Khaleda Akhtar's List: Discrimination

• Recent recitations of the comforting narrative by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and Britain's prime minister, David Cameron, garnered significant publicity.
• More attention needs to be paid to the mainstream racism it has given legitimacy to elsewhere in Europe
• The former Dutch immigration minister Rita Verdonk proposed a system of "integration badges" for immigrants. The former Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen declared a "battle of culture" against multiculturalism and Islam, and his culture minister, Brian Mikkelsen, explicitly targeted a "medieval Muslim culture" in Denmark. Päivi Räsänen, the new Finnish interior minister, proposed prioritising Christian refugees in the interests of cohesion and to "prevent discrimination". While these examples are drawn from contexts now associated with far-right electoral successes, they illustrate how the alibi of an "utterly failed" multiculturalism has provided political capital to centrists and liberals for quite some time.

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