Dutch: Multiculturalism a 30-year failure

Jan. 31 - The publication of the Dutch report which concluded their race policy 'a 30-year failure' dates back to Jan. 20, but although I knew it was an important report, I also found it incredibly depressing so held onto the link until I could find some meaning in it.

I haven't found a bit of meaning, to tell the truth.

The events related in Peaktalk's post on the recent Dutch experience with a Columbine-like incident and it's startling aftermath in Deliberate and Distasteful Disrespect adds a layer if not meaning. Furthermore, his conclusion is definitely intriguing:

In a week where one of the main political parties acknowledged that integration policies had failed miserably, the murder of a teacher and the distasteful disrespect shown thereafter, illustrates that simple integration models don't work and that a complete pan-European effort is required to stem the tide of economic misery and senseless violence.

I can't help feeling he's right. Looking at the tabled EU Report on anti-Semitism and various problems with assimilation of Muslim immigrants one sees in different news online publications (and let's not overlook Chechnya) a pan-European approach may well be the best approach.

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French headscarf ban

Jan. 29 - A post from EuroPundits on the ban of headscarves in France which is well-worth reading. (Note: if you get a blank screen, refresh a few times. Servers seem to be cranky today.)

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BBC's Greg Dyke apologizes

Jan. 29 - BBC's director-general, Greg Dyke, apologizes (actually, in reading the aritcle, the aplogy seems to be followed by challenges to the findings of the Hutton Inuiry) and, according to the scrolling news on the DT's webiste, he has also resigned from the BBC. (The BBC confirms the resignation here.)

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The Hutton Inquiry Findings

Jan. 28 - From the Daily Telegraph (UK) Blair 'cleared' by Hutton which links directly to the website for the Hutton Inquiry where the report is posted. The report is said to be a .pdf file ( didn't check) but the Summary of Conclusions appears in standard text.

The Summary itself is fairly straightforward and well-worth reading. Section 2.i. notes that

Therefore the allegations reported by Mr Gilligan that the Government probably knew that the 45 minutes claim was wrong or questionable and that it was not inserted in the first draft of the dossier because it only came from one source and the intelligence agencies did not really believe it was necessarily true, were unfounded.

The Report also criticizes the BBC management for not recognizing that Gilligans's own notes did not support his accusations about the dossier and, although it recognizes that the BBC Board of Governors properly recognized that they had the obligation to protect the independence of the BBC, it notes that they failed to distinguish between defending that independence and addressing the specific government complaints about the May 29 broadcast that alleged the government had deliberately inserted doubtful information and therefore should have made their own investigations.

On the question of whether the government or government officials behaved dishonourably by allowing Dr. Kelly's name to be know, the inquiry acknowledges (Section 4.A) that keeping Dr. Kelly's name secret was not "a practical possibility" given the media scrutiny, so confirmation after a reporter put his name forward was the only reasonable response. It does criticize the government's failure to inform Dr. Kelly that they would confirm his identity as the source (4.B.) and for not setting up a procedure by which Dr. Kelly would have been informed immediately once his name was released to the press but also noting that there were individual attempts by MoD officials to be supportive and helpful.

As noted by Expat Yank (if blogspotted, Ctrl+F "What is needed is an investigation"), the response from the Conservative Party has been to call for an inquiry. That's right, an inquiry into the inquiry.

UPDATE: BBC Chairman Gavyn Davies resigns in the wake of the Hutton Inquiry's finding that the BBC had "defective" editorial controls.

Does anyone else remember the Washington Post retraction of their erroneous stories about Jessica Lynch capture or how the NY Times handled the Jayson Blair firing? It's sad to see the BBC fail to remember their primary responsibility to the public like this.

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Hutton Inquiry Findings, Mugabe, Cheney on Iran, EU coruption

Jan. 25 - Hutton will clear Blair over Kelly death which is to say Blair will not be personally criticized, but Alistair Campbell and Andrew Gilligan are among those who will be. So a BBC reporter can misrepresent Dr. Kelly's statements (who should never have been speaking to the BBC to begin with) and thus violate every ethical standard of journalism to put forward his own point of view and Blair was put on the defensive? And Campbell did wrong . . . how? By standing up for the truth. No chastisement can be harsh enough for that crime.

And journalists complain that people don't watch the news or read the papers. Maybe because they don't trust big media? Hmm?

