Europe's Muslim dilemma
ZACARIAS MOUSSAOUI is an American nightmare. The concept of a Muslim fanatic taking lessons on how to fly an airliner is the quintessential horror of our new age. He is also Europe's nightmare because, as with other 9/11 hijackers, he became radicalized not in the turbulent autocracies of the Middle East or North Africa, but in the open, free, and peaceful democracies of Western Europe.Europeans ask each other: What have we done, and what should we do to better absorb our Muslims into our liberal democracies? For Muslims are Europe's fastest-growing minority, and Islam is Europe's third-largest religious affiliation after Catholics and Protestants.
The French model has always been assimilation, one of the definitions of which is ``to cause to resemble." Never mind multiculturalism, let's all be French, is the ideal. While the British stressed their railways, their civil service, their courts with wigged judges in their far-flung empire, France stressed the civilizing aspects of its culture and language. So do come, France says, but you have to become French.The Dutch thought that just leaving Muslims alone in their own space, which is how Protestants and Catholics learned to live together after Europe's religious wars, would be sufficient. But the violent murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Dutch-Moroccan religious fanatic has put the Dutch model into question.The German model, until 2000, was accommodation, which can be defined as ``providing a room for the night." Germany said to its Muslims: Come and work, but don't even think about becoming German.The British model is ``integration -- combining parts into a whole." Yet when British-born Muslims from the jobless mill towns of the north blew themselves up on London subways, the British began to seriously wonder where they went wrong.
The major problem that both Europe and America face, as far as their Muslim populations are concerned, is not to let vigilance against terrorism spill over into undermining civil rights and discriminating against the 99.9 percent of Muslims who just want to get along.
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