open Democracy News Analysis - global village - Comments

Not logged in on "Barack Obama, Moroccan Ali, and me"

Not logged in — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 00:14:02 +0100

SUBTLE RACISM

I'd like to thank you for this beautiful article . Even though i don't agree with everything you said i am happy that outsiders are somewhat noticing what is going on in Europe . Cause let me tell you African- Immigrants in Europe have absolutely NO representation in European media. But to respond to the last part about subtle racism the answer to your wish is NO nothing is gonna be or has been mild as far as subtle racism goes. See you Black Americans have done very well for your selfs : you top the entertainment business, Black serious senators, Black TV-shows, Black Movies, Black newspapers, Black News reporters, Black athletes, Black Entrepreneurs and lets not forget a serious Black candidate for the White House. With all the subtle racism you Black Americans face you have POWER to respond and more importantly be HEARD. Now as for the African Europeans we don't have peep. Why ? well #1 language barriers French Africans Dutch Africans Belgium Africans don't speak the same language and so for its hard to unite or speak to a whole audience #2 numbers there are approximately 10 million Africans in Europe divided over four country's Spain, France, The Netherlands and Belgium #3 separation in Europe its hard to have very big minority communities living in the same part of a city so its hard for us to create our own Harlem if you will And since there is no unity under Africans there is also no real community so it quickly becomes a save your own ass situation so there are no rules given to African Celebrities on how to act when on television for example i watched a Moroccan celebrity say on a all white program in front of a all white audience 'We sand niggers cant do nothing right' although joking was the purpose you probably know what the consequences of such a joke can be especially when there are no alternative perspectives shown on prime time day time or any time TV. So living in Europe as an educated African the frustration is somewhat comparable to the pain of a knife in your back and a hand on your mouth not allowing you to scream and yell out the pain. I'm not trying to victimize my self but i wonder if you to get a certain headache on top of your eyes just under your eyelids when you think of Subtle Racism. Just a few months ago a Moroccan stabbed 2 police officers not killing them but lightly injuring them a police officer responded by killing him in self defense of course later it became known that the young 21 year old called Bilal was suffering from Schizophrenia. Not to insult your intelligence but to clarify that Schizophrenia is not a split personality but it is a mental condition in where the victim suffers from, confusion, Delusions, Hallucinations, hearing voices and sometimes became aggressive it is a fact that most patients who suffer from this mental illness are suicidal. Now a new investigation has shown that this illness is diagnose 3 times more under African Immigrants then under White Europeans. It is also a scientific FACT that this disease is caused by strong feelings of not fitting in with the masses or not having a clear vision of who you are and where you belong. Talk about Subtle Racism.

Much love and Keep up the good work,
( and even if you not respond its a relief just writing this )
An African brother,
Youssef

Cheap Brochure Printing on "Morocco’s illusory democracy "

Cheap Brochure Printing — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 12:36:18 +0100

You touched a sensible chord when you said many people died so we can vote. Of course, it wasn't just about voting but this is a major development for us and we should take advantage of it and express our political preferences.

spamgreg on "France’s two worlds"

spamgreg — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 22:47:17 +0000

About the french law of carrying an identity card : it is necessary as we are not protected from unwanted incomers by a sea. In fact anybody may come into France by merely walking.
It is very rare to be checked by the police, unless one looks like a offender. I work in IT, with many stranger-origin people, and I assure you that they are not more, or only slightly more, checked than me (twice in my life). But one important point is that they dress well, and don't jump over turnstiles at train stations (one major way to be checked and get a fine).

The french police do not especially like checking people, nor do they gain from it. They gain from arresting offenders. Yes, they check people with a browner skin and particular, for instance an integrist look, or an USA-imported look (you know, the ugly US pants where the briefs are visible), and listening to loud rap music. There is a simple explanation : by heuristics the police know they have a better chance to take an offender. That's also why they don't check much girls, it wouldn't happen so if they were only racists.

