NationStates Jolt Archive

Simply put, who believes we are, or will be soon, at war with Islam. Between tensions ammounting in Europe, an anti middle east feeling in America and the near explosion of geo political current events coming out of middle eastern countries, who beleives we, as the west, (America, Canada, Europe, Australia) are actually, or will be at war with Islam?

Obviously not all muslims are bad, not even most, but the fact remains that there ARE lots of problems going on with muslims today that the minority are GREATLY overshadowing the majority in terms of reputation.

So....discuss.

I'm posting an article on Sweden and its problems with muslims...NOTE...these are not muslim extremist...just simply regular muslims that Sweden has problems with.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/magazine/05muslims.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin

Fass, I would really love for you to read that, reply in my thread, and tell me what you think about it. Thanks.

You know what would help stop war, NOT publishing offensive caricatures of Islamic religious figures.

If it did come to war, Israel would do its usual rutine of beating Egypt, Jordan Syria and whoever is helping them. And if they can't, the west could easily beat them. Im talking about the short term, i dont know what will happen or how extensive the resistance will be.

But i dont think the west will wage war on Islam, in the short term, all i can see is something realating to Iran's nuclear program.

First, there are many Muslims living outside of the Middle East.

Second, Peak Oil will cause pointless and fruitless resource wars with oil rich countries, like those found in the Middle East, and with other heavy oil users like Russia, China and maybe India.

Lol, they (the middle East (I am assuming this is what you are referring to, and not Islam, as Islam is a religion, and there is no chance the whole world is going to jump into a holy war)) has been fighing and killing everything and everybody since the beginning of time. Hell, Laurence of Arabia joined the tribes of Arabia together, and for his hard work and effort, they imprisoned him and tortured him mercilessly for years. I don't think that anybody takes them seriously, and the only reason we are writing about them right now is because they have oil.

End of story

We are at war with Islamic extremeists, all of which need to be killed by any means nessacary.

Obviously not all muslims are bad, not even most, but the fact remains that there ARE lots of problems going on with muslims today that the minority are GREATLY overshadowing the majority in terms of reputation.
Well then, there you have it. No war on Islam, only on some particular people who happen to also be Muslims.

Second, Peak Oil will cause pointless and fruitless resource wars with oil rich countries, like those found in the Middle East, and with other heavy oil users like Russia, China and maybe India.

Peak Oil. Now that would make a interesting new discussion. Yeah, but I agree. Those two things (war on Islam and peak oil) are related.

We are at war with Islamic extremeists, all of which need to be killed by any means nessacary.

Very "refreshing" to read this, do you know anything about the UN!? Ambassador?

Well then, there you have it. No war on Islam, only on some particular people who happen to also be Muslims.

Right...but the mere fact that the bad ones are overshadowing the not bad ones..might just be enough for a war on all muslims, regardless if their extreamist or not. I just read an article on Sweden and its problems with muslims. Those muslims are not extreamist at all, however they do hate western society and the Swedish government.

You know what would help stop war, NOT publishing offensive caricatures of Islamic religious figures.

If it did come to war, Israel would do its usual rutine of beating Egypt, Jordan Syria and whoever is helping them. And if they can't, the west could easily beat them. Im talking about the short term, i dont know what will happen or how extensive the resistance will be.

But i dont think the west will wage war on Islam, in the short term, all i can see is something realating to Iran's nuclear program.

So basically your saying that the West's war plan should be, just let Israel do all the dirty work and take all the blame for it?

War with Islam? Meaning with a religion?

It would be correct if you put "War with Islamic Extremists" because a war with a religion is just plain impossible.

And "near future" in the choice is too uptight (atleast for me, I don't think anyone will go to war with a religion for it isn't of a valid value).

There is no such thing as a war on Islam, we do not live in the middle ages. And theories about a supposed clash of civilizations are equally demagogic. What is to be uprooted are extremist organisations, formed with destructive intents, wherever they exist. In conformity with international law, based on basic human rights and fair dealings between nations, and respecting national sovereignty. Exception made of governments condoning and inciting this sort of illicit enterprise.
This however not being established unilaterally. The basis of any convention is that it is generally accepted as such. No law is imposed, but proposed and ratified. The recent warmongering portraied by the US administration with the implicit popular, even if ever more so impopular, support behind it, is the worst example any democratic state could give of a distorted perception of what self-defence is.
The solutions to this pressing problem not being raping the very foundation of what makes democracies states of law, by subtracting the people's basic rights, upheld by a countries' constitution.
What recent islamic fundamentalist terrorist cells want destroyed is, ironically what most people want changed, violences commited in the name of a price based, and not value based market capitalist system. Western civil liberties are not a target for terrorists, they just allow them to generate contorversy within western opinions, and through its demagogic nature recruit more radical followers in their home countries.

Where's the option for I want to attack all organised religions and destroy them?

You know what would help stop war, NOT publishing offensive caricatures of Islamic religious figures.


You know what would help stop war: NOT burning down embassies because of some stupid cartoons.

Right...but the mere fact that the bad ones are overshadowing the not bad ones..might just be enough for a war on all muslims, regardless if their extreamist or not.
Why?

Yes, not being a fundamentalist reactionary with suicidal or pyromaniacal tendencies tends to help logical thought and dialogue.

Their religous book (qua'rn or something) calls for war against the "infidels".. of course, before that, it said peace o___o So I think yes, because The saudi king will probably be replaced with a war fanatic

You know what would help stop war: NOT burning down embassies because of some stupid cartoons.

Also what would help is Islamic nut cases getting a brain and not been a bunch of dicks. :) :sniper: :mp5:

So basically your saying that the West's war plan should be, just let Israel do all the dirty work and take all the blame for it?
Dirty work? What dirty work has Israel on its hands that was not its own doing, or direct consequence of its inflamed actions or discourse?

An actual war we could never win. This war is a war of beliefs and can only be won in the mind. The more missiles we throw at them the more they will hate us, and the more extremist they will become. Unfortunately, its got to a point no short term strategies will work.

The only solution I can think of is a slow long term economic based strategy.
They have already started boycotting our products, so we should do the same to them, which means ending our oil dependednt culture. If you can bike to work, then do that.

We also should not allow any more of them into our countries as immigrants, we already have enough of them and the ones already here need to be better educated in the school system.

We must end all aid to the Muslim world, let them help themselves rather than rely on our generosity. They never seem to appreciate it anyway. Hopefully if left top their own devices, their culture will evolve naturally to a more progressive modern state.

I would say that Americans need to stop giving Israel so much support as this really aggravates the whole situation, but now that Hamas have been elected, its already too late for that, so supporting Israel wholeheartedly is now our only option.

You know what would help stop war, NOT publishing offensive caricatures of Islamic religious figures.

If it did come to war, Israel would do its usual rutine of beating Egypt, Jordan Syria and whoever is helping them. And if they can't, the west could easily beat them. Im talking about the short term, i dont know what will happen or how extensive the resistance will be.

But i dont think the west will wage war on Islam, in the short term, all i can see is something realating to Iran's nuclear program.


When We see the double standard that Islamic extremists hold the west to torn down. They have no tolerance for our choice in having free press free speech and being free from religous rule and expect their view to be held by all (or else). If they can not respect our free speech and all the consequences of it I beleive that is their fault not ours and we should not be held to a double standard.

You know what would help stop war: NOT burning down embassies because of some stupid cartoons.

The situation is more of a cause and effect issue.

Cause for Protests - Danish Cartoons

Effect of Protests - Burnings of embassies

The embassies would never be burned if Denmark didn't post the cartoons.

--

Also, The Atlantian Islands, do you REALLY expect the world to "in the near future" go to war with Islam?

I'd be damned if it did because what valid reason is there?

I can imagine what will happen if this impossible even occurs.

Scenario in the "near future -

I'm sitting in my living room watching CNN, when suddenly -

CNN Breaking News

"Today, the World Leaders discussed in an emergency press statement of declaring War on Islam. The reason being is to exterminate all Islamic Extremists and Violent Terrorists that claim to fight for Islam. President so-and-so of the U.S said, "The War on Terrorism cannot stop if Islam isn't demolished from the World. Islam promotes Terrorism and we must exterminate it!"

--

Two days Later

--

CNN

"Today, massive protests around the world by Muslims and Non-Muslims have been rallied. Following the Danish cartoon protests in 2005-2006, the protests reported have been reported to be far worse with clahses between protesters and National Police of various Countries. As the US and European Countries continue to wage war against Islam, many protester's have already held up signs threatening to burn down embassies while Islamic Militant Groups votived to assassinate political leaders."

--

And then WW3 happens.

Well, assuming by Islam you mean the Middle East, since Islam is spanned to all the continents (since it's a religion), I still don't see a conventional against it.

When We see the double standard that Islamic extremists hold the west to torn down. They have no tolerance for our choice in having free press free speech and being free from religous rule and expect their view to be held by all (or else). If they can not respect our free speech and all the consequences of it I beleive that is their fault not ours and we should not be held to a double standard.

Free press and other rights have to be used responsibly, or else it shouldn't be a problem if the New York Times published cartoons of Jewish Citizens being hanged by Germans (refrencing to the Holocaust) because, afterall, it IS in the name of Free Press :rolleyes:.

