2 personalities clash on European immigration

She is the daughter of Europe’s best-known far-right firebrand. He is Europe’s most controversial Muslim intellectual.

 

A face-to-face debate between Marine Le Pen, vice president of the National Front of France, and Tariq Ramadan, an Oxford academic barred from entering the United States, was predictably combustible and laced with mutual distrust: Both sides insisted on bodyguards.

 

But the more insightful outcome of this private debate on immigration Monday night was that the two highlighted many of the same problems, while offering very different prescriptions.

 

Europe’s treasured welfare state is at breaking point, both asserted in interviews following the debate. Europe’s ethnic minorities suffer from discrimination and risk growing more resentful of the white majority, they agreed. By 2050, they said, the Continent could see its identity profoundly transformed by immigration.

 

All these themes speak to widespread concerns among Europeans, making the Le Pen-Ramadan standoff emblematic of a much larger confrontation playing out between those in Europe who broadly believe immigration is at the heart of the problem and those who argue that it is part of the solution.

 

On Monday night the battle lines were swiftly drawn between two equally quick-witted and experienced public speakers.

 

"If we go on like this, Europe will no longer be Europe, it will turn into an Islamic republic," insisted Le Pen, 39, who is expected to succeed her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, at the helm of the National Front before the next presidential election.

 

"We are at a turning point, and if we don’t protect our civilization it will disappear," she said. "Yes, I’m attached to the nation. I want to preserve our cultural and historic identity."

 

If the postwar benefit system is creaking and if second-generation immigrant youths in tower blocks suffer from discrimination and unemployment, she said, it is because too many immigrants have been let in and because those immigrants have not made enough of an effort to integrate.

 

Immigrants need to assimilate by adhering to cultural and social norms and by learning the language before coming to a European country, she said.

 

"It’s true, if you’re called Fatima it’s harder to get a job than if you’re called Marine," Le Pen said, "but why don’t they give their children French names to show that they want to integrate?"

 

Ramadan, a Swiss citizen of Egyptian origin who is author of the book "Western Muslims and the Future of Islam," took a very different view.

 

"If Europe wants to succeed, it needs more immigrants," said Ramadan, 45. "Who is going to do the jobs Europeans don’t want to do? Who is going to pay for the welfare state? Europe is aging, and its population is shrinking."

 

But immigration is about more than just economics, he said: "I can’t accept that we talk only about our interests and not about people living under dictatorships or in poverty. You want immigrants to learn the language and develop an attachment to Europe’s universal values before they have even left their countries."

 

He added: "How can we preach European values if we don’t apply those values in the way we treat immigrants in the first place?"

 

Discrimination against second-generation immigrants was not a matter of a name change, he scoffed. ("So everybody should just be called Marine and all is well?")

 

"We need to stop Islamizing the problem, and we need to stop talking about minorities," he said. "I tell Muslims: You are not a minority, you are citizens. You can have a different culture and a different name and still adhere to the same laws and democratic values."

 

"What we need is a new narrative, a new ‘we,’ a multicolored, multicultural European identity," he said. "Immigration is a fact whether you like it or not. Europeans need to psychologically integrate that into their world view."

 

The event, which was organized by the private debating club Kitson, featured two ambiguous personalities.

 

Le Pen has avoided the blunt anti-Semitic remarks that gained her father his reputation. It was her idea to feature a girl who looks North African on the National Front’s election posters last year and to court suburban youths with the argument that those who did have citizenship would also benefit from the party’s flagship proposal to give the French priority over immigrants in everything from jobs to housing.

 

But her party did badly in the May elections, in part because Nicolas Sarkozy’s successful presidential campaign aggressively backed restricting immigration and bolstering national identity.

 

"I’m not the one obsessed with color," Le Pen said defiantly Monday before adding, "The National Front was in favor of French Algeria, remember?"

 

Ramadan, meanwhile, has been described by his fans as a "Muslim Martin Luther" who is helping to midwife a modern European Islam and by his critics as a Islamist waging a covert war against Western values. Ramadan is a grandson of Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, which seeks to resist what it considers Western domination and to create an Islamic state.

 

Ramadan was barred from entering the United States on suspicions that he "endorses or espouses terrorist activity," an allegation he emphatically denies. He is careful not to call for violence. When he argues against the French law banning Muslim head scarves and other religious garb from public schools, he puts it like this: "It’s against human rights to ban it; it’s against Islam to impose it."

 

There was one other thing Len Pen and Ramadan agreed on: Mainstream politicians who take a tough line on immigration, like Sarkozy, pose the biggest threat to Europe’s social fabric. Le Pen grumbled that they steal arguments and votes from the National Front; Ramadan complained that they make Le Pen’s ideas acceptable to average voters.

 

 

Source : Herald Tribune