Understanding? 2: Explaining

Remember the post I wrote with that article about changes in immigration policy in Denmark based off of the Muslim population?

Well, over the weekend, my Xanga repost got a reply, which I post in its entirety, unedited:

Your analysis obviously only depends on your feelings and not whether the article states defendible facts.

Your first response should have been check the facts of the article and having done that to analyse the facts. Only then can you decide whether the article is manipultive.

Look back in history and you will note the rise of many hateful and murderous totalitarian regimes. The first observes to warn the world of the potential horrors these regimes would visit on our world were labelled alarmist by people who where too lazy to check facts and prefered instead to slander the authors of the articles.

Having lived for extended periods in 4 Muslim countires and spent considerable time in a fifth, I can confirm simialr details as those noted in the article, Salute the Danish Flag - it's a Symbol of Western Freedom.

May I recount just one story for you? A friend of mine in the UAE awoke one morning to find the head of his 17 year old friend in the residential compound. His crime had been to question Islam as a result of a conversation my friend had had with him. His relatives, having beheaded him, had thrown the lad's head over the wall during the night.

Are all Muslims terrorists. Of course not. By stating one set of facts I am not stting anything more than one set of facts. Can I tell stories of great kindness I have seen displayed by Muslilms? Yes, many such stories. But I would have to say on balance that I cannot recall any of my friends finding the head of one of their friends in their garden except in the UAE. I do not know of any other culture that practises female circumcision other than Islamic ones. I do not know of any workers so poorly treated as those in the Gulf or Saudi, except perhaps in China or some other place you wouldn't want to work.

Please attempt next time to temper your views with facts before you allow your feelings to determine your response. If this challenge offends you then...go back and check the data before you reply. Then we can have a meaningful discussion.

Posted 12/15/2007 2:11 PM by Phillip Adams

He's not a regular Xanga user, so I couldn't check out his blog or find his opinions on other subject. I did learn, however, that his signal thing came Australia, so I assumed that he's from there.

I replied, unedited:

Phillip Adams -- I still think that the article in question is manipulative toward getting people to hating/fearing all Muslims while disguising it as an article about immigration policy. And that's what galls me. I don't like reading what I see as a manipulative piece geared toward hate that has been written as if it were an informational piece.

As I wrote earlier, a true article about immigration would have balanced itself by having information about non-Muslims immigrant groups and the problems they may, or may not, be having with integrating into the Danish culture and how the new laws (If there are new laws, since I did not go and check facts about them, that was not the intent of my post.) will effect EVERYONE who wants to immigrate to Denmark or has already immigrated there. No nation in Europe has the balls to ban just one group of people from moving into their country. (Unless they do it the sneaky way, like the US did in the late 19th early 20th centuries when they set policy to keep Italian and Irish immigrants out by making the legal numbers of immigrants allowed in be based on past numbers.) Therefore, any story about the change in immigration policy should be about all potential and existing immigrant groups, not just one very specific group.

(Pardon me if I repeated myself a few times in that last paragraph, but I thought it was necessary to get across that the purpose of my original post was not to defend the horrible things some people do or even to attack the woman who wrote this article, it was about me pointing out logical flaws and the lack of critical thinking among some people and how it frustrates me.)

As for the stuff about groups not integrating, it seems to me that every group that immigrates to the US has a tough time integrating and we, Americans, always have a problem with it. The Chinese with their braids and flat hats in the mid-19th century. Irish and Italians at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries with their Catholicism. Puerto Ricans in the 50s with their dark skin and Spanish. Vietnamese and Cambodian and other South Asian immigrants in the 70s and 80s with their slanted eyes and strange food. Russian and Ukrainian and other former Soviet Bloc immigrants in the 90s and 00s. And the Mexican and other people from Central American nations for decades. All new immigrants have a hard time integrating. At the best, when the groups that look like we do, they take only one or two generations to start to integrate with the culture. If the groups don't look like the average American (Which, lets face it, tends to be thought of as F*R*I*E*N*D*S creamy white.) they take longer because it's easier to feel like an outsider and hold on to the "old country" culture.

In the USA, all of these groups have also been accused of consuming the largest, or a large, portion of social services. Is it true? I don't know, I didn't, and haven't, looked up statistics. It sure is easy for it to feel true, though. It's a lot easier to point that person with dark skin or slanted eyes or a strange accent using government medical care or collecting food stamps or asking for workers' comp, isn't it?

How long have large quantities of Muslims been immigrating to "western" (AKA white) nations to live there, not just work? Fifteen or twenty years? So that's, what, like one generation born into that new culture? Time is what's needed for the integration to take place; until enough time has passed there will always be problems with shift from old to new. Crime goes up and hatred is spread. It's stupid and pointless and harmful to all those who want to just live their lives, but it has happened before and it's going to happen over and over again.

(Of course, being from Australia, there's never been a problem with the Aboriginal culture integrating into the European based culture, has there.)

The story you tell about what happened in the United Arab Emmirants is horrendous and I don't want you, or anyone else, to think that I would ever defend people for something like that; people should never be punished for asking questions, especially hard questions. I hate the thought that anyone anywhere could practice something like female genital mutilation. I can not and will not defend people who rape or mutilate or commit murder. Those people should be punished, no matter the color of that person's skin, the slant of that person's eyes, or the way that person prays. Terrible things are being done by some Muslims, I'd have to be insane to not see that, but I am not going to let those few scare me into hating everyone who follows the teachings and writings found in the Qur'an. If I do that, then the nasty people really have won.

Also from your story, I think I need to remind you that the UAE isn't Denmark. One has a, basically, hereditary "presidency" and was founded based on its interpretations of Islamic law and is still struggling with having elections. The other was a Christian monarchy that developed into a constitutional monarchy with a republic style parliament elected by popular vote by the people. I think, in a political context, comparing the UAE and Denmark is like comparing apples to spark plugs. Maybe one day it'll be more like comparing the apples to oranges or Fujis to Granny Smiths, but not until the UAE really moves toward true elections or Denmark's system crashes.

I won't pretend to be perfect or even necessarily right, Mr. Adams. I'm not a world traveler. I don't know what conditions are like in the Middle East, other than what I see on TV or read online or hear on the radio. I just want to believe that, for the most part, people are good and that they want peace and safety and love. (Yes, I know that's naive.)

As for "temper[ing my] views with facts before [I] allow [my] feelings to determine [my] response," I was practicing New Criticism, where a person uses the text as the source and finds the meaning (or meanings) by using what was and wasn't written in the actual text. That's why, in my original entry, I didn't get into the history of Denmark or go online to find sources about the crime rates of other immigrant groups in Denmark or even find out if the policy changes actually exist.

Being challenged does not offend me. If everyone out there thought and felt as I did, this would be a dull world. My thoughts and feelings should be challenged because I like to understand why I think and feel the way I do so I can better understand myself and my (basically) insignificant place in the world.

And I don't know what sort of data you wanted me to check before responding, since my only sources, originally, were the article and the e-mails between me and my co-worker and nothing else.

I'm going to use you're comment and my response as a blog post, just to let you know.

I still don't know if my response was good, as in well written or well argued, but I do think that the intent of the original post was more about how critical thinking is, or isn't, used out there when people read things meant to play on people's fears, and not about whether Denmark's new policies may be good or some Muslims have done and continue to do horrible things. (I also think that there are some Christians and Hindus and Buddhists and Taoists who use their religions to justify doing horrible things, too.)

Of course, talking about anything that mentions religion is like talking about abortion, people can rarely see beyond their gut reaction, even me.