In 2016 in Amsterdam, as in many other European cities, there are suburbs that are Muslim enclaves. On a sunny day the buildings in these areas look no worse than in any other European suburb, indeed, most of the houses are of a kind that most young couples in Western Europe would struggle to afford as a first step onto the housing ladder. This is where the Turkish guest-workers congregated from the time that they migrated to the country sixty years earlier. Today, like many other parts of the suburbs of Amsterdam and Rotterdam, these suburbs comprise mini-Turkeys and mini-Moroccos. The food shops are Halal. The women all wear some form of head covering and life goes on much as it would if the people were in Turkey or Morocco. One of the houses, in a row on a quiet, pleasant street, is where Mohammed Bouyeri lived – the house from which he set off that morning a decade ago to find Theo van Gogh and slaughter him. It is not an especially threatening area. It is simply a different area. There are election posters in many of the windows, all showing the face of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

10. The tyranny of guilt

10

The tyranny of guilt

In the first days of September, when the body of the three-year-old Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi washed up on a beach in Turkey, the reaction in Europe was almost unanimous. It was, as several newspaper headlines put it, ‘Europe’s shame’. When it was reported that the Kurdi family had been looking to join family in Canada and had already had one visa application there turned down, Aylan Kurdi’s death became an issue in North America. Some campaigning for the following month’s general election in Canada was suspended. Political opponents of the Stephen Harper government that was then in office made significant capital out of Canada’s alleged failure to save the life of the three-year-old. The Harper government lost the subsequent election.

This general feeling of guilt and shame spread across Europe and North America and pushed aside all practical questions of precisely what could have been done for the Kurdi family or all the other families that might wish to come after them. So great was this outpouring of guilt that several pertinent facts were lost entirely. Not least among them was the fact that the Kurdi family had set out from a safe country – Turkey. The father had chosen to leave that country – where he had paid employment – to get his family into Europe. The body of his young son had washed up not on a European beach but on a Turkish beach. And though there was some media mourning in Turkey over the tragedy, there was not anything there remotely like the introspection and self-accusation indulged in by Western politicians and media.