Posner on Islamist Violence
Judge Richard Posner has written this essay about Islamist Violence and Immigration Policy written July 31, 2005. Given current riots in France, you should read this point of view.
[tease] (emphasis added)
Advocates of the European model point to the pockets of poverty in the United States, but may not realize that poverty cannot be abolished without recourse to measures that produce the social pathologies that we observe in Europe. Social mobility implies the opportunity to fail. If society protects jobs, the employment opportunities of ambitious newcomers are reduced and they may end up at the embittered margin of society.
Thus, it is not poverty that breeds extremism; it is social policies intended in part to eradicate poverty that do so, by obstructing exit from minority subcultures. If Muslims in European societies do not feel a part of those societies because public policy does not enable them to compete for the jobs held by non-Muslims–if instead, excluded from identifying with the culture of the nation in which they reside they perforce identify with the worldwide Muslim culture–some of them are bound to adopt the extremist views that are common in that culture. The resulting danger to Europe and to the world is not offset by long vacations.
Source: Becker-Posner blog. (Both are professors at the University of Chicago Law School)
[via The New Editor]