Wangen Bei Olten Journal - A Swiss Treat for Muslim Diets Comes With an Aftertaste

Image via Wikipedia

By JOHN TAGLIABUE

WANGEN BEI OLTEN, Switzerland — Bertram Decker’s second-floor office in Nestlé’s big food plant here looks out over the town’s only minaret, a wooden turret topped with a gilt star and crescent.

The minaret, atop a Turkish cultural association, is one of only four in all of Switzerland, and it has a special place in the country’s recent history. It touched off a local scrap that in November led more than 57 percent of Swiss voters to approve a call for a constitutional amendment to ban minarets.

Here in Wangen, 61 percent approved the measure, which is a little curious, since Mr. Decker’s factory produces, among other things, packages of feuilleté, or puff pastry, that adhere to Islam’s ritual halal requirements.

Last year, the factory’s assembly lines churned out 100 million packages of pastry, up from 80 million a decade ago. Though halal products represent at most 3 percent of the total, Mr. Decker said, “We see now that it’s growing.”

On a wall near the entrance, he points to a certificate from the Grand Mosque in Paris certifying the factory as halal, or free of impure products like alcohol or pork. “The original certification was for two years,” said Mr. Decker, 41, a German who was brought in 18 months ago to manage the plant, part of the Swiss multinational Nestlé. “We just got an extension until 2012.”

As incomes rise in the Islamic world and Muslims migrate increasingly to Europe and the United States, Wangen’s halal production is part of a thrust by Nestlé to carve a niche in the global market for halal products, including coffee, baked goods, breakfast cereals and baby food. Halal products now account for $5 billion of Nestlé’s global sales.

But while Switzerland benefits from factories like this one selling its products to Muslim customers in many countries, it appears the Swiss are adamantly opposed to the construction of more minarets like the one down the street.

In some ways, Wangen wears this contradiction on its sleeve. When the Turkish club decided in 2006 to erect the minaret atop its clubhouse, local residents took the association to court to prevent construction, arguing that the minaret violated building codes. The case went to Switzerland’s highest court, which approved construction, though not because the minaret was a form of religious expression. “The court ruled on conformity to the building codes,” said Beat Frey, 50, a regional court judge who is also Wangen’s part-time mayor. “Not on freedom of religion.”

The decision was seized upon by conservative parties, above all the Swiss People’s Party of Christoph Blocher, a right-wing industrialist-turned-politician, who demanded a referendum on the future construction of minarets. Of course, all politics is local, and not just in Massachusetts. The vote in tiny Wangen, population 4,950, many local people said, was not the expression of intolerance it might have seemed.

“There were many reasons, not above all the Muslims among us,” said Mr. Frey, who himself voted in favor of minarets. “Yes, there was fear of political Islam, but people also wanted to send a message to the federal government in Bern,” whose opposition to the amendment was viewed as interference in local affairs.

“There was also fear of the unknown,” he said, adding that about 18 percent of the town’s population is foreign, though the largest group among them are native Germans from nearby.

Down at the Turkish cultural association, Mustafa Karahan, 50, sometimes feels under siege. “The problem is, people don’t know us,” he said over coffee. “If they did, there wouldn’t have been the referendum.”

In 2006, when the club was considering construction of a minaret, members organized an open house, and more than 500 people came. “When we dedicated the minaret, the local Protestant pastor spoke and several government officials came,” said Mr. Karahan, a teacher who migrated to Switzerland in 1980 and works in a machine shop.

But the controversy over the minarets provoked a backlash. As the date for the vote approached, stones were thrown at the clubhouse windows and a bag of pork products was hung on the door. Parking for club members along the nearby railroad was suddenly made off limits by railway officials (and remains so).

“They played politics with us, particularly regarding the minaret, to gain votes,” Mr. Karahan said. “They have damaged Switzerland’s image.”

Mustafa Bakci, 27, a chemist with a Swiss pharmaceuticals company, said the club was open to all nationalities, not just Turks. “Libyans, Saudis — it’s open for everyone,” said Mr. Bakci, who was born in Switzerland. “From A to Z.”

Many foreigners work in the Nestlé plant and at the town’s other big employer, Coop, a Wal-Mart-like retailer. “My sister-in-law works for Nestlé,” Mr. Bakci said.

