The New Republic

"What about the Catholics? They are too involved in postmodernism and "liberation theology." Catholics are now enemies of Western Civilization." What? Why is TNR allowing this continued posting of anti-Catholic hatred.

- brian@xao.com

January 16, 2007 at 4:50pm

Teplukhin You state: "they're unemployed, bored, angry, in many cases dumb and in all cases lost between two cultures..." To what extent do you see this a problem for immigrants in other Nothern European countries? Stephen from Minneapolis PS There are a very large number of Somalian immigrants here in Minneapolis and they are generally "welcomed" and youth seem to be employeed. (You will see them wearing "Target Red" hijabs at the Target checkout counters. Many, many of these young immigrants were out doing grassroots door knocking in the Keith Ellison campaign. The is a Somali caucus with in the Minnesota DFL (our state's Democratic Party. Assimilation is not easy (Somali cab drivers and the problem of "booze" has been brought up my Martin), but a welcoming community and job opportunities makes it easier.

- src

January 16, 2007 at 4:54pm

"Only religious people normally have larger families." Yeah, those Chinese, who represent 1/5 of humanity sure are religious. Man td, sometimes your moronic statements are amusing, where do you dig up such nonsense? Not all the muslims fit that pattern, it depends on the country that originated from, I have known many Moroccans who speak French fluently and abide by the customs and norms of France, while still maintaining their muslim identity.

- blackton

January 16, 2007 at 5:21pm

- teplukhin

January 16, 2007 at 5:25pm

src, I'm no expert on immigration or much of anything, to be honest. The little I know is that immigration to the US tends to be more successful because in the US you're allowed, indeed encouraged, to have a dual identity. We have no problem with, in fact promote, the notion of hyphenated americans (asian-american, lebanese-american, greek-american, african-american, irish- italian- etc american). So it's utterly no surprise that there are now very large communities across the midwest (IIUC 30,000 in Columbus OH, another huge one in Milwaukee) of somali-americans. Add to the favorable cultural environment a favorable political/state environment. Favorable in the sense of attracting the very best immigrants-- ie the strivers, not the resenters-- and then leaving them more or less alone to build businesses, raise families and generally pursue happiness as they see fit. The US, probably alone among modern nations, has always welcomed religious minorities, especially those that display commercial acumen, going all the way back to the quakers of Franklin's day. It doesn't hurt, in fact helps, matters that welfare is so scarce here; there's a de facto system of sticks and carrots in place that make it clear to would-be immigrants which outcomes they can expect from the US. It also doesn't hurt that most of the muslim immigrants to the US have come not from former colonies that still harbor deep antipathy to the colonialists (Algeria, for ex) but from relatively mercantile, apolitical backgrounds in places like Lebanon. Anyway, that's my $0.02. Note how few of these critical, largely American, success factors obtain in today's France. They've got a very steep hill to climb and could do with some instruction by their American friends.

- teplukhin

January 16, 2007 at 5:36pm

I find it rather astounding your simultaneous dismissal and embrace of things Judeo-Christian. Your condescension would be laughable except that you seem total immune to the schizo with which you regard such things. Just how the hell does such a sentiment work out? It would seem to me if you had done enough searching to validate your 'convictions' such cavalier and insouciant disregard would not present itself as such.

- boxofrox

January 16, 2007 at 7:32pm

"What? Why is TNR allowing this continued posting of anti-Catholic hatred." Anti-Catholic hatred? I am a very fair man. Pope John Paul II, for instance, is greatly responsible for the collapse of Communism. The Catholic Church has also admirably educated children in the pverty stricken inner cities.

- thomsondavid

January 17, 2007 at 12:08am

I don't trust Sarkhozy. Any person that invokes Christianity as a political weapon in an excludent way doesn't know the first thing about Christianity. I'm predicting dark times in France.

- luispc

January 17, 2007 at 2:57am

Those who minimize the role of Islam in prompting and sustaining the vicious, anti-social behavior of France's Muslim youth population are taking a much too literalist view of what religion in general, and Islam in particular, constitutes. The compartmentalized religion modern Westerners are used to is a relatively recent phenomenon, and Islam, with its total regulation of life, from the proper way to run a country to the correct way to clean yourself after sex or animal husbandry (or sex during animal husbandry) is so much more than a private metaphysics or set of communal rituals to be trotted out during weddings and funerals. Islam is also an ethos, the chief element of which is a belief in the exaltedness of Muslims and the inherent inferiority of infidels, who may be cheated, robbed, and assaulted with impunity until finally they accept Muslim domination and their own reduction to the status of cringing, humiliated supplicants. Today's teenage and 20-something arsonists and o.g. "outremer gangstas" need not pray 5 times a day or give the zakat or have anything at all in the way of a religious consciousness to still have thoroughly imbibed this hyper-aggressive ethos. And when those "jeunes" become 30 and 40 year old men, and recoil from their earlier lives of petty crime, mindless destruction, and meaningless promiscuity, it will be to Islam they will turn in order to regain some sense of "dignity" and "manhood", following in the steps of so many others (from Malcolm Little to Richard Reid and Jose Padilla). And their mischief in the streets of Paris will suddenly look less like "Grand Theft Auto" and a whole lot more like "Gears of War". PS: Stephen from Minneapolis, in celebrating our enrichedness at the hands of those wonderful Minnesota Somalis- so colorful and attractive in their "Target red" hijabs, so open-minded and civic as to campaign for an openly Muslim congressman, a congressman whose loyalty of course is first to our country, and whose election in no way represents to them a baby step in the eventual hijack of the U.S.- alludes to the slightly disturbing fact that Minneapolis Somali taxi drivers have taken it upon themselves to enforce sharia upon the rest of us by refusing to transport passengers carrying alcohol. This is slightly disturbing only because several other things the Somali community is currently up to- from turning out in force to protest the fall of the al-Qaeda-harboring Islamist government in Mogadishu (http://www.startribune.com/462/story/907052.html) to actually going home to fight in that jihad- are relatively even MORE disturbing.

