I don't know if they are extremists or not. They're engaging in what we would call civil disobedience to protest (apparently) not having enough prayer space set aside for them. I would not attempt to assign a religious component (extremist, moderate, etc) to their actions. I've certainly seen religious people block access to abortion clinics. I don't know if they are extremists or not either. I don't approve of either action. However, civil disobedience is a time-honored tradition in the USA. The point of it is that it should end up with the protesters being ticketed or arrested and in any case, forced to clear the streets.
I can't imagine why the French police are tolerating this behavior. I'd expect the police in the USA not to.
Maybe because experience has shown them that if they try to put a stop to it, then the Muslims there will cause violence. I point you to the 2005 riots there when the police detained some Muslim youths who were breaking the law.
And what about the violence after that Dutch newspaper published images of Muhammed? Essentially, we as Americans, would have to curtail our rights of free expression so as not to even offend Muslims so that violence doesn't ensue.
Embrace the people? Yes. Accept that kind of activity? No. But not because it is religious; not because it is Muslim. Because it's an impediment to traffic. I can't do it, you can't do it, the people doing it should not be able to do it. Make them move; if they don't, start taking up the blankets and issuing police citations. Tolerance does not mean 'do nothing while our laws are broken', and I hope I've never suggested that it does.l
And if they riot when we do attempt to enforce our laws, as they did in France?
See, it's easy to say enforce our laws, but when the French did, they had a state of emergency for three months. Then what? That would be just as much fuel for the fire for Muslim extremists to use against the west, as people here argue that burning the Koran does. This would just be the argument of, "See, they won't even let you pray in peace to Allah."
It's a no win situation.
No, I did NOT say that the only way to stop the violence is to embrace them into our culture. I said that there is a battle for hearts and minds going on right now, and refusing to embrace moderate Muslims into our culture is to shove them in the direction of the extremists and the terrorists. That's not the same thing at all.
"We stop it by embracing our Muslim immigrants, and enveloping them in our culture as quickly as possible."
Perhaps I misunderstood what you said here then. Because it sounds to me like you are saying that we need to take them and their views into our culture, because...
"Estrange them instead of embracing them, and you give them nothing to hold onto in our nation. They find themselves unable to succeed in our culture,
which leaves nothing but (TADA) their own culture. And the terrorists will gladly embrace them and welcome them back to the (from our point of view) Stone Age. And give them an AK at the same time."
Once again, I pose the question: If we must embrace them, how far does it go. After all, the French have had ample expericence as to what happens when you decide to enforce even burglary and tresspassing laws against them. (I know this is an oversimplification for the causes of the riots in France,
Once again, no, I did NOT say that. I said that if we do not embrace them, meaning accept them, then they have nowhere to go. I said nothing about rigging the game so that they have an advantage or succeed over others. All they deserve is what all Americans deserve; an equal chance.
The people to which I am referring are those (and I believe I said this) who are Muslim and have either been born in this country or have moved here and obtained citizenship. These are people who WANT to be here; they have embraced OUR culture to the extent that they are willing to live under our secular laws, to work, pay taxes, to try to achieve and better themselves. They may keep many aspects of their own culture, such as their religion, but they don't embrace the parts of the Koran, for example, that might urge them to kill infidels (just as we no longer obey similar commands in the Bible). They are the farthest thing from extremists. However, if they cannot be accepted in the USA, if they are rejected and not allowed to take part in the society of America because of their religious beliefs and practices, then they will be outcast and more open to the siren call of the Islamists. The Islamists tell them over and over that no matter what they do, they will always be hated and not accepted by the West. If we prove them right, then which direction do you suppose they will turn?
The terrorists are a distinct minority. They need converts to give them power. I don't mean converts to Islam, I mean converts to their way of thinking. In addition to their extreme view of Islam, they also believe that the West is destroying their traditional culture. They use this as a key point in trying to gain converts. It is not essentially different from any politician or salesman's spiel; they try to identify with their target audience, create a bond, and then build on it.
When terrorists reach out to an ignorant and relatively primitive (by our standards) people such as the tribes-people in places like Pakistan or Afghanistan or rural Iraq, they don't have a huge task in front of them. They can control the media, they can control the message. They can sway opinions by simply being the only voice that the people who live there hear.
When they reach out to the Muslims who live in more modern circumstances, they have to compete with other messages. In Islamic countries, they can try to control this if they can gain political leadership positions; taking over governments by fair means or foul, and controlling the media, public education, and so on.
However, when they reach out to the Muslims who live in Western nations under modern circumstances, they have to employ an entirely different set of tools. They cannot control the media or the access that Muslims who live in places like Europe and the USA have to it. They cannot tell the average Muslim who works in Dearborn, Michigan putting fenders on Fords that Americans hate him and want to kill him if the Muslim who lives in Dearborn knows that is not true. Does that make sense?
So he has to convince these moderate Muslims, somehow, that they will never fit in to American (or European) society. That they will not be permitted to succeed no matter how hard they try. That their religion will be hated, that their sacred symbols will be desecrated, that their Mosques will be burned down and that they'll be personally subject to violence and even murder if they stay.
They cannot do this if it's simply not true. The Muslim guy who works in Dearborn at Ford is not interested in blowing up buildings or taking up arms against the USA; he lives here, he has a house, a mortgage, his kids are in college, he has to buy groceries! He would be against the terrorists; they make trouble for him, they make his life more difficult; they hate the things he prefers. The only thing they share is a religion; but that's like saying my religion is like Fred Phelp's religion. They might be both called 'Christianity', but that's about as far as it goes.
If anti-Muslim sentiment continues to grow, if we begin to see more and more violent incidents against Muslims in the USA, then the terrorists will begin to be able to make headway with their message and their recruiting. If the Muslim guy who lives in Dearborn and works at Ford starts getting people driving by his house at night and firing shotguns in the air, if his local Mosque gets burned down, if people throw burned Korans on his yard, he might start to believe that no matter how much he WANTS to be an American, he'll never be allowed to be one. Then what is he supposed to do?[/quote]
