Ah, you must be a bit out of touch with recent developments in NL. We're soon to have elections and it looks like we'll have Geert Wilders for prime minister, his main motto is 'close the borders', the secondary one is 'the problem is the foreigners' and the third is 'let's throw all those refugees out'. And whether it is exactly 40% or not is immaterial, the numbers are scary.
http://gatesofvienna.net/2015/09/geert-wilders-party-is-the-...
That's 30% declared right there, another 10% undeclared would not surprise me at all.
I'm not out of touch enough to have missed this opinion. But that is not the same as saying that people should be sent back to war zones. We don't have borders with Syria.
But you are right that I don't know specifically what that Dutch politician actually demands other than closing the borders.
"In the region", you can choose whether to send them to:
1) Turkey, an increasingly-authoritarian regime which is already overflowing with millions of refugees, making money with the fanatics and holding mainstream cultural values that tend to despise people from Syria/Kurdistan/Iraq;
2) Lebanon, a country where refugees from other conflicts already account for over a third of the total population, and which is far from stable on its own (half-run by the unofficial Hezbollah militia)
3) Israel. They don't even want "their own" arabs...
4) Iraq, another war-torn country half-owned by the same petro-fanatics;
5) Iran, which is logistically very difficult (being on the other side of warzone Iraq) and, well, not great for people running from religious fanatics;
6) Jordan, another poor and unstable country already full of refugees from previous conflicts.
7) Saudi Arabia. They're the ones funding the fanatics. Enough said.
8) Egypt. Yet another dictator, vaguely more stable, as ruthless as Assad. They also have permanent Palestinian camps which have been there for decades and clearly don't want any more.
9) Palestine/Gaza or Palestine / West Bank. Let's not even go there.
Ok, let's go further then: Libya? Sorry, other war. Tunisia? Another wobbly government, and so close to Europe to make it look silly. Georgia/Armenia/Azerbaijan? Dictators, guerrillas... Yemen? Other war. Oman? Same guy has been in charge for 45 years. We can go on, but tbh, it's all like that. Countries in the region are either f*ed up, autocratic regimes, or are actively sponsoring the lunatics. Decent people have nowhere to go.
Right now, most refugees are in Turkey, Lebanon, Germany and Jordan (not counting the internally displaced). Lebanon and Jordan in particular are completely overwhelmed. What many people (such as the UK government) suggest is to help these countries cope by sending money and logistic support.
Many refugees understandably do not wish to spend the coming years in bleak refugee camps and want to leave the region. That is very understandable and in my opinion the world should agree on refugee quotas according to population size and economic strength. The world includes the United States of America that otherwise likes to make its presence felt in the Middle East.
Also, I'd like to point out that there's no Palestinian camps in Egypt that I know of but good on you seeing through all the BS that Sisi is just another ruthless and bloodthirsty dictator who is by the way a closeted Islamist who holds equally despicable fundamentalist views but he's good enough so far in hiding them under the veneer of reformist moderate leadership.
Armenia estimated 17,000
They prefer that such migrants should travel to Europe, who are naively taking those migrants in.
Meanwhile, people die.
And as for your Israel jab, they're better to the Palestinians than the Arab states in the area are. And none of the Israelis I've talked to seem to have inherently racist beliefs but many of the recently middle-eastern Arabs do. (About the Palestinians.)
Europe fully deserves the migrant crisis. It went into Middle East guns blazing, and expects to come out of it unscathed.
And help we must. We can't sit back and watch madmen kill millions, even if doing so would spite our idiot leaders (on all sides) who caused it in the first place.
I'm pretty sure the other 99.9% are hostages, and not half as committed to the bullshit as you think, except in stockholm-syndrome ways. Soon after they weren't being killed for not being fervent, they'd be as non-religious as we are.
Bush caused most of this current ISIS problem by lying about WMDs. At that point, we're the bad guys invading on a lie. It made us afraid of and hostile towards the Iraqis which caused the Abu Ghraib treatment, etc. He didn't make the terrorists but he provided them with their recruiting propaganda, made an ideal nest, and let them crawl in. It sucks, but we've got an uphill slog because we elected someone who was fine with murdering people on a lie.
