I'm pleasantly surprised at the numbers on Islam, considering the hateful climate in America lately. I would think that 43% is pretty high. But 53% unfavorable towards a group of people that, by definition, aren't even in the game? That's like 53% of Nascar fans being unfavorable towards David Beckham. I read about a study that claims that religious people trust atheists about as much as convicted rapists. I'm REALLLLY hoping that this is an instance of statistics and numbers being manipulated to prove an already existing hypothesis, but I'm not holding my breath. That study was done in Canada, anyway. Who ever believes Canadians?
And really, just saying 'Muslims' is kind of vague. There are huge differences between different groups of Muslims, just as there are amongst Christians. You think that Catholics, Methodists, Calvinists, Mormons, Lutherans, Baptists, blah blah are all the same? Of course not. Otherwise there wouldn't be so many churches in town, everyone would go to the same place. There are different kinds of Muslims, there are different countries that are fundamentally Muslim, and there are differences between the Muslim people who are from the same countries as well as the same religion. Just don't ask me what the differences are. I don't pay all that much attention.
I am not a person that believes in much. I have many ideas, but not many beliefs, and I don't put much stock into other people's beliefs because usually they're just things they were taught as children by parents and teachers or other adults in general. Sorry, but they are people too, and are often wrong, because the things they 'believe' are the same things that they themselves learned as children. That's how bullshit gets perpetuated, and this ofay ain't playin' that. But just because I don't believe the same as others doesn't mean that I can't respect other people and their beliefs. I can. I respect people. I just don't agree with them on many things.
When the average American or Canadian is asked how they feel about Islam and Muslims, I don't give a shit how they reply because I know for a fact that they are responding solely on presupposition and what they've heard on the television. How many Muslims do you know? How many times have you talked to them? How many mosques are there in your town? Have you ever visited one? Ever flipped through the Koran? Just ask yourself. I'm not requiring a response, and frankly, I figure if I did, you'd lie. That's what people do.
Almost ten years ago I moved to Europe, more specifically Belgium, where there are plenty of Muslims. There's a bunch of Jews there as well; outside of New York and Israel itself, you're not going to find a larger population of Jews as you will in Antwerp. But I didn't get to know any Jews there. The Hasids of Antwerp are a clannish lot. When walking through Jewish neighborhoods, I never got so much as 'hello' or 'goed Middag' in response to my greetings, and none frequented the cafe that I worked at. Muslims, however, were all around me and pretty much never shut up.
It was the end of April, 2002 that I flew over. I was engaged to a girl from the Netherlands whose visa had expired in the summer of 2001, so in order to get married it was going to have to be over there. I didn't mind, I'd always wanted to visit Europe and the idea of actually living there was mind-blowing to a small-town, broke-ass Iowa boy like me. So I jumped at the chance. Even if I had to get married to do it...
The journey by air is fuzzy in my memory; there was the jet-lag that I'd never experienced before (it's a ten or eleven hour flight to Amsterdam), and the fact that I hate flying so much that copious amounts of alcohol are required for me to get on a damn plane in the first place. I vaguely remember a layover in Reykjavik, Iceland, and being disappointed that I didn't have the opportunity to check the place out (I'm a big fan of Bjork), and waiting for hours at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam for Jetta to show up (she'd gotten bad information from the airline about when I was arriving), a couple of train and tram rides, and there we were in Antwerp. If I was Paul friggin Theroux, I'm sure I could come up with a better travel tale, but there you have it.
Now, you have to realize this is April 2002, just six months after 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are just heating up, people of all nationalities and religions are a little pissed about the way things were. Already I could see signs with messages like "Bush Is A War Criminal' and 'No Blood For Oil' in windows all over the place as we traveled by street car to our apartment that Jetta had procured a month before, so right off the bat I was a little nervous. And when we finally got to our neighborhood in South Antwerp and walked the couple of blocks from the tram-stop to our apartment, EVERYWHERE I looked all I saw were Arabs standing around in groups, smoking cigarettes and talking to each other in a way that made me think violence was imminent; harsh-sounding dialogue with lots of hand gestures. I later learned that's just how they talk. They could be commenting to someone on how nice the weather is and that the fuzzy kitties their kids have at home are so adorable and life couldn't be any better, and to us Westerners it all sounds like 'I'M GONNA FUCKING CHOP YOUR HEAD OFF AND CHKUDDAH DOWN YOUR NECK.' (That's Arabic for 'shit', I think...)
