Religion
Related: About this forumMuslims in Europe dogged by bias, Amnesty says
By Joe Sterling, CNN
updated 8:52 AM EDT, Tue April 24, 2012
(CNN) -- Muslims in Europe face discrimination in education, employment and religious freedom, an Amnesty International report said.
"Muslim women are being denied jobs and girls prevented from attending regular classes just because they wear traditional forms of dress, such as the headscarf. Men can be dismissed for wearing beards associated with Islam," said Marco Perolini, Amnesty International's expert on discrimination. "Rather than countering these prejudices, political parties and public officials are all too often pandering to them in their quest for votes."
The report, titled "Choice and Prejudice: Discrimination Against Muslims in Europe" and issued on Monday, details the problem, with a focus on Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland.
Amnesty International raised the issue, as it has done before, of restrictions "on the establishment of places of worship and prohibitions on full-face veils."
http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/24/world/europe/europe-islam-discrimination/index.html
Here's the 123 page pdf of the report.
http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/EUR01/001/2012/en/85bd6054-5273-4765-9385-59e58078678e/eur010012012en.pdf
= new reply since forum marked as read
Highlight:
NoneDon't highlight anything
5 newestHighlight 5 most recent replies
dmallind
(10,437 posts)I'm an immigrant. If I still insisted on getting to work at 9am and having a full hour for lunch including beer I might find myself with limited options too. Being neither a lawyer nor a construction worker I instead chose to observe the norms of my new home.
rug
(82,333 posts)Read the report. Right wing parties are feeding off the hatred and the governments are responding with targetted legislation.
But I've seen this work both ways. When I first moved from home a quarter century ago, being naturally poor, I lived in a low-cost neighborhood. Like most such places it was largely minority. In fact of the several hundred homes in the estate, there were only 2 where I knew for sure other Anglos lived. Other than that, wall to wall subcontinent. There were a few, but very few, burqas around. Not many more hijabs. Many many times more jeans and t shirts than either. There were certainly a few incidents with the still-rampant skinhead loons, and an even smaller number of retaliations, but no great animosity or seething hatred on either side, and no question of either litigation or legislation or civil unrest. I saw one minor act of vandalism the whole time I lived there - a spray-painted "Rushdie must die". Other than that quiet, friendly, safe. The Pakistani shops and Indian takeouts and Bangladeshi market stalls had frequent white customers who chatted amicably. These are not halcyon dreams of youth. There was plenty of grimness at the time in peak Thatcher. But the minorities, while certainly seen as such, were mostly accepted and mostly functioned in society as dark-skinned Brits who spoke weird languages to each other (but locally-accented fluent vernacular to us) and went on long diets in October. The extremist parties - the National Front at the time in those pre-EDL days - were a butt of jokes with no more chance of electoral success than a dog turd, favored only by skinheads with affectations of political intent.
I went back last year when I visited my dad a few miles away. Not an English word to be seen on any store, not a woman out of full cover, not a man out of shalwar khameez and full beard, nary an English syllable to be heard. No brown faces at the pub even in this estate (where it had been at least 50-50), but plenty of nasty grumblings about brown faces where there had been nothing worse than mutually insensitive banter before. This is after the race riots and after the demands for shari'a courts and after the rise of the far right as a still small but genuinely relevant and burgeoning political power, with a few low level seats and local power here and there. It's become acceptable to call for deportation of people in their third generation of English residency. It's become acceptable on the other side to call for and even nibble around the edges of actual violent revolution against white England.
What changed first? Buggered if I know. I don't know if fundamentalist Islam came first, turned the minorities into withdrawn alien and strange and surly outsiders who spawned resentment and thus further isolation and thus worse resentment and so on. I just know it's like that now and it wasn't. I don't know if another cycle of economic uncertainty came first and caused the whites to scapegoat the minorities which caused defensive retrenchment which caused more marginalization which caused worse insularity and so on. I just know it's like that now and it wasn't. I just know that every time one group makes a bigger unnecessary effort to say "we're different", the outgroup responds with saying "yes - and you're disliked". I was a bouncer at the time for quite a while - and English bouncers are different from US ones mostly. I knew damn well that if the club was one with a clientele of preppy fashion conscious pop music fans, then a guy walking in with long hair, leather and an Iron Maiden T shirt was going to cause trouble whether he wanted to or not, even if he was the friendliest and most unassuming guy on earth. And the same in reverse at a heavy metal club. Saw it happen both ways many times. The different are mistrusted. The intentionally different are suspect. The willfully different are hated.
rug
(82,333 posts)I grew up in NYC which changes every generation.
One thing that I keep close to me at all times is that, no matter the difference in language, color or religion, I always have more in common with that person than with a person who looks like me, talks like me, and worships like me but is part of a system that uses capital to exploit and to divide.
Class is the great global divide and it doesn't matter what the people on either side of the line look like. What is important is to know which side of the line you're on.
Racism has been the grand tool used to divide us for centuries but it ultimately is not about race at all.
