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Anti-Muslim Bias In Western Europe Explored

By Howard M. Friedman

Writing in today's New York Times Magazine, Noah Feldman writes that in Western Europe, familiar arguments against immigrants "are mutating into an anti-Islamic bias that is becoming institutionalized in the continent?s otherwise ordinary politics." He suggests that:

[E]ven after 60 years of introspection about the anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust, Europeans are not convinced that culturally and religiously different immigrants should be treated as full members of their societies....

The U.S. had its own terrible legacy of legalized racism... [H]owever, we began slowly and agonizingly to come to terms with this past. Racial bias is still with us, but so is self-consciousness about our problems and how they must be overcome.

In Europe, by contrast, Hitler?s horrifying success at killing so many Jews meant that the burgeoning postwar societies of the continent never had to come to terms with difference, because it was to a great extent eradicated. Today, as the birthrate for European Muslims far outstrips that for their neighbors, it is as if Europe?s discomfort with difference is being encountered for the first time.

Full post as published by Religion Clause on June 22, 2008 (boomark / email).