I don't think we have any discussion about the Danish Muhammad cartoons....

don't let's be beastly to the Germans!

and yeah, of course it's their job, our job, whatever. which is exactly the point -- people have to be free to draw those lines for themselves. even right-wing danish newspapers.

"The National Fatwa Council, comprising Islamic scholars hand-picked by Malaysia's king, said Monday that the themes of black metal music were prohibited by Islam, claiming they could lead Muslims to stray from their beliefs, consume alcohol and indulge in sexual misconduct.

Authorities plan to enact new laws allowing charges to be laid against Muslims who form black metal bands, council spokesman Shukor Husin was quoted as saying by the national news agency, Bernama."

Nabisco, you persist in taking it as a given that a moral judgement call, the call the Danish editors presumably should have made, would automatically conclude that the cartoons were gratuitously offensive.

But say hypothetically that the point of the turban-bomb Mohammed drawing was to illustrate the fact that jihadist Islamists (a/k/a devout muslims) were merely following the prescriptions of their murderer prophet, who stated in an accepted-by-orthodoxy hadith that all infidels should be offered the choice between conversion, subjugation or death.

In that case, would the linkage of Mohammed and the modern-day muslim supremacists who are guided by his example, not be a valid point to make in a free society in relation to the potential threat of mass immigration to the West by muslims - given that a significant proportion of them will inevitably devoutly adhere to the supposedly example of model conduct that was Mohammed's actions and beliefs?

Nabisco, this thread is almost a thousand posts long, and you've done nothing but dodge the fact that supremacist jihad as exemplified by Mohammed is, and has always been, a central tenet of mainstream Islam. Do you not think refuting this charge is essential to you whole line of reasoning? If so, please refute it (good luck trying).

But does any of that mean that I should welcome mass immigration from members of a religion which fundamentally believes that all other cultures and belief-systems should be subjugated under its rule? ("Islam will dominate")

Not at all - I oppose muslim immigration precisely because I favour multiculturalism.

It would appear you oppose allowing members of a particular group to immigrate because a certain number of them will predictably hold views inimical to your own and those of the great majority of your countrymen.

Do you support this prohibition because you believe these views will ultimately come to predominate over your own?

Or is it because you think these views will ultimately lead an unknowable, but small percentage of these immigrants to commit crimes?

How would this be any different in kind from preventing any (every!) other group from immigrating, because it is predictable that an unknowable but small percentage of them will commit crimes?

Can you demonstrate that self-identified muslims commit more crimes than, for example, self-identified coptic or nestorian christians, or former members of the communist party?

Or does your desired prohibition apply only to "mass immigration"?

If so, what defines "mass immigration" as opposed to "immigration"?

Pardon all the questions. They all seem pertinent to me.

If that wasn't the case, don't you think that the moderate muslims would be able to cite chapter & verse where the hijackers of their peaceful religion had gone wrong in misinterpreting the teachings of a peace-loving prophet. Can you give me any examples of them doing so?

They can't - all they can do is be moderate by ommission, by disregarding the orthodox teachings of 1,400 years of muslim doctrine, and disingenuously saying things like: really jihad is a spiritual struggle.

What they can't say is: the Koranic verses which say slay the unbeliever and the murderous conduct of Mohammed and the 1,400 years of aggressive jihad based on the two, were all a complete misunderstanding and misinterpretation of the Koran and the Prophet's actual peaceful behaviour, here's what our peace-loving prophet really said..., because there's no scriptural basis upon which muslims can make such a claim. Their prophet wasn't peace-loving. He was a vicious murderer!

To try to claim otherwise would be the equivalent of Christians reinterpreting Christianity by denying Christ's conduct and the Gospels' teachings. It just couldn't happen. So instead the 'moderates' so the best they can - they pretend that Islam is really a peaceful religion by ommitting all of its non-peaceful teachings.

But that's just not good enough, because there'll always be a significant number of muslims who take Islamic doctrine seriously, and the tolerant-by-ommission have absoltuely no theological ammunition with which to defeat them.

As far as I need to cite empirical evidence to back up the blatant doctrinal difference which exists between the teachings of Islam and all other religions, obviously I'm on shaky ground, given that the Hindu instigated mass-murder in Madrid and the Buddhist terrorist attacks on London prove that all religions are equally culpable.

if it's empirical evidence that you want...

