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THINK-ISRAEL |
Analytic and 'intellectual' articles on how the British perceive their Muslim neighbors are not, for the most part, outraged by what the Muslims actually do. They are concerned with maintaining British tolerance. They blame British society; they distance the "majority of Muslims" from grotesque Muslim activity by attributing it to "extremists"; and they reject straight-out condemnation of Muslim behavior less they appear to be agreeing with the Right, which is routinely called 'Muslim haters.' Their goal is to ensure that law-abiding Muslims aren't subjected to harassment. What is significant about these articles is more often than not to be found in the readers' comments on the article — some of the English public isn't buying the notion that the real victim is the Muslim community, which is blamed for the aberrant acts of the extremists in its midst.
England has, by small increments, become acclimated to eliminating piggy banks and novelty pig toys because Muslims abhor pig, not singing Christmas carols in public places because Muslims might be offended, serving only halal meat in public schools and hospitals because that's what Muslims want to eat, and not studying the Crusades and the Holocaust in school because these subjects annoy the Muslims.
But recent revelations have been sufficiently acute and sufficiently vile to jolt the British public. First, hundreds of English Muslims have joined ISIS (and other terror groups, but ISIS is the current focus). Unlike the Muslims of Gaza who hide the fact that they surround their missile sites with human shields — in fact they see to it that there are no pictures of them shooting missiles at all — ISIS Muslims make videos showing them beheading captured journalists and shooting civilians. Second, the open secret of rapes and forced prostitution of lower-class white children by Muslim gangs of "groomers," which has been going on for years, has finally been publicized in the main stream press.
There is concern among journalists that these happenings might make the English unhappy with their Muslim neighbors. The Guardian headlined that "British Muslims fear backlash after David Haines murder" (see here.) Nothing was written about what the British public might fear. Another Guardian story is called "British Muslims unite in fury at Isis murder of Alan Henning (see here.) Damage to the Muslim community is mitigated because they too are 'totally heartbroken' and, according to David Cameron, Henning's murder is 'senseless', which let's us know it was not inspired by Islam. A film-maker is quoted as asserting that Isis chose to 'spit in the Muslims' eye to show them who is boss" as if the Muslim community were the real victim of the violence. Other stories emphasize how negative the Muslim community is to Isis. "#Making a Stand: British Muslim women launch anti-ISIS culture drive (see here.) tells us about British Muslim women campaigning against ISIS and extremism. It is long on enthusiasm, short on details and, indirectly, tells us that the women won't be speaking in mosques and community centers, where radicalism is inculcated:
"In June this year, the British government introduced a strategy urging mothers and wives to report their loved ones, following the uncovering of Britons participating in Jihadist style fighting in Syria earlier this year. One critic of this policy explained in Huffington Post it was problematic because "relying on Muslim women to undertake the work of the security services is not only likely to be ineffective, it also risks further undermining women in highly patriarchal settings as possible 'agents', not to be trusted." [emphasis added]
The Spectator (see here) published an article that provides us with facts on why white British citizens are angry, Of course, it also suggests the Muslim community is the real victim of Muslim crimes and acts of terror. Anticipating demonstrations of anger by whites, Damien Thompson, the author of the article, puts it this way, "an anti-Muslim backlash could spread beyond the strongholds of the aggrieved white working class in Barking and Rochdale and into the home counties." I wasn't sure whether it was just clumsy writing or whether he didn't mind if resentment against the Muslims stayed confined to "the aggrieved white working class."
From his tone, Thompson finds it reasonable that the police and social workers did not sound the alarm because
"the authorities were terrified that grooming would be seized upon by racists playing the Muslim card. Their fears weren't unfounded. In 2004 the British National Party won a council seat in Keighley West with 51 per cent of the vote by exploiting local outrage over a grooming scandal. Its tactics were crafty. In BNP leaflets, the adjective 'Pakistani' was replaced by 'Muslim'. Nick Griffin praised Sikh and Hindu activists who had tried to draw attention to the 'Muslim sex gangs'."
All in all, Thompson's worry is not what the Muslims have done but that British tolerance might not be "strong enough to survive the horrors of Isis and Rotherham coming to light simultaneously."
Hitherto, according to Thompson, "British public opinion has never turned against Muslims. According to Pew's 2014 Global Attitudes survey, 26 per cent of us have 'unfavourable' attitudes towards Muslims in this country; compare that to 46 per cent in Spain, 53 per cent in Greece and 63 per cent in Italy... Our national tolerance has, so far, proved robust." Later in the article, we learn that "Pew research in 2006 found that British Muslims were more hostile to western values than their German, French or Spanish counterparts. In the four countries, the 'mismatch' between friendly attitudes towards Muslims and unfriendly attitudes towards the host society was greatest in the UK."
