European and Australian Muslims
AND
Racism in Europe and Australia

Significant items

Germany's 9/11

But Germany's racists cannot accept that the murder of some Muslim woman counts at all even as a murder of a human being, let alone a murder that deserves such outrage as the murder of Theo Van Gogh - the white, blond, Islam-hater and Muslim-basher who therefore deserves special consideration and sensationalised headlines. What a shame.

AND

British Muslims/Racism in Britain

French Muslims/Racism in France

German Muslims/Racism in Germany

Other European nations. Includes:

Muslims in Australia and New Zealand

'Racism is also a problem, not only integration'

An author-edited version of this article was published in 'The Record' daily newspaper, Ontario, Canada, November 2nd, 2007, under the title "Most Muslim immigrants embrace their adopted countries", by Hesham M. Sabry.

Quebec, Canada, is presently holding meetings on the "reasonable accommodation" of minorities -- not because of national security concerns, but because some Muslim girls want to play sports wearing headscarves, a Jewish school asked a fitness centre to use translucent windows, and Sikhs want to wear kirpans. Some Quebecers apparently find that too difficult to bear or accommodate!

Sadly, the hostility is driven by prejudice and racism. Quebec Premier Jean Charest has cautioned provincial leaders against feeding "on the prejudices rather than fighting them." Though he started it all, at least he has the good sense and honesty to admit the mistake and try and rectify it.

Action Democratique Leader Mario Dumont responded to the accusation that he was fuelling racism, that Europeans were doing the same thing. The question is, when Europe was persecuting Jews, would he have done the same thing too?

Some Canadian leaders in the past did hold anti-Semitic attitudes, and did act upon them, including sending Jews seeking refuge in Canada back to the Nazis. But have we learned anything from history? To his credit, Mr. Charest, like most Canadians, clearly has.

In a recent article by Cox Washington Reporter Shelley Emling on the European resentment of Muslims, "European Resentment Of Muslims Is On The Rise", she discussed a number of pertinent issues but failed to address the main question. What exactly are Muslims doing that deserves such resentment? The answer, gleaned from the article, is: nothing. Their clothes, their head scarves, their different customs, their lack of language skills, their sticking to their own cultures, are the very kinds of things that a tolerant society ought tolerate.

After all, what is a pluralistic society if everyone has to fit into one mould? Is it just a matter of different skin colours and visual features that make a society pluralistic or are cultural and other differences also included and invited?

Emling brings up the assassination of Theo van Gogh, the Dutch film maker, by a "Muslim" extremist, but suspiciously neglects to mention that Pim Fortuyn, the Dutch politician assassinated two years earlier, was killed by a white Dutch man. At the time, the BBC reported that Dutch right wing groups were all excited and primed to blame Muslims, and were disappointed by the truth. Even more poignant, only after van Gogh's murder did the Dutch call it a "loss of innocence." Apparently, loss of innocence occurs only when the culprit is Muslim.

What ensued was even worse. Muslim concerns were attacked, vandalized, or torched. That should have shown the Dutch that, like everyone else, they too have their extremists, and to judge all Muslims by the actions of one man who killed van Gogh was therefore wrong. But they didn't heed the lesson. Every Muslim of the 15 million in Europe was held responsible for van Gogh's murder. Hordes of innocent Muslims were fired from their jobs, discriminated against in various ways, and variously abused in public.

If the purpose of putting Muslims under siege is to isolate the few extremists among them, the policy is flawed. For example, targeting women who wear the hijab -- which harms no one -- will do nothing to isolate extremists. It may even drive moderate Muslims into the extremists' folds.

Emling mentions the Swiss poster of white sheep kicking a black sheep. That's nothing new. In 1982, while watching a parade in Zurich, Switzerland -- where I'd lived -- one float had white men kicking others painted black. The side of the float read "The church says in, the people say out." While some Swiss onlookers laughed, others seemed embarrassed.

As for the Christian "church" in Europe and elsewhere, to its credit it has been the greatest supporter of immigrants and their rights. Moreover, though the float's slogan read "Die Leute Sagen Raus" (The people say 'get out'), in fact, most Swiss, and for that matter most Europeans, are totally appalled by such racism.

Racists will have us believe that once Muslims are fully integrated, they'll be "tolerated" and made to feel welcome. Not so fast.

The majority of European Jews looked, dressed, spoke, and were fully involved in the nations they lived in. They were even white skinned. But when the time came for tolerance, their integration, their great contributions to Europe's arts, science, and industry, did little for them. They were shipped -- with the willing cooperation of many locals across the nations of Europe -- to be massacred in their millions in German concentration camps. What's scary, it wasn't that long ago either.

