[New York City]
I have been strenuously avoiding reading the newspapers about the whole Mohammed cartoons controversy, but it does seem strange to me that here in New York, I don't think I have seen one veiled woman in midtown since I arrived. Very different from Paris, the U.K., and Germany, where there are women in veils everywhere. However, that was not true ten or fifteen years ago. The veils are new.
Yesterday I read an article in the Atlantic Monthly, by Caitlin Flanagan, about how young girls in America are more and more likely to be giving oral sex to boys. Young girls, thirteen and fourteen years old. Here are a few quotes from the article.
"The dominant culture in this country...has abandoned girls in every possible respect....I believe we are raising children in a kind of post-apocalyptic landscape in which no forces beyond individual households--individual mothers and fathers-- are protecting children from pornography and violent entertainment. The 'It takes a village' philosophy is a joke, because the village is now so polluted and so desolate of commonly held, child-appropriate moral values that my job as a mother is not to rely on the village but to protect my children from it."
A lot of people are saying this, from Mary Pipher in Reviving Ophelia to countless mothers and fathers in worried conversations in their living rooms.
I see everything as a mother. If something makes society a worse place to raise children, I don't see how it can be good. It's one reason I am in France, where it is a little easier for children to stay innocent.
"For how but in custom and ceremony
are innocence and beauty born?"
Beyond the problems in the Middle East, beyond oil and Israel and mullahs and unemployment, I think some substantial part of the rise of fundamentalist Islam is that Muslims look at contemporary Western culture and cannot want that.
i think your comments were really naive. Girls in France aren't giving Blow jobs at 14 perhaps but they are having anal sex at 16! islam is a fundamentalist religion, its just taken the west a long time to see it. and unfortunately the left that looked away during Nazism is doing it again, it has become more acceptable to be a muslim in the west, we are more likely to appease them, to blame their follies, as they do, on our own culture rather than look at the culture which is creating this. And you've proven their point, by saying that there is credence to their lifestyle - blaming the west - or a media study on a bunch of slutty kids in a big city, look instead what is lacking in islam - the illiterate women, the physical abuse, the lack of control women especially have in their own lives (that is, if they are not killed for getting raped or refusing to be raped or married to their uncle). If your first thought at reading this is why she must be a racist, step back for a second. Ignore french tv and focus on the truth.
give yourself even 10 minutes to read http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/
or watch a translated video from Al Jazerra http://www.memri.org/video/
or wonder why it is not safe for you to travel on the metro late at night by yourself. is it the American girls who give blow jobs at 14 or is it the Muslim youth who grab, spit, steal and try to rape you on the metro. Or gang rape the teen girls of Sarcelles ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/audiovideo/programmes/crossing_continents/europe/1456204.stm ) It is not the Western culture that prevents me from wearing a Star of David on the streets of France, or carrying a bag from a casher shop. And who was to blame for kidnapping, torturing, burning, tying a Jewish man to a tree and then killing him?! Ah yes, Muslim youth! . http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3218190,00.html
which future would you want for your child?!
Posted by: teri | 20 February 2006 at 04:57