Via Dave Justus, the Brussels Journal's Paul Belien has an eye-opening roundup of media reports on the Muslim violence that is afflicting not just France (where riots continue to spread for a tenth day despite calls for calm), but much of Europe.
Here's a FOX News report on the situation in Sweden:
But immigrants, even poor and unemployed ones, don't always declare war on their adopted country. What's different this time is that poor, disaffected Muslims are all too receptive to the messages of hate preached by Muslim extremists. This isn't some far-right theory; I got it straight from the Associated Press, which reports:
Here's a FOX News report on the situation in Sweden:
Swedish authorities in the southern city of Malmo have been busy with a sudden influx of Muslim immigrants — 90 percent of whom are unemployed and many who are angry and taking it out on the country that took them in.Don't like FOX news? Blogger Henrik translates a report from Denmark's Jyllands-Posten daily:
"If we park our car it will be damaged — so we have to go very often in two vehicles, one just to protect the other vehicle," said Rolf Landgren, a Malmo police officer.
Rosenhøj Mall has several nights in a row been the scene of the worst riots in Århus for years. "This area belongs to us", the youths proclaim. Sunday evening saw a new arson attack.And Belien himself translates this report from Belgium's Knack:
Their words sound like a clear declaration of war on the Danish society. Police must stay out. The area belongs to immigrants.
The police have been told [by the Mayor] that it is "not expedient" to patrol [in the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek] and officers are not allowed to drink coffee or eat a sandwich in the street during Ramadan.Commenting on these events, Belien writes:
Our mainstream media, in attempts to preserve the Left’s chimera of “universal cultural compatibility,” hardly write about all this. Nevertheless, for some years now West European city folk and police officers have been familiar with the reality that certain areas of major European cities are no-go areas, especially at night and certainly if you are white or wearing a uniform. Three years ago, a French friend who had his car stolen learned that the thieves had parked the car in a particular suburb. When he went to the police he was told that the police did not operate in that neighbourhood and consequently would not be able to retrieve his car. This is Western Europe in the early 21st century.Is the current situation really due to a simple failure of "cultural compatibility"? Certainly Europe's open-door immigration policies and stagnating welfare-state economies certainly aren't helping matters. As Instapundit reader Joel Shepherd notes, France's high rates of unemployment are fueling frustration and resentment among immigrants there.
But immigrants, even poor and unemployed ones, don't always declare war on their adopted country. What's different this time is that poor, disaffected Muslims are all too receptive to the messages of hate preached by Muslim extremists. This isn't some far-right theory; I got it straight from the Associated Press, which reports:
The unrest is forcing France to confront long-simmering anger in poor suburbs ringing the big cities which are mainly populated by immigrants and their French-born families, often from Muslim North Africa. They are marked by high unemployment, discrimination and despair — fertile terrain for crime of all sorts and Muslim extremists offering frustrated youths a way out.And there does definitely appear to be a coordinated extremist element behind the French riots. The New York Times says that "most rioters appear to be teenage boys bent more on making the news than making a coherent political statement", and that may be true. But teenage boys don't have their own bomb factories. The AP reports:
Police found a gasoline bomb-making factory in a southern suburb of the city, with more than 100 bottles, gallons of fuel and hoods for hiding rioters' faces, a senior Justice Ministry official said Sunday.Not all Muslims want to destroy Western society and replace it with Islamic rule. But some do. And the failure of European socioeconomic policies is providing them with hordes of impressionable young recruits.
Six youths, all aged under 18, were arrested in the raid Saturday night on a building in Evry south of Paris where the gasoline bombs were being put together, Jean-Marie Huet, the ministry's director of criminal affairs and pardons, told The Associated Press.
The discovery, Huet said, shows that gasoline bombs being used by rioters "are not being improvised by kids in their bathrooms."
laff....
Here is what is recruiting young European muslims to the cause:
1. The US has backed the state of Israel in treating the palestinians like shit for three generations.
2. The US government's general demonizing of all muslims the last 5 years.
3. The West invading Iraq for no real reason (except getting their oil)
4. The impotent and cowardly position most European states have taken when it comes to keeping the world civilized.
Point one creates deeply rooted anger. Point two makes them paranoid that all Westerners might hate them. Point three focuses their anger and provides endless examples of how unjustly muslims are treated and Point four takes away the hope that anyone will ever be able to end this in a peaceful way.
