A very interesting article by Fyodor Lukyanov. Liberal Xenophobia The starting point is not the rejection of outsiders as such, but rather the need to protect the achievements of modern Western society: openness, tolerance, and diversity. Muslims living in European countries are perceived as carriers of an aggressive, intolerant traditionalism. Instead of enjoying the rights and freedoms that the developed world offers them, they impose their own ideas of social order on it. In the eyes of European liberals, they are obscurantist and deeply corrupt at their core. Not only do they hinder the integration of their fellow believers into the Western environment, they also try to dictate to Europe—which has spent centuries moving toward the triumph of humanism and tolerance—how it should conduct itself. http://www.gazeta.ru/column/lukyanov/2176320.shtml The author is the editor-in-chief of the magazine Russia in Global Affairs. The very existence of magazines like that is one of the biggest mysteries in the media world for me. But the article is excellent anyway.
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