Walter Leisi, 64, remembers well when in 1962 his father, a baker from Basel, decided to build a factory in Wangen to produce his packaged puff pastry, which had been such a hit at home. “We had three nationalities back then,” he said, recalling the starting work force of about 70 people. “Swiss, Italians and Spaniards.”

In 1972 the factory passed into Nestlé’s hands, but the younger Mr. Leisi, who also voted against the minaret ban, managed it until last year. Now there are 400 employees, about two-thirds non-Swiss. “Many Swiss think it’s not necessary for them to work nights,” he said.

Signs on factory walls are in numerous languages, including Albanian, Serbian, Italian and Turkish. During the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Mr. Leisi said, “I had a bad feeling; would there be knifings here? Down there they were killing each other, yet here we never had a problem.”

Most of the factory’s halal products are exported to France, which has Europe’s largest Muslim population. To meet growing demand, the factory runs three eight-hour shifts a day, Mr. Decker said, sometimes Saturdays.

How does Mr. Leisi explain the resistance to minarets in a town that lives in part by selling food to Muslims?

“The problem is you had a certain category of extremist on one side, and another on the other side,” he said, shaking his head.

Gesturing over his shoulder toward the Turkish club, he added, “One of the reasons, of course, was that little minaret over there.”

Chicken Little Goes to Europe

Stephen Holmes | August 17, 2009

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West by Christopher Caldwell, Doubleday, 422 pages, $30.00

What will be the consequences for Europe of decades of immigration, much of it from the Muslim world? In the eyes of Christopher Caldwell, a culturally conservative columnist at the Financial Times and an editor at the Weekly Standard, Europe is being remade, or rather unmade, from the ground up. As a result of the growing "nation of Islam" in Europe -- including 5 million Muslims in France, 4 million in Germany, and 2 million in Great Britain -- societies that used to be homogeneous and therefore coherent have become multicultural and internally divided.

But multiculturalism may be merely a halfway house. Echoing Edmund Burke in his title, Caldwell suggests that Europe is undergoing a "revolution" vaguely analogous to what happened in France in 1789. In his first letters on those events, Burke claimed to see a human society being dissolved and replaced by a world of monsters. This isn't far from how Caldwell portrays Europe today. The monstrosities he parades before us include honor killings, "menacing North African slums," anti-Semitic outrages, European police who "are petrified of Muslim men," vandals rampaging through the banlieues, and young zealots marching through European streets with signs reading "Death to anyone who insults Islam!"

You may doubt that a socially marginalized, economically impoverished, politically disorganized, and territorially dispersed minority could pull off a revolution, seizing the commanding heights from native Europeans who dominate their countries' institutions and own virtually all of Europe's wealth. After all, the groups in question are trapped in pockets of violent weakness where smoldering anger does not translate into significant power. But Caldwell mocks such doubts: "There were probably fewer Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917 than there are Islamists in Europe today."

Once the book gets under way, however, the concept of "revolution" plays virtually no role in the analysis. Instead, Caldwell wants us to see Muslim immigration into Europe as a kind of reverse colonization that may lead, you guessed it, to the Islamification of Europe. Because Europe's population is imploding and its territory is being reoccupied by non-Europeans, the homeland of Western civilization may be destined to vanish into the mists of time, in the manner of the Byzantine Empire.

If Caldwell and his fellow doomsayers are to be believed, Muslims have now done what they failed to do at the gates of Vienna in 1683. They have breached Europe's defenses and created "beachheads" behind enemy lines, "patiently conquering Europe's cities, street by street." We shouldn't view Muslim immigrants merely as seeking better lives for themselves and their families, Caldwell says. They should be seen instead as the avant-garde forces of a long campaign of cultural replacement.

Some may object that this way of seeing Europe's immigration problem is inflammatory, but the more serious problem is that it makes no sense. Given the huge numbers of non-Muslims mixed into Europe's immigrant population, Caldwell can only sustain his thesis by the gratuitous assertion that Romanian, Chinese, Dominican, and other immigrant groups will rally behind the banner of Islam in a campaign to blot out traditional European civilization.

Even if, for the sake of argument, we accept this fringe-conservative way of framing the issue, it leaves us wondering: Why are the Europeans, with so many material resources, losing this war? Caldwell's answer is that theirs "is a civilization in decline." Unlike Americans who often seem to love themselves uncritically, Europeans are mired in "self-loathing" and "hand-wringing self-detestation." He explains, "Whether or not [Europe] can defend itself, it has lost sight of why it should."

