Talk Elections

Anti-Islamism seems to be on the rise in the US. All though it is probably not yet on European level.
What do you think are the main causes for the growth in anti-islamism?

In my country it is:

1. Perceived Muslim hypocrisy: Muslims wanting equal rights but many of them claiming women are inferior to men and  harassing  gays and Jews.

2. Pesky "un-Scandinavian" macho attitudes

3. High crime rate/ gang activity

4. Many Muslims on welfare + cheating with welfare and/or taxes

I would assume that Islamic terrorism and killing of US soldiers plays a bigger part in the rise of US anti-Islamism.

I believe you assume correctly, sir.

Of course, there's always the matter of them holding different beliefs than the majority does, which is usually not a way to get popular.

the state apparatus desires to murder Muslims for various reasons, so it disseminates propaganda to lessen domestic public resistance to this brutal programme, which in turn leads to a seemingly indigenous anti-Islamism.

The media telling people it's okay to give in to these particular racist impulses but not others.

Of course "the media" are people too, and there's a bit of a chicken-egg dynamic here.

I don't believe a single individual in the west has ever been prejudice against Muslims. It's nothing more than a ploy by liberals to gain sympathy from their base. Actually, that was an exaggeration, but it's no worse than anti-semitism or anti-Christian attitudes. 9/11 contributed alot to anti-Islam.

In the American example, I reckon 9/11 was a significant factor but major news providers played an inadvertent part in stoking anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiments by allowing profit motive to compel them to air disproportionately negative, sensationalized, unbalanced stories concerning Muslims and countries in which they constitute a majority group. The general public, not familiar with this religious minority residing in their country, nor the values and social norms widespread in far off lands, was vulnerable to consuming biased, pre-digested information on these matters.

The government itself did not help, for many officials are beholden to ethnocentric views and as a consequence often pursued strictly self-interested policies pertinent to countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan with insufficient thought given to how said policies would be perceived abroad. Whenever there was a misstep or mutual misunderstanding resulting in elevated anti-American sentiments the media reported on it without enough understanding and context provided to an audience mostly unaware of what folks in those countries think and believe - much less why. On the home front, meanwhile, reporting on the wars and terrorism eventually managed to paint dark portraits of Muslims and Arabs that do very few of them justice. Stories involving any of the tens of millions of relatively normal Muslims weren't as good for ratings, and while some parts of the media provided fairer depictions of them it did not offer a heavy enough counterbalance, in my opinion.

Also, bigots will be bigots. Many of them are wrapped up in an us-versus-them mindset about perceived out-groups. When 9/11, the two wars, and major news providers' handling of current events are combined they send a signal to such folks that their way of life is in danger. Their suspicions gain legitimacy when leaders they look to for guidance speak of the grave peril posed to American society by Islamic fundamentalists, extremists, and Islamists. American Muslims and Arabs have become easy (i.e. minority group) targets for persecution since they are unlikely to strongly retaliate and, being blinded by ignorance, the aggressors fail to grasp that almost nobody in those groups are really aligned with the Enemy. This is a recurring theme in history, with each era apparently featuring groups widely misunderstood, marginalized, and discriminated against.

I do not know to what extent how many Americans' perceptions of Islam and its adherents have been skewed, and to what extent, but the problem now is that it is so much easier to make people suspicious of and worried about the cultural and security-related impacts of unfamiliar minority groups in their midst than it is to bridge cultural gaps and forge enduring intergroup trust and friendships. For European anti-Islamic sentiments, however, I lack a firm opinion for the time being.

Verbal sex change operation ;-)

I'm sure most of it is caused by the actions of Muslims combined with confirmation bias on the part of the people in the West.

Then why the -us? :P

My pardons for the assumption. Quite unfortunately we don't get many of the fairer sex coming to the forum.

That's interesting. How many females do we have here? From the tone and nick names I've seen and responded to, I'm not sure if I remember any of them being women?

fear of civilizational decline

One. Before politicus joined, zero.

Oh wow, that's less than I thought. Come to think of it, there was a female bitching about Santorum being a bad father and women being thought of as bad if they were like him having a sick child. Is that who you're referring to?

It's generalized hatred of a vague other, since most people haven't ever seen one of them in the flesh.

I don't think it's that. Do you think being prejudice is natural to the human condition? I had a philosophy professor who did.