To me, this suggests that the problem of relations between the communities might actually lie in Muslim attitudes to the host countries, which would lead to hostile and aggressive behavior. Thompson's fix is for the good Muslims to "find better means of expressing their horror — individually and collectively — at crimes against humanity."
CONSIDERING THE FOCUS OF THE ARTICLE on how not to rock the boat of good community relations, many of the comments were surprising. Some of course blamed it all on white bigotry, which makes at-risk youth "feel alienated and excluded from society." But some, such as this from beenzrgud, focused on Muslim attitudes as being the source of the alienation, and standard Muslim practices being responsible for prostituting the young girls of towns such as Rotherham.
The question needs to asked as to what exactly will satisfy Muslims in terms of them not wanting to change/destroy the society they have moved to. As far as I can see nothing short of our total capitulation to their will is going to suffice. This is clearly an untenable proposition, hence the current situation. Whether religious or cultural, there is something incompatible in their thinking when it comes to successfully integrating into our society. It should be remembered that the people now choosing to go and commit the vilest atrocities in the middle east are 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants. They have only known the UK and yet still they behave in ways that are alien to us. Whether it is jihadism, vote rigging, honour killings, FGM, or just their apparent inability to take advantage of the educational opportunities in this country, they appear determined to cling to the ways of rural Pakistan, or whatever backwater they originate from. At the same time their numbers in the UK are exploding. This fact should worry rational people, and throwing the term hate monger around to describe those who are articulating their concern will in no way facilitate a solution.
This was seconded by Meqmac who wrote:
Beenzrgud —This is all correct. The deepest problem is that so many of my fellow liberals have for so long refused even to glance at the large elephant (or, more correctly, rhinoceros) in our multicultural room: Islam, its founding texts (Qur'an, the six ahadith collections, the prophetic biography — the Sira —, all supplemented by centuries of jurisprudential materials on shari'a law), its history, and its communal undertakings in different cultural milieux. The Qur'an, the Traditions, and the Sira all command or exemplify the fighting of jihad against non-Muslims. The Qur'an also, in its later chapters, expresses often violent hatred for Jews and Christians (specifically) and non-Muslims in general. Muhammad himself led his forces into about 27 battles and collaborated in a massacre of Jews in Medina. The first caliph, Abu Bakr, sent armies out into the Arabian peninsula to kill or bring to heel tribes that had abandoned Islam on Muhammad's death. The first four 'rightly-guided' caliphs started the process that led Muslim armies to conquer a large part of the known world, which in turn led over the centuries into transforming Christian or Hindu or Zoroastrian countries into Islamic provinces in a succession of empires. The Islamic slave trade became the biggest and longest-lasting of all such trades, something the Islamic State (Da'ish) is continuing today. The contempt for non-believers that can be found easily in centuries of Islamic writing continues in Salafi and other publications today, and has been striking in many of the Muslim schools in the UK that I have studied. However many moderate Muslims there may be, they cannot disavow the Qur'an (which is the final word of God) or the ahadith, which contain 'authentic' records of the prophet's sayings and deeds. Presented with Qur'anic verses praising jihad and martyrdom, unsophisticated young Muslims may well disagree with their imams and head to the Middle East to kill Christians or fight Jews. As for the grooming gangs, how hard is it to see that they come out of a culture that regards women as men's inferiors, covers women up, stones 'adulterous' women to death, has the highest proportion of honour killings (over 90%) of any group, sentences young women who have been raped to death because 'it was her fault', executes or honour kills homosexuals, allows men four regular wives and as many concubines/sex slaves as they can afford, has 'traveller's marriage' (nikak misyar) for the sexual needs of men while travelling, temporary marriage (mut'a) for Shi'ite men who can hire a 'wife' for an hour or a day or 99 years, permits divorce by men on his say-so, forces a woman to marry and sleep with another man if a divorced husband wants her back, destroys schools for girls since women should not be educated (think of Mala Yousefzai), forces little girls to endure female genital mutilation (considered by many to be a sunna or properly Islamic practice), marries girls off to much older men from the age of 9 (because Muhammad married A'isha at 6 and consummated their union when she was 9), allows men 4 wives but a woman only one husband, allows men to marry Jewish or Christian women while stipulating that Muslim women may only marry Muslim men, and so on. Is it at all surprising that young men coming from backgrounds where women and girls have no value at all and are scarcely regarded as human beings will go on to groom, rape and prostitute non-muslim (including Sikh girls)? If our politicians, police, social services and media cannot get their heads round by this and let themselves be fettered by an outdated and often dangerous obsession with political correctness, all these things and more will continue and this country, like other Western countries, will suffer. I say this in a spirit very unlike that of the obnoxious EDL, BNP, and other racists. An intelligent approach to these problems will help balanced Muslims as much as anyone.
Several people responded to
"I think in some sense religious dogmas tend to converge towards secular humanism given sufficient time. People slowly throw off the aspects of their religion that have little practical value or are unreasonably unfair."
