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By Johnny Mnemonic
Oh dear. Apologies to, well, everyone, in advance. This author dissects presumed causes of radicalisation, firstly blaming Muslims and then non-Muslims. He is, at the risk of understatement, less than conciliatory to either party. Indeed, if I had to summarise this politically incorrect critique, I could do worse than to borrow from Shakespeare: the authors’ message to both Muslims and non is that when it comes to radicalisation, ‘a plague on both your houses’.
Writing about what causes Muslims to become terrorists has become a cottage industry since 9/11, keeping numerous ‘security experts’ with dubious or no qualifications in work, as well as ‘I can’t be an Islamophobe because I am Muslim so now I can say Islamophobic stuff’ organisations such as The Quilliam Foundation on the news. Of course, with the coming of ISIS, the world and his second cousin are now bombarding us with their take on what causes Muslims to join jihadist organisations overseas, behead people etc.
In reality, the discourse is sensationalist, has a clear anti-Islam and anti immigration right-wing agenda (as can be seen from the virtual absence of serious academics and even the security services of the US and UK from the discussion). It is also rather aimless as since we have already witnessed British born men (and strip-club attending ‘Americanised’ Arabs in the case of 9/11) launching indiscriminate attacks on civilian populations. The fact that there are people willing to engage in ‘jihad tourism’ for causes that were actually supported by the West, like the Syrian ‘revolution’, is singularly unsurprising: when you have people willing to blow up the London Underground with children, Muslims (and non) on board, recent events are merely an addendum to that. And not a particularly interesting one either.
To their credit, the aforementioned security services have done a lot of good work in this area – being rather honest about the role, or rather lack thereof, of Islam as a religion or belief system in both domestic and international terrorism as well as in radicalisation in general. They have written at length about how Islam is used as an ‘identity’ as opposed to a religion or belief system.
Of course, the ‘Daily Mail’ and it’s bedfellows are wont to ignore even the security services or the army when it does not suit their agenda, but great and honest work has been done by counter – terrorists (the genuine ones) and academics – up to and including detailed works in forensic psychiatry like ‘The Myth of Martyrdom’ by Adam Lankford (endorsed by that well known Islam promoter, the CIA), Harvard Terrorism expert Louise Richardson’s masterful ‘What Terrorists Want’, and this article for lazy people who can’t be bothered to read those books:http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119182/jihadists-buy-islam-dummies-amazon.
Predictably, you will find books and articles on both sides but when a comparison is made of the qualifications and credentials of the people doing the writing, it will be clear that those on the front line (literally in the case of the CIA) of the ‘War against terror’, are much more pragmatic and realistic about the role of Islam: since their agenda is actually preventing another attack or having an academic discourse, as opposed to using terror attacks or ISIS as a launch pad to promote their views on immigrants (by whom people tend to mean anyone who does not act how ‘they’ want, not actual migrants) or to provoke conflict between Islam and Western Civilization (by claiming that other people are promoting such a conflict), they do not feel the need to link Islam to the behaviour of Muslims and terrorists any more than is realistic.
With that said, since the issue of why any British person would attack Britain/join ISIS (or whatever domain name they have copyrighted this week) has become a dilettantes playground for both the far-right, so-called Liberals (who are anything but when you challenge liberal values) as well as Salafist speakers like IERA, who use the activities of these groups to play the victim and subliminally show young Muslims that the media/government/non-Muslims really are ‘out to get you’, I thought I too should toss my hat into the arena and give my take on what radicalises young Muslim men or women.
So as to equally annoy and offend the majority of people from both the Muslim and non-Muslim communities, both of whom in fact hold entrenched, poorly researched, overly emotive, and frankly bigoted views, I have divided the presumed causative factors into those which are ‘Muslim’ and those which are ‘non-Muslim’.
Oh, my qualifications you ask?
They are the same as those of your favourite commentators – the security experts on the news, the writers in the Mail and the speakers for Quilliam and organisations like IERA and HT: None whatsoever!
Muslims Cause Young Muslims to Become (Potentially) Violent Extremists
We Need To Talk About Muslims: Many Muslims do indeed support terrorist organisations
A few years ago, when I was even more naive than I am now, I was very excited to come across this article from the ‘Loonwatch’ website arguing that most terrorists are in fact not Muslims:http://www.loonwatch.com/2010/01/not-all-terrorists-are-muslims/
But shortly thereafter, I realised that I had taken ‘cold comfort': the study from Duke University (where it was no doubt helped along by Bruce B Lawrence, a wonderful man and a friend to Islam) with the now widespread assertion that 99.6% of terrorism is not committed by Muslims was in fact a bit misleading – though of course, Muslims were eager to embrace it’s findings. For example, what did the authors mean by ‘terrorist attack’ – granted, it is explained in the paper, but can you compare an incendiary attack where no-one died with 9-11 and say they are both ‘1’ terrorist attack? Yes, it may indeed be that most incidents classed as ‘terrorism’ may indeed be due to drug cartels, Animal rights activists or others, but what is at concern is not really ‘incidents’ but ‘casualties’.
What would have been better is to tally up numbers: in both the United States and Europe, what is important is not the number of attacks but the number of victims/casualties.
If I was to construct the study that way, nearly 100% of victims in both Europe and the US as well as the Muslim world would be due to Muslim attacks. When was the last time a ‘Latino’ organisation such as those named in the study, killed 3000 people? Or a group like ETA killed 300? And only Anders Brevik beats 7/7 (though the total of those attacks would have been much higher if the 21/7 attacks had not been foiled).
So we are just fooling ourselves by saying that ‘lots of people do terrorism’ when in fact the civilian targeting, effectiveness and genocidal nature of modern Muslim terrorists is unique, at least when it comes to successfully taking lives.
It really is dishonest for Muslim polemicists to pretend that there are many organisations that are targeting governments and people with terror tactics in the vein of what is called ‘Al Qaeda’. If we want to talk about unjust killing, we can only contrast terror organisations like ISIS and Al Qaeda with Western millitaries, and many will not accept the comparison.
I grew up in the 1980′s: people were largely indifferent to Islam. Who painted a massive target on our backs by flying planes into New York skyscrapers? Bin Ladens’ approval rating in countries like Indonesia was close to 60% at one stage (see below, Pew Research poll 2003)
What are non-Muslims to make of the widespread support for Bin Laden in the Muslim world:http://www.cbsnews.com/news/poll-bin-laden-out-of-favor-among-muslims/.
Until 2011, 26% of the worlds most populous Muslim country thought that Bin Laden would do ‘the right thing’ in world affairs. And that’s down from much higher in previous polls.
What are they to further make of the support and protection offered to Bin Laden and others by the ‘Islamic government’ (self appointed) of Afghanistan, not only after 9-11 only but after he proudly admitted to the Kenyan Embassy bombings many years before? Despite all this, Bin Lden was invited to deliver sermons at Deobandi madrassas (Islamic colleges) as far away as Pakistan until 2001.
Are they supposed to still know that he does not represent Islam or Muslims?
How about the Taliban having an ‘embassy’ in Qatar? What will onlookers make of that?
Would Muslims seriously believe that America supporting Israel and giving speaking engagements to Israeli war criminals does not mean that America or the West is ‘Zionist’? Then how are non-Muslims and other Muslims supposed to know that the support for Al Qaeda and other genocidal maniacs, does not represent ‘Islam’? Aren’t they expecting a ‘benefit of the doubt’ that they themselves are unwilling to extend?
Not ‘giving in to the narrative about Islam’ is not going to help in the least when you have clowns like the Imam of Mecca mosque saying that we should celebrate suicide bombings:http://asharisassemble.com/2013/05/30/with-imams-like-these-who-needs-enemies-sudais-shames-muslims-by-celebrating-suicide-bombing/]
It is even more unrealistic to expect either Muslims or non-Muslims to realise that this has ‘nothing’ to do with Sharia or Islam – a non-Muslim hearing that Mecca is the holiest sanctuary of Islam and that Hajj is a pillar of the faith will then think; ‘The guy who ‘runs’ that place and leads them in their prayers on pilgrimage is supporting mass murder. I was giving them the benefit of the doubt but…’ then when he or she sees the relative lack of response by many Muslims, do you really expect them to engage in academic research and discover that some Muslims are against Saudi or whatever?
Let’s face it it isn’t just a ‘tiny minority’. Muslims don’t want to face up to the reality that they need to get their own house in order rather than to sort out the ‘kuffaar’. It just takes away all the ‘feel good’ persecution complexes that Muslims have sometimes justifiably evolved.
Further, what if I say that the real cause of Islamomophobia is Muslims own behaviour and that terrorists may indeed be a tiny minority, but they and their supporters have huge approval ratings and controlled whole governments as in the case of Afghanistan and possibly Somalia?
Also, is there some randomised control trial where we can prove that the problem is that the media have it in for us as opposed to how we have acted? Wouldn’t an already xenophobic media do the same to any isolationist and occasionally violent group in their midst?
Let’s get some community, say, Chinese people, make it so that they have next to zero media or academic and political influence (not to mention are not represented in the Armed Services) and then get them to do something horrific like 9-11 and then see what happens: I’m guessing they will get the same kind of treatment that Muslims do now. Ditto with McCarthyism or the internment of Japanese Americans in WWII. But you know why we cannot do a comparison – because no other community has yet been foolhardy enough to behave like that or allow itself to be almost completely unrepresented in the media, academia etc, and mostly through their own isolationism (at least in the West).
Granted, there is the massive historical animosity to Islam from the West, but you get my point: Muslims are indeed too sympathetic to the motives of mass murderers like Bin Laden, regimes like the Taliban and extremists like Sedais. They have allowed their justifiable anger at Western foreign policy to blind them to the faults of the people who are the ‘enemies’ of the West.
People in England or Indonesia who think that Bin Laden is a ‘statesman’ or Sedais is an ‘Imam’ have only themselves to blame for the radicalisation of certain Muslim youth.
Predicted Salafist response: ‘We don’t trust opinion polls from biased kufaar media’…
So then where are our unbiased opinion polls and commentators to counter them?
No-one To Watch Over You: Most Muslims and their mosques are affiliated with Salafist and extremist organisations
An interesting aside to the fact that most of Britain’s’ 2.7 million Muslims are from South Asia:http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/may/16/uk-census-religion-age-ethnicity-country-of-birth, is that they tend to belong to a rather small number of ‘denominations’ or sects, who between them control nearly all of the mosques and likewise virtually all of the Muslim schools, and seminaries (‘Darul-ulooms’), which serve as training centres for Imams and ‘institutes of higher Islamic learning’.
As such, nearly all of Britain’s Muslims will hear about Islam from one of Deobandis, Salafis or Brelwis. In fact Saudi Salfists opened or control London’s two biggest mosque – the London Central or Regent’s Park Mosque and to a lesser extent, East London Mosque – with London having in turn having the largest concentration of British Muslims.
All three of these groups are largely a reaction to British colonialism and, at least in the case of the first two, are not from any of the normative schools of Islamic creed. They are heterodox, and yes, extremist leaning.
Deobandis, who have numerous madrassas and ‘Darul ulooms’ around the UK, as mentioned before, went so far as to lionise Osama Bin Laden (as the learned academic Bruce Lawrence exposes here:http://books.google.co.uk/booksid=3_fRlEZoaioC&pg=PA95&lpg=PA95&dq=international+deobandi+conference+2001&source=bl&ots=h6j1vmTnLB&sig=yFQKCj1J8OxOrbDqAdh5PNnUNA&hl=en&sa=X&ei=4ZvqU_GZOYaKOJqXgOgE&ved=0CCoQ6AEwBDgK#v=onepage&q=international%20deobandi%20conference%202001&f=false).
Another sane voice, and one of the few objective commentators on the Middle East, Robert Fisk, was also compelled by recent events to expose the isotropy between Deobandism and Talibanism:http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/isiss-undoubted-skill-in-exploiting-social-media-is-no-reason-for-us-leaders-to-start-talking-about-the-apocalypse-9688438.html.
As someone who studied under Deobandis and their fellow Salafists for many years, I had no need for the above academics and journalists: In the early to late nineties I was told ad nauseum by British Deobandi imams in countless speeches and even at Friday prayers that people should move to Afghanistan to ‘live an Islamic lifestyle’, join the Taliban or at least pledge allegiance to them – though the Taliban themselves only ever claimed to set up an emirate and not a Caliphate, yet some of their Deobandi UK supporters were even more zealous.
Of course, all this changed after 9/11. But that was a ‘top down’ change enforced by the government, as any Imam espousing the ‘virtues’ of the former Afghan regime would henceforth be prosecuted and/or incarcerated. But when it really counted, the Deobandis were blind to the faults of the Taliban.
That does not mean they are terrorists or even recruiting for them, nor that they do not have good and learned people amongst them (though the few that there are such as Ibrahim Mograh, are marginalised) – just that their ‘brand’ of Islam and their antipathy to the West was so pronounced that they could not see the Taliban for what they were and even invited a self proclaimed mass murderer such as Bin Laden to give a khutbah or ‘religious sermon’ to a crowd of some half a million people in 2001.
Likewise, the ‘Tabligh – i – Jamaat’ movement, which is informally affiliated with Deobandism, espouses isolationism and disengagement from the wider community. Again, not violent or necessarily extremist, but a breeding ground for conspiracies, resentment and alienation from British society and even British Muslim society.
Neither group has ever owned up or corrected it’s errors such as supporting terror groups (an error they are now committing again in Pakistan through the Deobandi political party, ‘Jamaati Ulema -y- Islami’) very extreme isolationism, nor their heterodox theology which results in harsh fatwas that are divorced from the Hanafism they claim to follow.
Their flock is easy picking for Jihadis.
Likewise, the incontestably extremist leanings of the Salafi sect are oft lamented facts of both Orientalist scholars and the criminal justice system. Of course, a whole industry has emerged around apologising for this heretical offshoot of Islam, and as Cambridge academic Tim Winter has pointed out, their Saudi and Qatari connections allow a shocking degree of immunity even from the British government. But, again as mentioned when you have the Imam of Mecca itself insisting that Muslims celebrate suicide bombings against other Muslims, there isn’t really a case for Salafis being ‘misunderstood’.
When books by ”scholars’ such as Ibn Taymiyya and Abd Al Wahhab, who advocate beheading and even burning to death of Muslims for trivial matters such as whispering the intention for prayer, are sold cheaply and en-masse in virtually all Islamic bookshops in the UK as well as the largest mosques in London, we should not be too surprised that some Muslims actually behead a poor American journalist or two: they are actually being ‘mild’ by the standards of Abd Al Wahhab and Ibn Taymiyya.
The Brelwi sect again often revels in such isolationism and in such confrontation with the wider British society that it would alarm their erstwhile founder, Ahmad Ridha Khan.
Since British Muslims tend to overwhelmingly belong to one of these three groups, and hardly any of them investigate or even question the bizarre leanings and heresies of, say, Deobandis and Salafis, even when it has a direct impact on their own lives (for example, there is no compulsion of the beard for men or the face veil for women, nor driving bans or gender segregation in normative Sunni Islam – but there are these and many more is Deo/Salafism), they and they alone are to be held responsible for the small but vocal and visible minority who take this hubris and isolationism as well as their heretical fatwas on killing and the bizarre sexual segregation and paranoia that is a hallmark of these people, to it’s (?logical) extreme by becoming ‘jihadis’.
