There's no question that France has a serious problem in its urban banlieues, where failure to wear a headscarf can be seen as an invitation to gang rape. Demographic growth rates and rising problems with unassimilated Muslim minorities have many pundits speculating about a "EUrabian" future - and speculation tends to fall most heavily on France.
Randy McDonald looks at France's situation with its Muslim minority, and says that the picture may not be as bleak as it has been made out to be:
"French culture will change, of course. The France of the grand siècle was a collage of widely varying provincial cultures, with a patina of "French" culture to unite the whole. The France of the Third Republic saw the homogenization of these provincial cultures, aided by large inflows of immigrants to produce a radical shift--France was now overwhelmingly Francophone, increasingly urban, increasingly secular. The France of the Fifth Republic seems to have had its major wave of foreign immigration already, though given the continuing poverty of post-Communist southeastern and eastern Europe and migratory pressures from the African continent this judgement might be premature. And so, Fifth Republic France’s major task will be the successful integration of the banlieuesards.
France and French culture will not, however, become substantially more Muslim or Islamic than it already is. Certainly France won’t become an Islamic republic—how can it, when Islamism on the model of Algeria’s FIS/GIA is a minority creed among a small minority? Granted, couscous is apparently a favourite national fast food in France, on par with curries in Britain. That’s a particular accomplishment in a country with a renowned national cuisine. But then, the French ultimately stole their culinary reputation from the Italians anyway."
I believe that McDonald it errs in focusing on majority status. That is not necessary to produce significant changes in a body politic, both on the streets and to the balance of political power. The potential dangers of population trends combined with a worldwide trend of rising Islamism also get short shrift, but it is a possible future and as such, worth pondering.
That said, France, its Muslims, and the Future is an impressively argued piece that brings a lot of useful points to the discussion. If the EUrabia scenario or France's future are topics of interest to you, then this is an article you ought to read.
"But then, the French ultimately stole their culinary reputation from the Italians anyway"
what more do you need to say???
IMO, the link between supporting jihad is as much a cultural attitude as a religious one. Getting someone to pray less is easier than getting them to think of people differently. A jihadist is not always a pious Muslim.
Colt:
"A jihadist is not always a pious Muslim."
True, but a jihadist will always exploit piety for control.
True. But the guy I have in mind is Ramzi Yousef. Not even approaching pious, but hating Jews, Shi'ites and Americans all the same. And he was one of the better people al-Qaeda had.
If time allows, I'll try to write a critique of his piece in full. Something McDonald doesn't even touch on is the near-powerlessness of the French state, high crime rates going unpunished, and traditional French xenophobia. In the end, I agree that Eurabia is unlikely. But that's about all I agree with.
Well, I read MacDonald's posting. First, let me say I intensely dislike the gratuitous LGF bashing that adds nothing to his premises, But I am not losing my temper.
1. I actually had a text book in grad school called 'How to Lie With Statistics'. Like Joe points out, it is simple to select supporting data and use a stop band filter on the rest.
2. Even so, the analogy of Catholic population assimilation is not valid. Islam is not Catholicism, and those statistics cannot be used to support Randy's argument. Islam is far more resistant to assimilation.
3. Theoretical population genetics can give us a far more accurate model of French/Islamic population dynamics. Hmm-- I think I'll take a shot at that on my blog. But for now, consider the population genetics problem that the French are dealing with. According to Evolution and the Theory of Games (John Maynard Smith), an Evolutionary Stable Strategy (ESS) is a strategy such that, if all the members of a population adopt it, no mutant strategy can invade. Do the French have such a strategy? I think secularism may be the French strategy. That is why the hijab ban is so important to both sides. It is a test for the invading strategy, Islam, that seeks to maintain cohesion and separation of the immigrant population. That is, not to be assimilated, but to replace.
Colt: I think Yousef would consider himself a pious Wahhabist or Salafist.
Maybe he would. "The New Jackals", admittedly the only book I've read on the guy, suggests he was not a very observant Muslim.
Pockets of moslem influence are already no-go areas for ordinary frenchpeople. This trend can only worsen with falling birthrates amongst nonmuslims and soaring birthrates amongst muslims. Let's face it...
France is basically doomed.
...high crime rates going unpunished...
