Re: ...Muslims in my experience expect others to adjust to them, they have no interest in adjusting to the situation they are in.
"Adjusting" to one's changing polity/society is a TWO-WAY street. It's also necessary for the (white) majority to adjust to the rightful aspirations of society's minorities....
Besides, many Muslim "ills" stem not so much from Islam itself as from the rural, third-world background of Muslim peoples... Muslim mores are at odds with Western/European ways of life because, as I noted before, Muslims for the most part come from backward, rural, underdeveloped, (North-)African countries. The role of women, respect of the tribe's chief, deviant behaviors and opinions are dealt with differently than they are in Europe. Yet, it's not an exclusively "Muslim thing". Just look at Japan(*), a country as traditional and socially backward as Saudi Arabia --look at the opportunities for Japanese women.... Contrariwise, Islam is the only "way out" for India's untouchable caste. India, cracked up by Judeo-Protestant media to be the world's greatest democracy! But Indian Dalits' only hope is to convert to Islam to escape Hinduism's sordid caste segregation!(**)
Finally, Americans and Europeans alike sometimes talk as if their current level of (political, gender, sexual, occupational,...) freedom has been a fact of life for centuries. Truth is, however, that most western freedoms were achieved quite belatedly during the last 20-30 years! Jim Crow was officially outlawed in the late 1960s, ditto with anti-homosex laws... Switzerland's women didn't have the right to vote until 1971! And this is the self-righteous West that fancies to lecture benighted Muslims?!? ROFL... Give me a break! And the best of it, as you are aware, is that all those liberal achievements, all those precious freedoms hardly won by ethnic, gender, sexual, political minorities over the past 30 years are NOT irreversible --they were not secured once and for all!! The self-righteous, allegedly freedom-loving West can yet lapse back into another Dark Age, we can yet sink into the throes of a cultural backlash... like creationism, the Moral Majority, Judeofascism, you name it....
Gus
(*) Message 22326641
(**) Plight of the "untouchables"
By Carla Power, Newsweek,
25 June 2000
After centuries of discrimination, India's Dalits are fighting back using the vote and civil disobedience to claim their rights.
On paper, the people in the slum on Delhi's Lodi Road don't even exist. The Dalits, or literally "broken people," as members of India's Untouchable castes are now called, don't show up on electoral rolls, ration cards or water bills.
[...]
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