The League of Shadows: Most Muslim Student Organisations are Salafist, thereby subtly radicalising students and putting their education to the service their favourite causes
Don’t get me wrong, I do feel bad for young British Muslims – they have no escape from the heterodox views which the West has broadly painted with the label ‘Political Islam’ or ‘Extremism’. When I myself finally escaped the Deobandis and entered university, a worse trial was awaiting me: the Deobandis could not make much headway in Western Student circles but that was only because the field had been entirely occupied by Wahhabis and ‘Hizb Ut Tahrir’ (or ‘HT’ as they are affectionately known), yet another Salafist organisation that makes the whole faith Islam subservient to the goal of establishing a political entity they call the ‘Caliphate’. To this group, creed, theology and fairness are irrelevant asides, as is the study of the Quran or spirituality – their entire focus is establishing an ‘Islamic State’ to avenge the perceived humiliation of Muslims and to inflict the same on the West. They too, like the Deobandis, were vocal supporters of suicide bombings and the Taliban before 9/11. And like them, they too learnt ‘self-restraint’ after the World Trade Centre attacks.
Though banned on campus, they have a strong presence through speakers who hide their affiliation (as is the organisations’ policy – no-one is to admit that they are HT except front men like Taji Mustafa or regional heads). Many of the worst banes of campus life and Islamphobes’ best fodder, such as Haitham Al Haddad & Hamza Tzortzis as well as Abdullah Al Andalusi, are spawned by HT, as was the notorious Omar Bakri Muhammad.
Again like the Deobandis, HT changed their language and tactics but never apologised (to Muslims or anyone else) for their errors in supporting the Taliban (and bizarrely, Khomenei as well).
For young Muslims, university is out of the ‘radicalisation’ frying pan (Deobandism for example) and into the fire (hard-core Salafist organisations such as IERA or HT). Like their mosque counterparts, these organisations inculcate a feeling of victimisation (which always goes hand in hand with a desire for revenge) and teach the political aspects of Islam (through their lens and their lens only) deliberately devoid of any Islamic juristic principles, spirituality or even aqeeda (creed). Therefore Islam becomes a useful tool to ‘raise up’ the Muslims and to humiliate Western Civilization. Which is dangerously like using Islam as Fascism. But why bother to construct a new totalitarian and supremacist ideology when you already have a sympathy for Islam built in to Muslims? All you have to do is suitably excite and persuade them to switch off the moral and rational faculties that Sunni Islam demands before any kind of political project and then watch the fireworks.
And it is a positive feedback mechanism: Muslims do dumb stuff like 9-11 (because you told them to), non-Muslims react and persecute them, Muslims then feel alienated and run straight into your arms. The Western media and Islamophobia is a God-send for these organisations – it sends ever more people into their sphere of influence.
And if ‘the West’ is not feeling all that Islamophobic today? No problem, Salafists can do another attack and they’ll soon come round!
When campuses, especially in the ‘old’, and unfortunately, still some of the best, British universities are squarely divided up between Salafi groups with extremist speakers like Hamza Tzortzis (who promotes the aforementioned precocious decapitator, Ibn Taymiyyah as the ‘greatest scholar of Islam’) and even until recently the utterly scandalous and vile specimen A.R Green (who makes comments that could make Frankie Boyle blush), Muslims have only themselves to blame when young men at University direct the whole of their learning towards a narrow definition of Islam as defined by Salafis and HT (and to a lesser extent, The Muslim Brotherhood), increasingly isolate themselves from their non-Muslim colleagues and even see other Muslims as the enemy.
When some of them decide to act on the ideas they have been fed, it is hardly surprising. The only brand of Islam available on campus is heterodox and implicitly violent towards other Muslims and non-Muslims (but of course, they can’t say it openly, though they try their best). Anyone who points this out is a modernist traitor.
So, since Islam is available in every colour (as long as it’s the black flag of ISIS), Muslims have only themselves to blame for letting the lunatics take over the asylum.
Muslims do sometimes criticise the evil actions carried out in their name (but only by having a dig at America in the process)
Forgive the cheap rhetoric, but many honest readers know I am right. Yes, Muslims do denounce terrorist attacks and lately the actions of ISIS, but it is nearly always hollow due to the caveat they almost invariably add: ‘What about when the US kills civilians?! HUH?!’
What they fail to realise is that everyone can see this for the cheap shot that it is. There are plenty of non-Muslims (particularly on the Left of the political spectrum) who do very well at critiquing Western foreign policy in the harshest terms – up to and including calling for the impeachment of their own President – but Muslims, divorced to a large extent from the social and media norms of wider British society by isolationist and ‘Occidentophobic’ institutions such as Salafism and Deobandism, fail to replicate their success, either completely relying on speakers from the left such as George Galloway or Jeremy Corbin or using terrorist attacks as a launchpad to (badly) criticise Western foreign policy.
The most important thing to do in cases where groups such as the 7/7 bombers or ISIS are claiming to kill in the name of Islam (and they most certainly do make this claim), is to rescue the good name of Islam and dissociate it from these actions. That means being clear that these people are certainly heretics and possibly even non-Muslims for ignoring clear Quranic injunctions against the killing of innocents, as people like Tahir Ul Qadri have made clear. But he is one of the few – in issuing a 500-page fatwa against suicide bombing he made a bold effort.
But for most Muslims it’s…
Unity before Self Criticism
Most of the responses I get from people after articles like this are 1) I am messing up the atmosphere for Muslims by criticising them when they are already under siege – i.e ‘don’t fight in a burning house’ (to which the answer is rather simple: ‘But who set the house of fire in the first place?’) and 2) the accusation of ‘sectarianism’, namely that I am ‘bashing’ certain groups of Muslims (of course with the implication that I should be bashing other groups of Muslims or better still, non-Muslims, instead).
What is ironic is that these allegations invariably come from the most sectarian Muslim groups imaginable: Salafist organs such as IERA that resolutely refuse to have Sufi or Brelwi speakers at all, even if they are famous like the aforementioned Al Qadri or British academic Tim Winter. And practically all accusations of ‘sectarianism’ are hollow rhetorical devices – none of these groups that will complain about them, such as Deobandis or Salafis would be seen dead being ‘non-sectarian’ to Brelwis let alone Shia or Zaydis or Mu’tazzila (in fact, Salafi Imams have given fatwas, even in the early period of Islam, that even taking a walk with one of the opposing groups constitutes disbelief and legitimises killing – see Barbahari et al)http://asharisassemble.com/2014/09/03/how-should-we-act-with-other-groups/
So what they really mean is; ‘anyone that criticises us is sectarian and is dividing the ummah. But if you want to divide the ummah by labelling Sufis, Mu’tazzila, Asharis, Brelwis, Shia etc as non-Muslims, no problem’. ie. they are orthodox Islam, labelling them is sectarian, but any overtures to Shias, for example, are are heresy.
Once again, Muslims, having been told by both Salafists and crypto-fascist cadres from the Western media that they are ‘under attack’, inevitably respond by huddling together and defending their ‘own’, even when it is unreasonable. In this they are joined by some of their Liberal friends, who will also explain terrorist atrocities with reference to Western foreign policy as a causative factor. They have a point and we will come to this, but for Muslims the highest ideal is meant to be God and his guidance: a terrorist attack or ISIS barbarity is not a time to ‘expose’ US foreign policy decisions but to exonerate the religion of God from those who claim to act in it’s name.
If we want to expose Western foreign policy, we can join with or spawn our own champions of the Left like Chomsky or Galloway (but we haven’t, due to the ‘non-engagement’ with Western institutions in general and politics in particular inculcated by the Muslim groups mentioned above).
Muslims failed to see that the Milquetoast criticism of violence committed by so-called Muslims such as Al Qaeda and ISIS (with notable exceptions such as Qadri and Winter, who were anathematised by many in the Muslim community for their trouble), played into the hands of extremists by making the West responsible for all of the foolish and violent actions of Muslims. So just as for the media, Islam became the ‘Deus Ex Machina’ to explain all of the misbehaviour by Muslims, in preference to genuine sociological explanations such as poverty, lack of education and marginalisation from wider society, so too in the case of Muslims, all bad behaviour on their part can be explained by the actions of ‘Murricah’ or Western Foreign policy or support for Israel etc.
But it wasn’t the West that made top Imams of Salafis give fatwas supporting the killing of innocents or the beheading of Muslims.
A corollary of minimising differences between your (preferred) groups of Muslims is that it results in magnifying our differences with non-Muslims:
For what then do we stand for if not for our creed, ideas and interpretations? Well, against the kufaar, that’s what!
Bizarrely, these Muslims who seek to unify the Ummah under the banner of the Caliphate or Salafism are exactly like their secularist opponents: whereas secularists do not want any religion in public life, these people want everything in religion – politics, redistribution of wealth, economics, military power, statehood – in short, everything in religion. Except actual religion.
You Made Me Do It: Muslims treat Western Foreign Policy the way the West treats Islam: as a ‘Deus Ex Machina’, catch-all excuse for any bad behaviour of Muslims’
There are numerous well known Muslim dawah carriers and public ‘thinkers’ whose entire intellectual range and claim to fame is being able to answer every question (from those about Female Genital Mutilation to domestic terrorism through to the alleged early marriage of A’isha (RA)) by saying:
‘Well if America hadn’t invaded [INSERT MUSLIM COUNTRY HERE] or supported [INSERT DICTATOR HERE] then it [INSERT SOMETHING DUMB MUSLIMS DID HERE] would never have even happened! Hah! Gotcha kufaar bastards!’ (The last bit is usually silent).
There are indeed powerful radicalising factors which have their origin in Western Foreign policy or unconditional support for Israel, and there are also plenty of scathing western critics of these [INSERT CHOMSKY REFERENCE HERE], but when it comes to Muslim apologists, that is their whole game. Which begs the question – is that an Islamic argument? Are they really helping matters at all or are they a one trick pony that in fact serves to curtail self reflection and increase animosity to the West instead of both sides coming to a balanced view?
Why do we even need these people when we have the aforementioned Chomsky and Galloway and countless others? Usually, the people who are hoping to score a ‘home run’ by bringing up the war in Iraq as an excuse for the 7/7 bombings or whatever, are as poorly read in international relations and current affairs as they are in Islam (IERA and HT speakers for example), and usually have plagiarised most of their information from the famous non-Muslim speakers or the ‘Socialist Worker’ and ‘Stop the War Coalition’ websites the night before regurgitating it to hungry Muslim audiences.
What they fail to answer is how come other groups which have also been the victims of Western Foreign policy (much of South America and Vietnam amongst others) do not respond with the same level of global terrorism. And the best response of all, which hopefully one day these people will receive from a scantily clad female art history student that they are looking down on in the audience; ‘But you are here to speak about and defend Islam, not reactionary behaviour towards western foreign policy. Isn’t the whole point of your religion that you act with justice and not ‘do unto others as they do unto you?’
But of course, practically none of the people that the Muslim community elects to speak for it actually believe in Quranic ethics: they are just involved in a point scoring exercise that resembles the response of the pagan Arabs to the Prophet’s call for justice: ‘Our tribe, right or wrong’.
By putting virtually all of the blame for Muslim extremism and inhumanity at the door of non-Muslims, these people stop Muslims weeding out the tiny minority of genocidal maniacs who actually are in their midst and in fact even tacitly support them. Just as the Western media, as we shall later see, is unable to blame the individual for terrorism but must try to pin the cause onto Islam, Muslims are unable to blame the individuals either and have to blame the West for ‘making them do it’.
Both sides are exact mirror images of each other, unable to accept moral culpability for anything and using their own crimes as an excuse to blame their opponents.
You know, like the old one about rapists saying that ‘she was asking for it’.
I Just Wanna Be Loved: Muslims refuse to engage with the political process or the arts…and then become radicalised by their lack of representation in politics and the arts
This essentially goes back to the preponderance of heterodox and ‘kind-of’ extremist or ‘diet extremist’ groups within the Muslim community: Deobandis for many years along with their Salafist familiars gave fatwas proscribing not only television but also photographs. People would agonise about taking even passport photos. I still remember refusing to have my picture taken for my student ID as an eighteen year old. Voting, still held to be disbelief by most HT cultists, was similarly a no-go area in my generation. Both positions have softened – but not by much and too late to guarantee the kind of widespread representation in both spheres achieved by our Jewish brethren – years of engagement has meant that if anything they are over represented in arenas such as Hollywood, where, all but admitting that people of Zionists held disproportionate influence, the Guardian recently claimed that criticising Israel was taboo in that town:http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/04/hollywood-divided-gaza-support-israel-backlash
It may be that ‘Zionists’ are well represented in Hollywood, but it is true that Jewish migrants and even refugees practically built Hollywood – not a conspiracy theory but rather acknowledging their tremendous contribution: if Neal Gabler can write a book with the subtitle ‘How the Jews Invented Hollywood’ without getting into trouble, neither should I for stating that the Jewish community has reaped the rewards of getting their voice heard in the US by gaining a large share in the arts (such as film-making) as well as lobbying and running for office. Regardless of how people feel that representation is used, Muslims have resolutely refused to attain it.
Whose fault that is will be discussed in the next section, but lets say here that it is Muslims': being part of organisations that declare voting to be ‘polytheism’ and ‘ascribing partners to God’ (as per HT) or declaring Music and photography being ‘absolutely prohibited’ and grounds for damnation is not going to lead to a glittering career in the arts or political spheres for practising Muslims.
Then when their opponents, whether the Far Right or Zionists, use these means to apply Islamophobic pressure on Muslims, they in turn get radicalised and go and join ISIS or whatever.
But who stopped them entering these fields and making Hollywood a means of promoting Palestinian causes? Was it discrimination by entrenched Islamophobic elites or was it the fact that Muslims never even gave it a shot, unlike our Jewish brothers (not exactly adored by the host community when the came to the US as migrants)?
And if practising Muslims cannot get representation in fields like the media and politics (with some exceptions), what of the police? Or even the Army?
Like it or not, pop-psych 101 means that no representation means these institutions will tend to experience xenophobia vis-a-vis the under-represented group, which in turn makes that group feel victimised. And do dumb stuff.
Yes, more and more Muslims are engaging in these fields. But isn’t it a bit too late? And with the guilt-tripping of Deo-Wahhabis and others when it comes to the arts and politics, they will always be like Achilles trying to catch the tortoise.
Except, they aren’t Achilles.
Ummah Before Country
When I was an inexperienced teenager in the 1990’s, I was convinced that I belonged to a supra-national entity that was a panacea for all of my and the worlds’ problems.
No, not ‘The Man From U.N.C.L.E’ or ‘The A Team’, but the ‘Muslim Ummah’. Sadly, this was as fantastical as the first two.
In fact, I think ‘U.N.C.L.E’ actually exists.
Nationalism is a dangerous and incoherent concept, which we shall look at later. Likewise, pride in one’s country is as strange as pride in any accident of birth and like most forms of pride, only works for good things (Germans are proud of their efficiency and not of the Holocaust, just as the Japanese like to talk about robotics and not the Rape of Nanking, Brits about the Indian Railway and not the Boer War etc). However, like it or not, it is the only show in town. The Muslim Ummah is not a reality in the sense Muslims imagine it to be. Whether it was ever real in the sense of a supra-national, non-imperial entity after the time of Ali (RA) is debatable. And even the last three Caliphs (including Ali) were assassinated. It was, thus, no utopia even at the best of times.
