Is Europe setting up clash between Muslims and the West?

Via CNN:

Europe and the Muslim world seem to be on a collision course that could have major political, economic and ideological ramifications. January 23, 2012, may well come to be remembered as the crucial date when Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis, which many of us believed discredited beyond repair, was reaffirmed.

Political scientist Huntington wrote in 1993 that cultural divisions preclude a defining global civilization, and the West and the Muslim world would never share the same values.

Last month, Europe took two different actions that nonetheless sent the same message to the Muslim world: You are not our equals and are doomed to be judged by standards different from those by which we judge ourselves. Future historians might call January 23 the day when Europe irreversibly alienated not one, but both, pivotal powers — Iran and Turkey — that in all probability will dominate the political landscape of the Middle East for several decades.

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EU: ‘Being too Western’ reason for 71% of ‘honour’ killings

Via the Irish Independent:

Yes, it’s a cultural rather than a religious thing, stemming from some nasty tribal customs of South Asia and the Middle East, but though Hindus, Sikhs and the odd Christian might be perpetrators, the blunt truth is that honour killings are mainly Muslim-on-Muslim (91 per cent worldwide, 84 per cent North America, 96 per cent Europe).

Worldwide, two-thirds of victims (93 per cent women) were killed by their families of origin: 49 per cent in North America, 66 per cent in Europe and 72 per cent in Muslim countries. More than half the victims died in agony, having been either gang-raped or burned or stoned or beheaded or stabbed many times.

Being ‘too Western’ did for 58 per cent: this includes being insufficiently subservient, rejecting Islamic dress, wanting a career, having non-Muslim friends or boyfriends, rejecting an arranged marriage or leaving an abusive husband. This criterion covers 91 per cent of North American murders, 71 per cent of European and 43 per cent in the Muslim world. Offences against sexual propriety (eg being raped or accused of adultery) were the justification for the other murders.

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Flanders: Minister proposes youth movements for immigrants

Via brusselnieuws.be:

Flemish minister Pascal Smet (SP.A) is considering starting a special youth movement for and by immigrants. This after the Council of Europe concluded that the existing youth movements are not succeeding in bringing together Flemish and immigrant youth.

The Felmish youth movement are split on the issue. Jill Marchantof Chiro Brussels says that it’s not a good idea and immigrant youth should be placed in the existing youth movements. Marchant worked with the BINT project for teenag girls from Molenbeek who wanted to be counselors. Chiro Youth of Flanders says that separte youth movements means giving up on the idea of real coexistence in society. They say that instead the existing groups should be more open to experimination and to being truly open for immigrant children. 14% of their members are of non-Belgian origin.

The Scouts movement in Flanders said they’re aware of the problem and can understand Smet’s proposal. The immigrant and traditional youth movement should cooperate together and the latter should be open for diversity.

A New Beginning for Muslims in Europe?

Via the Boston College Chronicle:

Western Europe hardly seems a model for harmonious relations between Muslim minorities and the non-Muslim societies in which they reside. Controversies have flared recently over the wearing of burkas in public, construction of mosques, and an ironic suggestion from a French ex-political official that his fellow Muslims wear green stars.

But Associate Professor of Political Science Jonathan Laurence tells a different story in his new book, The Emancipation of Europe’s Muslims: The State’s Role in Minority Integration. During the past two decades, he says, European countries have stepped up efforts to integrate Muslims into the institutional, political, and cultural fabrics of European democracy. Foremost among such initiatives has been the government-led creation of Islamic Councils to help resolve public disputes over Islamic practices.

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Morocco: Sex for a European husband

Via nieuwsblad (Dutch):

Poor Moroccan girls are willing to do everything in order to get a European husband.

Said, a 21 year old tourist in Tangier says there’s no talk of love, he says of the flirting in the streets of Tangier between locals and European-born youth. “In Morocco marriage has become big business. Singles no longer look for a beloved, but for somebody who will inject capital into their lives. Poverty is consuming this country, it makes its residents unemotional materialists. There is no future here for the Arab Romeo and Juliet.”

Many dream of a life in another country, preferably overseas. Some adventurers flee at nights by boat to Spain. Whoever fears the water, tries hooking somebody from Europe. Tangier in particular is flooded in the summer by Moroccans from abroad, to the delight of many poor Moroccan girls. Without any diversions they offer money or sex for European residence permits.

Naima from Antwerp: “In the nightclub I met a Moroccan girl from Casablanca. Very quickly she asked me how much my brothers would cost. I answered her that my brothers weren’t for sale, but she kept on pressing. She wanted to get out of Morocco. She was tired of the country and was looking for a boy from Europe. I joked that one of my brothers is asking for 10,000 euro. She couldn’t pay that, she said seriously. After that she asked if we couldn’t get to an agreement some other way.”

