Palestine’s Norwegians: Questioning diversity in Norway

My I-Phone pinged, and news came of the bombing in Oslo and the massacre on UtÁ¸ya Island. The dead at the latter were from the Workers’ Youth League (AUF), linked to the Norwegian Labour Party, but with roots in the Communist and Socialist movements of the 1920s. The current Prime Minister of Norway, Jens Stoltenberg, was once leader of the AUF. The initial reaction in the West was that the attacks had been conducted by Muslim jihadis. This has become a habit – after the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City, CBS’s Jim Stewart said, “The betting here is on Middle East terrorists.” Of course this was more Mid-West than Mid-East, but there was no apology from the media to the Muslims in America.

A few hours later, Breivik’s manifesto began to appear on various websites. Here Breivik fulminated against “Marxist-Multiculturalists.” This has become a familiar refrain among the defenders of Fortress Europe: they want to secure their continent from the re-conquest of the Moors. The tendency is hateful toward immigrants and Islam. But these are not marginal socio-paths. Their views flow down the center of the stream of European conservatism. In October of last year, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that multiculturalism “has utterly failed.” Immigrants needed to be force-marched into German culture, and if this is not possible, they should not be allowed to enter the country.

In February of this year, Britain’s Cameron and France’s Sarkozy followed Merkel’s lead. Cameron blamed the “doctrine of state multiculturalism” for encouraging migrants to “live separate lives, apart from each other and the mainstream.” France’s Sarkozy gave a bitter speech against multiculturalism and then told the MPs of his “Union for a Popular Movement” party that he wanted laws to rein in Islam. Electorally, Sarkozy wanted to outflank the increased popularity of Martine Le Pen’s National Front. “We had a debate on the burqa,” he said, “now we should have a debate on street preachers.” This is less a debate and more a vitriolic campaign against Islam and those who look like Muslims.

European Conservatism takes a harsh position vis-Á -vis its African and Asian migrants. There is not much that separates these sophisticated leaders from their antecedents (namely, Enoch Powell and his 1968 “rivers of blood” speech) and the neo-Nazis (namely, Breivik). This strand of Conservatism hates difference and diversity, and promotes mono-cultures in social life. It cannot fathom that human beings are able to live convivial lives with those who are different. It would like to blame society’s problems on difference. The last thing imaginable is to put the onus on the hierarchies of property, power and propriety, all of whom are generally alien to the commonplace conviviality of everyday people.

When Breivik writes that “indigenous Europeans” are committing “cultural suicide” by accommodating these migrants, he displays the typical ignorance of Nazism – they have no sense of the long centuries of interaction across the continents, of the mechanisms of colonial ideology that continued those interactions amidst the growth of a toxic racism, and of the recent histories of polycultural social life that has become so important to the lives of people in his own Europe. Watching television footage from UtÁ¸ya, one could see that the Labour youth had among them children of migrants from Sri Lanka and North Africa. Their Norway was not Breivik’s Norway.

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