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Multiculturalism questioned in WaPO
EFL While modern cities are a long way from extinction, it's only by acknowledging the primacy of security -- and addressing it in the most aggressive manner -- that they will be able to survive and thrive in this new century, in which they already face the challenge of a telecommunications revolution that is undermining their traditional monopoly on information and culture, and draining their populations. After a brief, welcome surge in inner-city populations in the late 1990s, most older American cities have lost more people than they gained since 2000. This is true not only for perennial losers such as Baltimore, Cleveland, Philadelphia and Detroit, but also places that enjoyed a brief resurgence in the last decade, like San Francisco, Minneapolis and Chicago. What do these cities have in common? Could it be their blue hue? Their dead voters? Should Democrats consider this a coincidence? Could they be considered a fifth column? Nor is this flight a mere American phenomenon: Inner-city population has been dropping in London, Paris, Hamburg, Milan and Frankfurt. In many of these cities, the only rapidly growing group is immigrants, most of them Muslim, including many who are increasingly targeted by and susceptible to Islamist extremism. It's too early to tell how businesses or individuals might react over time if terrorist attacks were to become commonplace. But the historical record isn't promising. Many of the earliest cities of antiquity -- in places as dispersed as Mesopotamia, China, India and Mesoamerica -- shrank and ultimately disappeared after being overrun by more violent, but often far less civilized peoples. As is the case today, the greatest damage was often inflicted not by organized states, but by nomadic peoples or even small bands of brigands who either detested urban civilization or had little use for its arts. The best-known example of security-driven collapse, of course, is Rome. The Roman Empire was a confederation of cities. By the 2nd century A.D., people, products and ideas were traveling quickly from urban center to urban center over secure sea lanes and 51,000 miles of paved roads stretching from Jerusalem to Boulogne, which connected scores of cities in between. Europe would not again see such a proliferation of secure and well-peopled cities until well into the 19th century. This archipelago of cities did not fall in one cataclysmic crash, but as a result of repeated assaults by brigands and stateless hordes over hundreds of years. The attacks led to a gradual withdrawal of the Roman presence, first from the outermost parts of the empire, such as Britain, and a gradual shift of population from beleaguered cities to the rural hinterlands. By the 7th century, virtually all the great cities of the empire -- large provincial centers such as Trier, on the German frontier, Marseilles and Roman Londinium -- had either been abandoned or had shrunk to mere shadows of themselves. Rome itself, a behemoth of almost a million in the 2nd century, was reduced to a pitiful ruin populated by less than a tenth that number. The U.S. cities that have declined most precipitously and consistently -- Baltimore and Detroit are obvious examples -- are those plagued by the nation's highest crime rates. Baltimore's Mayor Martin O'Malley has cultivated an image of coolness for himself and encouraged other "cool" people, including singles and gays, to add to his city's "creative class." Yet as one Baltimore resident suggested to me recently: "What's the point of being hip and cool if you're dead?" Now, cities may have to face a different menace. Sadly, many metropolitan leaders seem less than prepared to meet today's current terrorist threat head-on, in part due to the trendy multiculturalism that now characterizes so many Western cities. Consider London's multiculturalist Mayor Ken Livingstone, who last year actually welcomed a radical jihadist, Egyptian cleric Sheik Yusuf Qaradawi, to his city. Multiculturalism and overly permissive immigration policies have also played a role here in North America. Unfettered in their own enclave, Muslim extremists in Brooklyn helped organize the first attack on the World Trade Center in the early 1990s. Lax Canadian refugee policies have allowed radical Islamists to find homes in places like Montreal and Toronto, where some might have planned attacks on this country, like the alleged 2000 plot to blow up Los Angeles International Airport. In continental Europe, multiculturalism has been elevated to a kind of social dogma, exacerbating the separation between Muslim immigrants and the host society. For decades, immigrants have not been encouraged or expected to accept German, Dutch or British norms, nor have those societies made efforts to integrate the newcomers. Not surprisingly, jihadist agitation has flourished in Hamburg, Amsterdam, Madrid, Berlin and Paris as well as London. If cities are to survive in Europe or elsewhere, they will need to institute measures that encourage immigrants to assimilate, such as fostering greater economic opportunity for newcomers or enforcing immersion in the national language and political institutions. Militant anti-Western Islamist agitation -- actively supportive of al Qaeda, for example -- also must be rooted out; it can be no more tolerated in Western cities today than overt support for Nazism should have been during World War II. The kinds of policies needed to secure their safety may pose a serious dilemma for great cities that have been built upon the values of openness, freedom of movement, privacy, tolerance and due process. Yet to survive, these same cities may now need to shift their primary focus to protecting their people, their commerce and their future against those who seek to undermine and even, ultimately, destroy them. Posted by: Mrs. Davis 2005-07-24 |
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