There is certainly widespread relief that Toulouse police have ended the killing spree of Mohamed Merah, who had murdered seven people over the last little while (including three children) for the greater glory of Allah. He was shot dead when trying to escape police who had surrounded his home.
But many Muslims who have left Islamic societies to reside in France can only think of how the monstrous crimes might effect them. The Muslims believe traditional French will generalize blame on all for the action of one jihadist and a backlash against Islamic diversity will result.
Anyway, Muslims in France feel they are misunderstood little lambs, put upon by “islamophobia” when their non-assimilation is pointed out, and then they squawk “Backlash!” when none is on the horizon. They worry about their own skins when serious self-reflection would be more appropriate.
One bit of unintended hilarity occurs near the end of the article below where one interviewee said mass murderer Merah couldn’t have been a “real Muslim” because Islam is so peaceful.
PARIS: French Muslims said on Wednesday they feared a backlash and increased inter-religious tensions as police besieged a suspected Islamist militant who allegedly killed seven people including three Jewish children.
Police were trying to negotiate the surrender of Mohamed Merah, a 23-year-old Frenchman of Algerian descent suspected of killing three soldiers last week and three children and a teacher at a Jewish school on Monday.
Officials say he has visited Afghanistan and Pakistan, bragged of being an Al-Qaeda member and claimed to have acted to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children. On the streets of Paris and its suburbs, French Muslims denounced his attacks and said they hoped his acts would not spur anti-Islamic feelings in France.
“Killing young Jews to avenge young Palestinians causes nothing but revulsion,” said Abdelhak Eddouk, a Muslim leader in the Paris suburban region of Essonne.
“This type of person hurts everyone,” he said, adding that he feared that “in an election period, some will take advantage of this to stigmatise Islam as a religion and Muslims as citizens.”
Ezdine Ould Mohamed, the head of a local Muslim cultural association in Essonne, urged politicians to “ask the right questions and act responsibly” after the attacks. Immigration has been a top theme in the campaign for France’s April-May presidential election, with right-wing President Nicolas Sarkozy declaring this month that there were “too many foreigners” in France. Sarkozy allies and far-right candidate Marine Le Pen have also lashed out against the widespread production of Islamic halal meat.
In Paris’s working-class neighbourhood of Belleville, home to a large North African community, butcher Lassaad Fkiri said he feared the shootings would add fuel to the rhetoric. “I think politicians will fan the flames, after the halal debate, and some will use these dramatic events to point the finger at Muslims,” the 39-year-old said.
Outside a mosque in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, 31-year-old Mema Camara said she hoped most in France would not link the killer with all Muslims.
“He would not have done this if he were a real Muslim. God forbids us from fighting. I really hope there will be no confusion between this madman and the entire community,” she said.
Nearby, 51-year-old Nasreddine Hanifa said he believed the killer had been “recruited by extremists” and most likely “brainwashed,” but that he needed “to be punished for these horrible crimes.”
It’s funny how immigration enforcement has become something of a third rail in politics, where candidates fear to tread, but when politicians really want votes, they pipe up with statements favoring law and borders.
In France, President Sarkozy has been gaining ground by suggesting that family-reunification immigration by decreased by half along with other crackdown measures, according to recent polling.
French voters may favor less Muslim immigration after years of street violence (even in small towns) like the Grenoble car-burning shown below.
PARIS — President Nicolas Sarkozy, running from behind for reelection, pledged Sunday to pull France out of Europe’s 25-nation visa-free zone unless border controls are tightened to prevent illegal immigrants from sneaking in to find jobs.
The pledge, at a boisterous rally with 80,000 supporters in a Paris suburb, marked the latest in a series of campaign promises designed to appeal to conservative and nationalistic French voters by choking off long-controversial legal and illegal immigration into France.
It was part of a no-holds-barred effort by Sarkozy to raise his standing with voters before the two-round ballot scheduled for April 22 and May 6. The president, finishing a first five-year term, has been running steadily behind his main adversary, Francois Hollande of the Socialist Party, in months of polling, leading his followers to worry out loud that he could lose.
In the pressure cooker of the campaign, immigration repeatedly has flared as an emotional issue in a country already uncomfortable with more than 5 million Muslims — many are French citizens, others fresh arrivals — who live here legally or under the radar and are increasingly visible in a society deeply rooted in Christian tradition.