Gypsy, this is a statement about rights. We agree about rights; you don't have to keep reminding me. I was talking about the statements made by people like, say, Clinton, who has nothing to do with Danish law and is basically just making a moral suggestion -- a strong statement of opinion about how he believes people should act.

I think you're taking people a little too much at their word when you say the sole issue here was a depiction of Muhammad. As we've seen in this thread, Muhammad gets depicted now and then without international incident. Some people may be demanding a universal rule of no-depiction, but it seems pretty clear that the spark here was a depiction that was maybe even designed to provoke exactly this kind of reaction. In either case -- in the realm of moral suggestion, not law -- I think my idea is mostly just that people should think a whole bunch about what they're doing. Which may mean being considerate of taboos you don't believe in, in those instances where you don't actually have a pressing reason to violate them. (I mean that in the least repressive way possible -- something along the lines of how I might think one of my coworkers is a dick, but I'd probably avoid saying that unless it came up. Again -- that's a judgment/suggestion about politeness, not anything having to do with rights or freedoms.)

I mean, you don't really have to answer them if you prefer not to, but I still think they are all very pertinent and still unanswered. I think that honest, direct answers to them would clarify your position remarkably.

Meanwhile, you continue to argue from the existance of a certain hadith that Islam requires muslims to act a particular way and therefore they can be expected to act that way. Wouldn't it be more persuasive if you could prove that muslims act a particular way by citing their actions? This seems less roundabout, and more scientific.

1. The Koran says that infidels should be slain unless they submit to Islam (the literal meaning of Islam = submission, not 'peace').
2. The hadith says that Mohammed offered the infidels a choice between conversion, subjugation or death.
3. the muslim doctrine of jihad, which has always been an orthodox Islamic teaching, and remains so to this day in all orthodox schools of Islam, confirms and elaborates upon 1 & 2

Given the above, it is not surprising that 75% of the conflicts in the world today involve muslims on one side and Christians/Hindus/Buddhist/Animists/Securalists on the other. And there's no reason we should invite such conflict into the liberal West by acquiescing to the mass immigration of muslims, a significant proportion of whom will inevitably be true to their supremacist religion.

again, it all comes down to who gets to say. for some muslims, even the russian cartoon is blasphemous. for you, less concerned with blasphemy than general goodwill, the russian cartoon is no big deal but the danish one is a problem. for the danish newspaper, the cartoons were important to illustrating a point. all of those positions would be rhetorically defensible in a debate. the middle one, your position, is morally appealing, as moderate positions often are (for liberals, anyway). it's the position i would argue in a debate. but what's going on here isn't just a debate, it's hardball geopolitics, and it's going to have real consequences for what people decide is and isn't fair game for free expression. american papers aren't going to see the same thing as russian papers, obviously. but there will be effects, i guarantee it. editors are already plenty skittish about religion, and this will just make them more so. better not to talk about it, or if we have to, better to keep it to fluffy feelgood features.

and i think placing something as politically and culturally important and powerful as religion above critical scrutiny -- for fear of giving offense -- is a very dangerous thing.

try harder plz

It's perhaps the biggest step forward since 9/11 in the efforts of (some) Muslims to make (all) Muslims the "designated other", the "exemplary victim". Seen from this angle, it's a challenge to the previous "designated other", the previous "public enemy number 1", urban black Americans. Although this "designated other" status brings with it terrible tribulations, deaths and suffering, it also brings a global media spotlight, which means the possibility of powerful, provocative orators and politicians, the chance to become a figurehead for protest movements (and yes, Islamism is a protest movement against the current values of the West; today's Che Guevara t-shirt is a Bin Laden t-shirt), the possibility to be feared, to have people boning up on every detail of your ideology (there are now jihad theory experts in small Norwegian towns), even the possibility of strong cultural influence. Much of the rhetorical power of black music comes out of its link with the injustices suffered by black people (that's "the blues"). What cultural ferment will come out of Islamism? Will white suburban kids be wearing Muslim robes soon, the way they're currently wearing hip hop gear, as the way to both express and contain a sense of threat?