Another proof is that, in french jails 50 percent to 80 percent of prisonners are Muslims, but only 7 to 8 percents of the total population. If you can read french, please confer to FARHAD KHOSROKHAVAR 's study at http://www.prison.eu.org/article.php3?id_article=7700

As KA Dilday seems to live in a Paris suburb, she can't have not seen the "sport" of jumping over turnstiles at train stations. Who play that sport ? A massive proportion, perhaps 90 percent are black or brown, that is an unescapable fact. Same for smoking in places where it is forbidden, or listening too loud music, or spitting on the ground, or smoking cannabis. Just take the D line to Evry, you will understand.

It is true but shocking to read that these youth are "in a war with the police". It is not normal and these youth have most of the responsibility for that. As for the three boys who clambered into a power generator to escape the police, they are fit for a "Darwin award". Last week, and internal inquiry from the Police has ended, it has concluded that the police has done nothing wrong and is not responsible from these boys frying themselves.

Mind you, many others black or brown people manage quite well in the french society, have good job, etc., and the french society is rather open to them. The rate of stranger-origin people who marry someone of indigenous-origin is just 10 times higher than in Britain...

spamgreg on "France’s two worlds"

spamgreg — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 22:40:36 +0000

(continued)
It is true but shocking to read that these youth are "in a war with the police". You suggest that it is because the police is bad with them and checks their ID too often.
But these youth are also attacking Firemen, and Firemen don't ask your ID card, ok ? These youth are also in a feud with... their siblings from other districts, who don't ask their ID card either.

So, in fact, the asking ID card has nothing to do with their problem : these youth are in what canonlybe called a tribal behavior, attacking everyone who is not from their "tribe", including the Whites, the police, the Firemen, their own teacher, etc.
And where do the very most of these problem youth, or their parents, come from ? Africa. And what hapens in Africa, currently ? Hmmm ? Kenya, Democratic Congo republic, Somalia, Darfur ? Ethnic wars.

So the dots are connected. These problem youth from the "problemsome suburbs" act so because they are, and act as, African people.

mirvana on "Language, immigration and citizenship"

mirvana — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 19:29:57 +0000

I live in macedonia and I am albanian. Even the albanians are native people here in Republic of Macedonia our language is not official language, so what can you say for this.\\ Sincerely Mirvana

JFox on "Intelligence, inequality and race "

JFox — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 11:47:17 +0000

Intelligence may be defined as a quality of intellect believed to be unequally distributed in a population and whose definition satisfies the intellectual pretensions of those who claim to be able to measure it. We still know very little about how our brains work; but what is certain is that we can only display our ability through interaction with our environment. If someone is brought up with books, he/she will find easier it to negotiate literary discourse than - say - the average Kalahari Bushman. But I would bet on the latter surviving more successfully if both were set the challenge of negotiating Namibia on foot. Great sports men and women may have extraordinary hand-eye coordination, timing and reaction times. These are brain functions just as much as those that permit a Harvard philosophy scholar to penetrate the darker pages of Hegel. Is James Watson more intelligent than Roger Federer? Depends on the test.

Felix Cohen on "Intelligence, inequality and race "

Felix Cohen — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 14:01:28 +0000

Good discussion of the social side of IQ testing; and you managed not to mention the Bell Curve once! The thing I find most interesting in IQ testing is the Flynn effect, whereby average IQ scores across a population seem to increase by significant amounts each generation; most IQ tests have to be restandardised occasionally as a result of this. Everyone getting smarter, or just more education focus on answering the questions right...

alfredo.bremont on "Defenders of the nation "

alfredo.bremont — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 22:07:22 +0100

