Forward Op-ed on European Muslim Immigration

Ostensibly, our progressive and liberal friends who support mass immigration of Muslims both here and wherever they seek to live should be heartened by this week’s op-ed in the Forward by Eric Frey. The title of the piece is, “A Racist Stench Rises Out of Cologne,� and the end warns European Jews that,

The future of Islamic life in Europe does not lend itself to simple answers. If Jews find themselves too close to demagogues who want to rid society of all minorities, they should know that they are on the wrong track.

So it appears that the Forward is giving voice to those who categorically reject “racism� against Muslim immigrants.

But is that what is happening?

Let’s look at some of the actual content of the essay itself, apart from the specific building of the mosque in question.

“Why would a man who survived the Holocaust by hiding in a cellar in Hamburg and who spoke out forcefully against racism and antisemitism by neo-Nazis in the early 1990s allow himself to be associated with such company? Giordano’s answer is that radical Islam and its totalitarian creed, not the remnants of European fascism, are the main threats to liberal democracy today.

He finds himself in a similar bind as French-Jewish philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, who was widely condemned as a racist when he told the Israeli daily Ha’aretz in November 2005 that the French Muslim community was itself to blame for the social and ethnic tensions that led to the riots in Paris’s suburbs earlier that year. Finkelkraut’s arguments echoed those of Nicolas Sarkozy, then-interior minister and now president, and even National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. The mainstream leftist position, by stark contrast, was that French society had failed the immigrant youth because of a lack of integration and economic opportunity.

All across Europe, one can see liberal Jewish thinkers parting ways over the issue of Islam with their non-Jewish peers, among whom criticism of Islam is often frowned upon. Their willingness to speak out may have to do with a special Jewish abhorrence of totalitarian thinking, or concern over the widespread anti-Israel and antisemitic views among Europe’s Muslims, or (at least in Germany’s case) a feeling that Jews can speak out where others feel inhibited by their history.�

Emphasis added.