Mugabe flown to South Africa because he collapsed. Money quote:

"We were ordered not to give any details of the president's illness in case it brought people out on to the streets," a senior member of the 'Green Bombers', the notorious youth brigade created by Mr Mugabe, told The Telegraph.

Paul claims he's trying to resolve issues with his video card (or something like that) but I say he's been sacrificing chickens again. Good work! Today Mugabe, tomorrow . . . oh, kind of a big field there. I vote for Arafat, but I'll let Paul decide.

Dick Cheney is taking a hard line on Iran's Council of Guardians.

"Democracies do not breed the anger and the radicalism that drag down whole societies or export violence," he said. "Terrorists do not find fertile recruiting grounds in societies where young people have the right to guide their own destinies and to choose their own leaders."

Ineptitude in the EU?:

The report, by the parliament's budgetary control committee, notes that "no Commissioner has so far accepted political responsibility" for the fiasco at Eurostat, from which at least £3.5 million disappeared in slush funds and fictitious contracts, although some have admitted mistakes. Much of the fraud took place before the current commission took office in late 1999, but MEPs are furious that dubious contracts ran on, unchecked, until at least 2002.

Ever wonder where the UN learned its bookkeeping methodology? And these poor commissioners might receive a vote of censure! Oh, the humanity!

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German soldiers display solidarity

Jan. 23 - This is the second link I've seen on some outstanding acts of solidarity by German soldiers and civilians at Ramstein Air Base (German salute to U.S. warriors) which, combined with the at sea dress uniform rendition of full honours accorded by FGS Lutjens to the USS Winston Churchill on 9/14/01 (come on, surely you remember receiving that photo and email! I received at least 4 of them) is why we need to remember that politicians talk - too much - but they don't always represent the total will of their people.

UPDATE: homicidalManiak has a story of her own about the respect displayed by German soldiers. Sheesh, I didn't know HS was a medic in Germany. My respect, ma'am.

(Via Rantburg in comments section of lgf.)

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France bans religious beards

Jan. 21 - I felt the need to find a confirmation link to believe this story: France adds beards to list of banned conspicuous religious objects (and found one at the Globe and Mail here.)

Beards which are worn for religious reasons would be banned. The article said that Sikhs might be allowed to wear "discreet turbans."

Bandannas would also be banned if young girls present it as a religious sign.

(Please note that the bans being discussed are for schools and public places, not in public or in homes.)

David Warren has some thoughts on the ban in general here.

UPDATE: Stormy Dragon addresses the problem on how to determine if the beard is religious.

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Euro-terror news

Jan. 14 - Instapundit has a partial round-up of "Euro-terror news" and some links to terror activity in Thailand which seems to be of an Islamist nature.

Little Green Footballs links to a piece in The Observer Terror cells regroup - and now their target is Europe which has a summary of some key arrests in Europe, the emergence of groups in Eastern Europe, and provides a useful table:

The targets, the death toll and the suspects

Istanbul November 2003, 62 dead
Target: British consulate and bank, synagogues
Suspect: Local Islamic group thought to be linked to al-Qaeda or Abu Musab Zarqawi

Baghdad August-October 2003, 50 dead
Target: Al-Rasheed hotel, UN and Red Cross headquarters.
Suspect: European suicide bombers believed to have been recruited by Mullah Fouad in Syria.

Casablanca May 2003, 41 dead
Target: Jewish community centre and Spanish social club
Suspect: Local Islamic group. The authorities want to interview a Moroccan cleric, Mohammed al-Garbuzi, who is believed to be in Britain.

Riyadh May 2003, 34 dead
Target: Luxury compounds in Saudi capital
Suspect: Swiss arrest an eight-strong 'logistics cell'.

Mombasa November 2002, 16 dead
Target: Israeli tourists at Paradise hotel
Suspect: Kenyan Islamic cell. Some funds allegedly provided by a Somali-born militant living in London, arrested in Milan and 'a part of Zarqawi's cell'.

Little Green Footballs also has information about the Cleveland arrest of Imam Fawaz Mohammed Damrah.

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Veiled Threat in France

Jan. 12 - The Weekly Standard has an interesting piece by Christopher Caldwell (Veiled Threat) that explores the proposed ban on headscarves and the wearing of other religious symbols in French schools, hospitals and other public places.