We get to our tiny little chkuddah-hole of an apartment, two rooms and a kitchen for five hundred euros a month, the toilet's not even IN the apartment, we have to go out into the stairwell to get there (which led to a lot of incidences with me drunkenly peeing in the kitchen garbage can, of course), and I'm not real happy about this. I stood there in a semi-jetlagged, mostly paranoid daze looking out the window at all the Arabs in the neighborhood that she'd moved us into, and I see the street sign on the building across from me. Of course I don't speak the language, I never really did get a handle on it, but I tried sounding it out to myself--Gijzelaarsstraat, Guy-zee-lar-strat...
Me: Honey, how do you pronounce the name of the street we live on?
Jetta: Gijzelaarsstraat!
Me: Yeah, ok...and what does that mean?
Jetta: Mmmm, let me think...Oh, it means Hostage Street.
Me (in my head): WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK?!? YOU GET A TINY, TOO-EXPENSIVE CRACKERBOX APARTMENT, SIX MONTHS AFTER NINE ELEVEN, MY FIRST TRIP ABROAD, IN AN ARAB NEIGHBORHOOD ON FUCKING HOSTAGE STREET?!?!?!? WHAT THE FUCKING FUCKITY FUCK FUCK WERE YOU THINKING???
Me (out loud): Hm. Interesting.
It turned out totally fine; it was a Turkish neighborhood, and though I didn't know it at that moment, Turkish people are TOTALLY cool. Their country is the guiding light of the Arab world, every Muslim country wants their government to be like Turkey's, they are allied with most Western countries (including the US), they don't hate Americans, and this may be a generalization, they seemed to me to be the CLEANEST people on Earth. Seriously, like three times per week all the women would all run hoses out of the ground floor windows, hose the sidewalk down, use these big deck-scrubbers to clean the sidewalks off, wait for them to dry, bring out all those beautiful, ornate rugs from inside, lay them out and clean them with hoses and deck-scrubbers, wait for them to dry, take them back in and THEN AGAIN clean the sidewalks the same way as before. Seriously. I never went into any of their apartments, but I imagine they were spotless. The Turkish bakeries and restaurants are exquisite and very often inexpensive. The people in working in the bakeries, restaurants and shops were always nice and polite to me, even after they found out where I was from.
I cannot say that about the Muslims from other countries that I encountered.
They have a system for shops in Belgium. There are two kinds; dagwinkels (day shops) and nachtwinkels (night shops). The dagwinkels are open from 6am-6pm, the nachtwinkels open the other twelve hours. In the ten or fifteen minutes it took me to walk from my apartment to the Penny Black, where I worked, there were at least ten of each type of shop. Which was a damned good thing, because all of them were owned-operated by Pakistanis or Afghans or Moroccans and they generally LOATHE Americans. It was a familiar, well-defined patter; I would walk into a store, grab some Jupiler or Stella Beer for me, some Kriek (cherry) beer for Jetta, then have to ask the person working, in my intolerably bad Flemish, for 'een pakje Camels and een pakje Marlboro Lights, alstublieft.' After two or three such transactions, the question-and-answer phase would begin.
Clerk: Where are you from? England?
Me: Nope, America. (I was SO tempted to say Canada, but I never did.)
Clerk: (disgusted look) AMERICA?!? Your President is a verrry, veerrryy bad man!
Me: I know! I voted for Gore! (Which was a lie, I didn't vote in the 2000 election, and the guilt is still eating away at my innards.)
At this point, the conversation would go one of two directions. I would either infer through body language and slamming cash register drawers that my business was not welcome and to leave, or they would say 'Wellll... you don't seem like a bad person, but your President is A VERY VERY BAD MAN! What's wrong with Clinton? Why isn't he still President?'
I got that a lot, from people of all nationalities.
