As someone married to a first-generation immigrant, I disagree. First generation immigrants can and do assimilate – that doesn’t mean all of them do, but many certainly do.
Perhaps that isn’t the point, though? Maybe it works just fine as a message to assure the scapegoated people, and to publicly affirm the values of tolerance and inclusion. It doesn’t have to actually change any confirmed bigot’s mind to have value for the rest of us.
Cool. 
I have to say, as an outside observer, it makes me feel better toward majority Australians to see such embrace of the gesture.
If you think there were nearly zero anti-Muslim hate crimes going on pre-9/11 you’re living in a fantasy world. They have been the bad guy de jure for Hollywood for a long time prior to 2001.
No, just Sikhs being murdered by people too stupid to tell the difference between the two. Some comfort, that.
If “they’re not being lynched in the streets” “they’re not being put into internment camps ala WW2 Japanese-American style” and “mosques aren’t being burned down” (just huge stinks to stop the ‘Ground Zero’ mosque from being built) are your markers to prove that there was no such thing as the anti-Muslim backlash after 9/11 and consider a 1700% increase in hate crimes directed towards Muslims in the year after the 2001 attack reported by the FBI as unimportant it rather shows where you are coming from. Using benchmarks like this I could prove racism no longer exists in the US. After all, nobody’s lynching blacks or burning down black churches anymore, right?
You’d do well to restrict your absurd assumptions to your views on the world and not use them to tell me what I think as you are yet again way off the ball on this one. Using exactly which statements of mine were you able to arrive at this clear conclusion that this is something I share?
Check out this thread that was started while the 9/11 attacks were still going on.
The most recent FBI stats I’ve seen for hate crimes in the US are for the calendar year 2012. The stats are here:
How many religion-based hate crimes were there in 2012? One thousand, three hundred and forty. And the great majority of the victims were… Jewish!
Just over 11% of the victims were Muslims. That’s 11.6% of 1,340 people. Or (drum roll) 155 people.
NOBODY deserves to be assaulted or to have a home or business vandalized, but come now! In a nation of over 300,000,000, that’s all but insignificant.
Muslims in the US are not under siege, they are NOT being assaulted left and right, and rednecks are NOT murdering them in broad daylight. Religious hate crimes overall are extremely rare in America, thank God (or law enforcement).
Shouldn’t you be HAPPY about that, rather than inflating the danger Muslims face?
Why would there be a Muslim backlash in the US in 2012? did you check the numbers after 9/11?
So… you’re saying there were more than 155 victims of actual Muslim terrorists, in the United States in 2012?
IF all 155 of those Muslims were murdered (and they weren’t obviously- most of those crimes involved vandalism), and if that kept up for 20 years, it would equal 9/11.
He asked you about 2012, not 2001.
So 11% of religious hate crimes are carried out against something less than 2% of the American population - and you consider that a success? And I’m certain that the crimes against Jews are also out of proportion to their share of the population, but that is a non sequitur in this conversation.
What is offensive about the ride with you sentiment is that it assumes that other Australians are stupid and violent people who are just going to react to the terrorist attack by assaulting the first muslim they see. It betrays such a low opinion of the rest of their fellow countrymen.
The use of percentages makes the actual increase seem much bigger than it really was. There were 28 hate crimes against muslims in 2000 and 481 in 2001. That is a big increase in terms of percentage but it was still less than half of the number of hate crimes committed against white people and 650 less than were committed against jews. In 2000 99.9985% of muslims were not victims of a hate crime and in 2001 99.975% of muslims were not victims of a hate crime. Hate crimes went from really, really, really, really rare, to really, really, really rare. Not much of a backlash.
On September 11, 2001, 99.9999895% of Americans were not victims of actual Muslim terrorism.
For the whole span since, and for every year and day within that span, the figure has been much closer to 100%.
So it appears that–by percentages–actual Muslim terrorism went from really, really, really, really, really rare, on that one day, to damn near nonexistent ever since.
Well, this is a relief all round, I’m sure.
And just who are those folks fighting for ISIL in Syria and Iraq? With the Taliban in Afghanistan? Killing students in Pakistan? Kidnapping girls in Nigeria? etc.
These people came from somewhere and are multitudinous.
meh
If I recall, you live in the UK,where, for various odd reasons, Pakistani assimilation has tended to be slower than among other groups. However, assimilation is still occurring among Pakistanis and it is occurring more swiftly among Muslims from other locales. Meanwhile, Muslim assimilation in Europe and North America is continuing at about the same pace as previous immigrant populations.
Claims that Muslims just do not want to join the larger society are nothing more than the false rhetoric of the anti-immigrtion polemicists.
**
Nah. There are more than we would like to see, (as is any number greater than zero), but claims that there are multitudes of them is simply not factual.
Really? They have the manpower to resist the Armies of such nations as Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, The Phillipines etc. Thats a lot of people willing to die for their cause. And make others die.
In Western countries a certain level of assimilation is absolutely required. We dont allow slavery; forced and child marriage nor honor killings. We believe in the equality of the sexes. Sure. lets give everyone the benefit of the doubt while at the same time remaining vigilant.
Of course, this conveniently ignores the fact that the driver for anti-Muslim hate crimes only occurred when more than two-thirds of the year had passed and probably does not include those Sikhs and Lebanese, Syrian, or Egyptian Christians who were targeted because some idiot decided that they “looked Muslim” or had Arabic names.
Nice goalpost shift. You were initially responding to a comment thaat referred to those you would “meet on the street.”. Unless you have the habit of wandering down the streets of Aleppo, Kabul, Kandahar, and similar cities on a regular basis, you are not going to encounter " multitudes" of bloodthirsty Muslims. (And that is without even going into the various differences and ethnic and political conflicts that are behind the strife in the places you named.)
Not a goalpost shift as these groups recruit internationally. And, of course, are financed internationally.
A bit off-topic, but lets also give a thought to the various minority Christian communities across the Islamic world that are being decimated; their daughters being sold into slavery.