When I actually finally travelled in the Muslim world, I was quickly disabused of the notion of ‘ummah': more so than non-Muslims, who are in fact able to form multi-national or even global entities, from the EU to NATO to NAFTA to ASEAN, the Muslim ‘Ummah’ of Salafists affords you no benefits and can actually alienate you from your home country. I once thought that if things did not work out in the country of my birth, I could leave and go to a ‘Muslim’ country (it didn’t matter which) and get a job, get married or whatever people did when they grew up.
The fact of the matter is that as every Palestinian refugee knows, many ‘Muslim’ countries guard their boarders and self interest with a zeal equal to if not greater than the West, and unlike them, are unable to co-operate. At all.
Cashing in your UK citizenship for membership of ‘the Ummah’ (which often only treats you well if you have a British passport in the first place) is like trading in £10 pounds for a ticket to see a mermaid at the carnival. Try travelling and seeing how members of the ‘Ummah’ are treated by the wealthier Arab nations or Malaysia and you will soon be relieved of any excessive notion of ‘love between Muslim brothers’.
Or better still, get a job as a Bengaladeshi construction worker in Qatar and see how much you feel part of an ‘Ummah’.
Whatever the Prophet said the ummah is meant to be, Muslims need to see what is right now: resenting Britain for all it’s faults for other countries which are equally if not more faulted is magical thinking. Or just stupid.
And the fact remains: for all their xenophobia and bigotry, the US is willing, under certain conditions, to give the ‘right’ immigrant a job, citizenship, and a even a girl. One of their ‘own’ should he so wish.
Try getting that in ‘the Ummah’ (unless you have a Western passport to start with).
So Muslims belief in a semi-mythical cross-cultural supra-national entity called ‘the ummah’ can make them feel like they don’t need to make a life for themselves in countries like Britain, since, well, they could always leave. That may be true for overseas Chinese, who actually have a physical entity to go to, but for the Muslims, well, the Ummah doesn’t want you. The reasons are not necessarily bad ones – in many cases they cannot look after their own citizens, let alone other Muslims.
However, another part of Muslims magical thinking is that when they experience warmth and a good welcome from their co-religionists, they feel they have something unique.
Maybe.
Or maybe take a look at how people who look and believe the same from other groups treat each other. I think you will find it is much the same. You know, like Britain and Americas’ ‘Special Relationship’.
The Ummah and even further, the brotherhood of all men is a great idea that Islam represented to it’s best fruition.
But it has lapsed.
If you are British, you are most likely stuck here. You should make the best of it like everyone else rather than chasing pipe dreams (unless things get really bad with the Far Right, in which case ‘creek’ and ‘no paddle’ come to mind).
But of course, Muslims won’t do this. I recall (and have retained) a text message alert that was sent out by a local IERA ‘dawah’ organiser about one of their ‘training sessions’ in London. The text said explicitly that it was not allowed for Muslims, even those born here, to live in a non-Muslim country unless it was for the sake of ‘dawah’.
When Muslims tolerate this kind of extreme promotion of self-alienation, is it any wonder that people get radicalised? And my question to this IERA facilitator (‘groomer’ may be a better word): if I cannot live in the country of my birth except for Dawah, what am I supposed to do? Go to Saudi Arabia where IERA take it’s funding? Are they going to give me citizenship? A job? A wife?
Like it or not, NAFTA and the EU exist in reality. The ‘Ummah’, as Muslims are taught to think of it i.e as a supra national entity like the others, does not.
Which brings us nicely to…
Hearts In Atlantis: Muslims made up a fictional Islamic system which never actually existed…and then get angry and blame the West when it fails to actualise
We have already discussed how the desperation for some kind of ‘return’ to an Islamic system or state has led some of the biggest groups in UK mosques (Deobandis) and universities (the sadly not properly expunged HT) to support or even pledge allegiance to the Taliban in the past. The faults of the regime (and they were hideous faults) were overlooked: the dream of the Caliphate or ‘sharia’ was more important.
But it’s not a dream – it’s a fantasy. Like the difference between ‘Star Trek’ and ‘Star Wars': some bits of one could conceivably happen, the other not at all.
The state which these people envision not only does not and will not exist, it is a magical utopia which never existed. Further, the Prophet (SAW) made it clear that after the rightly guided Caliphs, things will fall apart. And they did.
But the Prophet is nothing to the utopian dreams of Muslims: so invested are they in these that they are willing, like Moazzem Begg, to emigrate to Taliban controlled Afghanistan, after 9-11. And today, people thus immersed in fantasies (blown into their yet sleeping minds by the keffiyah wearing Sandman of Salafism), are willing to actualise them with violence, and this is exactly what we have seen in Syria.
Young men going to fight to bring about and support this ‘Caliphate’ is a natural consequence of the import that the main Muslim groups gave this rather illusory notion. Combine this with the cult of isolation and violence as well as total disdain for Muslim let alone non-Muslim life found in the texts of senior imams of these movements, including those early ones such as Barabahari, Usman Dharmi and Ibn Taymiyya, and this outcome is not just likely but certain.
These people overlook the fact that the ‘sharia law’ as they see it was never applied by anyone (other than the genocidal Wahhabi state of Muhammad Abd Al Wahhabs’ followers themselves) for most of Islamic history, Hadd punishments were lifted or applied only in small areas. Even Umar, often used to legitimise stoning for adultery, refused to implement the punishment for fornication (let alone adultery) after a young man he had lashed for fornicating (and getting caught en flagrente) left Islam declaring: ‘By God, I will never lash anyone again’.
So even Umar did not implement the state these people want. Nor did the Andalusians and Ottomans (who didn’t manage to stone a single person in six hundred years) that these individuals (especially HT) wheel out for evidence of Islam’s glory days (since their own Salafist ancestors brought nothing of note to human endeavour – apart from curtailing it). Hilariously, they are forced to rely on the glories of Maturidi Ottomans and Andalusian philosophers – yet both groups are heretics and even disbelievers according to Salafists.
By telling people that it is their incumbent duty to set up a fictional Islamic state and guilt-tripping already alienated British Muslims over it, Muslims are again the ones fanning the flames of violent radicalism.
Once Upon A TIme In The Midlands: People in lower social classes and with less education, join violent and criminal organisations
It may be impolite to use the phrase ‘social class’, but that is how the medical profession breaks down society by economic status when cataloguing the very real differences in healthcare outcomes – from infant and maternal mortality to life expectancy – that exist between these ‘classes’, so I will retain their nomenclature.
Poorer people join criminal gangs and organisations – whether it is the Mafia or Snakeheads or just local street gangs.
Poorer people also tend to have higher incidents of violent crime, both as victims and as proponents.
Poorer people also tend to join ‘the Army’ (which can sometimes act a bit like a criminal gang).
Although the tendency is to see terrorism as somehow ‘uniquely evil’, it is at the end of the day violent criminal behaviour and the formation of criminal gangs, whatever else it may be. For many young Caucasian men, joining the army is an adventure and a uniform. Many poor young Muslims see ‘jihad tourism’ in the same way that many young working class white men see joining the army: glamorous.
The equivocation between the two will no doubt offend both jihad fans and sometimes equally unhinged armed services adulators, but it needs to be considered.
Muslims in the UK are poor. Whose fault that is is debatable (we shall look into this later). In fact, as a group, they are amongst the very poorest in the UK:http://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/dps/case/cr/CASEreport60_summary.pdf (page 15 onwards for lazy readers).
In fact, when it comes to both income and education, Muslim groups are the least well educated and have the lowest incomes – since the lowest income and education groups are Pakistani and Bangladeshi as well as Muslim (but not non-Muslim) Indians. Other immigrant and non-white groups such as Chinese and Indian Hindu communities actually not only outperform Muslims but even the ‘indigenous’ population. These results are consistent over many studies, over many years and even over many countries.
Poverty and lack of education is linked with criminal behaviour. Terrorism is criminal behaviour. Ergo, British Muslims will display this more than other groups which have on average better social group and education. In much the same way, they are over represented in the UK prison population as well.
Further, most Muslim are immigrants or their children. Immigration may be ‘risk factor’ for both criminal activity and being a victim of crime:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_crime
(This will cause much gnashing of teeth and possibly even speaking in tongues/glossolalia by Muslims and Liberals, but in fact is obvious: most immigrants are poor, or else why leave family and home unless there are significant ‘push’ factors, which is why wealthy countries have the smallest numbers of economic migrants leaving them. Since immigrants are poor and poverty is linked to crime, it is obvious that immigrants may be affected disproportionately by crime or rather certain types of crime)
But why am I ‘blaming’ Muslims for their straightened economic and educational circumstances vis-a-vis the rest of the British populace? Well, how come it doesn’t happen to other immigrant groups, like the Chinese and Indians and even Afro-Caribbeans to the same extent? (Of course it could be that migrants from non-Muslim countries tended to be wealthier and better educated to start with and passed on this advantage to their children).
A word of warning: whenever anyone makes a case like ‘people from China have epicanthic folds’ or ‘people from the east end of London speak with a distinctive accent’, one always gets someone trying to invalidate the claim by saying that it is ‘an unfair generalisation’ and that not all people are thus and that some Chinese people have ’round’ eyes or some people from the East End have a cut glass accent. This is a pointless discourse as when one speaks in this way one is usually speaking about the average or a ‘normal distribution': which means that most variables, like height or amount of books read in a year etc follow a pattern where the greatest number of individuals of that group are clumped in the middle and not at the extremes. So when I say that Muslims are poorer or less educated, it means on average and it is no answer at all to point out Muslims who are wealthy industrialists or famous academics. This is egotistical and is ignoring the majority by finding exceptions (which is a favourite strategy of the Far Right and Daily Mail, which in turn are synonyms).
Interestingly, most of the things which the anti-immigration (which could be renamed ‘Pro-Anglo Saxon’) and Islamophobic lobby accuse Muslims of doing, from grooming gangs to domestic violence, are also, in all studies, ever, correlated with poverty and lack of education. Whereas these same people would never make the pimping or drug dealing or domestic violence that is found in impoverished ‘white’ communities an indictment of Western Civilization in general but would rightly blame ‘poverty’, when it comes to Muslims, who are empirically and by academics’ and governments’ own studies even poorer than said white criminals, the cause is presumed to be Islam or even a passage in the Quran as the cause of rape, ill treatment of women or criminality in general.
Which is a blatant racist double standard that the vast majority of the British press, public and politicians in fact adhere too. But more on this later.
Islam – The Most Misunderstood Religion. By Muslims
Muslims who have been in the sway of heterodox circles (i.e all of them), which like Deobandis, Salafis and even some Brelwis, tend to be puritanical and suspicious of ease, get very easily annoyed by the perceived ‘immoral’ behaviour of non-Muslims and then look down on them, often in a most pronounced way, which in turn causes the non-Muslims to return the favour, which then causes Muslims to get more ‘radicalised’.
All the while, they have been presenting a form of Islam which no sane Western person would touch with a barge-pole (and then wondering why non-Muslims act the way they do and why they don’t become Muslim or see the ‘obvious superiority’ of the Islamic system).
Meanwhile, IERA (and their perfect mirror images the Far Right Islamophobes) are telling them that the UK is becoming more ‘Islamic’. Except it isn’t:http://asharisassemble.com/2014/05/11/the-cult-of-the-convert/
Most Muslims are under the influence of groups such as those above, which absolutely insist on things which are serious sticking points for Westerners and are favourite tropes of Islamophobes, but are not actually part of normative Sunni Islam (and by this I mean A’shari or Ma’turidi in belief). These groups think they are clever when they present often frankly outlandish (and strangely secular) arguments for why women cannot drive, have to cover their face, apostates have to be killed, why all hadith are verbatim true, why we have to stone adulterers etc. Except their arguments are unconvincing and often blatantly un-Islamic.
I was once presented with a ‘proof’ by an well known Islamic personality (who had some time in between exchanging wives) as to why Aisha (RA) the wife of the Prophet (SAW) was allegedly definitely nine at the time of her marriage. ‘Did you know that a girl in Romania got married and had a child at the age of just twelve recently?’. I genuinely believe that he thought it was a master-stroke. Everyone else, including the village idiot who happened to be passing, was appalled. And that is apart from the fact that ’12’ is a full 33% more than ‘9’, or to put it another way, it is the same as the difference between 12 and 16 years of age.
But most Muslim onlookers (and believe it or not, this was a university audience) betrayed no idea that they fathomed how poor this man’s argumentation was. He went on to elaborate that Aisha had to be young to ‘pass on Islam’. Like God ran out of other ways to do this. Or he could not keep her alive for another few years. Since, you know, God can’t do stuff like that right? (see a better answer here:http://asharisassemble.com/2012/11/01/the-age-of-hadrat-aisha-ra-a-detailed-and-balanced-answer/).
These types of repulsively bad yet self congratulatory answers by IERA-types convince no-one let alone sceptical non-Muslims.
But Muslims, understanding Islam largely through a distorted lens themselves, cannot present it to others.
Just as bad are those modernists who make Islam secondary to Liberalism (or whichever name what Tim Winter has labelled ‘The Monoculture’ is going by nowadays) and find licence for everything from gay marriage to The World Bank in Islam. They too think that they are presenting Islam to the non-Muslims but are equally unconvincing to them: for non-Muslims it begs the question of why God did not reveal the final draft of the secular liberal project as opposed to the Quran (and why they need the Quran and Islam at all when they are already following what Islam is being shoe-horned to fit by Quilliam and Co).
Whereas the Salafis can find no point of agreement between ‘Western values’ and Islam, the Modernists and Quilliam can find no point of disagreement.
Equally strange is the fact that both IERA speakers such as Hamza Tzortzis and Quilliam intellectual and fashion terrorists like Majid Nawaz, show a simply stunning degree of Islamic illiteracy. Spewing their poorly formulated Arabic phrases, they do not have even a rudimentary understanding of either the nuance or gross nature of Islamic jurisprudence and theology. Another alarming point of similarity between these crass wannabee Islamic ambassadors is that they are both products of HT.
The best outcome for the continuity of Islam in Britain is if the Hamza Tzortzis/Majid Nawaaz particle/anti-particle paring, created in HT shortly after the Big Bang, would come together at the same time and place and annihilate each other in a burst of pure egotism and stupidity.
Imam Al Ghazzali said that a stupid friend is worse than a clever enemy.
Islam has a lot of stupid friends.
Some may say Islam only has stupid friends.
So it makes little real impact on the lives and practices of non-Muslims in the UK – and this frustrates a certain type of ‘practising’ Muslim. Their lack of empathy, which in their case can only be inculcated with Quranic ethics and spirituality (which they cannot learn from either Salafists or Quilliam), means that they are simply not equipped to consider that the lithe and comely young woman in the park wearing the outrageous dress is in fact not a satanic temptress but maybe just a lonely person who finds validation from other peoples’ admiring glances. Or, you know what, maybe she is a temptress. So what? If Umar did not get worked up about non-Muslims walking around with their breasts out, who are we?
Usually when you look down on any person, God elevates that person and debases you. People can dress like courtesans and have hearts of gold. You know, like in that movie – the one you didn’t watch because they told you not to.
The negative and confrontational approach to non-Muslims’ behaviour and the superiority complex that many Muslims have from engagement with puritanical groups, who also cause Islam to be unappealing and not a ‘moral force’ in British life, results in these people blaming and resenting non-Muslims and their lifestyle. Which is again another ‘push factor’ for extremism and radicalisation (looking down on someone and/or not approving of them is a pre-requisite to ‘other things’).
And again, it’s all Muslims fault. Non-Muslims can’t be expected to be sympathetic to Islam when it is presented in a way so incongruent and in a language that they cannot understand.