Sarkozy did a great deal to curb the crime rate in France; which is why he is so popular.
...and traditional French xenophobia.
France is no more xenophobic than any other country.
jinderella,
Islam is far more resistant to assimilation.
It is? Can you demonstrate how that is so?
Theoretical population genetics can give us a far more accurate model of French/Islamic population dynamics.
You'll find that generationally speaking, immigrants to France have dropped their fecundity down to non-immigrant levels. Thus, descendents of immigrants (muslim and non-Muslim) from the 1950s have approximately the same fecundity of French people who are not immigrants.
BTW, I always find it humorous that the same folks who say that those with low expectations of Muslims in Iraq are a kin to racists, have low expectations of Muslims in Europe.
After carefully reading McDonald’s post, I tend to agree with Jinnderella.
I’ve been living in France since 1994 and became interested in European jihadism pretty early, in 1995, after a series of bombings in Paris RER commuter trains, carried by people who were French nationals, born in France, gone through the French unique public “école républicaine” and who probably talked more easily French to each other than Arabic.
First, the problem of Islam in France –and in the rest of W. Europe- can’t really be understood in terms of national demographics, as McDonald does. Or, if one absolutely wants to talk about population curves, reproduction rates and the like, the best is first to look at the map, since the Muslim population isn’t evenly distributed across France. If you visit the south-east, in places like Marseilles, you will find a much higher concentration of Muslims, and if you start studying the distribution at the municipality level, you understand that there are hundreds of nuclei of population, from neighborhoods and suburban small towns to some incipient conurbations in the northern part of the Parisian region or, again, Marseilles or Aix-en-Provence.
Second, the relevant question in the context of the jihadist war against democracy is, on the on hand, the European agenda of their followers. On the other hand, their capacity to control the Muslim associative network, their civil society or, if you prefer, the structure of their social capital.
The French government promoted a Council of the Islamic Cult (or something like that, I don’t remember the exact acronym) in order to have some one that could talk in the name of the French Muslims. And they did so expecting the moderates to win the election to that representative board that took place some six month ago throughout the country’s mosques. Wrong they were: the election was carried by an organization that is publicly close to the Muslim Brotherhood and less openly, but it’s a secret of Polichinella, intellectually sensible to the jihadist ideology, the Sayyid Qutb's postulates in Milestones…
I am amazed that McDonald won’t give an educated hypothesis about why al Qaeda has kidnapped two French journalists in Iraq and used them to try their hand at blackmailing the French government around the Islamic veil question in the French schools. I think that MacDonald failed to understand that al Qaeda is using that question to globalize their struggle and open a new front. Their European front.
And understandably enough the jihadists' first movement was against France, well-timed to coincide with the schools opening in France.
And just one last telling detail that somehow takes into account the demographics dear to McDonald: 48 hours after the kidnappers published their demands, with France shocked, the imam of the Paris mosque, the center of moderate Islam in France, called for a symbolic prayer of Muslims, Jews and Christians together, on behalf of the liberation of the hostages. Invited were Dominique de Villepin, the minister of foreign affairs at the time of the fight at the UN between the US and France and now minister of the Interior, the actual minister of Foreign Affairs and an array of representatives of politics an Media. The Imam had called all Muslims in the Paris region to join the prayer at the mosque. But there came more Christians and Jews than Muslims. All in all, 48 Moslems joined in. There are perhaps 2,000,000 Moslems in the Paris region.
See if you like a post that I wrote at the time at http://netwar04.blogspot.com/2004/09/distressing-puzzling-days-in-france.html
Gary Gunnels:
We're enjoying lowered crime rates in Britain, too. Lower because people have given up reporting them. Our legal system RE crime is a disgrace, and France is worse.
bq.
France is no more xenophobic than any other country.
LOL! France is probably the most racist country in Europe. In France, there are the French and other people who happen to hold French citizenship.
Why is that funny? Iraq will probably end up as a constitutional Arab state, with all the attributes that entails - good and bad. I think that is the best we're likely to get, at least for now.
That standard is high for the region, but low for Europe.
Juan A. Hervada
Tariq Ramadan worries me. He's a closet jihadist, no doubt about it. Even if we were optimistic and said most Muslims are not jihadists, he has a serious following in Europe. It would be very easy for him to lead them in a pro-jihad direction. See also: Izetbegovic.