The latest flareup involved halal meat, or meat prepared according to Islamic tradition. The far-right National Front candidate, Marine Le Pen, attracted attention by saying it was being widely sold to unknowing French families. Sarkozy at first dismissed the claim as frivolous. But then, sensing an opening to gain right-wing votes, he demanded that all meat be labeled with the method according to which the animal was slaughtered.
In the same vein, Sarkozy promised last week to cut by half the number of immigrants allowed into the country under rules designed to bring families together. The Interior Ministry, headed by a close Sarkozy lieutenant, Claude Gueant, reported in January that 12,613 residence permits were granted in 2011 for family reunification, down 14 percent from the previous year. Continue reading this article
President Nikolas Sarkozy is campaigning for re-election and he has been driven to speak the truth that many French know: France has too many immigrants and they refuse to assimilate to French culture.
I’m trying to imagine an American candidate speaking with similar honesty about foreigners in this country, and it doesn’t compute.
But Europe is curiously ahead of us in recognizing that multiculturalism is crap, as national leaders Sarkozy, Germany’s Merkel and Britain’s Cameron have all admitted.
Of course, the presence of millions of Muslims makes that realization easy, particularly when some unfriendlies are blowing stuff up in the name of jihad.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy has said there are too many foreigners in France and the system for integrating them is “working more and more badly”.
In a TV debate, Mr Sarkozy defended his plan to cut the number of new arrivals in half if he is re-elected next month.
Mr Sarkozy is trailing in the opinion polls behind the Socialist candidate Francois Hollande.
He is also competing for conservative voters with the far-right National Front party led by Marine le Pen.
The president said while immigration could be a boon for France, it needed to be controlled more tightly through tougher qualification rules for residency.
Mr Sarkozy, whose father was a Hungarian immigrant, also said he wanted to restrict some benefit payments to immigrants who had been in the country for 10 years. Continue reading this article
Next to language, food is one the most important cultural significators for human beings. One sees that in immigrant neighborhoods: as soon as the tribe reaches the level where it can support a business, ethnic restaurants and markets spring up. Foreigner moochers will reject even free American food because they want their tribal chow.
Muslims don’t subscribe to the idea of “When in Rome, do as the Romans do” because Islam teaches them that they are superior to Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, etc. So the idea of assimilation is anathema to Muslims immigrants. Europe should therefore stop Muslim immigration and so should America.
Now a recent revelation about the spread of halal slaughter has angered the French people with major elections coming up in a couple months.
(Reuters) – A TV documentary’s revelation that slaughterhouses around Paris have switched meat production entirely to halal methods has stirred a political storm in France, where attitudes to Europe’s largest Muslim minority are a subtext in a presidential election campaign.
The France 2 documentary last week said all of the abattoirs in the greater Paris region were producing only halal-style meat, selling some without labelling it as such to avoid the cost of running separate lines for halal and non-halal customers.
Far-right candidate Marine Le Pen – who is hoping to win voters away from centre-right President Nicolas Sarkozy ahead of the two-round election in April and May – has seized on the issue.
“All the abattoirs of the Paris region have succumbed to the rules of a minority. We have reason to be disgusted,” Le Pen told a rally in Lille on Saturday, pledging to file a legal complaint.
In a country known for its obsession with the provenance of its cuisine, the issue could play with a wider audience than the far right, including animal rights groups, consumer advocates and food industry professionals.
Some European animal rights campaigners say that the Islamic halal and Jewish kosher rules for ritual slaughter are less humane than standard European practice, because they ban the practice of stunning animals before they are killed. Continue reading this article
Below, over $3 million in damage was caused by 54 fires in four days of intense arson attacks in Los Angeles.
The arrested guy’s name is Harry Burkhart, so no obvious line to Islam there. However, the accused arsonist is German and said he “hates America,” perhaps because his mother was facing deportation. So immigration appears to be a motivator, in a bad way.
In addition, Burkhart’s travel documents indicated he travelled to Chechnya, home of many hostile Muslims and not a groovy tourist spot. Chechens have been in a sort of terror war with Russia, with one of the worst atrocities being the 2004 murder of more than 300 schoolchildren in Beslan.
So there may be an Islamic connection after all. Stay tuned.
Weeks before a string of arson fires began, the suspect in the case went on an anti-American rant at an immigration court hearing in Los Angeles, authorities say.
According to law enforcement sources, Harry Burkhart was angry that the federal government was trying to deport his mother. At the hearing, he erupted in an angry tirade, spewing anti-American statements.
He had to be escorted from the court, one source said.
When the LAPD released a photo of a “person of interest” in the fires on Sunday, an official involved in the case recognized him. LAPD Chief Charlie Beck said that was the big break that led to Burkhart’s arrest.
