I appreciate the attempt to draw attention towards the risk of throwing Muslims into "one single bucket" and overall this is a good article with a great comparative paragraph about Stalinism etc. However I find the following sentence a bit problematic: "In Paris, where Muslims tend to be better educated and more religious, the vast majority reject violence and say they are loyal to France."
In a way this sentence presupposes that Muslims - per se - are not very well educated and also it seems to suggest that they favour violence? Now I don't think that the author of this article intended to give this impression but one has to be very careful with statements like this. It seems such a subtle thing but it does contribute to automated assumptions that we - the westerners - make about the Muslim, "the other". The point is that the so-called Muslim is not "the other", even if he doesn't live amongst us, in Paris. I am certain that people who do have a strong Islamic belief, or people who still live in a country wher Islam is the main religion, do not favour terrorism or totalitarianism. In much the same way as we do, over here.
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I appreciate the attempt to draw attention towards the risk of throwing Muslims into "one single bucket" and overall this is a good article with a great comparative paragraph about Stalinism etc. However I find the following sentence a bit problematic: "In Paris, where Muslims tend to be better educated and more religious, the vast majority reject violence and say they are loyal to France."
In a way this sentence presupposes that Muslims - per se - are not very well educated and also it seems to suggest that they favour violence? Now I don't think that the author of this article intended to give this impression but one has to be very careful with statements like this. It seems such a subtle thing but it does contribute to automated assumptions that we - the westerners - make about the Muslim, "the other". The point is that the so-called Muslim is not "the other", even if he doesn't live amongst us, in Paris. I am certain that people who do have a strong Islamic belief, or people who still live in a country wher Islam is the main religion, do not favour terrorism or totalitarianism. In much the same way as we do, over here.