Sorry, but I'm a bit an antiislamist after I saw this:
http://ottenki-serogo.livejournal.com/191194.html
IN A F^^^KING CHRISTIAN CITY.

Ah, what seems to be the problem?  All I see from your link is a bunch of people peaceably praying in an orderly and clean manner.  

You didn't saw how they we're killing rams.
And I have a fear that one day I will wake up in a Moscowbad.

We are truly living in the end times.

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Maybe I am missing something here but my impression is that Moskva is a city of all the Russian people - not just those who adhere to the Eastern Orthodox faith.

Hey, Pingvin99, I'm an observant Muslim and I find the things that you're saying fairly offensive.

An offended Muslim?  Say it aint so!

Yes, zero, sometimes I get offended when people say offensive things. It's a pretty normal reaction among human beings.

Obviously general bigotry is a part of it. But I think the reaction of Westerners to Muslims has been substantially different to their reaction towards other non-Western immigrant communities.

9/11 is part of it. And to an extent in might be class based- East Asian and Hindu immigrants tend to be relatively wealthy. But even before 9/11 the difference existed... and the reaction to Muslims has been different to the reaction towards other working class immigrants such as Mexicans in America and Black Africans in Britain. It also bears noting that India and China have substantially tenser relations with Muslims then do their other religious minorities.

I see two probable explanations for this. Firstly Muslims seem to be a rather assertive culture, I would describe them as an "alpha culture" were as the Westerners became a "beta culture" over the course of the last century. Secondly Muslims are a lot more distinctive then other significant cultural blocs- Buddhists and Christians tend to blend in pretty well into their host culture, whereas Islam isn't just a religion but a way of life and necessarily resists blending in a whole lot more.

I think its interesting to note that Americans are more paranoid about Muslims then Hispanics, despite the former being a tiny presence and the latter being set to become a plurality of nation. I think my two explanations more or less sum up why.

Lol. Maybe that is true of the US, but hardly in Europe. In Sweden I imagine pretty much everyone who lives in a city must have seen plenty of Muslims.

There are a multitude of reasons. Fundamentally, a lot of people have negative experiences with Muslim immigrants.

There's partly general xenophobia, partly the socio-economic conditions that result from rigid labour markets. But there are also cultural issues. When Muslims demand to set up their own parallell legal structure with sharia law (like the main organization has in Sweden, for example) or when the many incidents with things like honour killings or demands for tolerance of intolerance float about, a lot of people in the West are put off.

I also think there is a general backlash effect against the taboos surrounding immigration and Islam in general (at least here, probably not in more openly racist countries on the continent).

But that doesn't really explain anything because everyone has had negative experiences with people from the majority community as well.

Haha, yes, but most people obviously have had a lot of positive experiences with the majority community as well. In Stockholm (and here I am obviously exaggerating and generalizing quite a lot) most Muslim immigrants live in what are basically poor ghettos surrounding the city. These areas have nothing that would make anyone from the city ever go there. Since many are either old, young or unemployed not that many come into the city either. So, those you do see tend to very disproportionately be gangs of young men coming into town to have fun. And running into gangs of young men is often a negative experience.

And in schools there is a strong tendency to form ethnic gangs as well.

I myself got punched in the face once by such a guy. Of course, many of my best friends are Muslims and all that so it didn't make me a Sweden Democrat but I don't think it is an uncommon process for many others. In the especially bad areas where they attack the police and even the fire brigade the impression that most other people will have will obviously become rather negative.

So what you're saying is that most people don't have many positive experiences of Muslim 'immigrants' because mostly they don't have any actual experiences of them as anything other than 'people who are not like us'. Which isn't so far off Xahar's argument, really.

We have politicalchick20 who occasionally posts in Congressional Elections.

I was referring to the United States; should have made that clearer. As I gather, in Europe it's much more similar to the American experience with blacks or Hispanics.

I think the difference is that what I'm talking about is linked to real problems. Immigrant groups that aren't living in isolated ghettos and don't have high unemployment rates naturally meet people in normal settings a lot more often.

It's always hard to have this kind of discussion without accusations of racism being thrown about, but I think there are a number of tangible problems with muslim immigration that contribute to islamophobia in Europe (and, no, it's not exclusively muslim immigration, it's just the main migration flows here happen to be from pre-dominantly muslim countries). That doesn't justify it or anything, but I do believe some of these root causes need to be adressed.