First we must understand the nature our civilisation has given to wars; wars dwell on 3 mayor principles; security, identity, and stimulation. Security we have got on our millions cameras that surround the nation ,on the speeches of Gordon Brown Sarkosy and George Bush, the war on terror and the anguish that the many bombs exploding in London Madrid and New York have created on the minds of many of our entertain citizens. The French as we all know are planning to follow the same path as Britain and Washington and implement, bionic passports, infrared identity cards and millions of surveillance televisions all over the nation in order to secure the population, the last’s French president Jacques Chirac won his election on the banner of security. Identity the second factor that moulds wars can be perceived once again by the French and their DNA test and minister of national identity. However France is a nation build by feudal families, not by presidents and is a mixture of Germans Latin’s and Spanish, therefore there is not a true Frenchmen for that matter neither is there a pure race. All this is on the name of identity as it is the European Union and its followers and sceptics. Stimulation has as opposite to boredom and we do entertain ourselves watching the many bombs that were drop on Iraq, Afghanistan and Haiti; from G I JOE to the video games and strings of films that were develop from the last two wars on Iraq. Today we find ourselves once again in front of a dilemma and at the beginning of a new war, which purpose is to identify and give the many Americans, and Frenchmen an identity and a reason to be secure and safely guarded from the Iranian evil intend, a nation that has never attacked another nation neither invaded anyone. But G W, Sarkosy and Gordon Brown are certain that the evil Iranians will do the trick therefore we will entertain you, protect you and make you proud of your origins, call them barbarians and we the civilise lot will democratise their realm. pilot you away from boredom and shall offer you meat for the newspapermen to chew on, divert you via CNN and fox news and at the end enrol Hollywood once again on his fateful duty of recreating war hero’s and sitcoms.

kimf on "The Copenhagen syndrome"

kimf — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 09:02:52 +0100

kimf It's all very well 'looking' at poor people and then retreating but what about 'doing' and why do so many people retreat from poor areas once they have acquired enough capital. Why not change things by staying put ? That is real acceptance of a we and being proud of it and it probably follows that diversity is not to be feared when a community is truly mixed because then probably there is nothing too uncomfortable to retreat from.

Cole_2233 on "Morocco outside in"

Cole_2233 — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 03:07:42 +0100

According to the CIA fact book all the Moroccan/Algerians are 99.9% Berber - just that some of them choose to follow their Berber traditions and some the Arab / Islamic. And how can the Moroccan be Arabs when their latter conquers were of Syrian origin? Who only occupied that African region for a total of 150 years. By their own definition the Spanish are more ‘Arab’ than they are. After they finally kicked their Syrian over-lords out of the south side of the Med, the N. Africans then returned from Spain en masse to N. Africa. Which also means that the so called Arab achievements were largely Syrian. And while we are here. Are the Sudanese, Arabs as well as the Egyptians? – Are we also to believe that the Arabs built the pyramids - forgive me for being a little confused !!

KVB Tharoor on "Morocco outside in"

KVB Tharoor — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 11:43:58 +0100

I think the last point on "Fortress Europe" needs to be untangled a bit more. European strategists talk openly about making the Maghreb a "frontline" in the EU's security strategy; the tide of both immigration and Islamic radicalism must be confined along the southern Mediterranean littoral. Yet are the institutions and infrastructure in place in the region up to the task? Can they cope with the pressure of both the increasing movement of people from the great underbelly of the Sahel (a movement that will only intensify as the effects of climate change take their toll) and the threat of growing Islamist violence (beyond its traditional north African arena in Algeria)? The Maghreb's governments - corrupt and anti-democratic as they may be - are caught between a rock and a hard place: the desert of the Sahara and, one fears, a desert of indifference in Europe.

demetret on "The university’s freedom lesson"

demetret — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 11:13:51 +0100

Education � Post secondary education.

The construct.

Opening the telephone directory in any community one can find a large list of churches and probably no listing of any university or in big cities very few.

The church and the university both try to uplift the sole of its members. In addition to a church, universities have a secondary role (or primary depends on who is talking), to uplift the material and cultural level of its members and at the same time to uplift the whole community. So why is there such a discrepancy between an institution that is so beneficial to the whole community and to the institution of the unchanging giving dogma? People of faith are willing to pay for the buildings that usually are of higher standards of beauty and design than any other building. They pay for the upkeep of the church, the salary of the priest, the buildings and salaries of the hierarchy of the church etc. From the church they get a community of fellowship and a certain soucial structure. But everything is giving, they can't change it and they can discuss the dogma.