Colt
Ramadan is a very intriguing and ambivalent character. As you may know, his father was, back in Egypt, one of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood and he is what I would call the catalyst celebrity that attracts to fundamentalism a significant proportion of young insecure second generation beurs (sons and daughters of North African immigrants). And he’s well, a European, although a quite peculiar one.
Now, I don’t want to say that all of those who become engaged in pious/social/militant (in that order temporally) activities became jihadists. In fact, there are several levels of participation in jihad, as one can sense through their websites and hanging around in some neighborhoods in Paris. I think that very often they reproduce the “inversed iceberg” political-military model of Marxism-Leninism, with a hard-core truly clandestine structure and a larger visible/legal structure of pious, charitable and cultural activities. Tariq Ramadan is a crucial public figure for the late part, the legal networks established all over Europe, an agglutinant force and an “educator” if I dare to call him so.
I agree with you that he’s a (closet) jihadist, perhaps one of the theoreticians of “lightning the fuse of the world”, the synthesizers of traditional radical (and violent) Islam and the post-modernistic brand of “situationism”. He has been, for instance, one of the most vehement preachers (in the literal sense of the term) of the so called “Muslim Identity” (a concept absolutely alien to Islam). A dangerous man, indeed.
Juan A. Hervada:
Several European intelligence agencies believe Ramadan is a senior leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. I've heard rumours he was linked to the FIS, too. Nasty piece of work.
Yeah. It isn't all that surprising that even 'moderate' Muslim groups lobby against anti-terrorist measures.
Colt
I didn’t know that Ramadan was known in America.
I have seen him in a couple of public talks/debates in Paris and then, on TV, in a French show called “100 minutes to convince” featuring Nicolas Sarkozy, the would be next French president (hopefully); Ramadan was one of the invited celebrities, along with extreme-right leader Jean-Marie Le-Pen. It took Sarkozy’s consummate command of the French language to trounce Ramadan to pieces (incidentally, he also bulldozed Le-Pen), but in the two debates I attended he always was the winner because he masters the art of the politically correct discourse (“You must respect our identity…”) and the justification of anything disgusting in Islam (or rather, in his version of Islam) as a part of that identity.
His public gestalt is like the god Janus: towards the Europeans he always fancies to project himself as a bridge between cultures, as a mediator of sorts. Then , towards the young Muslims already born in France, Belgium, etc. he’s the living proof that you can be sophisticated and a pious bigot, to look and eventually talk like one of them but zealously keeping his fanaticism under the glaze.
He’s the inspirer, at least theoretically, of many of the catchphrases the fundamentalists use in their low-level propaganda, like “the Koran is our only Constitution” (not the French) or “The hijab (Islamic veil) isn’t a Koranic commandment, it is a part of the freedom of the Muslim woman”.
The question is IF he also coined the other one: “you (the European infidels) love life, we love death”. I don’t want to calumniate him. This is my own very personal judgment: I believe him perfectly able.
Colt
I just realized (your post to Gary Gunnels) that you were in Britain. Has Ramadan been active there?
Colt,
Crime rates demonstrably decreased under Sarkozy when he was Interior Minister.
Why is that funny?
Because it reveals a rather interesting bit of hypocrisy, that's why. People here would like to see France collapse apparently, indeed, would revel in it; this strikes as strange as those who would like to see U.S. military fail in Iraq.
"The question is IF he also coined the other one: “you (the European infidels) love life, we love death”.
In September 2001, Afghan mujahid Maulana Inyadullah was quoted in the world press as saying "The Americans love Pepsi-Cola, we love death".
In January 2002, a blogger noted, "Well, it's January and I'm drinking a Pepsi and Mr. Inyadullah is probably dead".
Ramadan should note that we can not only fact-check his ass, but smear it over the landscape as well.
Jinderella:
I approached the project with no predetermined outcomes, I assure you. If the figures revealed different trends--sustained high fertility among Muslims, a lack of cultural assimilation, high rates of religious practice--then I'd have reported them and Eurabia would have gained itself a convert. As things stand, even the conservative websites--Islam Online, for instance--complained, when they weren't advancing maximalist causes, that French Muslims are disturbingly Westernized.
