Word: islam
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...have lived under an air of suspicion from the wider society since the 2004 murder of controversial film-maker Theo van Gogh by a Islamist radical. That killing and the subsequent arrests of extremists plotting terror attacks have understandably raised Dutch concerns over violence committed in the name of Islam, but they don't justify the over-kill and subtle bigotry behind the promised ban. Opponents of the move note that only a few score women wear a burqa or niqab in the Netherlands, and that such high-profile measures directed at a statistically irrelevant minority are really a message...
...what could the U.S. do differently? There's no simple answer to the challenge of political Islam, terrorism and authoritarianism. But by using its considerable capacity to decisively address the root causes of conflict, the U.S. would bolster moderate forces like Siniora and isolate governments and groups that exploit unresolved grievances to justify violence. Otherwise, existing trends will continue and the region will see further polarization, extremism and war-and perhaps the deployment of U.S. troops to additional trouble spots...
...movie’s revelry in Muslim “backwardness” remains awkwardly below the surface. Many of the gags, in fact, are not dependent on an explicit understanding of the movie within the context of the West’s recent encounters with Islam...
Overall, “Borat” provides a relatively unthreatening forum for expressing people’s exasperation and anxiety about the West’s encounters with Islam. But it does so in an oblique way. We can laugh at Borat’s ridiculous anti-Semitism, without having to think about Ahmadinejad’s ominous statement that Israel should be “wiped...
...unlikely that Sacha Baron Cohen designed his Borat character in order to capitalize on this anxiety. He introduced the character several years ago on “Da Ali G Show,” before Islam had become a major part of the political discourse. But if America were not mired in Iraq and if Muslim relations with the West and the War on Terror—or as Borat calls it, the “War of Terror”—were not so important, “Borat” would not have sold as many...