Went wandering the streets today. Dashed across a main road despite the red pedestrian light, in an attempt to get to the bus on time; was booed by teenaged youths as I did so.
I like Germany. It's good being in a place where even spotty antisocial hoodie-wearing teenagers will do their bit to uphold social norms and respect for law and order.
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In news from England: a Muslim peer in the Conservative party says prejudice against Muslims is now normal and socially acceptable in the UK. Well, no surprise there, really.
...actually, I'm surprised it's happening so fast. I thought that the politically-correct attitudes of our media & political classes would keep this suppressed a bit more, that anti-Muslim sentiment would percolate through society more slowly and eventually explode. It seems that the bien-pensants either have less power than I thought to suppress wrongthink, or that they're getting worried enough about Islam themselves to start slacking off.
Baroness Warsi, it should be noted, has something resembling a Clue. This is not always the case when Muslims comment on anti-Islamic sentiments. We live in a world where Muslims bomb the London Underground, mutilate their daughters' genitals, persecute religious minorities using blasphemy laws where they have power (Pakistan), kill people or take their children away if they abandon Islam (Afghanistan, Malaysia), and march through British cities with placards proclaiming "death to those who insult Islam". Despite all this, Muslims consulted by journalists do often express (apparently sincere) bewilderment at how terrible it is that Westerners, who know little of Islam except the horrors it splashes over the front pages of their newspapers, don't think all that much of Muslims.
...now, obviously Islam doesn't consist entirely of total bastards, but it's the bastards who get the news headlines (except on rare occasions, like recently in Egypt, where Muslims crowded a Christian cathedral to act as human shields to deter suicide bombers - a deed both praiseworthy, and as newsworthy as any atrocity). The lady Baroness seems to be aware of what this means:
Baroness Warsi will say terror offences committed by a small number of Muslims should not be used to condemn all who follow Islam.
But she will also urge Muslim communities to be clearer about their rejection of those who resort to violent acts.
If people's knowledge about Islam contains not only atrocities but an impression that large numbers of Muslims reject those atrocities, they will be a bit quicker to realise that not all Muslims are total bastards. It kinda sucks that "Muslim leaders condemn violence" is less attention-grabbing and less likely to register than "Muslim nutcase kills dozens", but sometimes life isn't as fair as we'd like. (It's also easy to segue into moaning about "Islamophobia" and thus sound like a self-pitying whiner. Easy, but bad idea.)
The Beeb also runs a sample of opinions from various European Muslims, including a notable response from a Danish Muslim:
One of the most positive results of the cartoon crisis in Denmark is that we no longer say "the Muslims". The Danish people discovered that there are different kinds of Muslims - and that the majority supported Denmark.
A well-known Danish company owner told me that before the cartoon crisis, he didn't want to hire any Muslims - it was the same as accepting trouble, he said. The crisis was an eye-opener for him, it showed him that Muslims were Danish and were democrats. It made him more tolerant - before, we were a heterogonous* group that only wanted trouble.
I and my friends established the Democratic Muslims Organisation for those Muslims in Denmark who are successful, who are educated, who are loyal to Denmark. Before they cartoon crisis they didn't have a platform, they were not well-organised. But the Islamist groups were, so when the media went to speak to Muslims, they spoke to Islamists who only represented the minority.
Guy has a clue. He did not wish that his creed's PR should be handled entirely by nutcases; he took concrete steps to solve this; now his creed has less of an image problem.
[*I think he means "homogenous" there.]
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I can also imagine that it's difficult for Muslims to get their point of view across in the media due to what they'd doubtless perceive as "media bias". It's noticable that sometimes the media tries sparing Muslims by, e.g., playing down the religious angle of the latest outrage; but I'd be surprised if the media didn't sometimes treat Islam unfairly just by sheer cluelessness. I've noticed that media reporting on Pentecostals, Evangelicals or - especially - the Pope needs to be read with great scrutiny and often diverges from reality significantly (most recent example: stories about the Pope criticising people who give their children silly names); I can't imagine what misconceptions and outright falsehoods Muslims need to put up with.
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