I'd be interested in your complaints about my statistics, since I've got a reply to critics on the backburner. Any specific issues?
I think you underestimate the degree to which the Catholic Church was fundamentally reactionary to a quite recent date. The entire Vichy period, when the French Church accepted Vichy as a way to regenerate Catholic morals, stands as an instructive example. The role played by clericofascism in Spain and Portugal, or the willing collaboration of the Church with fascism in Italy and exclusionary nationalism in Poland, also bears examination.
Do the French have such a strategy? I think secularism may be the French strategy. That is why the hijab ban is so important to both sides.
It's worth noting that the ban has been met with very little opposition. A hundred or so students out of a French Muslim student population of ~2M?
Colt:
Yes, immigrants and ethnic minorities tend congregate in distinct neighbourhoods where they often predominate. This isn't a new thing, in France or in other countries of immigration.
I wrote the article in April, long before the kidnapping incident. My thesis? The kidnappers were trying, among other things, to force the Muslims of France to choose between their Muslim and French identities (and more, a particular view of Muslim identity). It seems to have failed, badly.
Juan, great stuff from someone who sees it first hand. Thanks very much for uncloaking and adding your thoughts.
Randy, thanks for dropping by. Good to see you here - and please let us know if you follow up your original post with further thoughts. Agree with jinnderella re: the gratuitous LGF bashing, though - the problem has been noticed in far wider circles than just Charles' blog, and the best thing to do is simply present a good argument for your POV.
Randy, I think Juan covered a lot of what I am very interested in (thanx, Juan-- I have really enjoyed your inputs here, and I also read your blog! :)).
An example of not terribly useful stats is your "ban has met with very little opposition" statement-- just exactly what is the kidnapping of the french journalists if not opposition? Your piece at Gene Expression is dated Sept 8-- surely the kidnapping was an important piece of data by then.
A poll among schoolgirls? Better you should have poll results from the clerics and the fathers in this extremly patriarchial society. Exactly what is this poll measuring? Are you familiar with the Phillipine Toaster Test?
Catholicism was secularized centuries ago. I can't see analogs at all. Enlighten me.
Look, this is what I am interested in. There exists an evolved set of strategies that has preserved the 'integrity' of Islam for 1400 years. No one sat down and drew them up, they grew. The successful memes survived and replicated. Catholicism lost its integrity long ago. Strategies that had been potent in the past, excommunication, no marriage outside the faith, etc. have lost their power. Your examples of the church seeking a return of power by aligning itself with secular movements is classic.
I would like to see the macro model for Islam that includes immigration, reproduction, and conversion. Frankly, I suspect the maths behind your projections. Are you using the population genetics equations? Or simple linear models?
I do appreciate you showing up here to answer my questions.
Gary Gunnels: Sorry, missed your post. :(
Does my answer to Randy cover your questions?
Juan A. Hervada:
Not so much. I'm not sure quite why, frankly.
LOL! We're so easy to fool...
Gary Gunnels:
I expect that's true. But crime going from very high to just high isn't exactly great news.
Anything to back that up? It looks like you're confusing "are arguing" with "would revel in" that France could undergo major upheaval. Speaking for myself, I live across the channel. I'd rather not see Western Europe turn in to the Balkans. Unfortunately, my feeling on that matter is no barrier to it happening.
Randy McDonald:
I'm aware of that, and I think you confused me with someone else ;-)
If we're comparing the reactionary nature of the leaders of Catholicism and Islam as a guide to the direction Islam will take in Europe in the 21st century, surely this is a cause of concern to you? If the Catholic church reacted against assimilation/dilution, why won't Islam?
Randy McDonald:
Let me be more specific about the demographic question: My point is that you start having a problem when, in some areas you have a majoritarily Muslim population that may be heterogeneous by their country of origin but which is “homogenized” along religious lines by the fundamentalists. A fragile population that has had its social capital sequestered by the zealots. That’s what you have in Marseilles and much of the French South East, plus whole areas of the main conurbations (Paris, Toulouse, Lyon, Strasbourg…)
Now, estimations of the number of Muslims vary between the lowest 4 M to the highest 6 M. So, what we are talking about is between 7% and 10% of the population, heavily concentrated in some areas, ideologically targeted, with some success, by a well organized core of activists who want –we better stop kidding ourselves with euphemisms- to start a war of religion that they think they can win.