Yeah, I think the analogy with blacks in the US is fairly decent.

There's the big difference that anybody who grew up urbane and was born before, oh, 1993 or so, will remember a time, if he is not actively trying not to as a lot of people seem to be, when "muslim" had nothing whatsoever to do with it but the stereotypes and problems were otherwise quite identical.
Which tells you all you really need to know about "antiislamism".

Ok, I fit those criteria and I think I know what you mean. I believe the closest translation of the Swedish term would be "blackhead"

Of course, they WERE muslim to a large extent back then as well. And perhaps more importantly it was much less of an issue, at least as far as I can recall. At least in Sweden, xenophobia in general is a lot higher now.

Generally a lot of things, like 9/11 but not just that, has made people a lot more aware of islam  as a phenomenon and obviously most of this awareness has been in connection with negative stuff.

First of all, I think the OP should change the term he is using to 'anti-muslim'....'Islamism' is an interpretation of Islam that, frankly, every decent person should have negative regard towards.

As for why anti-Muslim sentiment is rising, there are two:

Islam breeds more terrorist movements than other religions, especially terrorist movements explicitly (and loudly) justified on the basis of religious dogma and goals, due to the jihad doctrine (which terrorists interprete much more broadly than most Muslims, but which facilitates the promotion of violent communal responses to percieved injustices).

A distressingly huge proportion of global Muslims* adhere (in varying degrees) to Islamist interpretations of Islam, promoting mandatory shariah law and opposing freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, and equality under the law (the basic, fundamental rights from which all other rights are conceptually derived are exactly those rights which are the most taboo under an Islamist worldview).

*this is much less the case in the United States than it is in Europe, much less majority-Muslim nations, but a reticence on the part of American Muslims to acknowledge the sheer depth of the global problem and explicitly separate themselves from illiberal theological elements (such as by creating readily identifiable 'liberal' Islamic groups and identifying themselves with them, much like the Protestant churches have historically distinguished themselves from alternate Christian groups) negatively affects public perceptions.

Just today the headline in Sweden's largest newspaper concerns so-called honour crimes. I should start with the caveats that a) the media reporting has its problems and b) I'm well aware that honour crimes are a product of the Middle East culture rather than of the islam religion.

The articles relates a couple of stories. Sara from northern Iraq was 15 when social services took her away from her family (her father had beaten her because he suspected she had a boyfriend). After a week 4 men armed with axes and guns arrived and abducted her from where she was placed and she's been gone ever since.

Fatima who was 19 was almost killed by her father and had to be hospitalized, again based on the suspicion that she might have a boyfriend. She was later sent by her family back to Iraq to marry her 30-year old cousin who prohibited her from reading. The last that was heard of her was a message where she said she was being raped every night.

And so on. Now, before the PC brigade jumps in, of course I am well aware that these stories are not representative of Muslims in general. In Sweden, however, the vast majority of Muslims  immigrants come from countries like Iraq, Turkey and Somalia (with those from the first 2 countries very often being Kurds). Within those groups these issues are quite real - Sweden's most well known Kurdish politician (who is the chairwoman of the Social Democratic Women's organization) moved out of one of the immigrant-heavy suburbs with precisely the motivation that the dominant view of women there created a bad environment for her children.

And, as with all things, there won't be that many news stories about all the normal Muslim families who don't have bizarre attitudes towards their daughters.

I think that plays a fairly large part in anti-muslim sentiment in Sweden. Especially because the establishment discourse wasted a lot of time trying to deny this as being a problem.

Moscow is Christian in the same way that Stockholm is Christian (hint: they're both not Christian).

Historically Europeans are more anti-Muslim than US people are not for the reasons you mention, but for the reason that the United States hasn't existed for very long.  Anti-Islam started in the Medieval period in Europe (and earlier in the Middle East), although the word Islamophobia doesn't show up till about one hundred years ago.  The Crusades were probably exploitative mini-culminations rather than causes.  Throughout the Renaissance and Age of Enlightenment there are many critical references to Islam.  Muhammad figures very negatively in Dante's works.  Even well-respected writers like David Hume impugn Muslims.  It has long been a part of European history and tradition to isolate, and sometimes murder, Muslims.  

