Link roundup.

Oct 10, 2004

Muslims' plea for a list of approved charities is rejected. So you can be detained for donating to various organizations, whether or not you know where they might be funneling their money. And no, we won't tell you which ones.
An excellent piece on how immigration law in France — and I'd extend this to most of Europe — victimizes women.
- A woman of Algerian parentage: "I desperately needed to establish my legal position," she said. "At that point, I was stunned to discover that, although I was born in France and my parents still live there, and although I could prove that I’d been forced to marry and I had had a child on French soil, I was seen as a first-generation immigrant. I had no papers. I was an illegal alien."
- She cites the case of a young Senegalese woman who came to France to be with her husband (they had had two children), only to discover that he was already married: "She is his second wife and, as such, has no legal right to papers."
- Poor women, whether they have French passports or no papers at all, often live in social spaces where such work as is available to them is mainly informal and unrecognised. Unemployment rates among those with foreign names are three times higher than among other women (10). The urban structure and the inadequate, or non-existent, public transport don’t help: there are no local shops or services, either, and few cultural activities or sports.

One thing I hadn't considered is that, in Europe, first- and second-generation immigrants seem more likely to live in what this article calls "rough, working-class" neighborhoods. This probably holds true for many American converts (especially considering the role of Islam in the prison system), but for immigrants? One statistic I read today said 26% of American Muslim households have an annual income of more than $100,000 a year. That's in keeping with my own anecdotal experience. I live in a "rough, working-class" neighborhood myself, but any time I seek out a Muslim event I usually end up facing a lot of BMWs and Mercedes. (What's the plural of Mercedes? Mercedii?)

I've read (and said myself) that racial and ethnic discrimination is much higher in Europe than it is in the U.S., but I'm wondering how much of that is class-based. Or, to take the other tack, how much American Muslims are protected from discrimination by their class standing, in contrast with their European counterparts.

As part of its desire to join the EU, Turkey considers passing hate crime legislation that would protect gays and lesbians.

Full coverage of the bombings in Sinai can be found here.

A long and scary article about George Bush from The New York Times Magazine. I've seen several people quote the Sweden/Switzerland mix-up, but this isn't just another article about how dumb Bush is — it's about the dangers of inflexible certainty. (By the way, this morning I heard a BBC reporter interview a woman from Oregon about why she'd be voting for Bush. We were attacked, the woman said. If it had been up to her they would have gone over there on September 14. "Iraq didn't attack us!" the BBC reporter said. "That was Al-Qaeda!" The woman paused for a millisecond, just long enough to let you know she'd never heard such a thing before, and then said, "I don't care, they're from the same place!") *fear*

And from the "oh for heaven's sake" files: The UK Muslim Law Council declares energy drinks and marshmallows halal. Praise Allah. I know that was on the tip-top of my priority list.

Category: Egypt, Islam in Europe, Islam in North America, Turkey, War on Terror