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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32947 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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but given even modest pressure from the institutions, they should stop being such a problem.

Yes, this was the counsel of hope that was endlessly given over the years. Basically a "hang tight" to all of the immigration skeptics. It was all supposed to work out (and, cynically, if it doesn't you can't exactly unscramble the eggs).

I don't know if there was ever good reason for believing this, or Europeans just looked across the pond at the integration of Irishmen and Hindu-Americans and assumed it would be the same for them with Muslims.

It's been a few years since I've checked on the issue, but iirc there was an issue in polling of younger Muslims being too or perhaps even more radical than their parents.

There was notable enough illiberalism in polling that public figures originally pushing for limitations on "Islamophobia" had to admit it didn't go as smoothly as expected

It’s not as though we couldn’t have seen this coming. But we’ve repeatedly failed to spot the warning signs. Twenty years ago, when, as chair of the Runnymede Trust, I published the report titled Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All, we thought that the real risk of the arrival of new communities was discrimination against Muslims. Our 1996 survey of recent incidents showed that there was plenty of it around. But we got almost everything else wrong. We estimated that the Muslim population of the UK would be approaching 2m by 2020. We underestimated by nearly a million. We predicted that the most lethal threat to Muslims would come from racial attacks and social exclusion. We completely failed to foresee the urban conflicts of 2001 that ravaged our northern cities. And of course we didn’t dream of 9/11 and the atrocities in Madrid, Paris, Istanbul, Brussels and London.

For a long time, I too thought that Europe’s Muslims would become like previous waves of migrants, gradually abandoning their ancestral ways, wearing their religious and cultural baggage lightly, and gradually blending into Britain’s diverse identity landscape. I should have known better.

...

It should come as no surprise that Muslim liberals are in despair. They knew all of this long ago. And unlike the political elite and the liberal media, they recognise that British Muslim opinion is hardening against them. The journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who has had to seek police protection because of her liberal views, argues that the optimistic belief that time and social contact will naturally lead to the integration of Muslims is mistaken: “You know, we [liberal Muslims] are a dying breed — in 10 years there will be very few of us left unless something really important is done.”

Almost the platonic ideal of "act like all minorities are the same then get mugged by reality"

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