Our blood and theirs

Someone could create an entire blog or PhD thesis around this article: Raised as Catholic in Belgium, She Died as a Muslim Bomber.

Religion, terrorism, racism, xenophobia, generation gap, nihilism, capitalism, Times speak, provincialism, sexism, cultural blindness, it's all in there.

I mean, where to begin?

[Muriel Degauque's] unlikely journey into militant Islam stunned Europe and for many people was an incomprehensible aberration, a lost soul led astray. But her story supports fears among many law enforcement officials and academics that converts to Europe's fastest-growing religion could bring with them a disturbing new aspect in the war on terror: Caucasian women committed to one of the world's deadliest causes.

The Times then tells us what these women are thinking:

Most of those in the conservative ranks are motivated by spiritual quests or are attracted to what they regard as an exotic culture.

And then, buried in the piece, is this:

Her mother told neighbors that she was pleased because Islam had helped her daughter stop drinking and doing drugs.

Muriel's Europe, I think, is lost; a rapidly aging Caucasian population is struggling against an influx of young non-white immigrants that it desperately needs to do the menial work and pay taxes, but that it deeply resents, is bewildered by and fears, the way old people everywhere always are by the young.

The age-old generation gap is supercharged by this clash of cultures that is finally stripping away the genteel racism Europe has always worn, and revealing the ugly bedrock racism that comes out when you fear for surival.

Survival on a personal level (terrorism) and societal level (Christian Europe not just being tuned out by the young, but being actively saturated by Islam).

And it's the old's fear of losing their young to such foreign forces as Islam and love across color lines that pervades the Times piece.

To this ancient conflict add the simultaneous crumbling of an economic system built upon the anachronism of socialism, speeded by the sense that new (non-white) powers are afoot in the world and are leaving old Europe behind.

A similar collision between just the generational and economic forces was sufficient to forge the soixante-huitards and barricadiers, the 1968 generation of radical political leftists that went from running from police in the streets to reshaping their countries by running for office and running businesses.

It is ironically this very generation of grown-up radicals that now finds itself at war with Muslims. And it is war, not civil war--because for most Caucasian Europeans, these Muslims among them are not Europeans; they are not the prodigal sons of '68, whose terrorism was all within the family and something to be grappled with and gone through together and ultimately worked out, no matter how hard and long the journey.

For Caucasian Europeans, the 'Muslim problem' is something that could end with separation. This 'if all else fails we'll just send them back' mentality is at the root of the ugliness in the streets.

This mentality allowing for the wholesale excisement of 'foreign' elements, like much else at the root of the Holocaust, wasn't brutally ripped out with the end of World War II.

There is still no concept in Europe today of citizenship being open to all; no parallel to the American assumption that anyone born in a country is a citizen like everyone else, or that all you need to do is live here X years and pass Y test and you're a full citizen.

Europe, to a degree unimaginable in the U.S., is still run on blood (yours and your parents), religion, and skin color.

Germany is a good example--believe it or not, until five years ago, in the words of the BBC, "an ethnic German from Kazakhstan who has never lived in Germany can claim citizenship, but not a Turk born and raised in Germany and speaking only German."

Until 2000, as the Germany Embassy in Canada explains, Germany's citizenship laws were "based upon the principle of the jus sanguinis ("right of blood"): a child inherits German citizenship from German parents."

But perhaps caught up in the euphoria of the new millennium, the Germans changed their laws:

The most important change in Germany's citizenship law is that the principle of jus sanguinis - of defining citizenship by inheritance - is supplemented with the principle of the jus soli ("right of soil") - of defining citizenship by place of birth.

Five years isn't much time for your average hausfrau to think of the Turkish immigrant she passes every day in the street as her equal, in the eyes of the state or otherwise.

Of course, even if you're born in Germany you're not a citizen unless one of your parents has lived there for eight years; as for becoming a naturalized citizen, a U.S. government study tells us it's still "at the discretion of the German naturalization authority."

Although this post is about Europe, a recent article in Japan Review entitled "Measuring Citizenship: Is Japan an Outlier?" adds additional perspective. The abstract suffices:

This paper explores the notion that Japan is an outlier in its definitions of citizenship. It looks at 190 states around the world and their sample political aggregates in order to test if "jus solis," or "citizenship by birth," is a common feature of all states. Analysis of the data indicates the opposite: that jus solis conferring states are within the minority. Japan is not an outlier.

The study finds that only two countries in Europe, France and Ireland, recognize anyone born there as a citizen.

But it's one thing for de jure recognition; citizenship in the eyes of your neighbor is very different. At least Caucasian Germans find it difficult to hide from their racism--it's just too obvious being there in black and white.

The Caucasian French, perhaps with typical Gallic ostrich flair, seem intent on proclaiming their model egalitarianism even as their cities burn.

As Semou Diouf said in the Times:

"I was born in Senegal when it was part of France. I speak French, my wife is French and I was educated in France." The problem "is the French don't think I'm French."

The Times piece continues:

That, in a nutshell, is what lies at the heart of the unrest that has swept France in the past two weeks: millions of French citizens, whether immigrants or the offspring of immigrants, feel rejected by traditional French society, which has resisted adjusting a vision of itself forged in fires of the French Revolution. The concept of French identity remains rooted deep in the country's centuries-old culture, and a significant portion of the population has yet to accept the increasingly multiethnic makeup of the nation. Put simply, being French, for many people, remains a baguette-and-beret affair.

The riots in France are just the latest in Europe's struggle with thousands of years of inured racism--when everyone around you has always been white, it's easy to spend your time lecturing America about its 'race problem'.

America is without question the least racist place in the world, which says something about how bad it is in other countries. We talk about race and struggle with it all the time because we have to--there are too many African Americans and Hispanics and Asian Americans to ignore the way Europe has tried to in various forms ignore or erase non-Caucasians. An archetypical example being the French's repeated avowals that it's their fundamental egalitarian nature driving things like banning headscarfs and yarmulkes in schools as ostentatious displays of faith (but not crucifixes or observing Catholic holidays).

Maybe the last word should just be this:

Ms. Degauque's mother answered the door at her home in Monceau-sur-Sambre on Monday, her blond hair neatly coiffed but wearing a weary frown. "I have nothing to say," she said, "I'm mourning my daughter."