At some point, I had to stop going into the stores that did welcome my patronage, as the word would get out that an American was shopping regularly there and soon there would be groups of men standing around and waiting for me to show up. Ribs would be nudged, necks would be craned, words would be quietly hissed, fingers pointed.... I obviously was never kidnapped or even really accosted, but that was because those would be the last times I ever went into those stores. There was always another winkel on the next block up...
That was the process in the dagwinkels on the way to work, the same process in the nachtwinkels on the way home. It was exhausting, really.
There were other instances that stand out in my memory; while wandering around and trying to learn the layout of the city, I stumbled out of an alley and onto this scene, captured by a local newspaper:
(Note: This is the wrong fucking picture. I can't find the right one, but if you look through the archives of Antwerp's Algemeen Dagblaad, you can find the right one. But this is basically what I saw as I popped out of the cobblestone alley onto the Meir.)
This was a seriously anti-American, anti-Israeli, pro-Arab march moving down the Meir, one of Antwerp's biggest shopping districts. The picture doesn't really make clear the size of the march; there were thousands of people, carrying signs that called for Bush's crimes to be accounted for, if not his head, and generally for Americans to burn in whatever Muslims call hell. I just lowered my head and did an about-face back into the dark alley I'd just popped out of and speedily walked home, locked the door and smoked hash until Jetta got home. She called me a pussy and said not to worry, get used to it, these kind of things happen all the time. Yaaaay!
Then there were the riots sparked by the killing of a young Moroccan, an Islamic teacher that was beaten to death by some Belgian guy who's father lived next door. The Belgian guy was a member of the Vlaamse Blok, or the Flemish Bloc, a notoriously fascist organization that thrives in the neighborhood bars and cafes of Flanders whose motto is 'Flanders Is For the Flemish'. They didn't dislike only the Moroccans and Turks that had come to their country in the 1940's and 50's to work in the mines, or the Africans who had come in the last few decades to escape civil wars and racial atrocities or the Ukrainians and Estonians and Belarusians that had flooded the local economy with cheap labor (and better-looking prostitutes also- people were apparently bored with the local labor force), they hated ME too. Because I'm not Flemish. Anyway, the Moroccan riots was big news for a bit, with it's own celebrity, a certain Abou Jahjah. Jahjah was the head of the local European Arab League and they had started patrolling Muslim neighborhoods much in the same way that the Guardian Angels patrol New York and Philadelphia, only that they're there to protect fellow Muslims. I didn't leave the house for a few days around that time. Maybe I am a pussy.
But really, what's my point? All I'm saying, how many problems would I have had if the Muslims I encountered in Belgium had they known I was an atheist? Probably a lot more. I have a feeling that if a survey were to be taken among European Muslims, the 'disapproval' numbers would be a lot higher than 53%, and though I hate to use generalizations and stereotypes, those cats like to cut people's heads off and drag bodies through streets. Or at least stone you to death when you don't follow their rules.
And Christians aren't any better, historically speaking! They might not be chopping off heads or dismembering you when encountered with dissension, but they're pretty quick with a match and a stake.
Does anyone ever take a public survey of atheists on their views? Why bother. We can't even come up with a correct number of people who don't believe in a god or some sort of spiritual force that runs the universe. Pew polls come up with a figure of about 15 million, the USA Today numbers are around 50 million. Either way, we're the most despised group of people on the planet in non-racial matters. If you ask me, based on my experiences, I would say that 4 out of 10 Muslims have been total assholes to me, and 5 out of 10 Christians. As I've mentioned, I haven't known that many Jewish people so I can't really give you a number. Brian Erlich and another kid from school, that's about it, and they were always pretty okay to me. So I guess I could say that one hundred percent of Jews, in my experience, are cool. Not exactly scientific, but there you have it. It doesn't really matter what religion someone belongs to, to me there's about a 50/50 chance that you're a dick.
In the final analysis, my only real point to all this typing, is that 53% of people, religious or otherwise, can suck my balls. Thanks for your kind attention!
Disclaimer: somehow I got the wrong pic of the street riot, that was a pic from 2008, the message on the sign was obviously a play on Obama's campaign slogan. So sue me.
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