Generalizations are not only irrational, they do not reflect reality, and we have no use for them. No matter how many "white", "Christian", "westerners" practice intolerance and racism, the overwhelming majority are the most decent, tolerant people imaginable. Significantly, the same applies to the other side, the Muslim side, and indeed one could invoke the same in every other "side", Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, etc. as evidence to that truth.
Feature Article on European racism:
Hesham M. Sabry
HaSM
June 27, 2007
Secular, non-practicing and non-observant Muslims don't subscribe
to any kinds of religious-based or religion-decreed clothing, but many support fully the right of anyone to dress as they wish as long as it doesn't break the laws of the land or infringe on other people's rights, safety, etc..
However, most have serious reservations where the "niqab" or the “burqa”, and their like - which allow only the eyes to show, or which cover the
whole face, respectively, are concerned. Still education is the best way to address the problem, not coercive measures or laws, especially in the “democratic” west, given the numbers of those who wear them are very small.
And forcing women anywhere in the world to dress the way governments or religious authorities wish them to is totally unacceptable. That specifically includes western democracies, not only Muslim nations.
In places like Afghanistan, the custom
of the burqa - which is a head to toe covering that has no place in the
modern or ancient world at all, and which is unrelated to Islam in
any way, has to come to an end. Afghan women should be liberated from this ugly, abhorrent custom as soon as is possible through focussed and accelerated education and religious enlightenment.
But forcing Muslims girls in France to remove their head scarves before entering school is no different in any
manner from Iran forcing women to wear them whenever they are out in public. That applies to Germany's and other European nations' latest regulations and laws concerning the wearing of head scarves by Muslim women.
Head scarves have no relation whatsoever to terrorism, extremism, hate speech, violence of any sort, or any other issue that may worry or concern the authorities of those nations.
What right has anyone to force Muslim women across Europe, going about their business peacefully, not breaking any laws, to wear or not wear certain clothes under certain conditions? It is as abhorrent to any free thinking, democratic mind as is the burqa. It is a matter of principle not a comparison of details
What has the head scarf been indicted of, or have to do with terrorism so that laws would be specifically created to control what Muslim women can or cannot wear, at which times, and in which locations? “You can wear this, but not the other, only in that location but not the other”. What a testimonial to European democracy - meaning, what a great disgrace. That same old, same old European intolerance that has not changed much since the old days of anti-Semitism.
And it is a disgrace to European democracy that it failed to prove democratic on the very first occasion on which it could have proved deserving of that label- democracy - beyond simply having free elections. There’s a minority which - like the Jews - once more practices different customs and holds different beliefs living in the midst of Europe, yet when that minority needed the much touted principles of democracy to protect and defend it against discrimination, hate and racism, the principles were no where to be found.
The major racial, religious, or ethnic-related tensions and problems in Europe now, in which Muslims are implicated, are not the result of Muslim wrongdoing, whatever the race or ethnic minority those Muslims belong to, but the result of European intolerance. They are caused primarily through supposedly "civilized" democratic western nations behaving in undemocratic, uncivilized, prejudiced, and discriminatory ways against minorities who dare do their own thing, in their own way.
And they mistreat those minorities even when they have done nothing wrong. In fact, those minorities have for years
endured racism, bigotry, discrimination, and hate against them by many in "civilized" Europe. Various Europeans have discriminated against minorities to their heart’s content, but it’s the minorities who are the bad ones, the uncivilized ones, the savages.
It’s reminiscent of another age, in another western democracy, where slave owners in a horrid example from the southern American states, enjoyed their elaborate mansions, their fancy clothes, banquets and balls, believing they embodied the pinnacle of
civilization, while their slaves were primitive savages. We now know, notwithstanding their buildings, guns, clothes ,and technology, they were the savages, not their slaves.
Mark Twain best describes the essence of such evil at the very time much of it was actually occurring:
In many countries, we have chained the savage and starved
him to death. In more than one country, we have hunted the savage and his
little children and their mother with dogs and guns, through the woods and
swamps for an afternoon’s sport, and filled the region with happy laughter
over their sprawling and stumbling flight, and their wild supplications for
mercy. In many countries we have taken the savage’s land from him and made
him our slave and lashed him every day and broken his pride and made death
his only friend and worked him till he’d drop in his tracks.
There are many humorous things in the world, among them is the white
man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.
(From: "Following The Equator. A Journey Around The World" (1897), Chapter
21.)
And that’s reminiscent of yet another people in another much closer age, who also thought they were the superior race, the Aryan master race, while those they gassed and incinerated in furnaces were unworthy of life. And again we now know that the members of the alleged superior race were actually the savages, in spite of their advanced technology, their weapons, and their fine arts, which obviously do not make a people civilized.
It’s remarkable how little attitudes have changed in some descendants of
those very same “civilized” Europeans who committed those barbaric crimes of
the past while believing they were the civilized ones!
Those who still believe they’re the civilized ones while the minorities they mistreat are uncivilized, are still, in fact - just as in Mark
Twain’s days - the uncivilized ones, simply glamourized once more with superfluous embellishments and ornaments, many obtained through wealth looted, forced out, and worked out of their colonial “uncivilized savages”.
The only thing that redeems Europeans is that the truly civilized men and women among them - the millions of Mark Twains and Abraham Lincolns - far outnumber the “civilized” savages among them.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
