Welcome violent fundamentalist sharia, because well, that's worked out so well for liberals before.

The French government subsidizes most private primary and secondary schools, including those affiliated with religious denominations, under contracts stipulating that education must follow the same curriculum as public schools and that schools cannot discriminate on grounds of religion or force pupils to attend religion classes.

This system of école libre (Free Schooling) is mostly used not for religious reasons, but for practical reasons (private schools may offer more services, such as after-class tutoring) as well as the desire of parents living in disenfranchised areas to send their children away from the local schools, where they perceive that the youth are too prone to delinquence or have too many difficulties keeping up with schooling requirements that the educational content is bound to suffer. The threatened repealing of that status in the 1980s triggered mass street demonstrations in favor of the status.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_choice#France

In other words, schools cannot become "closed to outsiders" madrassas ... I have no idea how this works for schools not accepting government funds ...

In the United States, education is overseen largely on a state level ... and religious schools, if I recall correctly, didn't get much (if any) government funding for education, nor was there oversight of quality of education. The recently imposed "No Child Left Behind" program is the first Federally mandated comprehensive testing (such as it is). I don't think there are many generalized comparisons to be made between the US and Britain or France. Charter schools, vouchers and privatization are all simmering issues, but again it's largely on a state by state basis ... and highly politicized.

Can I borrow your star?

I never got one even though I asked nicely . . .

:(

O.K. I'm all for treating people equally, and fairly, and taking a live-and-let-live approach to those people who choose to live their lives in ways other than those which I think to be reasonable (e.g., religious fundamentalists of various stripes, people who insist upon feeding their pets diets of nothing but raw organic meat, those who choose to drive gas guzzling SUVs for no other reason than because it makes them feel "safe," people who think that patchouli is a viable substitute for deodorant, etc.). There's (usually) room enough for people of all stripes.

But I'm starting to reach the point where I don't think that any degree of "understanding" will suffice to improve things between a certain percentage of the Muslim world and liberal Western society. The U.K. is home to a large and vibrant Muslim community, who are free to practice their religion as they see fit. And yet despite this freedom and the good life available to them (and from what I've read, most of the men recently arrested appear to be educated, employed, etc.) apparently a bunch of English-born Islamicists decided it was a good idea to blow up a bunch of planes flying out of their biggest airport. Even their failed plan will lead to an aggregate loss of years of others' lives (through, e.g., excessive waits in lines, stress-related cardiovascular damage, and many millions of dollars that could have been used for different socially valuable programs).

If these people (radical Islamists) can't get with the program, realize that their lives are pretty good, and live as civilized people in the societies that permit them to live, then they have no right to live there. In the civilized world, if we don't like the policies of our government, we work to change them using the institutions of our society. We don't just blow up, or attempt to blow up a bunch of innocent people (the occasionally McVeigh-like nut notwithstanding).

One of the key points in Mr. Brown's article is that the 'multicultural' perspective won't solve things here. I agree. What will work is if the (purportedly) vast majority of law-abiding Muslims stands up against the traitors in their midst. In fact, this may be the only thing that will work; insular, religious communities are very difficult for outsiders to penetrate. I don't think that outsiders can succeed in solving this problem, but I think that insiders could - through intelligence, influence, and other social means not available to those outside of their community. I also think that it behooves them to do so, because it won't take too many more homegrown terrorist plots before the entire Muslim community becomes increasingly suspect and unwelcome in the eyes of non-Muslims.

Multiculturalism means having nothinbg in common with your countrymen, except your willingness to ignore one another and work for multinational corporations.

What the UK bombers point out to me, and this aritcle goes a good way to articulate the point, is that the political catergories we have developed since the 1960s (and especially since the culture wars blew in the 80s) don't fit, and that a new set of ideas will have to emerge if we are to diffuse the fundamentalist time bomb ticking everywhere you turn. Conservatives want to priviledge religion (i.e. Bush, Zionism, Sharia) while persecuting terrorists and suspected or likely terrorists. Liberals want to protect freedom but can't fathom how this fits into a world of armed and dangerous religious communities (and I count the US Army now as being one--the Christian one). I don't really see a clear way through this. Rallying the middle against the extremes sounds good, but people in the middle are there often because they don't have the gut-level interest or drive to get politically committed. Counting on them to bear the brunt and carry the fight is unrealistic. We're facing a global crisis of meaning being filled by Islamic fundamentalist and End Times whack-jobs. What to we promise people more compelling than those poison pills?

Then they will love us.

TA-DAAAA!!

NO one expects the Islamic Jihad! Among our weapons are stealth, fake assimilation, grandiose religiosity, authoritarianism, paternalism, jihadism, jism...and, uh, well...hold on.

TA-DAAAA!!

NO one expects the Islamic Jihad!! Among our weapons are stealth, wealth, pelts, robes, fatwas..and..uh.. Oh fuck it.

You get the bleeding idea.