[lit-ideas] Searching for Moderates in all the wrong places
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Lit-Ideas " <Lit-Ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2007 09:10:55 -0800
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
Other related posts:
