To: pie-faced-mutt who wrote (1948) | 9/17/2002 5:50:04 AM | From: GUSTAVE JAEGER | | | Our own agenda
Is the Arab world Europe's nemesis, asks Dyab Abou Jahjah* -- or its last hope?
ahram.org.eg
Excerpt:
But 11 September also meant a new era for many Arabs and Muslims living abroad. It meant that the anti-Islamic sentiment which is inherent in European culture, but that had been marginalised by the politically-correct mainstream, could now manifest itself again. As a result, it is today no longer unacceptable to explicitly attack Muslims, to describe them as a "threat", and their religion as an evil mediaeval dogma. The discourse that once characterised far-right extremist movements has begun to take over not only the streets, but also the pages of newspapers and the corridors of parliament. Europe did not need 11 September to be Islamophobic; but it needed it to turn Islamophobia into a political agenda. The fact that the famous Hamburg cell staffed by Mohamed Atta and his friends operated out of Germany was all the justification the European nations needed to pour more resources into policing their Arab communities.
So now we are an infiltrated community. Our mosques are watched, our club houses monitored and our phones bugged. In Germany, Arabs are even classified into four categories -- A, B, C, and D -- ranging from activist, to somebody who just prays on Friday in the mosque. For the A category (the activists), millions of euros are invested in almost permanent monitoring. But that's normal for Germans -- categorising people. In other countries, the situation is no better.
In Belgium, Arabs are pushed into apologising for their presence on every possible level. Saying that you are a Muslim is almost a crime, unless you immediately add your condemnation of what happened in New York, condemn fundamentalism and also condemn a million other things, ranging from terrorism to female circumcision. If you do not attach this ten-page-long apologia to the statement of your faith, you will very likely be linked to Bin Laden or accused of belonging to a dormant cell of Al-Qa'eda. The hunt for terrorist groups has sometimes reminded us of McCarthyism and the witch hunt for communists: the same blind hysteria, the same confused criteria, and the same religious zeal. Europe may still be a democracy for most of its people, but for Muslims it has become a police state -- a permissive police state, but a police state nonetheless. [*]
When we look back at the events of last year on the European level and wonder what has changed for Arab Europeans, we realise that, far beyond the growing racism, and far beyond the growing harassment and the criminalisation of Islam, far beyond the tough policing measures against them, Arab Europeans have become more Arab and less European -- not because they decided on this, but because Europe has forced them into a corner. The attitude of Europe towards their identity and its most important components -- Islam and Arabism -- has not driven them away from that identity, but has rather made them reaffirm it, first to themselves and then to their European neighours.
A new generation of Arab-Muslims is no longer prepared to put up with living as second-rank citizens. Somehow, they have regained their sense of pride. Pro-Palestinian demonstrations have erupted everywhere in Europe; Brussels and Amsterdam have seen tens of thousands of mainly Arab youths marching through their streets in support of Palestinian resistance. No one cared any longer that they would be labelled "activists". Nobody cared about the pictures taken by state security agents at demonstrations. Pro-Palestinian action has become the channel through which young Arabs have discovered political action, and redefined their priorities. Through these actions, they have started telling their European compatriots: We too have our war on terrorism -- Israeli terrorism. We too are citizens here. We have our own agenda and we will prove it.
Why did they do that? Why did they not feel obliged to be docile and defensive, as their parents and the majority of first- generation immigrants did? Is it because they were maybe secretly proud of what happened on 11 September 2001? Is it because they were maybe secretly proud that the only people to deal such a blow to the United States on its own territory in the whole of its history were Arabs, like them? Or is it just because they realised that they have to make a stand, if they did not want to be overrun by a stampede of modern-day knights of the far right -- men like Pim Fortuyn in Holland and France's Jean-Marie Le Pen, who seek to make domestic capital out of Mr Bush's international crusade?
One thing is sure: there is a new sense of pride out there among Arab Europeans, and a strong new awareness of their identity as Arabs and as Muslims. Their heroes now are second-generation Arabs, people born and raised in Europe. According to the word on the streets, this is a trend that is here to stay.
In her book on 11 September, the Italian writer Oriana Fallacci wrote that Arabs are reproducing like rats in order to invade Europe and the West, and that their religion, Islam, should be forbidden. In Belgian newspapers, some respected writers defended her comments as acceptable, as forming part of an "honest" Western approach to Islam.
If this is the voice of Western civilisation, then that civilisation has now reached a level of decadence unparalleled in its history. If so, maybe Arab-Europeans will not only save themselves by rediscovering their identity and defending it with success on European soil. Maybe they will also save Europe from sinking deeper into this quagmire of obscurantism and hatred, just as many hundreds of years ago their ancestors helped a new Europe to emerge from the long dark night of its mediaeval soul.
* The writer is president of the Arab European League, Belgium. ______________________________
[*] The Belgian not-so-secret service --the Sûreté de l'Etat-- even set up a bogus Islamic outfit, the Centre des Jeunes Musulmans, to lure would-be "terrorists" among the country's Muslim immigrants.... (it used to be fashionable for Belgian police/gendarmerie officers to attend seminars with the FBI --and learn its cointelpro gimmickry) |
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To: epsteinbd who wrote (1952) | 9/17/2002 8:42:29 AM | From: GUSTAVE JAEGER | | | Okay Craepstein, I've got another Feminist crusade for you --Judeofascist Sweden and her Nazi-like eugenics:
Sterilization case rocks Sweden
From the Militant Vol. 61, no. 31. 15 September 1997
Margot Wallstrom, Sweden's social affairs minister, announced August 28 that a special commission will investigate allegations that up to 60,000 women were forcibly sterilized through government programs for over 40 years to create a "stronger Swedish race." Stockholm admitted that a policy of "ethnic cleansing" was launched in 1935 and involved women with learning difficulties or from non-Nordic ethnic backgrounds. The Swedish government paid $6,289 in compensation to 16 victims in the past 10 years.