A "guilt-based moral order" took root in Europe, according to Caldwell, when shame and remorse about both the Holocaust and colonialism threw Europeans into spasms of "moral self-flagellation." Ashamed of their past persecution and oppression of non-Christian peoples, European elites began to espouse an "ideology of tolerance." You might suppose that an "ideology of tolerance" would be ethical and principled, but in Caldwell's telling, it is actually an expression of unprincipled self-disgust.

Supposedly, it is this self-loathing that has led Europeans to see the admission of Muslim immigrants as "a moral duty." In other passages, Caldwell argues more reasonably that Europe opened its doors to immigration in a fit of absentmindedness, when its own work force had been decimated by war and the reconstruction of a devastated continent required laborers from abroad. So why, after arguing persuasively that Europe opened its doors to mass immigration without thinking through the consequences, does he go on to argue, inconsistently and implausibly, that Europe invited mass immigration because of its guilt-stricken conscience?

The second idea is important to him, it turns out, because it helps him unmask humanitarian universalism. He wants to reveal to the world the ugly reality hidden behind the pretty ideology of universal human rights. His thinking, to the extent that I can reconstruct it, goes something like this: When rich nations subscribe to universal human rights, they lose all moral grounds for keeping out poor immigrants. After World War II, Europeans abandoned their traditional intolerance of non-Christian peoples in the name of universalism. Their inability to turn away immigrants who "present themselves in suffering humanity's name" may look like a moral choice, but it is actually a refusal to defend their own values and traditions.

And the cultural malady that allowed the Muslim invasion, as Caldwell sees it, goes back even further than postwar guilt. The true source is "Europe's spiritual void," the product of "ideological secularism, which aims to break every link between religion and public life, shepherding people out of religion altogether." As Europeans lost their Christian faith, they also lost their "anchor" (one of his favorite words). Skepticism eroded the moral justification for cultural self-preservation because "all European cultures depend for their stability on certain ethical survivals of Christianity, and would have a difficult time defending their 'values' without them."

Readers may be forgiven for feeling lost at this point. Isn't Christianity one of the cultural sources of humanitarian universalism? After all, Christ allegedly died for all mankind. That is obviously what a secular philosopher such as Jürgen Habermas has in mind when he writes, in a passage cited by Caldwell, that "Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization." So how can Caldwell apotheosize Christianity for its contribution to European culture and then go on to unmask the moral decay and self-loathing that motivates the universalism that is said, in his own book, to be Christianity's most inspiring legacy?

The simplest answer, again, is that his book contains some strange contradictions. But we can untangle the yarn a bit by pointing out that Caldwell's Christianity has less to do with universalism than with dignity and a certain kind of spiritual vigor.

Once they had lost their Christian faith, Europeans were bound to become what Caldwell sees them as today -- promiscuous consumerists without souls. Such an unqualified generalization may seem cartoonish; and, indeed, Caldwell has a jolly time defending it. The principal characteristics of today's Europe are "its atomization, its consumerism, its sexual wantonness." What is the chance that the European civilization we discover in "the shopping mall, the pierced navel, online gambling, a 50 percent divorce rate, and high rate of anomie and self-loathing" could defend itself against the Muslim advance? Very little: "The spiritual tawdriness Islamic immigrants perceive in the modern West is not imaginary. It may be Europe's biggest liability in preserving its culture."

This is why Caldwell refers to poverty-stricken Muslim enclaves as "the strongest communities in Europe" -- strong, that is, in the context of a pitifully weak post-religious and post-nationalist Europe. "Islam is not the second religion of Europe but the first," he says, because it has maintained its "vital energy," while there is nothing left to European Christianity but a superficial "lifestyle." He even ends up agreeing with Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, that Europe's "materialist civilization" is "on the verge of collapse." Caldwell feels more at home with Muslim values than with the values of contemporary Europe -- as, he says, would Dante. And Caldwell also values women's chastity more than women's autonomy because chastity (not to mention virginity) "can further dignity, responsibility, and self-respect." You may think that burqas and niquabs demean women, he ironizes, but what about "jeans that cinch halfway down the bum crack"?