Ahmed, a twenty-something from Brussels, is passing through Tangier. He’s constantly confronted with desperate bartering: a night out for papers, sex for the right documents.. these are proposals boys from Europe often get.

“Ad nauseum,” says Ahmed. “And every year it gets worse. They see as as walking residence permits.” He says the girls aren’t ashamed of what they do at nights. “It’s downright disgusting and shocking. For some money or a false promise you get everything by Moroccan chicks. They’re whores!”

The older generation of Moro0ccans thinks the youth living in Europe are no good. “They’re westernized, also in their sexual behavior,” says Fatima (70) from Tangier. “The foreigners imported their uninhibited sexual mores to Morocco and turn our youth onto the wrong path.”

Of course there are differences in sexual mores between Morocco and Europe. 86% of the women in Morocco feel sexually intimated on the streets. The journalist says she herself got lewd comments multiple times while she was out. Even pregnant women aren’t exempt, and her pregnant niece was accosted by a disturbed man. [Ed: this article is summarized and I did not feel like translating all the comments]

Everything in Morocco is done secretively, and Moroccan society shuts their eyes, for fear of family or sex scandals. “And yet the Moroccans insist that their country is not sexually depraved. I’m irritated to no end by the hypocrisy,” says a Brussels woman. “In the hotel my friend and I can’t sleep in the same room because we aren’t married, but the Saudi sex-tourists can get Moroccan whores sent up to their room. The petro-dollars are suddenly above any modesty law. Sex tourism is flourishing like never before in Morocco. I see it with my own eyes, Morocco is a second Thailand.

Europe: a Christian continent?

Via Today’s Zaman:

I think the biggest challenge for the future of Europe is to develop ways and forms of coexistence among the culturally and religiously diverse populations living on the continent. Instead of declaring multiculturalism dead, Europeans have to reinvent it.

For a start, they should stop imagining Europe as a historically and culturally Christian continent. Such an endeavor will open up cultural space to accommodate a non-Christian social presence in Europe.

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EU: Muslim antisemitism rooted in integration failure

Via Latitude (NY Times):

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But while incidents in the Middle East are relevant, the root cause of the problem between Jews and Muslims in Europe isn’t simply the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; it is primarily the failure of European states to integrate immigrants, Muslims in particular.

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In fact, the real answer lies much closer to home: according to a position-paper by the Brookings Institution, if Muslim communities in Europe felt less marginalization and had more economic opportunities, they would resort less to misdirected violence. Although attacks on Jews are scary and hard to explain away, there is no broad and systematic anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe, neither among Muslims nor among the rest of the population. This is not 1936.

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EU: Radical right focuses on fighting Islam

Via AP:

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Yet many experts say the anti-Muslim groups have a greater potential to grow than traditional far-right extremists, who are struggling to boost their numbers.

That realization has led some political fringe groups, like the British National Party and Belgium’s Vlaams Belang, to shift from blanket opposition to immigration to a focus on Islam.

The manifesto of the BNP, whose leader has a conviction for racial hatred and has denied the Holocaust in the past, includes a “counterjihadist” chapter, saying Europe is being invaded by Muslims.

Even hardcore white supremacists are debating whether to stress the anti-Muslim message as a marketing tool.

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Greece: Radical Islam Passing through

Via Defence Greece (h/t Jan Simonsens blogg):

Until now Greece does not seem to have a particular issue of Islamic fundamentalism. Nevertheless, as aptly described in a 2009 U.S. State Department report on terrorism, “Greece is increasingly an E.U. entry point for illegal immigrants coming from the Middle East and South Asia, and there was concern that it could be used as a transit route for terrorists travelling to Europe and the United States. The number of illegal immigrants entering Greece, especially through the Aegean Sea, increased dramatically in 2008 and 2009, with more than 100,000 illegal immigrants, nearly half of whom originated from North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, arrested each year.”

Presently in Greece, there seems to be activity within radical Islamic elements as well as gradual projection of Islamic political entities through the use of Greek nationals.

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France: “We can not stand unlimited social immigrants”

Via Xinhua:

Sarkozy made the remarks while delivering a speech on Europe and the eurozone debt crisis in the southern French port city of Toulon, the same city where he spoke in 2008 about the global financial crisis and the need to “re-found global capitalism.”

“A Europe that applies the principle of free movement internally and does not control its external borders cannot last. The Schengen must be rethought,” Sarkozy said in the speech.

“We can not stand unlimited social immigrants,” he said, stressing that “Europe needs more political responsibility.”

Unfair competition caused by “social dumping and tax dumping between member states” could not continue, Sarkozy added, demanding immigrants to share the value of France for integration.

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