Spineless French government ignores insolent Muslim provocation

[Insula Dei]

1.I'm not saying the site you linked is biased, ... but it's named 'limitstogrowth.com', and the article right before this one is called 'pedophilia isn't condemned in Afghanistan' and the one right after it is about mexican drug cartels in Arizona.

2.Yeah, those French are so weak and really seem to give in to all the unreasonable immigrants. Like, everyone knows Sarkozy was handpicked by some mullahs in Tora Bora to succeed Jacques 'Mohammed' Chirac.

[Insula Dei]

GMantis is posting a link to a Pat Robertson video? Well, this issue sure does make strange bedfellows...

GMantis is typically bulgarian on these sort of issues. If you're surprised by this, that only goes to show you've never looked past his avatar.

[Insula Dei]

Aye, me and the Mantis don't agree on much, but both of us dislike asshat terrorists, the pansies that roll over for them and the douchebags that make excuses for them.  More power to the Frenchies with the balls to go into the street eating pork and drinking wine during these acts of civil disobedience!

Oh, the things they are willing to risk when they go out and drink wine in eat pork in France! When I think about the number of bomb atttacks by radical muslims in Paris this month alone, my hearth grows cold with fear. It's clear that we in Europe should all convert to islam or face the gruesome consequences.

Seriously people, why is it American evangelicals can get away with much more severe stuff (yeah, telling someone they don't have the right to marry, to do with their bodies as they please, that their lifestyle makes them disgusting,... ranks above whatever you guys think the muslim menace is forcing on us) and never get named 'terrorists'?

[Insula Dei]

Seriously people, why is it American evangelicals can get away with much more severe stuff (yeah, telling someone they don't have the right to marry, to do with their bodies as they please, that their lifestyle makes them disgusting,... ranks above whatever you guys think the muslim menace is forcing on us) and never get named 'terrorists'?

When have American evangelicals (who I don't like by the way) blown up a plane killing 270?  Or put bombs on trains killing 191?  Or buses killing 52? Or the many other plots that were thankfully found out?  Or killed a guy for making a movie they didn't agree with?  And that's not mentioning the horrible things done in Russia.  Maybe you remember part of your metro getting blown up back in 1995?

Yes, killing the occasional abortion doctor or nurse is a horrible act and the murderers are certainly terrorists.  Yes, the things Christian Fundies say about gay people here in the US are quite horrible and wrong.  But they pale in comparison....hell, it's not even close and it's kind of sad this needs to be repeatedly pointed out....there is no comparison to what Muslim Fundies have done in Europe.  I'm not sure why you have a hard time seeing this.

You still seem to miss the point that the European Muslim population has zero impact on the policies of the Euopean Nations. I don't know what you imagine is going on but it for sure is no muslim take-over of Western Europe. The idea that they have is ridiculous and uninformed. It's no coincidence that the only ones here argueign that they have are a Eastern-European and 2 americans wh very clearly have never been near Paris or Amsterdam. The concept's on a par with argueing that the Manhattan Mosque is evidence of the fact that the NY legislature has been intimitated into doing as muslims want because of 9/11. If anything muslims now are a minority under attack in most of Western Europe. The atmosphere in many capitals is comparable to the 'sensible anti-semitism' that many mainstream European politicians defended in the '30s. Links like the one that started this nonsense are a symptom of a xenophobic new standard of Political correctness where everything muslims do must be connected to their evil religion.

[Insula Dei]

And it's not really fair to compare the very real Muslim issues of today with the very made up Jewish problem of the past.  Unless Jews were killing thousands of Euros and the dirty Jew controlled media has managed to bury those facts from the prying eyes of history.

Don't you know that the jews caused WWI? The only reason they got away with that was because the German elite was afraid to die in the trenches.

[Insula Dei]

And it's not really fair to compare the very real Muslim issues of today with the very made up Jewish problem of the past.  Unless Jews were killing thousands of Euros and the dirty Jew controlled media has managed to bury those facts from the prying eyes of history.

Don't you know that the jews caused WWI? The only reason they got away with that was because the German elite was afraid to die in the trenches.