The suspected arsonist is a 24-year-old German national who carried travel papers from Chechnya. He had spent time in Germany, they said, but had lived in Southern California for the last several years. Continue reading this article
In France, a weekly humor magazine was firebombed early Tuesday morning because its upcoming issue featured Mohammed as a “guest editor,” a gimmick which apparently did not go over well in certain quarters. Muslims are notoriously unfriendly to the idea of satire or even graphic representation regarding their precious belief system. Free speech and its practitioners routinely come under attack in areas of Muslim immigrant diversity.
The latest kaboomery at the hands of hostile Muslims certainly won’t make the already fearful Western press confront the “Religion of Peace” more vigorously. One example: a Time magazine blog reported the firebombing incident by blaming the victim as engaging in “Islamophobic antics.”
AFP – The offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which published a special Arab Spring edition Wednesday with the prophet Mohammed as guest “editor”, were gutted in a petrol bomb attack overnight, police said.
The fire at the magazine started around 01.00 am (0200 GMT) and caused no injuries, a police source said.
Charlie Hebdo published a special edition Wednesday to mark the Arab Spring, renaming the magazine Charia (Sharia) Hebdo for the occasion.
The cover showed a cartoon of the prophet stating: “100 lashes if you don’t die of laughter!”
The depiction of the prophet is strictly prohibited in Islam.
A witness at the scene, Patrick Pelloux, told AFP a molotov cocktail was hurled through the window and set fire to the computer system.
When a nation welcomes millions of immigrants from a hugely alien, historically hostile culture who stubbornly resist assimilation, bad things happen.
One recent example was Sunday’s pitched battle on the streets of Paris between hundreds of Turks and Kurds, in which one person reportedly died and a dozen were injured. Riot police had to use tear gas to take back the streets for the French.
I could find no mention of whether the people of France celebrated the diversity of foreigners battling their internal political wars in Paris, although the video below shows non-Middle-Eastern persons avoiding the violence.
Fifteen people were wounded yesterday when a group of alleged Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) supporters attacked Turkish anti-terror demonstrators in Paris.
Turkish citizens had gathered in Bastille Square in Paris in the late afternoon to protest the recent terrorist attacks when alleged PKK supporters attacked them with sticks and stones.
Fifteen people were wounded, and one remains in critical condition.
The protesters refused to leave after the attacks and continued their demonstrations. The French police force then reportedly surrounded the group and used tear gas to contain them.
Anti-terror protests by Turkish citizens in other countries have been going on for some time. A recent protest took place in Holland, where the protests took place peacefully, excluding a minor discrepancy that was quickly resolved by the involvement of Turkish authorities.
From one viewpoint, the American efforts against certain jihadist enemies has been going great: several top bad guys like Osama and al Awlaki have been dispatched to Allah by our excellent armed forces. Those are big wins and we like it when enemies go away. But there are other brands of evil Islam in the world than the Qaeda bunch, and Washington and the complicit media overlook them at our peril.
One example is the degree of denial in the liberal media about what’s going on in the Middle East, which verges on the criminal. The press created the idea of the glorious “Arab Spring” and it was too sweet a concept to abandon just because of contrary facts on the ground.
For example, the New York Times characterizes the religious party that recently won the Tunisian election as “moderate Islamist,” despite the obvious contradiction. Presumably the Timesters want to keep their guy Obama in the White House by promoting the Middle Eastern political revolutions as a foreign policy success for him, even though any democratic elements are being swept aside by the well organized Muslim Brotherhood and other pro-sharia groups.
WASHINGTON — Since 9/11, the major focus in the War on Terror has been al Qaeda.
Now, after recent successes, including the death of Osama bin Laden, U.S. government officials have expressed optimism in the fight against terrorism.
But while al Qaeda may be weakening, the jihad against America is actually strengthening, at home and abroad.
But first, let’s examine the state of al Qaeda.
From the Fort Hood massacre and the Underwear Bomber in 2009, to last year’s failed Yemeni cargo plane plot, no terror group has wreaked more havoc against the U.S. homeland.
Al Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki had a hand in each of these terror plots and inspired many more, including the 2010 attempted Times Square bombing in New York City.
Al-Awlaki’s death in a U.S. drone strike last month dealt a major blow to al Qaeda’s operations in the West.
“I think Awlaki is going to be very difficult for them to replace because he had a unique mix of being theologically credible, speaking fluent English, and being very familiar with the United States,” terrorism expert Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, author of the new book, Bin Laden’s Legacy, told CBN News.