This proves unequivocally that no matter what Muslims do, it will never be enough in the eyes of racists, which brings us to the crux of the matter. It is racism and prejudice that are at the root of the problem, not what the minorities dress or do. Prejudice needs to be dealt with first, before asking anything of minorities.

But that doesn't let Muslims off the hook. Very simply stated, if they cannot appreciate, respect, and get involved in the cultures of their adopted nations, the honest solution is to return to their nations of origin, where they can live their lives the way they wish to at ease. Having said that, however, all reports and indications from Europe show that the vast majority of Muslims are doing their best to integrate.

On their part, Europeans must recognize that it isn't an easy process, as anyone who's been through it is well aware. There's no contraption into which an immigrant can be fed and presto, out emerges an instant Dutchman, Dane or German.

Tolerance includes patience and the understanding that it takes time, sometimes even a lifetime, for such acculturation to occur. Tolerance also includes accepting differences, not forcing people to transform themselves into what pleases us even when the differences hurt no one.

This article at:
http://www.secularmuslims.com/article.php?article_id=139&cat_id=23&subcat_id=50&cat=Racism

European tolerance only a veneer

Originally published in 'The Middle East Times' magazine, February 15, 2006, under the title "Viewpoint: European tolerance only a veneer", by Hesham Sabry.

"Denmark's reputation as a nation with a long tradition of tolerance toward others ... is something of a myth."

Those words were written in The New York Times on February 12 by Danish journalist Martin Burcharth, who continues:

"What foreigners have failed to recognize is that we Danes have grown increasingly xenophobic over the years. To my mind, the publication of the cartoons had little to do with generating a debate about self-censorship and freedom of expression. It can be seen only in the context of a climate of pervasive hostility toward anything Muslim in Denmark."

The reaction in Canada and the United States to the offensive Danish cartoons about the Prophet Mohammed has been a very civilized one. Newspapers have refrained from printing the cartoons and Muslim demonstrations have been peaceful. That's great, but the views of newspaper readers show a mixed response. Of the negative opinions, a few stand out accusing the Muslim world of being uncivilized, violent, barbaric and uncultured.

"Uncivilized, barbaric, uncultured." It was, after all, the "barbaric" Muslim world that massacred 6 million Jews! Six million people - a mind-boggling figure - deliberately rounded up for elimination. Not in some remote "barbaric" jungle, or by some terrorist group, but in the heart of "civilized" Europe by a "cultured" government right next door to where the present offensive cartoons originated. And that was barely 60 years ago, not 2000 - unbelievable as that is, and with the collaboration of numerous Europeans.

And the way it all started in the "cultured" Germany of operas, fine arts and fancy theaters was with gratuitous hate, much of it expressed in cartoons. 'Gratuitous', since Germans weren't under Jewish occupation, nor had they any other such justification for it.

Jews are forever agonizing over how they allowed what started out as expressions of hate, often in cartoons, to progress into 'The Holocaust'; why they didn't raise an uproar about what fellow Jews were undergoing. Now they're determined to never let it happen again. That's why a UN member state - Israel - sent its air force, not mere riots at embassies, to bomb another nation's - Iraq's - nuclear facilities to preclude another Holocaust.

Compared to such an extreme measure, in hindsight, if Jews had only persistently and intensely protested at German embassies back in the 1930s, that most horrendous of atrocities in human history might have been less severe, if not totally averted.

So, perhaps the reaction to the potential kernels of a new round of persecution against the latest targeted minority in Europe - Muslims - is not an overreaction. After all, it's not as if it's a far off fantasy.

Muslims have already suffered one genocide in Europe - as classified by the UN. Just over 10 years ago, again in the heart of Europe not in some remote jungle, some 8,000 Muslims were rounded up and massacred, Nazi-style, in Srebrenica, Bosnia. And that was only one of many massacres that they suffered at the time.

At the Nuremberg trials, a notorious publisher of anti-Semitic cartoons - Julius Streicher - was given the death sentence, even though he had not personally killed anyone. A white Belgian journalist and radio show host - Georges Ruggiu - who worked in Rwanda during its genocide, was given a 12-year jail sentence for hate incitement.

Hate incitement is the most dangerous weapon on earth, ahead of nuclear weapons. The Holocaust took 6 million innocent lives, and the Rwandan genocide almost 1 million, both by hate. And freedom of expression when abused transforms into such a weapon.

The government of Denmark has refused to condemn a blatant element of that new targeting of a minority group in Europe, despite four months of peaceful, civilized, Muslim pleading.