No, it's not. I have no expertise in ME affairs, do you? Who is the expert? What country has successfully demonstrated they can "handle it better"?
> Bush ... lie.
Yeah, and people died. I get it. But the next guy was elected partially because he wanted to withdraw from Iraq, and we did. Power vacuum. So we go back in and then what happens when we elect someone who wants to withdraw?
I mostly agree with fineman, except that I think it's too late for backing secular resistance to have much of a point. Just like Iraq, we left them high and dry when they needed us, and so now the only chance of having any significant influence is a direct invasion, which nobody has much stomach for anymore.
I'd summarize as grow up already. The fingers of Islamist and totalitarian interference are already all over this conflict, and have been for decades. The West keeping out of it only guarantees that one or the other will win and any chance of secular democracy will lose.
"We" didn't do "nothing". Countries like France, Israel, US, Turkey and Saudi Arabia spent years destabilising Assad and funding those "opposition groups" that eventually started the civil war. Syria originally was a USSR satellite with ambitions of regional hegemony (they basically ruled Lebanon and deeply influenced Jordan), so they had to be beaten into submission. However, there was never a real plan to get involved on the ground, that was just a huge bluff; Assad and Putin saw right through it. "We" (and French elites above all) did way too much already, and it's high time we stopped.
> The fingers of Islamist and totalitarian interference are already all over this conflict
That's really rich. "Our" best ally in the region is an absolutist monarchy running an Islamist totalitarian regime, the US just sold them a new crapload of weapons... nobody gives a shit about that stuff. What "we" care about is that the "right" totalitarian mofo is in charge, like in Egypt. Everything else is theatre and propaganda.
The real solution is less weapons and more diplomacy. Get the interested parties in a room and throw away the key until they come up with a shared plan. The US/Russia agreement is a first step in that direction, next it's for Saudi, Turkey and Iran to work out an agreeable compromise and pull their weight in the right direction. Otherwise, until countries like Turkey and Saudi keep buying IS oil and selling them weapons, you can invade a thousand times and achieve nothing except increasing shareholder value in the defence sector.
Reminds me of that Adam Curtis documentary Bitter Lake[1]. I wonder if Oil Countries are the real reason these terrorist keep appearing again and again.
I bet the moment world gets rid of oil, is the day Islamic terrorist stop appearing.
A secular democracy requires some kind of enlightenment on the part of the people, and usually this enlightenment happens after a great sacrifice has been made (something on the level of a war of independence) or through the slow and steady movement towards universal suffrage by way of representation.
All that ends up happening when you give democracy to a population that is not ready for it are strongmen who vote themselves additional executive power through legislative hook or crook leading all the problems that a secular democracy is supposed to prevent.
Whether or not the West gets involved, one side will win or lose guaranteed. Trying to pick the least evil from the outside is an exercise in gambler's ruin.
At any rate, the 'secular' fighters are now more often called 'moderate' rebels. Hell, Al Queda (fighting in Syria as the Al-Nusra Front) is moderate compared to Daesh. Since 2012 they and other 'moderate' Islamist groups received funding and weapons from the US, UK, France, Israel, the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia. Many of the arms ended up in Daesh's hands anyway. One doesn't hear a lot about the, at one point much lauded, Free Syrian Army except that many in their ranks have defected to Daesh.
The stuff I mentioned above is as close to factual as it gets in this chaotic war. The information comes from so-called reliable media sources with supporting documents provided. This doesn't guarantee absolute truth of course.
It's interesting how almost every person has strong opinions about the clusterfuck unfolding in Syria/Iraq and the role Daesh plays in it, but very few of those people actually have enough trustworthy information to make an informed opinion. The fog of war and the spread of disinformation, and just plain old misinformation, is as relevant here as in any other war.
It doesn't help that Senator McCain advocated supplying Daesh with weapons to shoot down Russian fighter aircraft and even had his picture taken posing with Daesh. The US and its allies and lackeys have a rich history supporting and arming extremely vile regimes and insurgent groups when it serves their interests.
The West provided the fertile soil from which Daesh sprouted and now the chickens have come to roost. Big time.
