Juan Cole replies to a bigoted anti-Muslim article by Dennis Prager in the LA Times.
“Why is it that our media personalities cannot think their way out of a paper bag? Why don’t high school civics courses alert them that there might be a problem with stereotyping everyone that you categorize as belonging to a particular group?”
“Mr Fernando is right to say that racism has no place in the lesbian and gay community. As I wrote in the Gay & Lesbian Humanist magazine ‘… racism is the antithesis of Humanism. We are not concerned where people come from genetically or geographically, but we ought to care very much about where they are going, ideologically. Racial discrimination is abhorrent …’ In other words, no one should be discriminated against or victimised because of their race, ethnicity, or skin colour – however, we should (and I quote again from the article) ‘… hold people to account for their beliefs and the actions that arise from them’.”
Diesel Balaam defends himself against the accusation by Denis Fernando of LAGCAR and other critics that his article in the current issue of Gay and Lesbian Humanist magazine is racist.
Happily, Balaam’s article is now available online and readers can judge for themselves.
“The attitude of much of the liberal media in Britain, France and the US to the French riots is now clear. The riots have nothing to do with Islam. The fact that most of the rioters are Muslim is irrelevant. The riots are about poverty, unemployment and discrimination. Anyone who says there’s an Islamist agenda here is a far-right bigot peddling patent and dangerous untruths.”
Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 14 November 2005
Mel also accuses Jason Burke of arguing that “my analysis is rooted in a barking mad species of conservative thought”. Couldn’t have put it better myself.
A new right-wing take on the multicuturalism debate. Mark Steyn asserts that it is not the co-existence of multiple cultures within a society that is a problem but the supposed fact that in Europe there are only two cultures – Muslim and non-Muslim. With its “ageing native populations, and young Muslim populations”, Europe is heading for inevitable confrontation between these two irreconcilable cultures – “you can’t buck demography – except through civil war”.
France’s employment minister on Tuesday fingered polygamy as one reason for the rioting in the country.
Gérard Larcher said multiple marriages among immigrants was one reason for the racial discrimination which ethnic minorities faced in the job market. Overly large polygamous families sometimes led to anti-social behaviour among youths who lacked a father figure, making employers wary of hiring ethnic minorities, he explained.
The minister, speaking to a group of foreign journalists as the government stepped up efforts to improve its image with the foreign media, said: “Since part of society displays this anti-social behaviour, it is not surprising that some of them have difficulties finding work … Efforts must be made by both sides. If people are not employable, they will not be employed.”
The riots, and the government’s slow reaction to the violence, has led to widespread criticism that France’s ruling class is out of touch with the rest of the country. Mr Larcher’s comments could further fuel the debate and are likely to outrage Muslim and anti-racism groups in France.
“In my article earlier this year (19 July 2005), I questioned the BBC’s persistence in keeping the anti-Muslim Melanie Phillips on the panel of the Radio Four programme, The Moral Maze. Four months on and her poisonous spin continues to fill the airwaves twice a week…. She utilises every opportunity on air to pour scorn on Islam and Muslims. The BBC shoulders the blame for promoting Ms Phillips at a time when the need for community cohesion and sincere dialogue has never been more pronounced….
“In order to understand the absurdity of the BBC’s persistence in this matter, it would be instructive for the producers for one moment to consider what they would do if it became clear that a permanent panellist on one of their high profile programmes was also a hard-line ‘fundamentalist’ who routinely used the opportunity to ridicule Jews and Judaism?”
Shaykh Riyad Nadwi on the OCCRi website, 14 November 2005
“After more than two weeks of nightly violence, the rioting of Europe’s Muslim minority has finally begun to subside. While the French government and Main Stream Media may be eager to pretend that the events of the last month were an anomaly, or persist in the notion that the underlying issues that incited the violence are now being addressed, the current lull in the violence in Europe is just that; a lull. The violence is doomed to return in the future. Europe is fast becoming ground zero in clash of civilizations between two equally intolerant cultures, radical Islam and Liberalism.”
What the uprising generation wants
By Charles Krauthammer
The gendarmes have weapons. The kids they face in the street have mostly stones and Molotov cocktails. It is a mismatch. But it’s the cops who are the heavy underdogs – the cops and the France that the cops alone represent in those burning godforsaken ghettos where most Frenchmen dare not go.
On the one side are the protester-arsonists, many if not most of them Muslim, whom the Interior Minister called racaille (rabble) – young, restless, violent, vibrant, angry, jobless, envious and fecund. And on the other side is an aged and exhausted civilization, the hollowed-out core of European Christendom, static, aging, contented, coddled, passive and literally without faith. Who would you think will win in the end?
If you needed a snapshot of the balance of forces in this civilizational struggle taking place in France, consider only the incomprehension and inertness of the official French response. The President didn’t say a word for 10 days. The state of emergency wasn’t declared until Day 13. Meanwhile, the Interior Minister and Prime Minister offered dueling slogans and empty promises, with an eye more on their upcoming presidential contest than on the fire this time.
The best way to know the future is to look at simple demographics. There are an estimated 5 million Muslims in France. Of course, no one knows for sure, not just because of the uncounted illegal immigrants but because in France the government is prohibited by law from even asking about ethnicity and religion. It is not surprising that you don’t deal with a problem whose very contours you refuse to see or even inquire about.
France thus is approaching 10% Muslim. But things do not stand still. Even if there were no further immigration, which is a pipe dream, birth rates alone will soon drastically alter the balance. Muslims have the highest birth rate – three times the rate of non-Muslims – of any demographic group in Europe. The most common name for a newborn in neighboring Brussels is Mohammed. Childbearing rates among non-Muslim Frenchmen are well below replacement levels. The old French, like the rest of Europe, are literally disappearing.
“With current trends,” Professor Bernard Lewis has said, “Europe will have Muslim majorities in the population by the end of the 21st century.” The future? “Europe will be part of the Arab west, of the Maghreb [Muslim northwest Africa].” Today’s rioting youth are just a bit ahead of their time in claiming their upcoming patrimony.
“… there have been whole legions of pundits wheeled out to offer an explanation. It’s deprivation, a lack of integration, poverty, unemployment, incipient French racism and so on. But the dreaded ‘M’ word has scarcely been mentioned at all; these were ‘young’ rioters or sometimes ‘immigrant’ rioters – they were never Muslim rioters. Islam was almost never mentioned … the suspicion persists that it is the North Africans who do not wish for integration – much as they might whine about a lack of employment opportunities – even more than the indigenous French…. It may well be that the motive for the rioting was nothing more than an inchoate grievance allied to youthful exuberance and a penchant for bad behaviour, but it was Islam which gave it an identity and also its retrospective raison d’être.”
Rod Liddle offers us his insights into the French riots.
Regarding the French, Liddle assures us: “Of all the countries in Western Europe, they have pursued the most extreme form of that discredited ideology, multiculturalism…” What an ignorant prat.
“It is perhaps pointless to look back at the shamefully irresponsible immigration policies that have brought so many European countries to this explosive point…. However, we might at least recognise the problem. As usual a great many people are deliberately avoiding it, in particular by editing the word Muslim out of their debates, as if Islam had nothing to do with the dangerous mood sweeping Europe. Poverty and rejection have played a significant part, but there is an unmistakable sense in which the riots are Muslim, consciously so.
“Muslims vary and their beliefs vary. But the response of some Muslims to frustration – whether or not the fault of westerners – has been to retreat into more extreme forms of Islam and into the arms of fundamentalists. Yet although we know this, and despite the Salman Rushdie affair, despite the bombs and assassinations that led up to 9/11, despite the recent atrocities, we seem unwilling to recognise that what this can mean is deliberate separatism – apartheid. Islam in the European ghetto can mean an unwillingness to integrate at all, a desire to practise the faith with as little interference from the geographical host country as possible.”
Minette Marin in the Sunday Times, 13 November 2005
I mean, these foreigners, they come over here and insist on living in areas with the worst housing and, try as you might, you can’t dissuade them from taking low-paid jobs or remaining unemployed, which ensures that they can’t move out of those areas. For some unknown reason, some of them even see the need for the sort of defensive solidarity that results from living together with fellow members of their own oppressed minority community. And they even insist on the right to follow their religious beliefs free from state interference. Clearly the existence of ghettos is entirely the responsibility of the people who live in them and has nothing whatsoever to do with the racism of the “host” society.