If you are an immigrant in Europe, especially a Muslim one, you are damned if you do and damned if you don't.
"At first, people thought Muslims were behind this," said a Pakistani taxi driver in Oslo when the news of the bomb attack and the murderous shooting rampage initially hit the news. But soon it became clear that the man behind the mayhem was tall and blond. The 32-year-old right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik wanted to spark a revolution against immigration, Muslims, and "multicultural Marxists."
Oklahoma Deja Vu
The Oslo attacks are eerily reminiscent of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people. News organizations quickly reported investigators were looking for several Middle Eastern men. But within 48 hours they arrested the very all-American Timothy McVeigh. A discovery that led to much media mea culpa about a rush to judgment.
What a difference 15 years, a 9/11, a London subway bombing and a Madrid train explosion makes.
No Muslim immigrant bought the fertilizer to make the bombs. No Muslim immigrant pulled the trigger. But the Oslo massacre will still put, not just Breivik, but also immigrants in the dock.
There is already enough hysteria against immigrants in Europe coming all the way from the top down to the man on the street. "Multiculturalism is a failure," French President Nicholas Sarkozy has declared. The right-wing Progress Party in Norway and Pim Fortuyn's LPF in the Netherlands rose to power by bashing immigrants.
Yet no political party, no matter how anti-immigrant, will acknowledge Breivik -- this thing of darkness -- as theirs. They will instead want to steer the conversation back to the "failures of multiculturalism" that have driven an all-Norwegian man to such desperate measures.
Yes, there is a failure of multiculturalism here but it's not the kind Sarkozy is talking about.
And it's revealed in one striking difference. If a Muslim extremist had committed these horrendous acts, the whole community would have had to answer for that act. It would an act of "Islamic terrorism" and would lead to even more strident calls to reform the entire immigrant system.
Breivik wanted to recreate a group like the Knights Templar who protected Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land in medieval times. But his acts will not be called a "Christian terrorism." Breivik will remain an individual, a rotten apple. We will remember his name just as we remember the names of Timothy McVeigh and "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski.
How many remember the name Shahzad Tanweer? He was one of the men behind the 7/7 London subway bombings. Those men were just lumped together as jihadists. Their identity is always defined by their community: Muslim, immigrant, or son of immigrants.
Clash of Civilizations?
This is not to say immigration has not brought with it a clash of values in Europe. The big fear is that multiculturalism has become all about tolerating the intolerant. And there is enough intolerance to go around on all sides. The fights over hijabs, female circumcision, honor killings, same-sex marriage, women's rights are not trivial.
But Europe has to face the fact that it has not opened its doors because of the goodness of its heart. It is a matter of necessity not noblesse oblige. It's let the immigrants in because it needs them to wash its clothes, and vacuum its shop floors. And most of all, it needs them to change the bed pans of its elderly. Stuck between a rock and a hard place -- a falling birthrate and an aging population -- it's holding its nose and looking outside its borders.
At some level Europe's vision of multiculturalism has been this -- that brown people can come to change its soiled sheets and mop its floors but bring with them only their shwarmas and doner kebabs. Yummy 'ethnic' cuisine everyone likes as long as it's not too spicy. The rest of their cultural baggage -- and citizenship rights-- they can leave at the border.
But it does not quite work out that way.
The Other
"We will not let fear paralyze us," asserted Oslo's Lutheran Archbishop Helga Haugland Byfuglien. "We will fight for the values that were attacked."
That's commendable. Tony Blair tried to do just that after the 7/7 subway bombings in London. But in trying to take the moral higher ground, in trying to protect Muslims from any kind of backlash, he unwittingly re-underlined their "Otherness" in the English imagination.
"The vast and overwhelming majority of Muslims, here and abroad, are decent and law abiding people who abhor this act of terrorism every bit as much as WE do," said Blair.
Until the immigrant becomes truly part of Tony Blair's "We," Europe will never be safe from both its Anders Breiviks and its Shahzad Tanweers.
Read a longer version of this post at Firstpost.com.