He tells us that which has been well documented, i.e., that Muslim (predominantly Arab) immigrants have not been assimilated into French society and the workplace:

France is now about 10 percent Muslim. Some set the Muslim population (almost all of it Arab) at 5 million, others at 8 million. But all agree that the Muslims are disproportionately (even unconscionably) poor, clustered in housing projects surrounding France's biggest cities, victimized by discrimination, and ravaged by unemployment and increasingly crime. Young men of Arab descent (beurs, as they're called) have been responsible for a lot of that crime, including the vast majority of the hundreds of attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions in France over the last three years, and for much of an epidemic unruliness in France's schools.

Part of that description is one Americans can relate to as it mirrors the experience of black Americans who migrated north after WWII: ghettoes, substandard schools, and job insecurity or widespread under- and unemployment. In other words, Jim Crow legislated segregation was replaced by de facto segregation, which, though not given the status of a legal code, was nonetheless real.

That is probably why there is widespread skepticism that banning conspicuous religious symbols will somehow solve a problem that is rooted in poverty and bigotry - bigotry towards them and their bigotry towards Jews.

The point of departure with the black experience in America is in fact the hundreds of attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions, and even though there was derision when the EU tabled its own report on anti-Semitism, it's been argued that banning the wearing of obvious religious symbols was how the French government planned to address active anti-Semitism. Back to the schools:

In "The Lost Territories of the Republic," the sociologist Emmanuel Brenner made an inventory of such classroom incidents [unruliness in France's schools] --kids guffawing through lectures on the Holocaust, teachers subjected to ethnic taunts, humiliation of girls--that is reported to have shocked Jacques Chirac profoundly. So the veil is to the French imagination what graffiti were to the American imagination in the late 1970s: harmless per se, yet a marking of territory, sparking fear that those willing to do harm are in the neighborhood.

Education isn't the answer to resolve bigory, evidently, and the comparison to inner-city gangs is not far off, according to Theodore Dalrymple's The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris, but as his article also looks at what befalls Muslim girls who do not wear the headscarves, there is indeed an unpleasant connection between headscarves and gang colours. But again, how is banning an article of female clothing going to resolve anti-Semitism as well as the unemployment and poverty of those neighbourhoods?

Actually, there is a logic behind the ban which is rooted in French history.

Although cultural relativism has come under intense fire these past two years, it does have its value. It is hard for Americans to understand the French insistence on secularism for the very simple reason that the establishment of the Church of England under Henry VIII provided the US with two degrees of seperation from the Catholic Church and the founding of the American colonies provided one degree of seperation from the Church of England.

Although religion plays an important part in American life, no one religion, denomination or sect dominates to the exclusion of any other. We have our bigots, and we even have outspoken members of what is called the religious right, but we label them for what they are and certainly, as in the case of the Iraq War, they do not sway US foreign policy. (I think it's fair to say that this also true in Canada.) Our political leaders may proclaim their faith, but would never attempt to impose their faith on others. The experience in France has been far different, and secularism needed to be promoted in response to a very specific problem:

In 1905, the [Catholic] church was reactionary; it possessed enormous state power through its control of the schools; and enormous power to influence elections through its assets and its authority to excommunicate and preach. These factors had come together to permit the church to play a central role--as both propagandist and backroom string-puller--in denying justice to Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish career officer framed on charges of spying for Germany and sentenced to exile.

So there is the connection: institutionalized secularism was successfully used to defuse Catholic church-led anti-Semitism, so institutionalized secularism is to be used to defuse Islamic-led anti-Semitism.

It still seems a bit fanciful until Caldwell brings up a real example, the French Muslims' party (PMF) is the organizer of an upcoming demonstration against the headscarf ban January 17. Religious parties are not allowed under French secularism, but the PMF is what Caldwell refers to as an ad-hoc exception and notes that it is not a religious party but a party of which much of the platform is based on anti-Semitism.

[PMF founder Mohammed Ennacer] Latreche was the subject of a telling profile in early January by the journalists Blandine Grosjean and Olivier Vogel of Liberation, in which it was noted that he has taken to referring to France's Socialist party as the Zionist party, and now associates with one of France's notorious Holocaust deniers. He coedited a work called "The Judeo-Nazi Manifesto of Ariel Sharon" and took several Parisian youths to Baghdad to serve as human shields before the invasion of Iraq. "Fear is going to have to change sides," Liberation quoted Latreche as saying. "It's going to have to pass from the side of veiled women to the side of those politicians who are going to vote for this law."