The US didn't exist for most of that period, and when it did come into existence, with the ratification of the US Constitution in 1787, a defining characteristic of the United States was the right to free exercise of religion.  To the extent that anti-Islamic feeling does exist, it has more to do with very recent history:  hijacking of planes by Islamists starting in the 1970s as a response to US policy regarding Israel.  About this aspect I think you're right.  Over the past four decades we have increasingly associated Islam with terrorism.  I imagine that eventually we'll have our own version of Tomás de Torquemada.  Such well-fermented bigotries take time.  US culture, being relatively young, simply hasn't been around long enough to develop them.

They are culturally and historically Christian cities. Which is what matters most in this context.

Yes. Islam is historically the arch enemy of Christian Europe. Every 10th coat of arms in the Hungarian nobility includes the chopped of head of a Turk etc. But I don't think this legacy is that relevant today. As I wrote the Muslim macho culture, opposition to the liberal dogma of equal rights for all and failure to integrate in the labour market are the main causes in Denmark (this is also true for the rest of Northern Europe IMO). Those are all modern causes unrelated to history. Most European societies are highly secularized today and the knowledge of history is rather sparse in Western Europe (this is of course very different in the Balkans).

Sorry but I'm a bit of an anti-Christian after seeing this:
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IN A F^^KING PAGAN CITY!

Historically, it does not matter what Moscow and Stockholm were. It matters that we're supposed to be living in secular, tolerant societies that allow people to peaceably worship whoever they want in public. If you have a problem with this, you're a probably a bigot or a fundamentalist.

I don't think you can ignore a millenium of history when considering these things.

Moreover, your comments may be very specific to Denmark.  Take cities with huge numbers of Muslims, such as Marseilles or Brussels, for example.  Very clearly the politicians use ethnicity as a motivator, especially those of the National Front and parties like it.  Similarly, there have long been anti-Turk sentiments in Germany.  Sure, much of it is practical, and for the reasons you mention (welfare abuse, crime, etc.), but much of it is simply historical.  It may also have to do with a desegration.  Muslims in many cities (e.g., Paris), are concentrated in various suburbs, and even second- and third-generation French-born citizens of North African descent are viewed as others, despite the official French tradition of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

The US simply doesn't have a thousand-year history telling it what to do.  Everything we try is new (and a number of our really good ideas were co-opted and improved upon by northern European societies).  I would venture a guess that even more ancient societies have even more ancient prejudices.  The Chinese, when they are allowed to speak freely, don't have much good to say about Muslims either, but they have a government structure that allows them to move large numbers of people into the provinces that were historically Muslim, and even to hold Muslim leaders without charge if necessary, in order to dilute the political strength of Muslims in those provinces, so you never see tensions coming to the foreground the way you see them in European cities.

In all seriousness how could one not be 'anti-islamist' and be a westerner?   

There's something else:  familiarity breeds contempt.  I was thinking about this and I found a table of European countries in order of percent Muslim population.  Ignoring the three with a majority Muslim population (Albania, Bosnia Herzegovina, and Kosovo), the top ten are something like this:

Macedonia [33%], Montenegro [17%], Bulgaria [15%], Cyprus [22%], Georgia [12%], Russia [12%]. Belgium [6%], France [5.8%], Switzerland [5.7%], and Austria [5.7%].

I bet if you could come up with some list of Islamophobia-inspired tensions, and control for economic factors, you'd find a nice correlation between those and percent Muslim populations.  I haven't found such a clean list yet, but I'll search a bit.

By contrast, not many US regions have such large numbers.  From the US Census bureau, the 10 states with the largest Muslim populations are California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Indiana, Michigan, Virginia, Texas, Ohio, and Maryland.  But that's a tricky thing, because you'd have to divide by population to get percentages, and the ten most concentrated may not be in this list.  

I did find that Dearborn, Michigan had the most Muslims, by percent, among US cities, and in that city, according to Zogby, Muslims claim not to feel isolated.  In fact, more generally, Zogby states that "Unlike Muslims in Europe, American Muslims do not tend to feel marginalized..."   Pew research has similar findings.

