Befremdet…
… vom europäischen Umgang mit Islamisten zeigt sich Ian Johnson (Wall Street Journal) in einer Stellungnahme vor dem Congress. Er bemerkt einerseits zur Behandlung individueller Migranten:
Religious and racial discrimination is rife and some European politicians have their head stuck so far in the sand that they deny that their societies are immigrant societies.
Andererseits werden islamistische Organisationen hofiert:
Many public officials, for example, don’t make an effort to find out the background of the people they meet. In Brussels, a member of the European Parliament told me that FIOE (Federation of Islamic Organisations in Europe, M.R.) seemed quite moderate but that in her country, the UK, there was this awful group called the Muslim Association of Britain. When I pointed out that this group was a founding member of FIOE, she was astonished. To me, this smacks of neglect–if you’re going to deal with someone, take the five minutes to figure out they are. Google them at least.
Sometimes it goes further. When I was in France last year writing a profile of a troubled banlieue–one of the ones that later in the year would explode in violence–I asked an official why his main “dialogue partner” was a group inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood. He said he knew the French government was dealing with the Brotherhood, but only Islamists were educated. They knew the rules of the game. “I never said they were for integration,” he told me. “but they have the level to talk to me.”
In essence, bureaucracies need other organized groups to talk to. The vast mass of unorganized Muslims by definition can’t interact with the state and thus don’t become dialogue partners. So they don’t set the agenda. Instead, what amounts to radical fringe groups do.
Sometimes, I’m not sure why Europe needs to deal with these groups. We are always told that states need to “dialogue” with Islam but is this really so? What if Europe just treated Muslims like any other religion. Sure, to some degree they have technical issues that need to be fixed. For example, health departments need standards for halal foods or to accommodate Muslims’ special funerary needs. But it seems to me that most of these problems could be dealt with by setting up a blue-ribbon panel, solving a few of these concrete issues and then letting Muslims be part of the normal political system. Most of the other issues we hear of–education, language training or jobs–are not specifically Muslim issues. They affect all immigrants. By dealing with migrants, Europe would defuse the issue and take away the Brotherhood’s platform.
Und hier, hier und hier Ian Johnsons Recherchen zu den Aktivitäten der Muslimbrüder in Europa.
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