It’s charming to put a beautiful engagement ring in an oyster. But not in excrement.
And that’s how Muslims very often present Islam.
Speaking of engagement rings…
Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask Muslims):
Muslims make it very hard for themselves to ever have sex. And then get annoyed when they see everyone else having it, start complaining about fitna and then get radicalised (and think that if they go to places like Syria, with one of those Arab scarves, the chicks will be lining up for them…and when this doesn’t happen, they get even more frustrated and radicalised and come back and attack the UK).
Yes, having no girl, no prospect of a girl, no whiff of a girl, is a great ‘push factor’ in making men do violent and stupid things. It’s always been like that – it’s in all those books you didn’t read growing up, because you were told that the only ‘useful knowledge was that of the Deen’ – neglecting to mention that ‘religion’ and ‘life’ are synonyms in Islam.
And the CIA agrees: just as young British men did (and still do) join the army with the prospect of exotic liaisons in the back of their minds, thus do sexually unattached Muslim men engage in ‘jihad tourism’.
Sexually dis-empowered, unable to talk to or attract the opposite sex, not even sure if they should try to attract the opposite sex, they are easy prey for people telling them that there is an endless supply of Syrian widows (I mean come on, you’ve seen them on TV: pretty even in rags aren’t they?).
Or worse, there could be ‘war booty’. Captives. You know the score – and fatwas from puritans justifying it are easy to come by.
Remember the jihadists and 9-11 ‘Masterminds’ (about as bad a misnomer as you can get) in the Philippines and their local girlfriends?:http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a98mabalacat#a98mabalacat
Can’t pull at home young man? Good, it’s haraam anyway. But I’ll tell you what isn’t haraam…
Don’t worry – the ‘foreign’ girls are simply gagging for some ISIS uniform dating! Chicks dig keffyas. And suicide vests and beheadings drive them crazy (and if they aren’t up for it, there’s always the injunctions about ‘war booty’. And the women of non-Salafists are ‘Ahlul Bidat’ – to be treated the same as non-Muslims).
I mean, even Bin Laden scored two Pakistani and one Somali wives (but strangely no Arab ones) at the last count. And that’s some job, what with being on the run from the CIA, FBI, Seal Team Six, Mossad, JSDF and God knows who else and not being able to speak a word of Urdu. And having kidney problems. And not being able to leave his cave. Or mansion. Or whatever.
Can’t get any action? Relax bro – dispossessed, lonely (and almost ‘white’) Syrian women need YOU! And so do exotic (almost Chinese) SE Asian girls! They are simply gagging for Al Qaeda types. I mean look at Khalid Sheikh Muhammad – he’s no looker. But ooohhh the uniform…sexy as!
Join the Jihad!
(Just don’t ask why you had to go to war to have any chance of ‘meeting’ a girl in the first place and who put you in that situation. Yes – it was those guys who told you to never attend events unless they were ‘properly segregated’. Which incidentally, are usually the same guys who want to send you on ‘Jihad’. Coincidence I’m sure).
Flashman on the March: Muslims are like those useless 19th Century English guys who could not get a job or girl in England and then used to run off to join The East India Company to ‘make their fortune’.
You know what used to happen if you were a total loser in the days of the Raj (it’s in all those ‘Boy’s Own’ adventures Salafis and Deobandis told you not to read as ‘wasting time’ was a sin)? If you could not cut it in the UK, couldn’t get a girl, couldn’t get a job, there was always the army. Or if you didn’t fancy running around the savannah in a bright red coat, you could always go to the Empire and try and make your fortune – there was Malaya, Shanghai, Hong Kong, recently wrested from a still seething China in the Unequal Treaties, Egypt and best (and easiest) of all, the jewel in the crown of the British Empire: India.
And today, if you are an angry young Muslim who spends all of his time reading Salafi books and watching jihadi torture porn on the Dark Web, but would really like a good job and a ‘pious’ wife (but can’t get one) then you have Bosnia (white girls), Chechnya (white girls) and Syria (white girls).
But not Malawi. Or Nigeria. Or Somalia. And probably not Kashmir. Or Burma. But maybe Afghanistan (sort-of white girls).
The press likes to make a big deal of that one or more bomber in every group that has a wife and kid (for example, the 7/7 attackers). Why would he do something like this?! The implication is the utter inscrutability and again, unfathomable evil of terrorism: it could be your neighbour – maybe that nice Pakistani lad…
In fact what they fail to mention is the other 90% of jihadists and terrorists who are jobless, girl-less and avid porn watchers (even Bin Laden had his ‘stash’, unoriginally placed under his bed apparently. He also had three wives. Go figure).
The outsider, marginalised and resentful of people who are successful with money or women is the common picture. The mentality of these individuals has been well documented, for example in Adam Lankfords’ work above or more obviously and accessibly in the number of 9/11 bombers who, though apparently about to cash in their ’72 virgins’ (or whatever the Daily Mail is saying is the ‘Islamic’ reward for the mass-murder of a bunch of impoverished immigrant cleaners and other staff in the Twin Towers at that time of the morning), nonetheless could not resist visits to strip-clubs, sniffing cocaine (possibly off of hookers) and other, err, indulgences:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1358665/Seedy-secrets-of-hijackers-who-broke-Muslim-laws.html http://www.breakfornews.com/Mohammed-Atta.htm
As for the ranting videos of the killers of Lee Rigby, if you gave them 72 virgins, they probably wouldn’t even be able to count them all.
The fact of the matter is that jihadists have made little to no contribution to either the Soviet-Afghan War (where some put the total number of Azaam and Zawahiris ‘Afghan Arabs’ at 400, and this in a decade long war which killed 2 million people) nor other conflicts such as Chechnya (where they had to be forcibly removed by the Muslims themselves, but have served to radicalise and terrorise the local population).
Yes, there are educated guys like the doctors who tried the Glasgow airport bombing as well as some family men (though we need to know if they were happily married as opposed to just ‘married’), but the majority of these people, as the CIA have said, are socially inept, isolated and have personality disorders. As well as enjoying an inordinate amount of pornography (like Bin Laden himself allegedly).
But for a very long time, the Muslim groups mentioned above carefully glamorised these people, inflated their contribution to conflicts such as Afghanistan and Chechnya and even pasted over their decidedly un-Islamic behaviour.
The veneer of glory given to jihadists is similar to that given to Marines or the SAS in the UK. This is entirely the fault of Muslims. They have now realised this and are speaking against it, but the damage was done in the time of the Taliban. And even now, if you look carefully, there is a great deal of scepticism and denial by Muslims about ISIS – did they really do this or that? The mindset that Salafist groups in the UK have inculcated in young Muslims under their sway does not necessitate that many will go and fight – but they will all feel the air of masculinity and glamour that has been gifted to the jihadis by the Muslims themselves.
How To Lose Friends and Alienate People:
Muslims couch their resentments in selfish, naval gazing terms – they complain about Israel-Palestine and Muslim causes but never injustice elsewhere: they complain about Muslim poverty but not the general problem of poverty – unlike the Left or some Liberals. This means people see them as selfish and don’t have sympathy for them. Muslims then get radicalised and go join ISIS or whatever (because people don’t have sympathy for them).
“The greatest truth in life is that is that the happiness and peace of each can be reached only through the happiness and peace of all.” – Muhammad Ali
This is the truth as it has ever been spoken. Even if this had been uttered at a Black Mass by Satan himself, it would yet be the truth.
Muslims as a group though do not understand this at all.
They are too self absorbed with their problems to see that their complaints can only be solved within the context of a fairer and more considerate global political and economic model: you can’t achieve Muslim happiness without human happiness (whether non-Muslims understand this either, will be discussed later on).
You hardly ever see Muslim Imams or apologists who can speak with the broad appeal and anti-capitalist rhetoric of people like Chris Hedges or Noam Chomsky. The reason is largely to do with their insularity and naval gazing. If Muslims were to couch their criticism of the West in the anti-globalisation and anti-capitalist rhetoric accessible to others, as well as presenting Islam as a solution for the general problem of injustice as opposed to (for non-Muslims) the non-problems of mini-skirts and alcohol, they would find a more sympathetic ear. As it is, they merely sound like another special interest group.
A bit like a rubbish, ineffective version of Zionists.
Even within Muslim causes, certain ones, like Israel-Palestine are given far more emphasis than Somalia, Kashmir, Burma, Xinjiang or Sri Lanka. And non-Muslim causes like Third World Debt or The South American Drug Wars…well you can forget about them entirely. Unless some HT non-economist is telling you that ‘Islamic finance’ is the solution (details are usually sparse).
You know why Chomsky has a cult like following, even amongst Muslims, despite being both an anarchist and an atheist? It’s because he comes across like he is genuinely enraged when he sees injustice. Even when it doesn’t concern him at all. Even though he doesn’t believe in God
Nor does he believe in the Quran. Nonetheless, that thing which the Quran talks about more than practically any other, more than prayer, more than adultery, namely justice. That part of the Quran, the very heart – whether he knows it or not – he believes.
Mu’tazzilite theologians such as Qadi Abd Al Jabbar used to sum up Islam as two principles only besides the oneness of God: Al Nazar (speculative reason) and Al ‘adl (justice).
If you are honest, nearly all Muslim speakers are very obviously concerned with a narrow range of Muslim causes. They do not have a wide appeal.
As God says in the Quran, if you forget about him, he will forget about you.
So too with the people, Muslim or not.
Non-Muslims or Their Institutions Are The Real Cause of ‘Radicalistion’
All You Need Is Kill: Europeans Really Don’t Give A Damn About Muslim Lives
I have been thinking of a nice way of saying this for a long time, but there really isn’t one. As a lot of non-Muslim commentators (notably the usual suspects Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, Norman Finklestein and John Pilger (http://johnpilger.com/articles/the-london-bombs-also-belong-to-the-new-prime-minister) have noted, there really is less sympathy and concern for Muslim causes and lives than for non-Muslim ones. In particular, amongst individuals of European extraction.
Non-Muslims seem to be genuinely unaware of this (or at least unaware that Muslims have noticed it). But it is so obvious that even the under-privileged and under-educated Muslim communities of the inner cities of Europe are entirely cognizant of it. Glen Greenwald put it very bluntly regarding the media coverage of the recent Israel – Palestine conflict (which he over generously graded with an ‘F’):
“There’s no question that the way that the American media covers this conflict is based on the principle that Israeli lives are just inherently more valuable than Palestinian lives. It takes probably 50 Palestinians being killed to get anywhere near the attention of, say, an elderly Israeli woman being frightened in her home and having some kind of a medical problem because of the trauma.”
According to Greenwald, almost as many Palestinians have been killed as Americans on 9/11, and the media has remained “essentially calm about it.”
“I think there’s a racist element to it. I think there’s an ethnocentric element to [the media coverage],” he said. “There’s definitely an anti-Muslim strain that runs throughout how this coverage is conducted.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/04/glenn-greenwald-israel_n_5648822.html
Glen can get away with saying it, but then, he is a Jew himself (though as Zionists are eager to point out, he was never ‘Bar Mitzvah-ed’ – just like most Zionists), but the fact of the matter is that despite it’s glaring obviousness, Europeans, as a group, just won’t accept this kind of observation from Muslims.
This blaise approach to Muslim life manifests itself in countless ways, all of which are again immediately obvious and infuriating to Muslims and yet seem to go entirely unnoticed by Non-Muslims. For example, recently a thousand Christians gathered outside the British Parliament to pray for ‘Christians and Yazidis’ in Iraq and reminded people of the non-fact that ‘Christians are the most persecuted minority on Earth’ https://www.facebook.com/events/1515119865388907/.
What do we think of the fact that they conspicuously neglected to mention that the vast majority of the victims of ISIS in both Iraq and Syria are Muslims? And what about the Alewites, another decidedly non-Christian group, which in fact despite being only 18% of the Syrian population make up nearly 50% of casualties of that conflict (according to the Syrian opposition no less)?:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/14/syria-death-toll-120000_n_3272610.html & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Syrian_Civil_War#cite_note-27
ISIS and groups such as Boko Haraam, the Taliban and God knows which other Salafist Hydra have been happily massacring Muslims but as soon as a journalist or Christian gets killed, the whole world suddenly sits up and not only notices, but the media soon try and spin it so that it appears to be a Muslim attack on minorities.
It’s just as Greenwald said: 50 Muslim lives are nothing compared to a Christian ladies’ cat up a tree in Mosul.
Mainstream media coverage has mirrored this type of disgusting bias at a prayer meeting – the likes of which Jesus would never be seen within ten miles of – harping on about Christians and Yazidis and faithfully neglecting to mention that just as with the Taliban and even Al Qaeda, the majority of victims as well as practically all of the people fighting against the Taliban in Pakistan and ISIS in Syria/Iraq are Muslims. Does this kind of flagrant disregard for Muslim lives and emphasis on Christian or other deaths not cause young British Muslims to think; ‘Our lives really aren’t worth anything to them. We should return the favour and treat them equally callously. Do unto others as they would do unto you (but do it first)…’
And how exactly is Christianity ‘the most persecuted group in the world’ when nearly all of the recent wars such as the Iraqi and the Afghan conflicts (as well as virtually all of the people who have lost their lives thereafter), were Christian majority countries (and armies) attacking Muslim majority nations? So now young Muslims are being told; ‘Okay, so a bunch of Christians went and killed two million of your religious brethren. But it is actually the few Christians who died that is the problem, and BTW, they are the most persecuted group, regardless of whether they are doing the persecuting or not. Also, please forget about what Christian armies did in Vietnam etc. and also forget all of the Muslims killed in Burma. And Sri Lanka (by Buddhist mobs). And India. Just worry about the Christians. because they are special. and ‘kind of European’.
Mosques are attacked, nay bombed after the murder of poor Lee Rigby http://news.sky.com/story/1185450/mosque-fire-bombing-former-soldiers-jailed and nary a peep; anti Semitism is similarly expectedly on the rise after the Israeli conflict and coverage is non-stop and indignant: ‘How could this happen!':http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/uk-jews-mourn-gaza-dead-but-antisemitic-attacks-surge-9658038.html.
It’s obvious where the sympathies lie. Europeans think it more ‘right’ to blame Muslims for what two unhinged basket cases did in their name and well, if some mosques get attacked, then those crazy Muslims have only themselves to blame for not ‘tackling extremism’. But someone attacking a synagogue after IDF atrocities is ‘unconscionable’ – and indeed it is – but this is despite most Jewish communities stated support for Israel, something that is conspicuously absent from Muslims vis-a-vis their self appointed genocidal representatives.
It’s ‘maybe’ offensive to build a mosque several blocks away from the World Trade Centre. Is it ever offensive to build a synagogue anywhere though? How about after the latest Israeli transgressions? Or is Religion only associated with violence when it is Muslims being violent?
It simply confirms the worst fears of already paranoid Muslim youth: the Last Crusade is still going on and it’s not the fun version with Indiana Jones: only Christian (or Jewish) casualties matter.
The basic fact is that any young Muslim who has reading comprehension or can watch television is acutely aware of something that is lost on Non – Muslims in general: Muslim life is cheap for Europeans. They don’t give it as much coverage, they don’t have prayer meetings for it and they ignore it to focus on loss of life from their ‘favoured’ groups (such as Middle Eastern Christians).
There are many reasons for European civilizations barely masked antipathy to Islam, foremost of which is it’s poorly examined xenophobia which culminated (if indeed it has culminated) in the Holocaust. Europeans, having been aggressors against Islam, Christian minorities, Jews and pagans in the Crusades, the Inquisition and The Reconquista and the recent wars in the Middle East that have claimed some million plus Muslim lives, nonetheless have, like Christians, inculcated a massive ‘victim complex’ against Islam.