Muslims have every right, indeed, the obligation to nip this new wave of persecution in the bud so that someday they may not regret, like the Jews have, that they silently watched the evolution of the next cycle of human rights abuses in Europe.

When an editor in a mainstream newspaper finds it appropriate, and expects it to be acceptable to his readers, to so callously and crassly treat a minority within his nation, it is already obvious that this minority is being viewed as lesser human beings and is treated as such.

That, to the T, is how it all started in Germany. Dehumanize the targeted group to the point where the mainstream first accepts and then supports the hate, and following that they'll be indifferent to any mistreatment of the potential victims. And the rest is history.

But to be fair to the Danes, much of the above hate has been going on in other parts of mainland Europe as well. The touted tolerance is only a veneer.

Europeans speak of integration and the necessity of assimilation, but acculturation takes time. There's no pressurized acculturation cylinder into which you can pop people and presto, at the punch of a button they'll emerge fully Danish, German or Dutch. But that's precisely what Europeans expect and want. An instant Danish Muslim, and instant Dutch Muslim, and so on. And if the newcomers can't all transmute rapidly enough into full Danes or Dutch, then they deserve to be the targets of hate.

But then again, the Jews were fully integrated for generations, and even occupied various high level positions in government, and yet were still targeted for hate. So in reality, it's a matter of racism not integration, the very racism that every single European colonial power practiced right across the globe in the past. Obviously, it's still there (where would it have gone anyway) and can't wait to practice its old ways on the first minority group that again dares come its way.

There are over 10 million Muslims in Europe and when one of them - one person - murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, the racism came out full blown against the 10 million, as if some people were just waiting for the opportunity to practice their intolerance and hate of Muslims even further.

As a matter of fact, when some two years earlier, the prominent anti-immigration Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn was murdered, the BBC reports that Dutch groups were ready to pounce on Muslims in Holland, and were disappointed when it turned out that a white Dutchman had committed the crime. Yet racists, shamelessly generalizing from a single incident - an obscene intellectual taboo - use that single murder to paint the whole 10 million European Muslims with the same brush!

The Danish government wasn't asked to censor free speech, simply to distance itself officially from such offensive material by unequivocally condemning it. It failed even that simple test of civility. But then, as the Danish reporter wrote, Danish tolerance is apparently a myth.

The question never was one of Muslims objecting to criticism. Muslims are criticized, often severely and unjustifiably - as in the name-calling discussed here, day in day out in the Western media, and yet we don't see protests across the Muslim world.

Muslim girls in France were forced to bare their hair at schools, and the most we saw were orderly protests in France, not riots across the Muslim world. Why, because people, even if angered by procedures that target them, can easily differentiate between objective criticism or government concerns, and gratuitous, uncalled for denigration of their most holy symbols.

Copyright © 2006 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.

This article at: http://www.secularmuslims.com/article.php?article_id=112&cat_id=23&subcat_id=50&cat=Racism

Cartoons a matter of civility

Originally published in 'The Calgary Sun' daily newspaper, Alberta, Canada, February 20, 2006, as a letter by Hesham Sabry.

The decision by the Calgary Sun not to print the controversial cartoons was very thoughtful.

It chose not to gratuitously hurt members of its community. I live in a neighbourhood that is predominantly white Christian. My neighbours and I are neighbourly friends and they know I’m not Christian. Every Christmas for almost two decades since my immigration to Canada, I’ve made sure my house was decorated with Christmas lights and I placed a decorated Christmas tree at the living room window.

Whether it was too cold and freezing to put lights up or whether I was sick or feeling unwell, there isn’t a Christmas season I didn’t put up the lights to share — in the least way I could — in my Christian neighbours’ joy for the season of Jesus Christ’s birth. Many other Muslims do the same.

The cartoon issue is really a matter of common decency and civility in a small world where we’re all neighbours.

Gratuitous mockery of others’ beliefs or sacred symbols is simply discourteous.

Simple courtesy does a world of good, whether it’s with neighbours on our own street, with people who represent a minority in our nation, or with people on the other side of the world.

This article at:
http://www.secularmuslims.com/article.php?article_id=118&cat_id=9&subcat_id=14&cat=Muslims%20in%20the%20West

Muslims Glimpse One Aspect of The Holocaust

An author-edited version of this article was published in the Toronto Star, an Ontario daily, May 1st, 1999 under the title "Glimpse Of The Holocaust" by Hesham Sabry. Also published in slightly or totally different versions and titles in other Canadian newspapers in April and May 1999.

The polls on Canada's intervention in Kosovo show clearly that the vast majority of Canadians are not racist, are not blind to others' suffering, are not uncompassionate, and are not biased. Canadians should be proud.