“And so he was a big draw to a lot of English speaking jihadis,” he added.
Awlaki is just one of many high-profile al Qaeda and Taliban targets taken out by the U.S. over the past two years. They include Pakistani Taliban leader Beitullah Mehsud, al Qaeda operational planner Ilyas Kashmiri, top al Qaeda deputy Atiyah ‘Abd Al-Rahman, and of course, bin Laden.
In the wake of these successes, Obama administration officials say al Qaeda is nearing defeat.
Al Qaeda Down, Not Out
But according to Gartenstein-Ross, history shows that while the terror group may be down, it’s not out.
“Back in 2003, al Qaeda’s leadership was significantly degraded,” Gartenstein-Ross told CBN News. “By 2007, it had managed to rebound from that loss.”
“Likewise, the Israelis have wiped out Hamas’s political leadership. Yet Hamas is a powerful political force that controls Gaza,” he added. Continue reading this article
Regarding the subject of world population, we unfortunately live in interesting times. The West, particularly Europe, suffers from insufficient reproduction and has made bad choices about immigration to fill the worker bee gap.
In contrast, the Third World is going gangbusters, as noted in the article below, which is standard boilerplate for world overpopulation reporting now that we approach the seven billion milestone. We read plenty of junk news in the press — entertainment trivia, horserace political updates and the shocker crime of the week — but there is almost nothing about the growing numbers of humans. That issue is transforming the world more than any other.
The Third World is becoming more crowded, violent and dysfunctional, and its residents from North Africa to Sri Lanka and Latin America are fleeing to the First World. So what happens there is very much felt here.
Below, already crowded India is expected to overtake China around 2030 as the planet’s most populous nation when the number of Indians reaches an estimated 1.6 billion.
She’s a 40-year-old mother of eight, with a ninth child due soon. The family homestead in a Burundi village is too small to provide enough food, and three of the children have quit school for lack of money to pay required fees.
“I regret to have made all those children,” says Godelive Ndageramiwe. “If I were to start over, I would only make two or three.”
At Ahmed Kasadha’s prosperous farm in eastern Uganda, it’s a different story.
“My father had 25 children — I have only 14 so far, and expect to produce more in the future,” says Kasadha, who has two wives. He considers a large family a sign of success and a guarantee of support in his old age.
By the time Ndageramiwe’s ninth child arrives, and any further members of the Kasadha clan, the world’s population will have passed a momentous milestone. As of Oct. 31, according to the U.N. Population Fund, there will be 7 billion people sharing Earth’s land and resources.
In Western Europe, Japan and Russia, it will be an ironic milestone amid worries about low birthrates and aging populations. In China and India, the two most populous nations, it’s an occasion to reassess policies that have already slowed once-rapid growth.
But in Burundi, Uganda and the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, the demographic news is mostly sobering as the region staggers under the double burden of the world’s highest birthrates and deepest poverty. The regional population of nearly 900 million could reach 2 billion in 40 years at current rates, accounting for about half of the projected global population growth over that span.
“Most of that growth will be in Africa’s cities, and in those cities it will almost all be in slums where living conditions are horrible,” said John Bongaarts of the Population Council, a New York-based research organization.
Is catastrophe inevitable? Not necessarily. But experts say most of Africa — and other high-growth developing nations such as Afghanistan and Pakistan — will be hard-pressed to furnish enough food, water and jobs for their people, especially without major new family-planning initiatives.
“Extreme poverty and large families tend to reinforce each other,” says Lester Brown, the environmental analyst who heads the Earth Policy Institute in Washington. “The challenge is to intervene in that cycle and accelerate the shift to smaller families.”
Without such intervention, Brown says, food and water shortages could fuel political destabilization in developing regions.
“There’s quite a bit of land that could produce food if we had the water to go with it,” he said. “It’s water that’s becoming the real constraint.”
The International Water Management Institute shares these concerns, predicting that by 2025 about 1.8 billion people will live in places suffering from severe water scarcity.
According to demographers, the world’s population didn’t reach 1 billion until 1804, and it took 123 years to hit the 2 billion mark in 1927. Then the pace accelerated — 3 billion in 1959, 4 billion in 1974, 5 billion in 1987, 6 billion in 1998.
