This initiative started by French Imam Chalghoumi and Jewish writer Halter toured Europe in July, 2017. According to one IPSOS Survey, the perception in France is that 31% of the population is Muslim.The true figure is 7.5 %. Paul Zinken/Press Association. All right reserved. Often, one of the gravest threats to an open and transparent democracy is that political decision-makers act not according to the reality of the facts, but according to how people interpret that reality. It might be argued that how people imagine the world has now become more important than how the world actually is, and that politics is frequently little better than an exercise in crowd-pleasing.
It is not unusual for these representations of reality to be shaped in one way or another by the media or by other major opinion-making outlets, subject to the influence of complex global and local phenomena, and particularly susceptible to political exploitation. As we are well aware, the most visible and attention-grabbing news items on the web are not necessarily based on sound data that has been properly weighed up and assessed, but are often merely those that happen to be the most widely circulated at a given moment.
Europeans on migration
The phenomenon is encapsulated in the attitudes of Europeans to migration and in the way that the upsurge in the number of refugees has caused instability in many countries. The economic and financial crisis has engendered a sense of public fear that has been further exacerbated by Islamist terrorism, leading many to conclude that integration is too difficult a task. The result has been rising intolerance and new forms of racism.