See here:  http://pewresearch.org/assets/pdf/muslim-americans.pdf

Of course, none of this answers your question.  In fact, it only raises new ones.  I still claim that the long arc of history provides us the easiest and most tangible answer, and in the spirit of Occam's Razor, I suggest that we at least consider it before dismissing it as irrelevant today.

I am all for freedom of religion. Just objecting to you saying they are not Christian cities.

Angus, I think you might have a point with certain parts, like Eastern Europe but I don't think it's very valid for a country like Sweden. Muslims weren't very important to us until rather recently.

That's mostly because Muslim immigrants to the United States are much richer than European Muslims.

And why are they richer?

Countries of origin, I thought?

EDIT: The vast majority of Muslim-Americans I've actually known were extremely secular, but that's selection bias as I don't normally talk to people that are really religious.  One of my best friends is an ex-Muslim atheist and first generation immigrant from Syria, and I've heard her say things about Islam that are more negative than most ultra-right wing Islamophobes.

"Secular, tolerant society" is one of the sweet lies that are told us by the socialists. Russia for Russians, Moscow for Moscowits, it is all about. If you do not accept OUR traditions and OUR habits, go back into your Dagestan/Chechnya/whatever-Stan.

Dagestanis and Chechens are also Russians, you see, to say nothing of Tatars, Buryats, Kalmyks, Tuvans, Bashkirs, Circassians, Slavic converts to Islam or Buddhism, Tatar or whatever converts to Christianity, diehards from Birobidzhan, et hoc genus omne, and Moscow is the capital of the Russian Federation, not some fictional 'Christian Russia' that elides everything south or east of Don/Volga. If you didn't want Russia and its capital to be diverse then you shouldn't have expanded out of Muscovy in the first place.

Main slogan of the Russian Nationalists is now "Stop feeding Caucasus!" And I support it. National Democratic Alliance got a nice plan about reforming Russian Federation - secede money-sucking Caucasus, build a wall on a border with it,  turn Russia into a confederation of 7 Russian Republics. But they also recognize the co-existence of Tatars, Yakuts, Kalmyks and other. And they support stronger regulation of immigration from Asia.

I don't think you can compare Moscow and Stockholm being Christian to Athens being pagan, that'd be more like if someone tried to argue that Istanbul or most of Cairo were Christian cities. You'd still have the vast majority of people there identifying as Christian and all. Not that I know if what was posted as really objectionable since I can't read Russian, and Pingvin's most recent post is probably the most fascist thing posted on the forum all year.

So if the Volga and Asian ethnicities are acceptable, why does one need to kick the Caucasus out? If it's purely economic reasons that seems like a puerile reason to break up one's country and if it's for cultural reasons that seems extremely discriminatory and sketchy.

I don't see what the use of the other part of the idea is. My ancestors on the side that my family name derives from were partly Litvak Jews, partly Great Russians from the area of Lake Peipus, partly Great Russians from the area between the Volga and the Urals, and partly Tartars, so I'm reasonably familiar with the layout of Russia ethnically and culturally, and I just don't see how the '7 Russian Republics' would be divied up.

Is that even possible with the current population distribution? I was under the impression ethnic Russians have a majority basically everywhere except the Caucuses and some enclaves, I'm sure there's a map of this somewhere...

European Russia is pretty much all Great Russian outside, as you said, the Caucasus, with the parts along the Volga and Komi mostly being to the best of my knowledge a question of pluralities rather than majorities, be it for the Great Russians or the republic minorities. Siberia has of course a strip of Great Russians along the railways outside of which everything is native Siberian ethnicities or sparsely populated.

ETA: In the little clump of republics east of Moscow, Tatarstan and Chuvashia have majorities of their titular group, Mari El and Bashkortostan are about tied, and Mordovia and Udmurtia have Great Russian majorities. Komi is also majority Great Russian. Karelia is under ten per cent its titular group. The republics with clear majorities of their titular group or groups are, in descending order of concentration, Chechnya, Ingushetia, Dagestan, Tuva, Kabardino-Balkaria, Chuvashia, North Ossetia-Alania, Kalmykia, Tatarstan, and Karachay-Cherkessia. Sakha is 49.9% Yakut. Mari El and Bashkortostan have no clear majority ethnic group. The majority Great Russian republics are, in descending order of concentration, Karelia, Khakassia, Buryatia, Komi, Adygea, Udmurtia, Altai, and Mordovia.

