heh, so maybe restrict entry to those over 50? 
Not sure if these have been mentioned, but increasing Muslim numbers in Europe is a contributor to massive expenditure on anti-terrorism measures, increased criminalisation of speech and fearfulness of violence if you dare criticise the religion.
I’m not sure I’d agree. Anti-terrorism expenditures have been increasing because many countries worlwide decided to embark on a fuzzy and overall pointless ‘War on Terror’. Countries like Pakistan, Uzbekistan or Malaysia have also been spending tonnes on anti-terrorism measures even though they haven’t been receiving much Muslim migration. The real question is whether terrorism itself has become a bigger problem due to increasing Muslim numbers. I’ve yet to see proof that terrorist attacks are more common today than they were 20 years ago.
Baseless paranoia as its own justification. How wonderful.
The evidence already provided in this thread is that the overwhelming majority of Muslim immigrants are assimilating as Europeans very nicely. Using fears that they might not be assimilating (when they actually are) to justify discrimination against them hardly seems to be a rational response.
The U.S. tried that with Asian immigrants, first the Chinese and later the Japanese, and history has demonstrated that the Asian exclusion laws protected no one and simply demonstrated that any large number of people can be led by the nose to persecute minorities in their midst.
I was thinking in terms of territorial bickering with Pakistan and/or the kerfluffle over Kashmir ; which I tend to see sort of like the conflicts in Ireland or Israel/Palestine : yes, they’re religious. They’re also cultural, political and ultimately *really *about old grudges being handed down and revered like they’re fucking family heirlooms.
That being said, I’ll readily admit that I don’t know very much about your country and you’d know best.
I think the distinction between religion and culture is false, especially the further you go back in history. Most culture tends to be inextricably tied up with religion. As for the politics angle, I agree that it’s not really about religion per se, it’s just people seeking power blah blah. So in the case of Pakistan and India, sure Jinnah was personally ambitious and his backers were rich Muslim landlords who wanted political influence after the British left, and that’s what funded and motivated the leadership of the Muslim league and led to the formation of Pakistan. But even after conceding all that, I still submit that religion(and perhaps Islam more than just ‘religion’) cannot escape blame as it serves as one of the primary tools in engendering conflict. It is a natural tendency of human beings to split the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’. The religious and cultural institutions that we have can either reinforce or weaken that tendency. Islam in particular seems to make it worse, with its strong focus on religious identity. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s probably how the religion became so successful in the first place. But in today’s world I think it’s harmful.
Hindu fundamentalism is older than Islamic fundamentalism in India. Hindu nationalism goes back to the 1930s. Islamic fundamentalism is a more recent thing, and arguably was a response to noxious neofascists like Savarkar.
India has also banned works of art that criticized Hinduism and Christianity (IIRC they banned Last Temptation of Christ), so it’s not a pro-Muslim thing, it’s a ‘keeping the peace’ thing.
Also, there are between 5 and 6 times as many Hindus in India as there are Muslims, so I’m much more afraid of the damage that Hindu nationalists could do to Muslims, Christians and others, than the other way round.
Back to the 1930s eh? So…not predating the Muslim league then? And if you would only read my comment carefully, I too am more concerned about Hindu fundamentalism. But it most definitely is a response to Islamic fundamentalism, and built around very similar precepts.
I went and looked up Savarkar, and I quote from his book “Hindutva: What is a Hindu”. It is attempting, almost explicitly, to create an identity for Hindus similar to Islam’s. Interestingly, he was an atheist.
Majority? Sure. Overwhelming majority? I don’t think so.
Yea, Savarkar was an atheist. which almost makes him more creepy in my book, he was stirring up religious passions in the name of a faith in which he didn’t believe. he reminds me a bit of Charles Maurras in Europe, the atheist advocate of reactionary Catholic ultranationalism.
Sorry. Pointing to one loon with a YouTube following hardly overturns the actual evidence provided by multiple polls and surveys throughout Europe.
