A message from Holland

I am not the only one who reads the FT Magazine, it seems. Simon Kuper's piece from 4 Dec has been commented on here and here and reprinted here. Kuper describes how following Van Gogh's killing, among other things, 'Women report having had their headscarves yanked off'.

Some of his opponents tried the old trick of associating him with nazism... But nobody believed Fortuyn was a Dutch Hitler. He was an impeccable democrat, untainted by anti-Semitism, always going on about “Jewish-Christian” Dutch values. He simply disliked Islam.
...
Old Fortuyn quotes, once shocking, have become mainstream. ...Geert Wilders, an MP who has founded an anti-immigrant party, repeated Fortuyn’s “Islam is backward” line.
...
The Dutch government['s] main move after van Gogh’s death has been to bury the multicultural consensus that prevailed from the 1970s. According to multiculturalism, a society consists of blocs of ethnic groups each living happily within their own culture. “The group should integrate ‘while preserving its identity’, those were the magic words,” recalls Van Thijn.

In Britain too, my sense is that the liberal consensus on race is brittle. That is, in most cases, what is behind all this talk about 'political correctness'.

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More on the Tariq Ramadan controversy : Sœur Caroline est de retour, par Pierre Tévanian.

Another quotation from lmsi, les mots sont importants : 'in Algeria also, " we " wished to liberate women by unveiling them.' See Alain Gresh, À propos de l’islamophobie.

I have commented here on Nick Cohen's article.