Nobody Is Pleased With The Riots In France
But this is the sort of "inflamatory Radical Muslim rhetoric" that has most of the Conservative blogosphere's knickers in a knot:
The demand for “assimilation” is a demand to abandon Islam as the price for particiapation in European “culture”. That is self-evidently not going to happen. Nobody with a real religion gives up their religion merely on such a whim.
We want to foster our own identity and culture while being law abiding and worthy citizens of the countries where we live.
America, at least, asks no more of any immigrant than that. And, by this standard, European immigrant is no different than the American one, the European native simply makes impossible demands on him as a price for a place at the table. “Multiculturalism” and “diversity” are not choices. They are facts.
For what it’s worth, my town, Columbus, Ohio, now has a large and growing Muslim population, mostly Somali, with a few African-American converts. They keep themselves to themselves and are careful to make no waves whatsoever. These days, who can blame them?
Because I have largely ceased to care what anyone thinks of my religion or my culture, I frequently chant Buddhist mantras silently in places like building lobbies using my mala of beads to count them with.
Only two sorts of people have the nerve to ask me about my beads. One is the cops, who are obviously on the lookout for “terrorists” when they talk to me.
The other is the Muslims, who recognize what I’m doing immediately (they call mantras “dikr”) and are intrigued that any American has the calmness and confidence to practice religion when strangers are looking.
The Arab European League, a Muslim advocacy group operating in Belgium and the Netherlands, states as part of its ‘vision and philosophy’ that ‘we believe in a multicultural society as a social and political model where different cultures coexist with equal rights under the law....We do not want to assimilate and we do not want to be stuck somewhere in the middle. We want to foster our own identity and culture while being law abiding and worthy citizens of the countries where we live.'
The demand for “assimilation” is a demand to abandon Islam as the price for particiapation in European “culture”. That is self-evidently not going to happen. Nobody with a real religion gives up their religion merely on such a whim.
We want to foster our own identity and culture while being law abiding and worthy citizens of the countries where we live.
America, at least, asks no more of any immigrant than that. And, by this standard, European immigrant is no different than the American one, the European native simply makes impossible demands on him as a price for a place at the table. “Multiculturalism” and “diversity” are not choices. They are facts.
For what it’s worth, my town, Columbus, Ohio, now has a large and growing Muslim population, mostly Somali, with a few African-American converts. They keep themselves to themselves and are careful to make no waves whatsoever. These days, who can blame them?
Because I have largely ceased to care what anyone thinks of my religion or my culture, I frequently chant Buddhist mantras silently in places like building lobbies using my mala of beads to count them with.
Only two sorts of people have the nerve to ask me about my beads. One is the cops, who are obviously on the lookout for “terrorists” when they talk to me.
The other is the Muslims, who recognize what I’m doing immediately (they call mantras “dikr”) and are intrigued that any American has the calmness and confidence to practice religion when strangers are looking.
posted by Joseph Marshall | 6:32 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home