And that is not all. "The closer one gets to European culture, the farther one gets from family and its raison d'être, children." While Muslim women living in Europe have an average of 2.34 children, nonreligious European women have an average of less than one (only 0.86), thereby doing everything in their power to insure that the descendants of native Europeans will be radically outnumbered by the offspring of immigrants. This is apparently how cultural self-loathing is put into practice.

Caldwell's unexpected embrace of Islamist criticisms of the West comes to an even less expected culmination. Europe's "most recent encounter with Islam" has been "painful and violent," he says. But it has also been "an infusion of oxygen into the drab, nitpicking, materialistic intellectual life of the West. It is a liberation to be able to talk about God once more, even in someone else's language."

Having inhaled this blast of oxygen, Caldwell is ready to turn to that old neoconservative hobbyhorse, the unbridgeable gulf between Europe and the United States. One difficulty with this analysis is that Caldwell himself asserts that Europe's national cultures have been eroded by "a homogenized, one-size-fits-all mass consumer culture" originating in America. "Europe is being taken over culturally," he suggests, not only by Islam but simultaneously "by a (market) liberalism that accords no particular value to Europe's most cherished traditions."

Unlike Europe, however, America will not be flushed down history's drain. At least not yet. For one thing, America "has not yet had any mass immigration of Muslims" and "scale matters." In addition, America has retained the moral fiber that Europe has lost. It is more Christian and more convinced that Christianity is morally superior to Islam. It is also less squeamish about using force to defend itself abroad (Iraq, Afghanistan) or at home. When Caldwell remarks that "a quarter of the prison inmates in the world are held in the United States," he means this not as criticism but as praise. Reflecting on U.S. "policies that are distasteful to most Europeans," such as the death penalty, he observes that such toughness means that "American cities and suburbs are extremely inhospitable places for immigrants who are criminally inclined." This is one of the principal ways in which America, unlike Europe, "exerts Procrustean pressure on its immigrants to conform." Most important, the United States believes in itself, while "Europeans are confused about whether they are citizens of the world or citizens of their own nations." No wonder they can neither defend their borders nor distinguish clearly between members and nonmembers of their community.

Near the beginning of his book, attempting to explain why Europeans have lost faith in their traditions, Caldwell quotes a remarkable passage from the French sociologist Raymond Aron: "Europeans would like to exit from history, from la grande histoire, from the history that is written in letters of blood." This brings us to the heart of the matter. Unlike the post-nationalist Europeans, Americans remain willing to write history in the letters of blood. Not Christ-like concern for the weak and the marginalized but readiness for organized violence is presumably why America's culture strikes the editors of the Weekly Standard as less drab than Europe's. America shares nationalist bellicosity with some parts of the Muslim world, and this is a good thing. European Muslims, he informs us, have "kept alive dreams of cultural, national, and even racial glory that were beyond the reach of Europeans' universalism because they were beyond the reach of Europeans' understanding." But thanks to America, equivalent dreams of patriotic (even "racial"?) glory have not entirely vanished from the West. Despite its sometimes-tawdry consumerism, America is pumped for war and is therefore well-positioned to take on the Islamic threat.

Yet it turns out that Caldwell has not entirely abandoned hope for Europe. While Europe's elites despise their own culture, the average, love-it-or-leave-it, tabloid-reading man in the street believes correctly that "Islam itself" is "dangerous" and understands simple truths, such as: Muslims living in Europe make life crummier. The "smoldering rage among working-class voters," moreover, suggests that at least these Europeans have not yet been drained of moral vitality.

But what can they do "to stem the implantation of Muslim culture" in Europe? Caldwell holds out three possibilities. One is deportation, an option that he broaches when he asks about rioters in the French banlieues who shout "Fuck France!": "Ought these people, assuming they are noncitizens, be put on the next plane out of the country?" A second possibility is conversion: "It no longer seems unreasonable to demand that immigrants who want to stay in Europe give up the ways of their parents." About the third possibility, Caldwell does not speak so directly, but he raises it in a parable about the fate awaiting guests who overstay their welcome: "The most spectacular illustration history offers of the kinship of hospitality and mistrust is that of Captain Cook, who was feted, flattered, and worshipped for a month by the Hawaiian islanders in Kealakekua Bay in 1779. When he and his crew returned on an emergency visit to repair a broken mast, they were massacred."