I ask myself why that such a useful institution as a university is not present in every community. In antiquity in Greece everybody who wanted to, could gather a few people around him and start his own school. The staff could be one person or a few people and the students didn�t have a time frame when they should finish their studies. They could stay there for all their lives if they wanted to. In the middle ages the universities were serving the needs of the church and the needs of the royal houses to staff the crown and church with people who could read the bible or people who could administer the property of kings. Industrial revolution needed much more people than ever before. Beside the administration now the industry needed engineers, mathematicians and all sorts of other educated and knowledgeable people. The middle age structure however remained the same. Still the universities were serving the church, the bureaucracy, and the owners of industry. Now we are in the information and scientific age but the structure of universities remains the same. The universities however are much bigger and becomming more and more costly to atend.

The Harvard University started with 9 students and 1 master for around a community of ten thousand people. Many colleges later on started with very few students and masters also. So we don�t really need so many people of anything to start a university. What I want to say is that in each community there should be at least one university for ten thousand people and for smaller communities even less than that.

Today�s technology allows us to have a first class university for all practical purposes in every community. Having some distant university supply the curriculum and the examination started many universities in the past. This way the new university had a given standard. So in order to have a university in every community we need a certain structure to facilitate it. For Canada, which is very large country with few people in order to avoid all of them living congested in only a few cities we need distributing the universities in all parts of the country. No community can exist in this day and age without a good institution of higher learning. People just want to live where culture is, companies want to be where the educated people are, and parents want their kids to be educated. I will describe a university schema that if materialized will bring the level of education of the whole population much higher that ever existed, it will increase the productivity and well being of everybody and will help alleviate the senseless increasing the size of only several urban areas. At the same time it will increase the fun doing it.

If an ordinary person wants to take a course in a subject of his choice without being admitted for a full course of study he cannot do it, in most institution anyway. If he wants to go to college for a half a year, he can�t do it. If a person comes from oversees and wants to take a few courses of the subject that he already knows, but wants to listen a different version and get to learn some English of the subject, he can�t do it. Why we have to have guards to block us from studying what we want whenever we want it? Who put those folks in the position to inhibit other folks to learn and contribute to material and intellectual life of the country?

There is another much deeper problem here. Each university gets some money from the government. Those monies however are not the prime ministers money or the government�s money. Those monies are the property of the people of Canada; they are taxpayer�s money. Further on, most universities don�t pay taxes for their grounds to municipalities. So again other people have to carry the burden by paying more. There is still another problem, the students because they don�t work for the duration of studies, or most of then don�t, other people have to pay much higher share of taxes than what is their fair share. Sure enough the transfer of property is from the less advantaged economically to more advantaged economically. If somebody takes from the store a chocolate bar it will be considered steeling and rightly so. When somebody steals from the poor it is considered beneficial to the community. People whose property the universities are; are not allowed to benefit from the learning if the mode of getting the learning is not according to a schema that some sick minds designed to benefit the few. This is not right. This is a bloody theft not to allow a person to go to math lectures only because it happens that what he likes is math only and nothing else.

People who didn�t benefit from university education should ask for their money back.

The new university system.

Because Canada is a federal state we will start with one university that is financed by the federal government. Education is a provincial jurisdiction, but there is nothing there that the federal government can�t operate a university. Financing one university doesn�t mean meddling in provincial affairs. The federal university will do as many other universities already do pay the professors to lecture few students and at the same time make each lecture available through the interned to the whole population of Canada. The federal university sets the curriculum and does the examinations and grants degrees. Now each province can have a similar university as the federal university. It can have one or several depending on the size or the smaller provinces can combine to have one together. So in our system Canada should have at least 11 universities that will design a curriculum, lecture, do examinations and grant degrees. We don�t start from scratch either. We just designate an existing university as federal or provincial with some more duties.

