A co-worker just said: The rioting in France proves Bush was right!

He says that the rioters are muslim, therefore it is terrorism... I then explained to him, that the rioting has nothing to do with terrorism, or Islamism..etc..etc... I'm not so sure he accepted my explanation. His response was: We'll see.

I told him to stop listening to Limpballs and Boortz, and then he would get a better analysis of what is going on there...

I suggested watching Amy Goodman on democracynow... and he said he wants a more middle of the road news show not a liberal leaning show. I then said "do you mean like Fox"... At least he said No. He doesn't watch Fox....

My co-worker is a good guy, but he is being seriously misinformed and I will admit he is not a deep thinker.

I wonder how many others out there have this same take on the France rioting?

That source at least will help sow some seed of doubt about some of the crap he gets from Limpballs Boortz (booze).

...of how far right the Radical Rightwing has diverted us.

I don't know a fairer, more objective news program than DN!

NGU.

but anyone who burns their OWN town in an act of defiance is a fucking idiot, and deserves to be sent off to live in the mountains.

other items with that bullshit. maybe they will be able to compare the two and find out which is not true. Maybe.....

His insight into the middle east is pretty well accepted. He cuts through a lot of the bullshit that americans are told about the middle east. Most american hear anything about the arabic people and automatically assume it is about Islam.


http://www.juancole.com/2005/11/problem-with-frenchness-readers-have.html


AValdoux

serious big eddie is great for people like your co worker.. Amy Goodman is too far "left" for him, but big eddie speaks the lingo he does...I have not listened to big eddie ina couple weeks so I have no idea if he has covered the riots.

Another tactic you may try is explain to him that the riots have the same economic origin as our cities going up in flames in the sixties: Racism.

Ed Schultz definitely cuts through the neo-con BS. I especially love the fact that Ed does not screen his calls. Amazing.

However on the riots in Europe I gotta say it's a lot more complex then simple rascism. See this article:

Given continued immigration and high Muslim fertility rates, the National Intelligence Council projects that Europe's Muslim population will double by 2025.

Unlike their U.S. counterparts, who entered a gigantic country built on immigration, most Muslim newcomers to western Europe started arriving only after World War II, crowding into small, culturally homogenous nations. Their influx was a new phenomenon for many host states and often unwelcome. Meanwhile, North African immigrants retained powerful attachments to their native cultures. So unlike American Muslims, who are geographically diffuse, ethnically fragmented, and generally well off, Europe's Muslims gather in bleak enclaves with their compatriots: Algerians in France, Moroccans in Spain, Turks in Germany, and Pakistanis in the United Kingdom.
more ...
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20050701faessay84409/robert-s-leiken/europe-s-angry-muslims.html

that what is happening in France is like our Watts Riots.

So that would be an internal problem with France..the Muslims are their poor, disenfranchised and didn't the police accidently kill two Muslim youths?

On edit~ bush isn't right about ANYTHING..he's a radioactive lyin' fool.

Seems to be the only talking point the freeps have nowadays. Just ask them if the Rodney King riots were terrorism related also.

If we do not crush the GOP and get the country back on its feet. The reason for the riots is deliberate and repeated provocation by its Fascist interior minister, following decades of racism and impoverishment of the Muslim minority.

In our country, the group most likely to riot will be a much larger one: the poor and the former middle class (newly poor). This poses a real threat to our security if we do not begin acting to reverse the injustices of the Bush regime, and fast.

I remember reading about an American who once said; "You have nothing to fear, but fear itself".

All the Repukes have left can be summed up with one word....

BOO

Mods, we need a new smiley of a ghost with the word "boo" under it. Everytime the repukes try to scare us, we simply post the smiley.

