What the fuck?! I’m from Cleveland Heights and it’s the best damn part of Cuyahoga County. Not the ritziest place around (that’d be Bratenahl or Bay Village), but culturally and intellectually the Heights is head and shoulders above the rest. It’s also, as you said, economically well-off, relatively, it’s probably the best racially integrated city in Greater Cleveland, and it doesn’t have any slummy areas. It’s a great place to live (apart from the northern Ohio weather). Zut alors! Ils sont fous, ces français….
“Christian Identity adherents are the best kind of white supremacists!” 
For that matter, it’s not like the *original *Caliphs were followed (or recognized) by all, or even most Muslims. 40 years in, and already there were splitters…
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Sure, Yala (Thailand) or Zamboanga (Philippines) -esque militants do not exist in every Moslem enclave. But provided the weight of numbers (a 5% Moslem population is a “tipping point” I’ve heard mooted), political and societal motivations are satisfied, a push for Sharia law, and everything that encompasses thus, is essentially inevitable.
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There are ~10% Muslims in France, at the (estimated, no hard numbers available) national scale. Locally, some cities and neighbourhoods can be 30, 50, 70% Muslim. No calls for Shariah law, although I suppose aspects of it might be enforced informally among various communities e.g. when it comes to authorizing weddings and divorces, causes for social shunning, that kind of stuff. I know I’m not paying the jizya, at least.
Plenty, possibly even a majority of French self-described Muslims are about as Muslim as I’m Protestant - and I have set foot in church once over the past 15 years. I must have told that anecdote a few times on these boards over the years, but I’ve once had a young thug threaten me in those terms : “Hand over the beers, or I swear on the Koran I’ll fuck you all up”.
So that threw me for a loop, I gotta admit :p.
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Lemme guess: it’s a Berthier, never been fired, dropped once?
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It’s actually a drawing of a gun emblazoned with the words Ceci n’est pas un pistolet.
I’m not sure why this story, of all the nonsense and misinformation Fox News has disseminated, ended in apology. Of course, they give no indication of what made them trumpet this obviously laughable crap to begin with. Maybe the network has an internal “laughability” threshold that they try not to cross, lest they become an obvious tabloid, and they hadn’t realized that this story had crossed the line until everyone was laughing at them on Twitter.
Still…a story about dangerous muslims in Europe, for consumption by an American rube audience. Why apologize? Though when you think about it, if their goal as a network is to inject bullshit into the political discourse, then it doesn’t really matter that they’ve retreated from their claims, because those false nuggets are already firmly lodged in people’s heads. People will be correcting their chainmail-reading aunts for months to come.
Because France is threatening to sue them, I thnk.
(Y’know, besides the fact that they were wrong, and all.)
Bobby Jindal, not typically thought a rube, not only repeated the idea at a speech in London, but when asked about it afterward, claimed to have “heard it from folks here.”
If anyone’s interested, here’s a bit about a housing project in Grigny, France, where one of the terrorists grew up.
Sounds like a housing-project slum. Much like some American cities’. Not a Sharia-law zone.
Yup. Also, pump-action shottys ? Not so much. I’m sure some are floating around, and evidently even AKs can be procured by a determined individual, but the article seems to be saying cops getting shot at or chucked Molotovs at is a routine thing. It’s not.
Yeah – if mullahs were in charge, would they allow drugs? Muslims aren’t even supposed to drink.
I remember the same was true of the Pruitt-Igoe projects in good old St. Louis, practically across the street from Scott Joplin’s house on Delmar. When I lived in St. Louis some 35 years ago I made a pilgrimage to the Joplin house, before it was designated a Missouri historical site and restored; at the time it was a ramshackle derelict. Across the street I observed a vast empty plot of urban land still littered with rubble. The former site of Pruitt-Igoe. It was supposed to have been a progressive new approach to housing & urban development. Instead it degenerated into an inhuman hellhole, where, you guessed it, even the cops and firefighters would not go! So it emptied out and in 1972 the whole vast projects were demolished. If you’ve seen the film Qoyaanisqatsi, you’ve seen footage of the P-I demolition. Not an Islam thing at all, as America’s own examples show. A poverty thing and an urban blight thing aggravated by governmental neglect is what it was. C’est la même chose en France.
Ha ha ha you kiddin? The world’s biggest drug dealers are the fuckin Taliban. Who do you think produces all the opium and heroin to fund their fuckin terrorism? Muslims aren’t supposed to beat up women either, but the Taliban wreak all kinds of violence on women and girls out of their sick extreme misogyny. (Ask Malala Yusufzai about that.) Drug dealing is their mainstay.
In America, by contrast, the Nation of Islam is highly heterodox and believes in all kinds of stuff other Muslims consider blasphemy, and they have a lot of fucked-up ideas such as anti-Semitism, and they murdered Malcolm X, “our shining Black prince” in Ossie Davis’s eulogy, but at least give them credit for helping African-Americans kick drug addiction and cleaning up the drug pushers out of their neighborhoods. Being part of the solution instead of part of the problem.
ISTM that if we’re going to have publicly subsidized housing for the poor, then it should be designed to keep them from living next door to other poor people – i.e., it should be in the form of small units, no more than four apartments per building, scattered all over the metro area, instead of big apartment buildings. Then, of course, you’ve got these all these tiny enclaves of poverty in nice neighborhoods – but, the police know where they are; a kid can’t just snatch a purse and fade into the background, as he might in or near Pruitt-Igoe. Meanwhile, the kid gets to go to a nice school.
Different thing. Just because they produce and sell heroin (because it sells like hotcakes, for a huge pile of money, and in the end it’s mostly the West that does the addicting and the dying, so, two birds) doesn’t mean they condone its use among themselves.
Indeed, the question of who had the legitimacy to rule the Muslim polity has even been said (by me!) to be the defining question of Islam’s first century.
Does France do anything that you think is helpful in terms of addressing discrimination and violence within immigrant communities?
When Islam/Muslims first created polities, and as they developed, they interacted with many influences - they had to, since they didn’t have Empire experience. Persian statecraft, Greek philosophy, Hindu Kingship, etc., all inspired responses. What didn’t inspire responses were modern developments to secularism and nation-states constituted by law. Caliphates are certainly a legitimately Islamic form of government FWIW, but this is not because they rejected specifically contemporary non-Islamic forms of government. The responses and negotiations with these new ideas are still ongoing, and clearly, plenty of Muslims have no problem with states that are not embodied in a divinely chosen figure. This includes a spectrum from progressives to hard Islamists.
I agree that “moderate” is not a good word and that too many people look at Islam from the perspective of other religions. But Islam is not fixed, it is moving and varied, for better or for worse.
The Taliban, as I remember, does make the effort to justify from an Islamic point of view their selling of drugs that they admit to be haram, in the service of their struggle. Might not be very reasonable from a historical perspective but they are at least aware of the optics of the situation. They also make an effort to justify their treatment of women as permissible in an Islamic framework. This is not to say that they are right about Islam in any larger sense, but they are engaging with it and claiming it.
An aside on the NOI, I recently read “Little X: Growing Up in the Nation of Islam” and I would recommend it to anyone here interested in learning more about the group.