The federal and provincial universities will be able to host any worthwhile lecture from any local university. The system lends itself to spreading the knowledge throughout the country rapidly and very cheaply.

There is one danger from governments running the universities though. They can use the social sciences as a propaganda tool to influence the population. It should be much safer to have the federal and provincial universities do the hard-core sciences and technology and totally leave the social sciences to local universities or the federal and provincial universities can give courses on social sciences, but only as subject of interest without including any of those subjects as part of the credits for a degree. On the other hand because there are many local universities there is no danger that all of them will go to the same direction and use the universities a propaganda tool. So it will be preferable for the health of the country to give the right of degree granting for social sciences to local universities only.

Each community of around ten thousand people will have its own local university, like a community of believers has its church; the community of all local people will have its own university. The local universities can do everything what the federal or provincial university does, but it doesn�t have to grant a degree. It can, but it doesn�t have to. Each local university mentors each student to get a degree on university of his choice. It gives each student in the country from each locality to follow the curriculum of any degree granting university or just get a degree from its own local university or just follow the field that a student likes for as many years that he likes without getting a degree from any university. Each local university will be to a certain degree a research establishment where students and teachers will do a research of their choice or a research that somebody else will want them to do. I see the university like a public library. You go there and somebody competent can advise you on a subject of study that you want. Instead of borrowing a book you are advised to courses, labs and seminars that are available and somebody also will be there who knows the staff to help you if you will need help. It also will introduce you to all other students that follow the subject study that you are interested in. You will get an instant community of fellow students and students that studied the subject before you. Because you receive help when you need it, when you will be knowledgeable enough will help the others when they will need help. When a student gets a degree it doesn�t mean that he is out of university. He can teach a subject, he can mentor other students, he can take courses of interest to him, he can do research, he can help with labs etc. We don�t want everybody to constantly study; we only want to give everybody the possibility to study whenever they want to do so without guards being on their way.

The courses will be available in the Internet; the texts of the courses will be in the Internet, and the lab demonstrations will be in the Internet, the tests will be in the Internet.

In the local universities will be the real labs. The labs will have real lab teachers. In the local universities the research will be done. Each student will be provided with a mentor. A mentor can be another student, a professor, anybody who knows the staff and is willing to do it. Now each student can have the benefit of lectures from the internet, lectures from the local professors, lectures from professors in any local university that is close by.

Because we are upgrading each person to a citizen, it is a birth right of each citizen to belong to university of his locality or any other that he chooses. There will be no admission to university. A citizen just belongs there. No selection and no tests of admission. What counts only for progression from one level to another at a given subject is to pass the test of the previous level. This applies to all subjects. Because everything has a cost, the test that can be computer evaluated will be relatively cheap to administer. The tests that require essays can be sent by internet to qualified test evaluators. Test evaluator can be anyone who knows the subject well. It can be somebody from the locality or any other locality. It can even be from another country.

It will be the intention of university to accommodate the students in a way that they will benefit the most. For example many students will want to take one subject at a time. So instead of going to a course for mathematics once a week, they can choose to take the course every day, study the subject every day and in 14 days go for examinations. They can take a week off, and take another subject, to say the next math. Because all courses are life and Internet based it is easy to do it. At the same time a professor can give a course every day for 14 days, take a week off and again give the same course again or the following math and after that take the rest of the year of, do research or whatever. Because each student is different and each professor is different there always will be a possibility to match everybody what it fits the best.

