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Politics : WAR on Terror. Will it engulf the Entire Middle East? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Chas. who wrote (18219)	12/7/2006 4:12:07 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 32591

Re: You seem to be saying religion is picked based upon ones social status, economic status and well being as opposed to being born into a specific religion as in 99% of all Muslims, Christians, Jews, etc Actually, I was referring to the instrumentalization of Islam as a political platform.... Most of Europe's nonwhite immigrants are not just "immigrants": they --or their parents-- came to Europe to fill menial jobs, drudging at construction sites, office cleaning, bus driving,... Today, they're the first to get laid off and make up the hard core of Europe's mass unemployment. They're routinely discriminated against on the job market, housing market, in schools, and swarthy youths are denied access to lily-white discotheques. All that adds up to a potent, potentially explosive, brew --just remember what happened in France in Oct/Nov 2005. Europe's immigrant ghettoes are swelling with resentment and despair, and that's how Islam has gradually morphed into a sociopolitical balm of sorts: angry, rebellious, immigrant youths soon realize that, beyond their ethnic and class/status differences, a common culture binds them all... Whether it's Mamadou from Mali, Mustafa from Morocco, Bilal from Bosnia or Nur from Turkey, they're all Muslim, they're all told by their parents to behave, to be a good Muslim, to attend to mosque, to fast during Ramadan,... They easily realize that they all share the same predicament, face the same challenges, in an increasingly hostile, xenophobic and Islamophobic society... So, instead of clutching at political straws to get their act together, why not just relying ever more on Islam, their common culture? Oh, granted, every European country has had a history of social/class struggle that spawned socialist and communist parties, labor unions and benefit societies. Yet, all that reputedly Socialist apparatus was set up in and for a lily-white constituency and it takes time and pain for it to adjust to a multiracial constituency.... Gus