Yes you are right and I was going to say as much in my post but didn't want to go off track. It's a genuine issue but I'm not sure how it is best addressed certainly not by singling out Muslims as uniquely troubling I would imagine. I have the same issue with the wearing of veils etc. Many Muslim women tell me that they want to wear it and I respect their right to do so while also suspecting that it is a cultural peer pressure that forces many to do it.
Again these cultural issues are not unique issues to Muslims. Nor are they particularly representative of the Muslims that I know personally.
There is no good way of addressing it, but simply accepting it on the basis of it being "
voluntary" when there is evidence of massive peer pressure seems misguided to me.
No. I can't agree that everyone has it just as bad. I don't think a white European or North American can anywhere near claim the same history and it would be a nonsense to claim that someone growing up in Ohio or Doncaster has it just as bad as someone born in Damascus or Baghdad.
It depends on who you were. Common workers in Ohio 100 years ago weren't much better off than someone born in Damascus or Baghdad 30 years ago.
And even if they did, that wouldn't make it not a legitimate grievance.
It would either make it an illegitimate grievance or make legitimate grievances so common the term itself became meaningless and useless.
Your choice.
No, again. This makes as little sense as telling me that a New York-born Jew should have no interest in Israel or at least no greater interest than a Utah born Mormon or a Tokyo-born Buddhist.
Judaism is a national religion that doesn't proselytize, a Jew has a blood connection to Israel, it is inhabited by his (her) nation. Islam does proselytize, sometimes bloodily so, the comparison is inherently invalid.
A French-born Muslim should have no greater grudge against Israel than a French-born Christian should. If anything the Christian should have a more legitimate grievance, because Israel lies on the holiest places of Christianity, whereas they're only about third holiest places in Islam.
But again, you try to take these things in isolation and I'm trying to explain that its a confluence of factors. Algerian immigrants to France have these things and other things influencing them.
I don't doubt they are, but these factors aren't particularly persuasive. Do you have anything better?
No not like every immigrant minority everywhere. Like some immigrant minorities in some places at some times. But yes, lots of immigrant minorities have legitimate grudges. You might remember that black Americans for example have some legitimate grudges over how they have been, and are being, treated.
Maybe, but there are two important issues that you miss:
1. Blacks in America were treated several orders of magnitude worse than Muslims in Europe ever experienced.
2. Despite this blacks in America don't go on killing sprees over these grievances. Muslims do.
In other words, another comparison that goes against the claim of Muslims having anything we could reasonably claim to be a legitimate grievance.
If you are prepared to understand then I can't help you but please don't then pretend to be the expert on what Muslims want think or feel. That you dismiss their grievances out of hand as illegitimate and immature just demonstrates why they have them and continue to have them. When those with power refuse to listen then bad things happen.
I'm sure they consider it legitimate, what of it? That doesn't make it such. It's also something they,
and only they (this is crucial!) can correct, but they refuse to do so. You can't expect acceptance if people get routinely slaughtered in your name and you refuse to do anything meaningful about it. Furthermore I don't see how acceptance would end this, because the attackers never claim to be doing it because of ill-treatment of Muslims in Europe, but over grievances far and wide. The Somali stabber last week (or two weeks ago?) claimed he was killing Americans over treatment of Muslims by Buddhists in Myanmar. Anything anyone else can do (short of the unspeakable) can't bring solutions. This is also one of the reasons why the grievances are illegitimate. A legitimate grievance is one that can be corrected, but the offending side refuses to do so - like the French grievance against Muslims. It could be argued this one is entirely legitimate, whereas Muslim grievances towards France are not.
Its funny though that you don't dismiss the racist xenophobic ramblings of Trump supporters and Brexiteers as immature and illegitimate. Instead they are things we need to listen to and act upon to prevent them escalating. Double standards evidently.
I may have never explicitly said so before, but they certainly are immature and illegitimate for the most part. I prefer calling their intelligence into question, because it's a bigger part of the problem.
That said, we do need to act upon their grievances, because we can and because they're using entirely legitimate means to act upon them: voting. Both Brexit and Trump were brought about by deporables coming in droves to cast their vote for the respective calamity. This is normal democratic process we really have little right to intervene in, other than entertaining their grievances and correct them when we can do so in an acceptable manner.
You can't compare that to deliberately driving trucks into crowded areas. Brexitards and Trump supporters are deplorable, but their methods differ from those that make Islam problematic to such an extent you can not compare the two.
Nonsense. Islamophobes are intimidated and offended by the mere sight of Muslims walking the streets looking Muslim. They are cry-babies of the highest order. And no need for the quotes and italicisation around the word as if somehow it doesn't exist - it's an undeniable phenomenon. Or do you also talk about 'climate change'?
Then stop calling anyone who claims Islam carries a good portion of the guilt an Islamophobe. Islamophobes certainly exist, but calling anyone who dares to say Islam has inherent problems an Islamophobe is the same as calling anyone who dares to point out any minor error in the most dire of climate change predictions (while fundamentally agreeing climate change is caused by humans and a danger to our civilization that needs to be acted upon immediately) a climate change denier outright.
I'm not sure what your last sentence has to do with the discussion here. How the grievances are acted upon (and I've said clearly that this act has no justification) has nothing to do with whether the grievances are legitimate or worth listening to.
Well, in 1920s women had a legitimate grievance, they were denied the right to vote. This was a legitimate grievance, it was acted upon and they received the right to vote. Any further grievance on this matter - for generations of women who were denied the right to vote - is inherently illegitimate, because there is no way of correcting or compensating for it.
It's a fairly good comparison, because it can also be used for Israel. If the creation of Israel is a legitimate grievance, what can be done about it? Destruction of Israel is at least as unjust as creating it, so this is not something that can be done. They're unwilling to contemplate any solution that could remotely be considered just (two states in return for accepting Israels' right to exist), so their grievance is inherently illegitimate on that alone.
McHrozni
