yo yao you

[thesightless]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11569485/site/newsweek/page/3/

interesting view on the dutch.

[Localizer]

Re: yo yao you

werd. quality article.

[Yao]

Re: yo yao you

lemme check that...been busy this week, hence my absence

[Yao]

Re: yo yao you

Nice story i have to say...

Welcome to the end of tolerance, or at least to the nonnegotiable limits to what Europeans will tolerate. Whether it's the Netherlands' rediscovery of Dutch communal values, or the universal affirmations of free speech (to mock religion, or anything else), Europe is everywhere on the defensive. After decades of relatively unfettered immigration and cultural laissez faire when it came to accepting people of differing values and social mores, there are signs that a potentially ugly backlash is setting in. Even before Jyllands Posten published the cartoons last fall, Denmark's Minister of Cultural Affairs Brian Mikkelsen said, "We have gone to war against the multicultural ideology that says that everything is equally valid." These days, he speaks for most Europeans. Danes, and Dutch, and a few other countries might be well on their way to creating multiethnic societies. But make no mistake: they're no longer willing to tolerate a European melting pot?a broadly multicultural society?where different cultures live by widely different norms.

Hell yes there is a backlash setting in, I only have to look at my reactions in the past months, and definitely weeks. I'm increasingly moving towards the right politically when it comes to these matters. Europeans, and certainly the people in the named countries, are fed up with minorities trying to dictate their lives through social pressure and emotional blackmail.

I've been a member of a Dutch/Moroccan forum for a bit now since those cartoon riots broke out, and have had some serious discussions on this topic. Most of them are willing to adapt, some of them aren't. But even those that are pretty open-minded sometimes don't seem to realise that they are still not abiding by our social contract at all, which is not really surprising since the Quran is not at all compatible with Western secular society, hell, even the Bible upon which our society once was built isn't anymore!

In particular, Europeans are concerned about Islamists hostile to Western values and the very idea of integration itself. Often, these elements drown out the voices of the moderate majority of Muslims. Dutch Integration Minister Rita Verdonk, one of several top politicians under death threats from Islamists, plans courses for imams to train in citizenship and Western values. She demonstrated what that might mean in front of press cameras in January, telling an imam who refused to shake her hand because of "religious rules" that he had better learn Western customs. "Next year I expect to speak to you in Dutch," she said through an interpreter.

Will such measures advance the ultimate goal of building a "Euro Islam" more compatible with Europe's values? Unlikely, perhaps, as long as only 5 percent of the imams in Europe's 6,000 mosques are educated in Europe. After decades of neglect, Germany and France have finally set up a small number of Islamic departments at public universities to turn out locally acculturated preachers. In Britain, the Home Office's brand-new Advisory Council on Mosques and Imams plans an accreditation program for Muslim clerics, similar to the systems in place at Christian churches. When Angela Merkel becomes the first German chancellor to hold a summit with Muslim leaders in April, setting up a Germany-wide council of Muslims to partner with the government on integration and religious issues will be high on the agenda.

Way to go Verdonk! When we as Europeans are in an Islamic country, I myself as a man shouldn't think to trying to talk to a woman in public, though I actually can when I'm in a more moderate country like Morocco. The crazyness of this is that Muslims in Morocco for example are much less hardline than the Muslims here! Women in Casablanca don't wear niqaabs in public, but here and in fucking Iran they do!
This has been described though as a protective reaction, a way for people to hold on to their traditional values while in their home country things are actually progressing already. Sad IMO, but that is the way people think, and always have thought. When away from home, you cling to your old values like a sucling to it's mother's nipple .

An Euro Islam? I have no idea...not while Islam itself is unwilling to reform. And even if it were, it would be a long process: something like that just doesn't happen within a few years, maybe not even within a generation's time. It will be necessary though if Islam is determined to find itself a place within our society.

Right now we have hardline Muslims calling moderate Muslims 'no real Muslims' or 'Bad Muslims'. Fucking hypocrites think they can do the judging before Allah...

Until such double standards can be abolished and a new equality established, Europe's new toughness will feel like forced integration. "It's a form of creating a second-class citizenship," says Tariq Modood, director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship in Bristol. "All the burden of change is placed on the immigrant." And if that's not to be the case, then Europeans will almost certainly have to accord Muslim faiths the same status accorded Christianity?including, perhaps, a media that voluntarily refrains from publishing needlessly offensive images of the Prophet, not under duress from abroad but out of greater respect for local religious sensibilities.

It's also clear that if Europeans want their immigrants to behave like Europeans, then they must be willing to accept them as Europeans, too. That's where many societies that long thought of themselves as culturally homogenous have problems. "Being German can no longer be defined on ethnic lines," says Bernd Knopf at the Integration Commissioner's office. It's an open question whether Germans, Dutch, or Danes will ever truly accept a multiethnic, multireligious "Germanness," "Dutchness" or "Danishness." But given the immigrant and demographic trajectories of Europe's future, there is little choice but to try.

I agree with both parts. Christianity has always had an advantaged position, while all political parties run by hardline Christians basically want to do the same to our society. Man, we even allow the SGP to partake in the elections, while that buch of Bible-lickers won't even allow women to become a member of their political party!
Treat them all equal, make them all abide by the secular rule of law too.

The last part is still an issue...it's not even us not seeing them as Europeans: they don't see themselves as Europeans, or Dutch. So IMO this is a two-way problem, not the onedimensional one described here...