Follow Sandip Roy on Twitter: www.twitter.com/sandipr
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In his next article, perhaps Mr. Roy could highlight the plight of non-Muslims in Muslim countries like Pakistan or Egypt. Neither the Hindus and Christians of Pakistan nor the Copts of Egypt are immigrants - in fact they were there long before there was an Islam - yet they are brutally persecuted in these Muslim-majority countries. If nothing else, perhaps Mr. Roy can go visit Kashmir from which 500,000 Kashmiri Hindus were ethnically cleansed in the 1990's by Islamic terrorism. For that matter, I fail to understand why the world needs 56 "Islamic" countries - after all, we don't have "Christian" countries or "Hindu" countries anymore. Doesn't this lead to a feeling of exclusion on the part of non-Muslims in these countries? I eagerly await Roy's insights on these matters.
In 1971, Pakistani soldiers killed 3 million Hindus in what is now Bangladesh.
Pakistani Colonel Nadir Ali writes about what he was ordered to do there:
http://pakistan-observer.blogspot.com/2010/12/colonel-nadir-ali-dacca-march-1971.html
"An order was given to kill the Hindus. I received the same order many times and was reminded of it . The West Pakistani soldiery considered that Kosher. The Hamood Ur Rehman Commission Report mentions this order. Of the ninety-three lakh (9.3 million) refugees in India, ninety lakh were Hindus .That gave us, world-wide, a bad press and morally destroyed us."
Noone was punished for these crimes. These are the acts of the Pakistani government. R.J.Rummel, the scholar of genocide, classifies Pakistan as a "mega-murderer state", just below Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and China.
Finally the killing of 1000 Muslims in 2002 was a response to a Muslim mob burning alive 59 Hindu pilgrims on a train in Godhra. Infuriated Hindus took the law into their own hands and the government let them vent their fury. It should not have happened but it sent a message to Muslims that there will be a response to Muslim violence.
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article1513008.ece?homepage=true&sms_ss=email&at_xt=4d732c194ed160ba%2C0
The main source of tension in Europe and the US over immigration is not due to a schizophrenic-like desire for inexpensive menial labor on the one hand and an intolerance of foreign culture.
The real tension lies between the rich and powerful classes which import cheap labor by the millions and does it in literally in the face of the majority of the people in the host countries who have never, ever agreed to it.
For example, in the US poll after poll after poll for the past 30 years has shown that the vast majority of Americans have wanted illegal immigration stopped, and yet nothing significant gets done. Another example is how in the UK, it has come out that the Labor Party threw open the country's borders in part in order to gain a permanent electoral advantage.
The source of tension in the West over immigration is that a small minority has imported foreigners for their own gain. Living in their suburbs and gated communities, the rich and powerful only receive the benefits of cheap immigrant labor, and rarely deal with the problems that come from very different cultures compelled to live side by side.
Sadly, when majorities feel like they are powerless in the face of much more powerful minorities it saps the legitimacy of the system. I absolutely oppose, reject and abhor what happened in Norway, but when people feel powerless they lash out violently too.
I didn't hear any great cry to reform the immigration sysytem.
You are wrong about that. Like most of your post.
In the long run the Christian doctrine will bury almost all easy touch cultures. The ones I am wondering about are the Latino catholics--I think maybe they would stand against the intolerant Jihadists types.
The US for example is much more successful in making its immigrants feel american. After a couple of generations, their link to their country of origine is much less prevalent than their US bound. That is integration. Not multiculturalism, but Americanism. The history of the USA is all about immigration. The state and the individuals have a very strong knowledge of what it means, and how to achieve it. Europe has much more trouble with it and much less experience in it.
No matter where they are they are trouble and nothing but trouble.
Sandip said "The fights over hijabs, female circumcision, honor killings, same-sex marriage, women's rights are not trivial."
No they're not but they are trivial compared to the bombings, murder and destruction of neighborhoods, town and in time entire countries. Their constant call for all to convert to their violent and backward so-called religion.
Sandip also seems to claim that there will never be peace in the host countries until, and unless, all aspects of muslum life are fully accepted by the non consenting people of that country. That sounds like a threat to me and the best way to handle a threat is to end it as soon as possible before it becomes a greater threat. In this case, the best thing would be is to deport ALL MUSLIMS from the host countries and prevent any more from immigrating to that country again.
All Western countries would be better without muslims in them. That's a fact.
