Kerry's Imaginary Coalition

In remarks at New York University Monday, Kerry laid out the steps we must now take. "First, the president must secure international support."

Oh really, from whom? These fine folks?

Court allows political asylum from Germany

Afghan fled Soviets first, then neo-Nazis

An Afghan woman who fled to Germany after the Soviet occupation, and fled again 17 years later after her family was threatened by neo-Nazis, is eligible for political asylum in the United States, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.

{...}

The lawyer said the family started encountering anti-foreigner violence in 1990, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

According to the court, Farid Mashiri was beaten twice by passengers in his taxicab in 1990, mobs attacked foreigners near the family's home in 1993 and 1996, their tires were slashed twice and their apartment ransacked in 1995, and the children were frequently attacked at school.

Several incidents had Nazi overtones, the court said. The mobs shouted "Heil Hitler,'' and the same phrase was included in a death threat left on their car windshield.

Authorities provided little help, the court said. School officials took no action to protect the children, and police made no arrests in any of the attacks. When the older son, then 14, was followed home from school by four neo-Nazis in 1996 and badly beaten, police told the mother that foreigners had to take care of themselves. [emphasis added]

We took this woman in to protect her, not from the Taliban or al-Qaeda, but GERMANS.

A article in The International Herald Tribune discusses the contradictions and difficulties Old Europe faces, it does not provide much hope for Kerry's powers of persuasion.

Politicus: Trying to put Islam on Europe's agenda

About nine months ago, Francis Fukuyama, the historian, said that one of the big things distinguishing America from Europe was that, while the United States had staged its great debate on race, Europe hid from dealing frontally with how much Islam it could live with inside its borders.

Now, Fukuyama, author of the celebrated essay "The End of History," has taken this message to the Europeans. In a speech in Germany about two weeks ago, he urged Europe to stop being intimidated about using its right to defend its own humanist culture. He even employed the expression "leitkultur," or leading culture - touchy among Germans because of its supposed elitist resonance - to describe the legitimacy of shoring up a distinctly European identity.

Fukuyama will return to speak in Europe this month and next. His desire to raise the issue of Islam and Europe is intriguing at the least, and surely intrusive for some Europeans. But it reflects a central concern of other leading American academics. Samuel Huntington of Harvard and Bernard Lewis, the Princeton emeritus professor and Middle East expert, men sometimes schematized with Fukuyama as conservatives (although Huntington and Fukuyama are tough critics of aspects of America's involvement in Iraq), have recently questioned the extent of Europe's stability over the coming century as a result of Islam's growing presence.

[...]

Huntington, in his book "Who Are We?" says that in essence "multiculturalism is anti-European civilization" because "it is basically an anti-Western ideology." In a conversation, he contrasted Hispanic immigrants in the United States with Arab and Turkish immigrants to Europe by saying the Muslims show "greater resistance to integrate."

"I am fascinated by how Europe and the Muslims there are confronted by redefining their religious identity," Huntington said. The forces in play, he found, were such that "Europe may be deeply divided in 25 years."

Lewis, in a little-noted question-and-answer session with the German newspaper Die Welt this summer, predicted Western Europe's coming Islamization. He reiterated this view in private talks with senators here in September.

"Europe will be a part of the Arab West or Maghreb," he told the newspaper. "Migration and demography indicate this. Europeans marry late and have few or no children. But there's strong immigration: Turks in Germany, Arabs in France and Pakistanis in England. At the latest, following current trends, Europe will have Muslim majorities in the population at the end of the 21st century."

Lewis also went on to point out to Die Welt what he saw as ambiguous feelings among Europeans about Muslims and the United States, saying: "In this connection, the European Union could rename itself the community of envy. Europeans have reservations about an America which has surpassed it so clearly. And that's why the Europeans understand the Muslims - because they have similar feelings about America."

Lewis regards plans in France and the Netherlands to train their own French and Dutch imams with national instincts and loyalties as illusory. And although the United States supports Turkey's entry into the EU, other Americans consider naïve the European elite's argument that a link to Turkey will be a bridge to Islam and an example to the Arab world. Rather, they say, the resentment lingering from the Ottoman Empire's historical subjugation of the Arab nation makes unlikely any Turkish secular role-model for the Arabs.

Although France's defense of its secular, republican tradition against Islamic head scarves was seen as an important development, and the Netherlands was cited for a rare level of political frankness in its national debate on Islam, there was concern among the scholars about how stubbornly Europe would make the case for its identity. Reality was also a report this summer from a French government internal security agency telling of 300 areas in the country where separatistlike situations, grouping Islamic fundamentalist preachers, contempt for France and the West, and violence held sway.

Isn't it interesting that the MSM hasn't covered an issue that is roiling the EU and key to Kerry's success in creating a new coalition. The wrangling over a very minor French union contract is illustrative of the larger issue facing the EU and France in particular.

Liberty, equality - apathy

By blindly insisting that all its citizens are equal, France is failing to tackle social injustice, writes Jon Henley

"Not a reflection of the France I know," said the agriculture minister. "Scandalous... reminiscent of the occupation," said the industry minister. "Discrimination based on ethnic criteria... wholly contrary to the spirit and values of the Republic," said the deputy president of the centre-right UMP party. "Shocking," said the head of the Socialists' parliamentary group.

So what sparked this extraordinary outburst (the above was just a fraction of it) from France's political establishment? A particularly racist recruitment policy? More rabid rantings from Jean-Marie le Pen? Another depressing TV item about Arab couples being turned away from a club because it was full, only to see the white couples behind them admitted?

No. The outrage followed an announcement made this weekend, at the end of a two-week strike by the Société Nationale Maritime Corse Méditerranée, a ferry company that carries something like 25m passengers a year between the beautiful but impossibly unruly island of Corsica and Marseille on the French mainland.

[...]

This is increasingly becoming a concern for France: the knee-jerk defence of principles that were once (and may, indeed, still be) valuable in the abstract, but are plainly not effective in practice.

The insistence that all French citizens are equal, for example, is now preventing the country from addressing some of its most pressing problems: the desperate need to raise the status of its Muslim community, the scandalous under-representation of ethnic minorities in politics and the media, as well as unemployment on Corsica.

The extraordinary response in Paris to a small clause in a corporate agreement that may eventually help maybe a couple of hundred Corsicans find work is another example of the inflexibility of the Republic and its incapacity to adjust to contemporary concerns.

Is such stubborn and inflexible thinking possible in the great enlightenment that is Europe?

Posted by feste at September 23, 2004 10:35 AM | TrackBack