(By the way, I think this also explains the provocative posturings of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Kim Jong Il. There's almost a competition going on to be "the designated other". Might as well hang for a sheep as a lamb... Might as well get the fringe benefits of being the world's ultimate villain or victim.)

iran's goal is more specific than "designated other." they want to be the standard-bearer for muslim pride and identity (ned posted a good stratfor analysis of their strategy on the "should we bomb iran" thread), but of course they're hindered by the shia/sunni split. from a sort of birds-eye view, the whole situation is really fascinating, there are so many different agendas colliding in that region. and of course this cartoon thing has been used to serve lots of different agendas there, and to project those agendas abroad.

Erm...could I turn your attention to some of the great conflicts and atrocities of the 20th century for a moment ? World WarI, World WarII and the Holocaust, Pot Pol in Cambodia, Stalin in Russia, Vietnam...You would have a hard time finding the Muslim side, or even the religous side, in these conflicts. So why don't you say "Germans/Cambodians/... shouldn't immigrate because they have a tendency to commit genocide" ?

you could be into che and mao and still get high and get laid

Great stuff.

Everything seems to depend on what Nabisco's definition of the word "is" is.

It's pointless picking this apart again, but note how he drew attention to the word "spirit" this time rather than the word "project". In his original statement he obviously means the Bush project. We should support the Bush project. He's backed away from that since, and I salute him for doing that. As for my January 22nd statement, it was certainly a statement about intervention, but not a statement about intervention in the Middle East. Breaking down "demagogues" is not what I want my government to do in an era when it just takes one anti-Israel speech (or an imaginary weapons program) for a leader to become a "demagogue".

Thus a quite appalling article in the Guardian – even by its own standards – which sought with unprecedented ferocity and malice to paint Israel as an apartheid state, even though anyone with even a passing knowledge of that country can see at a glance that this is an utterly baseless lie and despicable libel. Did I say article? It ran to 14 pages over two days. What kind of sick obsession is this?

The Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM) has published a riposte. As it says:

• Did black South Africans have the right to full citizenship in apartheid South Africa? No
• Are Israeli Arabs citizens with full rights? Yes

• Did black South Africans have full political rights in apartheid South Africa? No
• Do Arab citizens of Israel have full political rights, including voting rights and representation in the government? Arab citizens of Israel are full citizens with voting rights and representation in the government. There are currently 11 Israeli Arab and Druze MKs.

• Did black South Africans have the right to pursue any type of education or employment they desired in apartheid South Africa? No
•Do Arab citizens of Israel have the right to pursue any type of education of employment they choose in Israel? Yes

•Did apartheid South Africa have segregated public transport? Yes
•Does Israel have segregated public transport? No

•Was there severe censorship of the press in apartheid South Africa? Yes
•Is there complete freedom of speech and freedom of press in Israel? Yes

•Who were the majority in apartheid South Africa? The black community
•Who are the majority in Israel? The Jews

This extensive piece of work published in the Guardian offends not only British Jews but all friends of democracy as well as friends of Israel. Direct comparisons to apartheid South Africa and insinuations about collusion between Jews and Nazis are simply abhorrent. The content and associated imagery are inflammatory and one-sided. They are conveyed with a degree of emotion and hatred that should have immediately alerted the Guardian’s editors to question the writer’s professional integrity. There is a difference between criticising what Israel does and what Israel is. This article puts Israel’s right to exist in question and therefore crosses a very dangerous red line.

At any time, crossing this most dangerous red line would have been utterly disgusting, a travesty of journalism. But at this particular juncture, with Muslims in Britain and around the world being incited to violence against Jews in particular and the west in general on the basis of just such lies and libels, with demonstrators on the streets of London calling for more human bomb attacks on Britain and for the beheading of people they don’t like, with Islamists rampaging around the Middle East seeking Europeans to kidnap at random and with Iran racing to equip itself with nuclear weapons to annihilate Israel, such an ‘article’ takes on a different hue altogether. Along with the unrivalled platform the paper affords the Muslim Brotherhood on its op-ed pages, the article looks like a placard for the Farringdon Road wing of the jihad.

