Man, you are getting it on both sides.

Don’t back down. You never get everything you ask for, so you need to ask for more than you would accept. Wanting equality of treatment is the very least you could be asking for — it’s not radical at all.

I have a very warped view of Muslims, because 90% of my interactions have been with New York City taxi drivers, so I think of Muslims as very polite and thoughtful people who are extremely well-read about the world, when I’m sure that on average they’re just as dumb as your average person, no insult intended.

(It totally devastates me that these people’s financial lives have simply been savaged by Uber’s constant flouting of the laws. All of them were saving for their medallions, now worthless…)

I might add that at some point I realized that most of the drivers thought I was Jewish — I wore a Fedora and they didn’t realize that in NYC, it’s the black Fedoras that show you are Orthodox, not grey ones — partly because they would say, “Shalom!” as I left. It’s a mark of these individuals great civilization that they had such polite and even warm conversations with me, knowing that I might be supporter of beliefs hostile to them.

I’m in the Netherlands now, and unfortunately, Muslims are the visible minority here. It’s much more complex than in the US — there’s a “Party of Freedom” whose main role is to be anti-Muslim, and yet the leader is half Indonesian, and his second in command quit — to convert to Islam!

On the other hand, the Muslim community is a lot more politically active here — there’s a political party called Denk, “Think”, which is mainly for that — and unfortunately, I find I’m in opposition to them on nearly everything.

For example, for a long time they allowed mopeds on the bike paths here, but by law the engines needed to be capped at 30 km/hour. At one point, 85% of the mopeds tested had been illegally altered to get above that limit, and it got to the point where biking was miserable and dangerous because these fake “mopeds” would roar past you at 50 km/hour.

So they simply banned all motorized vehicles except wheelchairs and such from the bike paths. “Snorfietsen naar de rijbaan” (Mopeds must drive on the road!) Like all Dutch law, it took a year to roll out a bit at a time but it worked and I breathed a sigh of relief.

But this was widely seen by the Muslim community as targeting them and there were many demonstrations, some by Denk and some not, with weapons and some destruction. (Luckily, the cops here are fairly competent and not as violent as the US.)

But we get by. It shows you how well we do that the disputes are about mopeds on the bike paths, and not Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.

Ah, do I have a point? I do not! Except to say that relations between different groups of people are always hard, and it takes constant work and extra warmth to pull it off.

Greetings from Amsterdam, and please look me up if you are ever in the vicinity.