In Norway, meanwhile, the health ministry acknowledged some 2,000 men and women who had mental illnesses or were poor went through a forced sterilization program between 1934 and 1976. Oslo denied charges that 40,000 women were forced to undergo sterilization experiments of "racial cleansing sciences."
hartford-hwp.com
Swedish panel urges compensation for forced sterilization victims
STOCKHOLM, Sweden (CNN) -- Thousands of men and women forcibly sterilized during a 40-year selective breeding campaign in Sweden should receive more than $22,000 apiece in compensation, a government-appointed commission recommended Tuesday.
The panel of investigators determined that 63,000 people, mostly women, were sterilized between 1935 and 1975. Many of them were targeted for the procedure because they were considered racially inferior or mentally deficient. Minors, the mentally retarded, epileptics and alcoholics were among those sterilized. [snip]
cnn.com
A few clues on female circumcision, if I may....
III. PRACTICE OF MALE AND FEMALE CIRCUMCISION
Male circumcision is practiced by all Muslims and Jews and also by some Christians, as is the case for Christians in Egypt. It is also practiced by animist tribes in Africa.
As for female circumcision, it is neither practiced by all Muslims, nor by all Arabs. In fact, many if not most of the Maghreb countries as well as Turkey and Iran ignore this custom. On the other hand, one can find it among the Egyptian Christians and the Ethiopian Jews (Falachas) who in all probability keep practicing it in Israel today, as do Africans living in France. Sudan (98%), Somalia (98%) and Egypt (75%) are among the largest Arabic countries practicing it. In Egypt, 97.5% of uneducated families impose circumcision upon their daughters compared to 66.2% of educated families. Other Arabic countries practice it too: Yemen, the United Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, some areas of Saudi Arabia, Mauritania. It appears to be done also in some Muslim countries of Asia such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan and India under the name of sunnah circumcision, here with a reference to religion. But precise data on the subject are not available. In Africa, 28 countries appear to practice it, among them many animist tribes. It seems to affect about 75 million women. [...]
fgmnetwork.org
BTW, how's your Senegalese housekeeper doing? (Reminder: Message 17986285 ) |
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To: Thomas M. who wrote (1946) | 9/17/2002 10:11:13 AM | From: GUSTAVE JAEGER | | | Told you so... 911 was a Russian-Tajik operation --part of the job was likely subcontracted to Israeli and French semi-rogue spooks.
guardian.co.uk
Excerpt:
Moscow secretly offered the Americans the use of its bases in Tajikistan last year [2000] for a purported attack on Bin Laden, according to the military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer, writing in today's Moscow Times.
There are 10,000 Russian border troops strung out along the 750-mile Tajik-Afghan border, plus another Russian army division estimated at around 15,000 men at three bases in Tajikistan.
According to the Izvestiya newspaper, Russian foreign intelligence has already told the CIA that at least two of the hijackers were Uzbek Islamic militants aligned with the Taliban and Bin Laden.
Citing a Russian foreign intelligence officer, the newspaper said the information was based on phone intercepts and included the tip that the coalition of Islamic extremists based around Afghanistan has 400 potential kamikaze attackers within its ranks.
The Russians are believed to have plenty to divulge on Bin Laden and the Taliban since their forces are patrolling the Tajik-Afghan border, and the Afghan heroin routes perceived as crucial to Bin Laden's treasure chest pass through Russia and ex-Soviet central Asia. [...] ______________________________________ |
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To: epsteinbd who wrote (1952) | 9/17/2002 10:53:03 AM | From: pie-faced-mutt | | | Clitorectomies are not a Islamic custom, it is an African custom, as Jews in different cultures adopt what is traditionally not part of Jewish faith.
What about circumcision, you think that it is such an enlightened act? |
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To: Raymond Duray who wrote (1950) | 9/17/2002 1:06:18 PM | From: Thomas M. | | | Good articles, especially the second.
Why, then, is the United States, having lost 3,000 people in a terrorist atrocity by an al-Qaida network that is alive and anxious to kill thousands more, about to launch a new war on a country that even its neighbors – Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia – believe to be contained?
Indeed.
As for his chemical and biological weapons, Saddam's arsenal was largely destroyed by 1998, though a five-year absence of U.N. inspectors has given him time to rebuild his stockpile.
Time to rebuild? Yes. Means to rebuild? Doubtful. Remember, in the 1980s, he had the US, Britain, etc. actively trying to help him build and use these weapons. In the 1990s, he has been under total economic and military sanctions, as well as constant surveillance.
Tom |
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To: GUSTAVE JAEGER who wrote (1953) | 9/17/2002 2:40:29 PM | From: epsteinbd | | | Sorry to disappoint you, Gustave Adolf Goebbels, but I never had a Senegalese housekeeper. However I did have a Senegalese love I wanted to marry. Aïda N'diaye was her name. Her father was colonel in the French Army, her mother a Moroccan, yes GAG, an Arab... The parents didn't oppose to the marriage - and knew of my genetics,mind you! But Aïda chose Lescure, a nice guy BTW, but still.
But you didn't answer : is your girl friend sliced ? |
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