In a sense, this is exactly what France has bargained for in transforming a serious religious problem into a serious political problem. And it is a good bargain, too, making it possible to refer Latreche-style outrages to the police, arresting the violent, and leaving in peace those who practice their religion inoffensively. But none of this is as easy as it sounds.

So I can begin to see their logic (although I don't quite understand why the police could not be called in earlier given France's hate crime laws) which is to lay down a challenge to determine which is supreme: requirements of religion, or requirements of the state.

In an interesting turn of events, Sheikh Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi, the Grand Mufti of the al-Azhar mosque in Cairo and the foremost authority in Sunni Islam, supported France's right to ban conspicuous religious symbols, and said that although Muslim women were required to wear headscarves, that obligation only applied to those living in Muslim countries.

Caldwell then addresses something that has been nibbling at the edges these past two years:

PERHAPS WE ASSUME too much in asserting that the open democratic republics of the West are compatible with "religion." We know empirically only that they are compatible with Protestantism, Judaism, and Catholicism. It is no insult to Islam to say that it may not be as assimilable into a regime of lacite as Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism were--because there is little historical evidence that Islam can be effectively or sincerely practiced only in private.

My long-time response remains the same: Catholicism, Protestantism and Judaism worked at being compatible, and, in many cases, are still working on it, and there is no reason Islam cannot do the same if it choses to work at it and that includes actively rooting out anti-Semitism.

Caldwell asks:

WHAT LESSONS has America drawn from this episode? None. It has decided to gloat instead. ..

... One can prefer the American means of dealing with religious diversity and still question the smug assumption that America's constitutional order could easily cope with the facts on the ground that exist in France--i.e., the equivalent of, in this country, some 30 million rapidly radicalizing Muslims, concentrated in a handful of pivotal cities.

Mea culpa. My initial reaction was astonishment, although I did try to find the logic behind the ban. Moreover, what do we really have to gloat about? There have been skirmishes in the US over the veil, in particular in the question of whether to remove the veil for identification photographs or upon request by the police or security personnel, so that particular issue has already come up and the veil lost.

Interesting times.

(Weekly Standard link via Jack's Newswatch.)

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Red Sea air crash has Canadian connection

Jan. 6 - There appears to be a Canadian connection to the Red Sea airplace crash: Crash pilot's children here.

SHARM EL-SHEIK, Egypt -- Two young Brampton women grieved yesterday for their father, who was the pilot of the Boeing 737 jetliner that crashed into the Red Sea Saturday, killing all 148 people aboard. Ekram Hamid, of Montreal, identified the pilot as his estranged son, Ashraf Hamid.

"It's a sad day, it's unfortunate," Ekram, 70, told the Montreal Gazette. "His passion was flying. He loved to fly. I just wish he had chosen another career."

Ekram said a Canadian Foreign Affairs official called him Sunday morning to tell him his son had died.

The article also states that, according to a French embassy official, searchers have picked up a signal that could be from the black box of the Boeing 737.

According to this, a hitherto unknown terrorist group has claimed they attacked the jetliner:

A caller saying he represented a radical Islamist group in Yemen, Ansar el-Haq (Apostles of Truth) telephoned Agence France-Presse in Cairo to say the aircraft had been downed in an "attack."

The caller warned of future attacks against Air France flights unless the French government rescinded a law that bans Muslim students from wearing headscarves in public schools.

[...]

The 10-year-old Boeing 737 aircraft, leased by Egyptian charter company Flash Airlines, had made a planned left turn before suddenly -- and with no warning -- turning to the right and then diving into the sea.

The crew did not contact air-traffic control, apparently having no time to do so. The high-speed impact shattered the aircraft and its passengers. So far the recovery effort has found nothing to point to the cause of the crash.

The article notes that none of the wreckage or human remains recovered thus far indicate signs of an explosion, and also chronicles a brief history of problems with the rudder on other Boeing 737s flying at low altitudes.

(Globe and Mail link via Jack's Newswatch.)

UPDATE: Two black boxes have been recovered (Jan. 18-04)

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Germany: Hijab controversy

Jan. 3 - Hijab causes major row in Germany or more specifically, the wearing of the hijab by public servants, teachers and students.

[German President Johannes] Rau's appeal that Islamic headscarves receive equal treatment with symbols of other faiths such as Christianity or Judaism has led to furious reactions from Roman Catholic politicians and clerics.

Glad to see those enlightened Europeans are still so far ahead of us American rubes on the tolerance curve.

(Via Jack's Newswatch.)

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