The US is dragging Europe back to the days of white supremacism. Our leaders are playing along | Shada Islam

3 hours ago 4

Twenty-five years ago, George W Bush persuaded European leaders to back his “war on terror”. That disastrous project cost millions of lives and caused mass displacement of people from across the Middle East. It normalised racism and hatred for Muslims, refugees and racialised minorities in the US and Europe. I fear Marco Rubio’s speech at the Munich Security Conference, with its calls to defend white, western, Christian civilisation against supposedly contaminating racialised migrants – and the standing ovation he received from European elites – may mark a chilling sequel.

Rubio’s language of a shared and superior American and European civilisation differs from that of his bosses, Donald Trump and JD Vance. His tone is more emollient but his outreach is conspiratorial. Rubio talks of migration and identity and civilisational anxiety, rather than terrorism and hard security threats as Bush once did. In his Munich speech, Rubio flattered Europeans about the continent’s colonial past. He denied preaching a message of xenophobia or hate, and instead framed his call to defend national borders as entirely respectable, dutiful and a “fundamental act of sovereignty”.

The message of nativist exclusion, however, remained unchanged. Having lived through and reported on the aftermath of 9/11, I am acutely aware of the racist subtext and Islamophobic dog whistles that lurk behind such white-supremacy-tinged discourse, and the fears and even violence this can unleash.

The anxious debates that were triggered all those years ago on Islam’s place in Europe, about loyalty and belonging and about Muslims representing an impossible-to-integrate “other”, continue to haunt European Muslims today.

This is not alarmism. At a time of geopolitical precarity, not least over Ukraine, European leaders are understandably anxious not to alienate an already unpredictable US ally. But racism, however coded and cloaked as natural and virtuous, must be called out. Judging by the applause Rubio received in Munich, I fear that too many European leaders have already signalled their readiness to play along, either because they share Trump’s worldview or because it feels geopolitically expedient to do so.

Yet, if we want to protect multiparty liberal democracy and push back against the far right, we should be far more wary not only of toxic speeches from across the Atlantic but of Trump’s close ties to Europe’s xenophobic parties and the many ways in which the US’s Maga politicians are legitimising far-right ideologies. The fact that the US state department may soon be funding policy-aligned European thinktanks and charities should be ringing alarm bells across the continent.

When I hear Trump, Rubio and their European acolytes, I wonder why so few of the EU’s political elite dare to say out loud that we have heard this stigmatising language of exclusion before – and we know where it can lead. That we are not going to follow the US’s lead. That colonialism was not a glorious enterprise but caused immense death and destruction. That once, Jews, too, were portrayed as a threat to white Christian Europe and accused of weakening nations from within.

That today, the targets of what the British author Hanif Kureishi calls Europe’s “collective hallucination” about the power of unwanted outsiders to colonise and contaminate may be migrants, Muslims, and black and brown people. But the narrative about who belongs, and who does not, is dangerous and corrosive for all of us.

It is difficult to swim against the tide. Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, a rarity among European leaders in that he is trying to talk facts rather than fiction about migration, has run into strong opposition not only from the far right but from senior EU policymakers who portray his decision to regularise 500,000 undocumented migrants and asylum seekers as undermining the EU’s deterrence message. The EU migration commissioner, Magnus Brunner, a conservative Austrian politician, has warned that Spain “must ensure [its] decisions do not have negative consequences in other parts of the union”, conveniently ignoring the fact that hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants are already embedded in Europe’s labour markets, and that many EU states are signing labour-mobility agreements with countries in the global south even as they engage in migrant-bashing in public.

Instead of recognising these uncomfortable facts, Brussels is focused on securing European parliament backing for Brunner’s “simpler and more effective return procedures” to step up and accelerate the deportations of undocumented people, including potentially sending them to offshore centres in non-EU countries. These plans, according to rights groups, would expand and normalise ICE-like immigration raids and surveillance measures across the continent.

Europe’s leaders really should know better. Instead of being seduced and reassured so easily by Rubio’s faux flattery, they should find the moral courage to stand up to Maga’s divisive discourse and ask, as Sánchez did recently: “When did recognising rights become something radical? When did empathy become something exceptional?”

I know it is easy to fall in line with the dominant narrative and how difficult it is to stand up for one’s values. Soon after 9/11, a colleague took me aside and said that if I wanted to “succeed in Europe”, I should stop denouncing Islamophobia and align with the emerging dominant narrative of Muslims as inherently violent or, better still, condemn Islam itself as backward and barbaric. The alternative, he warned, would be very difficult.

He may have been right about the difficulty. But what still strikes me, more than two decades on, is how shocking that suggestion felt at the time. The idea that a European identity and a Muslim one were fundamentally incompatible was not yet mainstream. That today the same sentiment, voiced by Rubio, is met with applause rather than rebuttals in Munich is a troubling sign of how bias and prejudice – when they are not called out – can become embedded in Europe’s discourse and its politics at every level.