Looking ahead, the U.N. projects that the world population will reach 8 billion by 2025, 10 billion by 2083. But the numbers could be much higher or lower, depending on such factors as access to birth control, infant mortality rates and average life expectancy — which has risen from 48 years in 1950 to 69 years today. Continue reading this article
Praying in the streets of Paris is against the law starting Friday, after the interior minister warned that police will use force if Muslims, and those of any other faith, disobey the new rule to keep the French capital’s public spaces secular. [. . .]
But the public worship, the blocked streets, and the private security were already illegal, according to a 2010 report from CBN, the video from which is below.
The whole aim of the Muslims’ weekly pray-ins has been to intimidate Paris by showing their ability to overpower the streets whenever they please. The behavior is a reminder that annoying blockages could quickly spiral into civil unrest, like rioting for days or even weeks, as happened in 2005 all over France following the accidental electrocution of a couple of Muslim teens. When a gaggle of Muslims gets miffed, bad things can happen.
No surprise, the Muslims ignored the current proclamation. Perhaps the French authorities will organize some sort of enforcement next week to cope with their Muslim diversity.
PARIS — Hundreds of Muslims defied a French ban on outdoor prayer — which came into force Friday –and took to the streets and sidewalks of Paris to pray.
The French government announced Thursday it was banning praying outside, with officials pledging to enforce the ban from Friday.
But 200 Muslims ignored the ban and prayed on the streets in the neighborhood of La Goutte d’Or, Le Parisien newspaper reported.
French interior minister Claude Gueant said he had nothing against Islam but wanted it out of the public eye because France was a secular state.
He added, “Street prayers must stop because they hurt the feelings of many of our compatriots who are shocked by the occupation of the public space for a religious practice.”
Although officials would persuade people to pray in mosques, Muslims who continued to pray in the street would be arrested, Gueant warned.
The ban angered French Muslim leaders who said Muslims only prayed outdoors because of a lack of space in mosques in France.
The outdoor prayer ban is the latest move by the French government to remove Islam from the public sphere. Laws prohibiting students wearing headscarves in schools and banning women from wearing the full Muslim veil — the niqab –in public came into force in April.
The European Union superstate has illustrated the failure of government that is too big and too distant from the people it is supposed to represent. Problems began to be seen when referendums to approve the EU constitution went down to defeat in the Netherlands and France in 2005 — although the bureaucrats in Brussels have managed a work-around to rejection by the people.
The borderless world is a leftist fantasy, as shown by the Marxist maxim, “Workers of the world, unite!” In 2008, Britain’s Labour Party Prime Minister Gordon Brown declared in Boston, “We are all internationalists now.” He even coined the phrase, “a New Global Deal,” that expresses the plan of elites to redistribute wealth from the first world to the third.
However, transnational corporations see the advantages to them when the influence of national sovereignty is reduced with less rule of law. A future globalist world of rule by corporations unaffected by regulation of environmental quality and worker rights would be quite agreeable to many captains of industry. (The Obama administration has certainly gone crazy with business regulations, but nobody wants Red China-style air you can cut with a knife either.)
One of the most astute assessments of the size question of government was made by Czech President Vaclav Klaus in 2003 when he stated, “You cannot have democratic accountability in anything bigger than a nation state.”
Geert Wilders (pictured) gave a speech in Berlin recently which expounded on that general idea, that living in an accountable nation-state is vital to freedom.
Thank you for inviting me to Berlin. It is an honour to be here in this beautiful city of Berlin. When I was here last year I emphasized how important Germany is for all of us. We all benefit from a healthy, democratic, self-confident Germany.
Much has happened since my last visit. In the Netherlands we were able to achieve many amazing things. We have successfully started to roll back the process of Islamization in the Netherlands.
We have done so in a peaceful way and through the democratic process. Recently, a deranged narcissistic psychopath from Norway committed a horrible crime. In cold blood he murdered nearly eighty innocent fellow citizens. The assassin pretended to be a concerned European. He said that he had committed his atrocity because “It is meaningless to participate in the democratic process.”
But he is wrong! The mass murderer from Oslo murdered and maimed, and he justified his heinous crime by denying – I quote – “that it is remotely possible to change the system democratically.” – end of quote.
But he is wrong! The Oslo murderer falsely claims to be one of us. But he is not one of us. We abhor violence. We are democrats. We believe in peaceful solutions. The reason why we reject Islam is exactly Islam’s violent nature. We believe in democracy. We fight with the force of our conviction, but we never use violence. Our commitment to truth, human dignity and a just and honourable defence of the West does not allow us to use violence nor to give in to cynicism and despair. We cherish the tradition of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, Jelena Bonner, Lech Walesa and Ronald Reagan. These heroes defeated a totalitarian ideology by the power of their conviction and without firing a single shot. As the ex-Muslim and Islam-critic Ali Sina said in a reaction to the Oslo atrocity: “We don’t raise a sword against darkness; we lit a light.”
