A world Without Islam pdfdrive com

participants in Dutch society, and contributing to the life of Holland, then it is
very possible to become Dutch. And over many generations, the issue may lose
its poignancy.
The dilemma finds striking parallels in earlier Jewish concerns about aspects
of assimilation into American society. As the American scholar Eric Goldstein
points out:
The last decades of the nineteenth century brought Jewish immigrants
from Central Europe unprecedented opportunities for social integration.
While these opportunities made Jews ebullient, they also raised anxieties
about what borders were to remain between them and the rest of society.
Much of this anxiety stemmed from the tension between Jews’ impulse for
integration and their desire to maintain a distinct Jewish identity. Jews’
history of persecution and social exclusion had imbued them with a strong
minority social consciousness that was not easily surrendered and that led
them to place a high value on group survival. Since social ties were seen
as the protective force that had guaranteed Jewish continuity in the past,
most Jews were reluctant to break these bonds.

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These are legitimate concerns of the Jewish community—an accomplished
historical and cultural minority that is generally unwilling to become so
assimilated that it disappears. Jews were very poorly assimilated into American
and European culture for long periods and were the object of much
discrimination, even within people’s living memory. Additionally, for many
decades Jews were associated with radical movements and anarchist terrorism
that had a grip on the Western imagination in the early twentieth century, with
echoes of Muslim terrorism today.
Today the position of Muslims differs considerably from Jews in numerous
respects, of course. Muslims are now the object of intensified overt and covert
suspicions, sometimes even discrimination on a de jure basis, on anything that
smacks of security issues. Muslims in the West have yet to receive the benefit of
public political correctness; their characteristics and culture remain open season
for spoof, lampoon, derision, and hatred in ways no longer tolerated by Western
society in respect to African-Americans, Jews, or Native Americans.
The key argument, then, revolves around problems of large-scale migration
of people of color, at a particular time of intense geopolitical tension in the
Muslim world itself. Beyond that, there is little doubt that Islam does create a
stronger social glue and broader international links than is the case of most other
immigrant groups. But the United States has seen previously “indigestible” or
“unassimilable” minorities before—Hungarians, Italians, Irish, Chinese; indeed,
Jews were once routinely referred to as “clannish.” Clannishness, to a
considerable degree, reflects the absence of a social alternative.

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