Well, now young British Muslims have inculcated a massive victim complex against European civilization.
Except in their case it may actually be true.
Non-Muslims speak of Muslims in terms that would get them locked up (or worse) if they said so about Jews (or anyone else)
Again, many non-Muslim are blissfully ignorant of something which radicalises young Muslims extremely effectively: It is glaringly obvious that if one was to generalise or report about any other minority or group as people do about Muslims, it simply would not be accepted.
Examples from the media of shocking statements by ‘think tanks’, ‘security experts’ and ‘commentators’ can be multiplied ad nauseum. It would simply be sufficient to show that any group wishing to protest synagogues or Jewish areas after the recent events in Israel as the EDL and their bastard love-child with Satan’s stylist, ‘Britain First’ expect to do outside mosques and Muslim areas on the anniversary of 9-11 or any excuse whatsoever, would simply not be allowed to do so. They would get locked up faster than Prince Harry can drop his trousers in Vegas. The end.
Sam Harris has told us that we perhaps deserve to be killed for holding sufficiently dangerous ideas (he means Islam) [‘Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them’ Sam Harris, The End Of Faith: Religion, Terror and The Future of Reason p52-53]
In the States, less accommodating of the Far Right than Europe, you can still get away with this: Gavin Ellzey, the vice chairman of the Kansas Republican 3rd Congressional District Committee, advised on Twitter in early July that “Offending Muslims is the duty of any civilized person.”
Ellzey added, “Especially with a .45.”
Outnumbered co-host Andrea Tantaros suggested that the history of Islam set a precedent for the murder of Journalist James Foley, and that the only way to solve the situation was “with a bullet to the head. It’s the only thing these people understand”: you know she’s not just talking about ISIS but all Muslims right? Since she went to the trouble of clarifying that it was ‘Islam’ that was the problem:http://www.aaja.org/fox-news-islamophobic/
This genocidal maniac wants to combine the McCarthy witch-hunts and the Spanish inquisition:
‘It’s all very simple. We can’t fight Islam in the West without fighting the enablers of Islam in the West, namely the Leftists.’
http://enzaferreri.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Islam#axzz3CNsmERGA
She has has avoided arrest or censure (and examples can be identified indefinitely) despite boasting that she is ‘London based’. Yet the press is up in arms when we fail to deport Muslim hate preachers from abroad.
She goes on: And, since the Left has many different and separate aspects, we have to fight against each one of them. Secularism, environmentalism, global warming alarmism, homosexualism, militant feminism, sexual relativism, multiculturalism, anti-Christianity, Islamophilia, post-nationalism, internationalism are just as important targets to attack as Marxist economics, the expropriation of the capitalist class (or, in its modern reincarnation, high taxation and welfare state, aka redistribution of wealth), and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Whaaaa?! You can even cuss out secularism, environmentalism, gays and feminists too as long as you have a go at Muslims first? Why didn’t someone tell me?! And is ‘homosexualism’ a word now?
Holocaust denial is rightly a crime. But how about inciting new Holocausts? Creating the groundwork for new genocides is worse than denying old ones. But Europe doesn’t seem to care.
In fact, Islamophobia has become so extreme and normalised that sufficiently emboldened commentators like Marine La Pen have started attacking Jews again:http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/le-pens-attacks-on-islam-are-no-longer-veiled-8181891.html
Clive James: ”The first thing to understand is that the men of the Islamic minorities in the democratic countries should be prevailed to honour the law of the land before they concern themselves with the supposed honour of their families. They simply must be induced, if not by persuasion then by punishment, to stop cutting up and killing their women.”
Yes Clive, Muslim men (no specificity needed), ‘cut up and kill their women’. Come now Dear Reader, do you honestly think that we, in this day and age could get away with talking about any other group in this way? You know we can’t, but most of the non-Muslim readers think ‘Oh well, they only say it because it’s true’. We will come to how ‘true’ all of the stories about Muslims doing this and that are. Let us just say for now then that according to Operation Yewtree, men of Clive James’ generation, beliefs and culture like to fiddle children. And dead people (as Saville has been accused of).
Old ‘white guys’ like Jimmy Saville, Stuart Hall and possibly Clive James, living in the West need to be induced, if not by persuasion then by punishment to stop molesting kids. Feel free to sue Clive – though I’m just returning the generalisation.
Recently expired American comedienne Joan Rivers recently got away with saying that Palestinians deserve to be killed for not getting out of the way of IDF military attacks. In a bizarre endorsement of eugenics (from of all people, a Jew), she suggested that those stupid enough to not get out of the way of bombs (she obviously has never visited Gaza or she would realise that in this tiny strip of land, one of the most crowded places on earth, these is nowhere to get out of the way to) should die due to their low IQ.http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/joan-rivers-palestinians-deserve-to-be-dead-9656554.html
If someone was to suggest the same thing about Jews who stayed in Nazi Germany (or Jews in any context), despite all of the indicators of an impending massacre, they would rightly be locked up. So then how come Rivers was recently treated to a hagiographical get well soon card by the equally morally bankrupt Ellen E. Jones in ‘The Independent’, who despite acknowledging her comments on Palestinians, tells us ‘I hope Joan Rivers gets well soon and lives to be 110 and never stops saying mean things to people who definitely don’t deserve it. The woman is an inspiration…’.
An ‘inspiration?!’ To who?
To fascists, that’s who.
How do you think Muslims feel reading something like that?
But few Europeans ever put themselves in the shoes of Muslim readers and hence ‘struggle to understand’ radicalisation. Since generalisations are so well tolerated by such people, as we can see above, maybe I will be permitted to explain such lack of empathy as a hallmark of European civilization.
Europeans have simply never understood how ‘outsiders’ think – because they are too busy trying to make outsiders think like them.
Europeans also don’t seem to understand that since fascists today are targeting Muslims and not gays or Jews, they are nonetheless fascists still: no totalitarian group has ever ‘gone after’ everyone. Europeans have forgotten Hitler’s Axis partners – the decidedly and insistently non-Aryan ideal of Mussolini’s Italy and Imperial Japan (as well as all of the European countries that remained ‘neutral’). Fascists can get along with other races and even nations when they have to. But never their chosen target. The target is always, as for any bully, the easiest and most vulnerable.
In fact, many non-Muslims are so out of touch that they think there is not enough criticism of Islam and Muslims and people are treading on eggshells to avoid provoking Muslims. Hiding behind the catch-all of artistic expression (always a good excuse, just ask Leni Riefenstahl), freedom of speech or ‘comedy’, Richard Curtis, Rowan Atkinson and others have expressed their concerns that they are not being allowed to ‘freely mock Islam’.
Since we already saw what happened in Europe when we start to ‘freely mock’ non-European minorities, one would have thought that suggesting that Muslim should be killed for holding dangerous ideas and then actually killing a whole bunch of Muslims would be ‘expressive’ enough.
Good people from all races and communities sometimes console themselves with the fact that these EDL types are a lunatic fringe’ but they don’t stop to see how Muslims see it: they see it as the police facilitating Islamophobic protests and allowing street gangs into Muslim areas (as Hitler once correctly boasted, if they wanted to stop him they should have kept him off the streets). And then they wonder why the authorities want to keep these people around. Maybe they want to have a ready street army to help with the ‘Muslim problem’ in the future. Otherwise, these groups should have gone the way of ‘Muslims Against Crusades’ and their protests at Wotten Basset: Banned like the ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ on VHS.
It may sound outlandish to non-Muslims and liberals. But therein lies the root of radicalisation: it sounds eminently plausible to many Muslims.
To give credit where it is due, people are beginning to realise that the anti-Muslim rhetoric has gone too far:http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/peteroborne/100074414/if-youre-looking-for-islamophobia-try-the-comments-under-my-article-about-baroness-warsi/ and the banning of Pamela Geller from these shores was a step in the right direction, but a generation has been exposed to the unrestrained hate speech of an out of control media since 9-11.
They are now alienated and angry.
Our Men In Mecca: Non-Muslims created and sustain Saudi Arabia…and then complain when people get radicalised by it’s teachings
When the British sought to foment rebellion amongst tribesmen in what is now Saudi Arabia during the First World War as a means of destabilising the Ottoman Empire, TE Lawrence (of ‘Arabia’ fame), warned the fading colonial power against allowing the Wahhabi tribesmen to come to power, favouring his friends the Sherifs of Mecca. Of course the British did not listen and quickly knighted Abdul Aziz Bin Saud, who in alliance with the genocidal ultra-puritan Wahhabi clerics of the ‘As Sheikh’ family went on to promulgate and enforce the heretical Wahhabi creed throughout his kingdom, and with the Hajj pilgrimage bringing the Muslim peoples to them, the world. Before protection duties for Saudi were taken over by the Americans and Aramco following the discovery of oil, we Brits even helpfully put down rebellions against the House of Saud by carrying out airstrikes on his own troops, the ‘Ikhwaan’, who had rebelled against him for not being extreme enough. (We are now similarly carrying out airstrikes on ISIS, which Saudi helped create but has now become a threat to it).
Since then, despite the massive dissemination of extremist literature and fatwas from Saudi Arabia, with even recently the very Imam of Mecca mosque condoning the killing of innocents in suicide attacks on other Muslims, let alone non-Muslims, it has enjoyed the protection and patronage of both Britain and the US, being a top recipient of both military hardware and military assistance.
Saudi gets a pass for never having elections whereas Iran for example, is threatened with sanctions for having not good enough ones. From supporting and funding violent jihadis in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/iraq-crisis-sunni-caliphate-has-been-bankrolled-by-saudi-arabia-9533396.html, crushing the revolution in Bahrain (and Egypt), sheltering dictators such as Ben Ali of Tunisia (the inadvertent spark for the ‘Arab Spring’), Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and even Idi Amin (?!), Saudi can do no wrong and gain no censure from the West. Fifteen of nineteen 9-11 hijackers are from Saudi but it is Afghanistan that gets bombed back into the ‘Stone Age’ (from which it has not in fact properly emerged after the Soviet War). American and British diplomats, suitably anaesthetised with weapons contracts and trade deals, never stop to wonder why of all paces, the Taliban regime they are at war with is comfortable opening it’s offices in Qatar.
In fact, thousands of Western troops are stationed in Saudi to protect the very religious and monarchic establishment that is preaching the extremist Islam that the West allegedly wants to tackle.
Saudi funding and literature flow like wine at a Bacchanalian feast through UK universities, dawah organisations such as IERA and MDI, mosques and madrassas everywhere from Indonesia to Pakistan to Central London. They operate with relative impunity and yet the governments of these countries are telling us that the Muslim community needs to counter the ‘Islamic threat’ in their midst…that the West put there due to it’s unholy alliance with Saudi Arabia and Qatar, Wahhabi states that preach exactly the kind of violent and intolerant extremism that Orthodox Muslims have been railing against for centuries.
Non-Muslims want to blame Muslims for being radicalised after they themselves created and maintained the main source of this radicalisation: Saudi Arabia.
If London Central mosque can be run by Wahhabi extremists and East London mosque can appoint a disciple of Saudi clerics who is a self professed female genital mutilator, what chance do the poor masses of Indonesia and Pakistan have against radicalisation from Saudi scholars, books and cash?
Naked Violence Is The Best Negotiator: The West teaches Muslims that ‘Might Is Right’…and then gets annoyed when they learn the lesson too well
Chinese leader and well apologised-for genocidal maniac Mao Zhedong once referred to the US as a ‘paper tiger’. It was pertinent because the US, much like it’s stance towards Iran at the moment, had made all manner of economic and military threats to China, lest it become a nuclear power. As we all know, it eventually did, at which stage it was re-admitted to the UN Security Council in 1971. You know, since all of the permanent members just happen to be nuclear powers.
Iran learnt the lesson well: the West will threaten you, even attack you, but if you are financially or militarily (usually one leads to the other) formidable, they will eventually come to terms with you. If Iran actually does get nuclear weapons, history shows that the Western powers will ‘come round’ and start being nicer to them.
Again, largely insular and borderline xenophobic Europeans don’t realise what Muslims are realising all too well: the West is actually much nicer to dangerous and violent people. They just have to be very dangerous like China, in which case all talk of free and fair elections, human rights and even the sacred ‘freedom of expression’ will fade to a barely audible background noise while David Cameron kowtows to the Chinese leadership at Downing Street Receptions.
Turkey has to face constant threats of the ‘Armenian Incident’ being made a legally compulsory ‘genocide’, but no one is agitating Japan to recognise the Rape of Nanking and it’s rule in Northern China (possibly 20 million deaths) or China the horrors of the Cultural Revolution – whose aforementioned perpetrator has a giant Mausoleum in the capital, visited with almost Confucian deference by foreign dignitaries, despite being held by historians responsible for up to 78 million deaths (equivalent to 13 Holocausts). And I’m pretty sure no-one is going to make praising Stalin illegal any time soon.
Muslims or Iranians see this and think; ‘Hmmmmmm…human rights, elections, all of crap is not necessary, if you want the West to respect you, what you really need is ‘The Bomb’ (the nuclear kind, not a really attractive girl. Although, that too). And a giant army. And economic clout. But most of all The Bomb.’
The West is actually encouraging the horrors of nuclear and conventional military proliferation with it’s Milquetoast approach towards states that have acquired them.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of Russia’s actions (or lack thereof) in Ukraine, if a Muslim state had behaved with such adventurism towards an ‘nearly’ European state, they would not be receiving the barely imperceptible sanctions that Russia is experiencing – they would be getting what Iran does now but on steroids. And can you imagine if Iran had shot a commercial airliner out of the sky?
Again the message to Muslims is clear: might is right. If you have a powerful state backing you, we will come to terms. We might not like it, but hey, wouldn’t you rather be Russian than Iranian right now?
Even North Korea gets more leeway than Muslims – with over a million troops amassed around the 39th parallel, you can bet that the US is not going to be flying any drones or doing any air strikes on Kim Jung Un any time soon. Because then, well, as they say in America, it could get ‘real’.
The message to Muslims from the West and it’s history with ‘aggressors’ and ‘nuclear aspirants’ like China and Russia is clear: if you want our respect, you had better be packing. And they are listening.
From Russia (& China) With Love
How can China radicalise Muslims you ask? Well it is not exactly China but rather the West’s approach to China that radicalises Muslims: they can see that China is a non-European, non-democratic human rights no-go zone that not only enjoys excellent reception from the West but is also somewhat venerated and glamorised, including by Hollywood, such as the recent ‘Transformers: Age Of Extinction’ (the single stupidest thing to ever be committed to celluloid, unless someone films the next Hamza Tzortzis lecture).
Of course, I am not here to bash China, since Saudi enjoys huge leeway for economic reasons as well, but when the Red Carpet is rolled out for what human rights groups regard as a hugely problematic state:http://www.hrw.org/world-report/2014/country-chapters/china, onlookers will wonder. Just as Iran supports the ‘evil dictatorship’ of Assad, China is the major backer of North Korea (and Vietnam. And Burma), but the censures on Iran for not having ‘proper’ elections, human rights failings, alleged abuse of minorities, backing dictatorships and so on are severe and in the case of China, effectively non-existent.
It shows Muslims that the West does not even care about race or politics: they will bring down the hammer on an Assad or a Saddam Hussein or an Ahmedinijad – but what about the curtailing of reproductive rights, forced abortions and God knows what else in China?