As soon as Muslims grow to a considerable percentage of the population and gain power, their ideas about others shift. For examples of justification for second-class citizen, look at the Quran: "Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day and who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth from those who were given the Scripture - [fight] until they give the jizyah willingly while they are humbled." (Quran 9:29). The "people of the book/Scripture" referenced in this Sahih translation (explicitly stated in other translations) are Jews and Christians. So, fight them until they "willingly" pay a tax not given to Muslims. IRONY. This is an imperative, not a suggestion.
There are three phases to jihad as stated by ex-terrorist Walid Shoebat: 1. Tolerance; 2. Defensive Jihad; 3. Offensive Jihad. The empowerment of Muslims to change the culture around them directly rises as their numbers increase.
Lastly, I hope all forms of political correctness would be banished so we can actually freely talk about issues without having to worry about who we're "offending" and whatnot. Someone is always offended. We don't need a government to pamper us.
I'd like to end this with the fact that I COMPLETELY ABHOR what Breivik did. He is disgusting and in fact not a Christian at all if you read his manifesto. He even states multiple times that he is not a religious person (p. 676, 681).
In conclusion, I agree with you that something is wrong with Islam.
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Would you like to carry out an ethnic analysis of employed csarers who do such tasks and tell us what proportion are Muslim males?
What I don't care for in regard to immigrants is their refusal to assimilate. They don't want to learn the language of the country THEY have immigrated to,they want to bring all their traditions, customs, & religion, want to wear the same clothes they were wearing back home...in other words, to make a "little......" (name of place they came from) in the country THEY decided to immigrate to. Native people of their adopted country don't like it & I don't blame them. If the immigrant wants only to tote all this baggage from home to the place they've decided to immigrate to, why don't they just STAY HOME?
What? You're not making any sense.
It is my goal that by mid-2013, I will be living in a certain country in Europe, if all goes my way. If i find my way to, say, Rome, I'm going to do like the Romans do, in how I conduct my life there. If Romans in Rome eat a lot of pasta & wash it down w/red wine, chances are pretty good that I'm going to follow suit. If Romans don't tool around town in the car w/windows down & music blaring, it's a good bet I won't be either. If Roman women my age in Rome tend to wear skirts & dresses far more often than pants, you'll see me in that rather than long, ugly shapeless garments that go from neck to ankle. If Romans abstain from meat on Fridays--as I do--I'll be doing the same.
In other words, "When in Rome, do like the Romans."
Hope this clarifies what I said.
Immigrants are far better off doing so rather than toting all that cultural baggage w/them to their new home. Don't care what the imm't does in his/her home, what s/he eats, wears, speaks (oops--4got to mention that in prior post--so, I'll say it here: if I should find myself in the Eternal City aka Rome anytime in 2013, & haven't bcom fluent in Italian by then, I am sure going to make it my business to do so pronto. If I were going to Morocco, learning Arabic would be a priority....
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/christian-terrorism-and-islamophobia/
Yes there is another way to look at it. Sam Harris is great at explaining the world we live in, through evidence and reason, not faith and ignorance. Other readers who don't know about him should search for him on YouTube and watch some of his lectures and debates. Especially young people who haven't closed their minds to ideas and changing their views as the evidence is presented.
Yes there is. Sam is one of the best logical thinkers I've ever witnessed. If you're young enough to still have an open mind, and not all that inclined to believe things on the 'faith' others tell you to have, search for him on YouTube and TED, and watch some of his lectures and debates. (I'm talking to other readers, not the person I'm quoting).
If you do, you'll see that while atheism generally scoffs at all religion, Sam takes the time to show how by 'respecting' others 'faith', we are not helping the well-being of the human race, and in the case of Islam, we are ignoring a religion that is much more dangerous than the others.
I think someone probably predicted it wouldn't happen peacefully. It seems to slowly work if you let all the kids grow up together in school. Yet I wonder what was the purpose of this experiment anyways? Was it just to scrub the floors and change the bed pan?
Do they want to come and join our society? We can do that. Do they want to come and call us dirty names? They are doing a lot of that and while no one of right mind would support that sort of violence, there are some very angry responses to being thugged to support multiculturalism and in the case of the United States, a hoard of gimme, gimme illegal aliens.
A question to all... will our governments look at the anger and realize a vote on this issue would be an excellent way to pacify the processes? I hope so, and the 2012 election would be perfect for such a vote.
No, these events are the works of a very derranged individual and should be viewed as such. Had he attacked non-nordic people this posting might make more sense, but he didn't.