I do not suppose Caldwell is seriously encouraging Europeans to return to their venerable tradition of mass murder. But readers may be forgiven for wondering what he really thinks about writing history in letters of blood.

To be fair, I need to add that Caldwell weaves into his work a number of more reasonable claims that, while not especially original, remain instructive. Although his general argument is that "Islam itself" is responsible both for the failure of Muslims to integrate successfully in Europe and for the rise of jihadist violence, he also dwells more usefully on the role of modern communication technology, bad city planning, and the trauma of displacement -- none of which has anything to do with "Islam itself." By discussing the hostile reaction of 19th-century Boston Protestants to the arrival of "the violent and crime-prone Irish," and the mutual misunderstandings between American whites and blacks caused by lack of social contact, he manages to de-exoticize the European experience. And when he describes "Islam itself" not as a cause of political violence but rather as "an idiom useful for rallying the disgruntled," he is speaking common sense. I have omitted these and other thoughts from my discussion of his book not because they are uninteresting but because they are random flashes of sobriety at odds with, and unintegrated into, the main argument.

I have tried to dive beneath the jibes and anecdotes and to restate, as clearly as possible, Caldwell's central thesis. Spelling it out, I believe, is a sufficient refutation. Few of his audacious generalizations can survive serious scrutiny. European elites are not uniformly "self-loathing." (His own examples of their complacency and snobbery suffice to refute this claim.) Europe is not a "spiritual void." "Islam itself" is not a unified actor capable of formulating aims and carrying out strategies. Islamist criticisms of the market economy are, at best, half-truths. Non-Muslim immigrants in Europe will not rally behind the Islamist flag. "Racial glory" is not a worthy aim. Societies were not healthier when the norm of female chastity was enforced (while male philandering was allowed). Life does not become colorless and petty when metaphysical questions are no longer in the air.

And, above all, immigrant communities in Europe are not "beachheads" for a likely Islamic takeover. Caldwell's suggestions to the contrary are sophomoric fantasies, contributing little to the understanding and nothing to the resolution of the very real problems surrounding immigrant communities in Europe today. About his half-veiled thoughts on how a post-post-nationalist European public should confront its immigrant communities, the less said the better. If you like this sort of exercise, you may read it for the author's wit. For wisdom, look elsewhere.

Indian Actor's Questioning at Airport Draws Criticism

By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 16, 2009

NEW DELHI, Aug. 15 -- One of India's biggest movie stars said he was detained and questioned at Newark Liberty International Airport early Saturday, causing outrage across his home country and reigniting discussion of the hardships many Indians say they face while traveling abroad.

Shah Rukh Khan, 43, known here as the King of Bollywood, was on his way to Chicago for a parade later Saturday to mark India's Independence Day when immigration officials at Newark pulled him aside and interrogated him. The star of scores of top-grossing films was released after Indian consular officials vouched for him.

"I was really hassled -- perhaps because of my name being Khan," he said in a text message to reporters in India. "These guys just wouldn't let me through."

Khan recently finished a shoot in the United States for his upcoming film, "My Name Is Khan," which happens to be about a Muslim's harrowing experience with racial profiling. Khan told reporters that in real life he "felt angry and humiliated."

Jen Friedberg, a spokeswoman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the airport, said the agency did not request that Khan be detained, the Associated Press reported.

A spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Customs and Border Protection said Khan was questioned for 66 minutes as part of the agency's routine process to screen foreign travelers and was not detained, the AP reported.

The incident followed another recent example of an Indian coming under suspicion for what talk show pundits here call "flying while brown." Last month, Continental Airlines apologized to former Indian president Abdul Kalam for frisking him at the New Delhi airport.

News of Khan's detention broke on a day of national pride, marked by parades, family picnics and girls wearing bangles in green and orange -- the colors of the Indian flag. News channels aired nonstop coverage of Khan's troubles, along with reactions from Bollywood A-listers, civil rights officials and security experts, some of whom defended the questioning in a post-9/11 world.

U.S. Ambassador to India Timothy J. Roemer released a statement Saturday saying the American government was "trying to ascertain the facts of the case -- to understand what took place."

"Shah Rukh Khan, the actor and global icon, is a very welcome guest in the United States. Many Americans love his films," Roemer said.

