Opening borders to bigotry: It's heresy in our Disneyland version of multiculturalism, but Europeans are realizing that immigrant communities can be hotbeds of intolerance.

Nothing gets a point across like a gun aimed at your head.

The gun in this case was in the hands of a young Arab man. The head was mine. And the point is that concerns about immigration in Europe are not solely the product of white racism, but are in many cases a wise response to growing numbers of intolerant, violent young men in immigrant communities. It's a point we in Canada would do well to heed, not only to avoid thoughtlessly attacking European fears about immigration as bigotry, but also to ensure that we avoid the problems plaguing Europe.

This was not an issue I had intended to tackle when I visited Holland several weeks ago. I was in the Netherlands to research Dutch drug and prostitution policies, work which took me one Saturday night to a tippelzone -- a street where prostitution is permitted under regulated conditions -- in the city of Utrecht. While I was interviewing streetwalkers, a car slowly pulled closer. A window rolled down. The two young men inside screamed at me: "Flikker! Flikker!"

I had no idea what they were going on about, but then they pulled the car over to the sidewalk a few feet from me. The driver screamed, "Flikker!" and pointed a handgun at my head.

I ducked, hard. But the next sound I heard was the car peeling away.

As I learned later, "flikker" is the Dutch equivalent of "faggot." These men had assumed that because I was standing on the sidewalk, I must be a prostitute, and therefore gay.

I was stunned. I've been to many dodgy countries without incident, but here, in peaceful little Holland, I had just had a gun stuck in my face. Impossible.

Fortunately I was working that night with a young Dutch journalist and she had an explanation. "They were Moroccan," she said with a shrug.

As a nice, liberal Canadian, it was a little shocking to hear ethnicity cited bluntly as an explanation for criminality. But my Dutch colleague is a thoughtful feminist and a leftist, not some racist reactionary.

Nor were any of the dozens of Dutch people I spoke to about this incident in the following days. Given the subjects I had come to Holland to research, I was based in central Amsterdam -- the world capital of tolerance, a place where everybody's welcome and the only rules are don't hurt anyone and get out of the way of the bicycles. And yet everywhere I went, the mere mention of crime would swing the conversation to immigrants, and specifically Moroccans (who, along with Turks and Indonesians, are among the largest migrant groups in the country).

"Young Moroccans are the worst problem," the owner of a coffee shop in the red-light district told me. In Holland, "coffee shops" are pubs that sell marijuana, and the owner, a Dutch man in his 30s, was sampling his wares as he spoke. He and his wife were just as ultra-liberal as one might expect of red-light-district coffee-shop owners, but they were furious with Moroccan men, and specifically with the second-generation children of Moroccan immigrants -- the sort who scream at gays in Dutch, not Arabic. Many are bigoted and violent, they insisted, and there's no place for that in a country renowned for its tolerance. "If migrants want to live here, they have to be tolerant, too," he said.

I heard similar comments over and over. Women told me they cross the street to avoid young Moroccan men. Prostitutes fear Moroccans and often won't take them as customers no matter how badly they need the money. Dutch homosexuals are also afraid. And angry.

I spoke to a group of gay men in a bar one afternoon, telling them how I had become acquainted with the word "flikker," although I was careful not to mention the ethnicity of the young men. They were horrified. That sort of thing just doesn't happen in Holland, they insisted. In smaller Dutch towns, they told me, people may not accept homosexuality but they would never shout at or attack a gay man.

Then I told them that the two men were Moroccans. There was a collective rolling of eyes. Ah. That explains it. While gay-bashing may be extremely rare in Holland, it is something of a speciality of young Moroccan men, many of whom think it's great fun to go to parks where gays meet and attack men at random.
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"Many Moroccans, not all but many of them, make a lot of problems, not only about gays but about everything," one gay man told me. He and his friends had been talking about it just before I arrived.

Much of Holland is talking about it, in fact, and has been for years. But until recently, it was a whispered conversation. "Everybody was talking about it, but only when the door was closed," I was told by a woman at a coffee shop, a comment I heard again and again. No more. The Dutch are talking openly, even eagerly, now, thanks to a political hurricane named Pim Fortuyn.

In North America, we didn't hear about Mr. Fortuyn until an animal-rights fanatic murdered him this spring. The obituaries here were not kind. A few commentators claimed the neophyte politician whose soaring popularity had thrown Dutch politics into turmoil was a "fascist." Others simply lumped him in with far-right politicians such as France's Jean-Marie Le Pen and Austria's Joerg Haider. Fortuyn, we were told, was part of a trend sweeping Europe, an anti-immigrant backlash led by xenophobic, even racist, demagogues.

It was grossly unfair. Pim Fortuyn loathed Mr. Le Pen and his ilk. A former university professor, he was an advocate of drug legalization, a gay bon vivant, a Wildean fop -- a true laissez-faire liberal. He did sneer at Islam as a "backward religion," but that comment has to be seen in the context of a man who was more provocateur than politician or professor -- a man who defended himself against charges of racism by citing the non-white men he had slept with. It also has to be remembered that he made his anti-Muslim comments at a time when Dutch Muslim clerics were making viciously anti-gay statements and young Muslim men were beating the hell out of "flikkers."