I remind you that the last war of religion in France, between Catholics and Protestants, lasted over 100 years, in fact, from the 16th century to the uprising of the Camisards in the first third of the 18th. French Protestants were never over 9% of the population… but then they were concentrated in some very precise regions: the Bearn, some zones of the Languedoc, the Saintonges, etc. where they often constituted important minorities, say over 25% of the population...
Weighing all the evidence, France is doomed. France needs a wakeup call, not a soporific. If you consider yourself a friend of France, come up with ways that France can maintain its national integrity against an age-old enemy.
Joe:
Thanks for the kind words.
Agree with jinnderella re: the gratuitous LGF bashing, though - the problem has been noticed in far wider circles than just Charles' blog, and the best thing to do is simply present a good argument for your POV.
I used the example of Little Green Footballs simply because Charles and too many of his posters (I'm tempted to call this group his followers) simply because they don't bother making distinctions between different populations.
Islam is a religion practiced by well over a billion people scattered across most of the world; it's very difficult to make generalizations about its followers. In my personal experience, for instance, I haven't encountered any homophobic Muslims, certainly not any violently homophobic Muslims.
The issue that we have isn't with Muslims in general, not even traditiona Muslims. The problem is with radicals who want to use violence to enforce a particularly narrow version of Islam on their fellow Muslims, with non-Muslims mostly coming as an afterthought save in certain particular districts of the world. You really do need a policy sensitive to these distinctions. LGF seems to have abandoned any idea of sensitivity. Plus, as a visitor and occasional poster I noticed that the "ha! ha! Europe's going to be Islamized" meme is visible in the comments.
Jinderella:
An example of not terribly useful stats is your "ban has met with very little opposition" statement-- just exactly what is the kidnapping of the french journalists if not opposition? Your piece at Gene Expression is dated Sept 8-- surely the kidnapping was an important piece of data by then.
Yes. It was interesting to note, in the English- and French-language press coverage, how Muslim organizations and individuals in France not only rejected the hostage-taking as an immoral act in itself, but rejected it as an unjustified intervention in internal French disputes. The quote that I cited, about the schoolgirl who said that she'd prefer to be French and Muslim but that if she had to choose she'd prioritize her French identity, seems diagnostic.
A poll among schoolgirls? Better you should have poll results from the clerics and the fathers in this extremly patriarchial society. Exactly what is this poll measuring? Are you familiar with the Phillipine Toaster Test?
Catholicism was secularized centuries ago. I can't see analogs at all. Enlighten me.
Centuries ago? The Catholic religion, though, institutionally and in its folk variants, has generally tried to resist secularization. This tension with secular authorities is substantially responsible for the French Third Republic's frequent internal instabilities; the Catholic Church's desire to have public law approach Catholic moral law as closely as possible has resulted in democratic states which were fairly conservative and somewhat repressive across the board (Ireland until the 1980s, Québec until the 1960s) or which were frequently outright authoritarian (Spain, Portugal, and Italy under dictatorships). Democratization in Catholic countries proceeded, by in large, with the declining influence of the Catholic Church over public policy-making and the empowerment of people who didn't want Catholic moral and religious law to dominate everyone.
Look, this is what I am interested in. There exists an evolved set of strategies that has preserved the 'integrity' of Islam for 1400 years. No one sat down and drew them up, they grew. The successful memes survived and replicated. Catholicism lost its integrity long ago. Strategies that had been potent in the past, excommunication, no marriage outside the faith, etc. have lost their power. Your examples of the church seeking a return of power by aligning itself with secular movements is classic.
Catholicism only really lost its integrity in the mid-20th century, arguably after Catholic Europe was divided between Communist states which repressed religion and democratic states which tended to disturst the Church based on its dubious record to date. Afterwards, the effect spread generally, to Québec, to Latin America, and so on. Catholicism was frequently associated with a "third way" of development between Western liberal democracy and Soviet Communism in the interwar years--Chesterton's writings are an example.