I don't know if it's sad or funny, but I have no idea if you are kidding or not.  I hope you are, but I fear you are not.

I hope that that's just you being slightly hyperbolic and that you were in fact able to see the sarcasm.

[Insula Dei]

Now really, what would make anyone think that muslims are privileged? Seriously many countries actively legislate to limit their freedom to express their religion or to live according to the way they interpret it. They are the constant target of people such as yourself who seem determined to voice their innermost convictions at every chance they get and of a lot of racism directed towards them by groups that'd have been anti-semite 70 years ago.

[Insula Dei]

1.If laws are made with the express goal of humiliating and attacking some religious or ethnic minority, then we have a moral obligation to be vocal about our disagreement.

2. How does a woman wearing a veil, for example, attack anyone in their rights?

[Insula Dei]

Also, I have a Muslim friend. Just wanted to get that in before someone calls me racist and it will look desperate.

That always looks desperate

[Insula Dei]

I think you're libertarian approach to this is naive, because it seems to amount to saying that all choices are equally free and valid. I don't think the choices made within certain cultures are particularly free. I think certain cultures constrain people to an undue degree and I believe society has a role to play in aiding people to break free from those cultures.

<...>
Basically, I don't think the choice of a woman not to work, never be seen and marry a man her parents picked up is as important to respect as the choice not to eat pork or wear funny hats. That might make a racist authoritarian in your eyes, but certainly not in mine.

You don't quite get where I am coming from. I am, first and foremost, selfish: I care a lot more about the society not caring about my own choices, than I care about choices of others ))

On a less selfish note, of course it is true that in many cases within closed communities there is a substantial pressure to conform. However, the fact is, that the outside pressure for integration is, usually, as strong or stronger, even in the absence of anything deliberate on the part of the society as a whole. It is when the society at large tries to force things that the wagons get circled and communities close further.

A woman, growing up in Sweden has every opportunity to join the maintsream. In fact, she is likely to be continuously exposed to that mainstream - through the school system, through the mass culture (from which it is hard to isolate), etc., etc. And, no doubt, the secular Swedish world is quite attractive - I, for one, am comfortable enough about the superiority of the, broadly, "western ways" to believe that, in most cases, they'd be winning in the contest of ideas and modes of being.  You've never been a part of a minority - you simply don't realize how strong the pressure to assimilate is.

However, try forcing assimilation/ modernization, and things change. It doesn't have to happen in the context of migration, of course: perhaps, Turkey might provide the cleanest example here. Several generations of Turkish women have been denied secular university education, due to the "religious" prohibition on wearing hidjab in public schools. In fact, come think of it, this has been, probably, the most effective imaginable policy leading to segregation between the "white Turk" secular elite and the "brown Turk" traditionalist plebs. When policies of this nature get introduced in the west, they only serve to push the migrants into ghettos, where the interaction is minimized and the need to choose between tradition and the outside world is reduced.

Women who attend religious Muslim schools, which are legal and publicly financed in Sweden, are a lot less likely to encounter these societal pressures. This is even more so for the many grown women who have not attended Swedish schools but came here as teenagers or adults and are left at home in their apartements, surrounded only by other Muslim immigrants. If you want to stretch it further - I've done volunteer work as a private tutor for children who fare poorly in a godforsaken area of Stockholm. They are all Muslim immigrants. In fact, it seems like pretty much everyone in their area and in the school are Muslim immigrants. Sure, the teacher might say a few token words about the possibilities for women, just like the teacher might say a few token words about the dangers of smoking. I suspect the peer pressure from those around them will tend to be a stronger force.

Also, Sweden has publicly finances education for immigrants in the native language of their parents, which, combined with their poor education in other subjects, usually means they're better at that language than in Swedish. And any area dominated by Muslim immigrants will also be dominated by the satellite dishes bringing in tv channels in their own native language. Again, I'm not saying all of this is bad. But they do tend to be isolated from the rest of Swedish society and given some of the more unpleasant aspects of the culture they're being isolated in, I think that might well be a bad thing.