In any type of rebellion, or any other organization for that matter, the views of the group will naturally change over time to be more in line with whatever the source of funding and resources wants them to be. Let a couple of years go by with the West providing essentially no support, and all of the support coming from the Gulf Arab states with a history of exporting extremism, and naturally any moderate groups and moderate elements in less moderate groups will wither and fade away, and the extremist elements will come to the front. The more time goes by, the harder it is to find any actual moderation to back.
Whatever moderate and secular-leaning elements there may have been at the beginning, they've long since withered and died, and there isn't much of anybody good left to back, aside from the Kurds. We have the Iranian-Russian aligned Assad regime, versus the ISIS extremists so out there that even Al-Quada is fighting them. I don't see much in the way of good options now, honestly.
It might have been different if we had backed groups heavily from the start and gotten that view-shifting effect working in our favor. Of course, it also might not have. And it's hard to fault the American people for not wanting to get deeply involved in another messy Middle-Eastern war. But if you care about spreading democracy and liberal western values, this is pretty much the worst thing to do.
But EU is IMO losing just as much. The borders are being redrawn between states, there is palpable tension between EU members(Poland, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia). And weren't abolition of state borders and prevention of another Hitler the motivation behind EU? If so, its failing apart (not a syntax error, figure of speech).
> And weren't abolition of state borders and prevention of another Hitler the motivation behind EU?
That never was openly stated afaik but it would seem to be that the architects of the EU had as one of their main driving forces the fact that they wanted to re-structure the EU in such a way to avoid another war. The problem with their approach is that they did many things without sufficient buy-in of the residents and on top of that started out by setting up all kinds of irrational schemes inside the EU to funnel money to their pet special interests. If they could have waited a few decades with tricks like that it probably would have worked a lot better.
The major issue that I see with a really unified EU is that the divergence of cultures within the EU is enormous, much more so than say the Americas, where a strong federal government was the result of a large group of people uniting behind a single good cause. And even then - in spite of that much more homogeneous culture - they had to have it out in a civil war to beat the remainder into submission (and that war was a war of ideology as much as it was a war over money and power).
> If so, its failing apart (not a syntax error, figure of speech).
Unfortunately, yes, it looks that way. The Euro is quite fragile, the intra-communion tension at record high levels since the previous world-war.
Separatists may get emboldened by all this, the refugees are so much kindling on a fire that is already smoldering. It will take some really smart people with the long view to repair this.
In that bastion of critical thought called 'the Onion' they had a pretty good summary of such a solution:
http://www.theonion.com/article/northern-irish-serbs-hutus-g...
But as all seemingly extremists becoming prime ministers, he'll eventually learn to see a bit more of the bigger picture and cool down if he gets in office.
</humor>
This is a very scared, very scary person who is pushing every emotional button available with his policies and rhetoric who has the backing of a much too large segment of the country already. If you had told me 25 years ago that this would happen in NL I would not have believed you but I'm witnessing it. This whole thing started with the murder of a guy called Pim Fortuyn, the previous populist (who at least made some sense some of the time), he would have done some damage but not enough to seriously threaten the country. The segment woken up by the voice of Fortuyn was then handily co-opted by Wilders, who is now in an excellent position to put his play-book into action. It's super scary to watch friends and even relatives succumb to this idiots words and to hear his words being echoed by people dear to you.
It's like watching a re-run of Germany, ca. 1935, and then too people were saying 'Oh, it won't be that bad, he's just going to wake up when he actually has power' and we all know how that one ended.
Again, fortunately, NL is a crappy little country, but don't forget that Hitler came from Austria, not from Germany to begin with, who knows what his plans are. There is a large body of similar minded people in Belgium, and a much larger one still in France led by one Marine Le Pen. You can bet they're planning some sort of collaboration (too early to call it an anschluss) once they have managed to capture some power.
It's like watching the periscope of a submarine moving through a flotilla of merchant boats.
That's incredibly depressing. I only know of Geert Wilders from the court case (it was part of a law class), but I always assumed he was some uber-fringe politician who would never get anywhere near high office.
The world is entering a new period of radicalization and I'm very worried about the consequences.
But then again these are just polls. And then there needs to be a majority coalition.
But it's a far cry from the Netherlands I knew in the 90's.
Back on the topic: there are some really disturbing messages on social networks and in politician mouths regarding the refugees (who are called migrants here).
