Moslem Invasion of Europe.

Well, AU, i don't see that there's much of a difference between how you state, and how i've stated it.

No, neither do I.

Sentanta
There isn't any it was just my apparently inept way of agreeing with you.

American scientists have developed a brain scan that they say can detect people harbouring racial prejudice.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1086737,00.html

Sorry, AU, i did misunderstand you.

Walter,

the world population in the 17th Century was about 0.5 billion people. Today it is nearly 6.5 billion and rising quickly. 20,000 Hugenots is small beer by todays standards, about the same number of illegals entering the UK every month.

Steve,

Perhaps I should have said c**n or Ni**ger? I bow to your knowledge on the subject. I wonder if they have a test for people harbouring religious predjudice?....... Hmmmm I suppose that means most of the people on the planet..bit of a no brainer then!

Setanta,

"It is worth considering the effect on Islam of large numbers of Muslims living in nations which are more or less democratic--at any event, not the repressive regimes so common in the Muslim world."

Turkey has become a more or less as described above and see what joys this particular faith has brought about today.

Hobitob,

I get the impression that you think that I think that it is OK to mutilate genitals of any faith or historical cult beliefs. Well I don't. Nor burning witches either. Nor treating women like sh*t in the name of religion.

As for "proclaiming to eat the flesh and drink the blood of your god?" Well, you got that wrong as well. Mankind discovered that the earth actually goes around the sun and that the earth was was not the centre of the universe, despite all the murder, torture and persecution of anyone (by the holy men) who dared say otherwise 500 hundred years ago. Nobody ate flesh or drank blood in any god that I am aware of. Of course, if you have any evidence that your particular deity exists, please share it with us.

I dont know sh*t about religion, but isnt that a reference to Christianity/Catholicism? Bread and wine and all that?

<googles it up>

Yeh: "The Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, which teaches that when the priest pronounces the words, 'This is my body', and, 'This is my blood'; the bread and the wine before him on the altar become the actual body and blood of Christ in everything but taste, color and texture". Thats probly what he was referring to ...

He was making the point that "stoneage religious practices" were in no way specific to Islam or other "third world" religions, I think ...

That is specious for more than one reason which ought to be obvious. In the "more or less" category of democratic government, the Turks are definitely at the "less" end. However, the government does seem to have national interests at heart, which is a far cry from the Sultanate, or the Young Turks of Enver Bey. Unrecognized as such yet by historians, Mustapha Kemal, Attaturk ("father of the Turks"), was an accutely preceptive man who firmly, without fan fare, and without a cult of personality to queer his pitch, turned Turkey toward the west and the future. To simply compare Turkey in 1924 to Turkey in 1904 is to see centuries of progress effected in a few years.

Furthermore, your statement suggests that somehow Turkey was the target because of Islam. I suspect you did not intend that--we are not an Islamic nation, but our "suicide bombers" took out thousands. If, however, you are suggesting that the bombing in Turkey resulted naturally from Islam as a general principle of that belief, then you display incredible prejudice, once again.

By linking Turkey specifically to a condemnation of Islam, however inferential, you suggest that Muslims died because Islam is venal and murderous. Muslims died in Turkey because fundamentalist Muslim extremists do not want an example of a stable, prosperous and secular nation evident among Muslims. Turky resembles the West in more ways than it resembles the rest of the Islamic world today. It becomes a target as surely as are any of the industrialized nations of the West.

At all events, the bombing seems to have been an attack on British interests. Your thesis is murky and poorly constructed.

The hugenots came in 17th century and was -in relation to the - one of the biggist immigrations to a single country ever.

I really doubt that 20,000 persons are entering illegally the UK per month.
And it's just not me - it seems (after looking through different British statistics, media and opinion pages) that you are stand rather alone with this figure.



Actually - and I'm speaking here as a Roman Catholic - every day the flesh and blood of our good is eaten during masses, worldwide, some thousand times.

Ah - the Turks. Ataturk, a man far ahead of our times (to judge by some).

Does anyone here believe that the War on Terrorism really is a war on Islam. For all their protestations to the contrary, have Western leaders in fact decided to initiate fight and win the "clash of cultures" between medieval Islam and modern western secularism?

And even if they haven't doesn't this actually explain what's going on?