India's information and broadcasting minister, Ambika Soni, suggested that Americans should be treated the way Khan was when they arrive in India.

"There have been too many instances like these in the U.S. concerning Indians," Soni said on television.

Actress Priyanka Chopra, a friend of Khan's, expressed on Twitter a widely held view: "Its such behavior that fuels hatred n racism. SRK's a world figure for Gods sake. GET REAL!!" But not everyone appeared upset.

Meghnad Desai, an Indian-born economist, member of Britain's House of Lords and author of books on Indian cinema and globalization, joked in an interview in New Delhi that the whole thing seemed like a publicity stunt for Khan's new film.

"The U.S. government was an inadvertent accomplice to 20th Century Fox, which is investing millions in this movie," he said.

"This was a no-no for India-U.S. relations."

Wikipedia entry - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahrukh_Khan

In Dresden, Cultural Beauty Meets the Bigotry of Marwa al-Sherbini’s Murder

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

DRESDEN, Germany — In early July thousands of mourners took to the streets in Egypt, chanting “Down with Germany.” Thousands more Arabs and Muslims joined them in protests in Berlin. In Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad added to the outcry by denouncing German “brutality.”

The provocation was the murder on July 1 of Marwa al-Sherbini, a pregnant Egyptian pharmacist here. She was stabbed 18 times in a Dresden courtroom, in front of her 3-year-old son, judges and other witnesses, reportedly by the man appealing a fine for having insulted Ms. Sherbini in a park. Identified by German authorities only as a 28-year-old Russian-born German named Alex W., he had called Ms. Sherbini an Islamist, a terrorist and a slut when she asked him to make room for her son on the playground swings. Ms. Sherbini wore a head scarf.

The killer also stabbed Elwi Okaz, Ms. Sherbini’s husband and a genetic research scientist, who was critically wounded as he tried to defend her. The police, arriving late on the scene, mistook him for the attacker and shot him in the leg.

More than a week passed before the German government, responding to rising anger across the Arab world, expressed words of sorrow while stressing that the attack did occur during the prosecution of a racist and that the accused man was originally from Russia.

Dresden is one of the great cultural capitals of Europe. It is also the capital of Saxony, a former part of East Germany that, along with having a reputation as Silicon Saxony, has made more than a few headlines in recent years for incidents of xenophobia and right-wing extremism. One wonders how to reconcile the heights of the city’s culture with the gutter of these events.

This year’s annual report of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, showed that far-right crime rose last year by 16 percent across the country. Most of these offenses were classified as propaganda crimes — painting swastikas on Jewish headstones or smashing the windows of restaurants run by immigrants — but politically motivated violent acts like murder, arson and assault accounted for 1,042 of the nearly 20,000 crimes recorded, a rise of 6.3 percent over 2007.

And these violent crimes turned out to be far more commonplace in parts of the former East Germany. Saxony, with roughly 5 percent of the country’s population, accounted for 12 percent of the violence classified as far right in nature, the report said.

These days Dresden’s center, once obliterated by Allied bombs, is a marvel of civility, a restored Baroque fairyland surrounded by Socialist-era and post-Socialist-era sprawl. The rebuilt Frauenkirche, the great Baroque cathedral where Bach played, again marks the skyline with its bell-shaped dome, as it did for centuries.

The ruin of the Frauenkirche became a gathering spot for protests against the East German regime during Communist times. In February, as usual on the anniversary of the Allied air raids, neo-Nazis marched through the streets. Some 7,500 of them carried banners condemning the “bombing holocaust.” They were outnumbered, Spiegel Online reported, by anti-Nazi demonstrators, but 7,500 was nonetheless twice as many neo-Nazis as showed up last year.

The other day only the benign clop-clop of horse-drawn carriages sounded across the cobblestone square outside the cathedral, the carriages bouncing camera-toting tourists past high-end jewelry shops and overpriced cafes. Nearby, the Zwinger palace, perhaps the most beautiful of all Baroque complexes, attracted the usual supplicants to Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, which was paired in the Gemäldegalerie with an African sculpture.

Germany is now a bastion of democracy in the heart of Europe. But the far right is on the rise across the Continent, and xenophobia is gaining in this country, not least among youth and not least singling out Muslims. A recent two-year government survey of 20,000 German teenagers classified one in seven as “highly xenophobic” and another 26.2 percent as “fairly xenophobic.”

