Eternity RPC Board
Well I agree with you Zab that selectively quoting violent paragraphs from Holy Books that contain many more times messages of love and virtue is to give a misrepresentation of things. In a similar fashion, I'd add that ''violent Islam'' is not exactly representative for Muslims: there are about a billion Muslims (with how many fighting for Islamist armies? 100,000? 200,000?), and if my math is correct, the Middle East isn't even representative for the majority of the Muslims since the vast majority of the Muslims do not live in the Middle East. The majority share of the worlds Muslims live in Southern Asia (Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Iran (which are Shiites and have nothing to do with all the Al Qaeda/ISIS terror crap)), and then the largest Muslim communities exist around the Middle East: Turkey (NATO member), Egypt, and Russia.
On top of that, there are about 5 million Muslims living in France, with only a handful of them having committed terrorist attacks. That brings me to the next point: we talk of the immigrants as being the main source of the terrorist threat, but if I'm not mistaken, only the recent attack in Germany was the work of a recently arrived immigrant. The vast majority of the ISIS terror attacks (including those on US soil), were committed by home grown terrorists. The Muslim community in France for example, descended from the Algerians who had served the French colonial regime and therefore had to flee Algeria upon its independence from France. The French didn't know what to do with these Algerians in their country, and didn't integrate them. They ended up lacking proper education, unemployed, and their grandchildren - living in the ghettos of Marseille or whatever, have radicalized and committed those attacks in the name of ISIS. Its ironic by the way that ISIS members have complained about the complete lack of knowledge of Islam by the European Muslims that have travelled to Syria - most of them not even being able to read Arabic, which is required in order to read the Quran.
As for the status of ''refugees'' or ''migrants'', the problem is that people fleeing Syria are refugees. But they have to register in Turkish or Lebanese refugee camps. Now because Lebanon is only a very tiny country, having the majority of the Syrian refugees, there has to be some kind of redistribution or otherwise the refugees risk starvation in Lebanon, or worse, Lebanon collapses into civil war as well. Turkey can accomodate a lot more, but is doing everything it can to bully the refugees away. No wonder then, that many of the refugees travel further to reach Europe, where they do have the means and the willingness to respect their basic human rights. Unfortunately for the refugees, this means they are leaving a non-warzone in search for better living conditions, which can (in legal terms) turn them into migrants. They are no longer fleeing a war. The EU continues to regard all Syrians as refugees however.
As for the point whether the refugees are almost all men - this is incorrect. When the refugee crisis erupted, they were mostly the men risking their lives to cross the sea between Turkey and Greece. But entirely families have soon followed (and drowned, we've seen the images). Although most of the Syrian refugees are men I believe, its far from ''almost all'' of them. On top of that, its blatantly sexist to judge the Syrian refugees on their gender. A simple look into their backgrounds shows that all these ''dangerous young men'' are in most cases, the highly educated sons of Syria's upper class families. The Syrian poor are still left in Lebanon. They suffer from food shortages and they lack the means and the money to travel further.
And no, no sane government here in Europe is deliberately putting lives at risk. How do you think voters would respond to that? And for the record, Merkel still has the firm support of the German people - so for as far as the ''Will of the German People'' is concerned, there is broad support for accomodating refugees. The only alternative is to close the German borders, but there is only 1 political party that supports such as a meassure and it barely represents 10% of the German electorate. So before we get into the Populist quagmire with claims that the German government is betraying its citizens, the facts are that the German government is acting in accordance with the will of the majority of the German people.
And this brings me to my final point: there is nothing inherently ''Populist'' about opposing immigration or whatever. What irks me about the Populist use of the immigration issue is that they treat immigration as a conspiracy. The core idea of every single Populist movement is that ''the People'' or ''the Nation'' is under siege by a conglomerate of evil forces: the elites dominate and exploit the People from above, and immigration is their tool to undermine the People from below. Not all Populists make an issue of immigration, but the ones that do, do so with the assumption that it is a conspiracy against the people. And that is where I say ''bullshit''. Geert Wilders, the Dutch Populist, for example claimed that the ''Leftist establishment'' uses immigrants as (literal translation) a ''voting herd'' - as if there is some secretive pact between immigrants and a specific political party to oppress the rest of the people. Its a double frame that serves to frame immigrants as enemies to be feared, and to frame other political parties as traitors - making them enemies of the people as well.