- severus

January 17, 2007 at 3:29pm

Ah, severus, so now the argument shifts from actual Islamism among young French beurs, for which there is not much evidence, to latent Islamism. Fine, let's assume that your diagnostic skills are far more refined than mine, and that you can, W-like, peer inside their souls and say which Islamist grain will grow and which will not. But could you also please predict just when, where, how many and in what degree this future Islamist wave will surge and break? In 2035? Or maybe 2060?

- teplukhin

January 17, 2007 at 4:45pm

". . . so open-minded and civic as to campaign for an openly Muslim congressman, a congressman whose loyalty of course is first to our country, and whose election in no way represents to them a baby step in the eventual hijack of the U.S." So a secretly muslim congressman would have been better? It's not clear to me why said congressman should be any more bound to hide his religion than, say, Rick Santorum obscured his. Indeed, there's now somewhat of a backlash against hyper-religiosity in public life, so maybe across the board we'll have a little less invocation of divine approval for public policy decisions.

- ironyroad

January 17, 2007 at 8:41pm

In order to fret "latent Islamism" I would first have to be confident of its existence; that it had an independent reality; and that it was not simply an artificial construct imposed from without. Pray tell, what is "Islamism" and how does one become an "Islamist"? Is bin Laden an Islamist? Harder question: are all Wahhabis? If so, is Ahmadinejad and the rest of the Iranian executive? If so, how useful can a conceptual category be that conflates the two most bitter sectarian rivals in all of Islam and ignores the real fissures between them that infidels can so usefully exploit (or have the worried rumblings in Riyadh over Iran's nuclear program escaped you)? And if not why should I care about a category which captures one but not the other of the world's two most dangerous Muslim assholes? Was Saddam Hussein an Islamist? Was Hafez Assad, whose party newspaper once called Islam "a mummy in the museum of history"? What about Qadhdhafi, who those of a certain age can remember having once been the face of international terrorism? Is this serial blasphemer, with his little "Green Book" and pretensions of supplanting Muhammad and his dispensation, an "Islamist"? http://www.danielpipes.org/books/rushdie-chapter.p hp If not, what use is a category that distracts me from several of the most dangerous anti-American, anti-Western, antisemitic Arab/Muslims thugs out there? And if so, doesn't this concede that outward signs of piety or ritual tell us nothing about who and who is not a menace, and that even without conscious religious identity, the atmospherics of as predatory a religion as Islam can remain, and be nursed, and manifest itself in unpredictable bursts of anti-social aggression that in time will almost certainly revert to proven and religiously and culturally sanctioned forms- that of full-blown jihad? Please tell me how these supposedly "non-Islamist" French Muslims differ from the alienated, seething Muslims in Holland- or Britain- or Scandinavia? Why do these non-Islamist Muslims take so much pleasure in menacing France's tiny community of Jews? And why are we repeatedly told France's President must bend his foreign policy to Arab Muslim interests or risk losing the domestic "peace" (i.e. nights when only a few dozen cars are burned outside Paris)? Where do all these attitudes, so confusingly like those of real "Islamists", come from? The latest 50 Cent album? Grand Theft Auto 14?

- severus

January 18, 2007 at 12:56pm

Do you think Sarkozy will "bend his foreign policy to Arab Muslim interests"? The old elites, sure. But there's nothing I've seen in Sarko's record or character to suggest that he's of a feather with the popinjay or ChIrak.

- teplukhin

January 18, 2007 at 2:23pm

Were Sarko or Segolene to relax labor laws to promote hiring and enable firing of low-skilled kids, the unemployment rate, and the Grand Torch Auto incidents, would fall by half within a few weeks. Not saying the violence against jews isn't a major problem, but the gangsta stuff in the projects just isn't connected to it in any organic way. Two distinct and separate issues, IMO

- teplukhin

January 18, 2007 at 2:26pm

There was a discussion elsewhere on whether committed Mormons should be summarily disqualified from running for President. Mormonism is the only major religion completely autochthonous to America. Mormonism does not seek to hijack America and use its wealth and power to serve alien interests. Mormonism's long-term trajectory will not lead to the barbarization of America. Any politician who ostentatiously declares himself a Muslim, who thrusts this fact into the public square and affirms it will bear any influence whatsoever on his governing philosophy, who in short declares Islam is anything more than a matter of private faith is immediately suspect and should be ceaselessly scrutinized to see where his true loyalties lie. If anyone believes Islam is in any way compatible with an enlightened political dispensation predicated upon freedom and equality for all I suggest taking the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and seeing what the Muslim Declaration of Human Rights excised and mutated from it.