And yes, the coalition is pretty much our hope right now, but Wilders is ex VVD and SP might even join (they have a lot of similar things in their programs even though they're on opposite points of the political spectrum in nl, how that happened is another story). A 'cordon sanitaire' has been discussed but it is also already being broken.
The Netherlands that you knew in the 90's is dead, 25 years of divisive politics have seen to that.
Yes, it is absolutely deplorable how our 'chosen leaders' are positioning themselves and how they use the Paris attacks as a fig leaf cover to do things they nominally would have nothing to do with, except now that it is politically expedient.
Threatening to close your border to incoming foreigners is nothing like like closing your border, enslaving locals trying to flee you, and murdering them systematically.
And there's a difference between a leader being elected once on a wave of fear and the leader declaring themselves god's representative on earth - let the slaughter begin.
There was a boat of Jewish refugees that Roosevelt hoped would be accepted to Cuba but whom the United States was unwilling to accept. 254 of those refugees ended up murdered in the Holocaust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St._Louis#.22Voyage_of_the_....
Well, only 50+ years ago there was an over 40% population in the US that thought that blacks were inferior and shouldn't sit in the same restaurants/hotels/schools with whites. In fact it was even law in some states.
Beyond that, there were about all major western countries, France, UK, Belgium, Holland, Italy, etc, that had other people enslaved in colonies up until the sixties. 2+ billion people had their countries managed by foreigners, and their fellow countrymen tortured and executed when asking freedom (and sometimes, just killed for fun).
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/apr/18/britain-destroyed-...
http://www.monbiot.com/2005/12/27/how-britain-denies-its-hol...
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/inside-france...
http://www.theplaidzebra.com/human-zoos-one-europes-shameful...
Heck, even in Paris itself, the French police famously killed over 200 Algerians marching for their country's freedom in a single day in 1961 -- and it took them 40+ years, after all officials were dead or too old, to finally admit it and ask for an apology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_massacre_of_1961
These countries also thought that they should have a say as to whether a remote country should have this or that president or regime -- to the point of toppling legitimate regimes, bombing those countries, coming to assist one party or another in a civil war, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
There have been over 2 million victims of those interventions in the last 10 years alone. Every despicable hit by muslim terrorists (and we all agree its despicable) was met with 4-5 orders of magnitude many more innocent victims on those countries.
If some muslim country managed to harm 1/100 that number of, say, Texans, where would the percentages of "tolerance" and "acceptance" towards them go?
We should condemn all violence -- not forgive the one that has better PR and is done by cool looking people who have the same background as us.
I suspect you too have a bulging bookmark folder like I do of hypocritical western behaviour.
However the battle against militant jihadi extremists is one issue where 'we' are completely in the right. Completely.
No need to apologise for past wrongs. If we have regarded life as too cheap in the past, that is irrelevant to ensuring your own family cannot be killed.
Now prior actions of our own may have exacerbated, strengthened and accelerated the militant jihadis ( Iraq, Afghanistan ). But even without our own errors and crimes militant jihadis would have arisen eventually.
The jihadis have so many 'reasons' to kill us. If some 'reasons' did not exist because we didn't invade Iraq say, or we addressed other 'reasons' ( say for example we disbanded Israel ) there are just so many more 'reasons' left for the jihadis that single us out for killing.
Lets say Iraq was still under Saddam and Syria under Assad. No ISIS perhaps. What then about al Qaeda, the Taliban, al Qaeda in the Yemen, Boko Haram, Jemaah Islamiyah.
And the militant jihadis have found a brainwashing method that repeatably draws from a small but replenishing minority of evil, vain and stupid young people.
Young people join ISIS not because they are "evil" (what, are they Darth Vader?). They join because ISIS makes a compelling case that the world would be a better place if it was rid of western domination. I'm not saying we should try to prove them wrong by being really nice or something, I think it's too late for that, but it helps to understand this.
ISIS gives them a clear path to rectify the situation. Terrorism is pathetic militarily, killing 100 civilians is no accomplishment. However it is brilliant strategically.
Terrorist attacks cause the western world to completely fly off the handle and give the terrorists everything they could ever ask for. So far, we've gifted them 3 countries (there's no way they could have ever invaded by themselves, but we did it for them). We've also gifted them with a huge number of weapons, which were originally intended for such entities as "the free Syrian army" and "democratic Iraq".
