Bulgaroctonus

Congratulations, you have managed to be unneccessarily rude and condescending to me. Just like the old days huh? Keep your insults to yourself!
Also, I can't find the post where you wrote " However prejudice can be a tool in carrying forward one's agenda." I've looked over all the relevant posts and I cannot find this statement.

I riddle no issues with contradictions. You wrote in post #124:
I decided that we were discussing it here, and we should continue to discuss it. That's why in post #141 I wrote:

This does not contradict with any of your assertions and is logically comatible with your statements. There is no contradiction.

Muslims in the US are a different ball game to muslims in the arab world. I urge you to try sometime. You can always be a guest at my home in Oman and give it a shot.
You wrote in post #124 that:
From this statement, I thought that American Muslims were within your specified group of Muslims I should come into contact with. Apparently this is not the case. However, the error is not mine since you did not further specify your group as Arab Muslims. I imagine the main difference between Arab and American Muslims in in political views. The theology of Islam seems to be the same for both groups. Please point out some of the differences, if it can be done concisely.




The U.S. system was mutually beneficial. The European system is hard to decipher. Maybe this story from The New Yorker will help:

COMMENT
DIFFERENCE
Issue of 2005-11-21
Posted 2005-11-14


Eight days ago, when the violence that had erupted in three hundred of the immigrant housing projects that circle France’s big cities spread, briefly, to Belgium and Germany, the sigh of relief among French politicians could be heard from Lille to Marseilles. “Voilà! It isn’t us,” they seemed to be saying. “It’s everywhere.” And, in a way, they were right. The immigrant poor are everywhere in Europe now, and what the French novelist Antoine Audouard, writing in the Times a few days later, aptly called France—“a society that no longer knows how to enforce its own rules or how to create the dream of a better life for its new generations”—describes more countries than his own. Since the end of the Second World War, Western Europe has been at the center of a labor migration that, in its proportions, rivals the great forced migrations of the Roman Empire; and since the nineteen-fifties and sixties, when Europe’s own empires unravelled, the strains of that demographic shock have been compounded by what could be called an implosion of difference, as the colonized fled the chaos—economic, tribal, political—that the colonizers left behind. It is easier to manage difference at a safe colonial remove than it is at home. To say that Europe was unaware of this is an understatement.

Every country with an influx of migrant workers had to scramble toward some sort of social formula to absorb them (or, as often as not, pretend that they weren’t there). And before long those formulas had frozen into easy, and, not surprisingly, competing, certainties—all of which have turned out to be as shortsighted as the government-sponsored agents who first combed Africa and Asia and the Indian subcontinent recruiting labor for Europe’s postwar factories. There was the British “multicultural” model—or, to put it perhaps more accurately, the “You will never be us” model. There was the “We’ll support you, but please be invisible until you are us” Scandinavian model. There was the “integrated but not assimilated” oxymoron called the Dutch model. There was the “You’re guest workers, so you’ll be going home” German model—which, until the late nineties, put off even the possibility of citizenship for most immigrants and their children. Everyone had something to contribute to this debate: the social theorists and social planners and social workers and politicians and, of course, the people who hated immigrants—everyone but the immigrants themselves, who were rarely consulted. The only thing most Europeans agreed on was that the “American model” was wrong, although the American model wasn’t really a model at all but a kind of success ethic—the Europeans said “dollar ethic”—in which making money and moving up in the world was what made Americans out of strangers. It was, for better or for worse, the one model that seemed to work.

The French model could be called the “You will be us” imperative. All children born in France are citizens at birth, and citizenship, it was believed, confers an instant, almost mystical “Frenchness” on them. But the cités, as the immigrants call their projects, belied that fantasy. They were social planning at its most earnest and its worst—the glitch in the French republican case for assimilation. Back in the early fifties, when Le Corbusier designed the first of these projects—Unité d’Habitation, on the outskirts of Marseilles—they were called villes nouvelles and declared to be the last word in progressive urban thinking. The idea at first was that soon the middle classes, fleeing their crowded cities, would arrive, and merchants would open stores and big business would start investing. But it was hard to imagine anyone “French” moving to a project who didn’t have to. Most of the immigrants had nowhere else to live.

The projects were huge, some of them built for as many as fifty thousand people. And they were grim—cheaply made, almost impossibly monotonous (the government said “modern”), and well beyond the pale of city life or, for that matter, country life. Social psychologists were hired to make the projects “friendly,” which is why you will occasionally find, say, circles of faded pink or purple paint on the cinder-block walls. But there was nothing to do in a cité, nowhere to go, nothing “French” to attach to. Within a few years, the projects had deteriorated into slums; the new ones—welfare ghettos, targets of choice for construction boondogglers—never pretended to be anything else. The only real investment in most of the cités was in cheap chain stores and in schools that taught Frenchness but had no way of folding an immigrant’s child into anything resembling French life. Children sang the “Marseillaise” and memorized the lengths of France’s rivers, as their parents had in the colonies, but in most ways remained as far from France as their parents had been.

The statistics you read about young Muslims in the cités are true: six times the national unemployment rate; five times the incarceration rate. Some ten per cent of France’s children are Muslim, and, like all children, they are vulnerable to promises of a newer, “truer” identity that will transform their lives. The problems in the cités today are arguably complicated by, or perhaps obscured by, the politics of Islamic identity—by imported imams and Islamist chat rooms and bin Laden posters in teen-age bedrooms—which may be why, when the rioting started, the country’s politicians panicked to the point of dazed withdrawal (President Jacques Chirac), or grandstand threats of deportation (Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy), or meaningless pronouncements about a plan for France (Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin).

The riots were undeniably alarming, as much for the carnage—one man beaten to death, sixty-five hundred buses and cars torched, a dozen schools set on fire—as for the political incapacity they revealed. (The number of arrests has, in fact, been small—a couple of thousand—compared with the fifteen thousand arrests in October of 1961, when Algerians were demonstrating in Paris.) By now, the rioting has become sporadic, but the rioters’ rage was so self-punishing, so focussed on their own lives and neighborhoods, that an obvious lesson should have been drawn by the Élysée the day the first bus burned. The kids who are rioting hate their lives. They are lonely for France; they are sickeningly disappointed in France, in the promise of France. And, in desperation, they are attacking their own half-world cités. They want the real cities, where the “French” live. A few years ago, the Minister of Urban Affairs, Jean-Louis Borloo, took the unthinkable step of demolishing tens of thousands of apartments in the worst of the cités. Richard Descoing, the director of the Institut d’Études Politiques, or Sciences Po, launched what amounts to an affirmative-action program—the French called it “positive discrimination”—bringing bright young graduates from the cités into one of the most prestigious schools in France. Those men made the first cracks in the national myth that the badge of citizenship makes happy citizens. But, so far, no one else has



The proper solution to a non-assimilated bloc depends largely on the attitude of that bloc. If the bloc is amenable to the host culture, then they should be enfranchised and gradually integrated into the host society for mutual benefit. If the non-assimilated bloc is hostile and dangerous, they should be deported by force.

mich

islamic culture helped bring europe out of the dark ages. because of all this knowledge learned from muslims in medievel times,europeans were able to spread their influence and conquer a lot of the known world, and of course the highlight of european achievement is the United States.the western is world is where it is today partly because of islam. I guess its true what they say("knowledge is power")

dalem

And what have they done for us lately except for murder?

-dale

Enzo Ferrari

An bloody, hypocrite, cynical next superpower...

astralis

and how's that significantly different than the current one?