On 9/20/2010 6:00 PM, Joseph Catron wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 5:01 PM, SA<s11131978 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> and (relatively) civilized political discourse
> Eh? I don't have time to do a lot of Googling right now, but isn't the
> political discourse in much of Europe, particularly around Islam and
> immigration, considerably more toxic than our own?
I don't know if it's more toxic. If it is more toxic it doesn't seem obviously more toxic, or at least not to me.
First of all, we have plenty of wackos who say awful things about Muslims. Just the other day they held the Values Voters Summit, with all the Republican hopefuls speaking, and you can look up Gary Bauer's comments on Islam.
Second, it's sort of unfair to use Islamophobia as the criterion for comparison because Europe actually has a lot of Muslim immigrants and we don't, so the friction is greater there. In the US anti-Islam is more based on ethereal ideology than day-to-day resistance to otherness.
SA