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mean streets A Muslim woman in an Antwerp shopping district |
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In Antwerp, the far right is facing off against muslims. Who's winning? BY VIVIENNE WALT |
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Posted Sunday, February 20, 2005; 12.03 GMT
Along the windswept sidewalk of Hollandstraat in Antwerp North, the half-built shell of what was meant to be the neighborhood’s first official mosque is boarded up, with only the stumps of two unfinished minarets poking above the construction site’s walls. Work was shut down more than a year ago, thanks to a stop-the-mosque campaign orchestrated by Filip Dewinter, the leader of Belgium's far-right Vlaams Belang party; non-Muslim residents protested against it and lawyers acting for anti-immigrant groups sued its builders for fire-code violations. “Look at this,” says Dewinter now, waving a dismissive hand at the mosque's shell. “It's just a few doors from the church.”
As he strolls through Antwerp North, a residential area on the edge of town, Dewinter, 42, is soon recognized; African men and Muslim women in head scarves yell "Racist!" at him as he passes. Africans began moving into Antwerp North about 10 years ago, and white residents were soon fleeing to the suburbs. Today, the streets are dotted with stores offering ethnic food and cut-rate telephone calls to Rwanda. But even here Dewinter has his supporters. Spotting him from the window of her apartment, one Belgian woman leans out and shouts: "You're doing great things, Dewinter. Keep it up!"
The ferocious, polarized responses Dewinter evokes in Antwerp North mirror the immigration debate that's raging throughout Belgium — and across Europe. As anti-immigration parties grow in strength in countries like Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, mainstream conservatives are tacking right, arguing that immigrants must be compelled by law to assimilate by adopting Europe's secular values and even turning their backs on their own Islamic traditions. It is, the politicians argue, the only way to counter the frightening nexus of immigration and Islamic terrorism that hits the headlines virtually every week. Late last month Belgian police briefly arrested a Moroccan immigrant whom they suspect of involvement in the massive March 11 al-Qaeda bomb attacks in Madrid. Four other Moroccans were charged in Spain earlier this month with involvement in those attacks. And last November, after a Dutch-born Islamic radical was arrested for the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, a vociferous critic of fundamentalist Muslims, many Europeans wondered whether their liberal attitudes had given immigrants too free a rein — and whether assimilation itself was even possible.
In the wake of the Van Gogh killing, Geert Wilders, a right-wing Dutch M.P., called suspected terrorists "Islamo-fascist thugs" and proposed freezing all non-Western immigration for five years; he received death threats and now lives in a safe house and travels only with bodyguards. In Germany, where surveys suggest that voters worry more about immigration than about terrorism itself, opposition leader Angela Merkel declared late last year that "the idea of a multicultural society cannot succeed. It is prone to failure from the start. Multiculturalism is not integration."
At issue is nothing less than what it means to be European. In the U.S., the ideal of the cultural "melting pot" has allowed ethnic communities to flourish without preventing immigrants from regarding themselves as true Americans. But the same sort of multiculturalism has been less successful in Europe, where small nations that have for centuries been defined by distinct languages, customs and cultures now feel besieged by fast-growing ethnic populations. Several countries find themselves with large immigrant ghettos for the first time. In Sweden, for example, about 15% of the country's 9 million people are immigrants, many of them concentrated in mainly Muslim areas inhabited by Kurds, Iranians, Iraqis and Somalis. What does it mean to be European when, say, a Swede may speak Kurdish at home, Arabic with friends and Swedish at work? "Traditionally, a European is just a citizen from a European state," says Carl Devos, a professor of political science at Belgium's Ghent University. "But there's a more philosophical discussion going on about European values. The fact that [second-generation Muslims] are still thought of as immigrants means we have a big, big problem. They're born here. They pay their taxes. They speak the languages. They are not guests in the European house; they're co-owners."
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