Pentagon Board Report: "US 'alienating' world's Muslims"

You beat me to both of those points, nimh, but I can't help myself.

australia wrote:

So, according to you geniuses, can i paraphrase your opinion, that there is no muslim problem in europe and as many muslims as possible should be encouraged to immigrate there?

I'm not sure how you get this from several statements asking for verifiable facts. I suspect it's a smokescreen, as we all still await sources for your numbers.

As far as the JustWonders' article, I don't attach weight to conclusive statements. A bolded statement floating without a factual anchor, or even an argument, is less than compelling no matter who said it. Again, I await real numbers.

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But nimh, what percentage of muslims in your country, would you start to feel uncomfortable with? 10%, 20%, 50%? I am interested to know your view.

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Nimh - I understand what you're saying. I just found it interesting (the article) in light of the direction this thread has taken.

Interesting (but perhaps not pertinent at all), is that a friend of mine recently vacationed in Switzerland where his hotel-room TV had 10 stations. Six were Arab and four English.

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australia wrote:

But nimh, what percentage of muslims in your country, would you start to feel uncomfortable with? 10%, 20%, 50%? I am interested to know your view.

I dunno, all depends. The "third generation" of Muslims here (those my age and younger who were born here) are mostly as modern and articulate as any of us, and so much freeer than their parents that there's this severe alienation between the generations. On the other hand, a minority of 'em seems to be going the other way, radicalising rapidly - especially the higher educated ones, apparently, frustrated perhaps by how they cant seem to get through within the system, and tempted astray by radical sites and mosques. What will happen next? Nothing is stable, today's young Moroccan Muslims and Muslimas are one hell of a different breed than their docile parents. That good or bad? I dunno yet, but I know that what tomorrow's Dutch Muslims will be like is a lot more important to my comfort level than how many of 'em there'll be.

JW, thats amazing - I travel regularly enough around Europe, but I've never seen that. Switzerland, eh? Well, I havent been there much - but they dont have many Muslims living there actually (now Switzerland has strict immigration rules, they outdo us all I think). So I havent got a clue. What we have in Holland on TV is a Turkish station, usually also a Moroccan station, and very rarely a Middle-Eastern news station. Along with three public and five private mainstream Dutch stations, two or three Dutch music stations and a kids channel, and usually a Belgian station or two, two or three German stations, the BBC, CNN, French TV5 and occasionally the Italian RAI.

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comment
This whole mess would not have happened including 9-11 if we had not sided with Israel unconditionally. Every day Bush digs a deeper hole for us. If we force Bush out of office he and his thugs will end up in prison as international criminals.

What can we do? Educate your friends to use the internet for the news of what is really going on, you cannot get the truth from the media. The more informed the better. We as a nation have never been in so much trouble. When Bush loses his smirk we will know we are making headway.

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I can't speak for the netherlands as I have never been there, but a lot of german people I know, of different ages are putting the steps into place to emigrate because of the muslim population increase. I travel to Germany a lot and you tend to find a huge amount of muslims in city areas such as berlin, hamburg, munich etc but not many in smaller towns. This makes sense because of the fact that there is less work in these towns. But the point I am making, is that things must have changed a lot for people to want to leave the country. The most quoted comment from german people I know is " we feel like a foreigner in our own country".

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Yeah you hear that a lot. And the cities have changed, enormously, its true. Biggest cities here have about half minority population now (not just Muslims, from all over), and if you look at, say, high school kids, its much more still. And its always grating to find that the place you grew up in no longer exists. Most all of my mum's family, which grew up in the working class area of downtown The Hague, have moved to the outerlying neighbourhoods or out of town altogether, though one or two are staying put.

But then again its the same story every generation, isnt it. I mean, whenever in these past two centuries have the biggest European cities not changed beyond recognition within one generation? Back in the seventies those folk/schlager singers from the Jordaan in Amsterdam were already singing tunes about how the Jordaan just wasnt the Jordaan anymore, the people they just werent the same, and the fun times of old would not return - or they would hotly contest those saying so, and assert they were wrong because "Hey, Amsterdam, you're still just like back then" - and all of that was when hardly any Muslim had yet set foot in the neighbourhood.

Its the same in New York or LA, I'm sure - whole neighbourhoods that turned from Irish to Italian, from Italian to black, from black to hispanic ... Meanwhile, the talk of emigration is mostly just that - talk. Actual numbers are very small, beyond the odd specific group - say, farmers heading for Poland to exchange the land they own here for large farms that go for cheap.

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I know what you are saying. It was a shock for me the first time I ever went to Germany about 6 years ago. I had the typical stereotype expectations that all I would see in Germany was blonde hair, blue eyed people and it was exactly te opposite. I think Germany has the most liberal immigration policy because of their war history and needing to show the world that they have changed. Maybe I am too sentimental but I think it would be sad if Europe lost a lot of the culture that it is famous for.

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Sorry for the whole double post / editing going on there. I posted prematurely, then finished the post and posted it in full, then realised it was already there, went back and changed the first one to the complete version and deleted the second one. Kinda confusing. Anyway, its done now ;-)

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australia wrote:

I think Germany has the most liberal immigration policy because of their war history and needing to show the world that they have changed.

I do think their history had a lot to do with what was, it's true, one of Europe's most liberal immigration policies, yeah. But Walter can probably say more about that.