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Federal spending on the Northern Caucausus Federal District (2010 numbers):
Kabardino-Balkariya - 12900 roubles
Karachaevo-Cherkesia - 13600 roubles
Dagestan - 14800 roubles
Ingushetia - 27800 roubles
Northern Osetia - 12000 roubles
Stavropol (Note: Russian region included in the SKFO aganist people's will) 6000 roubles
Chechnya - 48200 roubles
Other regions (Note: median) - 5000 roubles.

Not entirely. A Turk in the United States will generally be much richer than a Turk in Germany, because only skilled workers go from Turkey to the United States. The American supply of unskilled labor comes from parts southward and not from the Muslim world.

So what you mean is that there is a selection bias going on - different groups of people go to different countries. That's probably true.

I've been thinking a bit more about the whole interaction with Muslims thing. In my high school class of about 27 people there were 3 Muslim kids. One Iranian guy who was very stereotypically Iranian - quite, career-focused and not allowed to have a girlfriend. One Bosnian girl who was very nice and whom of course no one thought of as Muslim since she was white (until she shocked everyone in religion class by quoting the Quran in Arabic). And then a Turkish guy. Who was reasonably nice and all (I remember watching Dr. Strangelove with him at my home once. He ate all my candy). He did say that he would never allow his wife to work and that he hated Jews and wanted to see all Jews dead. So that wasn't very nice. He also once attacked another kid in school and tried to strangle him (to be fair, the kid had said a racial slur, or so he claimed at least).

There was another Iranian guy in a parallell class who was an outspoken Nazi who supported the Holocaust. And I think a bunch of Iranian girls who were all working hard to be doctors.

Of course, my high school was a bit on the posh side - I think there only 2 violent incidents during my 3 years there and none of them were particularly serious or led to any real bodily harm.

I guess the point is that if one wanted to, it wasn't hard to find some negative traits there. And while there were plenty of perfectly native Swedish assholes to dislike as well, the dislikeable Muslims tended to be so due to things that were linked to their religion or culture (anti-semitism, conservative views on women). Of course, once a negative stereotype is established it tends to become self-reinforcing. The Turkish guy was a lot more outspoken in his identity as a Muslim and probably affected most people in the class more in their impression of Muslims than the nice Bosnian girl.

LOL.  "Dees my freend Mahir.  He very nice guy.  Well, he don't like wife work, or show herself in public and he want all Jews dead, but otherwise he very nice guy.  Say hello Mahir."

Well, neo-fascism's very popular in Russia AFAIK.

Yeah, the US State Department has this to say:

It's not so much that the main immigration flow came from Muslim countries, in fact outside a few countries it didn't, but Muslim have had a much lower intermarriage rate so while Yugoslavs, Italians and Finns has begun to disappear in the mass of the majority, Muslims has stayed distinct.

Well, I'm not really counting Scandinavian immigration because they're pretty much the same people - there is no issues with integration or anything there. And most other groups came in the past, so current immigration includes a lot of Muslims.

The problem is that you look at Sweden as the example of migration. In Europe Yugoslavs and Italians came at the same time as the Turks, Algerian, Pakistanis and Moroccans the  four traditional Muslim immigration groups. These latter groups has shown themselves to be much harder to integrate than the former. If we look at the intermarriage rate for Yugoslavs it's several times higher (in Denmark 66% of Yugoslavs born in Denmark marry someone from another ethnic group) than for Turk (among Turks BID only 14% marry outside their ethnic group) or Pakistanis BID (with 18% it lies sligthly higher than the Turks)

It's true that I tend to think primarily of Sweden, I guess. Although, you're obviously picking specific countries as well, since your statement can hardly apply to Italy. ;)

Generally, I was talking more about people coming as immigrants now than the people who are currently in the country. And then I think it largely holds true that Muslims constitute a large part of that (again, discarding groups like Norwegians or American CEOs or Spanish graduate students and whatnot).