- severus

January 18, 2007 at 10:44pm

Serevus You references the Minneapolis Star/Tribune for your claim that Somalis turned out "...in force to protest the fall of the al-Qaeda-harboring Islamist government in Mogadishu (http://www.startribune.com/462/story/907052.html) " In making this claim, you distorted the Tribune article. First, the title of the news article is "Area Somalis Want Peace for Homeland" Second, the sub-heading of the article reads: "Many of the 1,500 protesters in Minneapolis were angered that the U.S. gave tacit support for ousting of Islamists". The key work here is "MANY" Severus, "Many" does not equate will "all" or "in mass". In fact, the article also reports the opinion MANY members of the Somali community in Minneapolis supported the OVERTHROW of Union of Islamic Courts. In other words, the Tribune reports that there is a division of opinion within the Somali community and not monolithic as you would suggest. Moreover, it is not at all clear that those who protested the overthrow UIC government did so because of that governments relationship to al-Qaeda. There are other, independent reasons

- src

January 18, 2007 at 10:59pm

Stephen from Minneapolis tells us we should take local Somalis at their absolute literal word, and that when they (actually, their more polished spokesmen) say they are for "peace" and "stability", these words are to be understood unproblematically, as if the things they signified were their normally-understood selves and not hideous Islamic mockeries thereof. And when Ahmadinejad speaks of "peace", "stability", "prosperity and the happiness of all peoples through a commitment to justice and respect for the rights of all nations" we are supposed to take that literally as well? And forget that Iran is a repressive police state? And the chief sponsor of international terrorism? And in the process of instigating nuclear genocide? And practitioner of one of the most cruel regimes of sharia apartheid, in which the various means by which unclean infidels may pollute the Muslim elect are enumerated in exquisite detail? These are the facts: The Union of Islamic Courts is a Taliban-like movement that harbored actual al Qeada terrorist masterminds such as the author of the 1998 Nairobi embassy bombings. Putting even the most charitable spin on things, which the Minneapolis Star Tribune was going to do regardless of how disturbing any of the facts it might uncover would be (the chief duty of any "responsible" major newspaper being nothing so quaint as the discovery and dissemination of truth about the world, but rather conditioning the public to an acceptance of such progressive ideals as an increasingly "diverse", culturally and socially fragmented United States) U.S. Somalis see nothing particularly objectionable in supporting a regime that implements the barbaric full rigor of sharia law (amputations and all) and no problem supporting a regime harboring sworn enemies of the United States. Or, to satisfy Stephen of Minneapolis' demand for as mind-numbingly literalist a rendition of the "facts" as reported by the Star Tribune as possible, Somalis do not consider a regime's sheltering of dangerous sworn enemies of the United States sufficient cause to refrain from expressing outrage at its liquidation. In case some of you missed that let me repeat: the Somalis we so carelessly admitted into this country do not consider the safety and well-being of America or Americans non-negotiable. No other immigrant group has so faithfully promoted the interests of the repulsive governments and societies they supposedly fled from as Muslims. Eastern Europeans, Cubans, Vietnamese- all were more anti-Communist than the Pope. No one was more supportive of punitive measures against their home countries' regimes (and unavoidably the people held hostage by those regimes) or more fiercely patriotic than them. So what makes Muslims different? What makes them so implacably hostile to their host societies, regardless of how advanced and dynamic (the United States), how socially-democratic (Western Europe), or how traditional (India, the Philippines, Thailand) they happen to be? Why has no society in the history of the world successfully integrated a Muslim minority population? Could it be the teachings of Islam and the ethos they infuse in those who are not even particularly religious? An ethos that teaches loyalty and decent behavior is only owed to fellow Muslims, and that outsiders may be robbed, abused, and preyed upon with impunity? The civilized West has dealt with several barbaric ideologies over the last 100 years, all of which appropriated such terms as "freedom", and "justice", and "peace" merely to confuse and paralyze the West. This is no different. Let's not "contextualize" things by making facile analogies with other religions, or pretending that even in their most unpleasant guises they are anywhere near as hideous as Islam. They side and will continue siding against U.S. foreign policy interests not because they truly care about the suffering in Somalia, or believe the Union of Islamic Courts is the only game in town, or that any military response to 9/11 will only lead to more innocents suffering (remember the 50% who opposed any military action in Afghanistan?) but because they are Muslims and we are infidels. And any religious accommodation they ask for now, phrased in the language of "tolerance" and "mutual respect" only because their numbers are not sufficient to speak more belligerently to us, is only the beginning of an endless series of demands to change our social and political dispensations until the full-blown domination of Islam is achieved. Let's not contextualize by harking back to things we are already familiar with; let's actually learn something for once.

- severus

January 22, 2007 at 6:12pm