Greek slant on Euroarabia and Islamophobia

Source: Enet.gr

by Pericles Korovesis, PM SYRIZA to the Greek Parliament.

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Is Europe in danger of becoming Islamized? How can Turkey, a non-Christian country that never has had Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment, integrate into Europe without distorting its characteristics? Should all Muslims be expelled from Europe in order to find the lost identity?

These are some questions and more similar others that the Right and extreme Right Wing of Europe and the USA are asked to answer. Several books have been written and the Yellow Press officiates of racist campaigns of any kind incriminate immigrants that have Islamic religion.

Racism and nationalism, in order to make its arguments seem truthful, must distort reality. So the fact is concealed that in Europe, out of 493 million residents, only 3-4% are Muslims. And still they do not bring the question of who brought them. After World War II, Europe needed cheap workers. Where could they find them? The old empires sufficiently destroyed their colonies. France made mass import of workers from North Africa. Britons brought workers from India and Pakistan. Holland brought Moroccans. Germany preferred to bring Turkish, but also took Greeks, Yugoslavians and Italians. Even the Spanish that did not want Muslims at all for historical reasons brought Muslims massively in 1970 for the needs of their economy.

Mainly, this working force was occupied for the hardest and heaviest jobs, was living in the urban ghettos and never attained the same rights with the natives. Even the second or third generation that had no Islamic education and the vast majority of them went to public schools (in France only 5% of the Muslims go to the mosques), they have not become first class citizens. Surely there are extremists as they exist in every religion. But they are an insignificant minority cut from the Muslim community.  If we can talk about something like that, their problem is not the Islamization of Europe, but the unemployment that hits always the weak.

The extreme right parties as the National Front of France, Liberty party of Austria or the British National Party etc., have invented a neologism: “Euroarabia”. And that means new pogroms. Islamophobia takes the place of the old anti-Semitism that carries basic characteristics to Islam. For example, that behind any world conspiracy Islam and Arabs are hiding. After 9/11, terrorism and Islam were coincided, and was formed the axis of good Bush and of bad Muslim. In Greece, these theories have not found a ground yet, because what  prevails is the native xenophobia and the specialized Turkophobia. But besides this, we have made neither a mosque nor cemetery for the Muslims. And maybe this is our own Islamophobia. At the point where there is no tolerance for the others, the different, there is no democracy and we enter in dangerous paths. And the other becomes the enemy.