TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Ross Douthat comments on the possibility that Norway’s tragedy will make discussion of Europe’s failure to integrate immigrants off-limits:

For decades, Europe’s governing classes insisted that only racists worried about immigration, only bigots doubted the success of multiculturalism and only fascists cared about national identity. Now that a true far-right radical has perpetrated a terrible atrocity, it will be easy to return to those comforting illusions.

But extremists only grow stronger when a political system pretends that problems don’t exist. Conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic have an obligation to acknowledge that Anders Behring Breivik is a distinctively right-wing kind of monster. But they also have an obligation to the realities that this monster’s terrible atrocity threatens to obscure.

It’s easy to use tragedies committed by people flying a certain ideology or religion’s banner to dismiss that ideology altogether. Some anti-immigration (xenophobic, even) conservatives in the U.S. have attempted to use radical Islam to reject Islam as a whole, and for a short period after Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot by Jared Loughner in Arizona, some liberals used it to argue that conservatives who support reducing government created the environment for the shooting to happen, and thus, by implication, their viewpoints could be dismissed without a second’s thought.

It’s easy to do, and it’s dishonest. It’s a coward’s way of winning an argument, a win-by-default; rather than acknowledge that the people they disagree with are also well-intentioned, and deal substantively with their arguments, they seek to win by disqualifying them—after all, they agree with a mass-murderer, and… do I really need to spell out the implication?

It’s also dangerous, because when serious political and cultural issues go undiscussed, we don’t make any progress on them. We delude ourselves that they aren’t really issues at all, that only bigots and extremists are concerned about them, and we allow problems to get worse. Yes, immigration is a huge problem in Europe, because Europe hasn’t found a successful way to integrate their immigrants into existing society. That’s a recipe for disaster, and one that may be even more taboo now than before the terrible tragedy in Norway.

And that is a tragedy of its own.