It Ain't Easy Being A Migrant.

Note: It cannot be easy to be a migrant. This site recognises that the problems faced by many muslims in Australia are not slight. The principal problem must surely be 'how to reconcile a socially backward set of muslims attitudes to the modern life in Australia'?

Read this excellent essay and think about these matters..


Reconciling the hyphens of identity

By Evan R. Goldstein

The question of why Europe has been producing homicidal extremists took on fresh urgency with the discovery of what British authorities describe as a plot to down several commercial jets. Most of the suspects are British-born Muslims. To successfully counter this threat we have to better understand the immigrant experience, in particular the identity crisis that afflicts many children of immigrant parents.

In many respects, this is an old and not particularly Muslim drama. And while the stakes today are far more deadly, there are resemblances to the experience of second generation Jews who came of age on the Lower East Side of New York in the 1930s and 1940s.

Born into immigrant families, these young Jews teetered between an origin many no longer accepted and a desired status they could not attain. A very young intellectual by the name of Irving Howe described his confused legacy as a feeling "of total loneliness, of complete rootlessness." Howe's wistful lament highlights the central psychological feature common to immigrants: a sense of dislocated identity, confusion at being lost between two cultures, and a gnawing inauthenticity. As part of an unsettled minority in a liberal society, one's identity is no longer defined by the mere fact of having been born into a Jewish or Muslim community. Instead, there remains the endless task of reconciling the often contradictory hyphens of modern identity. What does it mean to be Jewish in a predominately non-Jewish society? What does it mean to be a Muslim in a predominately non-Muslim society? To what extent can one conform to the surrounding culture without completely abandoning one's identification as a Jew or as a Muslim?




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In a magisterial 1950 essay in Commentary, critic Harold Rosenberg defined this as "the problem of the voluntary aspect of modern identity." Rosenberg argued that in a free society identity is more an act of will than an accident of birth. Therefore, great emphasis is placed on the act of defining ourselves. Yet, somewhat paradoxically, it is this very freedom that contains the seeds of so much terror. "People freely choose to subject themselves to totalitarian disciplines in order to be something," Rosenberg writes. "Perhaps even more, however, in order to quiet the anguish of possibility." It is the anguish of possibility - and the attendant feelings of isolation, homelessness, insecurity, and anxiety - that is at the heart of the crisis in Europe.

The allure of the international jihadist movement in many ways echoes that which attracted many young Jews of Howe's and Rosenberg's generation to radical politics: the psychological security they both offer to their adherents.

I find it significant that later in life, with a certain bemused detachment, Howe explained his youth spent in the trenches of sectarian politics as, in part, a salve for his disorientation: "We were adrift and needed definition," Howe recalled. "We needed order both in our lives and in our view of life, and we thought to gain a semblance of the former by imposing an ideology on the latter."

Similarly, many young Muslims in Europe seek the secure identity and quasi-authenticity of a jihadist.

The renowned French scholar Olivier Roy has persuasively argued that jihadism is an enticing ideology to disaffected European Muslims, who have "broken mentally with their backgrounds." "We are not dealing with the reaction of a traditional Muslim community," he writes, "but with a reformulation in religious terms (Islamic) of the more general revolt of a generation adrift between its culture of origin and Westernization."

At a certain point the comparison between Muslim immigrants in Europe and Jewish immigration to America begins to break down; but much of the value in making the comparison is that it does. The smothering embrace of America's unique hospitality made it easy (maybe too easy!) for Jews to yield up their particularism, and the alienation articulated by Irving Howe was, in hindsight, a passing phase of acculturation.

American citizenship, never a biological construct, extends a reciprocal offer to its immigrants: a national identity you can both assume and shape. In "The Human Stain," Philip Roth calls this "the democratic invitation to throw your origins overboard if to do so contributes to the pursuit of happiness." It is not mere luck that instances of American Muslims becoming terrorists are extremely rare.

In contrast, national identities in Europe remain far more blood-and-soil-based, rendering them much more inaccessible to those ethnic groups who did not initially populate the country. The implications of this were made ghoulishly clear in events like the brutal murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh in Holland, the 3/11 bombings in Madrid, and the 7/7 bombings in London. All of these were perpetrated by Muslims born in Europe. These terrors amount to a damning indictment of Europe's long-practiced multicultural policies, which should be quickly retired. They also point to the need for Europe to reformulate its definition of national identity to make it more accessible to citizens of non-Western backgrounds.

While these steps should be undertaken with great urgency, they do not satisfactorily explain how someone comes to the belief that it is right to explode innocent people, fellow countrymen. Results of recent polls in Britain stand as a stark reminder of just how daunting a challenge we face. One jaw-dropping survey of UK Muslims found that only 44 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds feel Britain is their country, while 51 percent believe September 11 was the result of an American-Israeli conspiracy. In a Pew poll, an astonishing 81 percent of British Muslims said they thought of themselves as a Muslim first and a citizen of their country only second. Furthermore, 30 percent of British Muslims would like to live under sharia law, and 28 percent would like Great Britain to become an Islamic state.

All of which begs the question that needs to be posed: Can we ever win over hearts and minds that seem so implacably opposed to everything decent about liberal-democratic society? We must be clear-eyed about the difficulties, but we must try.

Evan R. Goldstein is a contributing editor at Moment Magazine.




Comment: The Australian government is not especially bright when it comes to dealing with muslims in Australia. No other migrant group has ever caused such difficulties as this one. In the absence of proper government policies and sensible help, these poor muslims in Australia( especially the sunni muslims)are left to the none too tender mercies of their poisonous imams.

Proper policies in Australia would keep these foreign agents out of Australia and would have support institutions for muslims in Australia which helped them to integrate quickly and quietly into the Australian mainstream.

No such mechanisms currently exist. None are on the horizon. Why?