They've been progressively tightening it over the past ten years though, and now are no less strict than most other European countries - who have in turn also tightened theirs. Mostly because nobody wants to be the country with the freeest law, especially considering asylum-seekers, since then all the asylum-seekers would go there.

We're gonna have to arrive at some kind of EU-harmonized immigration policy, because otherwise each government will keep on trying to compete with every other to be the strictest, and we'll end up with a Fortress Europe that won't let in even the most persecuted of refugees anymore. (I think it's a scandal, if you look at all the asylum-seekers we're turning back now. Random example: the Dutch government considers Iran a "safe country", and thus will automatically reject any asylum application by an Iranian.)

But I dont think we're gonna agree here on what that harmonized policy should be ;-)

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Mind you, to be fair, I feel the same way when I go to egypt and see mc donalds everywhere. I am against one culture invading and taking over another.

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JustWonders wrote:

Interesting (but perhaps not pertinent at all), is that a friend of mine recently vacationed in Switzerland where his hotel-room TV had 10 stations. Six were Arab and four English.

That's really interesting:
why didn't they show the more than 16 German, eight Italian, six French programs, you can get (at least) elsewhere in Swiss hotels - besides the national Swiss ones?

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australia wrote:

I know what you are saying. It was a shock for me the first time I ever went to Germany about 6 years ago. I had the typical stereotype expectations that all I would see in Germany was blonde hair, blue eyed people and it was exactly te opposite. I think Germany has the most liberal immigration policy because of their war history and needing to show the world that they have changed. Maybe I am too sentimental but I think it would be sad if Europe lost a lot of the culture that it is famous for.

Germany always had a much greater mix than, say, Sweden and the blue-eyed flaxen-haired stereotype is just a Wagnerian myth.

And can lead to very dangerous racist nonsense.

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You missed the point

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australia wrote:

I can't speak for the netherlands as I have never been there, but a lot of german people I know, of different ages are putting the steps into place to emigrate because of the muslim population increase. I travel to Germany a lot and you tend to find a huge amount of muslims in city areas such as berlin, hamburg, munich etc but not many in smaller towns. This makes sense because of the fact that there is less work in these towns. But the point I am making, is that things must have changed a lot for people to want to leave the country. The most quoted comment from german people I know is " we feel like a foreigner in our own country".

Seems,

a) you met only Nazis

b) you have a rather minimal and narrowed knowledge/view of Germany.

The religious beliefs in Germany:
Protestant 34%, Roman Catholic 34%, Muslim 3.7%, unaffiliated or other 28.3% .

Quote:

" we feel like a foreigner in our own country"

Hating foreigners seems to be the first qualification to become a "patriot".
(However, I partly can agree with that, since my wife is from the Rhineland, here, in the heart of Westphalia, and my local newspaper is called "The Patriot".)

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I didn't meet any nazis. Just germans who do not like the change that germany is undergoing. Some people like change but others don't. Just because someone does not like the way their city scape is changing, does not make them nazis. Nazis are people who hate a race or religion so much that they systematically want to wipe out the entire race. A big difference to what I am talking about.

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No, it's not, but you don't know it.

Joe

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Well, australia, those people you know must be very similar to me then: certainly they are members of the local and regional history societies, do a lot of charity work for the restauration of historic buildings, protest against the building of ultra modern ones as well as against globalisation ...

Obvioiusly you really don't know much about Nazis!

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Source

Christmas Song Revives Religious Debate

Mon Dec 6, 8:12 AM ET

ROME (Reuters) - An Italian teacher's efforts to make a Christmas carol more acceptable to young Muslim students by removing the word "Jesus" has rekindled the debate over religious symbols in the Roman Catholic country.

A middle-school teacher in the northern Italian town of Como set off a storm when she told Muslims in her class that if they preferred they could replace the line "this is the day of Jesus" with "this is the day of virtue."

"Jesus banned in Christmas songs" the daily Il Giornale, run by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's brother, said in a front-page headline Sunday.

"Substituting the word Jesus in a Christmas song is a serious mistake and an offence against the entire Catholic community," Como's mayor, Stefano Bruno, from the center-right Forza Italia (Go Italy) party, told Agi news agency.

Religion has been an increasingly prickly issue in Italy as immigrant communities grow.

A judge sparked a nationwide controversy a year ago when he ordered that a crucifix be taken off a school wall. Pope John Paul (news - web sites) weighed in saying it was undemocratic and dangerous to try to erase a country's religious symbols.

Tension mounted again earlier this year when a nursery school refused to hire a Muslim woman, saying her headscarf could scare the children.

But before the latest standoff exploded into a full-blown controversy, the 10- and 11-year-old students resolved the issue by opting to stick to the original lyrics.

The director of the school, Pasquale Capria, told reporters on Sunday: "The foreign students themselves told me it wasn't a problem for them to sing Jesus."

Foreigners, many of them Muslim, represent about 20 percent of the students at the school. There are some one million Muslims living in Italy, a country of around 57 million people.

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Quote:

But before the latest standoff exploded into a full-blown controversy, the 10- and 11-year-old students resolved the issue by opting to stick to the original lyrics.

The director of the school, Pasquale Capria, told reporters on Sunday: "The foreign students themselves told me it wasn't a problem for them to sing Jesus."

Sometimes we can get all worked up over nothing and make things a bigger deal than they need to be. The kids got it right.

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Pentagon Board Report: "US 'alienating' world's Muslims"

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