The British press is supposed to regulate itself. I hope there are complaints about this monstrosity to the Press Complaints Commission; if the British press had any moral fibre left, it would call the Guardian to account not just for this egregious display of its pathological hatred of Israel but for the likely consequences in these most incendiary of times. The press is supposed to spread enlightenment; instead, articles like this merely spread the darkest kind of prejudice which is casting ever lengthening shadows over Britain.

it just illustrates how the Guardian (love it as I do) and the British media in general are perfectly prepared to publish "offensive" material, to "offend" certain (racial/religious) groups and use the justification of free speech, but not others.

which is why their holier than thou attitude to the European press strikes me as disingenuous. better (presumably) to piss off those who will call for strong letters of protest to be written to the press complaints commission than those who will place prices on the heads of your staff and call for your reporters to be butchered.

I don´t think the real problem/issue is the 12 Muhammad cartoons, the agenda is a very different one.

As I have gently tried to indicate to you, your small set of facts, with which you are so impressed, are not nearly sufficient to undergird the huge conclusions you would like them to support. You cling stalwartly to your facts as true(!) and unquestionable(!) and incontrovertible(!), which they no doubt are.

The sad thing is that this smug knowledge that your facts are unquestionable (as genuine facts always are) has led to a totally unjustified belief that your conclusions are unquestionable. They are not. I have questioned them and I still do. I think they are, at best, terribly misguided. It is you who have feared to answer my questions or to follow them into territory you find frightening. This reluctance reeks of ordinary, garden variety intellectual dishonesty.

It is time to reopen your mind on this matter. Consider it seriously. It wouldn't matter much to me, except that jumping to bold and unwarranted conclusions such as yours is what drags nations into stupid wars, such as Iraq.

Which is, for those wondering, why someone like Bush will condemn the cartoons. The whole logic of his mid-east plan is that people really want freedom and democracy, and they've just been hijacked by theocrats and extremists. It's absolutely essential to him to make that distinction, and it was critical in selling military action there -- i.e., "once we get rid of extremists and corrupt governments, the bulk of the citizens will be relieved and just want to go about their lives." Again, methods aside: the general thrust there is better than this. Plenty of people will still believe lots of the same things that extremists do. But this is a long-term project. And I think we should commit to the spirit of the long-term project, if not the invasions -- which is that breaking down extremists demagogues and empowering people in the mid-East to participate fully in their own societies will lead to new generations for whom this kind of fundamentalism has no appeal. This is a big project, but it's the only thing that can work. Rehabilitation is the only option here, because you can't imprison or execute an entire culture.

Momus’ most recent response:

It's pointless picking this apart again, but note how he drew attention to the word "spirit" this time rather than the word "project". In his original statement he obviously means the Bush project. We should support the Bush project.

That’s an evasive reading. You don’t gloss what “the Bush project” is, nor what Nabisco alleged it to be—you simply enlist the name “Bush” to condemn by association whatever it is Nabisco had to say. Nabisco already provided an example of this logic taken to its extreme, but I’ll try another one: Let’s say I think it’s bad for people to shove other people in front of moving trains. I suspect that it was also illegal to do so in Pinochet’s Chile. Does opposing the shoving of people in front of moving trains make me a Pinochet apologist? Or put another way, does the fact that Pinochet also opposed the shoving of people in front of trains mean that we ought to endorse the shoving of people in front of trains?

OK, let’s examine your rhetoric more closely rather than resort to analogies. You have reduced Nabisco’s statement to the following: “We should support the Bush project.” Which you take as a Bad Thing, seemingly because supporting anything associated with Bush is, to your mind, a Bad Thing. But notice how Nabisco defines that project, above: “breaking down extremists demagogues and empowering people in the mid-East to participate fully in their own societies will lead to new generations for whom this kind of fundamentalism has no appeal.” Note that in that paragraph he suggests, and later he has explicitly, that this project belongs to many more than George Bush; indeed it’s a project shared by a great many, across the political spectrum (and to which certain of your own statements have suggested a strong affinity). Nabisco is careful to distinguish between this larger “project” and the particular logic—and fact, and policy—of the invasions, of which he clearly disapproves (as you well know, not just from the paragraph above, but from Nabisco’s posts over the past three years).

What you seem to be most incensed by—or should I say rather, seem most keen on getting rhetorical mileage from—is the idea that Nabisco would dare to suggest that at least part of the rhetoric, the stated ideals, of the Bush administration is something worthy, something that can be widely shared. Now it’s clear that you, me, and Nabisco are quick to condemn the policies to which the Bush administration have applied these ideals to justify. We may even very well doubt the sincerity of Bush et al in repeating the rhetoric of democracy and pluralism. But I don’t think it ought to be verboten to recognize the potential rightness of certain ideals as expressed.

