It’s interesting to see the views of those on blogs. I recently stumbled upon a website frequented by Pakistanis in the west. As an example, here are some comments about an incident where a Muslim woman in France was not allowed in a public pool wearing a full body swim suit, a “birkini”.
How representative are these views I wonder? Are these extreme views within the community? Here are some comments:
The comments come from here:
http://forum.pakistanidefence.com/index.php?showtopic=84064
They need to do way instain mother who kill thier babbies. becuse these babby cant frigth back?
I dunno. I live in Europe, but I’m not a muslim. Fringes are everywhere. What strikes me as particularly stupid (aside from the spelling) is the “birthrate” comment - if you’re serious about your religion, why the fuck wait for “your” women to produce enough babies to outgrow europeans? There’s plenty of muslim countries to go if that’s what you like. If you really think that your perfect state is so perfect, why stay here? Go to the UAE or Indonesia - see if they’ll accept you as a muslim brother. Or - you know - kill everybody else, but that’s not what’s happening.
Sounds like stupid teenagers who either haven’t thought things through (which is scary because they might think things through later, and I’m not at all sure that would work for everybody else, but at least for now they’re pretty naive) or a bunch of “internet hardasses” who are just trying to see who’s the toughest. Not mutually exclusive.
Its a forum, whose main source of members are teenage boys with a hardon for military equipment. Do YOU think they are representative?
Reminds me in a way of a certain poster on these boards, gone but not forgotten, and whose absence it is difficult to regret.
I believe part of the idea of keeping the said Doper around was to present “a” Middle Eastern point of view. Coming to understand his point of view seemed to coincide, in me at least, with an abrupt lessening in my trust that the situation in the Middle East could ever be resolved.
It is rather easy, at least in the US, to assume that most other people are basically of good will, and that most of the problems are caused by a tiny and marginal minority, like many problems in the US. This is an attitude difficult to sustain the more you read him. He was rabidly anti-Semitic, not in the “anti-Zionist but okay with Jews in general” but in the “Protocol of the Elders of Zion is gospel truth” kind of way. And he was supposedly educated in the West, at least to some degree. And I don’t think he was Iraqi or anything - IIRC he was Saudi, and they are supposed to be our allies.
But he was as nucking futs as these bloggers appear to be. And if any significant portion of the Middle East thinks as these European Pakistani and the departed Doper do, they are not of good will, and it is not just a question of getting the terrorists out of the way.
No doubt many of the Pakistani here are indeed teenagers. But that is one of the problems of many Middle Eastern countries - a high proportion of youth, unemployed and marginalized. And who have drunk the Islamic Flavor-Aid.
Not that the French don’t suck for preventing the poor girl from wearing her birkini.
Regards,
Shodan
There are plenty of places you can go to hear bigoted idiots posturing about all sorts of things. Some of them hate blacks, some hate jews, some hate whites, some hate Mexicans, some hate catholics, some hate muslims, some hate christians, some hate Americans, some hate Europeans, and so on.
It’s easy to be a tough guy on the internet.
Meh. The equivalent of the Stormfront forum in the US.
Bunch of deluded morons with an internet connection.
This one is pretty much correct, I think. You can’t wear a yarmulke or a scapulary to a French public school any more than you can wear a burka; Spain is headed in the same direction.
In the South of Spain there’s quite a few public schools named after a priest who worked to create public schools in the area: there’s people trying to get them renamed, because they consider that the fact that he was a priest outweighs the fact that he founded a ton of schools (he did not name them after himself, these were all named after he was dead); there are people who want to get streets named after religious figures renamed. Some of those religious figures are also scholars or political figures, but again, the religious part outweighs anything else. Many holidays have been renamed to secularize them: December 3rd isn’t “the feast of St Francis Xavier, patron of Navarra” anymore, it’s now called “Navarra Day,” and at least it got a name; July 25th is now “the national holiday” (the national holiday? what are all the other holidays which are set at the national level? I mean, other than not-the-feast-of-St-James-the-Greater, patron of Spain); October 12th is… what is October 12th again? Can’t call it “el Pilar” because that’s a Madonna, can’t call it “la Hispanidad” because it’s imperialist (I have a poster from the year I got to Miami, proudly announcing the celebration of October 12 and calling it “el Día de la Raza” and “la Hispanidad”).