Feminists cannot get over the lack of women’s rights in Muslim societies to uncover their hair or whatever, but they spend far less time agonising about a ‘woman’s body’ when it comes to the one child policy or forced and gender selective abortions in India (and again, China).
Recently, card carrying NATO founding members Britain and France actually continued to sell weapons, including warships to Russia on the very same day as NATO Secretary General Anders Fogg Rasmusen declared that Russia was ‘attacking’ Ukraine and that NATO was preparing a rapid response to the changed security environment: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/world-news/nato-secretary-general-anders-fogh-rasmussen-says-russia-is-attacking-ukraine/articleshow/41690201.cms.
Well, arming your opponent is certainly a novel solution to military confrontations. Not sure if it will work though…
But can you imagine the West arming Iran at all, let alone if it had ‘invaded Ukraine’? Not only would they not be getting any warships, NATO would probably carry out a nuclear strike on Tehran and turn the city into molten glass and concrete.
Again, this is not to take NATO or Russia’s side – I don’t want to face either of them in a ‘one on one’, but rather to highlight the West’s radically different approaches to dealing with states like Iraq and Iran on one hand and Russia and China on the other (or equally, leaders like the Ahmedinijad and Kim Jung Un).
Doesn’t this confirm, in the eyes of young Muslims in the UK radicalised by Salafist propaganda that ‘the kufaar all stick together. We should do the same’?
Again, this is not to problematise poor China or any other country, they are the same as anywhere – some good and some bad points. But what Muslims notice is that censure is only for, or at least disproportionately for, Muslim majority countries when it comes to human rights and democracy.
It is not actually the fault of China but rather the West’s morally bankrupt and Islamophobic foreign policy.
And it makes the Muslims angry – it just another way of the west saying to Muslims; ‘We hate you’.
Delta Farce:
Supporting Israel – no matter what it does. And then getting angry when Muslims support other Muslims, no matter what they do.
Lets approach this from a slightly different angle than usual: why on Earth is Israel part of the Eurovision Song Contest?
Since when was Israel part of Europe? There are lots of countries closer to Europe than Israel, are they part of it too? Poor Turkey is actually in Europe and can’t get membership of the EU. Did I miss something in geography class?
Yes I did: Muslims in particular missed the lesson on ‘the solidarity of European civilization’ – but they learnt about it from the media the hard way. They saw how sympathetic Europeans are to the plight of their extended cultural network and people who look and act like them. They saw how when something bad happens to one country (like the US), they all jump in and ‘hang tight’. And then some Muslims thought it might be a good idea to do something like that for themselves, since the West’s foreign policy made it abundantly clear that ‘hanging tight’ was only for European origin countries, or those over which they enjoy a degree of suzerainty such as South Korea and Japan. And of course, Israel.
For NATO and other Europeans, an attack on one is an attack on all.
So Muslims started to copy this idea and hold ‘ummah’ above loyalty to state (since their state already made it clear that it does not like Islam or Muslims) and started to ‘over sympathise’ with their co-religionists and go off to fight for them in foreign lands….Just like how Europeans ‘over sympathise’ with their co-culturalists and go off to fight in foreign lands to ‘back up’ the US (or whoever) when they are attacked.
Which is also why Israel is in the Eurovision song contest: because Westerners are showing Muslims that they belong to an exclusive supra-national entity that defends their interests regardless of considerations of justice (or citizenship or geography).
Some stupid Muslims think that ISIS is the same thing for them.
The Gypsy Curse: Okay – The West doesn’t just hate Muslims: It has a whole taxonomy of people it doesn’t like – windbagging about Immigration (especially when you really mean non-white immigration and Muslims)
In the UK we have a particularly annoying man, a man who is a ‘Diet’ or ‘Low Calorie’ xenophobe called Nigel Farage. He annoys Muslims and anyone else with good sense because he is involved, like the vast majority of the British press and thus public, in perpetuating a nonsense debate about immigration to the UK.
We and our public services (as well as our ‘way of life’) are apparently in danger of being ‘swamped’ by ‘migrants’, which is actually a catch all term in the minds of most British people, covering everything from any ‘non-Whites’, white people who don’t ‘act white’, to recent migrants from Europe to second generation Asians and blacks. And especially people from the ‘wrong’ parts of Eastern Europe (Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary). And even more especially gypsies. Who are to be called the politically correct term ‘travellers’. But still treated like gypsies.
Much like how one can get away with saying things about Muslims that would otherwise get you locked up if said about anyone else, Nigel Farage and the anti-immigration lobby can get away with saying such flagrantly racist things about immigrants:http://www.independent.co.uk/incoming/nigel-farages-romania-comments-show-he-is-clearly-a-racist-says-labour-mp-david-lammy-9397763.html
Immigration and it’s perceived threat to the ‘British way of life’ and resources has become, like the ‘Muslim question’, such a big problem in the UK and Europe that at the last election, it was considered the first or second biggest concern of British voters, despite the horrific downturn in the economy (and most of those who were concerned about that were probably worried due to the alleged effect of immigration on the economy).
The only one slight tiny, itsy-bitsy hardly-worth-mentioning problem with all this is that there is in fact no such issue as an ‘immigration problem’ in the UK: the whole debate is fictional and manufactured by the press. But despite the entirely obvious fact that the whole debate is baseless and largely perpetuated by a self – professed racist, it is allowed to continue and dominate even the liberal press.
An ageing population and falling birth rates as well as stagnant economic growth have mandated large scale liberalisation of immigration barriers not only in the EU but even in such formerly racially homogeneous places as Ireland and Japan (both of whom have their own entrenched lobbies propagating an equally fictitious debate on migration and it’s ‘evils’).
Business leaders and reputable economists have a consensus against the diatribe surrounding immigration, but it falls on deaf ears:http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/pa014.pdf
In fact, the concerns of Europeans about immigration are so detached from economic reality that even illegal migration helps the economy:http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/jun/15/migrants-amnesty-immigration-london-johnson
Business leaders are understandably furious at immigration policies which damage the economy – and then blame the poor state of the economy on migrants:http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/news/1171968/Great-British-immigration-scandal-Young-gifted-foreign—shut-UK/
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/wanted-more-immigrants-to-boost-british-economy-6271541.html
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/05/migration-target-useless-experts
For stupid people (i.e all UKIP voters) here is a primer that an entry level student of economics might study about immigration:http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6399/economics/impact-of-immigration-on-uk-economy/
Now prepare anti-emetics and a bathroom before reading this absolute un-academic emotionalist tripe from the other side:http://www.migrationwatchuk.com/briefingPaper/document/283
There is, very simply, no reputable study to support what UKIP and all of the major parties as well as the popular press are saying about immigration – i.e that it is a ‘problem’.
Basically, the voting public in Britain is most concerned at election time about a problem that, according to all economists and business leaders as well as academics, does not exist. They might as well be as concerned about pixies, banshees and leprechauns raping their pets as about the economic impact of immigration.
It has further escaped the British public that the increase in Eastern European migration was an entirely foreseen and desired consequence of the European Community project – as France and Germany in particular were very keen to displace their North Africans and Turks with culturally and ‘racially’ homologous Poles and other groups.
Muslims and others see the false debate about immigration, and what the xenophobic British electorate really means when it talks about immigration: it just means people who don’t fit in, not actual immigrants. People like them.
The Monkeys Paw: Britain, the US, Israel, Saudi and Turkey created ISIS before our very eyes, and are now trying to make it look like it’s an ‘Islamic’ issue
Britain (and everyone else) told people that Assad was a uniquely evil dictator who gasses his own people and wanted to deploy their own forces to fight him (Parliament refused, thereby ice-bucketing any plans President Obama had as well). This of course did not stop weapons and aid flowing from the Turkish boarder and elsewhere into ISIS held territory. We were told that there was a ‘Free Syrian Army’ and a ‘moderate opposition’. Where these have disappeared to in ISIS held Syria and Iraq is a mystery. Or rather it isn’t – since the terrorist and extremist groups were the most well funded and armed as well as effective from the very start of the Syrian conflict.
Basically, Britain and the US are now agreeing with what Assad said all along: the Syrian Rebels are largely terrorists. Or the Syrian rebels who were not terrorists have disappeared into a wormhole somewhere on the Iraq/Syria boarder (which is now effectively controlled by ISIS).
In fact, the Syrian conflict from the beginning was a proxy war between Saudi, the US, Britain and Israel on one side and Iran on the other, with Syria and to a lesser extent Iraq being Iran’s only regional allies (as well as Hezbollah in Lebanon). Since Israel hates Iran for obvious reasons and the US ‘♥’ Israel and Saudi had, according to wiki leaks, demanded strikes on Iran for years by the ‘kufaar’ (i.e US):http://uk.reuters.com/article/2010/11/29/us-wikileaks-usa-idUSTRE6AP06Z20101129, these parties wanted to disabuse Iran of it’s only real regional supporter.
When it became clear that the extremists were the main opposition in Syria, long after they had been armed and supported, everyone including the Saudis did a quick about face – but by then it was too late and ISIS, as was always obvious, migrated into Iraq inflaming latent sectarian tensions there, which had already reached boiling point due to Nouri Al Malikis’ US and Iranian backed government alienating Sunnis there.
By this time, hundreds of young men from the UK (and at least 60 women), emboldened by both Salafist propaganda and UK media coverage with a pro-Israel and thus anti-Syria/Iran bias, had gone to Syria to fight. (accounts like this by Patrick Cockburn can be multiplied almost indefinitley:http://www.middleeasteye.net/culture/book-review-jihadis-return-isis-and-new-sunni-uprising-patrick-cockburn-2027905245).
These people are indeed deluded extremists but they can hardly be blamed alone when the Prime Minister of the UK was, until he was suitably humbled by Parliament, willing to commit UK forces to the conflict. However, it soon became clear that Assad, foul as he is (though no more than any other Middle Eastern dictator as everyone seems to forget), was indeed right and the ‘moderate opposition’ was a pipe dream of Zionists, other Iran – o – phobes and Liberals alike. From the very beginning the security services had warned that jihadis returning from the Syrian arena (through Turkey’s deliberately porous boarder, all the better to supply the rebels with), would be a significant and potentially untraceable threat to Britain.
When this became especially clear with videos of British born men carrying out beheadings, the media and politicians screamed in horror at the barbarity and of course, inevitably asked if it was Islam’s fault and what causes young British men to go and fight in a foreign land and attack their own country.
Well, you do.
The British government legitimised the ISIS rebellion and did everything but pay for the fighters air-plane tickets. When the governments’ zeal to support Israel and Saudi as well as weaken Iran proved too self damaging they quickly retracted and tried to make ‘radicalisation’ the sole cause.
But the radicalisation was largely by the British media and political cadres. And the rest of it was done by allowing Salafists to control British universities and mosques and collect millions for the rebels from sympathetic British Muslims, lamenting the coverage on television and seeing it as a Sunni vs Shia conflict (when in fact a disproportionate number of the dead are Alewite and most of Assad’s army is Sunni. As well as Assad himself).
As usual, Islam gets the blame: Ideological opponents of capitalism or the ‘monoculture’ always make the best scapegoats.
If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is – the same thing happened when the US and others (including Israel) supported the Mujahideen against the Soviet occupation. When that movement splintered and was hijacked later by Zawahiri and Deobandised Taliban, it took more than a decade for the West to come to blows with the extremist forces they had helped unleash.
This time, it’s taken a lot less time for Frankenstein to try and kill his monster.
But Frankenstein’s monster, as everyone knows, came after what his creator loved the most.
Will UK fighters in ISIS do the same?
You Owe Us: The West single handedly saved everyone from Hitler/Fascism: Without any help From ‘The Darkies’. Hitler would have come for you next. And respect our WWI & II Commemorations. Or else.
A few years ago, we were treated to an interesting exhibition of European chauvinism in what is in fact by far the most tolerant country in Europe – the UK. A somewhat famous English actress called Joanna Lumley took on board the cause of Nepalese soldiers, who despite being in a British Army special services regiment known as ‘The Ghurkas’, and regularly dying for this country, were sometimes denied not only citizenship but could expect to receive far lower pensions and wages than their ‘British’ (read: more white) counterparts.
It wasn’t this that was surprising though: what was truly remarkable was that no-one in the British establishment seemed to think there was anything wrong with this until an ‘English Rose’ with a cut glass accent like Joanna pointed it out to them. They soon happily capitulated. But until then, it just wasn’t that big a big deal. You know, like how fighting and dying for your country doesn’t entitle you to citizenship or equal pay. Unless a proper English chick makes a fuss over it first.
The Ghurkas must have been paraphrasing the old question: if a Nepalese guy dies fighting for Britain and a European woman doesn’t hear it, does it still hurt to get shot dead?
North African troops who served in WWII (some 350,000 or more of them) would not have been at all surprised at the case of the poor Ghurkas: the release of a film acknowledging their contribution, ‘Days of Glory’, was greeted with death threats in France, since the closing credits of the film correctly state that despite the ruling that pensions should be paid in full for France’s colonial troops, successive French administrations have not done so. It was only after the film’s release that the government policy was changed to bring foreign combatant pensions into line with what ‘French’ veterans (of whom there are very few relatively compared to ‘the darkies’ – the colonial troops) are paid. As of 2010, no war pension in arrears (almost 40 years) have been considered.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Days_of_Glory_(2006_film)#cite_note-5
”In 2009, the BBC published documentary evidence that showed black colonial soldiers – who together with North African troops made up around two-thirds of Free French forces – were deliberately removed from the units that led the Allied advance to liberate Paris in 1944. General Charles De Gaulle, made it clear that he wanted Free French troops to enter the French capital first. In response Allied Command therefore insisted that all black soldiers should be replaced by white and North African ones from other French units…Even more important was the fact that Algeria contained an important reservoir of North African troops. At the end of 1942 de Gaulle’s total forces never numbered more than 50,000, but now, in 1943, thanks to Algeria, he had an army of about half a million men. This multi-racial army was first thrown into battle in Italy in 1943 – it fought at the Battle of Monte Cassino – then landed with Americans in southern France in August 1944.”
Thomson, Mike (200-04-06). “Paris liberation made ‘whites only'”. BBC. Retrieved 2010-02-19.
Spielberg (and everyone else) forgot about this army in ‘Saving Private Ryan’. After all, what’s nearly half a million blacks and Muslims compared to poor old Private Ryan?
It is actually very obvious: France was under occupation. Normandy is in France. We fought Axis forces ‘on the beaches’ of Normandy – thus they and not the French held that territory. There were either 1) No French involved in the fighting or 2) The majority of the army of 500,000 that De Gaul eventually had was from (North) Africa (and the majority of them Muslim).
The relative lack of representation of these troops in Remembrance Day, the media as well as the newly refurbished Imperial War Museum in London and literally all movies is glaring.
No-one knows the total number of colonial troops in the various Allied armies, but we know for a fact that the actor Errol Flynn did not single handedly liberate Burma from Japanese occupation as depicted in the movie ‘Operation Burma’ – British Commanders had a lot of help from Indian (and other) troops. Of course, almost none of those troops, with their associated lower life expectancies from living in Third World Countries, survived to make it to televised celebrations that you saw as a kid. But plenty of European soldiers did. I guess their full pension helped too.
You hardly ever see these North African, Indian or Black African veterans along with the poor old guys at Remembrance Day celebrations, but there were a lot of people involved from the colonies/Commonwealth – as well as the huge financial burden they had to bear for the European and Pacific wars.