Note that you can easily use Bush’s rhetoric of democracy and pluralism against Bush’s policies. Bush’s use of a set of ideals does not give him exclusive rights to those ideals or the rhetoric he uses to advance them. As an example: you suggest that you don’t endorse the aforementioned project because you’re concerned that the category of “extremist demagogues” might include people of sympathetic political persuasions who simply run afoul of Bush et al (by the way this is a new objection to Nabisco’s argument, not one you voiced before; Momus-rhetoric in action). But the very ideals of democracy and pluralism that Bush occasionally gives voice to can be used to remind us of the value of opposing points of view, of the necessity of letting certain voices be heard. This is the quandary that Bush seems to find himself in now that Hamas has won the Palestinian elections; his response to this event may reveal how much he really believes in, or wants to act upon, the rhetoric that he often employs.

Well, yes, I'm also in favour of denying immigration rights to Stalinists, Nazis and members of the Khymer Rouge.

It was the first major protest to erupt over the issue in Africa’s most populous nation. An Associated Press reporter saw mobs of Muslim protesters swarm through the city center with machetes, sticks and iron rods. One group threw a tire around a man, poured gas on him and setting him ablaze. ...

Thousands of rioters burned 15 churches in Maiduguri in a three-hour rampage before troops and police reinforcements restored order, Nigerian police spokesman Haz Iwendi said. Security forces arrested dozens of people, Iwendi said.

Chima Ezeoke, a Christian Maiduguri resident, said protesters attacked and looted shops owned by minority Christians, most of them with origins in the country’s south.

“Most of the dead were Christians beaten to death on the streets by the rioters,” Ezeoke said. Witnesses said three children and a priest were among those killed.

This is getting silly, but it's absurd to say I'm being evasive! Nabisco defines the Bush project for the Middle East perfectly adequately as "once we get rid of extremists and corrupt governments, the bulk of the citizens will be relieved and just want to go about their lives". He then witholds his approval from the method Bush used to achieve that, ie war, but lends his support to the rest of it, and asks us to do the same, and adds that it's "the only way". He also goes to the absurd length of digging up a statement I made saying we were political eunuchs if we didn't stand up for things we believed in, and condemn things we didn't approve of, and making it look like it's support, in theory, for the idea of intervention in the Middle East, when in fact I would use this very argument to attack the attacks on the Middle East. The war was fought on false pretences, and has only increased extremism in the Middle East. But it's not just the war I condemn, but the whole idea of going into other regions and trying to give them our system of government. One of Nabisco's sophistries in the argument I'm so objecting to was painting European non-interventionism as "dismissing a whole section of humanity", ie if you don't intervene you just don't care enough, and are even ethnocentric. It's quite the reverse; you're ethnocentric if you do intervene. Angrael's conduct, rhetoric and action, throughout all this has been completely reprehensible, brutal, and illegal. I'd like to see it condemned more ringingly here, by people as smart as you and Nabisco, Amateurist, rather than justified by slippery arguments.

I mean, just to catalog a couple of the nine or ten willful lies contained in that paragraph, let's look at two:

(1) "Empowering people to participate in their own societies" DOES NOT MEAN "giving them our system of government." I pointed this out, above. I pointed out that I could have saved myself a whole lot of typing by putting "democracy" in place of that "empowering" phrase. But I didn't, because I meant something more subtle.

(2) When I talked about "dismissing a whole section of humanity" I WAS NOT referring to "European non-interventionism." I was referring to the whole argument we were having up there about "taking sides." I was referring to the spirit I worried may have been present in the original cartoons, which was one that invited division. This is the opposite of "non-interventionism." The spirit I was worried about is one that asks people to take sides and harden stances, to write off the entirety of the Muslim world as some sort of "lost cause," such that our only options are to subdue it by force.

You've missed that context from the beginning. I talked about the spirit of Bush's project and said "the general thrust there is better than this." What I meant was that at least in Bush's mind there is some hope that certain types of progress might be made that would allow the west and the Muslim world to exist peacefully and mostly non-antagonistically with one another. I said that that idea was "better than this" -- and by "this" I meant the spirit of division, the spirit that says Muslims are hopelessly extreme and irrational and there's nothing to do about it but fight.

