Category Archives: International

MIGRANTS FACE FORTRESS EUROPE’S DEADLY MOAT

April 22, 2015 by Kenan Malik

My latest column for the New York Times is on the tragedy of migrant deaths in the Mediterranean and the immorality of the EU policy. Here are the opening paragraphs. You can read the full article in the NYT. The image above is by Arianno Vairo from the New York Times. Up to 1,200 people are believed to have died this past week when, in several incidents, their flimsy boats foundered in the Mediterranean. These migrants from Syria, Mali, Eritrea, […]

Categories: International, Race & Immigration • Tags: european union, fortress europe, immigration, italy

THE FAILURE OF MULTICULTURALISM

February 17, 2015 by Kenan Malik

This is an essay about multiculturalism in Europe that I wrote for the latest issue of the journal Foreign Affairs, which has a series of features on ‘The Trouble with Race’. 1 Thirty years ago, many Europeans saw multiculturalism – the embrace of an inclusive, diverse society – as an answer to Europe’s social problems. Today, a growing number consider it to be a cause of them. That perception has led some mainstream politicians, including British Prime Minister David Cameron […]

Categories: Britain, International, Multiculturalism, Race & Immigration • Tags: assimilationism, britain, british asians, europe, france, germany, handsworth riots, identity politics, immigration, islam, multiculturalism, muslims, racism, turkish migrants, working class

BRITAIN AND FRANCE, CENSORSHIP AND IDENTITY

February 11, 2015 by Kenan Malik

I took part in a discussion at the Institut Français in London featuring the French film-maker Karim Miské, whose debut novel Arab Jazz, a noirish policier set in a Parisian banlieue, has just been published. The discussion, in the shadow of the Charlie Hebdo killings, focussed on questions of Islam, identity, free speech and the differences between British and French social policy. Also taking part in the discussion were the translator Ben Faccini, Jo Glanville, director of English PEN, and the journalist Suzanne […]

Categories: Free Speech, International, Multiculturalism • Tags: anti-semitism, assimilationism, britain, censorship, charlie hebdo, france, free speech, identity politics, islam, jihadism, multiculturalism, muslims, national identity, racism, secularism

RADICAL ISLAM AND THE RAGE AGAINST MODERNITY

January 28, 2015 by Kenan Malik

This is the full version of the article on ‘Radical Islam, Nihilist Rage’ published last month in the New York Times. Faced with a horror such as the slaughter of 148 schoolchildren and staff by the Taliban in Pakistan, it is tempting to describe the act as ‘inhuman’ or ‘medieval’. What made the massacre particularly chilling, though, is that it was neither. The killings were all too human and of our time. The Peshawar massacre may have been particularly abhorrent, […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, International, Justice & Liberties, War on terror • Tags: anti-imperialism, boko haram, frantz fanon, islam, islamic state, islamism, left, pakistan, religion, taliban

HOW A BUNCH OF VICIOUS CHANCERS BECAME MEN OF WISDOM

January 25, 2015 by Kenan Malik

‘The world has lost a revered leader’, claimed US Secretary of John Kerry on the death last week of Saudi King Abdullah, a ‘man of wisdom and vision’, in Kerry’s words. David Cameron praised his ‘commitment to peace’ and ordered flags to be flown at half mast on government buildings. Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund, even hailed him as a proto-feminist, a ‘strong advocate of women’. In reality, the man that virtually every Western leader has […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, History, International • Tags: arab world, imperialism, islam, islamism, saudi arabia, wahhabism, western policy

CIVILIZED FRANCE AND SAVAGE FRANCE

January 21, 2015 by Kenan Malik

I wrote in a previous post about the process by which French citizens of North African origin were pushed out to the banlieues, redefined as ‘Muslims’ and cast as the ‘Other’, as not really part of the French nation. What this process revealed, I suggested, were then anxieties of the French elite about the values and identity of the nation. I am publishing here three passages from writers of very different perspectives who speak to those anxieties, from both sides of […]

Categories: International, Race & Immigration • Tags: andrew hussey, assimilationism, banlieues, charlie hebdo, france, islam, islamism, karim miske, michel houellebecq, muslims, national identity, racism, sartre

ON FREE SPEECH AND DOUBLE STANDARDS

January 16, 2015 by Kenan Malik

My latest column for the International New York Times is about Charlie Hebdo, Dieudonné and double standards in free speech. Here are the opening paragraphs. Read the full article in the INYT. On Tuesday, the French police arrested the controversial French comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala. He had written on Facebook ‘I feel like Charlie Coulibaly’ — a mash-up of Charlie Hebdo and Amedy Coulibaly, the gunman who killed four Jewish hostages in a kosher supermarket in Paris, in an attack linked […]

Categories: Free Speech, International • Tags: charlie hebdo, dieudonne, france, free speech, islam, liberal hypocrisy