And Canada should be proud to be actively trying to fulfil that call for 'Never Again', proving that we truly have not forgotten.

In my life, I have been deeply moved by personal accounts of Holocaust survivors. I have visited with horror the Dachau concentration camp near Munich, and I have done research at university on anti-Semitism.

But now, right here in Canada, the opportunity has offered itself to get a glimpse of one small but significant aspect of that unparalleled tragedy, the Holocaust.

I can now get an inkling, if no more, of how painful it must have been for Jews in North America to watch Jews in Europe being massacred, while here they were subjected to the spoken views and written articles of Nazi sympathizers and racists, or simply of indifferent or uncompassionate persons.

Today, as I see the suffering in Kosovo, it is very painful indeed to listen to the handful of Milosevic/Serb sympathizers speak out in favour of leaving Kosovars to their fate, criticizing NATO for intervening to save them, or simply calling for a halt to the bombing because they are more concerned about the infrastructure of Yugoslavia than the human beings in Kosovo.

They show no compassion or concern for the killing, the rape, or the ethnic cleansing of Kosovars, which they hardly ever mention in their press conferences or newspaper articles, offering only lame excuses for once more abandoning a European minority group to its cruel fate.

And once more, it is a minority that, like the Jews back then, has no political influence on the powerful nations that can save it.

However, unlike the past, it's heartwarming that such sympathizers represent only themselves.

The rest of the world is enlightened and understanding, as the polls indicate. But polls aside, in my experiences with Christians everyday, I see how they are compassionate people, whose views are based on moral imperatives, free of any racism, or religious bias.

Though the modern day sympathizers with atrocity are only a minority--whether they are academics and politicians hiding their true colours behind thinly veiled excuses, or well-meaning but misguided others--they have offered through their stance a taste, painful as it is, of just one aspect of World War II, an aspect that left the Jews to the mercy of the merciless Nazis.

Unlike the rest of us, apparently they have forgotten.

The world is watching. When the smoke clears, it is our words and actions -- during that horrific tragedy -- which will differentiate us, much like they - words and actions - differentiated the Nazi-sympathizers from the Schindlers during the greatest of all tragedies, the Holocaust.

This article at:
http://www.secularmuslims.com/article.php?article_id=50&cat_id=7&subcat_id=38&cat=The%20Balkans

Britain Stands Defiant... Against What?

Divided we Fall

"Britain stands defiant", one headline read soon after the July 7th, 2005, London bombings. It stands defiant not against massive invading armies, the Nazi Blitz, or even against the puny, pathetic, criminal losers who committed the recent crimes. Britain stands defiant against divisiveness.

That's been the main theme there since the bombings. In his first statement in London after the bombings, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said "When they try to divide our people or weaken our resolve, we will not be divided...". Blair expressed that same sentiment in his next speech as well, "our diversity is our strength. It is this which is under attack", he said. British Minister of Defence, John Reid, was very clear about that: "..part of the intention of terrorists is to terrorize, but another part is to divide the community", he said.

That's the message that's been repeated by everyone including, David Reddaway, Britain's high commissioner to Canada, who emphasized that unity is the best answer to terrorism. And it's been the overall message from Muslims and non-Muslims alike in Britain.

Four individuals, or ten, or twenty, do not a whole people, faith or community incriminate, and that's the greatest, most heart-warming message that a mature British public is sending out in solidarity with their Muslim compatriots. "You have failed", is what they're telling whoever the recruiters or handlers are.

As is very clear, those criminals don't discriminate between targets. They're in fact the enemy of all decent, moderate Muslims who love peace and abide by the law. Indeed, in Iraq, fellow Muslims are their primary target.

Britain's message to the world is we should all - non-Muslims and Muslims alike - unite in defeating those criminals who hurt everyone, non-Muslims and Muslims alike.

Disproportionate Reaction

But apart from the expected outrage, anger and indignation, and that message of unity, the attacks were also followed by haters and racists taking advantage of the opportunity to practice their favourite pastimes.

We saw an example of that in the disingenuous overreaction of some groups, public figures, and media following the bombing. And North America contributed its fair share of such hypocritical sensationalism.

Sadly, the British government soon became more impressed and influenced by such overreaction than by its own statements of unity and solidarity.

As if in a cycle of mindlessness and ignorance that it's unable to break out of, it has embarked on an anti-terrorism legislative adventure in Britain, mainland Europe, and across the Atlantic that's well beyond the proportions of the crime committed, especially given what the crime told us of the pathetic capabilities of the perpetrators. They're obviously common, unsophisticated criminals with very limited numbers of supporters among the nearly two million Muslim Britons. They should be dealt with as such, not by targeting two million Muslims. All the talk of unity soon shed.