Islamic societies are, by and large, not modern societies. They're at roughly the same level of human and economic development as southern and eastern Europe at the beginning of the last century, save that certain problems (the ubiquity of mass media to create broad pools of radicalism, the depression of death rates by modern medicine) have been exacerbated by modernity. The most modern societies, though--the Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union, the western Balkans, Turkey, Tunisia, Malaysia--have proven increasingly resistant to radical Islam, with Muslim movements being assimilated to democratic political structures just like their Christian counterparts a half-century earlier. (That's where the Christian Democrats came from.) The effort of Iranian Shi'ism to use the stat to reinforce its dwindlingh hold seems likely to bring about a nice bout of French-style radical anti-clericalism sooner than later.
I would like to see the macro model for Islam that includes immigration, reproduction, and conversion. Frankly, I suspect the maths behind your projections. Are you using the population genetics equations? Or simple linear models?
I'm using linear models. I believe, though, that my underlying assumptions--a steadily declining French Muslim fertility rate alongside a stable and moderately high French non-Muslim fertility rate; growing French Muslim assimilation to French cultural norms; growing intermarriage between Muslims and non-Muslims; the breakdown of traditional Muslim religious culture--would hold generally. Rates of conversion to Islam seem to be fairly low, at 0.1% of the French non-Muslim population per annum; it would be interesting to compare this with the rate of adoption of other religions by non-Muslim French, like New Age and Buddhism.
Colt:
If we're comparing the reactionary nature of the leaders of Catholicism and Islam as a guide to the direction Islam will take in Europe in the 21st century, surely this is a cause of concern to you? If the Catholic church reacted against assimilation/dilution, why won't Islam?
It's doing that already--the point of radical Islam, starting from the 1978-1979 Iranian revolution, has been to expel or even reverse the growing Westernization and/or modernization of Muslim societies. In so doing, though, it's had to adopt many of the methods of modernity, like mass media and mass education. Thus, you see interesting things like the Islamic Republic of Iran hosting a female-majority university student population and a thriving and rather radical segment of the blogosphere. Physical violence and state repression are crude tools to control modernizing populations.
Juan A. Hervada:
You make an excellent point about the relative percentages of Muslims and Huguenots. I think that the underlying situations differ, though. If it ever came down to a war of religion in 21st century France, for instance, the banlieues, urban and dependent on external support, are much more vulnerable than Huguenot peasant communities and seaports to military action and blockade.
Just because 7 to 10% of the French population is Muslim, though, doesn't mean that they'll necessarily rally to the cause. The violent radicals are trying to impose a particular version of Islamic culture on a broad, diverse, and generally secular Muslim population. This is a good way to alienate their nominal constituents. For instance, 49% of French Muslim women support the ban on the hijab; the percentage rises to proportions found only in Stalinist elections when you talk to younger and younger demographics. If Muslim radicals ever try to start a war against France, I'd lay bets that they'd find the substantial majority of their nominal coreligionists actively or passively hostile.
Jinderella, sorry I missed this paragraph:
A poll among schoolgirls? Better you should have poll results from the clerics and the fathers in this extremly patriarchial society. Exactly what is this poll measuring? Are you familiar with the Phillipine Toaster Test?
I'm not familiar with this test, no. The poll I'm referring to was conducted by the Economist in spring or early summer of this year. I can find the precise cite if you want.
I'm not sure how patriarchal French Muslim society is. Conservative in its vision of gender roles, yes, but this conservatism is undermined by the very fact that French Muslims are embedded in a rather secular and gender-equal society. The one-fifth of children born into the French Muslim community outright of wedlock is an indicative figure, IMO, about the true weakness of patriarchy.
"Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century." --Bernard Lewis.
Randy McDonald
Just a few lines after a long working night before I go to bed (it’s 4 a.m. over here).
I liked very much your post; even if I disagree in some relatively lesser aspects, I do agree in some others which are of more consequence. In any event, your post is indeed a good spur to think about what I feel is a major, decisive, front of the jihadist war against democracy. I’ll try to answer in detail during the weekend but, to summarize my feeling in one sentence, my criticism against your way of seeing the relationship Islam/France has to do with a major weakness in your argument: you don’t address the fact that a well organized minority can in certain circumstances hijack the will of a disorganized majority, particularly if that majority (say the French Muslim “community”) lacks a strong structured civil society and a reasonable level of social capital.
