I came across a New Report in a Swedish News Paper in English as to who represents the Muslims in Sweden.
Is it the Moderates or the Social Democrats?
Being political animals every one treads softly on Muslim toes.
Read.
In a report released this week and commissioned by liberal think tank Timbro, researcher Ivar Arpi asked “Who represents Sweden’s Muslim voters?”
That question, he said at a Stockholm seminar on Wednesday, was deliberately provocative in many ways. It presupposed that the half million people in Sweden with roots in the Muslim world were a homogenous group.
“I represent Muslim voters,” Moderate MP Andreas Norlén said calmly. “I represent them if they voted for the Moderates, just as I represent Buddhists, atheists, and Jews who voted for the Moderates.”
Next to him was Social Democrat veteran Bo Ringholm, who had just pulled off the tough task of diversifying Sweden’s main opposition party’s candidate list for the upcoming elections. Every fourth person had to be younger than 35, and another quarter had to have at least one parent with roots outside the Nordic region. Add to that the age-old Social Democrat tactic of “zipping” their lists after gender, with every second candidate a man.
Ringholm defended his party’s use of quotas, arguing that “identity politics” – who the politician was as a person – mattered. That term became the focus of much of the ensuing debate, because Timbro and Arpi were looking at the question from a liberal point of view. In other words, they think picking someone for what they are rather than how good they are at something is wrong.
So who represents the Muslim electorate, if there is such at thing?
Arpi’s report looked at two prominent Muslim politicians in Sweden. The Moderate MP from Gothenburg, Abdirizak Waberi, and the Social Democrats’ former steering committee member Omar Mustafa. Did either of them fill that role? Or neither?
Both men, the report underlined, had served as head of Sweden’s Islamic Association (Islamska förbundet), widely regarded as rather purist, or as Social Democrat and Muslim MP Nalin Pekgul once said: “The Islamic Association is an Islamist organization with strong ties to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt”.
Last year, days after his appointment to the inner circle of his party, Mustafa was booted out. He said his party had thus showed Sweden that it was impossible to combine politics with “representing Muslim civil society” or religious activity in general in Sweden.
Nonsense, responded Pekgul, Sweden’s first Muslim MP. She added that no one had any business pretending that Mustafa was any kind of representative of Swedish Muslims as a sort of ill-defined aggregate.”
As against this, look at following Table, which shows that support for Terrorism and extremism is on the decline were they are mushrooming.
In other words, others are those who seem to support Muslims and thereby indirectly Terrorism!
Overall, the 2005 Pew Global Attitudes survey finds that support for terrorism has generally declined since 2002 in the six predominantly Muslim countries included in the study – Indonesia, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Pakistan, and Turkey – although there are some variations across countries and survey items.
We will focus on results for three terrorism-related measures: attitudes about suicide bombing and other violence against civilians, views on suicide bombing carried out against Americans and other Westerners in Iraq, and opinions about Osama bin Laden. The first two measures were only asked of Muslim respondents. All respondents were asked their opinion of bin Laden; however, we will restrict our analysis to Muslim respondents.”
In India it is the non-Muslims who promote Muslims in the garb of Secularism.
Source:
http://www.pewglobal.org/2006/05/23/where-terrorism-finds-support-in-the-muslim-world/
http://www.thelocal.se/20140130/who-represents-swedens-muslim-voters-politics-islam
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