The only thing such a misguided, agenda-driven adventure will do is alienate more Muslims in Britain (and Europe) rather than bring them into the fold of British mainstream life from which they'd been virtually shut off in the past.

Deporting and excluding hateful preachers was a commendable, long overdue, and positive step. By eliminating one source of hate for the surrounding society, in the long run it is a step in the right direction of better integrating Muslims in Britain.

But Britain's institutions and leaders, and the Muslim community seem to be all working at cross-purposes. Muslims want to use the opportunity to open up to the British mainstream, while proposed security legislation (not to mention the hate propaganda by malicious sources) will drive them farther away from that goal and marginalise them even further. It will also serve to radicalise more of their numbers.

No doubt measures do need to be worked out to face threats of indiscriminate carnage. But the belief that increased security measures of the kind which will infringe upon the civil rights of ordinary Muslims will make Britain more secure displays a certain degree of ignorance, lack of insight, and especially a dismal failure to understand and learn from past incidents and the flawed security measures that didn't work. They are also divisive rather than uniting.

But besides ensuring that increased security measures respect innocent people's rights and that we rely on good intelligence and police work, the real solution lies in working and cooperating with the Muslim community. Inclusion, involvement, cooperation, and, most importantly, trust - giving Muslims the credit they deserve for the decades of peacefulness which were broken only by those unrepresentative recent attacks - can produce much better results that any amount of harassing measures. It also certainly diffuses from the feelings of alienation that lead to radicalisation among disillusioned youth

The ten or even fifty individuals who were manipulated into committing or plotting violence are the exception that proves the rule. Over the decades the Muslim community in Britain, almost two million strong now, proved to be overwhelmingly peaceful .

Beware Haters' Divisiveness

Like the Muslim preachers of hate which Blair vowed to deport or exclude, there are more than enough haters on the other side - the mainstream, white, Christian, British, European, North American side - as well. Their agenda is to use the current events to marginalise Muslims even further, and to exclude them from any political participation. We therefore must beware of taking counter-productive and alienating paths that some such haters would love to see taken against Muslims.

Rather than implement suspect "security" suggestions that marginalise and alienate Muslims even further based on those suspect suggestions made by haters of Muslims, we ought marginalise the haters who suggest or applaud such extreme measures instead. We ought expose then reject their agendas as well, which do not differ much from the Muslim preachers of hate.

Terrorists no doubt have to be contained and eliminated, but the mainstream haters and inciters are just as dangerous as the terrorists. No one should ever forget that words kill long before the guns and swords carry out the actual blood shed. It was so in Nazi Germany when six million Jews were mercilessly exterminated, it was so in Rwanda when hundreds of thousands of Tutsis were massacred, and it was so in Bosnia and Kosovo when tens of thousands were either massacred or ethnically cleansed. Words drove the killers and the killing. Words drove the 9/11 and the 7/7 killers as well. Words kill.

If we are going after the haters on the Muslim side, we should root out and expose those on the non-Muslim side as well, whose hate is insidious and cunning rather than overt, making them potentially much more harmful to Britain's peace and harmony in the long run.

Haters in the mainstream, who being of the mainstream ought know better, need to be dealt with and defeated before they manage to either drive even larger wedges between communities than they already have, or further brainwash, coerce, or manipulate government officials and others in positions of authority into taking steps that will only create more alienation and unrest in the country.

So while one couldn't agree more that condemnation of terrorism is no longer sufficient, and action is required, the Muslim community's genuine cooperation can't happen when Muslims are kept constantly busy fighting external divisive forces, hate-mongering, and unwavering attempts by hateful mainstream entities to marginalise and disenfranchise them.

Hate is a two way street

If we want Muslims to face and combat - to the best of their abilities - the problems that some in their midst create, we must be prepared as well to face the problems some in the mainstream society create for them.

In other words, it takes two to tango, and hate is a two way street. And that's where the roles of instilling trust and eliminating long-held suspicions come into action. Only by intensive work with the Muslim community will positive results be achievable. We need to tackle all aspects of the problem with balance and equal thoroughness.

Britons, both Muslim and non-Muslim, need to build on the unity call that went out soon after the attacks, rather than on the devious security advice dispensed by dubious characters with dark but obvious agendas.

Copyright 2005, Humanist and Secular Muslims (HaSM)

This article at:

http://www.secularmuslims.com/article.php?article_id=87&cat_id=2&subcat_id=36&cat=Terrorism