Well, assuming by Islam you mean the Middle East, since Islam is spanned to all the continents (since it's a religion), I still don't see a conventional against it.

Really, attacking the Middle East because of some VERY FEW Extremists HIDING in countries?

How narrow-minded.

Your arguing how to avert it, but it isn't going to work!
Their holy book says kill the infidels
They view everyone non-muslim as infidels
Therefore
We're going to get attacked (America at least, Islam would have half the world on their butts if they attacked Canada)

You know what would help stop war: NOT burning down embassies because of some stupid cartoons.

hahaha...quite true

"if you make fun of my peace loving religion...i shall beat you/stone you/stab you/burn you/kill you!!!"

stone age comes to mind when i think of islam..what a shame they allow their religion to be hijacked by a bunch of f#@#ing lunatics,and yet the "peacefull" ones are also out in the street throwing stones and burning shit.

in the name of allah no less!

sickens me...as hypocracy and ignorance usually does.

and i'll be the first to admit i am ignorant of islam,but i think any religion that is as freakin violent as islam seems to be..isn't a religion of god..but a cult of personality and pretty much still in the stone age.:(

When We see the double standard that Islamic extremists hold the west to torn down. They have no tolerance for our choice in having free press free speech and being free from religous rule and expect their view to be held by all (or else). If they can not respect our free speech and all the consequences of it I beleive that is their fault not ours and we should not be held to a double standard.


Being free from religious rule? Have you noticed the radical christian overhall the whitehouse has been going through these past few years?

America is becoming less and less secular by the day. The result is that many see this as a war between christians and muslims.

Sure, we preach secular values, but at the end of the day, it's "for God and Country".

An actual war we could never win. This war is a war of beliefs and can only be won in the mind. The more missiles we throw at them the more they will hate us, and the more extremist they will become. Unfortunately, its got to a point no short term strategies will work.

The only solution I can think of is a slow long term economic based strategy.
They have already started boycotting our products, so we should do the same to them, which means ending our oil dependednt culture. If you can bike to work, then do that.

We also should not allow any more of them into our countries as immigrants, we already have enough of them and the ones already here need to be better educated in the school system.

We must end all aid to the Muslim world, let them help themselves rather than rely on our generosity. They never seem to appreciate it anyway. Hopefully if left top their own devices, their culture will evolve naturally to a more progressive modern state.

I would say that Americans need to stop giving Israel so much support as this really aggravates the whole situation, but now that Hamas have been elected, its already too late for that, so supporting Israel wholeheartedly is now our only option.

What beliefs are you allegedly fighting? Religious beliefs? Living in democracy presupposes religious freedom. You're antidemocratic. Aid is a national choice, but then again i'm sure nike tennis shoes at half the price they would be selling for if not produced in Indonesia, is a bit of a counterstrike on that one way relation you picture. Most industrialised countries benefit far more from economical exploitation than give out in aid.
Ending an oil based economy, well thats what most people say but none do. USA is the worst student when it comes to that issue. Not even ratified Kyoto. Now this is used as diplomatic ammunition against oil producing countries, instead of being part of a real strategy for the energy industry, and the fruit of environmental concerns.
Supporting a state that does not deign to acknowledge human rights proclaimed by the Geneva Convention, because it suits political powers that another such state is circumstacially deemed persona non grata is a very, very smart move. In perfect accordance with constitutionalist societies.

Free press and other rights have to be used responsibly, or else it shouldn't be a problem if the New York Times published cartoons of Jewish Citizens being hanged by Germans (refrencing to the Holocaust) because, afterall, it IS in the name of Free Press :rolleyes:.
You do realize that the cartoons that aroused this comotion were in part manipulated by islamic communities representatives to incite violent repercussions.
http://counterterror.typepad.com/the_counterterrorism_blog/2006/02/fabricated_cart.html

Britian soon will be. Depressingly both Enoch Powell and the BNP are now being vindicated, however, more happily, the police will soon be afforded extensive powers to suppress the rag'eds

You do realize that the cartoons that aroused this comotion were in part manipulated by islamic communities representatives to incite violent repercussions.
http://counterterror.typepad.com/the_counterterrorism_blog/2006/02/fabricated_cart.html

Yes, seeing by the name "Counter Terrorrism", it is highly assured that this website is not based on a neutral ground.

2 weeks ago I would have said no we're not and we won't be, but after the protests and what not over cartoons, I think they're going to start one. I agree most muslims are good but there is a very high precent that seems to want to burn down embassys.... I guess we'll have to restart the crusades....

The situation is more of a cause and effect issue.

Cause for Protests - Danish Cartoons

Effect of Protests - Burnings of embassies

The embassies would never be burned if Denmark didn't post the cartoons.

--



And yet this is perfectly logical and self explanatory?
The named blog is fed by journalists of diverse positions.

Isso, this is not a debate about the economic world system, its about how to curb dangerous political Islam. Doubtless the two issues are related, so lets here your solution then? Or maybe you dont even recognize Extremist Islam as a problem? Is it entirley our fault?

What is to be uprooted are extremist organisations, formed with destructive intents, wherever they exist. In conformity with international law, based on basic human rights and fair dealings between nations, and respecting national sovereignty. Exception made of governments condoning and inciting this sort of illicit enterprise.
This however not being established unilaterally. The basis of any convention is that it is generally accepted as such. No law is imposed, but proposed and ratified. The recent warmongering portraied by the US administration with the implicit popular, even if ever more so impopular, support behind it, is the worst example any democratic state could give of a distorted perception of what self-defence is.
The solutions to this pressing problem not being raping the very foundation of what makes democracies states of law, by subtracting the people's basic rights, upheld by a countries' constitution.


Quoting myself... eeww. Counter intelligence, not indiscriminate phone taping, or censorship in the media, reducing individual freedoms, etc.. You know the type of work James Bond movies caricature. The type of work that CIA sucks at completing. The undercover, in the field personnel do the job, but when the info gets to the States nothing is done about it. The 9/11 attacks were known to be likely, dates and mode of strike, prior to the ocurrence. The decisions weren't made in time. Danger was minimised, then. Now its inflated, danger is next door, just look for a turbant and a beard!! Neither is a sane way of dealing with the situation.
The same way drug dealing is infiltrated in one's country, international organisations can be infiltrated by law enforcement officers. Is it flawless, no. To eradicate the problem the economical and social issues, worldwide have to be adressed. But I realise that for the US administration its easier to encourage fear and ignorance, rather than introduce social reform. Mainly because they are lackeys to obscure lobbies, economical and ideological.

Being free from religious rule? Have you noticed the radical christian overhall the whitehouse has been going through these past few years?

America is becoming less and less secular by the day. The result is that many see this as a war between christians and muslims.

Sure, we preach secular values, but at the end of the day, it's "for God and Country".

The above just sounds like paranoid hysteria. The "radical christian overhall" in the White House hasn't preached beheadings for homosexuals, holy war, firebombing media outlets and hollywood for the promotion of un-christian values, attacks against non-believers, or anything of the sort. Besides, in January 2009, someone else will be inaugurated 44th president of the United States of America.

Islam is not an entity. It's not even a unified idea.

If you want, we can talk about a war on Islamism, although "war" still wouldn't be the right word.

But a War on Islam is just as impossible as a War on Terror, or a War on Car Accidents.

Have a look:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Islam
That is what we want to promote. That is what we need to put on the news.

We've been at war w/Islam since islam began its warmongering spread in the 6th century. WE we always be at war w/Islam, it has simply been a lull since the muslims became weakened after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

We've been at war w/Islam since islam began its warmongering spread in the 6th century. WE we always be at war w/Islam, it has simply been a lull since the muslims became weakened after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
Naturally, its all just a big conspiracy isn't it? Some Communist Muslim Pirates are to blame as well.

It's been done ...

http://www.bung.org/~jt/images/aa102.jpg

HASSAAAAANNN CHOP!

Naturally, its all just a big conspiracy isn't it? Some Communist Muslim Pirates are to blame as well.

No to be a conspiracy something has to be hidden. It hasn't been hidden. The fact that Islam waged war to expand its borders over most of the middle east, north africa,parts of Eastern Europe (Unprovoked mind you unless you consider Jews refusing to mass convert to islam a provocation.). Then Christianity launches its retaliatory attacks (The Crusades) which Islam deflects, then the numerous wars between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. People have simply forgotten because we have been in a period of "Dark Ages" for islam. Islam is about 600 years behind Christianity in its calendar making this (1400's or so) the time that they are coming out of their "dark age". The similiarity is shocking.

How can there be a war against a religion?

Nobody is at war with islam.

However, pan-islamists are at war with kafirs, whether we accept it or not.

How can there be a war against a religion?

Nobody is at war with islam.

However, pan-islamists are at war with kafirs, whether we accept it or not.

So if I bombed Mecca took out the holy sites, and also destroyed the holy sites in Jerusalem (but didn't strike any other portions of those countries) that wouldn't be an attack on Islam?

