and synagogues in the Netherlands are now under police guard owing to “anti-Semitism…in pockets of Muslim communities.” (There’s no need, of course, for those words “pockets of.”) They cited a Dutch Jewish leader’s charge that the “openness, tolerance, and diversity” preached by “liberal elites” are “hard to defend” when “radical Muslim[s]” are “so highly intolerant.” (Again, “radical” isn’t really required there.) And without criticism or snark, they quoted a Dutch Jewish novelist’s statement that Geert Wilders’s strong anti-Islam posture makes him “a necessity in today’s political landscape” and a gay Frenchman’s explanation that he supports the National Front because it calls for “reducing immigration, taking back control from the European Union, and promoting a tough stance against Islamic fundamentalism.”
Now, any honest reporter faced with all of the above data would be obliged to acknowledge that, yes, Islam preaches the murder of gays and Jews and that members of those groups in Europe are aware of this fact and are acting out of sheer self-preservation. Period.
But the mainstream media can’t allow itself to admit these facts and leave it at that. So it muddies the waters. Llana and Micner did so in a familiar way. The “far-right” parties, they charged, don’t really believe in freedom and human rights, and don’t really care about gays’ or Jews’ well-being, but are, on the contrary, nests of bigotry – including homophobia and anti-Semitism. Why, then, are these parties welcoming Jews and gays into their ranks? According to Llana and Micner, it all came down to two words: window dressing. They’re taking in Jewish and gay members, you see, only because those groups’ support for them allows the parties to pose as non-bigoted “[e]ven as they feed on” – wait for it – “the fear of the ‘other.’”
Ah yes, that useful concept: “fear of the ‘other.’” Llana and Micner, as we’ve seen, had already made it perfectly clear that Jews and gays have a very good reason for fearing Islam. But by bringing in the postmodern concept of “fear of the ‘other,’” they deftly swept all sense away and turned the whole thing around. For the entire concept of “the other” is tied up, in contemporary academic discourse, with what is meant to be regarded by all and sundry as the thoroughly ugly history of Western imperialism – the colonization of various non-Western corners of the earth, and the cruel subordination of the almost invariably dark-skinned natives of those places to their white European conquerors. Let it be understood, moreover, that for one of today’s academics to reduce a social or political situation to a distrustful encounter between “self” and “other” is to suggest that the former view themselves as civilized and view the “other” as a bunch of savages.