Rockylives said:
I'd like to believe you are right, but with Islam I fear you are wrong. Islam is so fixated on the absolute authority of the recorded words of its prophet that to even attempt to interpret them (in the way the Gospels have been interpreted over centuries) is deemed a form of heresy. This leads to a narrowing spiral of one-up-mullah-ship with Muslims trying to prove they are better Muslims than others by taking a more rigidly literal view of the Koran. The most extreme instructions in the Koran are seized upon (hence the beheadings, genocide, forced conversion, death sentences for women who have been raped on the grounds that they have committed adultery and so forth).
Then other Muslims who do not also follow this extremist path are accused of not being real Muslims and are duly killed, expelled or forcibly converted.
All Islam is gradually reducing to the most violent, intolerant and supremacist interpretation of that faith.
and Aldabaran said:
You don't seem to get the message. Sunni Islam is an unchangeable set of rules, devised in the 7th century and set in concrete by law schools afterwards. This is quite unlike the history of Christian doctrine and canon law. Moreover fundamentalism insists on stripping out, not adding, later accretions and refinements and going back to the naked texts. That is what Salafism has been about since the 18th century and the movement is getting stronger not weaker.
Talking about a reformation is simply uninformed tosh.
William_Brown sarcastically addressed "...but at-risk youth who feel alienated and excluded from society in part because of bigots like you".
"Alienated and excluded? Who? Our recent exports to Syria of the young men from Cardiff who had a choice of which universities to attend in order to continue their medical studies? Or did you mean the qualified doctors who drove a 4×4 loaded with explosives into Glasgow airport? I could go on, but I fear that your knee-jerk, dogmatic, position taking will not be persuaded."
Some saw restrictions on the Muslim community as abrogating their free speech. But logdon summed up many of the arguments that put the source of the problem in Muslim unwillingness to integrate and asked: what next:
A reversal of the headline would answer the headline itself. 'Britain's one of the friendliest places in Europe for Muslims. But for how much longer?'
Rather than asking if we are prepared to tolerate an entity quite plainly at odds with our liberality, free speech and ability to assimilate others we should be asking or rather telling Muslims who reject this core of British values, either fit in or other arrangements are in store.
We have kowtowed for far too long and our supine appeasement has resulted in an attitude by Muslims that all they have to do is raise the spectre of 'community disharmony' and we'll cave in.
We've seen the appalling rapes in Rochdale, Oxford and Rotherham. We've seen Trojan Horse. And we've seen Warsi flouncing out because we didn't support her Islamic ingrained anti-Semitism.
Time to call the shots, the boundaries are being tested by shariah compliancy and if our establishment won't act, I'm afraid a street level will. Muslims came here for a better life and now certain elements are demanding that we bend to the rules of the hell holes they escape. They can't have it both ways. If that's what they want, give it to them by sending them back. To paraphrase an old saying, nothing concentrates the mind better than the prospect of permanent deportation. Once they see we mean business, I'm convinced that this attitude of, when in Britain, do as the Pakisani's do which is basically the recipe for our disastrous multicultural idiocy will cease.
Many expect the situation to worsen and to have no peaceful solution. investigator wrote:
It is too late to ask, "What can be done?" There can be no peaceful outcome. There are many millions of Pakistani and other Muslims in Britain already. They are not going to integrate. They will increase rapidly as a percentage of the population and they will continue to establish no go areas for non- Pakistanis and demand special legal dispensations. Leaders will arise in the non Muslim community who will advocate concerted action against them. This cannot be stopped; it is inevitable. There will be battles such as we see in now in Syria.
I have no statistics on how many of the British public have serious and fact-based concerns about their Muslim neighbors. Sampling even of readers' comments was limited — in part because some papers don't have a comments area and some don't publish negative opinions of Islam — but the British media do seem cognitively miles behind many of their countrymen in articulating that Muslims are imposing their life style on Britain rather than integrating into the larger culture. It is members of the public that see that appeasement solutions — blaming English society, blaming Muslim behavior on poverty or alienation; and condemning bigotry — aren't useful. These readers won't allow themselves to get trapped into the few extremists versus the large number of moderate Muslims argument or be silenced by the thought that their anger at Muslim behavior is politically incorrect. Many feel English culture and its institutions are under real threat from those advocating sharia law. Surprisingly, in contrast to the American news media, some of those discussing how to stop the Muslim threat appear to be from the liberal left. The high percentage of Muslim cousins marriages, the poor treatment of women in Islam, the dependency of the political parties on the Muslims vote, the low number of English children being born compared to the high Muslim birthrate, and the large number of rapes and murder by Muslims every where in Europe are all examined by the readers. The sexual exploitation of young English girls by Muslim gangs infuriated many to their core. As for the media, as Roy puts it, "Despite all this the writers of mediocrity every time, every article, denounce nothing; they carry on in their disbelieving sleep walk telling all and everyone we must be more tolerant."