All of this is made possible by the cowardice of western morons whose entire education on geopolitics comes from Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. Please stop helping the terrorists.
People love this kind of fantastical good/evil stuff. Who's good and who's evil depends on what side you're on, of course. Like that Russian book I heard about that's a rewrite of Lord of the Rings from Sauron's perspective.
Look at what games boys and young men so often choose to play. When I was seven I was out in the forests with my friends with fake guns. It was really fun. Then I put down childish things and got into Counter-Strike. I loved playing the terrorists. The AK-47 was just great and the avatars looked pretty cool.
This is kind of off-the-cuff sociological speculation or something, but: religion is a very powerful aesthetic phenomenon. In combination with war, you get a combination of thrills, ecstasy, excitement, danger, meaning, and hope that's hard to beat, for certain personality types.
Look at the ISIS propaganda videos. They're not laying out a rational strategy for improving the world. They're presenting an aesthetic image, a very masculine one, full of cars and guns and desert missions and fighting and stuff. Combined with the pious literalist faith that also has its own appeal. They do offer a hope for a future world, a glorious Islamic caliphate and whatnot, probably the deserts will bloom and peace will reign and Muslim Jesus will rise from the dead.
They say things like "Are you satisfied with your shitty life in suburban London or Paris? Do you like the way people look at you? Do you feel alive? Do you love your life? ...no? Come here. We not only have an exciting virile lifestyle full of action and terrible sublime beauty, but also we are the true messengers of the true prophet and God is on our side."
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isi...
I will not speak about young people joining ISIS, but I've known people who joined or wanted to join the military strictly to kill. These folks exist. You give them a strong ideological or philosophical reason to kill for and it brings in some of those sitting on the fence. In the case of the US military, I've not known anyone who made it through bootcamp with these attitudes (though I'm sure plenty have). They actively weed out these folks because, while their main mission involves killing, psychopaths aren't usually good soldiers. Groups like ISIS have no qualms in this regard, so these attitudes will survive their equivalent of basic training.
And women can desire to kill too. Or see conservative Christian women in the US (where I am) choosing to deliberately set aside careers and other "modern" or "masculine" things for their beliefs.
I can't explain that either, seems bizarre to me to deliberately reduce your agency, but some people think it's the thing to do.
Bullshit. The people who are destroying ancient statues and slaughtering other Muslims didn't sign up for some grand scheme of bringing down the west after a reasoned argument. They signed up because they are violent psychopaths and they were given an avenue to do all of the fucked up things that struck their fancy.
I think it's more like gangs. Kids join gangs because they want to belong to something bigger than themselves. ISIS offers something similar to people who feel alienated from the West.
If they signed up because of this, boy I wouldn't want to be in their shoes once they realize their mistake! Judging by everything I read, ISIS rulers enforce a strict Sharia law, with patrols making sure everyone is using the correct dress code.
I've also seen a documentary with a woman going undercover into ISIS-held territory (I think it was by the BBC) which claimed that Jihadists that break the "law" get killed, and that in fact ISIS welcomes any reports of misbehavior of their troops and punishes them hardly. ISIS seems to be ruling their territory with an iron hand, it's definitely not the land of do as you please and kill whom you fancy.
I was comparing social attitudes not counting casualties of armed conflict and its repercussions. Comparing these two things quantitatively makes very little sense.
The conservative advocates of Sharia who execute people for their sexual orientation are executing people who live right now in those countries. They don't execute European or American racists from the 1950s and they don't do it as an act of revenge for the Iraq war (that I strongly opposed by the way)
Yes. So other countries should not encourage the tolerant co-patriots of those fanatics to adopt their attitudes -- e.g. by showing a plundering, hypocritical and hateful face of western democracies that destabilize the region, arm dangerous fanatics like ISIS and Laden, meddle in their politics, pillage their resources, and while condemning backwards islamism at the same time hi-five equally backwards Saudi regimes.
Because that's what has been happening. All of these countries were much more tolerant and humane 30 and even 50 years ago.
