To the Editor:
A May 6 news article on European Muslim immigrants stated that failure or success of European immigration policies "could have important lessons for the United States, with its own large, new Muslim presence."
While you identified the Muslim immigrants of Europe as North Africans in France, Bengals in Britain, Turks in Germany, you did not explain what this "new Muslim presence" in America means and which ethnic groups it involves.
The situation of Muslim immigrants in Europe is perhaps incomparable with that of Muslims in America, in the same way the colonial legacy of Europe has no equivalent in American history. Most North African immigrants did not invade France, but were shipped from North Africa to Parisian suburbs in the 1960's to fill jobs the French consider cheap and filthy.
Now that unemployment is rising among the French, Muslim immigrants are subject to political bargaining in which their voices are never heard. When they are not threatened with expulsion, they are asked to accept blindly the French policy of assimilation, which remains vague, hardly supported by concrete cultural and social projects.
Worse, to the French, their food is smelly, their languages are repulsive and their mosques harbor fundamentalists.
In America, food, language and worship are reflections of a multicultural society. I have not heard Americans complaining of Chinese, Indian and Caribbean food. Neither have I seen Americans repelled by signs in Chinese or Hebrew.
Had you included interviews with European Muslim immigrants, they might have outbalanced the racist statements by Europeans you interviewed. EL MOKHTAR GHAMBOU New York, May 8, 1995