Ok... I am simplifying this a bit. But really, go read what Goebbels &co. wrote about the jews in the 30's Germany and you will see that he was playing the same propaganda as you are writing above.
And I am not saying you are conciously being unjust or wrong. What I am saying is that you have fallen pray to the perpetrators in point 2 above.
Think about it... 10 years ago, when someone said to you: "What is a muslim?" I am pretty sure your associations were somewhere along the lines of waterpipes, flying carpets, bellydancing and hashish.
A muslim is no different from you or me bud, and if we belonged to a group of people that were put in the same thumbscrews as the West has put muslims... I am pretty sure we would be right now banging up cars and torching houses.
For starters.
I'm not sure I agree 100% with your police work there, Lou. France opposed the invasion of Iraq. Shouldn't it get a free pass?
Also, I have simply written that unemployed, frustrated young men are more receptive to the message of extremists. This is hardly a controversial view. As I point out in my post, which you really don't seem to have read, the Associated Press itself makes the same point. Perhaps the MSM itself is packed with Nazi sympathizers?
Just imagine you are one of them... just for a minute. You are a young, unemployed muslim, surrounded with these western christians that have been (or apathically watching other western christians) drop s*** on Islam and anything they hold sacred for years on end.
You hear that Iran can not have nuclear power because they are inferior people, Libya is not allowed to do s*** because they said no to letting western oilcompanies steal all their oil, Palestinians are supposed to be forever and ever prisoners in some uber-workcamps so that Israeli industry can have access to cheap workforce when they need, Iraq is invaded because... because... well no one really knows, unless it is just to take their oil and to funnel US taxpayers money into the Halliburton coffers.
Come on Gajin, tell me that something like this was happening to the USA, that Ebil Canadians were going around stealing all your resources and what they could not take with them they would burn down and you would just cuddle up under your bike and hope things got better by themselves??!! Never! And even if you happened to be in Japan instead of the US when this was going on, you would kick out some Japaneese teeth rather than doing nothing, just because they are friendly with Canadians.
And you know what, even I would say you were the better man for it.
Differences and friction between groups is natural and inevitable, for as long as the groups remain separate. Assimilation is very difficult, and relations can be easily inflamed. Remember how easily Milosevic disintegrated the multiethnic Yugoslavia? It seems that there are certainly problems with lack of opportunity and barriers to integration in Europe, and the US invasion of Iraq has also fostered polarization.
Do you not see that it is religions (all of which are man-made, but satisfy important personal and social needs) that divide rather unify mankind? Religions were quite useful at certain points in history bringing diverse peoples together - sometimes by force, when that religion provided a source of unity that was much stronger than the unity of opposing peoples, but religion also make it difficult for people with different backgrounds to live together peacefully and to forget past grievances.
This has been true certainly even within the West, where different Christian sects have persecuted and gone to war against each other for centuries, only reaching some accommodation after being exhausted by WWII and as modernization allowed many to see their particular religious sect as not representing the whole "truth". Of course this struggle continues today, because demagogues who care mostly about personal gain and fame realize that appealing to religion is particularly effective.
There is no united Judaism either, by the way - and Israel is torn by religious and ethnic faction. Even if they would settle their disputes with Palestinians, it is difficult to think of Israel as becoming a peaceful country. They can't even decide what is a lawful wedding!
mama, as to Islam, the same is true. Muslims are no different from other peoples who are riven by divisions. Where do Shias and Sunnis actually live together peacefully? Where do these people actually get along well with others of different faiths? Muslims need to create open, modernizing societies where people put aside their religious differences. The abating of religious tension inside the West is what has made it strong - after people got tired of fighting each other - as well as creating open societies where people were able to pursue their own lives without ruinous government interference. We all need to do the same thing globally.
What has happened in the West must be achieved within Islam as well, or Muslims will always remain backwards and bitter, nursing memories of a glorious past rather than trying to build a shared future with others.
By the way, it was competition within the West and with Russia that led to our interference with Middle Eastern countries - there is no particular desire to oppress Muslims; we have been equally meddlesome in other countries, and our policies in the Middle East (and India) today have as much to do with trying to check the growing strength of China as it does with frustration over the failed modernization of Islam.
You have trouble looking through the world without a religious filter. But if you think for a moment of how many different faiths there are, all proclaiming to be the sole "truth" and willing to kill each other for it, then perhaps you may think the somewhere God must be laughing at our foolishness and arrogance!
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