More to the point, how does he propose telling the difference?
“Are you a Christian or a Muslim? If you say Muslim you can’t come in.”
I suppose there might be some slightly viable shibboleth, but Muslims can buy rosaries and memorize the Lord’s Prayer as easily as anyone else. Are customs agents and border guards all going to go to seminary as part of their training, to administer theological exams rooting out the nonbelievers? “Ah-ha! The Diet of Worms was in 1521, not 1520! Away with you, Saracen!”
In all seriousness though. Without anger or condemnation. They have right to be angry at the world. However they are targeting the wrong people with that anger, and I would be willing to bet at least a few know it but don’t want to admit for fear of being considered too stupid to have been backing the wrong horse.
I wonder what the response would be to “actually, I find all religions to be human-created methods of control. I reject all of them and refuse to accept their moral authority.” Are atheists more or less acceptable than Muslims, in their eyes?
So do the Japanese. They try to make up for the lack of diversity of actual people from those countries by having natives learn the cuisine of other nations. The results are usually inauthentic and sometimes downright awful (The Japanese do not know how to do Italian food at all, but try their hardest) What is left unspoken is their policy of importing labor from the Middle East and South America in the last 20 years.
Also being a nation with no history of national identity linked to race and religion helps a lot too. When Europeans see a place with more than 5% of population with dark skin they tend to get a little nervous. Don’t get me started on how the average Frenchman views those of Algerian descent. Even the most liberal ones start sounding like David Duke on the subject.
Another reason why we are able to integrate them into our nation more easily is citizenship by birth. It ties families to an American identity within one generation. No distinction is made whether one’s parents were employment based or family based immigrants or even illegal aliens. You are born here, you are a citizen and nobody can take that away from you.
When nativist morons talk about “anchor babies” what they are really saying is they want to attack the rights of natural born US citizens guaranteed the same rights as themselves. Its why legislation to go after the US born children of illegal aliens is always more of a token gesture to appease wingnuts than anything that ever has a chance to make it out of committee.
You don’t usually see decent quality native dairy products. Cheese is usually some variation of processed lifeless dreck, closer to Kraft singles than Polly-o. Tomato sauces are thin, lifeless stuff. Even the jar sauces we are familiar with are not particularly common in supermarkets. Fresh tomatoes and garlic tend to be expensive. Regular use of wheat dough is also uncommon there, so you don’t see decent pizza crusts or Italian style fried stuff. Generally most of the stuff we associate with Italian food has to be imported and the demand is not high enough to make it cheap.
That is not even including the compulsive need to add canned corn, cod roe (which is far better than it sounds) or seaweed flakes to pasta and pizza.
I see this dichotomy in Europe between those northern European countries that confer citizenship by blood, and the southern European countries that confer it by birthright.
That interplay between Germanic and Latin words, family structures, and political views still plays out in the US.
And of course is part of the stock sentiments that assholes play on when manipulating their audience into voting against their interests.
No tomatoes or real cheese? I smell a market opportunity. Thanks for the expansion on that, it makes more sense now. I was thinking they fail at oregano or something.
Its far less self imposed than the result of systematized discrimination. You have generational slums of native born disenfranchised people due to lack of sane naturalization policies. You have a lot of (probably illegal) discrimination in housing and employment. Couple that with national identities which were always keyed in to race and religion and you have a breeding ground for terrorism.
A good analogy would be black neighborhoods in the 1960’s and 70’s. Imagine if the Black Panthers had a “warchest” involving petrodollars and support by dictators. Imagine if you didn’t have figures like MLK around who could garner support for civil rights outside of the black community. Imagine if Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam was not just a self-interested group solely interested in raising hackles by speech to, “make whitey nervous”.
Muslim neighborhoods in the US such as Deerborn, “Tehrangeles” (LA), “Little Baghdad” (Brooklyn) or in North Jersey are fairly well off. They are certainly not ghettos in the literal sense or even figuratively.
Can’t speak for those nutjobs, but I’m always down for brauts and or burgers along with a friendly discussion. We disagree on a few points, but most I’ve met I wouldn’t mind hanging around with more. People are people, you have dickbags in every group and in every group are awesome people.
The only failure regarding oregano in Italian food is using too much of it (son of a pizzeria-owner-turned-wholesaler here). Too much oregano and I assume the cook is Greek or Middle Eastern (which can be delicious, but totally different).
It plays out within countries too. There’s a clearly racist saying in northern Italy (or at least there used to be) that “Garibaldi didn’t unite Italy, he divided Africa.”