Yes, many people believe this is a muslim thing. It is, but not in the way they think. There are Muslim fanatics there who are taking advantage of the situation by recruiting these youth. But there are also Imams there who got on their megaphones and urged the rioters to stop. My boyfriend listens to all these radical right wing radio shows (it's the slant on radio around here). They are all stressing the "muslin" aspect of the situation. They do not understand the history of France and what happened in Algeria, the importation of cheap labor, etc. They are cheering this because France did not support the war in Iraq. I visited France a couple of years ago and stayed in one of the suburbs where they had some of the trouble. It was not one of the dangerous Banleius, but on the train into Paris, we passed the worst areas. After I got back I researched this situation and tried to explain to my boyfriend about Le Pen and everything. This disenfranchisement has been going on for decades, but has just now gotten this bad. My point is, the right wing on the radio is just thinking France is getting what it deserves, but as usual, slanting everything to support it's narrow views.

violence, it hardly proves anything right about Bush's Goblal War on Terra.

If anything it would tend to show that the West cannot invade, intervene or generally fuck with Islamic countries without their pattern of imperialist actions provoking dire reactions scattered throughout the west. Not anymore. Bush's position is that what we did to Iraq we did out of concern for its people and because we wuv muslims soooo much. It's kind of hard to maintain an excuse like that when, all over the world including inside western countries, Muslim people are rejecting the excuse as a lie and begin to take to the streets to demonstrate their anger. I'm not saying that's the reason behind the riots in France, but your friend does. Either that or he believes that Muslims are all out to destroy the West, because that's part of their religion, or their religion's principles are eternally hostile to the west, and this development in France is just stage II or stage III in their dark design to overrun our white chrisian homelands. Bush's position was that we could invade Iraq and transform it and the whole Middle East and do so at no cost to peaceful order here at home. Or even darker: that we could transform Iraq into a battleground where we would have an all-out fight with Islamic terrorists for as long as necessary with no cost to peaceful order at home--remember we fight them there so we don't have to fight them here?
In either case, if we accept your friend's characterization of the riots as part of the Islamic terrorist movement against the west, then it's clear that Bush was wrong not right about our ability to invade and transform Iraq and to keep all the undesireable repercussions contained to Iraq. By wrapping a war of conquest up in rhetoric of democratizing the Islamic Crescent, Bush has shown that he thinks he can wage a "Clash of Civilizations" style conflict, but that it will be one-sided. By his own description of the goal behind the GWOT/Iraq-War, we are trying to transform an entire region of the planet by force of arms and to change its culture; but in this grand design of his, they, the-people-to-be-changed, are only going to see the immediate circumstance of our occupation of Iraq and go along with it as acceptable, because Saddam was a monster, instead of reacting to our overall goal of dictating to them how they must live and govern themselves and fighting back against us on every front. They'll never catch on to our true aim of changing their entire culture--that apparently is the sole provision in Bush's plan for the possibilities of an escalating conflict. But Muslim rioting in France (if it is, in fact, what your friend thinks it is) would argue the contrary: the rioting would indictate that Muslims have reacted to the general threat of the Bush War on Terra, they have glimpsed the larger goal of the GWOT, and are fighting back. They have seen the Global War on Terrorism as a Global War on Islam and are joining the fight wherever they live. And what has happened in Jordan could be cited as another counterexample exposing the idiocy of Bush's belief in the simplicity of his civilizational conflict (Much more plausibly in my opinion, since I disagree with your friend about the motivations behind the riots in France).

Something like Bush proposes to do cannot stay contained to one neatly bounded theater of conflict. It will tend to spread to the corners of the world, just as the grand plan was sweeping and grandiose. It's expanding and escalating, and the world may be plunged into pervasive conditions of instability because of it and the idiocy of the chimp who brought it on.

applaud. As one of my learned & well-educated European friends, who was married in Paris in the 40's, and has a child and grandchildren in a Paris suburb, explained it to me, the French have always taken the attitude that if someone immigrates to France, they must accept France as it is. One of the major problems for Muslims was the French attitude that women are equals to men. So decades ago, when the issue came up of Muslim girls covering their heads with scarves in school, the French govt. absolutely forbad it. Such behavior by women was considered to make them subservient.There was no debate on the matter. Similarly, there was no question that any immigrant to France would learn to speak French. That' s where your conservative co-worker's values come in, because I bet he really resents the Spanish option given to callers by US businesses, banking machines, govt. agencies.I heard one of the teenage rioters interviewed, and he pointed out several issues like the ones I mentioned, and said that Muslims had more freedom in the US, the UK and the Netherlands.