I share wholeheartedly your anti-clerical sentiments, but, still, why do we need to bash Islam? I am not a sociologist and don't have reams of data to draw on, but my informal impression, based on what I read in the papers and see on the street in the (well-integrated) neighborhood of Amsterdam where I live, is that the process of secularization among Muslims here is well underway. Sure, the first generation immigrants are devout and traditional, but many of their children aren't. If you will accept for the sake of argument that, say 50%, (which I think is not unreasonable) have adopted largely secular ways, then it seems to me the problem will be solved within a generation or two. After all, many of the problems with the first generation immigrants were not solely due to religious issues: these were mostly young, unskilled men who came from dirt-poor rural parts of Morocco and Turkey and had no experience living in a big city; many failed to learn Dutch adequately (some are still even illiterate). They were needed in the boom years of the 1960s as cheap labor. When the economy cooled off, they became redundant, but by that time had moved wives and families here, and so they were allowed to stay under circumstances which were not propitious.
As far as I can tell, fundamentalist Islam is not getting much traction here; "Islamic" political parties are not acquiring substantial political power. Islam has no where remotely near the kind of influence in a country like Holland that the Christian Right has in the US. In short, there is no titanic "clash of civilizations" going on among the tulip bulbs.
I take your point about the pillar system as being a cop-out, albeit an effective one; the softdrug policy here is likewise, in geek terminology, a bit of an "ugly hack", but long live pragmatic fixes to society's ills; much preferable to endless wars over ideological correctness.
On 5/16/06, Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
> As to Hirsi Ali - every time a woman is blamed or chastised for some social
> problem, I become suspicious, regardless of whether she is an immigrant, a
> politician, or for that matter, a US Army general.
Sorry, but I don't see how Hirsi Ali can be construed as a victim here. Contrary to Doug's creativity with the subject line, she is not being "kicked out" of Holland. Some people don't like her message here, but no one is blaming her for anything.
--
Colin Brace
Amsterdam