But you clearly misunderstood that sentence. You misunderstood it so much that when you quoted it, you put brackets in there to make it mean something else: the general thrust [is that] there is better than this

You added a verb to make it mean something you disagree with! And now you just won't let go and admit that you completely misread something. In fact, as much as you keep making smug arguments about my being "smart," you won't offer me the courtesy of believing that I meant what I said, and not what you've chosen to imagine I said. As of a day or two ago, I was trying to get myself to just ignore you and let this thing drop, but I've decided this is actually more fun -- because you're just WRONG, and the longer we argue about it, the more you're just going to keep demonstrating that you TOTALLY MISREAD those paragraphs. The more you keep trying to make them say what you think they said -- the closer and closer we look at them -- the more they reveal themselves as not saying that at all, to the point that you had to actually add words to them to change their meaning! It's okay if you misunderstood me; don't worry about it. Just stop pretending you didn't.

Focusing only on the violence (instead of having a conversation about the world) bugs me when I read it as filled with xenophobic self-satisfaction (i.e., "The only thought I'll take from this whole experience is 'They're Bad'"), and it bugs me because it's never expressed what anyone thinks should be done with that disapproval. The implication is that they're Bad, and so we'll fight them. This is weird, because it seems to me more responsible to think about what we can do to support them in being less Bad. This isn't imperialist guilt or asking us to cave on principles -- it means thinking about ways to help. Even Bush at least seems to believe there's a point in encouraging democracy and moderation and development there, whatever the problems with his methods. I worry that these cartoons want (or anyway just will) lead some down a path to giving up on even that -- writing off a whole portion of humanity.

I will totally fess up to one thing: I can see how you'd read that as me calling for "democracy" and "development," two things which aren't the sudden magical answers we want them to be. But the purpose of those words was to delineate Bush-thinking, not mine. And the purpose of the paragraph is very clear. It says that I'm worried about writing off the Muslim world as nothing but an enemy, nothing but an antagonist. Hence the wording. You've focused in on the "Bush" part, but not the words around it -- "EVEN Bush AT LEAST." It's an argument against hardening of divides, and it says that even Bush at least is offering some kind of vision -- however fucked-up -- of how the west and Islam might be brought to exist more harmoniously together. Nothing you say here can change that very clear intent. No lies, no misreadings, no nothing. That paragraph speaks for itself, and I stand by it. It says: if we're going to identify these things as problems, then we need to advance some sort of vision about how those problems might be solved (even if it's as simple as the non-interventionist "leave it be") -- not resort to some hardened position where Islam becomes an intractable enemy and our only option is to fight it.

Don't you see what you do in this passage? You criticize a certain hardline section of Western public opinion (call this group A) for focusing only on Islamist violence and drawing the conclusion that it should be answered by violence, but then your proposed alternative (call it group B, overlapping with the Bush Project but not supporting war) accepts the same framing. Your proposed alternative also focuses on Islamist violence, because you then accept the "They're bad" part of the argument you're criticizing, and propose a way to "support" them to be less bad. You later urge us all to join B rather than A, and tell us there is no alternative. What you don't admit is that the extremist violence (this "bad" that you don't want people to use as a pretext to fight) you use as the justification for intervention is the product of intervention. Your framing of the "solution" exacerbates your framing of the problem, and the result is an endless, escalating "war on extremism" that throws gasoline on the fire.

on the non-existence of moderate Islam.

"If we're going to agree with the people who dismiss a whole section of humanity, then we need to advance some sort of vision about how to make that section of humanity less than entirely worthless."

The West is wrong to think its machinery and concepts "neutral" or "universal" and try to impose them on other civilizations.

Modernization is not the same as Westernization.

Demographic and economic growth of other civilizations will result in a much more multipolar civilizational system in the future.

China is the real threat to the West's dominance.

An "Islamic-Confucian connection" is emerging in which China will cooperate more closely with Iran, Pakistan and other states to augment its international position.

a) people are polite and basically respect the differences they encounter.

b) immigrants are able to "maintain separate civilizational spheres" within their host countries, ie not be pressured to assimilate. (There's a difference between integration, which respects difference, and assimilation, which doesn't. Linguists would say it's the difference between a syntagm and a paradigm.)

