Not desperation I am afraid more the way of modern warfare. N. Ireland is an example of how a small group can hold a country to ransom for years. As the ways of war have changed is it not time to review the rules of war so that the enemy cannot hide behind them
As usual, Ramira, you make some excellent, perfectly relevant points… and leave out half of the story.
There’s this boy in one of my daughters’ class who’s Belgian of North African origin. His father is nowhere to be seen. His mom barely speaks French although she’s lived here for years. She needs a friend to translate what the teacher says about her son during parent-teacher conferences. She does not communicate with other parents, except those who speak Arabic. Guess what? The poor boy, age 6, is already experiencing problems at school. The main reason: although he was born here, he doesn’t speak French as well as the other kids, including some who only arrived in Belgium a couple of years ago. He’s a sweet boy and I feel sad for him. It’s difficult for me to blame Belgian society for his problem, though.
Just one anecdote?
How about this other woman I know who’s lived here for almost 30 years. She’s totally unable to say one word in French. Well, ok, perhaps bonjour and that’s it. I happened to have her on the phone once, she wanted to speak to my wife who had left her phone at home and I picked it up. It took me a while to understand who she was. I had to speak to her in broken Algerian Arabic to make myself understood because she couldn’t understand a sentence as basic as “My wife is not at home” after 30 years in Belgium. Again, she has not contact whatsoever with non-muslims.
Or what about this guy who arrived here illegally almost 10 years ago. His goal in life? “Marrying a blonde Belgian girl”. I kid you not. He talked about that every time we met. I knew about a dozen stock phrases in French. Good luck impressing a lady with that. Within a month of his arrival, he was taking part in sans-papiers demonstrations which often ended in fights with the police. He thought it was great fun. Last time I saw him, he still didn’t speak French and of course, didn’t have a job. Oh, but he was married. To a Belgian woman. And had two daughters. But we couldn’t meet them because they lived in another country. And he didn’t have any pictures of them. But that was ok because his invisible wife had converted to Islam and spoke perfect Arabic, which she had learned in a couple of months (and it was a shame that I only spoke very bad Arabic).
Anecdotes, anecdotes, I know. I’ve got more, all relating to people I’ve met and talked to.
It’s absolutely clear to me that racism and supremacism run both ways. That fact that Muslims suffer revolting discrimination from some Europeans doesn’t make the attitude of some of them more appealing.
Of course it is desperation. They were not interested in distraction of the al Qaeda type actions until they began to lose the territory and the air strikes began to degrade their capacity to pay their foreign fighters who are their ideological backbone.
Now there are many stories of the allocations of cash to those fighters, their cars, their priviledges being cut. This hurts the DAESH. Their power came from the narrative of the winning and the sexy action film image / video game image they put forward (under the veneer of the Takfiri discourse).
No I do not.
The story is the STATISTICS.
This is not a very different anectdote than what I can read about the immigration anectdotes for the Italians who went to New York City or any of the mass immigration stories for the North America.
And yet because at least the Americans have been somewhat honest to themselves about discrimination and have not hid behind the so Typical Francophone theoretical discourses, they have good integration over the long-term.
But the Italians and the Polish not speaking well the English and being involved in the Mafias, this is not somthing strange.
.
Yes, I know. I have run into this many, many times. It is the typical dreaming of the Harraga profile. It is fantasy by a class of the underclass of the Maghreb who have the double victimisation of the oligarchic economy in their home countries, the shit schools and then their dreaming of living the life they see on the Sat TV, on Téva, on TV5…
Anectdotes are anectdotes.
Statistics are statistics.
The stupid attitudes in the Harraga sourced community of course will not evolve without the employment barriers removal.
There is not a magic wand to change the basic evolution of the immigration process - the stories of the American immigration make this clear.
But the lies the Francophones are telling themselves about Equality and the theoretical fancy discourses are at the heart of the non-resolution of the actual practical problems.
It is not the employment discrimination resolves ALL the problem, but this festering wound is what takes a marginal problem and turns it into a crisis. It is letting what would be a passing scar become a gangrene that can lose the leg.
I am sorry Ramira the problem is not going to be solved by burying it under a pile of statistic’s. The problem is that people who claim to be Muslims are slaughtering innocent men, woman and children with indiscriminate attacks in public places. I think that it is disgraceful that you are condemning unemployed Muslims as terrorists
Statistics, well yeah, we all know how they can be interpreted in very different ways, depending on the agenda of the person using them.
Still, on the whole, again, you make valid points.
What I totally disagree with is the fantasy that if you remove discrimination against Muslims in Europe, everything will be rosy and we will all live happily ever after.
Central to the problem is also the view that Muslims are better than non-Muslims. It can be mild (“Thank God, we’re Muslim and we don’t have the same problems as these people”) or rabid as seen recently but it’s there in one form or another in a lot of the dozens of Muslims that I have met, lived with and shared iftar with. And this is also a major obstacle to harmonious relations between groups. As long as your worldview is obscured by supremacism, even in its milder forms, conflict is just around the corner.