But we do not even have to go back to WWII – this year marks the centenary of WWI. 1.2 million Indians fought in that war – which had absolutely nothing to with them (or fascism for that matter) – as subjects of the Raj – in many cases against their Ottoman co-religionists.They too have not been prominently featured in the centenary celebrations.
That’s like putting someone else’s country, in fact someone who is occupying your country, ahead of your co-religionists. Pretty dedicated, no? Deserves a movie or a bit of space in the Imperial War Museum perhaps?
If only the Ghurkas had read the history of these events, they would not have in the least been surprised by the racist policies extended to them. In fact, Hollywood and the film medium’s depiction of ‘non-white’ or certainly non-European troops in WWI&II is currently at about the level of it’s portrayal of Native Americans in classic era Westerns. Or worse.
Europe did not ‘save’ the world from Fascism: it was the womb in which that monstrosity was born (nay, Europe nurtures it at the warm teats of it’s bosom still). It was the colonies and brave Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and yes, Muslims, who helped save Europe from her own experiment in terror – with their taxes and their blood.
By literally whitewashing history, Remembrance Day and even recent WWII movies like ‘Inglorious Basterds’ (which couldn’t bring itself to depict the contributions of African and Asian troops even in a fictionalised version of the Second World War) and then acting as if immigrant communities owe them a favour, the West can radicalise some who will again come to the conclusion that an ethnic or Muslim life is cheap.
In The Media, No One Can Hear You Scream:
Whenever Muslims do something bad it’s because of Islam: when Non-Muslims do something bad, it’s because of ‘life’. Or ‘poverty’. Or ‘lack of education’. But never, ever, due to their religious or secular beliefs.
Two things are ‘allowed’ towards Muslims in the West that aren’t generally (any longer) allowed against anyone else: collective punishment and linking their beliefs (religion, culture) to their behaviour so as to generalise. The West’s conviction regarding the second means the first comes naturally.
No one would be stupid enough, despite the 90% approval that the recent Israeli ‘action’ against the Gaza strip enjoyed from Israeli citizens themselves, to suggest that the Israeli public is responsible or deserves causalities of it’s own for the actions of the IDF. Yet the conviction that the Palestinians ‘deserve what they get’ for voting for Hamas or simply because Hamas is ‘from them’ is widespread in both apologia for the actions of Israel in the West as well as in the public perception and media (in reality, these are in fact the same thing).
Likewise, the British public resolutely refuses to consider lack of education and poverty (empirically demonstrated by the UK’s own institutions – see below) as explanations for Muslim wrongdoing at home or abroad.
Recently, newspapers took very obvious pleasure in branding prostitution grooming gangs in Rotherham and elsewhere as ‘Muslim grooming gangs’ (The Independent 31-8-14). This harks back to both the ‘black crime’ waves of the 1980’s (there was strangely never a ‘white crime’ wave) and the Bosnian War (well remembered by British Muslims), where the parties were universally described by media and commentators as ‘Serbs’, ‘Croats’ and ‘Muslims’ – two nationalities and one religion. Muslims are to be identified by their religion – not so other combatants, victims or criminals. Is it the presses way of conditioning people to, as Greenwald says, devalue Muslim suffering and lives? Like how ‘Vietnamese’ became ‘gooks’? How else to explain that the defining feature of a white paedophile is neither his race nor religion but rather his name; ‘John Smith, 47, from Rotherham was arrested on child grooming charges’. But Muslims criminals are instantly to be associated with their presumed religion.
It’s as if the British press is in a strange way Salafi and insists that Muslims have a Muslim ‘badge’ everywhere, all the time, never ‘imitate the kufaar’ and be distinct from everyone else.
A corollary of not accepting the role that social and economic circumstances play in the crimes and errors of Muslim communities in the UK is playing the same game globally and attributing all that comes with Third World poverty, which is ‘enjoyed’ by most of the world’s Muslim majority countries, from poor education of women or child labour and corruption, to the Islamic character of these people as opposed to the fact that domestic violence, lack of political representation and all the rest are found in all under-developed societies, and were in fact especially found in Europe and the US when they in turn were similarly economically challenged.
Muslims however are expected to conform to Western norms of political and personal behaviour, no matter that they are living in societies with half the life expectancy and one hundredth the income:
‘Education for women – why is it not provided?!’ Well, because there is education for no-one at all, including women. And when there is education, poorer societies tend to give it to the boys, regardless of religion. ‘Why are there not free and fair elections!?’ Because democracy is only possible with certain economic and social pre-conditions, frequently absent in the Developing World. ‘Why is there so much violence?!’ Because in poor countries life is literally cheap, whether they are poor Muslim countries or poor non-Muslim countries. What of it?
Does anyone blame Christianity for domestic violence in the Philippines or Hinduism for female infanticide in India? Or atheism for the abscence of reproductive rights in China? How about Buddhism for pogroms in Burma and Sri Lanka? Hardly ever. Not so with Islam though.
Put another way, no one blames the rate of domestic violence in the Philippines on Catholicism, the high rate of persecution of religious minorities in Sri Lanka and Burma on Buddhism and nor India murder/rapes on Hinduism. If these countries were Muslim, they most certainly, almost gleefully, would.
This guy:http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/may/06/sexual-abuse-in-white-community, who is clearly an expert in Quranic ethics regardless of whether he has read the Quran or not, made a hilarious parallel between the reporting of Operation Yewtree, which targeted usually (actually, always) white and ageing celebrities from ‘back in the day’ such as Jimmy Saville, and that of ‘Muslim grooming gangs’. In a most concise and articulate manner he made it clear that the behaviour of white sexual predators was never make a jumping off point for what exactly about being white, Christian, British, old etc may lead someone to be a sex offender. Muslims however from the very start were not identified by their names or ethnicities but by their (usually presumed) religious affiliation. The inference was clear – white guys who commit the same crimes or worse do so for their own ‘reasons’ or even inscrutable motives. But Muslims are de facto doing so due to their religion, ethnicity or culture.
His sarcastic masterpiece is worth quoting in it’s entirety:
”Every day across Britain, it seems, there’s a new and horrific revelation of sexual abuse: last week we had the guilty plea of veteran TV presenter Stuart Hall, who confessed to 14 cases of indecent assault against 13 girls, the youngest only nine years old.
Days earlier the possible scale of child abuse in north Wales children’s homes was revealed. We now know there were 140 allegations of historical abuse between 1963 and 1992. A total of 84 suspected offenders have been named, and it’s claimed the abuse took place across 18 children’s homes.
But after the shock has subsided and we have time to reflect on these revolting crimes, the main question in most reasonable people’s minds must surely be: what is it about white people that makes them do this?
Jimmy Savile is alleged to have abused 300 young people, and in his case and in north Wales, the abuse could not have happened without a wide range of co-conspirators either grooming children or ensuring the truth never got out. Hardly a week goes by without another white man being arrested in connection with sexual abuse.
I’m beginning to feel sorry for whites. I have many white friends and I know most of them are wholly opposed to sexual abuse. But they must be worried that their whole community is getting a bad name. I can imagine that, every day, with each unfolding case, they must be hiding their face behind their hands, pleading: “Please, God, don’t let it be a white person this time.”
And with so many senior community figures implicated, many of us are starting to wonder what will happen to the next generation of whites. How will today’s young whites learn that abuse is wrong when their role models are so tarnished?
First, though, we need to find out what’s causing the problem. Is it something to do with white people’s culture? Is it something to do with their loss of empire, and their new role in the world, as a diminished state desperately clinging to its glorious past? Do they seek to impose their last vestiges of power on the most vulnerable in society?
Or is it that, having spent so much of their history waging wars against each other, they cannot cope with the relative peace of the last half-century, and their frustration at not fighting is taken out on the weakest? I may have no evidence for this, but that’s not going to stop me putting it out there as a cause.
Or maybe it’s their religion? Child abuse in the priesthood has, of course, also been tolerated for decades, allowed to continue unpunished through a conspiracy of silence among the church hierarchy.
And despite the recent falls in attendance, Christianity still dominates European culture. And the Bible, which many whites still look to, has such verses as: “Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you strike him with a rod, he will not die. If you strike him with the rod, you will save his soul from Sheol [hell].” (Proverbs 23:13-14) It hardly fits with white society’s claims to care for children. And even those who don’t believe, such as Richard Dawkins, a senior cleric in the atheist community, have sought to downplay the gravity of child abuse, believing it’s no worse than religion itself. As he wrote: “Horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place.” Of course, what we really need now is for brave white community leaders to come out and distance themselves from the abusers.
Maybe, say, the new head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission should come out and admit the issue is “racial and cultural” and that she fears that “in those communities there were people who knew what was going on and didn’t say anything, either because they’re frightened or they’re so separated from the rest of the communities”. Or a white cabinet member could say: “There is a small minority of white men who believe that young children are fair game. And we have to be prepared to say that. You can only start solving a problem if you acknowledge it first.” Or the head of a leading children’s charity could say: “There is very troubling evidence that whites are overwhelmingly represented in the prosecutions for such offences.“ Yet none of this has happened. And this saddens me. Because until we hear those brave voices speaking out against abuse, what are we meant to think?
I urge white people to break this conspiracy of silence. Call on your leaders to show leadership. To show us all that you’re not like the people who dominate the news headlines. That you really do care about protecting children.
You may think all the above is ridiculous; that I’m stirring ethnic tensions on an issue that is clearly about individuals and small groups of people and has nothing to do with race or religion. And that by making this spurious case I’m ignoring the core issue, which is that children, many of them in vulnerable situations, were terrorised and physically harmed by opportunistic men who were able to get away with their crimes for years. You’d be right.
But all of the above arguments were made within various parts of our print and broadcast media when similarly small numbers of Muslim men were revealed to be grooming young girls for sex. If you think the claims about white people are wrong, then so is the stereotyping of Britain’s Muslims, and the widespread questioning of their culture and their religion, because of the perverted actions of a few.
Since the “black crime shock” tabloid stories of the 1980s, editors have known that stoking fears about misunderstood minorities is good for sales. If you object to this article, then you should understand how it feels to be a Muslim reading similar pieces pandering to Islamophobia day after day – and you should object to those too.”
Hurts doesn’t it ‘white people’?
I bet you breathed a sigh of relief when he finally said it was a ‘joke’ (if you made it that far without going off in a huff. Also, it wasn’t really a joke. He’s just saying that to make you feel better).
Remember that feeling then: that’s how your British Muslim compatriots feel every day of their lives.
Most readers of The Guardian (the most balanced and sympathetic to Muslims mainstream newspaper) needed this pointing out to them. To Muslims, it has been glaringly obvious for years. The British public’s near total ignorance of something so infuriating and discriminatory towards Muslims causes the latter to become radicalised.
And yet Richard Curtis and perhaps even the much smarter Steve Coogan, seem to think that Muslims get an easy ride in the press.
You know who gets an easy ride? White, often Christian celebrities (perhaps like them). No one is asking what exactly it is about being Caucasian, a celebrity or Anglican or whatever, that makes one want to tamper with children.
Make some more jokes about that first maybe eh Richard?
Deadman Wonderland:
Unrestrained Crap-italism and the Monoculture -The West is best and no one else matters
”When someone is honestly 55% right, that’s very good and there’s no use wrangling. And if someone is 60% right, it’s wonderful, it’s great luck, and let him thank God.
But what’s to be said about 75% right? Wise people say this is suspicious.
Well, and what about 100% right? Whoever says he’s 100% right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worst kind of rascal”
- Old Galician Jew
Lets face it – few in the West’s establishments are willing to entertain the possibility that they are wrong. About anything.
European civilization seemingly has a real problem accepting anything other than it’s own advice – the last time a non-European idea made serious headway here was Pauline Christianity – and even that was greatly modified by Constantine and others. We are, however, very good at giving advice to others – including such great gifts to the 20th century as Fascism, Nationalism, Laissez Fair capitalism and even Communism, which again is a European idea. This tendency to be insulated from the ideas and cultures of others but imposing ones own is a of hallmark of the xenophobia that has engulfed minorities (usually Jews, Muslims, Christian sects and Gypsies) throughout all of modern European history.
I don’t mention this with any hope of averting a repeat performance – when it comes to preventing racial genocide in Europe one is about as likely to prevent drunkeness in a brewery.
In fact, most of us in the West are subliminally taught to be markedly under-critical of our own civilization by constant portrayals of how bad other ‘systems’ are – especially Islam. Having you see just how much better your life is as an independent British woman (even if you are over-worked, over-taxed, narcotised and treated like a life support machine for a vagina), than those poor Afghan wretches walking around in ‘tents’ is very useful: don’t complain – you are the representative of a glorious civilization – just look at the rest.
Recently the press in the UK and other Western countries rightly used high profile and particularly disgusting murder/rape cases in India to highlight women’s issues there – but there is a small problem: the UK sits sixth on the league table of rapes per 100,000 population. India is at around position fifty (well behind Australia and most western countries).http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics.
Even accounting for under-reporting, as well as the uniquely violent rape and murder of a young women in India which resulted in the spotlight being placed on that nation, this is devastating. Yet commentators and feminists were bounding over the news and print media lecturing Indians on how to treat their women.
This is possible because most people in the UK would simply not be wiling to entertain the possibility that things for women could be harder in a European country than in India, regardless of the evidence. And this is chauvinism at best and racism at worst.
Just as during the Rotherham grooming story no-one asked the very important question: do Muslim men carry our more sexual violence or grooming than a similar cohort of black, white or other men or is it the same or even less per capita, no-one asked while taking India to task about its’ treatment of women how many rapes are committed in the UK. Or Australia. Or Germany. Or the US. It was simply assumed that there would be less. Even many Indian people refused to believe that there could be more rape in the UK or France than India. Because of course, we are more ‘civilized’ – we have the right to lecture others. Facts be damned.
Despite any personal or empiricle evidence to the contrary, most of us in Europe, just like our erstwhile Wahhabi opponents in ISIS, are simply blind to the reality that our conception of the ‘Good Life’ is extremely narrow, homogeneous and intolerant of competing views.
Put more simply, the West, just like all totalitarian ideologies, cannot accept the possibility of it’s conception of the ‘Good Life’ being wrong.
Even when problems such as a possible environmental catastrophe come to light, it is usually used not as a criticism of the western model but rather an example of how it is in fact ‘omni-competent’ to deal with anything – including it’s own problems. An exogenous solution is never proposed let alone tolerated. We can build you. And we will fix you.
Of course, there are trenchant critics and commentators of western civilization, often more so than most other segments of the global community: in fact it has the most articulate discontents, Chomsky has been mentioned here repeatedly: Gai Eaton and John Gray can be added from thousands of other choices. Some of these people are famous, but where is Noam Chomsky’s daily newspaper with a circulation in the millions like the Sun or Daily Mail?
Just like in Wahhabised nations of Saudi and Qatar, most people in Europe secretly think that the system which they are in is the best of all possible worlds. Those who wish to question the architects of this ‘monoculture’ are always a tiny minority – and often tolerated merely to show that the system is so strong that it can allow free reign even to it’s critics. It somewhat resembles ‘The Architect’ in the rubbish Matrix sequel, who allowed ‘the system’ to be destroyed by rebellions every so often, to give people the illusion of freedom – since none are so powerfully enslaved as those who believe themselves to be free.
Just like Plato’s watchers in the cave, a prisoner believing his cell to be the entirety of the universe will in fact kill to preserve it.