Yes to some degree I agree with you and most of your earlier points, but I think that the primary problem isn't the new waves of immigrant, but that the earlier waves has stayed so distinct (and poor), that people talk about all Muslim as one group. The three biggest "immigration" groups as example in Denmark the last 10 years has been Iraqis, Poles and Germans (around 30 000 of each). The Iraqis as refugees and Germans and Poles as blue-collar workers (much as the earlier Turks). But it has not resulted in Poles and Germans being singled out (through Romanians a much smaller group have). Much of it is because many Danes have a Polish or German grandparent or great grandparent so there are a unwillingness to single these groups out, even after the crisis have begun and some employers has kept importing them even with rising unemployment among Danish blue-collar workers. If a lot of Danes had Middle Eastern grandparents, I think we would see a greater tolerance toward new immigration waves.
Of course it doesn't help that many Middle Eastern immigrants have social attitude which can mildly be described as disgusting from a European POV, and a willingness to be completely open about their disgusting attitudes.

Wahabism.

The huge range of cultural difference within Islam stretching from Morocco to the Moluccas is being usurped by Saudi funded fundamentalist cultural bullsh-t that is seeping into settled communities in Europe. Indeed in Britain, it appears to be working it's way into Pakistani, Kashmi and Bengali communities (in their 3rd generation) in a way that it hasn't worked its way into their respective home countries. Afghanistan is a prime example of a Muslim country whose culture has been be overturned by an invasive ideology.

That ideology is so at odds with liberal democracy that it gets associated with all Muslims.

If you take a look at the Balkans; at the Albanians and Bosnians and Kosovans and other remnants of Ottoman Europe you have a completely different European based cultural identity in existance which in many regards is more tolerable in terms of democracy and human rights than neighbouring Orthodox Slavs. Long may it continue.

For the record the same thing is happening to Evangelical Christianity, though in this instance it's a US dominance of ideological thought (as well as church planting, missionary work and the good old fashioned dollar) that has based itself in small churches in Europe and larger churches in Africa, to great distress.

Good point.

Unfortunately Wahabism is making some inroads in Bosnia. Jihadists got in during the civil war as mercenaries and control some mountain villages i central Bosnia. Many are married to Bosnian women.
Wahabi foundations also fund mosque building and educational centers in several cities.
Money talks.

I don't see how it could be.  Blacks are not considered foreign to America at all, except to a very small number of ideological racists with mythical narratives about genealogy.  Blacks are sometimes considered inferior or dangerous, but there's no doubt to most people that they are American.  (Obama here is an anomaly due to his foreign sounding name and cosmopolitan life story)

There are some parallels with Hispanics in terms of questioning allegiance, but that concern is not at the center of the public consciousness, the distinction between Islam and the West dwarfing the distinctions between Hispanics and Anglos.   The best US parallels are in the past: the Chinese and Catholic immigrants of the 19th century, for example.  There was a lot of concern about Catholics operating their own schools, having an allegiance to the Pope rather than the nation, and setting up their own social institutions - a parallel anti-society to America.  Some of the same attitudes are what we hear about Sharia taking over the US, so that laws need to be passed against it in Oklahoma, and Herman Cain needs to become President so he can stop it from taking over the country.. Yes, the fear here is over the top.
 
 I've heard that the vast majority of Muslims don't want to establish Sharia law, even in Europe - that is the kind of thing the left their home countries to avoid.  it's just a few organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood that are agitating for it, and a few well meaning public figures and academics willing to listen to them.

I think the whole loyalty thing is a very American phenomenon. In Sweden at least, people don't really think much in those terms.

Here the hostility centres around crime, cultural differences and views on women, gays, etc.

Of course then you have these guys, who are not exactly helpful...

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Society becoming more diverse increases societal friction and decreases trust, so even without 9/11 anti-islamism in the west would still exist. The fact that western nations are zero or negative-sum economic equations doesn't help either. I'm not overly keen on islam or third world immigration in general, but I like to look at things with more clarity than the neocon talking points.

For proof of this, note the current reactions in the US to latin american immigration despite 1) they're being christian 2) their cultural background is largely western 3) Based on poll numbers, they're not much more conservative than the anglo-american norm socially*. Going by the naive logic of neocon anti-islam types, we shouldn't have any problems with digestion of the newbies from south of the border. A quick look at the situation in any southwestern state or visit to such should be enough to dissuade optimists.

* Compare to the differences in opinion on women, gays, evolution between Turks and Germans.

Latin American immigration to the US is on a much larger scale than Muslim immigration to Europe though, right? I mean, especially when looking at the local level.