And that's the paradox of Pim Fortuyn. In calling for the end of immigration to tiny, crowded Holland, he was defending openness. In defending "Dutch values" against multiculturalism, he was supporting pluralism and diversity. His party did attract an appalling number of cranks and kooks, and Mr. Fortuyn's comments were often irresponsible and inflammatory, but the man genuinely believed he was fighting intolerance, not promoting it.

This isn't easy for North Americans to grasp. On this continent, tolerance is something we demand of the native-born. Intolerance is a sin of the white majority. And hostility to immigrants is about the purest form of intolerance imaginable.

The idea that immigrants themselves may be horrifyingly intolerant is strange to the North American mind, almost incomprehensible. In part, that's because post-Second World War immigration to North America has been a smashing success. Immigrants in Canada and the United States have overwhelmingly accepted the idea that we must at least tolerate people who are not like us -- which is the core cultural element of liberal societies and the key to making pluralism work.

But there's another reason why we assume immigrant communities are innocent of bigotry and hatred: radical multiculturalism. This isn't the multiculturalism that values simple human diversity. Rather, it's the multiculturalism that insists all cultures are marvellous, benign and equal, that all folkways must be cherished and accepted, that all cultures can live side-by-side in sweet harmony. In this Disneyland ideology, the gravest sin, the one inexcusable crime, is criticizing another culture (with the exception of Western cultures, criticism of which is not only encouraged but de rigueur).

This is the multiculturalism that refuses to see that most human cultures, now and throughout history, are saturated with tribalism, bigotry and other illiberal nastiness. It refuses to see, for example, that a burning hatred of homosexuals is deeply ingrained in many Muslim cultures, that it is not a mere coincidence that the man who stabbed the openly gay mayor of Paris was a fundamentalist Muslim, or that so many young Moroccan men are amusing themselves by beating up Dutch "flikkers."
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Unfortunately, this strain of multiculturalism has been particularly virulent in Europe, sometimes bursting forth in lunatic forms. When a Norwegian newspaper reported that immigrant Muslim men were committing a disproportionate numbers of rapes in Norway, a professor insisted that Norwegian women were at least partly responsible. Their dress is provocative by Muslim cultural standards, he wrote. "Norwegian women must realize that we live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves to it."

For years, this sort of multiculturalism smothered discussion of the problems that people saw with their own eyes. In Holland, for example, half the prison population is made up of non-Dutch nationals, but until Pim Fortuyn came along, mainstream parties refused to discuss immigration and self-righteously shouted down the few who dared to say in public what everyone was saying in private. In this stifling atmosphere, it was perhaps inevitable that many Europeans would turn to those who were only too happy to talk about "immigrant problems" -- demagogues such as Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Fault doesn't lie only with Europe's multicultural left, however. For decades, the political right promoted policies that brought huge numbers of "guest workers" and their families to Europe, but deliberately kept them at arm's length with segregated housing and laws that made citizenship difficult or impossible to obtain. The results of this brutal exploitation can be seen, for example, in the Soviet-style housing blocks on the outskirts of French cities -- barren ghettoes pulsing with the poverty, alienation and anger of second- and third-generation Algerians.

Inevitably, al-Qaeda and other radical Muslim groups arrived to reap the bitter harvest. Five Dutch Moroccans have been charged with plotting terrorism. "A violent strain of radical Islam is stealthily taking root in Dutch society," declared a recent Dutch intelligence report.

Earlier this year, Belgian intelligence warned that al-Qaeda networks in Brussels and Antwerp posed "a grave and immediate threat." In November, a riot by Arab youth (which started when a mentally ill white Belgian killed a Muslim man for reasons unknown) swept the streets of Antwerp; Belgian authorities say the riot was organized and directed by an Islamic radical who wants Muslims in Belgium to live in separate communities under Islamic law.

The situation is not all gloom. The Dutch intelligence report noted that, while the extremists have had success with Moroccans, they have largely failed to cultivate Holland's Turkish or Indonesian communities. This squares with perceptions of the crime problem and the opinion of most Dutch people, who worry specifically about Moroccans, not all Muslims. It also suggests -- along with much other evidence -- that immigration to Europe can work, including Muslim immigration, if it is done with due care for integration.

The mainstream Dutch parties are also starting to openly acknowledge the problems and talk about ways to make integration happen -- a major change prompted by the spectacular political career of *Pim* Fortuyn. The same change is under way in other European countries.

Part of this shift has included restrictions on immigration, which North American commentators have unfairly attacked as simple intolerance. Of course there are very real currents of xenophobia and racism at work in Europe. But there's also a legitimate and vital attempt being made to understand what has gone wrong with immigration so that it can be made to work for both immigrant and native-born alike.

And in doing so, the political centre is snatching the issue away from the xenophobes and sending the illiberal right back into the wilderness. Already, Joerg Haider's support in Austria has collapsed.

For Europeans and North Americans alike, there's an essential lesson in this: No matter how explosive an issue may be, pretending it doesn't exist is always more dangerous than discussing it openly and honestly. It would be nice to think that's obvious to all in a democracy. But it seems that every now and then we need a gun to the head to be reminded of the point.

Dan Gardner is a senior columnist with the Ottawa Citizen. He can be contacted at:
E-mail:dgardner@thecitizen.canwest.com

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