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As regards traditionalist Jews...I'm not really following your point here, to be honest. I agree that some of the things I've said here could be applied to some groups of Orthodox Jews. There are many reasons why I don't think these situations are comparable (everyone was a reactionary racist back in the ninenteenth century and at least many of the Jews did very well in Europe - much better it would seem than the Muslim populations of today (I'm aware this is more a Western European phenomenon than an Eastern European one though)).

The most important point though is that these were never the reasons for persecuting Jews back in those days. At least not that I'm aware of. I've never heard an anti-semitic charge making the point that Jews treated their women badly. And that's been my entire point here.

You say those groups will deal with their happiness themselves - I have no doubt that reactionary structures within those groups will deal adequately with those seeking freedom from it. The girl who was murdeded for having a Swedish boyfriend is fresh in the memory of most Swedes, after all. I just don't think that's a moral stance to take, because I think her right to sexual and romantic freedom was just as strong as mine. (And here there's a good example - I know from firsthand experience that the Chinese community in Sweden is about as conservative and about as isolated as the Muslim one. But none of the Chinese girls I know who got boyfriends against the will of their parents were murdered or abused for it)

How many of the muslim girls you know who got a boyfriend their father disapproved of were tortured or murdered?

[Insula Dei]

I beg to differ on a number of counts.

1) There's a difference between remarking that certain characteristics of Protestantism (the 'Sola Fide' and 'Sola Scriptura' things mainly) encourage religious extremism, or saying that Catholicism's stance on the use of condoms is misguided when iuxtapositioned to the situation in Africa, on the one hand and seemingly believing that Islam encourages high crime rates and huge unemployment on the other hand. While the fact that Islam is the 'religion of submission' might help to explain some of the reasons for the high degree of unemployment ('Inch'Allah'), it can never be the sole reason for such a trend.

2) Yes, we love structural explanations, mainly cause they tend to make sense. There actually have been put forward some of the reasons for the situation of many muslims in Western-Europe in this very thread. The way they have been 'othered' ever since 9/11, which is just an extension of the way we have seen the middle east for centuries. While we never really had a clear vision of the far east beyond the one that's the basis of orientalism, we always have had such an idea of the Near East as a place where, to put it in the words of Disney's  Alladin's theme song, 'they cut of your nose when they don't like your face'. The idea of the Arabic Cultures as being barbarian/heretic/in some other way unpleasant dates back to at least the crusades.

3) Peope always seem to be happy to blame Islam for some characteristics of Middle-Eastern culture in general. I don't think muslim women are less emancipated than those of Hasidic Jews or Armenian Christians.

[Insula Dei]

But just so I get it straight, what is the difference between saying that Christianity is bad and that Islam is bad? I got that the first was ok and the second was racist, but I didn't really follow your reasoning as to why. (because I'm not claiming that Islam is the root of all of society's or even all of Muslims' problems)

I didn't say that christianity is bad, neither will you ever hear me say so. In part that is because I'm Catholic myself and in part because christianity just isn't 'bad'. The problem is that there are some people out there who appearantly never learnt how to deal with religion in a mature way.

[Insula Dei]

But just so I get it straight, what is the difference between saying that Christianity is bad and that Islam is bad? I got that the first was ok and the second was racist, but I didn't really follow your reasoning as to why. (because I'm not claiming that Islam is the root of all of society's or even all of Muslims' problems)

I didn't say that christianity is bad, neither will you ever hear me say so. In part that is because I'm Catholic myself and in part because christianity just isn't 'bad'. The problem is that there are some people out there who appearantly never learnt how to deal with religion in a mature way.

Gotcha. My simple reasoning is that if religion or culture does influence peoples' behaviour then a religion or culture having bad elements is a problem. It may not inherently have bad elements but it's pretty obvious that from the point of view of a liberal democrat like me, islam today is a worse religion than Christianity today. It puzzles me that the left seems to think that pointing this out is racist or should not be allowed because I think it is just as valid as criticizing Catholicism for condom usage in Africa, as per your example.

Please cite some bad elements of islam, so we can at least debate substance.

