There has been plenty of violence and sexual misconduct blamed on muslim men, and for good reason. But could it be possible that we are making a false assumption? We can see very different rates of violence and rapes in different muslim countries. And the muslims that are being accepted into our countries as asylum seekers are mostly coming from the worst of these countries. Is it possible that race or ethnic culture might be the key factor here? Now, I am not saying that Islam and the religious culture associated with Islam has nothing to do with it, but maybe this is a lesser factor. Or possibly there could some enhancing effect of Islam onto the ethnic tendancies that are already there. Some, seeing the waves of crime resulting from the influx of immigrants in their area, have gone so far as to call them "sand nigers" — presumably a comparison to Africans. When I first heard this derogatory reference, my first thought was how silly and ridiculous it sounded. As if they could not think up any creative slur for muslims so had to compare them with Blacks in America. But perhaps there is more of a parallel here than is at first obvious. Geographically, the Middle East is immediately adjacent to Africa. Is this just a coincidence? Could it be possible that different historically isolated populations of humans are like different breeds of dog, with different personality tendancies, and statistically different inclinations towards violence and rape? And if it is genetic, does that mean both groups share psychologically more in common because they come from adjacent regions, or could Africans and Arabs have evolved the traits independantly from eachother, for different reasons? The Middle East is was (up until very recently) an unforgiving desert after all, with scattered population, less societal interaction. There was traditionally plenty of tribal conflict over scarce resources, and livestock were frequently stolen. Or could it be more of a cultural and/or poverty thing? After all, adjacent regions is likely to share more in common with eachother than just genetics. Both Africa and the Middle East are notorious for being full of conflict. There is also plenty of poverty in both regions, and if it were not for all the oil resources, the Middle East would be a much poorer region than it is now. What about family structure? That is no doubt important too, and is probably one of the main reasons there is not more crime in India, for example. If it is "socioeconomic", why are these poor people all coming from Africa and the Middle East? Surely there are poor people coming from southeast asia and India also, so why don't we notice any big problems coming from them? And what I have difficulty understanding is why there is such big differences between the Pakistani immigrants and the Indian immigrants. I thought they were mostly ethnically similar, just different religions? Or does Pakistan have more of a genetic contribution from the Arabs through the muslim invassions in the fifteenth century? This seems rather unlikely, but may not be entirely impossible if the muslims of arab origins in Pakistan had much higher fertility rates, which does indeed seem to be the case now. What got me thinking about this was noticing differences between different ethnicities of muslims. The Turks I have met all seemed very nice, congenial, and friendly. Both the men and the children. But the Arab ones seem to be different. Impatient, hot-tempered, loud, not so friendly. What really got struck me was a youth gang that approached me in the streets. They were shouting and being loud for no apparent reason, then as I was walking minding my own business the three of them sort of surrounded me. One of them had a pocket knife sticking out of his pocket (although he did not pull it out). It was getting dark outside, there was not really anyone else around, and I was a scared. But then a group of people came walking towards us around the corner, and the youth gang sort of just dispersed as if nothing had happened. It really struck me how much this gang of Arab youths reminded me of the Black youth gang thugs I have seen in videos from America.
As you mentioned, I think poverty is a key factor. I was looking at pictures of the riots in Egypt on Monday and I could see the Sun in the background. That means most of these rioters are unemployed/underemployed.
