Within
a day of the terrorist outrage in Brussels, US presidential candidate Ted Cruz had
seized the moral low-ground, suggesting that police should ‘patrol and secure
Muslim neighbourhoods’ in America before they ‘become radicalised’. He was
unable to say which neighbourhoods he had in mind, nor how such aggressive
policing would encourage the residents to feel more bonded with the rest of
society. Meanwhile in Britain, UKIP leader Nigel Farage exploited the attack as
an argument for Brexit, as though terrorism is a peculiarly European problem.
On Easter Sunday, hundreds
of demonstrators disrupted a peaceful gathering of mourners in the Brussel’s Place
de la Bourse, chanting nationalist slogans, making Nazi salutes and
confronting Muslim women in the crowd. To what
problem, I wonder, did they imagine this aggressive behaviour was the solution?
Britain’s own far right groups, such as the National Front, the English Defence
League, the Scottish Defence League, South East Alliance and Combat 18 (so
named because Hitler’s initials A and H are the first and eighth letters of the
alphabet), have gathered in Dover in recent months to signal their opposition to
the refugees across the Channel.
These are some
of the more grotesque ways of missing the point. With a tad more subtlety,
David Cameron, responding to concerns about the numbers of British citizens attempting to travel to Syria to join Isis, said earlier this year that
there are too many Muslim women unable to speak English. Referring to those who
have entered the UK on a five-year spousal settlement programme, he said that ‘After two and half years they should be improving
their English and we will be testing them.’ Asked whether those who failed would
be deported, he replied, ‘You can’t guarantee you can stay if you are not
improving your language.’
Cameron puts a feminist gloss on
this new policy, suggesting that it is patriarchal cultures that keep women
from integrating. But the discriminatory threat speaks more loudly than the
promise of liberation. Risking an Orwellian paradox, he explained that ‘We will never truly build One Nation unless we are
more assertive about our liberal values.’
I think of my late father-in-law Irving
Zeiger who grew up in a Yiddish-speaking household in Cleveland, Ohio. When he
misbehaved at school and his widowed mother was called in to see the principal,
young Irv had to translate. Their neighbourhood was full of Jews and Italians,
many of whom would have struggled, like Anna Zeiger, to pass a test in English.
America didn’t do badly out of that generation of immigrants.
For a more contemporary insight,
I turn to British blogger Fatima Rajina, who is keeping a record of a research
project she is conducting with fellow academic Victoria Redclift (to whom I am
related), comparing communities of Bengali heritage in London’s Brick Lane and
LA’s recently established Little Bangladesh (https://bricklanetolittlebangladesh.wordpress.com/2016/01/).
Rajina expresses anger at Cameron’s
linking of the terrorist threat to the linguistic choices and deficiencies of
Muslim women. She is grateful to her own mother for making her speak Bengali at
home, ‘the only place she felt we could preserve and engage with our Bengali
identity’. With proficiency in five languages other than English, Rajina feels
that ‘knowing another language is like having another soul’. Time spent in
Bangladesh during childhood gave her ‘an insight into the culture, the everyday
nuances I would have missed otherwise’. With so much of her work conducted in
English, a language which for her ‘lacks animation and is slightly burdensome’,
speaking Bengali, she says, ‘gives me life and breathing space; it gives me
freedom.’
Fatima Rajina’s experience allows
her an unusually wide reach, but her sense of occupying multiple identities is
far from unique. In my own family, I see how Jewish and American attachments overlap
and conflict. I know what it is to feel
both English and Irish, both British and European, and it isn’t obvious to me
that I have more in common with the demonstrators in Dover than with the
refugees in Calais.
Cameron’s authoritarian impulses pale
in comparison with Cruz’s. But like Cruz he seems to imagine that social
cohesion can be imposed by threats and scolding. And he slips too easily into a
position of thoughtless privilege, apparently unaware that he himself inhabits
social and economic subcultures from which many of his fellow citizens feel
excluded.
For more on minority languages in Britain