I came across this article on Instapundit. It’s a Reuters article about Italian authorities criminally charging an author for defaming Islam. For all practical purposes she would be tried for blasphemy. She’s rather old and living in the US and I doubt she’ll be extradited. Glenn ends with this quote

Tom Wolfe once said that Fascism is forever descending on the United States, but that somehow it always lands on Europe. Perhaps the same is true with theocracy?

Now mind you, she is being charged in Italy, not the US. If the Italians want to dig their own grave, so be it.

The cause (I think) is based upon vastly different underlying concepts; namely the West has moved the concepts of state, society and religion (and, for the properly educated, the economy) so far apart that Westerners’ really aren’t on the same page as those raised or educated in the Middle East or in the Middle Eastern way. What is a minor matter to us is a much larger thing to them and vice versa. Political Correctness and a permanent indignation industry don’t help either.

I do think it’s going to end badly. The cumulative effect of legal and other victories on behalf of Muslim sensibilities will effectively dehumanize Muslims in the eyes of the West and move them further out of the mainstream. By expending large amounts of effort on what seem to be trivial matters (based on the conceptual differences listed above), and maintaining group unity (which also seems to be happening) it will have the de facto effect of separating Muslims from the rest of society and giving them a high-maintenance reputation. Put in more mathematical terms it will raise the costs of interaction. The long run effect of all this is that the Western world treats Muslims as exotic pets and they never assimilate.

I wonder if there are any Ricardian Theories of cultural conflict? If not, this is the genesis of one I suppose.

Yesterday while at Borders I spent about 20 minutes flipping through a US News & World Report special issue about Islam. What I read was fairly informative. While I thought it neglected the conceptual differences between traditional Islamic notions of law and society and traditional Western notions, it was still a good read.

One thing that stuck me was the interviews with American Muslims (in describing themselves they used the phrase “Muslim-American” which annoys me intensely) was their descriptions of how 9-11 affected them. Granted I’m sure they interviewed dozens of people and they only chose a few, but they all had the same theme, largely that they were all self-consciously Muslim in their day to day life, whether in garb, associating with other Muslims, etc. One even went so far as to describe identification with a larger group as “uniquely American”. That also annoyed me intensely (this should be a country for individuals, groups are for the Balkans.). They were then surprised and offended when people began viewing them differently after 9-11. Put another way, they voluntarily profiled themselves before 9-11, but became offended when perception became negative.

There was also a section on Europe’s experience with Islam. The Theo van Gogh story is well known, but there was an article about Muslim immigrants not assimilating in Germany. The article also mentioned that the immigrant children are taught in Islamic schools. I don’t remember if the German taxpayers were on the hook for that or not. Not surprisingly this produces youth who have no interest in assimilating and I would imagine no economically viable skills, which is great if you’re trying to produce a permanent underclass, but beyond that it seem braindead. The slur mentioned in the title is “Pork Eaters” which is a derogatory term that the Muslim schoolchildren use for ethnic Germans.

I then come across this article in Reason

On April 30, American journalist Chris Crain became the victim of a hate crime in Amsterdam. While walking in the street holding hands with his partner, he was savagely beaten by seven men shouting antigay slurs. A few days later, Scott Long, director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Program at the Human Rights Watch, expressed some sympathy for the gay-bashers. Crain’s attackers were reportedly Moroccan immigrants.

“There’s still an extraordinary degree of racism in Dutch society,” Long opined to the gay news service PlanetOut. “Gays often become the victims of this when immigrants retaliate for the inequities that they have to suffer.”

and

Serap Cileli, a Turkish-German author and filmmaker who escaped an arranged marriage, told Der Spiegel that until recently, the German media refused to publish her accounts of her and other Turkish women’s experiences for fear of appearing “racist.”

Even feminists often balk at breaking the multicultural faith. A 2001 article in Labyrinth, a feminist philosophy journal, lamented that concerns about the oppression of women in the Third World could perpetuate “the stereotype that ‘brown’ men abuse ‘brown’ women more than white men” and cause “Third World” people to be perceived as “more barbaric” than Westerners.

Now beyond the implicit statistical errors in the above what does it say when everyone is so concerned about appearances and feelings over everything else. I’m reminded of the old Onion headline “ACLU defends Klan’s right to burn down ACLU headquarters”.