Each locality should have for starters 3 professors. Each jurisdiction, the federal government, the provincial government and the local government should provide financing for minimum of one professor. These three are salaried positions and they lecture to students for set fee per lecture or for free from being paid by tax money. All internet courses are also paid by taxes. Each qualified person however can submit himself to university and teach whatever course he wants. Those students who will attend the lecture or seminar will pay his fees at the door. A non-salaried professor can set his fees as high as he wants. Because there does not exist any compulsion to pay for the full course in advance, each professor will try his best and will set a reasonable fee for his lectures, if not he will have next time an empty room and no fees. The same applies for seminars. The fees for labs must be set because this the students usually don�t have any other choice and providing competing labs will be in many cases prohibitive. There should be possible to set competing private labs if the fees will be equal or lower than university owned labs. There is no need to restrict fees for non-salaried lecturer because there are alternatives plus there is a choice between minimum of 11 choices through the Internet. Some professors will lecture full time in one or more universities. Because a lecturer is in reality a small businessman he can set his own schedule as he sees fit. The only restrictions that he has are those of the market. Many professors will be full time teachers, but many will do it because they like doing it and to keep abreast with the latest in the field and to keep in contact with many smart professors and students.

There is an easy way also to evaluate the professors. Because the examination universities are removed from local universities, the students when they go for examination will at the same time report the name of the local professor that they attended seminars, labs and lectures. The judgment will be by how many students passed and with what marks. Not that it is a perfect system, but is cheap and nothing is better.

Because the universities are small the administration can be almost zero cost. The staff, which is required, is very small. Students and teaching staff help to supply the administration by taking turns. Its members taking turns again administer each department. Members of a department are the teaching staff of that department and any student that is taking a course there. The administration will more or less imitate the present university structure; only all the functions are done by skeleton administrative staff and students and professors taking turns. The democratic ideal will be practiced by everybody taking turns in the affairs of the university. The administrative leadership will be practiced by giving a chance to everybody to lead. If somebody will never have a chance to lead how do we know if he can or not do it? To know something one has to try it, the school is the place to learn it. All the students and staff by self-administering their school can become trained administrators and practicing democrats.

However the academic affairs will be on the hands of teaching staff with each of them having the voting weight according to his academic achievements.

For physical structures the locality can supply the land and labour. The province and the federal government pay certain amount for materials. Because each locality has to be more or less equal in numbers each locality gets the same amount of money. The physical structures of examining universities are supplied by governments that own it. There is another way how to build the universities quickly. We can use the armed forces. Most soldiers are just bored when they finish their training. It makes no sense not using them for building what we need.

The university will be the glue of the community. For all practical purposes we don�t have any structure to admit students because everybody can belong as an equal member. Being a member of the university everybody can benefit by obtaining an education, everybody can take part by having higher education to develop the locality; everybody can benefit from the development and enjoy the higher culture that education facilitates. The brightest young people will not abandon the locality and add to an urban sprawl. They will stay and will develop the community. Not all people want to live in huge cities. The universities will give them the jobs and the amenities that they want for themselves and for their children.

Communities spend huge amount of monies as a community through taxes and students individually to obtain an education in one of existing universities. After they finish their studies they get a job usually not in a walking distance from university. Most of the jobs that exist utilize only a small fraction of what the student studied. It is true that some of what they studied they have to expand to the ultimate depth, but that is still one direction. All the remaining knowledge is slowly being lost by not utilizing it. It is like spending lots of money to create a beautiful work of art and throw the biggest part into the sewers and using only a small part of it. The existing universities will not accommodate somebody who is not a student to go to the labs and do some of the person�s pet project. Even if they will want to, they don�t have the proper structure to do it. Besides the labs are in many cases utilized to the limits so there is no chance for outsiders to do anything. As we all know any good thing needs some kind of fertilization to grow.

Some people tried and still do to create centers of excellence. Although it looks like a worthwhile effort, in reality nobody can select the best. Even the definition of the best does not have a meaning. By spreading the universities through the whole country and giving everybody a chance to participate in research in local labs if a person wants it, it multiplies the chance for success hundreds and thousands times. Nobody can predict from whom and from where the new breakthrough can come. Many times the new things come by chance, many times they come by just from somebody asking totally unqualified or as they say stupid question. There just doesn�t exist one right way.