No to be a conspiracy something has to be hidden. It hasn't been hidden. The fact that Islam waged war to expand its borders over most of the middle east, north africa,parts of Eastern Europe (Unprovoked mind you unless you consider Jews refusing to mass convert to islam a provocation.). Then Christianity launches its retaliatory attacks (The Crusades) which Islam deflects, then the numerous wars between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. People have simply forgotten because we have been in a period of "Dark Ages" for islam. Islam is about 600 years behind Christianity in its calendar making this (1400's or so) the time that they are coming out of their "dark age". The similiarity is shocking.

Never have I heard such scewed and misguided drivel from history... except the last time you posted about Barbary Pirates and Spanish surrendering to terrorism....
Seriously, where do you get your facts from?

Never have I heard such scewed and misguided drivel from history... except the last time you posted about Barbary Pirates and Spanish surrendering to terrorism....
Seriously, where do you get your facts from?

Actually all of that is well known fact (except for the portion on Dark ages ect. That I pieced together myself just by looking at similiarities.)

The fact that Islam waged war to expand its borders over most of the middle east,
And? So what? Wars of conquest. You make it sound like it had never been done before.


north africa,parts of Eastern Europe (Unprovoked mind you unless you consider Jews refusing to mass convert to islam a provocation.)
Unprovoked? ITS CALLED CONQUEST! You might as well throw the same logic at the Romans, Greeks, Mongols, Chinese and so forth. Its about politics and wealth. Simple as. Stop scewing history to make it out like its 'us' vs. them.

And please explain to me then why in both Moorish Iberia and the Crusader states, did both Muslim and Christian fighters swap allegiances constantly, like mercanaries, and fight against those of the same creed as themselves, if it has always been a historical religious war? Hmm?

Then Christianity launches its retaliatory attacks (The Crusades) which Islam deflects,
Ah yes. The 'noble' Crusades against the evil Islam. Again nothing to do with power politics in rome or competeing interests between the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope, or amassing a huge army to later bring home and wage war against Louis/Henry/Richard/Barbarossa etc etc. Nothing to do with politics whatsoever. :rolleyes:

then the numerous wars between Russia and the Ottoman Empire.
Russia?! When? The Russian principalites weren't united for centuries! What time period are you talking about now!?

People have simply forgotten because we have been in a period of "Dark Ages" for islam. Islam is about 600 years behind Christianity in its calendar making this (1400's or so) the time that they are coming out of their "dark age". The similiarity is shocking.

People haven't forgotten shit- it never happened the way you picked out facts to fit your 'theory'.

Remember the Moors? Do you know how accepting they were of the Jews in Spain? When the Chrisitan Kings took over, a little thing called the Inquisition spread to Spain. Target: Jews. And muslim converts to Christianity.

Britian soon will be. Depressingly both Enoch Powell and the BNP are now being vindicated, however, more happily, the police will soon be afforded extensive powers to suppress the rag'eds

The BNP is your conservative part over there?

The BNP is your conservative part over there?

Think the political wing of the KKK.

Think the political wing of the KKK.

Really? Is it anything like the other right wing parties out there in Europe? Because one time me and Neu Leonstein were talking about right wing parties in Europe, and he was telling me about this terrible party, the SVP (Swiss Peoples Party) and I looked at the links he sent me about it, it wasnt a bad party at all, in fact...it supported most of my political views.

ANYWAY, I digress, do you have a good link to the BNP? I wanna see whats so "bad" about it.

ANYWAY, I digress, do you have a good link to the BNP? I wanna see whats so "bad" about it.
First link off google:
http://www.bnp.org.uk/

First link off google:
http://www.bnp.org.uk/

I was hoping you would drop in and help me out with my quest...you are all-knowing when it comes to all things politically European. :)

Thanks...in your opinion...and I know you dislike the SVP, is the SVP on the same level as this one?

Thanks...in your opinion...and I know you dislike the SVP, is the SVP on the same level as this one?
Maybe a little worse.

But yeah, they're pretty similar. British equivalent of the NPD of Germany.
http://partei.npd.de/

God, I feel so dirty for going on that link now...seen the map of Germany?

You know what would help stop war: NOT burning down embassies because of some stupid cartoons.


Touche.

Where's the option for I want to attack all organised religions and destroy them?

You have my support !

From the way i perceive it, a marxist perspective in regard to control of opinion would seem highly applicable here.... the "war against terror" liberation of palestine/islam/western war... whatever you want to call it, seems to be merely a violent expression of backlash and attention seeking , a resultant force of the spread of media prevalence over religious prevalence in the middle east as a way of controlling opinion.... underneath it all is the true struggle for power... religion versus media control, at least thats the way i perceive it. not to dismiss any religious element in regard to christian xenophobia, but it seems that its not just the christians in americathat wanted this war... i suppose it depends how great you perceive the christian control of the media to be.....

Maybe a little worse.

But yeah, they're pretty similar. British equivalent of the NPD of Germany.
http://partei.npd.de/

God, I feel so dirty for going on that link now...seen the map of Germany?

Ahhh!!! Its all in German!...lol, I'm an ugly American who only knows English, can you tell me how to get that website in English...please?

What am I looking at about the map?

Also...from what I have read from the BNP...they are a little extreame on most points, and they want a bigger government that I really like, but I would honestly have more in common with them than I would with the liberal parties over there.

The SVP, while I would not vote for a part like that in America (America is not Switzerland, it doesnt have the luxory to be) I would defenatly support it should I ever find myself in Switzerland.

We are at war with Islamic extremeists, all of which need to be killed by any means nessacary.

In another corner of the world: "we are at war with American Imperialists, all of wich need to be killed by any means necessary"

You know the deal with the Danish cartoons about Islam? I think that the Danes should not mess with a religion that has known ties to terrorism, and the idiot fundamentalist Muslims should just deal with the fact that the rest of the world hates them.

:upyours:

Its actually war with Islamic Extremists, not Muslims.

The Koran/ Qu'oran, does not promote terrorism, and neither does the Prophet Muhammad. Islam is similar to Christianity in that both are generally peaceful, rely on constant prayer. and devition to one deity.

Islamic extremists are the left-overs of Saddams regime, unfortunately.
Osamam Bin Laden resented America's involvement in trying to interfere (however well meant it was) with the Middle East, and started a new wave of terrorist attacks.

There have always been suicide bombers and terrorists, but recent events have shown us more, and pushed us almost nose-to-nose with each other.

I remember seeing a documentary on Islam in my RS class (Religious Studies) and not all Muslims are asian, or from the Middle East. I think because the extremists are calling the conflict in Iraq a 'Jihad' (Holy War. Let us not forget that Christianity had The Crusades....) we are confusing their evil acts with a peaceful religious group, every bit as ancient and revered as Christianity, Judaism, Buddism etcteras.

I dont think all Msulims should be killed, or shot at dawn. I dont believe innocent asian families should be driven from their homes simply because they wear their national dress, or worship someone else than God (Jehovah). We Brit's are supposed to be open-minded, with a good sense of humour, and dont take ourselves too seriously-if anyone was offended by scenes featuring Jesus' powers in the Family Guy movie, let me know...

I believe in Freedom of Speech-I do not believe in torture, burning of property, shootings, death threats and genocide, and am appalled by recent marches by obviously militant-led groups and their brainwashed followers.

Islam should go on. Terrorism should be stopped, and in these dangerous times we cannot afford to make mistakes and must recognise our true enemy-put aside our stereotypes and look closer. It is not asian people, it is not immigrant, it is not Islam...it is Terrorism

PS My boyfriend narrowly missed the 7/7 bombings. Every time I see the banners go up on militant marches crowing the praised of the 'Fantastic Four' (what irony...an American title) I get a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach as I think I wasnt even aware of the bombings until he phoned me. I would never have known...but I can make the distinctions, and hopefully others can....

Ahhh!!! Its all in German!...lol, I'm an ugly American who only knows English, can you tell me how to get that website in English...please?
I have my doubts whether they would consider using a language other than German to promote their glorious message.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Democratic_Party_of_Germany_%28NPD%29

What am I looking at about the map?
You have got to be kidding.
http://partei.npd.de/medien/bilder/brd.gif
You realise how they don't draw the Eastern Border, and that strangely darker area in the Czech Republic, Austria and Poland...

Don't get Canada involved. We havew a good relation with the Middle East and our Muslim Population. If you Europeans and Americans are having a problem tough luck, and stop wearing our flag on your backpacks.

Also...from what I have read from the BNP...they are a little extreame on most points, and they want a bigger government that I really like, but I would honestly have more in common with them than I would with the liberal parties over there.


Well the BNP has a lot of members that would be routinely involved in race beatings and the spouting of nonsensical, unfounded and irrational claims about "dem immigants is stealin' our wimmin and our jobs". And the usual bullshit that those parties spout.

You know, 'Native Culture', dilution of the proper gene pool and all- sounding familar to what some people in the States are like?

PS Im a pretty normal, twenty-two year old girl with a job and a life. I have no particular affiliations to religion-I was christened, but obviously not by choice, and am not practicing any religious devotion (unless Karma counts...) and I believe that sometimes one view (one newspaper, one netweork channel, one photographers 'prize' shot) can misinform so many millions.

