[lit-ideas] Re: Searching for Moderates in all the wrong places

And with three paragraphs of quoted froth, Lawrence yet again proves his case. 
France, no longer that bastion of the fight against terrorism, once more 
becomes a haven for all the world's nasties. 

What would we do without Lawrence? No, don't answer that...
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Lawrence Helm 
  To: Lit-Ideas 
  Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2007 5:10 PM
  Subject: [lit-ideas] Searching for Moderates in all the wrong places


  In my never ending search for Moderate Muslims, I noticed Omar's "One reason 
I usually ignore Lawrence's demands to hear from 'moderate Muslims' is that I 
don't know what would qualify in his eyes as such."   Well, shoot, I think.  
Run some candidates by me and I'll see if I can pick any out.   

   

  Still on my own, as I indicated in an earlier note, I've been conceding that 
there are Moderates outside of the Middle East, but maybe I'd better take a 
closer look at France:

   

  The Canadian Mark Steyn suggests that in France they define Muslim 
immoderates as something else.  Maybe there are some left over Moderates.  
Let's look.   On page 33 of America Alone he writes, 

   

  "You may vaguely remember seeing some flaming cars on the evening news toward 
the end of 2005.  Something going on in France, apparently.  Something to do 
with - what's the word? - 'youths.'  When I pointed out the media's strange 
reluctance to use the M-word vis-a-vis the rioting 'youths,' I received a ton 
of e-mails arguing there's no Islamist component, they're not the madrassa 
crowd, they may be Muslim but they're secular and Westernized and into drugs 
and rap and meaningless sex with no emotional commitment, and rioting and 
looting and torching and trashing, just like any normal healthy Western 
teenagers.  These guys have economic concerns, it's the lack of jobs, it's 
conditions peculiar to France, etc.  As one correspondent wrote, 'You 
right-wing shit-for-brains think everything's about jihad.'

   

  "Actually, I don't think everything's about jihad.  But I do think, as I 
said, that a good 90 percent of everything's about demography.  Take that media 
characterization of those French rioters: 'youths.'  What's the salient point 
about youths?  They're youthful.  Very few octogenarians want to go torching 
Renaults every night.  It's not easy lobbing a Molotov cocktail into a police 
station and then hobbling back with your walker across the street before the 
searing heat of the explosion melts your hip replacement.  Civil disobedience 
is a young man's game.  

   

  "Now ponder that bland statistic you heard a lot in the news reports: 'about 
10 percent of France's population is Muslim.'  Give or take a million here, a 
million there, that's a broadly correct 2005 statistic as far as it goes.  But 
the population spread isn't even.  And when it comes to those living in France 
aged twenty and under, about 30 percent are said to be Muslim, and in the major 
urban centers, about 45 percent.  If it came down to street-by-street fighting, 
as Michel Gurfinkiel, the editor of Valeurs Atuelles, points out, 'the 
combatant ratio in any ethnic war may thus be one to one' - already, right now. 
 It is not necessary, incidentally, for Islam to become a statistical majority 
in order to function as one.  At the height of its power in the eighth century, 
the 'Islamic world' stretched from Spain to India yet its population was only 
minority Muslim.  Nonetheless, by 2010, more elderly white Catholic ethnic 
frogs will have croaked and more fit healthy Muslim youths will be hitting the 
streets.  One day they'll even be on the beach at St. Tropez, and if you and 
your infidel whore happen to be lying there wearing nothing but two coats of 
ambre Solaire when they show up, you better hope that the BBC and CNN are right 
about there being no religio-ethno-cultural component to their 'grievances.'" 

   

  Well, shoot, no mention of real Moderates.  I guess I'll have to keep looking.

   

  Lawrence

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