Motus Mentis

There was an article in yesterday’s Times about friction between European Muslims and their host culture. In it we find the following:

Youcef Mammeri, a writer on Islam in France and member of the Joint Council of Muslims of Marseille, says that the debates over minarets, burqas and national identity have angered many French-born Muslims and brought them together in a defensive circle.

Asked about the source of “this anxiety about Islam,’ Mr. Mammeri said: “I ask myself this same question.’ He finds “a perverse aspect to all these questions asked Muslims, which are not coherent,’ he said, but “liberate and dignify existing racism’ and “stigmatize Muslims.’

Racism in France has moved from being anti-Arab to anti-Muslim, he said, “a terrible regression.’

And a terrible confusion — perpetuated, unsurprisingly, by the Times. Opposition to the Islamization of Europe has little to do with race; it is more akin to opposition to, say, Maoism. Both are systems of ideas, and both are expansionist, totalizing ideologies. What is at issue is not Europe’s relationship with this or that Muslim, or group of Muslims, but rather with Islam itself, a highly stable and well-replicating meme-plex of which any person, of any race whatsoever, can be a carrier. It is the increasingly conspicuous implantation of this alien complex of ideas and customs — one that is fundamentally at odds with the cultural and philosophical foundations of Western civilization — on their home soil that Europeans are alarmed about. What it is not is racism.