“It was known that the figures were high,” Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble said. “But I’m appalled that they’re this high.”

The newspaper Tagesspiegel reported that Alex W. asked Ms. Sherbini in the courtroom, “Do you have a right to be in Germany at all?” before warning her that “when the N.D.P. comes to power, there’ll be an end to that.”

“I voted N.D.P..,” he added.

No surprise.

The far-right National Democratic Party, a marginal but noisy troublemaker on the German political scene with a tiny official membership (some 7,000), is as strong in Saxony as it is anywhere. Recent polls have routinely shown its support in the state as nearing 10 percent of the population; it claims 8 seats out of the 124 in the state parliament in Dresden. On Tuesday the party issued a statement calling for a black politician, Zeca Schall, working on regional elections in Thuringia for the ruling Christian Democratic Union, “to head home to Angola.” Thuringia should “remain German,” the statement said. Mr. Schall, Angolan-born, has lived in Thuringia, another region in the former East, since 1988.

High-tech industries and research institutes like the one where Ms. Sherbini’s husband works, which recruit foreign experts, have lifted Dresden economically above much of the rest of the former East, and last year nearly 10 million tourists fattened the city’s coffers. With half a million residents, some 20,000 of them foreigners, the capital looks prosperous and charming, like its old self.

All of which gets back to the problem of reconciliation: What are the humanizing effects of culture?

Evidently, there are none.

To walk through Dresden’s museums, and past the young buskers fiddling Mozart on street corners, is to wonder whether this age-old question may have things backward. It presumes that we’re passive receivers acted on by the arts, which vouchsafe our salvation, moral and otherwise, so long as we remain in their presence. Arts promoters nowadays like to trumpet how culture helps business and tourism; how teaching painting and music in schools boosts test scores. They try to assign practical ends, dollar values and other hard numbers, never mind how dubious, to quantify what’s ultimately unquantifiable.

The lesson of Dresden, which this great city unfortunately seems doomed to repeat, is that culture is, to the contrary, impractical and fragile, helpless even. Residents of Dresden who believed, when the war was all but over, that their home had somehow been spared annihilation by its beauty were all the more traumatized when, in a matter of hours, bombs killed tens of thousands and obliterated centuries of humane and glorious architecture.

The truth is, we can stare as long as we want at that Raphael Madonna; or at Antonello da Messina’s “St. Sebastian,” now beside a Congo fetish sculpture in another room in the Gemäldegalerie; or at the shiny coffee sets, clocks and cups made of coral and mother-of-pearl and coconuts and diamonds culled from the four corners of the earth in the city’s New Green Vault, which contains the spoils of the most cultivated Saxon kings. But it won’t make sense of a senseless murder or help change the mind of a violent bigot.

What we can also do, though, is accept that while the arts won’t save us, we should save them anyway. Because the enemies of civilized society are always just outside the door.

French Muslims' Veils Intensify Debate Over Values

By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 9, 2009

VENISSIEUX, France -- It was market day on Place Leon Sublet, the main square in this little working-class town southeast of Lyon. In the shadow of an old Catholic church, unhurried shoppers wandered the food stalls.

It could have been a portrait of France at its most traditional, except that many of the women wore robes down to their ankles and long scarves to conceal their hair.

Then along came a woman shrouded head to toe in black. Only her dark eyes were visible through a narrow slit in her veil, a portrait more reminiscent of Saudi Arabia than traditional France.

French people have long been accustomed to Muslim women wearing head scarves and long dresses. But the sight of women covered by black veils, increasingly frequent in some towns, has become the latest test of France's uneasy role as host to the largest Muslim population in Europe, nearly 6 million out of 64 million. Because of its stark distinction from the way European women dress, the full veil has generated a public outcry, becoming a symbol widely perceived as an assault on France's secular values.

"It's ridiculous," sneered Jose Aparecio, 66, a retired plumber surveying the busy square in Venissieux. "I don't know what they're trying to prove."

Responding to the sudden swell of concern, President Nicolas Sarkozy declared recently that "the burqa is not welcome" in France. He did not say what he would do about it, but the National Assembly, or parliament, named a commission of inquiry last month to weigh whether full-length Muslim veils should be outlawed.