No wonder then, that Trump's election victory, or Brexit's referendum victory, went accompanied with a massive outburst of violence against immigrants and ethnic minorities.
No wonder then, that Germany has witnessed a sharp increase in the number of mosques and refugee centers being set on fire. And no wonder then, that in my own silly country - well-known for its ''tolerance'' witnessed several riots over simply a local debate about whether or not to accept refugees being temporarily placed in their town:
On top of that, there are about 5 million Muslims living in France, with only a handful of them having committed terrorist attacks. That brings me to the next point: we talk of the immigrants as being the main source of the terrorist threat, but if I'm not mistaken, only the recent attack in Germany was the work of a recently arrived immigrant. The vast majority of the ISIS terror attacks (including those on US soil), were committed by home grown terrorists. The Muslim community in France for example, descended from the Algerians who had served the French colonial regime and therefore had to flee Algeria upon its independence from France. The French didn't know what to do with these Algerians in their country, and didn't integrate them. They ended up lacking proper education, unemployed, and their grandchildren - living in the ghettos of Marseille or whatever, have radicalized and committed those attacks in the name of ISIS. Its ironic by the way that ISIS members have complained about the complete lack of knowledge of Islam by the European Muslims that have travelled to Syria - most of them not even being able to read Arabic, which is required in order to read the Quran.
As for the status of ''refugees'' or ''migrants'', the problem is that people fleeing Syria are refugees. But they have to register in Turkish or Lebanese refugee camps. Now because Lebanon is only a very tiny country, having the majority of the Syrian refugees, there has to be some kind of redistribution or otherwise the refugees risk starvation in Lebanon, or worse, Lebanon collapses into civil war as well. Turkey can accomodate a lot more, but is doing everything it can to bully the refugees away. No wonder then, that many of the refugees travel further to reach Europe, where they do have the means and the willingness to respect their basic human rights. Unfortunately for the refugees, this means they are leaving a non-warzone in search for better living conditions, which can (in legal terms) turn them into migrants. They are no longer fleeing a war. The EU continues to regard all Syrians as refugees however.
As for the point whether the refugees are almost all men - this is incorrect. When the refugee crisis erupted, they were mostly the men risking their lives to cross the sea between Turkey and Greece. But entirely families have soon followed (and drowned, we've seen the images). Although most of the Syrian refugees are men I believe, its far from ''almost all'' of them. On top of that, its blatantly sexist to judge the Syrian refugees on their gender. A simple look into their backgrounds shows that all these ''dangerous young men'' are in most cases, the highly educated sons of Syria's upper class families. The Syrian poor are still left in Lebanon. They suffer from food shortages and they lack the means and the money to travel further.
And no, no sane government here in Europe is deliberately putting lives at risk. How do you think voters would respond to that? And for the record, Merkel still has the firm support of the German people - so for as far as the ''Will of the German People'' is concerned, there is broad support for accomodating refugees. The only alternative is to close the German borders, but there is only 1 political party that supports such as a meassure and it barely represents 10% of the German electorate. So before we get into the Populist quagmire with claims that the German government is betraying its citizens, the facts are that the German government is acting in accordance with the will of the majority of the German people.
And this brings me to my final point: there is nothing inherently ''Populist'' about opposing immigration or whatever. What irks me about the Populist use of the immigration issue is that they treat immigration as a conspiracy. The core idea of every single Populist movement is that ''the People'' or ''the Nation'' is under siege by a conglomerate of evil forces: the elites dominate and exploit the People from above, and immigration is their tool to undermine the People from below. Not all Populists make an issue of immigration, but the ones that do, do so with the assumption that it is a conspiracy against the people. And that is where I say ''bullshit''. Geert Wilders, the Dutch Populist, for example claimed that the ''Leftist establishment'' uses immigrants as (literal translation) a ''voting herd'' - as if there is some secretive pact between immigrants and a specific political party to oppress the rest of the people. Its a double frame that serves to frame immigrants as enemies to be feared, and to frame other political parties as traitors - making them enemies of the people as well.
No wonder then, that Trump's election victory, or Brexit's referendum victory, went accompanied with a massive outburst of violence against immigrants and ethnic minorities.
No wonder then, that Germany has witnessed a sharp increase in the number of mosques and refugee centers being set on fire. And no wonder then, that in my own silly country - well-known for its ''tolerance'' witnessed several riots over simply a local debate about whether or not to accept refugees being temporarily placed in their town: