Samurai_Jerk wrote:Muslims (not including Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam) in the US were a largely ignored minority that no one worried much about before 9/11. Probably because they tended to be better off and better integrated than their cousins in the Europe. I grew up with secularized Muslims friends and they were pretty much like the rest of us. They drank, smoked pot, ate ham sandwiches, and tried to get laid. Their parents weren't particularly strict or religious either. Plus unlike those uptight Korean Christians the Muslims would sell us beer and porno mags at their bodegasSo for me it really is sad to see how much things have changed.
This situation is being made worse because it's tough to have an intelligent conversation about this. If you point out there are problems within the Muslim world, you're a racist, fascist and Islamophobe. Oh, and you're not allowed to speak at our university. If you say Muslims are people too and deserve the same civil liberties as the rest of us, you're a bed-wetting PC liberal appeaser. Why can't I believe that the problem is Islam as it is practiced today by a large enough percentage of its followers to be a real threat, that even if it is our chickens coming home to roost we have to deal with the problem at hand regardless of the cause, and that while we do deal with this problem we make sure not to demonize whole communities? I know that's not an easy task and there will mistakes along the way but this slope could quickly get very slippery if we don't proceed with caution.
That is an interesting insight, and when I was young, the muslims I remember were all very secular, but changes started long before 9/11. In Toronto, things started to change in the mid 1980's. I remember one guy at university who was a champion drinker, who all of a sudden proclaimed his abstainence which at the time we assumed was due to cirrhosis or some other condition until he told us about he new found devotion. A secretary at the office who was previously not adverse to going to the pub and wore regular short skirts all of a sudden going head scarf and Gandolf robe. I suspect this deintergration was a product of the Saudi clerics who started funding their brand of Islam at the time.