Spreading the university to all locations of the country is the single most important thing that a country can do. Countries that they will do it will be the countries most desired to live on, countries where the wealth will be distributed more equally, countries that the well being of its inhabitants will be the highest, countries that will be able to withstand outside attacks. Although North Americans are not better than any other people, by transforming their High schools to everybody as oppose to only the elites and trying to make the universities and colleges available to more people they got a jump in technology before anybody else. It looks however that the rest of the world is catching up. The next step thou is decentralization to stop the expense and ill effects of urban sprawl, the availability of learning to everybody, the availability as much learning as a person can take and wants and the avability of the ways that suits the most to individual learners.

The philosophy that you have to learn a whole chunk or not allowed to learn at all is a product of sick minds depriving the development of individuals and development of a community. The philosophy that you have to learn on a given schedule giving to you by other people maybe had some justification in the past when the technology was not available; it does not have justification now. The philosophy now must be that each person learns as much as he can and wants, when he wants it and in the place that he wants it.

The price for education must be decreased. Such things as tuition fees should be outlawed and all the fees if any should be paid on the door. Activities like sports, cultural activities and other extra curriculum activities should be organized through the community to benefit everybody and to be of duration not of university course but on the duration that a person chooses.

Mayors and city councilors that will not put their maximum effort to help create a university for each ten thousand people should be thrown out from the office and from the city. There is no quality of life without proper education. The city fathers don�t deserve to be there without providing what is today a basic necessity, a university.

Pindos

obyrne2 on "Justice, not globalisation: Lebohang Pheko’s voice"

obyrne2 — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 16:05:07 +0000

What a wonderful article. The truth.

As Ngugi said in," Devil on the Cross."

"As a worker, I know very well that the forces of law and order are on the side of those who rob the workers of the products of their sweat, of those who steal food and land from the peasants. The peace and order and the stability they defend with armoured cars is the peace and the order and stability of the rich,who feast on bread and wine snatched from the mouths of the poor-yes, they protect the eaters from the wrath of the thirsty and the hungry. Have you ever seen employers being attacked by the armed forces for refusing to increase the salaries of their workers. What about when the workers go on strike? And they have the audacity to talk about violence! Who plants the seeds of violence in the country?

Have you ever seen the police being sent to silence the rich?

A book everybody should read.

Johanna Moren

xxx_3 on "Sister in spirit: Ayaan Hirsi Ali's 'Infidel'"

xxx_3 — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 12:34:15 +0000

I think the writer missed the point entirely of the events. Who cut off communication her or his reaction? After the writer doubted her faith I doubt she had to face death treats and personal attacks like Hirsi Ali did which might make her a bit wary too.

This sounds very much like a lack of empathy on the writer�s part. Next she�ll be telling battered women that she had a boyfriend that shouted at her so she knows what it feels like and the women should just confront their abusers. It is about as insensitive as this article.

spamgreg on "Sister in spirit: Ayaan Hirsi Ali's 'Infidel'"

spamgreg — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 22:17:43 +0000

There is a big misunderstanding of the "Charle Hebdo" trial, there. The muslims accused "Charlie Hebdo" of BLASPHEMY. Yes, the Middle-Age word for which people were burned.

There is of course no offense resembling blasphemy in the French law, since we headed off a few kings. So the muslims had to hide the accusation of blasphemy under a very light pretext of racism, they did not show themselves "french" in acknowledging some french aspects ; they just tried to get round an impossible accusation.

In fact, "Charlie Hebdo" is not and has never been racist, it is on the contrary a left-wing libertarian journal, full of sex and blasphemy, and very funny.

There is that piece also : >

That is completely false. We integrate most immigrants - but it takes time (in decades), and immigrants come each and every year. So there is always a lot of people engaged in the process for whom, apparently, it has failed. And, also, if failure there was, it would be the immigrants' as it is them who have to try and integrate, because after all, it is them only who want to come in.