The Indian protester who donned a Suicide-bomber-esque apparel at the recent march was splashed across one paper with the title 'Nick Him' and people texting in said he should have been 'shot on sight.'

Ahem...Jean-Charles De Menezes? Anyone?

In another paper, the young man (a britsh born student, well-spoken and polite) said he donned the garb to make a point about Britains double standards. We cannot fly our nations flag, cannot have Christmas lights, etc...we are a slave to our political correctness. He added he was appalled by the 9/11 and 7/7 bombings, and sickened by terrorism, he never meant to harm anyone and is not an Islamic Extremist, but a non-practising muslim.

Peopl are so quick to react, we dont stop to think 'Is there something we've missed.' Thats how one man ended up pinned to the floor and having six bullets slammed into his skull. He's adead, and now has our sympathy. We feel for his family.

But hands up those, who on hearing the news reports stating he was 'running' was wearing a 'large bulky coat' and a 'rucksack' and was being 'pursued by police officers' breathed a sigh of relief, thinking 'we got one of the bastards..he had it coming to him.'

I raise mine.

I have my doubts whether they would consider using a language other than German to promote their glorious message.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Democratic_Party_of_Germany_%28NPD%29

Ha!..Are they a neo-nazi group? Because I thought those were illegal over there..:confused: I'm gonna read it and see if I agree with their main points.

You have got to be kidding.
http://partei.npd.de/medien/bilder/brd.gif
You realise how they don't draw the Eastern Border, and that strangely darker area in the Czech Republic, Austria and Poland...

:eek: I totally missed that! I wasnt even looking, I just thought it was supposed to be like a third Riech map, or something...but a quick glance told me it was just a map of Germany, so I figured I must be missing some kind of caption in German...but wow...I guess we know this groups "ambitions"...

Don't get Canada involved. We havew a good relation with the Middle East and our Muslim Population. If you Europeans and Americans are having a problem tough luck, and stop wearing our flag on your backpacks.

I love Canada and want to move back there. I wear the flag because I miss you guys so damned much...such a wonderfully friendly, safe place to be. That place made my childhood 10, 000 times more lovely than England ever could.

You guys rules. I wear your flag (well...a pin badge) and I remember Labrador, and some truly great people.

All those BNP guys are missing is the pointy hats, a can of petrol, some matches and two long peices of timber....they're playing off peoples insecurities.

Remember the episode of the Simspons where the mayor claimed the tax hikes were due to immigrants, bot government mis-spending? The BNP are playing their constituents like fools. They dont have to promise education system reform, lower taxes, global warming precautions...they just say 'Kill the Blacks' and people come running, relieved and overjoyed that their prejudices and bitchy comments at last have a home.

Id love to see a Question Time with the BNP partyl leader, answering his 'constituents.' I'l be a fiver Lizzie Bardsley's in the audience, along with all the party member's children. And that lovely young closed-minded teenage daughter of a BNP MP will sing us out of the credits with her wonderful new racial abuse song, targeted at our children and our airwaves.....

I love Canada and want to move back there. I wear the flag because I miss you guys so damned much...such a wonderfully friendly, safe place to be. That place made my childhood 10, 000 times more lovely than England ever could.

You guys rules. I wear your flag (well...a pin badge) and I remember Labrador, and some truly great people.

Okay people who were born in Canada can wear the flag, or lived here and moved away.

Ha!..Are they a neo-nazi group? Because I thought those were illegal over there..:confused:
They are Neonazis.

But as a good law should, the anti-neonazi law has various criteria which have to be proven, and so far they managed to get around that.

The most spectacular time was when the government tried to get them outlawed and it turned out that the party was so infiltrated by the secret service to gather evidence that the court just threw the charges out.

They are Neonazis.

But as a good law should, the anti-neonazi law has various criteria which have to be proven, and so far they managed to get around that.

The most spectacular time was when the government tried to get them outlawed and it turned out that the party was so infiltrated by the secret service to gather evidence that the court just threw the charges out.

:D ..That is funny. Well...I suppose they water down their shit on their website to make it more appealing. It doesnt seem too bad to me, however its not my kind of party and, I'll admit, too extreme for me.

I like the American Republican Party and the SVP...the best out of any other parties I have come across.

So if I bombed Mecca took out the holy sites, and also destroyed the holy sites in Jerusalem (but didn't strike any other portions of those countries) that wouldn't be an attack on Islam?

No. Islam does not depend on holy sites.

Holy sites depend on Islam.

Muslims can be muslims without Mecca/Jerusalem/Najaf/Karbala/etc.

No. Islam does not depend on holy sites.

Holy sites depend on Islam.

Muslims can be muslims without Mecca/Jerusalem/Najaf/Karbala/etc.

Well see about that once someone "accidentaly" takes out Mecca.

the only reason we are writing about them right now is because they have oil.

End of story
My siggy agrees with your statement.

I just read an article on Sweden and its problems with muslims. Those muslims are not extreamist at all, however they do hate western society and the Swedish government.
Source please.

Source please.

With pleasure...http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/magazine/05muslims.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin .....be sure to read it all....as its VERY informing.

After you read it...would you please tell me what you think of it.

With pleasure...http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/magazine/05muslims.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin .....be sure to read it all....as its VERY informing.

After you read it...would you please tell me what you think of it.
The link you posted states that I have to join the NY Times. Can you access the article itself and post that link?

Thanks.

The link you posted states that I have to join the NY Times. Can you access the article itself and post that link?

Thanks.

Well, it links directly to the article for me and I'm not a member so heres the best I can do.


February 5, 2006
Islam on the Outskirts of the Welfare State
By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
In few places on earth is the air fresher than in a Swedish housing project. Take Bergsjon, which sits five miles from the center of Sweden's second-largest city, the stately Dutch-built port of Gothenburg. Home to a Volvo plant and some of the world's biggest shipyards, Gothenburg was long an industrial powerhouse. Bergsjon was built between 1967 and 1972 to reward the workers who made it that. Bergsjon resembles the places Swedes love to retreat to in midsummer — quiet, pristine, speckled with lakes and smelling of evergreen trees — but it is only a short tram ride away from the city's giant SKF ball-bearing plant. The center has no cars. Its 14,500 people live in apartments set within a lasso-shaped ring road, on grassy hills that climb toward the country's rustic uplands. As Asa Svensson, a municipal coordinator for the development, notes, "It was planned for people who like to be in the country."

But now the shipyards are gone. The Swedish industrial workers Bergsjon was planned for no longer live there. Today it is inhabited mostly by immigrants, many of them refugees, of a hundred nationalities. Seventy percent of the residents were either born abroad or have parents who were. The same goes for 93 percent of the schoolchildren. You see Somali women walking the paths in hijabs and long wraps and graffiti reading "Bosna i Hercegovina 4-Ever." A few years ago, the mayor of Gothenburg declared, "The prospects of turning Bergsjon into a normal Swedish neighborhood are almost nil."

Forty percent of the families are on outright welfare, and many of the rest are on various equivalents of welfare that bear different names. Far below half the population is employed. There are reports of a rise in recruitment to criminal gangs — and to radical Islamic groups, too, although none of the authorities can give a clear idea of how Islam is practiced and where. In October, Mirsad Bektasevic, a 19-year-old Swede from near Gothenburg, was arrested in Sarajevo in an apartment that contained suicide-bomb vests, explosives and a newly made video presumably intended for broadcast. Bektasevic, who was born to Muslim parents in prewar Yugoslavia and found refuge in Sweden as a 6-year-old, reportedly ran a Web site supporting Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. In October 2004, Osama bin Laden disparaged George Bush's claim that Al Qaeda hated freedom by saying, "Let him tell us why we did not strike Sweden, for example." Sweden may have kept its distance from the Iraq war, but it has been unable to shelter itself from world events.

There are places like Bergsjon ringing the major cities across Sweden. They are all terra incognita to the vast majority of native Swedes. It would be wrong to overdraw the picture. Svensson, who has been working in Bergsjon for 25 years, says she has never been attacked or felt insecure there. The public spaces are clean, and the apartments are large. In the wake of last fall's riots in France, journalists from France and Germany visited Sweden's public housing, and some hailed it as a model to be imitated. But clearly, various experiments close to the heart of Swedish democracy and Swedish socialism have gone wrong. Swedes pride themselves on the success of the cradle-to-grave welfare state they developed over the last 70 years. For its foreign defenders throughout the cold war, it was an ingenious way of avoiding the pitfalls of both American-style capitalism and Soviet Communism, of achieving both equality and prosperity. But neighborhoods that were built to keep citizens close to nature now keep them far from the job market. Policies meant to protect people from persecution now expose them to neglect. Swedes have begun to use a word — "segregation" — that they used to employ only when lecturing other countries. A sobering realization is beginning to spread that the Swedish system cannot be easily adapted to a society in which a seventh of the working-age population is foreign-born.