ASSIMILATIONISM VS MULTICULTURALISM

January 12, 2015 by Kenan Malik

One of the key debates in European social policy has been that between multiculturalism and assimilationism. French ‘assimilationist’ policies are generally seen as the polar opposite of British-style multiculturalism. French politicians pride themselves in having rejected the divisive consequences of multiculturalism. Unlike in the rest of Europe, they insist, in France every individual is treated as a citizen, not as a member of a particular racial or cultural group. The question of French social policy, and of social divisions, has […]

Categories: International, Multiculturalism, Race & Immigration • Tags: assimilationism, bernard-henri levy, britain, burqa bans, charlie hebdo, enlightenment, france, islam, jihadism, multiculturalism, muslims, racism, universalism

JE SUIS CHARLIE? IT’S A BIT LATE

January 8, 2015 by Kenan Malik

‘Je suis Charlie’. It’s a phrase in every newspaper, in every Twitter feed, on demonstrations in cities across Europe. The expressions of solidarity with those slain in the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices are impressive. They are also too late. Had journalists and artists and political activists taken a more robust view on free speech over the past 20 years then we may never have come to this. Instead, they have helped create a new culture of self-censorship. Partly, it […]

Categories: Free Speech, International • Tags: charlie hebdo, france, free speech, islam, islamism

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RADICAL ISLAM, NIHILIST RAGE

January 5, 2015 by Kenan Malik

My latest column for the New York Times is on radical Islam and about what acts such as the massacre of school children in Peshawar by the Taliban tell us about Islam and about radicalism. Here are the opening paragraphs; you can read the full version in the NYT. Faced with a horror like the slaughter of 148 schoolchildren and school staff members by the Taliban in Pakistan, it is tempting to describe the act as ‘inhuman’ or ‘medieval’. What made […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, International, Justice & Liberties, War on terror • Tags: anti-imperialism, islam, islamism, religion, taliban, western policy

GERMANY, BRITAIN AND THE ANGEL OF HISTORY

November 22, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is the full version of my essay on British perceptions of German history published last month in the International New York Times under the headline ‘Germany’s History Lesson for Britain’. Ernst Barlach was one of Germany’s great Expressionist artists of the early 20th century. A virulent nationalist in the run-up to World War I, Barlach found that his experience of the Western Front stripped him of his jingoism. Much of his subsequent work explored the sorrow and suffering […]

Categories: Britain, Culture & Books, History, International • Tags: britain, britishness, ernst barlach, germany, neil Macgregor

GERMANY AND BRITAIN, MEMORY AND MYOPIA

October 24, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is my latest column for the International New York Times, published under the headline ‘Germany’s history lesson for Britain’. You can read the full version in in INYT. Ernst Barlach was one of Germany’s great expressionist artists of the early twentieth century. A virulent nationalist in the run-up to the First World War, Barlach found that his experience of the Western Front stripped him of his jingoism. Much of his subsequent work explored the sorrow and suffering that he saw […]

Categories: Britain, History, International • Tags: britain, british museum, britishness, ernst barlach, first world war, germany, holocaust, imperialism, second world war

AS IF STILL BURNING

August 6, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This week marked the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War. Today marks the anniversary of an even more grotesque event – the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. Three days later the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. These remain the only use of nuclear weapons in warfare. Some 12 km² of Hiroshima were destroyed, as were around 69% of the city’s buildings. The images above, which were taken […]

Categories: Culture & Books, History, International • Tags: haiku, hiroshima, nuclear warfare, poetry, war poetry, yasuhiko shigemoto

THE MONSTER THAT ISRAEL HELPED CREATE

July 17, 2014 by Kenan Malik

There is a terrible irony in Israel’s current assault on Gaza. More than 200 Palestinians have died in an onslaught supposedly aimed at weakening Hamas and degrading its capacity to fire rockets into Israel. It was Israel itself, however, that helped Hamas to power in Gaza. For more than thirty years,from the 1960s to the 1990s, successive Israeli governments viewed radical Islamism as a useful tool with which to counter the influence of the secular Palestine Liberation Organization (of which […]

Categories: International, War on terror • Tags: afghanistan, hamas, israel, muslim brotherhood, palestine, plo, war on terror, western policy

RELIGIOUS VIOLENCE, BUDDHISM AND ISLAM

May 20, 2014 by Kenan Malik

My latest column in the International New York Times. There is perhaps no religion that Western liberals find more appealing than Buddhism. Politicians fawn over the Dalai Lama, celebrities seek out Buddhist meditation, and scientists and philosophers insist that Buddhism has much to teach us about human nature and psychology. Even some of the so-called New Atheists have fallen for Buddhism’s allure. For most of its Western sympathizers, Buddhism is a deeply humanist outlook, less a religion than a philosophy, […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, International, Justice & Liberties • Tags: buddhism, islam, myanmar, religion, religious violence, rohingya