Well, it’s about time. However, I, too, wonder how well they can make this work. You can stir as hard as you like, but you still can’t mix oil and water.
“It’s a form of creating a second-class citizenship,” says Tariq Modood, director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship in Bristol. “All the burden of change is placed on the immigrant.”
Guess what, Tariq? In the 19th and 20th centuries, when immigrants were coming into the United States, they either learned English and how to fit themselves into American culture, or else. Demanding that your neighbors speak Ukrainian to make things easier for you might satisfy your principles, but you can get awful hungry after a while when you can’t trade with anybody.
And if that’s not to be the case, then Europeans will almost certainly have to accord Muslim faiths the same status accorded Christianity—including, perhaps, a media that voluntarily refrains from publishing needlessly offensive images of the Prophet, not under duress from abroad but out of greater respect for local religious sensibilities.
Well, that’d just be dandy, except for one thing—I’m not sure which liberal utopia
Newsweek has been floating around in, blithely oblivious to reality, but the media
doesn’t refrain from publishing needlessly offensive images when it comes to Christianity----so, technically, in this instance, Islam
has been given the same status accorded Christianity. The secular media is an equal-opportunity offender. To say that Europe needs to treat Muslims “the same way they treat Christians”, and then turn around and say, “such as not publishing offensive images” is disineguous in the extreme. Come on,
Newsweek----you think we all fell off a pickle boat the day before yesterday???