The Garlic Express

s Hemingway might have put it, Sweden has become a multiethnic, multicultural and racially divided country in two ways: first gradually, then suddenly. The gradual part started with World War II. Sweden was neutral, but it fell under Germany's sway. Indeed, the historian Byron Nordstrom has described this neutrality as "a sham" and Sweden as a "virtual ally" of the Germans. Sweden provided million of tons of iron ore to the Nazis and permitted the free movement of troops across its territory. This neutrality would have two important consequences in the half-century that followed. The first was spiritual. The ambitious Swedish welfare state, defended in the first decades of the century on grounds of ethnic, and even volkisch, solidarity, was maintained and expanded, but on different rationales — expiatory ones, you could say, like egalitarianism and humanitarianism. The second consequence was logistical. At a time when all of Europe's infrastructure needed to be rebuilt or replaced, Sweden had one of the few undemolished industrial bases on the continent. In retrospect, its astonishing postwar growth rates — 4 percent a year until the oil crisis of the 1970's and 7 percent for most of the 1960's — were almost inevitable. All Sweden lacked was sufficient people to man its factories. A result was a series of temporary labor agreements with foreign countries along the lines of Germany's Gastarbeiter program, starting with Italy and Hungary in 1947 and spreading to Yugoslavia and Turkey two decades later. (Finns, many of them Swedish-speaking, streamed in throughout the period.) As they did in Germany, the laborers proved considerably less temporary than anticipated. But in contrast to the German case, the immigration has been a success by any economic or cultural criterion you would care to use.

When the boom stopped all over the West in the 1970's, labor unions sought — and got — restrictions on work-force migration. But one door was left open: political asylum. Polish Jews fleeing state anti-Semitism and Greeks fleeing the dictatorship of the "colonels" began arriving in the late 1960's, and Swedish immigration since then forms — to use a metaphor of the economist Torsten Persson — "a ringlike pattern of political crises," from pro-Allende Chileans in the 1970's through Kurdish nationalists in the 1980's to Somalis and Bosnians in the 1990's. So began the "sudden" phase of the emergence of multiethnic Sweden. Since 1980, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, half of all residence permits granted — almost 400,000 — have gone to reunite families from various geopolitical disaster areas. A lot of these places were in the Islamic world. So Sweden now has a Muslim population of 200,000 to 400,000; the higher tally would place it among the most heavily Muslim countries in Western Europe.

Goran Johansson, Gothenburg's Social Democratic mayor, was a labor boss at SKF in the late 1960's, back when the tram line used by foreign workers was known as the Garlic Express. When the Yugoslavs started coming, Johansson recalled on a dark afternoon at City Hall earlier this winter: "I introduced these guys around. They directly found work and met Swedes every day. They had temporary housing, but they moved out quickly — often with Swedish women. Compare that to today!"

Sweden suffered from bad decisions and bad timing. In 1985, it shifted responsibility for integrating immigrants from its employment bureaucracy to its welfare system. Then, between 1990 and 1994, squeezed between an expanding state sector and increasing global competition for its industries, Sweden underwent the worst economic collapse of any Western European economy in decades. G.N.P. contracted by 6 percent, and employment levels declined by 12 percent. This was the moment (1992) when asylum applications were reaching a peak of 84,000 a year — to a country of only 9 million. The vast majority were accepted. That is, before family reunification is even reckoned in, Sweden was adding almost 1 percent a year to its population by welcoming some of the most desperate and traumatized people on earth.

Sweden had been trying to link immigrants with jobs and communities, along the lines Johansson still suggests. But such plans buckled under the size of the influx. The country now scrambled simply to house the newcomers. As it happened, empty housing was something Sweden had in abundance. Facing a housing shortage in the early 1960's, its government undertook an ambitious plan to build a million residences. It came to be known as the Million Program. The apartments that resulted compare well with other European subsidized housing, but Swedish culture is not built around apartment living, and native Swedes were unwilling to stay in them once they had enough money to afford their own houses. When the immigrants began arriving en masse, there was an obvious place to stick them. Assar Lindbeck, the dean of Sweden's welfare-state economists, points out that they were sent to areas where there were empty apartments — which are "by definition in an area of high unemployment."




Cool Million

By now, so fully has the immigrant population become associated with the Million Program that the immigrant magazine Gringo has coined the term miljonsvenskar, or "million Swedes," to describe the people who live in these apartments. The editor, Zanyar Adami, 24, a Kurd who arrived with his parents from Iran at age 6, brought out the first issue of Gringo in August 2004. He has since won the country's most prestigious journalism award.

Adami wants to defend and even glorify the culture of the newest Swedes, but admits that he is confused about what that culture is. Growing up as he did in newish housing in Hasselby, west of Stockholm, brought feelings of alienation, loneliness and inferiority. His own journalistic career began when he went out to a disco with seven Swedish-looking friends and was singled out to be turned away at the door. He went home and wrote a white-hot article that was published to considerable fanfare in Dagens Nyheter, the most influential national newspaper. "There was this feeling," he recalls. "'A Swede is better than a foreigner."'

But alienation is by no means the whole of it. Adami is just as keen to show he does not have any chip on his shoulder. Sitting in the Cinnamon coffee shop in the upmarket bohemian neighborhood of Sodermalm, Adami says: "My father is an economist and works as a taxi driver. He's always positive about Sweden, even if he's discriminated against. That's affected me a lot."

Gringo is a large-format, buzz-chasing magazine with a broad sense of humor and almost absurdly sophisticated graphics. Its articles depict life among the children of refugees as better than it is sometimes portrayed. The ghettoized svartkalle — or "black head," in the Swedish slang — comes off as positively cool. (Youth slang also has a term for ethnic Swedes: They are called Svennar, or "Svens," much as American ghetto slang used to refer to white people as "Chuck.") Adami sometimes says that Gringo's project is to create a new Swedish national identity. A recent article on "new Swedish words" included several Arabic ones, like habibi, haram and hayat. Every issue carries the motto "Sveriges svenskaste tidning" ("Sweden's Most Swedish Magazine"). "Mainstream Swedish media give an idea of the country that is 40 years out of date," he says. "Typically, their editorial staffs are middle-class, middle-aged, living here in Sodermalm." On the other hand, Adami recently moved to Sodermalm himself.

A generation ago, Nalin Pekgul looked at Sweden through Adami's eyes. When she arrived in the community of Tensta from Turkish Kurdistan with her parents in 1980, Tensta and the neighboring development in Rinkeby seemed to offer the best of both worlds — Swedish security and a cosmopolitan mix of cultures. Forty percent of Tensta was immigrant then, much of it Greek. Today immigrants and their children make up closer to 85 percent of the residents. As in Bergsjon, dependence is at astronomical levels. A fifth of the women in their late 40's, to take just one of many possible indices, are on disability benefits. Pekgul, who sat for eight years in the Riksdag, the national Parliament, now heads the National Federation of Social Democratic Women. Her decision to stay in Tensta, among people she grew up with, has been an important symbol.

So it was national news when Pekgul let drop in a radio interview that she was looking to move elsewhere, citing rising insecurity and Islamic radicalization. "People are using Islam to distance themselves from Swedish society," she says, sitting over chocolate-covered oatcakes and tea in the building she grew up in. "Ten years ago when I was a member of Parliament, people would see me on the tiniest cable stations. Now, when I'm on big national programs, only one or two people will ever say they've seen me. Everybody else is watching Al Jazeera."

Last January, Pekgul had a public discussion with the French feminist Fadela Amara about changes in France. "Whenever she talked about France," Pekgul recalls, "it sounded like we were undergoing the same changes France did, only 10 years behind. It was the first time I had thought: I'm going to have to leave. It's not going to get better."




Burning Cars

"In segregated areas," Mauricio Rojas says, "schools are the key." Rojas, 55, is a charismatic economic historian with a bewitching intellect who fled Chile in the early 1970's. "Many Swedes think the areas are interesting to live in," he says. "And they're right. But they won't stay if they don't think their kids are getting a Swedish education." Such blunt opinions have been Rojas's trademark since he began his career with the free-market Liberal Party. Immigrant politicians (although not voters) have gravitated to the Liberals, from Rojas to the Congo-born parliamentarian Nyamko Sabuni. This is perhaps not surprising in a country where the Social Democratic Party has been in power for all but a handful of years since 1932 and "progressive" is a synonym for "establishment."

Rojas estimates that the tipping point where white flight begins comes when immigrants reach 20 percent of the local population. The reason is that — given the tendency of immigrants to have more children — school systems then become half-immigrant. Kids come home speaking a "Rinkeby Swedish," with flat intonations and lots of slang derived from Turkish and Arabic, and the ethnic Swedes scatter. In Rinkeby and Tensta, that point was passed long ago.

"You have segregation," says Bjorn Hjalmarsson, the principal of the Bredby School in Rinkeby. "It's an enclave here." Of the 400 students at Bredby, fewer than 10 speak Swedish in the home. Sweden introduced a wide-open school-choice program in the early 1990's, and that affects a district like this. Some ambitious parents send their kids to schools in the city center, the only way to make connections with ethnic Swedes and thus (parents feel) to rise in life. The most conservative Muslim parents, who see Sweden as immoral and atheistic and don't want their daughters going to school dances, use the area's "intercultural" schools.

