Carl, my point in the Irish comparison is that people don't change culture because they change country. Their children will adopt local norms to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the context of their lives. If they live in Jewish ghettoes, they remain Jewish, perhaps for 2000 years, wishing for the Promised Land.
Moslems will do the same. New Zealanders used to congregate in Earls Court in London [back in the day].
Birds of a feather and all that.
But remember Romeo and Juliet; Fiddler on the Roof.
The young ones mix it up and those deep in the culture keep it separate. If there is a critical mass, they remain separate. It's 150 years in New Zealand since the British started arriving in big numbers and there is still plenty of Maori identity here.
Moslems in France [and elsewhere] have robust ideological beliefs. Sure, they might ignore the exhortations to fire and brimstone, stoning and head-hacking of infidels by the ideology, but it's still built in. Similarly, Christians ignore the more lurid calls to viciousness in the Olde Testamente, though it's not long since witch-burnings, inquisitions and heresy trials, and they are still mad enough to believe that the biblical mayhem is the literal word of some supernatural deity. It doesn't seem to occur to them that it was really written by some ordinary bloke back then, with a particularly nasty turn of mind.
People support the group with which they identify most strongly. It's usually self first, then family, then friends, cult, country, humanity, animals, Gaia. Of course, people try to upset that natural order, with some success at times.
If you ask people whether they are first and foremost a Moslem or American, and put it to the test - say the order goes out to a Moslem-American pilot, from the President and Congress, representing We the Sheeple, to nuke Mecca, with his Islamic Jihad brother in it, would the Moslem pilot be with us or against us? Decisions, decisions!!
Carl, the Irish-Americans supporting the IRA weren't Irish in any meaningful sense. Any more than I'm English or French just because some ancestors came from there, though I have some cultural norms and genes derived from there. I recall a young woman in Ottawa telling me she was Irish [back in 1974]. She seemed Canadian to me. It turned out that one of her grandmothers was from Ireland. What a laugh! She thought she was Irish.
Similarly, French-Canadians would claim to be French. They were anything but French! They had a weird accent and had the big Yank Tank car and white shoes and didn't seem much like French to me. They've been Canadian for 100 years! But they didn't agree and wanted to break up Canada [half of them].
As push comes to shove in France [and Europe], I bet the Moslems are primarily Moslem, and Islamic Jihad will exert its influence against the domineering infidels who presume to tell them not to cover their female heads at school.
I hasten to add that I am against compulsory school uniforms and couldn't care less what people wear to school. Youngsters do wear a uniform. They slavishly follow their own dress code.
I believe American girls currently wear the Britney Harlot dress code. Boys wear the extreme baggy and saggy pants style, with boxer shorts sticking up. Maybe that has gone out of fashion now as it has been around a while.
A few decades ago, the Parti Quebecois were getting violent to gain independence. Pierre Trudeau put the kibosh on that. Renee Levesque is out of business now, but it was serious for a while. They weren't all happy Canadians - and French and English are much more the same than different, especially after living in Canada all that time.
<They have a critical mass, stick with their culture and they will enforce their religious ideology if they get a chance.>>"
These are all vicious bigoted things that were once said about the Irish in the US, LOL, and are just as bigoted now. >
American cultural and political norms don't especially conflict with Irish-American values and religious ideology. Heck, there are even attempts to get the ten commandments written in stone in the courthouse and the President is running a Crusade! Ashcroft is bible bashing. Jerry Falwell is well known with his fire and brimstone. Stem cell research is NOT to be funded.
Look at the carnage in India [Kashmir and elsewhere] and during the partition of Pakistan in an attempt to keep the peace. The partition wasn't all that successful in that there was just the other day a test firing of a rocket by Pakistan and there was the recent nuclear weapons confrontation. Hindus and Moslems seem to be at each other's throats all too often.
The gap between Moslems and Infidels is a lot larger than the gap between Irish Americans and USA political norms.
Maybe you are right and the Moslems and French and Belgians and Germans and other Euros will happily mix in and get on just fine.
But it seems arrogant to me to think that <If you lived in the US, you'd discover that a society is able to peacefully coexist with all kinds of dress habits. Eventually, their kids will rebel, and insist on wearing classic American attire (g-strings and "wife beater" shirts).>
For a start, I don't need to live in the USA to discover things. The USA, surprising though it is to some, is not universally the leader of the free world or whole world, where good things appear from Aladdin's Lamp. It follows along behind in some respects. Freedom for negroes, women's vote, joining WWII [way behind NZ], supporting freedom for East Timor, for example.
New Zealand has all kinds of dress habits, including habits, not to mention a wide variety of people from different countries, and we have been co-existing as well as or better than the USA ever has. It's not news to me.
It's arrogant and presumptuous to think that children will continue to rebel and adopt the French way, or American way, though they largely have until now. Presumably the point of being Hyphenated-American is that individuals are not fully subsumed by the melange of culture. But the Hyphenated-Americans generally look like clones of other Americans to me, with little of their ancestors' cultures left in their speech or behaviour.
But immigration to the USA has been gradual and mostly from Euro sources. France has got a LOT of immigrants who are Moslem, not Irish, German, English, Spanish, Russian, Polish, etc. They are qualitatively different in their ideology.
I wonder how "equal under the law" will go in socialist, centrally-planned France. So far, equally allowed to pay taxes for a school system, for your children to be ordered to take off the religious symbols, such as head-covering clothing. That's not a recipe for peace, light, harmony, happiness, health, longevity, prosperity, fun and love.
Parents vs State vs Islamic Ideology with Catholicism thrown in. It should be an interesting brew, stirred up by youthful lust, love and offspring.
The winner gets to own the Force de Frappe. Then the USA better look out.
Mqurice |
