Excellent piece on the state of Islamic extremism in Britain and the fight against it

[TastesLikeChicken]

Ah, somebody with some perception. I was dealing with the remote probability that the tiny number of Islamic extremists in the world would be any real threat, but I am not too worried about living under Sharia law either. As you may likely know, what Sharia law is to one society it is quite another to another. It gets interlarded with tribalism. Also, the external world and the rules that apply there have no effect on one's inner freedom. Some very great Islamic saints were slaves, outwardly.

My greater preference by far, however, would be to live under a secular democratic system where the rules aren't fixed by some absolute notion. And I feel that in the long run in the competition of ideas, our system will win. Like Obama and the founding fathers, I believe that rights are inalienable and can't be suppressed. Let me see if I can find again a statement on what Islam really is.

I'm not concerned about Islamic exremists so much. However, I am concerned about those extremists and non-extremists that prefer we live under Sharia law. While much of the extremism is cultural, some of it is not. I'm not just picking on Islam either. Christianity is too regimented as well. However, Islam is more regimented and I believe it to be a step backward, not forwards.

If Islam truly was the religion of peace I'd have no problems with it. It has not shown itself to be that though. When it does I'll be convinced.

 

[Moonbeam]

TastesLikeChicken:I'm not concerned about Islamic exremists so much. However, I am concerned about those extremists and non-extremists that prefer we live under Sharia law. While much of the extremism is cultural, some of it is not. I'm not just picking on Islam either. Christianity is too regimented as well. However, Islam is more regimented and I believe it to be a step backward, not forwards.

M: Christianity has been a part of the West for a longer time and has had more time to evolve and adjust to democratic society, I think.

TLC: If Islam truly was the religion of peace I'd have no problems with it. It has not shown itself to be that though. When it does I'll be convinced.

M: It shows in some and not in others, the same as it does or doesn't in Christians.

 

[JohnOfSheffield]

I'm not concerned about Islamic exremists so much. However, I am concerned about those extremists and non-extremists that prefer we live under Sharia law. While much of the extremism is cultural, some of it is not. I'm not just picking on Islam either. Christianity is too regimented as well. However, Islam is more regimented and I believe it to be a step backward, not forwards.

If Islam truly was the religion of peace I'd have no problems with it. It has not shown itself to be that though. When it does I'll be convinced.

I think pretty much everyone is concerned about ANY form of influence of religion in society, Christianity is no better, there are plenty of examples of Christians who actually follow the Bible and in it it clearly states that the wife is below the husband.

Hell it wasn't too long ago since the last nation of the west deemed spousal rape illegal.

Freedom of religion and freedom of NO religion in a secular nation is what we enjoy, i wish that for everyone but we are not going ot get it by claiming that one religion is worse or better.

No one should ever have to be subjected to anything but common law, not wives, children or immigrants, you have a long way to go there US, you still hold wives, children and immigrants under rules that reminds me of Nazism. (which entire point was to keep one culture under one flag, pretty much what many Americans are advocating today)

 

[grebe925]

And yet 98% of all honour killings in the UK are Indian culture killings.
.....
Obviously you don't live in Britain, i do, but it doesn't matter since these are all available figures, in my home town more people have been killed by christians in terror bombings than by any other religious sect, that goes for most of the world too. In Britain as a whole, the problem with marriage is PREFUCKINGDOMINANTLY one where an Indian girl wants to marry someone other than her parents have picked for her. (She'll marry who they tell her or be killed or disfigured for life, most likely be pushed off of a balcony in a building wher many Indians live and no one saw anything.

I am not saying sheit about immigrating to a Muslim nation, that wasn't even on board of this discussion before your sorry Nazist arse decided that that was how you could win an argument.

I repeat my motion for ban of an obvious Nazist.

From Wikepedia (google honor killings):

While precise figures do not exist for the perpetrators' cultural backgrounds, Diana Nammi of the UK's Iranian and Kurdish Women's Rights Organisation is reported to have said:"about two-thirds are Muslim. Yet they can also be Hindu, Sikh and even eastern European."

You're obviously f*rting from the wrong end. Stop stinking up this board with your fictional facts.