The students in the English class for 15-year-olds come from Somalia, Syria, Turkey and Iraq. Many of the girls wear head scarves or hijabs. If Bredby is a representative school for the area (and it appears to be), then Sweden is getting educational outcomes far, far better than those of other European countries and the United States. The kids' English — a third language for all of them — is excellent, even if it takes them a while to get over their shyness in using it. They don't bring up politics, and they are unanimous in considering the United States "cool." They want to know how much American journalists earn and whether Tupac Shakur is really dead. "You can get famous there," say two of them. The only dissent on the question of America's coolness comes from the Swedish-born teacher, and this is not surprising. Particularly since the toppling of the Saddam Hussein regime, which numbered among its victims many relatives of the Kurds and Iraqis who sought asylum in Sweden, you find more unapologetic pro-Americanism among the children of Muslim immigrants than among those of Swedish stock.

Ethnic Swedes seldom come to Rinkeby, and many of these students get nervous and feel they are being "looked at" when they travel far from the neighborhood. What divides the students most sharply is the question of whether they are Swedish. When asked, half of them nod vigorously yes; the others nod vigorously no. "I'm Swedish," says one Somali girl. "And I'm proud to be Swedish. I'm born here." One of her friends snorts.

Could something like the French riots, with burning cars and rampaging gangs, happen in Sweden? "Absolutely," says one lanky boy near the window. "People burn cars here all the time. Not because they're angry — because they think it's fun." And, in fact, the charred patch of ground visible next to the school entrance that day marks the spot where a car was driven up to the wall of the school the previous weekend and set alight.




'Sweden Will Never Accept You'

Swedes aren't used to endemic crime, and they aren't used to associating certain neighborhoods with crime. Late last summer, there was a spectacular armed robbery by a gang from the town of Tumba. A month later, there was an attack on a police station in Ronna, a Million Program neighborhood in the city of Sodertalje, by Swedes of Assyrian Christian background. The incidence of violent crime is 37 percent higher in Sodertalje, at 13 incidents per thousand people, than in the rest of Sweden. While such figures would not cause an American's jaw to drop, they are part of a growing impression that society is losing its grip. Youths have discovered that if you hammer the panes at bus and tram shelters, the glass will rain into a pleasing arrangement of vitreous pebbles. Such piles are visible at several stops on the tram that connects Bergsjon to downtown Gothenburg. This hobby caused about 2.7 million Swedish kronor ($350,000) worth of damage last year, according to an official in the Gothenburg mayor's office. Among Somalis, the chewing of khat, an addictive low-intensity stimulant popular in East Africa, is widespread. Shipments of khat arrive daily (as they must, for the drug spoils quickly) from middlemen in England and Holland. On more than one occasion in the summer of 2004, transit authorities stopped bus traffic to Tensta because of attacks on passengers. Firemen and emergency medical technicians have been attacked in the suburbs of Malmo, Sweden's third-largest city.

Just as Pekgul's young immigrant neighbors complain that crimes against Swedes are taken more seriously than crimes against immigrants, you frequently hear allegations from white people that the more violent among the miljonsvenskar pick out ethnic Swedish youngsters to rob. According to Johnny Lindh, the police commissioner in Rinkeby, this may be statistically true but does not mean that crime is motivated by race. It is more likely that white Swedes in the center of Stockholm are easier marks — identifiably middle class and unlikely to have developed the habit of defending themselves aggressively.

According to the National Council for Crime Prevention, citizens of other countries make up 26 percent of Swedish prison inmates. Among those serving sentences longer than five years — which in Sweden are given out for only serious crimes like major drug dealing, murder and rape — about half are foreign citizens, and these figures exclude the foreign-born who have become Swedes. Again, to a non-Swede, the scale of this problem is small. In 2004, there were only 329 people serving sentences of more than five years in all of Sweden. Still, the association of crime and immigration is not a figment of the Swedish imagination. Last summer, the left-leaning tabloid Aftonbladet revealed that a number of Muslim extremist groups were recruiting in prisons. The largest is a group called Asir, perhaps named for the Saudi province from which four of the Sept. 11 hijackers came.

It is where crime interacts with the world of Sweden's hundreds of thousands of Muslims that people get most passionate. There can be few countries in Europe where natives know less about the ways of the Muslims who live among them than Sweden. The isolation of the apartments where immigrants mostly live has a lot to do with this. But even those who live and work in those areas find it hard to be precise about Muslim ways, and particularly about Islamist radicalism — although all are fairly sure that it is increasing.

"We have some people here who can't leave Sweden," says Commissioner Lindh in Rinkeby. "If they went to the U.S., they would be imprisoned."

So the police have a pretty good idea of what's going on in the mosques? "No," Lindh replies.

The Great Mosque of Stockholm dominates a busy square at Medborgartorg, three subway stops south of the city center. Reportedly financed by a sheik from the United Arab Emirates, it has a highly varied body of worshipers and leaders. Last summer, a window opened onto the mosque's internal politics. Swedish public radio broadcast the content of anti-Semitic cassette recordings being sold there. And various rival mosque leaders began to use the pages of the right-leaning tabloid Expressen to hash out their differences and expose each other's agendas.

An Algerian-born, Saudi-educated conservative imam, Hassan Moussa, announced in the pages of Expressen that he was receiving death threats from within his own mosque. Moussa, who said he had been "shocked" by the London bombings that summer, called on Sweden's integration minister, Jens Orback, to establish a council to combat extremism. In expressing his opposition to violence, Moussa recalls over coffee at the Culture House complex in central Stockholm, "I decided that I would leave the word 'but' out of my sermons."

Moussa didn't gain much from going public. He lost influence within the mosque, according to someone knowledgeable about its inner workings. But his article brought many new Swedish Muslim voices out of the woodwork, the most forceful of whom was the Iraqi-born writer Salam Karam. Karam had long criticized Moussa himself for his "double messages" and his intimacy with the hard-line Muslim Brotherhood, so he opposed Moussa's council on the grounds that Moussa would probably wind up serving on it. But Karam applauded Moussa's change of heart and added some horror stories of his own. One involved a prominent imam who had been ostracized and condemned as "a Jew who converted to Islam" because he had opposed suicide bombing and suggested that Muslims vote for the Christian Democratic Party. (In general, the Social Democrats command a loyalty among Swedish Muslim voters approaching that of African-Americans to the Democratic Party.)

Swedes increasingly get the sense that these are not just exotic or foreign stories. "Radicals are abusing the situation in Sweden to recreate the old culture," says Lebanese-born Kassem Hamadé, who reports on Islam and Islamic radicalism for Expressen. "One of the most important appeals to potential members is: 'Sweden will never accept you."'




Irresistibly Seductive

weden's immigrants are far from the poorest in Europe, but they are among the most excluded. Is outright prejudice to blame? A recent study by the economist Dan-Olof Rooth found that Swedish-raised children adopted from other lands, who often look different, did worse when looking for jobs than similarly situated ethnic Swedes. Channel 4's Kalla Fakta ("Cold Facts") and other national news shows routinely practice "sting" journalism, showing, for example, that an apartment "open" for a Swede is somehow "taken" when a non-European shows up or calls. Real-estate companies have campaigned for the removal of satellite dishes — which tend to mark an apartment as home to unassimilated immigrants from developing countries — from apartment windows on the disingenuous reasoning that they could hurt someone if they fell.

But when Swedes discuss immigrant issues, the background attitude is less often prejudice than political correctness. Problems are constantly fudged — and resolved in such a way as to establish no principles and offend no one. In one recent case, two girls were forbidden to wear full burkas to school in Gothenburg — but only because teachers supposedly could not tell them apart. There are shibboleths: education is hailed as a panacea for the ills of exclusion, even though the "problem" immigrants who came from the developing world after 1980 have, on average, more academic qualifications than the successful ones who preceded them.

And there are taboos: the practice of second-generation Swedes returning to their ancestral countries to find husbands and wives, for instance, is common, particularly among families from Turkey. Neighboring Denmark has passed laws limiting the practice. In Sweden, public discussion of this kind of endogamy is muted, although Swedes complain in private that it slows integration and unacceptably widens the number of potential new immigrants. "It's nothing you can talk about," says one educator at a Million Program school. "In general, we despise the Danes for raising this." The rise of a right-wing anti-immigrant party, along the lines of the Danish People's Party, appears unlikely in Sweden — in part because memory is still fresh of the New Democracy Party, which stormed into the Riksdag with more than 6 percent of the vote at the height of the economic downturn in 1991 but then performed erratically, embarrassing even its most ardent followers.

Dilsa Demirbag-Sten, a Kurdish immigrant author and television personality, says the focus is too much on discrimination. "Are immigrants discriminated against?" she asks over coffee in the Hotel Lydmar on a sunny Saturday morning. "Definitely. But it is not the only reason they have problems. They are also discriminated against by the racist, anti-Semitic honor culture that many of them live under." Demirbag-Sten, whose new book describes honor culture in Kurdish Sweden, says that the larger problem, in her community, at least, is a new kind of political Islam, one that knows how to probe liberal institutions and use them to advantage. She is particularly frustrated that recent government reports, thick with postcolonial theory and quotations from Edward Said, address neither immigrant anti-Semitism nor immigrant antifeminism. "The focus on discrimination is a way of avoiding the real problem," she says. "Because if the problem is not discrimination, then the problem is the Swedish system itself."