Perhaps even more than Salafist pipe dreams, Western civilizational hubris deserves to be examined and countered, for it is both more popular and more plausible than the fevered dreams of the wahhabis, which few sane people can bring themselves to slumber to. As Amy Chua put it, the US (and by inference, the West), has the worlds largest overseas fan-club.
But no society that is largely indifferent to a system which spends more on ice cream (or if you prefer, pet food or perfume) than it would cost to provide food and basic healthcare to all humans who lack it should be so sure of itself as we are:
|
Global Priority
|
$U.S. Billions
|
|
Cosmetics in the United States
|
8
|
|
Ice cream in Europe
|
11
|
|
Perfumes in Europe and the United States
|
12
|
|
Pet foods in Europe and the United States
|
17
|
|
Business entertainment in Japan
|
35
|
|
Cigarettes in Europe
|
50
|
|
Alcoholic drinks in Europe
|
105
|
|
Narcotics drugs in the world
|
400
|
|
Military spending in the world
|
780
|
|
Global Priority
|
$U.S. Billions
|
|
Basic education for all
|
6
|
|
Water and sanitation for all
|
9
|
|
Reproductive health for all women
|
12
|
|
Basic health and nutrition
|
13
|
http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-stats.
Countless children in African countries die from vitamin A deficiency, which causes their eyes to ulcerate and gradually go blind and finally get infected and kill them. Slowly, painfully. Vitamin A is a water soluble substance that most of us have so much of that we urinate away the excess. It could be said that we are literally pissing their lives away.
It’s almost artistic in it’s cruelty.
People often ask where God is at such times. What we should be asking is where am I? Or rather, where is the Western consumerist capitalist model that dominates the globe?
It is similarly fashionable to hold events such as ‘Live 8′ and expensive meetings of G8 (or however many of them there are now) to discuss the reduction of Third World debt and how to help those poor Africans (and others). Most of this is actually counter-productive because it makes it seem as if the problem of inequality is a supply and demand issue that is insurmountably complex and the best you can do is give a small handout to Bob Geldof and get on with your life.
I mean, I know I’m wasting food at lunch but come on, are you really gonna take that food and give it to Africans or something?
Well, it isn’t complicated – as you just saw, the entire problem can be solved for the amount of money we spend on pet food. But isn’t that really the problem – that we live in a moral vacuum which really is more concerned about our pets, saving the panda or the dolphin and buying poppies on Remembrance Sunday than these dark others?
No society that allows such things in the midst of European food mountains and obesity crises even has the right to consider itself civilized let alone superior.
The injustice and inequality that we see all around us show any thinking person, not just Muslims, that we have a spiritual and moral void at the very heart of our society.
I am not here to tell you that Islam is the solution or that there are not truly great achievements of Western Civilization. I’m just asking you to look at what the system which the West wants to export to the whole world is doing to their own citizens, the poor of the world and the planet itself, and have a bit of civilizational humility.
And it isn’t just our indifference to the suffering of others – our harm is self directed too. We have become so lost that we cannot even take care of ourselves, let alone African children. The suicide rate is far greater in Tokyo or London than Mogadishu or Malawi – something is terribly wrong when people in some of the poorest and worst places in the world cling to life with greater tenacity than those in the world’s most gleaming metropolises.
The Confucians say that the heart that is indifferent to the suffering of others is not truly human.
The Confucians are right.
Despite our shortcomings, we do have a lot to teach and contribute to the world – but our arrogance, posturing and chauvinism is turning everyone against us. We are losing our ‘fan-club’.
Refusal to see radicalisation amongst some Muslims as partly in the context of the wider process of growing discontent with the western economic and social model amongst diverse peoples may yet compound our error.
Because I hate You: British society does it’s utmost to make sure that Muslims do not integrate…and then blames them for not integrating
We have all heard about how Muslims have their own ‘insular communities’, dress code and customs ‘incompatible with the British way of life’ (though the ‘British’ way of life is conveniently never satisfactorily defined).
Much has been made of ‘no-go areas’ for ‘whites’ in the north of England, the ghettoisation of Muslim communities and how they attend state or faith schools where they are an overwhelming majority and thus do not come into contact with the wider society.
Some of this is true but of course the real implication is obvious: Muslims are ‘taking over’ and not only want to practice their way of life but impose it on the wider British public – the debate is punctuated with stories about gangs of Muslim youth ‘enforcing’ Sharia in inner city areas.
Indeed, there are such misguided individuals but as with the discourse about radicalisation and immigration above, this is once again an evidence-free zone where people with crypto-fascist far right agendas allow their perverse imaginations to run wild: the ghettoisation of the Asian Muslim (and black) immigrant communities in the UK has been placed, by numerous eminent sociologists, squarely at the door of bad town planning and councils who ensured that these communities were housed away from the ‘indigenous’ population [see Lucinda Platt's concise 'Parallel Lives; Poverty Among Ethnic Minority Groups In Britain'].
This is in addition to the expected reality that new arrivals from immigrant communities tend to move to places where there are already some members of their cohort for ease of communication, food and employment – which is why you find a ‘Little Italy’ in New York or a ‘Chinatown’ in London.
Most ‘white flight’ (the name given in the press for the phenomenon of ‘white’ English people moving out of areas like Blackburn or Barking in East London when ‘large’, i.e. any, migrant communities arrive) is not to do with the poor Anglo-Saxons being made to feel like strangers in their own country but rather because most of these people cannot themselves tolerate being around migrants since they are in fact usually mildly xenophobic Sun and Daily Mail readers. Precisely the same phenomenon occurred in the East End of London when first the Jews and then the Irish communities moved in – the locals exited the East End like Wahhabis at a Sufi tomb. Did the the Jews and Irish too try to ‘impose their way of life’ (lets say bagels and Guinness) onto the poor oppressed locals or is it, as sociologists have repeatedly demonstrated, that many ‘indigenous’ people just don’t want to be around migrants?
Yes, of course, it’s probably a bit of both (it isn’t really, I’m just saying that to make you feel better). But that’s not what British people seem to think by and large, is it?
As for the ‘no-go ‘areas, these again work both ways: so polarised are the two groups that there is little interaction between them (thanks to housing policies and the media radicalising the whites). Asians wandering into the wrong part of Bolton or wherever could be thrashed and likewise with whites – the situation perhaps resembles Harlem in the 1940’s, depicted in books like ‘Devil In A Blue Dress’, where there was a sharp contrast in the ease with which a black man could operate in his ‘own’ area an that of the ‘other’.
But this isn’t going to be one of those ‘No one is to blame! We both need to change! Hug!’ explanations: in fact, having previously laid the blame squarely at the door of Muslims, I am now going to posit that the non-Muslim UK ‘host’ population is entirely to blame for both the straightened financial circumstances of Muslims in the UK as well as their poor educational level (since one usually leads to the other regardless of your religion or ethnicity).
How will I prove such a bold claim you ask? Well, with the great British press of course!
A recent article in the UK’s Independent newspaper lead with this:
”A study by the London School of Economics showed that applicants from Black and ethnic minority students face discrimination in seeking a university place…The study…showed that applicants from most black and ethnic minority backgrounds were less likely to receive offers from universities than their white British peers…’ [the study analysed 50,000 individuals in 2008]
However, as so often, this paper could not bring itself to speak the awful truth: it wasn’t ‘blacks and ethnic minorities’ that were being discriminated against – it was Muslims and blacks (many of whom are Muslim anyway) in particular:
”Around 71 per cent of applications from white British students to the most elite universities resulted in an offer compared with just 49 per cent of Bangladeshi and 52 per cent of Pakistani students….Dr Michael Shiner of the LSE’s department of social policy said; ‘Even when we take account of A Level grades, candidates chances of receiving an offer vary according to their ethnicity, the type of school they attend and family background’‘
‘Pakistani and Bangladeshi’ is another way, in the UK at least, of saying ‘Muslim’, since we already saw how the majority of Britain’s Muslims are from such South Asian backgrounds and British Pakistanis & Bangladeshis in turn tend to be overwhelmingly Muslims.
The author, Dr Shiner, is very honest – but not quite honest enough to say: ‘if you are Black or Muslim in particular, it is harder to get into a British University. Because we hate you’.
But it gets worse still:‘
The only ethnic minority groups to buck the trend were those from a Chinese, Mixed white or other Asian Backgrounds’…
http://www.independent.co.uk/student/news/minorities-less-likely-to-get-university-place-9621952.html
[Note: the online version is a very strangely 'edited' version of the original article - it revealingly omits the information about how Indian and Chinese students do very well. Anyone wishing to chase up sources is advised to find the hard copy, published Wednesday 23rd July 2014 or e-mail Dr Shiner and his unit]
The only ethnic groups’?! That’s not an ‘only’ anything – it is a lot of people ‘bucking the trend’ – just not black or Muslim people.
So it’s not even race or ethnicity that’s the ‘problem’ – it’s actually religion and being ‘black’ (and we still need to know how many of the black students rejected are Muslim as well as black).
‘The Independent’ is trying to make this a ‘black’ versus white issue (actually more palatable to liberals) rather than admitting it as anti-Muslim bias – whereas in reality it is discrimination on the basis of religion and certain colours – since last I checked, Chinese and Indian or ‘other Asian’ individuals are not any more likely than ‘blacks’ to be mistaken for Anglo Saxons. Basically, The Independent could not bring itself to tell the real story, despite clear prompting from the author of the study itself.
Sadly, this is the latest in a long line of uncontested studies, dating even from before 9-11, that all show exactly the same thing.
In fact, if one combines this information with the other LSE study on immigration quoted above, it appears that there are even more lenient rules on immigration for certain (again non-Muslim and non-black) groups to add to the flagrancy of denying them university places. This again will be seen by Muslims as a besmirching slap and an attempt to displace them with more ‘palatable’ immigrants (for example, the study showed greater immigration, work permits and visas for people from China and India, mirroring the university admissions case).This is to be contrasted with the near total lack of the UK accepting refugees from Syria (or Iraq) – conflicts which it supported and propagated (but didn’t want to clean up the mess for).http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/20/uk-24-syrians-vulnerable-persons-relocation-scheme
How do Muslims see the disparity in ease of immigration and maybe even refugee status – i.e harder for Muslims and ‘Blacks’ and easier for others? Yes, perhaps it is because of more skilled migrants from those places. But remember: the disparity in university admissions held even after adjusting for qualifications.
Refuse to extend University places to Muslim and Black students (but non-Muslim Indians and Chinese are fine), and then complain about how Muslims are not integrating? Rank hypocrisy.
It reminds me of what my father who moved to the UK to cover the post war labour shortage (although of course he was told the British government was doing him and other ‘darkies’ a favour) recollected once.
He had learnt excellent English at University in his home country, but it lapsed somewhat through lack of practice when he worked at a factory in Dagenham (to this day a stronghold of UKIP types), since no English people would ever talk to him except to call him a Paki or chase him on his way home for a good old fashioned ‘Paki-bash’ (which was racist beating and not a party for Pakistani people).
One of the reasons that we, the forever complaining (about others) British public could postulate for why immigrants do not learn English is that they have no need to learn it. Being largely invisible to the wider British public until they make the headlines and having no English friends, they are expected to learn the language simply to please the proclivities and tastes of the majority population.
Things have come somewhat a long way since my fathers’ time – not necessarily because the British public has become any less racist (to certain groups) but largely because any attempt to ‘Paki/Coon bash’ in inner city London or Manchester would now result in a massive riot, possibly visible from outer space – i.e there are compelling demographic reasons to be more ‘tolerant’.
Most non-Muslim, non-black readers have to be honest and ask themselves a question: since they accepted (in large part) the evidence free diatribe of the right wingers about immigration and lack of integration, I too will now deploy emotional argumentation, since this seems to be a ‘proof’ for the British public: How many immigrant, Muslim or gypsy friends do you have? I mean honestly – people who really have a different culture and belief system to you?
Lets move away from this juvenile idea that ‘tolerance’ is having friends of different skin colours who in fact behave exactly the same as you (a Chinese guy and an Indian guy with an English guy sitting in a pub drinking beer and arguing about Sundays’ football match is the classic example).
How many of us of any background really have friends who have beliefs and practices that we disagree with or find ‘different’ and thus actually need to tolerate? Or is it just like the LSE survey above – we can be very tolerant of some people but not others – i.e those who behave more like ‘us’.
It’s easy to be tolerant of attractive Polish waitresses and pretty Chinese exchange students – but what about the others? Integration is a two way process – how much effort have we really made? Or is all the effort to be made by blacks and Muslims?
Will you venture into the mosque or do they have to venture into the pub or wherever?
Newsflash to the British public (which according to the ‘News’ is white, ‘other Asian’ and Chinese but not so much Black or Muslim): telling people that you hate them compared to other immigrant and religious groups, not extending them the benefits you extend the rest of society and then accusing them of not being integrated makes them hate you. And get radicalised. And do dumb stuff.
Enemy Mine: Pretending that people like Ayan Hirsan Ali or the Quilliam Foundation are spokespeople for or impartial critics of Islam
This is much like getting Anjam Chaudhry or the North Korean Ministry of Information to represent American foreign policy on Sky News. And then taking them seriously.
Muslims can see it for what it is – caricaturing and the journalistic equivalent of ‘blackface’, and it makes them angry. And yes, do dumb stuff.
It also shows how badly out of touch with their Muslim compatriots other people in the UK sometimes are: virtually no practising British Muslim, including myself, is particularly confident of what religion Majid Nawaaz and most other members of Quillium are – though they may indeed be Muslims. They themselves often make deliberate provocations to make the Muslim community think that they are in fact closet non-Muslims and are using their self proclaimed Islamic identity as a shield against accusations of Islamophobia and thus get away with saying things that even the British press wouldn’t tolerate from a non-Muslim. Liberal Democrats and the media, by using such people, who are nearly universally reviled and seen as extremists, turncoats and traitors by the Muslim community are sending out a dangerous message to them.
Another writer compared poor sartorially challenged Majid Nawaaz to the character of Stephen, played by Samuel L. Jackson in the movie ‘Django Unchained’. But this was nonsense – Majid Nawaaz makes ‘Stephen’ look like Malcolm X.
Ayan Hirsan Ali merely represents an even more extreme evolution or perhaps even ‘apotheosis’ of the tendency, discussed above, to make the actions of some Muslims representative of the whole faith (a procedure nonetheless considered unconscionable in the case of the adherents of ‘Western Civilization’ though). It is merely generalising the unverifiable experiences of one person to all Muslims and likewise with her complaints.
An entirely consistent rejoinder to Ayan Hirsan Ali would be finding a young English girl who was horribly sexually abused by her family and then ran away to Pakistan, embraced Fundamentalist Islam, studied at a Russian university (where Vladamir Putin personally paid her tuition and gave her Judo lessons) and then married an Afghan mullah at a ceremony officiated by Kim Jong Un. In Iran. And then getting her to do the speaking circuit around the world, lecturing about how hard Western Civilization sucked because she was abused by her uncle and did not get over it until she accepted Islam and ran away from the civilization that was indifferent to her suffering, in fact facilitated it, in fact facilitated the suffering of all women, and then saying offensive stuff about the Holocaust to offend Europeans as much as possible (as Hirsan Ali and her supporters go out of their way to do with Islam, the Prophet SAW and the Quran).
We would be rightly incandescent with rage at such a performance. But yet this is exactly what we expect young European Muslims to put up with.
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reported that:
and asked how his worship was. When they were informed, they considered their own worship to be insignificant and said: ‘Where are we in comparison to the Prophet 
