Alright. I was going to stay silent on this issue, but Ive had absolutely enough of people attempting to understand and sympathize with the incredibly complex sociopolitical problems in France without actually understanding anything about the country itself. Warning: This is pretty vitrolic but not directed toward anyone in particular. Vous netez pas Charlie, Ahmed, ou Juif. You are a white American sitting at your desk marveling at just how ~bad~ those Muslims of France can get because of Islam corrupting them. You are completely and utterly ignorant of the fact that Muslims live in extremely over-crowded population centers just outside of one of the most beautiful, one of the richest cities in the entire world, where the unemployment rate is anywhere from 14-40% at a given time and over half of them worry about losing their job on a daily basis. You dont understand the cultural meaning of being French and how closely guarded that is by the white majority of France, who seek to purify their idea of France through blatant xenophobia (which also includes anti-Semitism). You dont know of the Marine Le Pens of France who campaign along this exact premise, who call for terror suspects (gee who could that be?) to lose their citizenship. You rally about police brutality in America and then stay silent for the Muslim men who are killed by police indifferently in France. You fail to learn this even after a satirical newspaper decides to shit on the one thing that Muslims in France can hold sacred, can hold as their own cultural identity. Then, to top it off, you mourn the deaths of people from Charlie Hebdo and the targeted Jewish centers while COMPLETELY IGNORING the bombings and shootings at prayer halls, kebab shops and mosques all across France. Also while ignoring the NAACP bombings in our own country, but hey, weve got our hands full looking out for the whites of France, and we just spent soooooo much effort talking about racism in America for like a month, I guess. Denounce the shootings, the bombings, the people who co-opt ideals for the sake of motivating underprivileged youth to violence. Never should a religion, or any set of ideas, be so removed from the satirical canon that an act of violence is justified against it. But dont you dare think you have a place in this conversation without educating yourselves on the actual issues between people of these countries because you have a passing knowledge of their religion (...that you likely gleaned from conflicts in the Middle East, which are, ya know, COMPLETELY DIFFERENT COUNTRIES). That puts you on par with the conservatives who would carpet bomb them all if they could. And furthermore, I am 0% interested in having a discussion with any single one of you that thinks they understand Everything There Is To Know About Islam until you have exercised your proper critical thinking skills and read about what it means to be a Muslim in France... or really, any other country. I am not even going to pretend that I myself understand this conflict fully. I have a long road of studying ahead of me if I really wish to speak with an educated mind on the subject. But at least Im not willing to throw Muslims under the bus due to my own ignorance. This status is not a call for debate. It is a wake up call for you to read up or shut up. euro-islam.info/country-profiles/france/ brookings.edu/press/books/chapter_1/integratingislam.pdf blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2013/01/31/muslims-france-north-africa-senegal-discrimination/
Posted on: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 16:51:09 +0000
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