They are mostly confined to menial jobs. They are accused
of spreading crime, terrorism and disease, of being backward and
violent, of refusing to fit in.
Their religion, atavistic and rigid, insists on ritual slaughter and
male circumcision. They rarely mingle socially or inter-marry. Most of
them - though born in European countries - are not allowed to vote.
Brown-skinned and with a marked foreign accent, they are subject to
police profiling and harassment and all manner of racial
discrimination.
They are the new Jews of Europe - its Muslim minorities.
Muslims - especially Arab youths from North Africa - are, indeed,
disproportionately represented in crime, including hate crime, mainly
against the Jews. Exclusively Muslim al-Qaida cells have been
discovered in many West European countries. But this can be safely
attributed to ubiquitous and trenchant long-term unemployment and to
stunted upward mobility, both social and economic due largely to latent
or expressed racism.
Moreover, the stereotype is wrong. The incidence of higher education
and skills is greater among Muslim immigrants than in the general
population - a phenomenon known as "brain drain". Europe attracts the
best and the brightest - students, scholars, scientists, engineers and
intellectuals - away from their destitute, politically dysfunctional
and backward homelands.
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