The prospect of new legislation revived resentment, still lingering among Muslims here, over a legal ban enacted in 2004 against female students wearing scarves to cover their hair in public schools. Although France's main Muslim organizations have not endorsed full veils, calling them a "marginal phenomenon," they have denounced the possibility of restrictive laws as further stigmatization of Muslims trying to find a place in the French landscape.

"A very large majority of us only wish to live our religion in moderation and tolerance," Mohamed Moussaoui, head of the French Muslim Religion Council, said in a statement to Le Point magazine. "Naming a commission of inquiry corresponds to something heavy, which is normally reserved for major subjects affecting society."

Most of the outrage, particularly among Paris commentators, has centered on women's rights, based on a supposition that women who wear full veils are forced to do so by their husbands. For instance, the Council of State, France's highest administrative tribunal, upheld the government's refusal to naturalize a veiled Moroccan woman because it said her attire "clashed with the values of a democratic society and the principle of sexual equality."

But more broadly, the decision to wear a full-length veil has been interpreted as a way to defy the ideal of integration, which traditionally has underpinned France's attitude toward Muslims and other immigrants. By ostentatiously refusing to blend in, women wearing such attire have generated intense resentment among European-stock French people long uncomfortable with an unaccustomed religion in their midst.

To some extent, the resentment also has spread among Muslim immigrants, particularly the elderly, who from humble beginnings worked hard to become part of the society and now see fellow Muslims challenging their adopted values. "If they don't like it here, they can always leave," sniffed Mustafa Zemaoui, 65, a retired locksmith who was sipping on a little glass of rose wine as the lunch hour approached.

In that vein, the official High Authority Against Discrimination and for Equality ruled recently that government-sponsored, free French classes are entitled to exclude fully veiled women because, on one hand, the veil covering their mouths impeded teaching and, on the other, the classes are part of an effort to integrate immigrants into society.

Although concern has been brewing for months, the recent outcry was set off by André Gerin, who was mayor of Venissieux for 24 years and is still its member of parliament. Gerin, 63, a former autoworker and Communist Party veteran, said his experience here showed him that the veil is "the tip of an iceberg," behind which lurks a small core of Muslim fundamentalists determined to impose its ways on French society.

"There is real ideological work underway to refute the best parts of what makes up Western civilization," he said in an interview at city hall, where he maintains an office despite resigning recently as mayor.

Backed by about 90 fellow members of parliament, Gerin introduced a resolution in June asking for the commission of inquiry. With Sarkozy's comments in the background, the commission was immediately set up, scheduling hearings after the August holidays and promising to issue recommendations by the end of the year.

"The vision of these imprisoned women is already intolerable for us when they come from Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia or certain other Arab countries," the resolution said, suggesting the likely outcome of its work. "It is totally unacceptable on the soil of the French Republic."

Gerin throughout his political career has made it a point to work closely with Muslims, who make up a little more than half of Venissieux's 60,000 residents. But when he discovered in 2002 that two Venissieux youths were captured in Afghanistan and imprisoned at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, he said, he began to worry. Two years later, Gerin was instrumental in getting the government to expel a Muslim preacher who he said was preaching hatred of the West and "brainwashing" young Venissieux Muslims.

Public comment in France has focused on the burqa, a full veil popular in Afghanistan that allows women to see out a lacelike patch at eye level. But most fully veiled women in France have adopted the niqab from Arab countries. It leaves the eyes visible in a gap between the head covering and a separate face veil.

Whatever the term, Gerin said, the women become "walking prisons" behind their veils and, more important, are part of a campaign by hundreds of politically oriented Islamic fundamentalists to spread their views among Muslims in poor neighborhoods near the major cities of Lyon, Paris and Marseille.

The Interior Ministry's internal intelligence services estimated last month that fewer than 400 women wear the full veil in France; most are native-born citizens and some are recent converts. The decision to adopt such garb, the ministry's analysts said, often arises from a desire to provoke French society rather than submission to husbands or fathers.

Gerin disputes the ministry's estimates as too low, but said that in any case, the government has underestimated the danger posed by fundamentalist thought in France. The older generation of Muslims, immigrants from Algeria or Morocco seeking to integrate into a better life, has been challenged by younger radicals, born in France but often trained in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, he said.

"They question everything," he added.