This would indeed be troubling news for Sweden. Although its vaunted welfare state was called into question in the 1990's, it has since shown much more resilience than anticipated and retains its place as the foundation stone of the national self-image. No one expects the Social Democrats to be chased from power any time soon. And yet this system poses particular problems for welcoming newcomers that other systems do not. When the state winds up allocating goods and services, more things are "decided" and fewer things "happen." Most Swedes are proud that 40 percent of apartments are public housing, distributed according to need. But that means that immigrants clustered together in apartment buildings far from the labor market can more plausibly blame the government for "segregating" them, even if this segregation arose purely from Sweden's desire to help the world's most unfortunate, regardless of their race or country of origin. The welfare state's good deeds never go wholly unpunished.

An argument now in vogue, particularly on the left and in academia, holds that Sweden suffers from "structural discrimination." Abdirisak Aden, a Somali-born Muslim who is also an active member of the Social Democratic Party, advances this view when he says, "Whether you're Ahmed or Svensson, you should be equal in the labor market." This takes the stress off of intentional discrimination, which is hard to document, and focuses on the ways ethnic Swedes and minorities would still be unequal in the labor market even if employers were not themselves biased. The "structural racism" school emphasizes the inequalities that immigrants face because of their relative lack of access to capital and social networks.

The problem is that the solutions it offers may involve dismantling more of Swedish society than anyone would be comfortable with. Consider a 2004 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development report, which saw a possible source of inequality in the fact that two-thirds of the jobs in Sweden are filled through "informal methods." Those "informal methods" have never been a problem before. "Informal methods" — whereby a man can, say, introduce his neighbor's nephew into the union local — may even be necessary in an egalitarian culture, where people have little chance to exercise what the social theorist Francis Fukuyama calls the "thymotic" urge, the will to stand out. They may be the lubricant that keeps a free, socialist society from hardening into a system of bureaucratic authoritarianism. Zanyar Adami may be right when he says, "I see no contradiction in having a bigger, more open Swedish society that keeps the old Swedish virtues." But he may also be wrong.

Mauricio Rojas, the free-market politician, once wrote that, in the 20th century, Sweden has "improved living conditions for its citizens at the expense of limiting their vital alternative choices." It unlocked the secret of one-size-fits-all well-being. Maybe Sweden is now simply too diverse to benefit from the mass-produced prosperity and security that suited it so well for almost a century. Critics of capitalism used to cite Joseph Schumpeter and Daniel Bell to show that the free market is ultimately undermined by its own successes: the wealth the work ethic creates makes people want to work less. The welfare state has its cultural contradictions, too. It rests on consensus, which is another way of saying a lack of cultural variety. The stronger the consensus, the more room a welfare state has to grow. But as consensus strengthens, so does a certain naïveté, a belief that your own idiosyncratic habits are something that no one else could fail to find irresistibly seductive. Sweden's biggest immigration problem may be a matter not of crime, unemployment and Islamic radicalism but of something else altogether: that its newcomers understand perfectly well what this system erected in the name of equality is and have decided it doesn't particularly suit them.

Christopher Caldwell, a contributing writer, is at work on a book about immigration, Islam and Europe.

The above just sounds like paranoid hysteria. The "radical christian overhall" in the White House hasn't preached beheadings for homosexuals, holy war, firebombing media outlets and hollywood for the promotion of un-christian values, attacks against non-believers, or anything of the sort. Besides, in January 2009, someone else will be inaugurated 44th president of the United States of America.

First of all, if you're not seeing the reactionary christian influence in and around the White House, you're not paying attention. Granted it's not on the scale of radical theologies that you hear about, but it's there, and in a nation that is supposedly divided between church and state, Bush's religious influence on his politics is unacceptable.

Second, Bush already got two Supreme Court justices past Congress, so in effect, they will influence the nation in Bush's favor well beyond his reign of power.

Third, who knows; George's brother Marvin (whith whom W snorted cocaine with at Camp David while their daddy was off being president), could very well be the next POTUS. And 2009 is a loooooong way off.

by the by, to access NY Times and other regester sites without signing up, go to bugmenot.org

Well see about that once someone "accidentaly" takes out Mecca.

I guess I should have been clearer.

A war on islam by using military means is a non-starter.

I guess you can make a war on islam by ideologically disproving islam...either by giving irrefutable proof for the absence of God (futile) or by proving that the islamic tenets are false (that Muhammed did not get revelation or that Qur'an is not accurate rendition of Muhammed's preachings etc).

Bombing Kabba would not remove the faith that resides in the hearts of muslims.

Right...but the mere fact that the bad ones are overshadowing the not bad ones..might just be enough for a war on all muslims, regardless if their extreamist or not. I just read an article on Sweden and its problems with muslims.
Okay, I read the whole (way too long) article and I suggest that you re-read it. You have certainly not stated the truth in your comment above, and as a matter of fact, I think that you have totally misrepresented the facts.

Those muslims are not extreamist at all, however they do hate western society and the Swedish government.

The students in the English class for 15-year-olds come from Somalia, Syria, Turkey and Iraq. Many of the girls wear head scarves or hijabs. If Bredby is a representative school for the area (and it appears to be), then Sweden is getting educational outcomes far, far better than those of other European countries and the United States. The kids' English — a third language for all of them — is excellent, even if it takes them a while to get over their shyness in using it. They don't bring up politics, and they are unanimous in considering the United States "cool." They want to know how much American journalists earn and whether Tupac Shakur is really dead. "You can get famous there," say two of them. The only dissent on the question of America's coolness comes from the Swedish-born teacher, and this is not surprising. Particularly since the toppling of the Saddam Hussein regime, which numbered among its victims many relatives of the Kurds and Iraqis who sought asylum in Sweden, you find more unapologetic pro-Americanism among the children of Muslim immigrants than among those of Swedish stock.

Perhaps you just want to incite hatred towards Muslims or feed into the current controversey?

In the meantime, I shall set your credibility meter to zero. Perhaps you could start a thread to apologize to the Muslims for any harm you may have caused by your unthoughtful comments?

Oh, The Atlantian islands, in regards to your assertion that "Those muslims hate the Swedish government."

From the same article that you posted:

In general, the Social Democrats command a loyalty among Swedish Muslim voters approaching that of African-Americans to the Democratic Party.

Perhaps you should invest in a new dictionary? Hate and loyalty have two very different meanings.

the real war doesn't have a dam thing to do with what anyone does or does not believe.

it is between international law and global corporatocracy,

the latter wanting to get away with whatever might line its own pockets, even in the sort term at its own long term expence,

the former trying to get for the real rest of us something resembling an even break, or all too often, even just the barest chance to survive.

(and not just those in, or from, less fortunate countries either!)

=^^=
.../\...

If we do have a war, the west would lose. Eventually.

If we do have a war, the west would lose. Eventually.
I believe that there will be more wars in the Middle East as long as George Bush is the President and Congress is dominated by the Republicans.

Hopefully the elections this year will take some wind out of the War Party's sails, and that the US elects a truly diplomatic President in 2008.

No. Islam does not depend on holy sites.

Holy sites depend on Islam.

Muslims can be muslims without Mecca/Jerusalem/Najaf/Karbala/etc.

Have you ever read the book Angels and Demons, by Dan Brown? This whole discussion is eerily reminiscent of it. I think it's pretty obvous that if you take out a religion's center, it's as good as gone. To use Brown's example: if you used a nuclear bomb on the Vatican, and all the cardinals and the Pope were killed, along with the millions of religious fanatics there, I'd say that there is a pretty good chance that Christianity is not going to recover easily, if at all.

P.S. Kudos to the guy above me

I believe that there will be more wars in the Middle East as long as George Bush is the President and Congress is dominated by the Republicans.

Hopefully the elections this year will take some wind out of the War Party's sails, and that the US elects a truly diplomatic President in 2008.

Yeah, your right...because what this asshole in Iran is doing and the situation with Palestine and Hamas is TOTALLY Bush's fault...:rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:

The problem is is that the Muslim Religion is still stuck in the equilivent of the Christian Middle ages, where anything that goes against their beliefs must be destroyed. The main reason why this happens is because they won't
"Grow up" and instead pitch Terrorism Temper Tantrums.

This is their version of the Crusades if you will. Lets hope we live long enough for the Muslim Renniasance.

The problem is is that the Muslim Religion is still stuck in the equilivent of the Christian Middle ages, where anything that goes against their beliefs must be destroyed. The main reason why this happens is because they won't
"Grow up" and instead pitch Terrorism Temper Tantrums.

This is their version of the Crusades if you will. Lets hope we live long enough for the Muslim Renniasance.

Well, offending religions and not taking action against it isn't an idealogy that was in the past, it still exists today. How much can you tolerate it if someone was racial against you because of you religion? You WOULD want to beat them up, not walk by and say, "Eh, whatever, freedom of expression" although that probably IS the mature thing to do.

Also, The Atlantian Islands, educate yourself over Islam before making ridiculous threads/posts ridiculing time against Islam and seeing if the World will have war with Islam.

Maybe if you meant extremists, then it's fine, but Islam as a whole? -- I hope you're not too young to think that, really.