LeftishBrit
(41,212 posts)Native English discrimination against immigrants and Muslims has led to a backlash by some Muslim and other immigrant groups, which then leads to further hostility, etc. I do know that some Muslim groups can be quite isolationist themselves; e.g. I know a child, the son of East Europaean immigrants, who has faced both English anti-immigrant prejudice and the prejudice of Muslim neighbours who won't let their kids play with him because he's not a Muslim.
Of course, this all just plays into the hands of those who would 'divide and rule'. If the low-paid people in work (including many immigrants) and the benefit claimants; the Jews and the Muslims and the Christians and the secularists; the old and the young; etc. can be set against each other and persuaded to see themselves as rivals for pieces of a small pie, then there will be fewer awkward questions about whether the pie really needs to be that small and who got most of it, and the post-Thatcherite status quo will continue.
snagglepuss
(12,704 posts)
cbayer
(146,218 posts)
Odin2005
(53,521 posts)
dmallind
(10,437 posts)Odin2005
(53,521 posts)To this Yankee lunch is coffee time, alcohol would just exacerbate the mid-afternoon slump when you just want to take a nap.
LeftishBrit
(41,212 posts)A lot of it is based on traditional free-floating anti-immigrant bigotry and xenophobia, some of which got more specifically directed at Muslims since 9-11 and the War on Terror. In the UK, the extreme anti-Muslim groups are the generally anti-immigrant BNP, and the more specifically Islamophobic EDL. There is a certain amount of overlap between the two, much as the EDL may deny it; and apparently the EDL and Tea Party share a few funding sources - so much for nation-specific 'grassroots' movements! There is also some overlap with football hooliganism. The RW tabloids also encourage a lot of anti-Muslim discrimination, when they're not screaming about other immigrant and minority groups/ gypsies/ secularists/ single parents/ benefit claimants/ sick and disabled people whom they assume to be frauds until proved innocent/ etc.
But as regards the full-face veil: I am not sure that this is simple discrimination. A full-face veil does interfere both with communication and identifiability. I don't think the government should be in the business of making laws about what people can wear; but I do think that employers and other organizations should be able to rule against these, without coming under anti-discrimination laws. A headscarf is different; people can still see your face.
cbayer
(146,218 posts)As to the face veils, is it not possible to define when it is important to see someone's face and when it is not?
I can see that there could be times when an employer could make a strong case for not permitting this, but much of what I have seen is bogus. If there is really no cogent reason for prohibiting it, then it would seem to boil down to overt bigotry.
LeftishBrit
(41,212 posts)mr blur
(7,753 posts)just the one part of England where I was born and grew up - The Lake District - was invaded at various time by the Romans, the Celts, the Vikings and then the Normans, all of whom left their marks in buildings, landscapes, ideas and place-names. Unfortunately it seems to take the average Brit about 2,000 years to go from "Fucking Romans - who do they think they are?!" to "Well of course we can trace our family all the way back to the Romans!" It's like the "What have the Romans ever done for us?" bit from Life of Brian.
But of course all of the above were invaders. The 'problem' with Muslim immigrants is their very other-ness. A cultural identity based so strongly on religion promotes confusion in a country that, on the whole, doesn't care much about religion one way or the other, and confusion leads to distrust. A distrust which is easily exploited by the the far-right all the way down to the Daily Mail.
Odin2005
(53,521 posts)Many Europeans are angry that a lot of immigrants, most Muslim ones, refuse to assimilate into Western cultural norms.
dmallind
(10,437 posts)Americans are famous for their lack of assimilation in other countries. Language may be adopted or may not but habits and norms are much rarer. We tend to cluster in expat bars and insist on keeping business casual western dress. We may or may not eat local food, but rarely with locals. We almost never adopt cultural norms that have anything to do with religious observance or raising children. I obviously can't pretend I've seen every American expat but I've never seen one wear a kurta or burnous (I'm sure it's happened of course). I think even the most insular Muslim groups in Europe are at or beyond the level of integration of most Americans living abroad.
Why then do our emigrants raise less ire than Muslims, even when we are in Muslim nations for the most part? Is it the economic and military hegemony? Numbers? Lack of insistence on societal change (none of the expat communities I have experienced have wanted to change the norms or culture of their host country - just to ignore them)? What WOULD happen if a large enough group of Americans settled in, say, Pakistan, and behaved exactly as insular Muslims do in England? Worse race relations than there? Better? More or less "success"?.
cbayer
(146,218 posts)In previously colonialized places, there are still large communities where you would think you were back in England.
dmallind
(10,437 posts)The retiree/tax shelter working-class-with-money types in the coastal areas of Spain aren't by and large eating paella and drinking Rioja while knowingly discussing La Vuelta in perfect Andalusian accents either.
cbayer
(146,218 posts)It was really enlightening. Other than the climate, I don't think you could have known you were outside England.
cbayer
(146,218 posts)need to relinquish in order to do so? What do you think they might be permitted to keep?
Odin2005
(53,521 posts)cbayer
(146,218 posts)And since US and European laws prohibit violence towards women or discrimination, that is just asking them to comply with the law.
It sounded like you meant much more than that though.