‘Europe Is Failing Its Muslims’ – The Live Debate [incl. Tariq Ramadan]

This is Our Shared Europe’sbig London debut – and it has a large audience. Not just the 800 people sitting in the stalls, or indeed the further 1000 or so who wanted, but could not get, tickets but a potential 70,000,000 more people who will be able to watch it when BBC World News broadcast it on 6th and 7th March.

The motion is ‘Europe is failing its Muslims’. BBC presenter Zeinab Badawi in the chair warms up with trails to camera, spinning on her heel as she profiles the event, then introduces the speakers: Tariq Ramadan, Muslim thinker, academic and controversialist, Petra Stienen, former Dutch diplomat and now commentator and broker in intercultural relations, Douglas Murray, controversial chair of the think-tank the Centre for Social Cohesion, right-of-centre, polemic and seen by many as virtually single-issue on Islam and finally Flemming Rose, the Danish journalist who commissioned the ‘Mohammed Cartoons’. British Council CEO Martin Davidson speaks eloquently about what we’re here for, and sits in the front row.

The debate starts with opening statements and it becomes clear that in one sense at least everyone supports the motion. We’re all liberals, even when we’re not. Flemming in particular, whom some expected to see with horns and a forked tail, was a gentle liberal, persuasive and articulate, pressing the values of an equal society in which government did justice to its minorities by resisting block-thinking, and supporting the rights of those communities’ dissidents. Tariq and Petra undermine their own case, for the motion, by glimpsing strong hopes of change – optimism is good, but confusing. The vote, almost even at the beginning, with the pro-the-motions ahead by 20 or 30, swings to very much the opposite – a convincing win for the antis. But I think not everyone is quite sure what they are voting for, and I hear much equivocation. Flemming and Douglas seem rather surprised.

The most striking thing? The way discourse from everyone on the platform, pro and anti, reverted to words like ‘welcome’ and ‘them’ and even ‘where they came from’. These are habits that Our Shared Europe is built to address, and it was very good to be reminded by speaker after speaker from the floor that ‘They’ are ‘Us’ and ‘We’ are ‘Them’.

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