Note that in country after country examined in the several surveys I noted in this post, Muslims provided similar answers in the same proportions as their non-Muslim neighbors. Unless you can provide serious survey results that contradict all the posted surveys, you are allowing yourself to be led astray by mere demagoguery. In none of those polls has European Muslim opposition to assimilation reached even 10%. That is overwhelming. (In several of the surveys, Muslim immigrants actually posted more favorably about their host countries than those countries native citizens did.
He’s not really stirring up religious passions though. He’s trying to build a cultural and nationalist identity, based on geographic origin, not religion. So religions that find an origin in India, like Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, Buddhism are explicitly ok in his book, and Islam is not. A sort of ‘original inhabitant’ view. And this is essentially a reaction to the various wars of conquest that India faced, and as I’ve highlighted in the passage I quoted above, the aggression that they were still facing. The Muslim league was the first attempt to politicise religion in the subcontinent and it directly inspired political responses to it, and there’s no doubt in my mind that Hindu fundamentalism of the sort that Savarkar represented would have had little purchase on its own.
Even with all the rather extreme events to react to(partition, Pakistan’s recurring jihad, ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri pundits) , it hasn’t had all that much purchase. There is no mainstream appeal for Hinduism as a political organising principle in India today. The prime ministerial candidate of the ‘Hindu’ right barely, if ever, invokes religion. I submit that this is a function of institutions. Hinduism provides less fertile ground for extremism and politicisation, Islam provides more. And the ‘Hindu’ fundamentalists like Savarkar saw this and attempted(and are attempting) to change it. It has always struck me as one of the great ironies of our time that in their chosen path of reacting to Islam, they are becoming exactly what they profess to most despise.
Are you excluding Britain from Europe?
The ones being led astray by demagoguery are those Norwegian Muslims who publicly expressed support for the death penalty for homosexuals and adulterers.
So what exactly are you arguing here? That these radical proclamations by Islam Net and Fahad Qureshi do not embody the views of a sizable and vocal minority of Norwegian Muslims, or that that the views are somehow not extremist?
The fact that these radical proclamations exist doesn’t mean that they are supported by many.
Since you bring out the Norwegian example: the fact that a right-wing bell-end went out and killed 70 people at Utøya doesn’t mean that there are many in Norway who support those tactics. Isolated incidents do not make for good evidence
What are YOU arguing by pointing to the opinions of a “sizeable and vocal minority” in the first place?
I dunno what he’s arguing, but if I were responsible for British immigration policy, I would be considering at least temporarily reducing immigration from countries/groups that may feed extremism. It should be possible to do it without a fallout in terms of discrimination against immigrant groups already in the country, by not targeting them explicitly. This may in fact already be happening
You attempted to make a distinction between a “majority” and an “overwhelming majority” without setting any definitions in place. Based on the fact that I have seen no attitudinal survey of any Muslim community in Europe that differs from their non-Muslim fellow countrymen by more than single digit percentages, I maintain that “overwhelming majority” is the apt description of Muslims who are assimilating in Europe. One can find extreme views among small clusters of people in any community. If those numbers amount to fewer than 10% of that population, I consider the majority view to be overwhelming.
It would appear that your actual point was to promote fear of Islam or Muslims even when the proponents of radical/Fundamentalist/Salafist Islam are a minuscule (if loud) minority of the Muslim population in Europe. Unless you provide serious numbers instead of staged YouTube events, I dismiss your claims as unsupported.
The Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, (The Tea Party 
), and similar groups are loud in the U.S. None of them demonstrate that this country is in danger of being overrun by Right Wing extremists. So, too, Qureshi and his merry band of zealots fail to represent any movement by other Muslims in Europe to refuse to assimilate.
I’m very much on tomndebb’s side here, but I would like to point out that no one should have to assimilate, just refrain from running amok and hurting innocent people. We’re not the Borg, and if someone wears a hijab and worships Allah while another wears a necktie and worships next quarter’s P&L, neither is anyone else’s affair.
This is true only if you hold that cultural values held by the population don’t have any externalities(beyond just running amok and hurting people i.e, which are also externalities). If you think that cultural values affect things like institutional functioning, economic success and in general how a society fares in the long term (and there are some good theoretical models and evidence that suggest they do), then there is every reason for successful countries to want immigrants from less successful countries to assimilate.