Unfortunately it's precisely this right to be different, to be in Rome without doing as the Romans do, to integrate without assimilating, which the cartoons affair is bringing under attack. We're edging closer to a world where Kassim has to call himself Claude-Francois, or leave. And then there's even the possibility that "back home" (wherever that is) Kassim will find an occupation by a neo-colonialist power which also wants him to become "Claude-Francois" in one way or another.

But a society consisting of separate civilizational spheres brings quiete some problems: Some differences between them can't just be "respected" without compromitting the core of one's own civilizational sphere.

First, there's the question of behavior in the public (some people don't want to talk to strangers in the metro at all, some like to talk very loudly, some like spitting on the sidewalk). I think mutual respect COULD work to some extent here, although it would be a great effort for everyone concerned.

Second, there's the question of democracy in a society consinsting of very different groups. Trust is a key issue here, because if you're living together with people whose motives you don't trust, you obviously don't want this group to influence your life (the rightwing in Austria: getting Austrian women to produce more children than immigrant women *sigh*). One way to improve trust would be to improve knowledge about the different civilizational spheres, but in a rapidly changing world, I don't know if people are willing to keep up with the flow of information. Another way would be to force some universal (in the context of one society) values on every civilizational sphere, which would make it a lot easier to trust other groups, because "Hey, they just have the same values like us !". This would be assimilation.

i guess that's the motive behind the "citizenship test" that we over here (UK). immigrants are taught what to do if they knock someone's pint over in a pub, and that getting a drink at the bar is "a situation where a strict queuing policy may not operate".

"Trial Opens for Accused Holocaust Denier
By WILLIAM J. KOLE, Associated Press Writer

A right-wing British historian goes on trial Monday on charges of denying the Holocaust occurred — a crime punishable by up to 10 years' imprisonment in this country once run by the Nazis.

The trial of David Irving opens amid fresh — and fierce — debate over freedom of expression in Europe, where the printing and reprinting of unflattering cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad has triggered violent protests worldwide.

Irving, 67, has been in custody since his arrest in November on charges stemming from two speeches he gave in Austria in 1989 in which he was accused of denying the Nazis' extermination of 6 million Jews. An eight-member jury and a panel of three judges will hear the proceedings, which officials said could produce a verdict as early as Monday.

Within two weeks of his arrest, Irving asserted through his lawyer that he now acknowledges the existence of Nazi-era gas chambers.

The historian had tried to win release on bail, but a Vienna court refused, saying it considered him a flight risk.

His lawyer, Elmar Kresbach, said last month the Third Reich historian was getting up to 300 pieces of fan mail a week from supporters around the world, and that while in detention he was writing his memoirs under the working title, "Irving's War."

Irving was arrested Nov. 11 in the southern Austrian province of Styria on a warrant issued in 1989 and charged under a federal law that makes it a crime to publicly diminish, deny or justify the Holocaust.

In the past, however, he has claimed that Adolf Hitler knew little if anything about the Holocaust, and has been quoted as saying there was "not one shred of evidence" the Nazis carried out their "Final Solution" to exterminate the Jewish population on such a massive scale.

"What was he doing in Austria? God only knows. Possibly looking for an audience," Austrian state television said in a pre-trial commentary.

Vienna's national court, where the trial is being held, ordered the balcony gallery closed to prevent projectiles from being thrown down at the bench, the newspaper Die Presse reported Sunday.

It quoted officials as saying they were bracing for Irving's supporters to give him the Nazi salute or shout out pro-Hitler slogans during the trial, which will continue into Tuesday if a verdict is not forthcoming on Monday.

Irving is the author of nearly 30 books, including "Hitler's War," which challenges the extent of the Holocaust, and has contended most of those who died at concentration camps such as Auschwitz succumbed to diseases such as typhus rather than execution.

In 2000, Irving sued the American Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt for libel in a British court, but lost. The presiding judge in that case wrote that Irving was "an active Holocaust denier ... anti-Semitic and racist."

Irving has had numerous run-ins with the law over the years.

In 1992, a judge in Germany fined him the equivalent of $6,000 for publicly insisting the Nazi gas chambers at Auschwitz were a hoax"