I didnt come back to this thread anymore, simply because it wasnt worth the annoyance. But since Steve brought up a barb relating to the discussion here in another thread, I decided I should come back and answer his post. I suppose its only polite.
Steve (as 41oo) wrote:All I have been saying nimh is that the religious dimension to the various disturbances has been deliberately played down, for fear of making bad relations between Muslims and the wider community worse.
My first reaction here is that all
I have been saying is that I dont believe this is true. I believe some French media played the
riots down, in general, especially initially, either out of fear of whipping up further violence or out of mere disinterest in the banlieues. But when it comes to the religious dimension of the riots, I think that, if anything, that's been
overplayed, in foreign media at least, the headlines of some of which sketched this urban rioting as some kind of religious insurgency.
My second reaction is annoyance, because no, thats
not all youve been saying. We've been through this,
here in this post. You have said "the French rioters are Muslim", "the French rioters are organised by Islamist groups", the French rioters "have one basic objective, the rejection of the French state and the establishment of an Islamic caliphate," "the jihadists behind the riots are of the same mind set as those who put bombs on trains in London and Madrid," "Islam [is] the common factor in uprisings all over France," and the French riots are part of the struggle that's going on between "modern western secularism v medieval Islamic fascism".
And those are the notions I have reacted to, and which I have argued are ill-informed and contraproductive in understanding and tackling the problems in these neighbourhoods.
Now of course you are welcome to
nuance those assertions now - I am happy if you do! If you now say that you "have no evidence that religious zealots organised the riots", for example, good, then we agree on that, cause I sure havent seen any. But frankly, I'm getting a bit annoyed by the routine of asserting something radical (in my view) quite clearly, then, when one gets called on it, saying "well, jeez, all i was saying was that <something much more nuanced>". Lash does it, and now you did it too.
I dunno, perhaps its not deliberate at all. Perhaps its a kind of dual mindset about this, a kind of shifting between two gradations of a concept. It appeared
in this post, where you agreed that "things are always more complicated the further you examine them", but at the same time came right back up with "the big picture" that you perceive the French riots to be part of. And that's exactly where we part ways, and where you
are saying much more than simply that "the religious dimension to the various disturbances has been deliberately played down". You are saying that the riots somehow fit in the "conflict between Islam and the West", that has "been going on for 1200 years", with "the current spat [beginning] 100 years ago".
This, IMO, is utter nonsense. The whole concept of 1200 years of conflict between Islam and the West is a non-starter. For much of those 1200 years, the Muslim and Western/Christian world have in fact interacted productively, in fertile cross-influence; the West actually has the Muslim world to thank for a boost in its own development. For most of the remaining of those 12 centuries, meanwhile, conflict between Western and Muslim countries has not been any more pronounced than that between the West and any other major place: say, the West vs Russia (from Napoleon to the Cold War) or Europe vs Africa (with consecutive centuries of colonial conquest and oppression and anti-colonial uprisings).
Moreover, grouping conflicts that did take place - say, the Suez crisis - as part of some overarching cultural-religious conflict is highly dubious, since they were rarely fought out as such and most of the time neither the West nor the Muslim world presented much of a closed front. The only era in which one can speak of an overarching conflict between Christian Europe and the Muslim Near East is that of the Crusades.
The last century, which you specify as the latest arena of this 1200-year clash of cultures, notably fails to measure up. If, say, the 1953 coup d'etat against the Iranian president, the Suez crisis, the uprisings in Palestine and two Iraq wars add up to "the conflict between Islam and the West", what incredible conflict of cultures between the West and Oriental Asia have we not seen! Hiroshima, Korea, Vietnam, the independence war in Indonesia and the later US-fostered Suharto coup - the number of victims dwarfs that between the suggested conflict between Islam and the West. And if you now, sensibly, interject that those conflicts took place within individual contexts, WW2, the Cold War, decolonisation, and that they thus just dont illustrate some kind of big, ongoing conflict between cultures, then why is that logic suddenly applicable re: Suez or Mossadegh?
Superficial derivations from Huntington have a lot to answer for. In any case, it is my conviction that anyone who looks at today's society's urban riots through the perception of 1200 years of conflict between the West and Islam, is going to fundamentally misperceive what's going on, and is going to come up with the wrong answers.
Steve (as 41oo) wrote:The admission from French tv that they restricted coverage of the rioting and pieces such as Gary Younge's in the Guardian where he went out of his way to not mention Muslim or Islam, add fuel to the suspicion that governments and the media fear the people cannot be trusted with the truth.
I think those two instances are totally different. The former is an admission of opportunistic damage-control. Younge, however, and I totally agree with him, tries to counterbalance the disproportional media focus on religion as possible cause by describing the riots for what he believes they really are: the kind of urban riots by perspectiveless young, often immigrant toughs that you can expect in a society where their communities are economically, socially and politically excluded and discriminated against.
Steve (as 41oo) wrote:Just as an aside, protests from Muslims in Denmark about the cartoons depicting Mohammed (nothing to do with unemployment or bad housing) have received very little coverage in the UK. I may be wrong but it does seem as if there is an attempt to eliminate or minimise the Muslim/religious aspect to news stories, and if thats impossible (as in the Danish case) to bury it on page 56.
Again, I'd say, if anything, the opposite. its hardly like they went rioting and burning cars for three weeks; they wrote an angry letter to the government. And you've heard about it. How often are you aware of an organisation writing a letter of protest against the Danish government? Even if it results in some kind of conference declaration of an organisation like the OIC?
I'd say it's only
because it's about Islam that it even reached your newspaper before the OIC involvement in the first place; it pretty much takes a Muslim connection for any kind of political development in a country like Denmark (or Holland) to reach a British newspaper outside election times.
have you ever known our dear Walter to make a tpyo?
We don't actually use the word a lot but our practice of and belief in multiculturism stems from our tradition of encouraging religious minorities to immigrate here, build communities, and worship more or less as they see fit. It seems (to me) that in Europe the approach is to co-opt the leadership of the minority groups under the benevolence of state structures (for instance, France's Muslim Parliament).