 

[Double Trouble]

Truth is, there is no nation on this gods green earth as free as England.

Bwahahahahahahaha :biggrin: Good one.

 

[cirrrocco]

Bwahahahahahahaha :biggrin: Good one.

It is almost like being on candid cam every day , every where.

 

[yllus]

They are winning Europe over in the maternity wards. Apparently it pays to be poor....

Thing is, "they" aren't all extremists - maybe a tenth of those raised in a Muslim household go that way. Their parents usually aren't extremists either, but I'd wager the parents often push an "us versus them" or "You're Pakistani/Saudi/Iranian, not British" mentality at home which their children then take to the next level.

They win because the west is bound and determined to appease them in the name of multiculturalism and diversity.

I'd argue the opposite - it's a push for monoculturalism and racism that radicalize these people to begin with. They don't start out religious, but they become so during a search for identity and for a group to seek protection within.

Usama Hassan

The Muslims who arrive here every day from Bangladesh, or India, or Somalia say they find the presence of British Islamists bizarre. They have come here to work and raise their children in stability and escape people like them. No: these Islamists are British-born.

...

And so Usama begins to tell me his story. He arrived in Tottenham in North London in the mid- 1970s, when he was five years old. His Pakistani father was sent here by the Saudi Ministry of Religious Affairs, which aims to spread its puritan desert strain of Islam to every nation. His family led a locked-down life, trying to adhere to Saudi principles in a semi-detached house in the English suburbs. "We weren't allowed music or TV or any contact with the opposite sex," he says. "We were very sheltered. I didn't go out a great deal." By the age of 10, he had memorised every word of the Koran in its original Arabic.

He had a strong sense of the Britain beyond his walls – the Britain where I was growing up – as a hostile, violent place. "You have to understand – it was the time of the Tottenham riots. It felt violent in the streets," he says. "I got used to expecting white people to use the beloved patriot word. We used to have a fear of skinheads the whole time."

Maajid Nawaz

Asian families were a rarity there in the 1980s, but he had a large group of white friends and felt no different to them. Yet when Maajid turned 14, a strange political shift was taking place in Southend. It began – for him, at least – one evening when Maajid, his brother and his friends were at the funfair, leaping on and off the rides and eating candy floss. A group of young skinheads spotted them and started making Nazi salutes and shouting "Seig Heil".

Maajid and his mates "ran the hell out of there", but a white van pulled up and seven skinheads piled out, wielding machetes. They cornered Maajid and one of his white friends. To his astonishment, they turned to the friend and stabbed him repeatedly with a carving knife, shrieking: "Traitor! Traitor! Race traitor!" They drove off, leaving Maajid covered in his friend's blood.

The story of what happened next is buried in yellowing cuts from the local newspapers. A pack of unemployed young men who had been kicking around on Southend's beaches had joined the Neo-Nazi group Combat 18, named after Adolf Hitler's initials: A is "1" in the alphabet, H is "8". They targeted Maajid's friends one by one for befriending a "beloved patriot". Over the next two years, three of his friends were stabbed, and one was smashed up with a hammer. Maajid began to distance himself from his white friends, out of guilt.

Ed Husain

"On a basic level, we didn't know who we were. People need a sense of feeling part of a group – but who was our group?" They were lost in liberalism, beached between two unreachable identities – their parents', and their country's. They knew nothing of Pakistan or Saudi Arabia or the other places they were constantly told to "go home" to by racists.

Yet they felt equally shut out of British or democratic identity. From the right, there was the brutal nativist cry of "Go back where you came from!" But from the left, there was its mirror-image: a gooey multicultural sense that immigrants didn't want liberal democratic values and should be exempted from them. Again and again, they described how at school they were treated as "the funny foreign child", and told to "explain their customs" to the class. It patronised them into alienation.

"Nobody ever said – you're equal to us, you're one of us, and we'll hold you to the same standards," says Husain. "Nobody had the courage to stand up for liberal democracy without qualms. When people like us at [Newham] College were holding events against women and against gay people, where were our college principals and teachers, challenging us?"

Without an identity, they created their own. It was fierce and pure and violent, and it admitted no doubt.