[Insula Dei]

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Which is more of a cultural thing, than a religious one. We were talking about how Islam specifically was a religion that obstructed the integration of Muslims in the Western-European society. You might be surprised by how little the muslim community in Western Europe ressembles Saudi Arabia. I am told some don't even beat their wives.

[Insula Dei]

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Which is more of a cultural thing, than a religious one. We were talking about how Islam specifically was a religion that obstructed the integration of Muslims in the Western-European society. You might be surprised by how little the muslim community in Western Europe ressembles Saudi Arabia. I am told some don't even beat their wives.

Ok. This is becoming rather frustrating. Until you acknowledge that I pointed this out repeatedly I'm going to assume that I can't reason with you.

Well yeah, but I thought we had agreed that the position of women in the Middle-East had nothing to do with  religion and everything with culture. You explicitly state so in your own post, yet are upset when I point that out and ask you to give me another example, that is a specifical issue of Islam. If you want to argue about specifical problems of Middle-Eastern culture at large don't do so in a thread which explicitly names 'muslim' in its title.

I'm getting irritated because most people have plenty of time to criticize 'Islam', but seem uncapable to give one specific example of the supposed problems of that religion. If you could please direct me to the place (preferably a quote from the Quran) where it is revealed how misogyny is more of an issue with muslims than with Hasidic Jews or other ethnic groups and that can explain that phenomenon from the content of their religion, I'll be mlore than happy to grant you your point.

[Insula Dei]

If you want to believe that all the atheist, liberal Swedes and Dutch and whoever who oppose Muslim immigration are just waiting for their opportunity to gas all non-Aryans, fine. I must assume you have some compelling reason for wishing to believe this.

No, but you (if you count yourself among those atheist, liberal Swedes?) want to limit their freedom to stand and go and live where they want, based on the fact that some of them don't share your values. A lot of people also are spewing rhetoric that makes the atmosphere of society grow sour. Whatever that is, it's hardly liberal. It also is something I'm vehemently opposed to. If I engage in debate here it's not because I desperately want to win a debate but because to speak out is the only option that I see as being a possible counterreaction.

[Insula Dei]

Here's a post I made on France's ban on the burqa. Please tell me again how I'm an anti-semitic racist.

It's a pretty sad day for Europe. It shows that France's claim to be a bastion for enlightenment and progress is rather hollow.

Once you really start thinking about the arguments made for this and other similar laws and apply them to other areas that aren't as infected with xenophobia you realize how stupid this is.

Why not legislate against women wearing high heels? It's highly impractical, hindering women in endeavours as simple as crossing a street and forced upon women by the norms of society.

1. Have I implied you're an anti-semitic racist? I'm higly sorry if that's the impression I've given you because it certainly wasn't my intention.

2. It seems we agree on the burqa ban

3. Problem I have with engaging the argument you are trying to make in this thread is because, quite honestly, I'm starting to feel at loss as to what that argument might actually be. I don't feel like you've clearly and unambiguously stated what your opinion boils down to. I accept that your position might be quite a bit too nuanced to be compressed into a three-word sentence, but I'd like if you would bang your head against the wall once more and try to briefly state your position.

4. No really, I wasn't trying to imply you were a Nazi, nor was I trying to discredit you or what you said in this thread by means of an old-fashioned ad hominem.

[Insula Dei]

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I actually agree with 90% of what you said there. It really is miserable to see how many people live in these kind of circumstances, but, while I accept that it'd make me look like some cliché caviar comrade from the '90s if I'd attribute all of these circumstances to society's ills, I do feel that that's where the state should kick in, not by banning these people from having a meaningfull experience of their religion but by actively supporting them. If you want to make sure muslim extremism doesn't become an issue you should, imo, make sure that those schools are functioning, that those people have acces to decent jobs, that these people do have an opportunity to learn the language, etc.

Oh, and as for the idea that Hinduism would be less likely to result in serious problems with immigrants, the only 'Honour killing' to have ever made the national media here in Belgium was of an Indian Hindu girl by her Indian Hindu father. So, I don't think you can argue that.