I'm also not really sure that I'd paint 1985-era Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Death-To-America Iran as markedly better than they are now. The region has historically been ruled by despots. Western intervention has occasionally (by design or accident) made things worse, but the West has the same responsibility in the rise to power of noted humanitarian Khomeiny as France's position during the negotiation of the Treaty of Versailles.
https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-14-African-countries-a...
You are using the "someone did some bad things some time ago (and now that I've put things into perspective for you), lets be open minded about another someone doing another something bad right now, because it's only fare!" argument.
So many misunderstandings I don't know where to start.
First, did I say anywhere "lets allow another someone do another something bad right now, because it's only fare!"?
No, and that's why you didn't directly quote from my comment. In fact in it I very precisely write: "We should condemn all violence -- not forgive the one that has better PR and is done by cool looking people who have the same background as us.".
Second, I don't try to justify or excuse (I mean, Jesus!), just to put in perspective and explain. And one main I try to explain is that "40% of people" believing a horrible thing is neither irredeemable, nor unknown for even in our countries, even in the time of our fathers and grandfathers. Those people grew up in countries that resulted of those conditions and heard those horror stories from their relatives.
Third, as I noted it's not "some time ago", it's something ongoing. Foreign powers still plunder, meddle and hold those countries down, with unbelievably far greater blood tolls than all those attacks combined.
So, more like "If you fuck people over repeatedly, including having a history of enslaving their parents, you shouldn't be that surprised that they might come and hit you back, or that they develop a cult of hating you and what you stand for".
That's the point, you are putting in perspective unrelated things and unrelated places and unrelated times...
None of the events you listed are related to the polling results that almost half of Muslims think that death should be the penalty for apostasy. That's something inherent to the ideology and its resulting culture.
That's why it's called a perspective though: because it has to expand the places and times (the "perspective view") we're taking into account to explain a situation.
But while expanded, they are not "unrelated" -- the places that had those things done to them are the homelands of those people, all have ancestors, relatives and friends that suffered from those things. And similar things (interventions, plundering etc) happens to this very day. Heck, those ISIS fanatics were pampered initially by foreign powers to topple the, call it whatever but at least stable, regime.
>None of the events you listed are related to the polling results that almost half of Muslims think that death should be the penalty for apostasy.
When you hold people in misery, fear and bad living conditions (and poor education), don't be surprised if they revert or held closer to backwards beliefs. Carpet bombing and plundering creates more fanatics than investing or opening a school.
So they probably would agree with this passage from their bible: Deuteronomy 13:6-10:
“If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers; Namely, of the gods of the people which are round about you … Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him: But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die.”
So... Yea. Oh, and in the 80s in high school, I had a loaded gun held to my head and was told that if I did t believe in god (which god??!!) I must surely be worshipping satan. (The kid with the gun was pulled away by his friends. Lest I forget to mention it, this was a school in Texas. Somehow that is relevant, I'm sure.)
No. The bible says itself that those laws no longer apply.
Romans 7:6 But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code.
Galatians 5:13-15 For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another.
That never stopped Christian fanatics from selectively mix and matching the Bible.
For so-called Christians, ALL the Old Testament stuff should no longer apply when it clashes with what Christ said (which is like all of the time).
But they still prefer the Old Testament's more barbaric and base rules than what's in the Gospels.
Especially in light of this: http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/nov/17/te...
Which shows that the people fleeing are mostly Muslim. Muslims are more likely to be the victims of terrorist violence, not the perpetrators.
Having read various internet comments over the past few days, I'm doubting if that number has gone down any since then.
And to make it clear, I'm not concerned about the number of people coming to Europe. I'm concerned about the attitudes of conservative Islam, anywhere in the world.
That statement really doesn't make much sense at all. People are fleeing a war, among them people from the 40% and the 60% group alike. And no one in Europe is advocating throwing anyone back into a war zone. Many want the refugees stay somewhere in the region instead of letting them come to Europe by the millions.
It's not my opinion, but please don't compare that opinion with people who advocate that homosexuals, adulterers and apostates should be put to death. There is no 40% group of the population in Europe that holds views that are anywhere near as disgusting as that. Your relativism goes too far.
[Edit] And just to make it clear, I do not believe that it is really 40% who really hold those opinions. It's probably less. I hope.