Tolerance or Solidarity?

In Algeria Christians who did not fast during Ramadan are being condemned to prison sentences or ordered to leave the country, defined as a “land of Islam”.

Lest we forget - or lest we never knew - present day Algeria, along with Egypt and the rest of North Africa (to say nothing of Arabia itself),  adopted Christianity with enthusiasm in the first centuries of the first millenium, well prior to its spread in Europe. It was only long after, in the 8th century, that Islam was imposed by conquest. But Christianity persisted, despite oppression. In recent decades the massacres and persecutions of Christians and Christianity rival and surpass previous episodes, and an active resistance is starting to form. Its fate is impossible to predict - particularly in the absence of support from a de-christianized West.

In France there are now calls for a moratorium on the construction of mosques, by solidarity with Algerian Christians. The building of churches is forbidden in several “lands of Islam”, and non-Muslims are forbidden to enter certain “holy cities” of Islam.

Tolerance, if it is to retain any meaning or force, must end where this sort of intolerance begins.

Do you know that there is a conflation of “Muslim” and “Arab” in Islam which gives it a certain racialist tone? Most north Africans are not Arabs ethnically. As Muslims, however, there is a pressure to self-define as Arabs. The term “Arab world” - though westerners are becoming more sophisticated in these matters - has tended to cover a much larger area than relatively small Arabia. There are indeed Arabs all over the North Africa and the Middle East - descendants of the Muslim conquistadors of the first millenium, but they are an ethnic minority. Many people considered "Arab in Lebanon, Palestine or Jordan are in fact ethnically Phoenician or Cannanite. And the Egyptians, of course, are not Arabs. Who cares? There are some Muslims and Arabs who care very much.

Riot Wave Cover up in Paris

The French media, it seems, is covering up recent Muslim riots in Paris. For example, excited by the Gaza "relief" fleet incident, a large group wearing Arab scarves and displaying foreign flags attempted to storm the embassy of Israel, to cries of "Baise la France" (Fuck France), "Juifs dans les fours" (Jews in the ovens), "Sarkozy le petit Juif" (Sarkozy the little Jew) and "Obama le nègre des Juifs" (Obama the slave of the Jews). These thugs come armed with rocks and cause the usual millions of dollars of damage to public and private property, while the police, overwhelmed, use "restraint".  

Such riots, organized with cell phones, are like the ethnic gang fights and skin-head soccer fan rumbles which occur regularly in Paris and other cities in France and Europe. France, you might say, has seen plenty of organized urban violence, much of which failed to shake the established order. But then much of it did; one must look particularly to the examples where the army and police were not allowed to fire upon the rioters.