My learning curve was steep. When I look back, it's as if one day the whole business wasn't even on my radar screen, and the next day I understood that it was the most important issue of our time.
It happened in Amsterdam, a city I flipped for in 1997 and moved to a year later.But it wasn't till 1999, when I lived briefly in a predominantly Muslim neighborhood, that I took in the fact that the city was divided into two radically different and almost entirely separate communities. One of them, composed mostly of ethnic Dutchmen, was secular, liberal, and (owing to a very low birthrate) dwindling steadily; the other, composed of immigrant Muslims, lived in tradition-bound, self-segregating enclaves whose autocratic leaders despised democracy and whose population (thanks to high birth and immigration rates) was climbing rapidly. This division, I soon realized, was replicated across Western Europe. Clearly, major social friction-and more-lay down the line.
No comments:
Post a Comment