Islam is a conveniently exotic foe for those who wish to provide a reason for the "projection of US power" across the world. It doesn't help that here in the US people are idiots who believe ohther idiots like Pat Robertson!

I agree hobit, it is just the consolidation of American power.

PARIS, Dec. 11 — A long-awaited report on church-state relations in France advised the government on Thursday to forbid school pupils to wear Muslim veils, Jewish skullcaps or large Christian crosses.



THE REPORT PRESENTED to President Jacques Chirac said wearing such “conspicuous signs of religion” was contrary to the strict secularism French law requires for state establishments.
It also suggested that a Jewish and a Muslim holy day — Yom Kippur and Eid al-Kebir — be made official holidays such as Christmas and that companies allow workers to take off the religious holiday of their choice, commission secretary Remy Schwartz told journalists.
Muslim headscarves have become a major issue in France amid growing concern that militant Islamist views could be spreading among disaffected elements of the country’s five million Muslims, who make up eight percent of the population.
The debate over a ban — which Christian, Muslim and most Jewish religious leaders opposed — also reflects concerns about the failed integration of most Muslims and the way globalization is changing the nature of French society.

Interesting website with a good article on the religious cloting debate in France:Quentara.de

Therein lies the problem and the seeds of conflict. People who immigrate and yet are unwilling to integrate into the greater society of the host nation. Should they be welcome?

Most of these people in France, au, didn't immigrate: they are French in the second or third generation.

The Auslander in Germany have been there at least as long, but have not had the opportunity for citizenship until recently.

Well, the inhabitants of the former French North-African colonies certainly got the French citizenship much easier than any 'Ausländer' in Germany - Germany is still officially no "immigration country".

I couldn't find the actual text of the law in English online, but in 1998 it was like this:

