Moslims: We hebben van hen niets te vrezen

[DeProf_eet]

Dit is wat we nog nodig hadden om ons in het vervolg totaal geen zorgen meer te maken over die lieve Moslims. Sorry voor het Engels ..

Debunking fears of the "Muslim Tide"

The new book by Globe and Mail columnist Doug Saunders draws uncanny parallels between modern-day Islamophobia and the outmoded anti-Semitic/anti-Catholic rhetoric of our past—and it refocuses our attention on the real immigration problem we should be worried about. BY: Edward Keenan

When I was growing up, I had no real bond to ethnicity—my Dad’s side was Irish, and my mom’s side contained a vague mixture of Scottish, English, Pennsylvania Dutch, and parts unknown. My family had been here long enough on both sides to be mostly just “Canadian.” But we had religion: Our social lives (and our extended family life) revolved around the local Catholic church.

At school and elsewhere we’d hear about the relatively recent history of rabid anti-Catholic discrimination in Toronto: the Orange parades and the joblessness faced by previous generations because papists were considered beneath contempt. The memory of discrimination was fresh and real. Today, it seems absurd; Catholics represent the largest religious denomination in Ontario, they get their own publicly funded school system, and all the prime ministers in my lifetime, except Kim Campbell and Stephen Harper, have been Catholic. What’s more, Catholics seem fairly generically Torontonian and Canadian; despite controversial orthodoxy from church leaders, most of this generation adheres to pretty mainstream values. Today, the old idea that Catholics are an unassimilable horde taking over Canadian society with their mindlessly dogmatic theology seems incredible.

In his new book, The Myth of the Muslim Tide, the Globe and Mail’s European bureau chief, Doug Saunders, spends considerable time documenting just how recently waves of Catholics and Jews in Canada, Europe, and the United States were seen as a major threat to society—disproportionate fears prompted by all-too-real evidence of terrorist activity by Catholic and Jewish groups around the world. He makes a compelling case that the same pattern of unfounded hysteria is at work today in Western fears about Muslims.

We constantly hear from political and media voices that Muslims are too bound to their theology, too prone to violence, too unwilling to mix with the mainstream population. Moreover, they are allegedly reproducing too quickly, transforming themselves into a majority that will take over Western liberal democracies and refashion them as illiberal theocracies in the image of the Taliban. Saunders carefully demolishes the pieces of evidence offered to support these claims. “We see it over and over again when a new group of immigrants arrives who are members of a religious minority…writers and politicians offer the same set of frightened and frightening ideas,” he writes. “The similarities between the arguments made about Catholics, Jews, and Muslims are not coincidental: This is the same argument, made for the same reasons, applied to the newest and most alien-seeming group.”

Saunders dissects many myths about Muslim immigrants, deploying statistics to prove that they are unlikely to reproduce any faster than the populations they are joining. (In Iran, their birth rates have fallen below Western levels.) They are no more religiously adherent than Western Christians or Jews, and no more in favour of religion-based laws than non-Muslims. Terrorists tend to be recent converts, and not religious fundamentalists.

After allaying numerous unfounded fears about the “Muslim tide,” Saunders points to several issues we should actually be worried about. His primary concern is the increasing marginalization of immigrants: how the West lumps very different people from very different ethnic and national cultures into a single religious cultural identity held separate from the rest of society. Saunders suggests that the much-feared “clash of civlizations” (a phrase frequently used by Islamophobes) is more likely to occur if Muslims are forced to become outsiders in countries they immigrate to. It’s not an imposing cultural tide we need to worry about, but imposed cultural islands.

This is not a Toronto-themed book, but its reassurances and warnings resonate here. A glance at our history over the past hundred years shows that we’ve been here before, and all has worked out relatively well. But recent demographic trends that see newcomers often settling in isolated towers on the periphery of the city’s geography and cultural life should serve as a warning that “Diversity Our Strength” (our municipal motto) doesn’t simply work on auto-pilot. Inside our own city, we needn’t worry about a clash of civilizations. But we do need to work on building a better, more inclusive society for citizens both new and old.

Link

http://www.thegridto.com/city/politi...e-muslim-tide/