Bari Weiss's clash of civilizations.

In a speech to the conservative Federalist Society loftily titled “You Are the Last Line of Defense” Bari Weiss declares a clash of civilizations.

“Of course that is what we must talk about tonight,” she starts. “The civilizational war we are in.”

She continued:

But seriously: I am here because I know that in the fight for the West, I know who my allies are. And my allies are not the people who, looking at facile, external markers of my identity, one might imagine them to be. My allies are people who believe that America is good. That the West is good.

A clash of civilizations—when has that been known to backfire? (9/11)

Weiss’s speech focuses primarily on some of the bad public responses to the horrific Hamas massacre and hostage-taking. And that’s valid. I have progressive Jewish friends who feel politically alienated because of some terrible reactions on the “Left”, especially in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attack. I feel terrible for older Jewish people who carry the trauma of family histories rooted in pograms and the Holocaust. So I don’t take issue with Weiss’s concerns here (though she mischaracterizes certain incidents like the Cooper Union story).

But you can say all that without using the frame of “Western civilization” and positioning fucking right-wingers like the Federalist Society as a bulwark against barbarism. Because there are real people on the receiving end of that logic as well.

***

There’s a global refugee crisis, and it’s driven, in large part, by fear and revulsion at the idea that “they” lack Western values. That they’re too savage to embrace our superior Western culture (right, good point: Muslims don’t drink themselves to death and Venezuelan asylum seekers want to work, rather than get addicted to fentanyl. They could really learn a lot from the West). The fear is that an influx of foreigners—“low-skilled” at that—will irrevocably transform, hence destroy, the peak historical achievement that is Western (white) civilization.

This is an ugly sentiment that takes insidious forms across the political spectrum, in the U.S. and abroad. It’s Tucker Carlson ranting about “white replacement.” It’s Denmark tearing down immigrants’ homes and forcibly relocating them because they fear “non-Western” enclaves. It’s French people’s bizarre obsession with Muslim women’s headscarves. It’s Sweden flipping from “we don’t build walls,” in 2015 to largely reaching the consensus that the country should close its borders to asylum seekers. It’s endless.

It’s Eric Adams boasting of New York City’s “sanctuary” status when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott shipped asylum seekers to New York—and then swiftly reversing his pro-sanctuary posture and declaring that there was “no more room'“ in New York. There’s lots of room in New York. Hell! It’s the fact that my Bulgarian cousin and his wife don’t have any friends in Switzerland, where they both have high-level jobs in finance. People are cold to them because some Western Europeans manage to be racist against white people from Eastern Europe.

Both the U.S. and Western European countries push poorer neighboring states to illegally keep refugees away, by encouraging/turning a blind eye to violent border pushbacks. I spoke to a Syrian couple at a refugee camp in Bulgaria. The woman had been 7 months pregnant when they made the treacherous, 5 day crossing, from Turkey to Bulgaria. When his pregnant wife kept falling and hurting herself, her husband called 999 — some border guards showed up and beat the shit out of him instead of helping her.

The U.S. uses various tactics to push back Latin Americans into Mexico— “there’s no more room! The asylum process is dangerous chaos!”—putting them at risk of extortion and kidnapping by the cartels. There’s Donald Trump’s creepy fantasy of “immigrant rapists.’

***

“I hear they have knives!” a woman at a coffee shop near the Bulgarian refugee camp told me in a frightened whisper. She was talking about the sweet, friendly 20-something Syrian guys who are her main customers in an economically gutted town. Young Arabs can drink 90 espressos a day without dying. They were probably singlehandedly keeping her business alive. “They have knives!” a cop told me (they don’t carry fucking knives). “They rape children!” some children told me, clearly having gotten this information from the adults in their lives (they do not rape children).

The notion that refugees are barbaric invaders, with strange, dangerous, violent customs—that they’re infiltrators looking to undercut Western values and sow violence and chaos—creates an environment of xenophobic loathing that makes it possible for coast guards to let a boat full of men, women and children sink into the sea. Recently, there was right-wing outrage that MIT refused to suspend foreign students who took part in pro-Palestine protests because they could lose their student visas.

Going back to Weiss’s celebration of Western values: It would be juvenile to understate or dismiss the unique levels of tolerance, codified into law, in the U.S. and Western Europe. But we can celebrate the fact that Weiss could marry a woman and also note that Western chauvinism is the main ideology that drives xenophobia. That, in turn, fuels the suffering of people who want to stay alive, not starve, work and make better lives for their kids in a different country than the one in which they were born.

I’m so worried about the asylum prospects of my Muslim and Arab friends.

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