Thinly Veiled Threats

Europress Review
Denis Boyles

Hermès, as you recall, was the messenger of the gods. And what he told the French, apparently, was that they should wear really expensive silk scarves on their heads to indicate their sensitivity to fashion and as an indicator of their wealth. So perhaps it isn't surprising that today most French politicians and journalists truly believe that the most pressing social issue of the moment has to do with whether or not girls should be allowed to go to school with their heads covered.
The problem, of course, is the statement behind the fashion, and how that statement violates the sense of secular propriety that governs one of the key French myths of their république. If a Muslim girl's scarf-statement is a reflection of obedience to fashion, there is no problem here, monsieur. But if her taste in headwear is so lousy that the scarf-statement suggests proselytism of the religious sort, there is a very large problem.
When my daughters first attended a French public school, they mistakenly wore their little silver Orthodox crosses over their sweaters. They were promptly instructed to hide them, lest the children on the playground be seized with a need to return to the Julian calendar. It is acceptable in the secular state to send a girl to school looking like a hooker, because that doesn't affect the spiritual conviction of teenage boys — and besides hookers aren't nuns. But there is a great fear here that if you send your Muslim daughter to school looking like a character from a Laura Ingalls Wilder book, it will drive others to fall on their knees before Allah.
The problem of Islamic girls wearing scarves to school and Islamic women wearing scarves to work has been simmering here for many years. It's not the head covering that's the problem, of course. It's what's in the head being covered. Chirac's declaration, reported not long ago in the Guardian, that "there is something aggressive" about the Muslim veil, and the predictable feminist view, expressed in an open letter from prominent Frenchwomen urging a ban on headscarves because they represent the submission of women, published in Elle and reprinted here in Le Monde, pretty much reflects the view of the issue from the right and from the left. It was clear that something must be done.
What was done was to appoint a government commission to investigate the headscarf issue and tell the president of the republic what should be done about it. The report was issued this week. The unfortunately named Stasi (after Bernard Stasi, the chairman) Commission's recommendations were given saturation coverage in Le Monde, Libération, Le Nouvel Observateur, Figaro, on French TV and on radio. The story drowned out every other issue normally preoccupying the French media, including Johnny Halliday. Even the Bush administration's decision to not send U.S. taxpayer money to French corporations was swamped in the reportage devoted to the way Islamic schoolgirls dress.
The reason for this fascination is obvious — and a perfect example of how the French attack a critical, complex social issue by focusing on the most superficial aspect of it. The real problems associated with the rampant Islamification of the French state won't be solved by issuing a dress code: In French hospitals, Le Monde reported, female Muslim patients refuse to be examined by male doctors, and the corridors are turned into crowded prayer halls. There's a problem with overtly Muslim jurors and with Muslim defendents, who claim their trials are unfair because the judge is a Jew. Crime is rampant and the public, the media, the politicians, even the authors of the Stasi report itself (reprinted in a .pdf file here in its entirety by Le Monde) all know who is responsible. The large minority of Frenchmen — although not all have citizenship — who perpetrate hate crimes against the French Republic are frequently "disaffected" Arabs, mostly from North Africa. They despise America, Jews and, unfortunately for the French, France itself. They are responsible for the rapid escalation of anti-Semitism in France. The once-suppressed EU report on European anti-Semitism said as much, and there aren't many Frenchmen who would deny it. Hence, the chauvinistic Le Pen's popularity, according to this Guardian report, continues to soar: 22 percent of French voters support him, which means he would still give the Socialists and the other parties on the left hell in an election. (Wait. It wasn't too long ago that every nationalist politician in France was fighting for all of Algeria to become part of France, if I recall.) Nicholas Sarkozy, the popular and efficient interior minister, and perhaps the only French politician willing to call a Muslim a Muslim, has been diligent in keeping social unrest under control, but it's an uphill struggle.
Before his tenure, the figures were really ugly: In 1999 crime in France was worse than in the U.S. By 2001, crime had increased 7.2 percent over 2000's figures; murders and attempted murders were up 35 percent; sexual assaults increased 40 percent; pick-pocketing on the Metro was up 38 percent. In 2002 there were violent clashes in Paris following Le Pen's electoral surprise; on Bastille Day, Chirac survived an assassination attempt; and last October, the mayor of Paris, Betrand Delanoe, was stabbed during an all-night rave he had organized called "Nuit Blanche." Not a small percentage of this can be laid at the feet of fanatical and angry French Muslims.
The Stasi Commission's report comes out against this backdrop of violence and racial tension, and at a time when the French concept of laïcité — formulated in a 1905 statute that was meant to resolve a church-state conflict, but failed to do so — is still being defined. Since at least 1989, when some Muslim girls were expelled from a school in the Paris suburb of Creteil for refusing to take off their scarves, the French have been struggling with problems that come from what happens when an ill-defined concept is fashioned into statutory art. Often, implementation of secularism has come down to an individual teacher or headmaster, like the poor atheist dad in all those Pagnol stories. That kind of arbitrary enforcement didn't do much for "racial relations." (Neither will the recent decision by the government to give French students a more accurate picture of the Holocaust, as reported in Le Nouvel Observateur.)
The Stasi report will, it is hoped, resolve all these difficult issues by making "aggressive" displays of religious conviction illegal, while still allowing small items of jewelry to be worn. This will have absolutely no effect on the larger, more difficult issues concerning Islamification, anti-Semitism and French political cowardice. But in France, some cheese is better than no cheese at all. So the papers are heralding the report as if it were divine writ. Libération's headline today: "Les sages disent oui à une loi sur le voile." In Le Monde, the joyous religious fervor of the secularists is on display, especially in this item, expressing the deeply felt faith of the authors (all liberal intellectuals — or whatever passes for such a thing in modern France) in the holiness of the secular state, and explaining that only the ideals of the république stand between Frenchmen and the barbarism of people with mainstream religious convictions. Elsewhere, the paper celebrates the noble, "intriguing" uniqueness of the French character — something Sadie Stein does better in this brilliant squib from Agora about the Beaujolais fetish, in which the French celebrate the annual arrival of that truly undrinkable plonk.
Meanwhile, if you want to buy milk or bread or Beaujolais on a Sunday in France, you'd better hightail it to a less secular place, because in France, Sunday is the day of rest and the stores are all shut tight.
You can look it up on your little French calendar, in which every week ends with the Lord's Day and in which every single day is labeled with the name of a Catholic saint. And those small crosses my barbaric daughters wear? They will be okay — provided they aren't use to theologically blind those around them — just as a tiny Magen David will be permissible around the neck of a state-threatening Jew. But no yarmulkes, no "big" crosses, and no scarves allowed. Gay-pride buttons? Go for it. Bellybuttons? Dude!