Add to that the phenomena of social resonance (as studied for the Civil Rights movement versus the Nation of Islam by Gabriel Acevedo (http://www.yale.edu/ccr/acevedo.doc ), add the tradition of clandestine work the jihadists have inherited through disgruntled radical leftists through the Middle East and a notorious group of converts in Western Europe… I’m convinced that the kidnapping of the French journalists in Iraq has one leg here, in France.
The problem in my view is that today’s jihadists are much closer to a synthesis of the old day Kommintern and an apocalyptic, infinitely more cruel and anty-system, remake of the Bader-Meinhoff or the Red Brigade terrorist cells than we would like to admit. And they are trying to play in a truly global chessboard.
Randy: In deference to Joe's Good News Saturdays (which I embrace with all my heart), I'm postponing further argument until Sunday, but I will explain the Phillipine Toaster Test. In the late 50's, the Phillipine government desired to implement some sort of reduction in the birth rate. The variable with the highest negative correlation to family size was dicovered to be the number of electrical appliances owned by the family. In conclusion, family size could be reduced by handing out toasters. :-)
My point is, is the poll measuring the ability of muslim schoolgirls to reject the hijab, or their desire to?
Randy; One more thing, lest I forget--
"Certainly Little Green Footballs has become spectacularly slimy of late."
This gratuitous, subjective, and noncontributory remark literally poisoned your whole argument for me. Colt and I are long time posters at LGF.
When I come back to this thread, I like to point out some comments from Gene Expression made by razib and zack latif (two of my favorite muslim commenters) on the 'organic unity' of Islam.
Jinnderella: I intensely dislike the gratuitous LGF bashing
What do you expect when many LGF posts could have happily appeared on Der Sturmer with a few proper nouns changed?
Phil Hunt: This is not an appropriate comment for a Good News Saturday. I was replying to Randy's statement, and I think your comment is off topic to this thread.
Gary, "BTW, I always find it humorous that the same folks who say that those with low expectations of Muslims in Iraq are a kin to racists, have low expectations of Muslims in Europe."
Excellent point.
Jinderella:
Randy: In deference to Joe's Good News Saturdays (which I embrace with all my heart), I'm postponing further argument until Sunday, but I will explain the Phillipine Toaster Test. In the late 50's, the Phillipine government desired to implement some sort of reduction in the birth rate. The variable with the highest negative correlation to family size was dicovered to be the number of electrical appliances owned by the family. In conclusion, family size could be reduced by handing out toasters. :-)
My point is, is the poll measuring the ability of muslim schoolgirls to reject the hijab, or their desire to?
I'd argue that it's their desire to reject the hijab. It doesn't measure their ability, no. That's what the ban on the hijab does, by removing the choice from their paternal relatives. That the number of French Muslim schoolgirls wearing the hijab numbered in the low hundreds suggests that it's working.
Yes, this constitutes social engineering. It strikes me as a rather cost-effective (low cost, high effectiveness) way to destabilize patriarchy, particularly Muslim religious patriarchy.
Colt and I are long time posters at LGF.
I think I remember seeing Colt--curiously enough, in a discussion on Muslim demography.
When I wrote that, I didn't mean to give generic offense to LGF posters. What I did see, and continue to see, at LGF, is an active minority of posters (and, to some extent, a biased editorial policy of Charles) that doesn't distinguish between different sorts of Muslims, most particularly between conservative and traditionalist Muslims who aren't much different from 19th century North American Christians and the radicals like the Salafists of Algeria and bin Laden who'd like to spill oceans of blood. Too often, a generic "Muslim" is too often used to stand in for the 1.2 billion actual Muslims.
Jinnderella: Thanks for stepping in, but my policy re: Saturdays does allows people to continue threads attached to entries posted earlier in the week.
I tend to refrain from that on "Good News Saturdays" myself, and others (like you) may also choose to do so, but it's optional. Non-conforming Blog Posts in the Saturday slot are, of course, a different matter.
The problem with Phil's comment is that it's attached to no evidence and is just a gratuitous and not very intelligent smear. In other words, the problem is that it's false and inappropriate, period - no matter what day it is.
But this (very good) thread isn't about LGF, and I think everyone's position is clear now. We've put that subject on the table and addressed it, IMO; which lets us stick to the larger topic from here on.