Here's what I think should be done:

1) Stop dependence on foreing oil. The whole reason we're in this mess (speaking as an American) is because we need their oil. Without it, our economy is shite. Therefore, instead of spending billions of dollars on the military, we should divert some of that to research programs for alternate energy, and encourage it in the private sector.

2) Stop Muslim immigration. I know this isn't nice, but what are you gonna do? Europe has tried socialism, and that hasn't worked out too well. In the US, Muslims are assimiliated into society somewhat better, but we've still got our problems...like the possibility of Al Qaeda sleeper cells. I have 2 Arab friends, I enjoy their company and I think that most Muslims are normal, rational people, but there's definetely a significant and vocal minority that is, frankly, dangerous to classical Western values such as freedom of press, religion, etc. Extremist muslims aren't the only ones who would undermine these freedoms (I'm looking at you, Bush administration:mad: ) but removing them would go a long way in solving our insecurities.

Well, offending religions and not taking action against it isn't an idealogy that was in the past, it still exists today. How much can you tolerate it if someone was racial against you because of you religion? You WOULD want to beat them up, not walk by and say, "Eh, whatever, freedom of expression" although that probably IS the mature thing to do.

No, might tell them to go **** themselves. But I wouldn't try to kill them.

Yeah, your right...because what this asshole in Iran is doing and the situation with Palestine and Hamas is TOTALLY Bush's fault...:rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
You are 16, you are Jewish, you are misquoting news articles to try and make Muslims look bad, you are displaying intolerance towards these people and I would even say hatred, given the topic of this thread, and are quite liberal with the word "extremist".

Have you ever thought that perhaps that your views are a bit extremist as well?

"the mere fact that the bad ones are overshadowing the not bad ones..might just be enough for a war on all muslims, regardless if their extreamist or not."

Hmmmm

The US is arrogant, the muslims are being childish and the Chinese are too big.
Man the world is going down the shit hole

Muslims in the middle east and around the world are childish in the way they view themselves, they have to seperate church and state in many cases, they do not mix at all.

US arrogant in its foreign policy however they deserve to be after all they lead the economy and they would fall the hardest

Chinese have way to many people

If i put all of the worlds names of real living people, i have a one in six chance of a chinese persons name.

Muslims in the middle east and around the world are childish in the way they view themselves, they have to seperate church and state in many cases, they do not mix at all.

US arrogant in its foreign policy however they deserve to be after all they lead the economy and they would fall the hardest

Chinese have way to many people

If i put all of the worlds names of real living people, i have a one in six chance of a chinese persons name.

Eh, yeah we're arrogant, but face it, if you were the best, wouldnt you be arrogant too?

*Ignores AI's flamebait*

Here is a good interview with a well-known Muslim scholar (one of my favourites) I just found. Talks about some of the problems there are today.
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,399965,00.html

*Ignores AI's flamebait*

Here is a good interview with a well-known Muslim scholar (one of my favourites) I just found. Talks about some of the problems there are today.
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,399965,00.html

lol.

Yeah..I'll read it in one second, I'm just finishing up my research paper.

Has not the Christian west and islamic east been at war for centuries, wether its the heroic struggle of the East Romans against the invading turks, Crusades, Spanish reconquista or the portuguese shattering the arab merchants in the indian oceans is not the present day struggles a continuation of an age old struggle between rival civilisations. In my opinion the struggle is reaching crunch time and we in the west had better win it or our grand kids will end up circumcised and bowing to mecca.

Has not the Christian west and islamic east been at war for centuries, wether its the heroic struggle of the East Romans against the invading turks, Crusades, Spanish reconquista or the portuguese shattering the arab merchants in the indian oceans is not the present day struggles a continuation of an age old struggle between rival civilisations..On some level, yes. But all of these conflicts have been about resources, and in recent times, none have been about religion -though they are percieved as such by some misguided individuals.

Edit: It's also worth considering that it can be pretty hard to watch one's nations be raped, and not come to the conclusion that people hate everything about you.
In my opinion the struggle is reaching crunch time and we in the west had better win it or our grand kids will end up circumcised and bowing to mecca.Why? The secularisation of the western world have, and is, gaining momentum. More and more people completely ignore religion in the western societies. If you just go by cold statistics & popular opinion over the last 50 years, you'll end up with the conclusion that, barring some Earth-shattering event, the west will eventually be a religion-free zone.

Of course, the US is another matter entirely.

On some level, yes. But all of these conflicts have been about resources, and in recent times, none have been about religion -though they are percieved as such by some misguided individuals..

Yes they ahve been about resources but many of the conflicts had the venner of religious difference, wether we like it or not european cultural traditions have been shaped by Christianity, this has brought us into conflict with Islam time and time again.


Why? The secularisation of the western world have, and is, gaining momentum. More and more people completely ignore religion in the western societies. If you just go by cold statistics & popular opinion over the last 50 years, you'll end up with the conclusion that, barring some Earth-shattering event, the west will eventually be a religion-free zone.
Of course, the US is another matter entirely.

Agreed but the differences between the west and Islamic culture remain large if not larger than say in the early chrisitan era, sure less people go to church now but the traditions remain vibrant and strong (ever seen the religious Fiesta's in southern europe?), the feeling among people i know is that we can no longer live side by side with muslims.

Yes they ahve been about resources but many of the conflicts had the venner of religious difference, wether we like it or not european cultural traditions have been shaped by Christianity, this has brought us into conflict with Islam time and time again.
I wouldn't even say that the wars between Christians and Muslims had anything to do with religion at all.

The Saracens were warriors, before and after Mohammed. Islam merely provided them with a unifiying force - it did not make them go and make war. And importantly, they fought everyone, from the Persians over the Orthodox Christians to Pagans and Catholics.

Then for a while Islam was actually a much more open religion than Christianity. That is the period that makes me think that the whole comparison between today's Muslim world and the European Dark Ages is silly - the two go seperate, unique ways.

The Caliphs and Sultans etc made a lot of money from trade. They were rich, Europe was poor. Plus, Europe had its own internal problems - and it all resulted in Muslims being attacked by Christians, not the other way around.

And the Osmans later, well the Turks were warriors just like the original Saracens had been. And once they had taken their good old objective, capturing Constantinople, they pretty much gave up on the religious fervour and became an empire like any other, making its policies on the same grounds as any other.

The history of Europe and the Middle East is not so much a tale of struggling religions as it is a story about economic interests and empires struggling.

I wouldn't even say that the wars between Christians and Muslims had anything to do with religion at all.

The Saracens were warriors, before and after Mohammed. Islam merely provided them with a unifiying force - it did not make them go and make war. And importantly, they fought everyone, from the Persians over the Orthodox Christians to Pagans and Catholics.

Then for a while Islam was actually a much more open religion than Christianity. That is the period that makes me think that the whole comparison between today's Muslim world and the European Dark Ages is silly - the two go seperate, unique ways.

The Caliphs and Sultans etc made a lot of money from trade. They were rich, Europe was poor. Plus, Europe had its own internal problems - and it all resulted in Muslims being attacked by Christians, not the other way around.

And the Osmans later, well the Turks were warriors just like the original Saracens had been. And once they had taken their good old objective, capturing Constantinople, they pretty much gave up on the religious fervour and became an empire like any other, making its policies on the same grounds as any other.

The history of Europe and the Middle East is not so much a tale of struggling religions as it is a story about economic interests and empires struggling.
with a veneer of religion, wether it was sincere or not, i agree that religon has little to do with it (as regards the europeans anyhow) but culturally we are poles apart.

Well, to hopefully close this thread, let me quote Tariq Ramadan from the link I posted above.
We as free citizens and democrats need to stand between the two extremist sides -- between the Iranians* and those calling for war against Iran*. We need to stand between the people who are prophets of a very dark tomorrow. If we end up with a clash of civilizations, we are both going to lose. If there is a dialogue of civilizations, then we are both going to win. We have to realize that whether we win or lose, we are going to do it together.
*Note how in this case, Iran can stand for Muslims as a whole in the context of the interview.

*Note how in this case, Iran can stand for Muslims as a whole in the context of the interview.
That's because there are only two remaining powers in the world with large Muslim populations that have not been subjugated by foreign powers: Turkey and Iran. Turkey has voided its possible leadership position in the Islamic world due to movements to join the EU. Iran has self-appointed itself as the leader. Thus, Iran is putting words in the rest of the Muslim world's mouths.

Okay, you can close now Leonstein. :D

Nice sentiments but does not reflect the growing feeling on the ground i am afraid, come to the UK or France and you will see how large the divide is, wehter it is right or wrong is no longer a matter of debate as many non muslims where i live (london) no longer trust Islam and all it represents wether on a religious or social level.

Nice sentiments but does not reflect the growing feeling on the ground i am afraid, come to the UK or France and you will see how large the divide is, wehter it is right or wrong is no longer a matter of debate as many non muslims where i live (london) no longer trust Islam and all it represents wether on a religious or social level.

And what's your solution? I'd think it would be better not to give into the feelings of the mob, and try to go for understanding. Even if the divide is wide, I'd think trying towards fixing it is better then intentionally making it worse, even if it's futile. Which, personally, I don't think it is