Oddbean

My brother in Christ, I'm talking about crime. If you go to places like Barcelona or Brussels you see that a good proportion of "street" crime come from certain nationalities like Marrocco or North African. If this goes unpunished people in the local population start recenting the total population of immigrants. Is this a simptom of poverty and non-integration? probably I can see similar things happening with certain of my Venezuelan countrymen in countries like the US or Peru.

It depends on where you are, and what gangs have formed there, and what kind of microculture they happen to have developed. In Barcelona, it may be Moroccans as you say. Here in my city the crime is perpetrated mostly by a small number of recidivist Maori and a small number of recidivist NZ Europeans, as well as by youth, and I haven't heard of any crimes from the Syrian immigrants (who all profess to be Muslim) as far as I can recall. So my point is that being Muslim isn't coorelated with criminal activity in general... even if it might happen to be true in certain parts of Europe for one reason or another. And therefore arguments against Islam that are based on that culture being incompatible with Western culture don't hold as much weight in my mind as they used to (although it still has some weight) because I see a counterexample right in front of me.

I think we are saying the same thing. I think what happens in Europe is that there are a lot of Mosques that are financed by extreme wings of Islam. I might be wrong here but I think what happens behind the scenes is that this mosques protect some of this criminals from punishment, so it creates an area of impunity. I'm also sure this also happens in Christianism or Judaism in other areas of the world.