The separation of Church and State is one thing, but requiring people to negate their religion in order to be considered “civilized” is another, as is negating that religion is one of the forces that shaped our history. Quite the contrary, in fact: a neutral evaluator wouldn’t foam at the mouth seeing that the knight on top of a water fountain is a St. George or that there’s Coranic verses in the Cathedral of Córdoba.
Setting the nuttiness aside, I think certain demographic trends give reason to wonder what Europe looks like in the future.
The info on birth rates appears correct for western Europe. According to this link:
Pakistan is not a middle eastern country.
The OP seems to have cherry picked the more sensational posts. Quite a few posts there were reasonable, indeed the majority of posters.
3)You seem to be labouring under a delusion that everyone who is"of good will" will have identical opinions to your own. That is far from the case sir/ma’am.
Actually as a lot of Muslim populations are heavily young, teenagers ARE pretty representative.
Ok, I’ll be the one to ask.
With immigration from Muslim countries and high reproductive rates in the Muslim communities, Europe is slowly changing. While it may be stormfrontish, bigoted, racist or what have you, what does the changing demographic lanscape in Europe look like in say, 50 years or so? I am not sure I can find accurate unbiased data sources online that do not have an agenda.
I think a higher percentage Muslim population in Europe will actually have a moderating affect throughout the Muslim world, rather than the sensational predictions of the biased websites I found.
Thoughts?
In “50 or so” years, they’ll be pretty much like everyone else in the country, unless the country in question constantly harasses them, ghettoizes them and in general refuses to let them assimilate. They’ll be a bunch of low birth rate, mostly secular Europeans just like all the other low birth rate, mostly secular Europeans. That’s what generally happens with these “the foreign hordes are going to outbreed and swamp us!” panics.
Not sure about the mostly secular part.
How much of the “…refuses to let them assimilate” part is due to the country and it’s native population versus the immigrant group’s own problems of assimilation?
What examples are there where significant numbers of muslims have become secularized?
I don’t know if these views are representative but they’re definitely not factual. On the immigration issue, I recall hearing that most immigrants to Western Europe are Christians, unsurprisingly as they mostly come from Eastern Europe, West Africa, or the West Indies. It’s the case is Denmark, Britain, and Holland at least.
As for the notion that Christians have a long history of aggression of Muslims, whoever wrote that needs a history lesson. It was Muslims who launched campaigns of unprovoked aggression against the Christian world starting in the seventh century. They first conquered the Middle East, then North Africa, then invaded Spain and then France, where they were finally turned back at the Battle of Tours. In the following centuries, Muslims invaded Sicily, Asia Minor, and the Caucasus. The Ottoman Empire pushed into the Balkan peninsula in the 16th century and sent a fleet against Italy in 1571, which was defeated at the Battle of Lepanto. But their aggression against Europe continued until the late 17th century, when they were defeated while trying to take Vienna. (September 11, 1688, was the date.) It really wasn’t until Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt that any Islamic country had any right to complain about European aggression.
That’s the way the trends seem to be going.
Mostly the former. It’s one of the major problems with not having the “if you are born in the country, you are a citizen of the country” system we have here in America.
All over Europe; it’s happening now. The idea that they aren’t is xenophobic rhetoric, not reality. When a bunch of Islamic people hold a protest or riot or whatever there, they get portrayed as Islamic fanatics even if what they are mad at is something like wages.
Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, . . .
On a more local level, Dearborn, MI.
Heck, the overwhelming majority of the youth involved in the “Muslim” riots in France in the autmun of 2005 werer identified by their neighbors and families as non-practicing. They were simply under educated and under employed kids reacting to their perception of police harrassment. “Islam” was used only as a way to identify whom they believed the police were targeting, not as a way to identify their own beliefs.
Errr, France has the same rule.
ETA : **tomdnebb **: what ? You guys perceived the 2005 riots to be a religious uprising ? Boy, I had no idea. To us French, it was clearly a “banlieue” thing, not a religious thing. I.e. poor people and sons of immigrants tired of getting more shit than their share because they’re poor people and non-white. There really was no religious undercurrent to it, at least not that I’m aware.
Much of the Muslim world is bigoted and anti-semetic and anti-western. Is it any real surprise that they have such difficulty assimilating?