I think it is disgraceful and disgusting to make gross distortions about what was said. Some other people do not.
When there is a story of documented, statistically validated, discrimination on race-ethnic basis for several decades across multiple independent studies, I fail to see what excuses are for.
Super. When someone here makes this argument, then you can go busily around to refute it.
Otherwise it is perhaps wise to save the straw for soaking up the bullshitting.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here. Sorry if I misinterpreted something you said but these two sentences aren’t clear.
By the way, would you care to adress the last part of my post?
Since I have replied to the assertion that was blaming all this on the non-integration, I am only addressing the aspect of the blaming of a non-integration only on the minority community. This happens again and again here.
And your last part, I am not a Psy to be addressing people’s complexes. That there are religious supremacists among the muslim among the catholic etc. is not something that is an object directly of policy action.
There is a thing that is a demonstrable object of policy action, the active discrimination in the employment market.
The typical abstract philosophizing of the francophone habit, I am not interested in it. The concrete pragmatism of the anglosaxons is superior here.
Military adventurism would make this problem much worse, and endanger Europe (and the US) far, far more, than no such action. That’s what got us into this mess (not just the Iraq war, but Western meddling in the region for a century).
“Abstract philosophizing”? Wow, you’re really overestimating my contribution. I was just relating things that I’ve experienced first-hand. I doesn’t get more pragmatic and less abstract than that.
True.
Why are people surprised that this is happening in Europe. The continent has suffered the longest financial crises in a century, one that is not abating and which has affected twenty and thirty somethings the most.
As the Guardian points out; this is a generation which has faced the perfect storm of debt, housing and joblessness and inability to start a family.
I don’t usually like Niall Ferguson, but he is spot on when he says that the underlying causes are usually more economic, then religious, or ideological.
So you consider yourself the judge of who has a “valid opinion” and who does not? You are giving yourself a lot of credit.
The statistics you are carrying before yourself like a banner show one thing: Employers are hesitating to hire applicants with Muslim sounding names. They do not provide information as to *why *they behave that way. You of course have your own explanation which in its essence simply is that they are all xenophobic assholes. Consequently your soluion is that they just need to stop being xenophobic assholes or the state should force them to stop being xenophobic assholes. There it is: problem solved.
Is your world really that simple?
If that was so, then the problem would affect the US too. We don’t lack poor minorities.
They are not hiring people with Non Christian names. The Jewish are also hit by this as multiple studies show as well.
So yes, at a level it is this simple and the fact I am informed of this - and I of course live in the society - I do think that the valid opinion is the one that has is (1) not reducing the problem to MUSLIMS!!! (omg omg omg) and (2) recognizing the decades long data that shows long, consistent discrimination across multiple backgrounds against “outsider names.” Jewish, Muslim etc. (since it is the Jewish and the muslims who are large immigrant populations of course these stand out).
People who ramble on about how somehow it might be the Muslims own fault, without any demonstrated knowledge of the situation, no I do not think they have useful opinions.
Then Jewish terror attacks should be expected as a consequence.
By what faulty logic are you arriving at this?
Or are we back to the Straw Man distortion again?
For the clarifcatoin for those who are so attached to the Muslim OMGOMGOMG narratives, my statements are the response to the blaming principally of this terror on the non-integration.
I do not make that argument, I respond to the idea that to locate the blame of a non-integration upon the communities in question.
For the StrawMan incomprehension or distortions, these are not Mechanical factors and I am not making any such mechanical relationship argument. I reply to the distortion about integration.
Now of course for as like adaher ignores the signficant difference in his other reply to AK84, between the European labor markets and problems of the discrimination and the American, of course we will have immense confusion and distorted conclusions. it is expected, perhaps a correcting of the statistics is needed…
This is a complete misunderstandig of the European challenge.
We can luckily point to the drawing of the difference by none other than the head of the ECB, M. Draghi who laments the severe structural biases of the continental european labor markets against the youth, things that I have never seen as expressed as problems for your labor markets. It is not simply poor minorities, that is a cartoon version of what AK84 raised.
Draghi is doing an important job in raising these issues in front of a calcified continental decision making.
Jews account for less than 1% of the French population. I’m pretty sure they’re dwarfed by migrants from Subsaharan Africa. What about discrimination against the latter?
What about it?
The illustration that the research shows the discrimination against persons of the obvious Jewish names(*) has not any statement in it denying a discrimination against the Senegalese or the Ivoirien immigrant, does it?
Or does every intervention to satisfy the Deniers need to be fully foot noting all the demographics?
(*: which it is noted is not the most common for the Maghrebine origin Jewish in the France, who often have names not easily distinguished from the ‘ordinary French’)