So it is. We lit the light of the truth. And the truth will set us free.
The truth is that Islam can be successfully fought with democratic means. We do so in the Netherlands. You can do so, too, in Germany! Let me tell you what we have achieved in the Netherlands since my last visit to Berlin, less than one year ago. It will encourage you. What can be done in the Netherlands can also be done in Germany.
My party, the Party for Freedom, which has 24 seats of the 150 seats in parliament, supports a minority government of Liberals and Christian-Democrats. We do this in return for measures to restrict immigration, roll back crime, counter cultural relativism, and restore our traditional Western freedoms, such as freedom of speech. The Party for Freedom has been in this position for less than a year, but we are achieving great things.
We have achieved that the Netherlands will soon ban the face-covering Islamic burkas and the niqabs!
We will restrict immigration from non-Western countries by up to 50% in the next four years! Continue reading this article
Leave it to the Associated Press to readminister its scab-picking habit of portraying Muslims residing in America as poor little victims who suffer Islamophobia at the hands of cruel Americans. That’s the unsubtle message in the AP’s report on a new Pew poll that begins with the assertion that Muslims here endure harassment from the public and undue attention as potential terrorists from law enforcement.
If life in the United States is so terrible, then Muslim immigrants can always pack up and leave the same way they got here. Most can be defined as newbies: 63% of Muslim residers are first-generation immigrants to the U.S., with 45% having arrived in the U.S. since 1990.
Wouldn’t Muslims be happier in Dar al-Islam? For example, living in Riyadh would be ever so handy for the hajj, and Saudi Arabia does not permit any pork chops that annoy Muslims. It just seems a better fit.
Most come for the money alone (like most immigrants) and live in their tribal enclaves like Dearbornistan and Tehrangeles.
The liberal press assumption about mean Americans always leaves out the fact that the behavior of Muslims themselves has reduced any positive regard toward them from the public. The average citizen doesn’t need to read Jihadwatch.org or TheReligionOfPeace.com to understand the widespread hostility among Muslims when there are unavoidable news stories like the gang rape of Lara Logan in downtown Cairo during the press-touted “Arab Spring” or the various attempted terrorist attacks in this country like the Christmas underwear bomber over Detroit and the Times Square bomber.
Ezra Levant and Kathy Shaidle have an intelligent discussion about the poll results in the following video:
However I don’t agree with them that it’s a good thing that Muslims with all their complaints still find America a friendly place to them — go figure. More Americans need to get unfriendly, and pipe up with the idea that Muslim immigration should end yesterday, because it is one of the worst public policies ever.
The growing presence of foreign Muslims, fueled by continuing immigration, endangers national security and domestic tranquility. Washington elites are determined to ignore the disastrous diversity experience of Europe, from the restricted freedom of Scandinavian women to no-go zones where police fear to tread and the potential of future civil war.
Europe is burning, while Pew and the AP are concerned about whether Muslims are happy immigrants in the US.
More than half of Muslim Americans in a new poll say government anti-terrorism policies single them out for increased surveillance and monitoring, and many report increased cases of name-calling, threats and harassment by airport security, law enforcement officers and others.
Still, most Muslim Americans say they are satisfied with the way things are going in the U.S. and rate their communities highly as places to live.
The survey by the Pew Research Center, one of the most exhaustive ever of the country’s Muslims, finds no signs of rising alienation or anger among Muslim-Americans despite recent U.S. government concerns about homegrown Islamic terrorism and controversy over the building of mosques.
“This confirms what we’ve said all along: American Muslims are well integrated and happy, but with a kind of lingering sense of being besieged by growing anti-Muslim sentiment in our society,” said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington, D.C.-based Muslim civil rights group.
“People contact us every day about concerns they’ve had, particularly with law enforcement authorities in this post-9/11 era,” he said.
Muslim extremists hijacked four passenger planes on Sept. 11, 2001, crashing them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Shanksville, Pa.
In all, 52 percent of Muslim Americans surveyed said their group is singled out by government for terrorist surveillance. Almost as many — 43 percent — reported they had personally experienced harassment in the past year, according to the poll released Tuesday.
That 43 percent share of people reporting harassment is up from 40 percent in 2007, the first time Pew polled Muslim Americans. Continue reading this article
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One of the most astute assessments of the size question of government was made by 