Also, I think the problems seem a lot smaller in the US compared to Europe and more specifically seem to be about concrete problems like drug smuggling and payment for welfare services to illegals and such things.

Is the problem really about Islam or just general xenophobia in Europe? Are non-muslim immigrants from India or subsaharan Africa treated or looked at any differently from Muslim immigrants?

Because Europe allows more low skill immigration/refugees would be my guess. Class plays a huge role in all these prejudices, and of course middle/upper class people are able to assimilate better and quicker as well. Still waiting for the answer to my previous question. Are non-muslim poorer African or Indian immigrants looked at the same way as Muslims? Of course stereotyping is the order of the day when looking at immigrant groups so it really matters more on how the group is (in terms of behaviors and class)than any one individual.

It depends on what you mean. Sweden don't really have non-Muslim immigrants from India or sub-saharan Africa. We have a fair number of Middleeastern Christians, but those are perceived by most people to be Muslims I think.

US Muslims as a whole aren't necessarily richer than the average and in fact are actually slightly poorer.

US Muslim immigrants have the same source countries as Europe does but the big difference is that US Muslims are 20-25% African-American while nothing really comparable exists in Europe. Also it's easy to see that immigrants > native-born in terms of income. Regression to the mean and what not.

Black Muslims are of course not considered non-American in the sense that Muslim immigrants are.

France's case is interesting because it has had a lot of immigration experiments in the 19th and 20th century (an important Polish immigration, an important Italian immigration, an important Spanish one, a significant Portuguese one) before the 'Muslim ones' (a big majority from Maghreb, and from Western 'Black Africa' to a lesser extent), so you can compare the different ones. And here the Muslim population would be about 10% of the population (figure most often cited, though no official stats about religion/ethnic origin in France), so the argument of 'people don't meet them' doesn't work here.

From all the records I heard, all the 1st generations of those different waves, then those who actually immigrated, have been harshly discriminated, all, from Poles to Portuguese, all. So exactly the same thing than what happened to immigrants from Muslim countries.

But then, the children of those previous European immigrations have been gradually, more and more, and quickly enough, accepted within the society, and now it mainly remains some bashing and you mainly detect origins of someone eventually through its name.

On the other hand, children from Muslim communities, keep undergoing discrimination over and over and over, unlike for European immigrations, it doesn't really improve, while it began 60 years ago.

Then you have discriminated communities, which means communities where unemployment is bigger than elsewhere, where social mixing is lower than elsewhere, where access to leisures is lower than elsewhere, where resentment against the dominating community is bigger than elsewhere, then where social problems are bigger than elsewhere and where criminality is bigger than elsewhere.

So, in the end, it shouldn't surprise anybody if you have more chance to identify such communities to annoying people, and if people eventually have more chance to have 'bad experiences' with people from communities living this.

The point would be: why the discrimination, since it seems to be the starting issue, while so much other communities have been accepted?

Really, dunno, the most obvious answer would be the most basic ones, the most visible ones: cultural differences, and color of skin. Cultural differences that makes that we don't have same traditions, same kind of names, and the color of skin which makes that when your skin hasn't the same color it's kinda written 'you don't belong to here!' on you. Other big European immigrations were all Christians and were even all Catholic, so people could easily adopt a French 1st name equivalent to the one from the country of their family, and we also all had more or less the same big traditions, and once children spoke good French they didn't have to suffer from a much different color of skin from French people, then no, or less, automatic discrimination due to visible things.

And then, if you add colonial wars (which for example imported violence in the homeland with Algeria), and all the resentment that would be born from the colonial era, in which France acted like a civilizational superior power, plus Islamist terrorist in France in the 1980s and 1990s (due in part to French foreign policy respectively with Iran/Lebanon and Algeria), the fact that French (and most of Westerners generally speaking I would say) still feel superior to people coming from Muslim civilizations, and then the US that brilliantly continued the colonial era by other means, also with violence and conviction of superiority, which led to reactions like Al Qaeda, 9/11, and all the stuffs, if you add all of this, don't be surprised that there are some kinds of...frictions between Westerners/Christians and 'Muslims'.

(...and here I haven't even thrown all the fantasies that can exist between both 'communities'...)

And I might have forgotten some stuffs, but it's 5 am, and it might not be sane that I'm still here. So, that will do for now.